Digital Marketing

Madison Avenue and the Web have a symbiotic relationship. The Internet was financed by advertising! Without it, the free Internet couldn't exist. Online advertising totaled $5.95 billion in 2002. Although it was down 14 percent from the previous year, Madison Avenue depends on that revenue stream. Fifteen digital marketing companies with serious-sounding names , such as DoubleClick, Mediaplex, CoreMetrix, and aQuantive (formerly Avenue A), control and generate 80 percent of all online ad sales and revenues .

DoubleClick, the Internet advertising giant, recently sold its North American media sales division to L90, a former competitor, for $9.4 million plus incentives. L90 immediately changed its name to MaxWorldwide. (I guess L90 didn't sound serious enough.) Both companies sold online ad-delivery and tracking technology to advertisers, while selling an advertising inventory on behalf of a network of Internet publishers.

The deal solidified an emerging strategy for both companies. It enabled DoubleClick to concentrate on its advertising technology and data-analysis tools and move out of ad sales, while L90's network expanded to more than 1,000 sites, including the 850 it acquired from DoubleClick. Perhaps this corporate shell game provides plausible deniability, but in my opinion it's a smokescreen. DoubleClick is in the business of harvesting personal information and profiling and targeting consumers. Which company sells the banner ads and which develops the technology is really irrelevant!

Figure 10.4: The DoubleClick Web site

Ad servers place cookies on computers that track your Web-surfing habits. These companies claim the function of their cookies is to regulate the type and amount of advertising we receive. Baloney! Because of the huge networks these advertisers serve, their cookies have the capacity to identify and shadow us!

Following is an excerpt from DoubleClick's Database Marketing Statement:

With more than 3.5 billion transactions from more than 90 million U.S. households, DoubleClick's Abacus Alliance Database is the largest proprietary database of consumer transactions used for target marketing purposes. By combining transactional data with advanced statistical modeling, database marketing can help marketers target the potential consumers that are most likely to buy their products or services.

For consumer-focused marketers who are looking for sophisticated modeling techniques and a large universe of quality names to increase their revenue, Abacus Catalog Alliance is a blind alliance of 1,800 merchants offering shared data representing over 90 million households.

DoubleClick sells names, addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers , brand preferences, buying patterns, and other personal information. You just heard it from the horse's mouth!