DoubleClick

E-commerce marketing concept was the topic of the week for Development in Digital Business class. It talks about Internet usage, online consumer behaviour as well as marketing techniques to attract and retain the customers. One of the examples of the best known advertising network given during the lecture was DoubleClick and I think it would be fascinating to talk about it here =)  

According to DoubleClick itself, it is a provider of digital marketing technology and services. DoubleClick’s expertise in ad serving, rich media, video, search, and affiliate marketing help the world’s top marketers, publishers, and agencies to provide superior insights and insider knowledge to its customers.  

The three main aspects that DoubleClick is doing are: 

• Freeing you to focus on strategy and creativity
  • Integrate products to simplify and streamline your advertising sales, buying, operations and billing.
• Ahead of the market – then and now
  • DoubleClick has been on the forefront of the industry since 1996. Its Innovation Lab and R&D program are constantly developing new solutions.
• Where the world’s top publishers, marketers and agencies connect
  • DoubleClick works across industries, platforms, and around the world. 

 How DoubleClick works?

Headquartered in New York, DoubleClick’s vision of being an ad-serving company that understands their customers as well as the messages and offers that drive the best response has always been challenging.

DART for Advertisers is a comprehensive ad management and serving solution with the flexibility and scale to handle the entire scope of your digital marketing program. DART platform allows you to manage advertising campaigns in both current and emerging media with the introduction of seamless integration of display, search, rich media, and video.

DFA is a single solution to manage, traffic, serve and report on your complete online advertising campaigns. It saves time by handling manual and time-consuming tasks in managing your online ad campaigns. DFA’s sophisticated targeting ability allows the user to reach the intended audience.  

Despite its success, DoubleClick is often involved in the controversy over spyware. It uses HTTP cookies in the browser to track and record what commercial advertisements they view and select while browsing. According to a San Francisco IT consulting group, DoubleClick offers an opt-out page, which only affects the cookies. It continues to track users via IP address. 

IP address, domain, browser, local time and date, operating system, and page viewed are collected during creation of the customer’s profile. According to DoubleClick, the personal information stored in the DoubleClick servers belongs to DoubleClick’s clients and is used only for the purpose for which it is requested, and it generally uses the date only as a statistical or aggregate information source. They promised that they will not use the information that they could recognise as either sensitive or personally identifiable to target ads source. 

So do you now know why Google tried so hard to acquire DoubleClick? On 14^th April 2007, Google announced the acquisition of DoubleClick. However, it was only until on 11^th March 2008, the European Union regulators approved the purchase of DoubleClick. Google purchased DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in cash, making this by far Google’s biggest acquisition to date. Just so you know, Google acquired YouTube for only $ 1.65 billion in an all stock purchase.  

As I mentioned in the previous post, Google had “snatched” DoubleClick from Microsoft, which was also said to be considering an acquisition of DoubleClick. It was seen as a blow to Microsoft. As now software and “old media” content is moving online in ad-supported form, Microsoft is going to fall even further behind  in the ad-industry.  

What Google is doing with its adSense is selling ads whereas DoubleClick serves or delivers the ads. But why the sky-high price? The main reason is DoubleClick has something that Google does not have – a vibrant advertising business. Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, and Google co-founder and Technology President Sergey Brin have always emphasized on the importance of display advertising. David Rosenblatt, DoubleClick’s CEO, perceived that the market could be equal to – or even bigger – than paid search. 

Google is a minor player in display advertising industry as compared to Yahoo, AOL, and MSN. DoubleClick has contact with nealry every major online publisher and more than half of the online ad agencies. DoubleClick enables Google to complement their search and content-based advertising capabilities. By enabling AdSense network to work with DoubleClick, the advertisers are now able to obtain more accurate metrics in order to judge the effectiveness of their campaigns.  

Acquisition of DoubleClick has put Google in stronger position. Do you think this is the right move?

Mic-Goo? Mic-Ya? Ya-Goo?

The controversial issue about the bid that Microsoft places on Yahoo has sparked my interest to start a blog with this topic. Thanks to my friend, Salim, who has given me a few constructive idea on this area =)  

  

On 1^st February 2008, Microsoft has announced that it has made a proposal to acquire Yahoo! for $31 per share, which add up to a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion. Yahoo! concluded that it is not their best interest of all as they believe that Microsoft’s offer undervalues Yahoo! global brand, large wide audiences etc. In February last year, Yahoo! already informed Microsoft that it was not for sale but would look for a way to cooperate to fight with Google. Microsoft’s proposal of the acquisition of Yahoo last month is said to be breaking its promise.

Having said that, Microsoft seems to stand firm to the decision and persistent on the proposal until today. 5 days ago, The Times has learned that Microsoft is going to aim for coup if Yahoo! fails to start serious talks or accept the bid within a week. According to the rules that govern the way in which Yahoo! is set up, any shareholder can nominate directors before the annual meeting. The deadline for this nominations is March 14. If Microsoft’s nomination is successful, the appointment will be made effective right away.

  

  

Regarding the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo issue, Google seems to be very concerned about the future of the Internet should the companies merge. David Drummond, chief legal officer of Google believes that the acquisition is not just about financial transaction, it is about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openess and innovation. Google raises the question on whether the PC software company will unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitor’s email, IM, and web-based services. Google also is borrowing a page from Microsoft’s book by urging antitrust regulators to take a hard look at the proposed marriage between its two rivals. Google is trying every way to delay the its approval as long as possible in order to have more time to draw a plan to counteract the acquisition.

Microsoft is eager and anxious to take control of Yahoo! because Google is dominating in today’s Internet scene.  Microsoft wants to dominate the online advertising market which is going to double its size in 2 years time. The Google’s DoubleClick purchase was seen as a blow to Microsoft, which was also said to be considering an acquisition of DoubleClick. Apart from that, Google Doc is threathening the existance of Microsft Office. Google Doc allows the creation of documents, spreadsheets, as well as presentations online. The best thing about it is that it allows anyone you’ve invited to share and collaborate it in real time as soon as they have signed in. There is no need to worry about the failure of hard drive or power failure as it uses online storage and auto-save.  

Microsoft and Google are already debating pros and cons regarding the proposals while Yahoo! has very little to say until now. It is known that Google has started offering whatever help they can to stop Yahoo! from being swallowed by Microsoft. It seems that Yahoo! wanted to restart a merger talk with AOL, the Internet arm of Time Warner, but it is understood that AOL is not interested. Yahoo! has also started talks with News Corporation, the parent company of The Times, over a possible joint venture that would involve merging News Corp’s My Space social networking business into Yahoo! in return for a large shareholding. The talks are believed to be continuing.

The question is: Which combination that you think is the most competitive, most likely to create real value? Microsoft has the resources to pay for the development of the business whereas Yahoo has the global brand name and the wide Internet audiences. It will have the second-largest ad network and a vast array of sites on which to place its own ads.

Yahoo’s strong point is that it understand how to bring poeple together to have fun but its search engine has always not been competent enough to compete with Google’s. With Google as a potential business partner, Yahoo can merge its email into Gmail and concentrate on the enhancement of its social applications such as Yahoo! Groups, Flickr etc.

Google has a clearly dominant position in Internet searching whereas Microsoft as a search competitor could change the market’s assessment of Google’s value. If Microsoft attempts to integrate Web search features directly into its coming Longhorn operating system, it could restart the bitter feud that led to the government antitrust case that grew out of Netscape’s failure.      

What do you think?

Social Networks for Enterprises?

The term “Web 2.0” has clearly taken hold after the first O’Reilley Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. The dot-com burst in the fall of 2001 was once seen as if the web had overhyped. In fact, the shakeouts marked the technological revolutions and had separated the pretenders and the real success stories.

Web 2.0 did not introduce new technical specifications. What makes it different from Web 1.0 is that it changes the way on how the end users and software developers use the web. It is an expression referred to the second generation of the Internet-based services, such as the social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies. It aims to facilitate collaboration, creativity, and sharing among the users.

Web 2.0 is the trend in the Internet technology. Social networks are growing like weeds and have attracted millions of users that integrated these sites into their daily lives. This creates fear among the employers who worry that the trend will cause the workers to waste their time on the social network sites during working hours and share the corporate information on the sites, which are not protected by corporate firewalls.

Since the Web has already made its way into most of our heart, it is appropriate that the employers start accepting this fact and implement the social networking tools to drive business value and gain competitive advantage to the company. In fact, most corporate executives believe that Web 2.0 assist the employees to work more efficiently.

Security ProPortal.com stated that 472 executives around the world had been surveyed by the professional services firm and the Economist Intelligence Unit and nearly 70% said they believed that Web 2.0 tools will help the employees to work more efficiently. 75% said that Web 2.0 tools would foster innovation within their businesses and 86% see them improving knowledge sharing.

Another survey done by Sophos last year has shown that the respondents perceived that good productivity is the result of good management. Some of them worry that the employees might try to get round the Web filters and try to gain access to the site in some other way.

Israeli-American software company, WorkLight Inc., is one of the growing number of software companies that provides secure server-based software product that provides a secure, simple, and customisable “Web 2.0 style” access to corporate data that resides in the enterprise application. These accesses include RSS readers, personalised homepages, gadgets/widgets, application mashups, and instant messaging. The employees are the one who define how they want the information to be aggregated and presented.

WorkLight was approached by a major US bank that has 70, 000 employees (and about 10% on Facebook) and was focusing on communication among remote users and expertise. The investment bank installed IBM’s Lotus Connection but it is not adopted by the employees in a meaningful way. The solution for this is the WorkBook.

WorkLight launched WorkBook Facebook application in the UK on 19th February 2008. This is to address the issues caused by the usage of social networking sites among the employees. Since many employees are already familiar with Facebook, it requires no training and they are able to pick up the new software instantly.

To install WorkBook, log on to Facebook and install it like FunWall, SuperPoke or other Facebook applications. It will appear in your application list and when you click on it, you will be asked for authentification with your organisation’s identity services. You can have your company information on your Facebook profile but it is only visible in the WorkBook application. Workbook enables you to communicate securely with colleagues and to perform the functions you normally find on Facebook, such as form groups, share information and ideas, as well as search for employees with specific expertise or by the location, department, project etc. It also allows you to receive activity streams from the Facebook news feed. 

Apart from implementing social networks for enterprise, WorkLight has begun trial to allow customers to view their credit card and bank account transaction history on NetVibes, iGoogle or Yahoo homepage. WorkLight also has a software that enables the employees to fill out their expenses on their personalised homepage. Unlike SAP software, which requires the employees to go through tedious steps just to file their expenses, there are no flags, no codes to memorise, and no need to involve a help desk on WorkLight.

All of these applications are hosted on the company server and are protected by security layers as the software deals with highly valuable and private personal or corporate information. Only those who are presently on the company network or who sign in via VPN are allowed to gain access to the WorkBook.

While these benefits are encouraging companies to implement the system, putting up highly confidential data on the Internet is always a risky business. Will you adopt the social networking site as your collaboration tool for your company?