Google is killing off the DoubleClick branding

Google is announcing a major rebranding of its marketing products. With this latest change, the tech juggernaut is putting its services into three buckets: Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform, and Google Ad Manager. The three new divisions simplify a long list of advertising services the company has offered for years since its launch of AdWords and its landmark 2008 acquisition of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.

With Google Ads, the company is rebranding its AdWords product. Google Marketing Platform puts Google’s DoubleClick for advertisers product and Google analytics into the same advertiser-focused category. And Google Ad Manager puts an umbrella over DoubleClick for publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Overall, the change is mostly aesthetic–putting a Google branding atop products the company acquired over the last 10-plus years. Notably, all DoubleClick services will finally lose the old branding. Now the company’s advertising and marketing services–for advertisers, marketers, and publishers–will all be given more generic Google branding.

“This is a bit of a bittersweet moment for us,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s SVP of ads, referring to the sunsetting of DoubleClick. Still, he said most of functionality would stay the same. Google earned $40 billion from its advertising business last year, and is expected to control, with Facebook, over 58 percent of digital advertising in 2018, according to eMarketer, amid growing competition from Amazon and others.

The changes, detailed in a blog post on Wednesday, came about primarily due to “consistent feedback we’ve been hearing for several years now.”

The company is also slightly revamping some of its ad interfaces to streamline the various services Google’s marketing and advertising products offer, Ramaswamy said.

“The underlying products aren’t changing,” he said. Mostly this was a matter of marketing. “This is primarily a name change.”