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:
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Freeing you to focus on strategy and creativity
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Integrate products to simplify and streamline your advertising sales, buying, operations and billing.
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Ahead of the market – then and now
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DoubleClick has been on the forefront of the industry since 1996. Its Innovation Lab and R&D program are constantly developing new solutions.
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Where the world’s top publishers, marketers and agencies connect
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DoubleClick works across industries, platforms, and around the world.
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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 14th April 2007, Google announced the acquisition of DoubleClick. However, it was only until on 11th 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?
Ravings about Technology 