
DoubleClick is one of the largest providers of online marketing solutions, headquartered in New York City. DoubleClick is a subsidiary of Google which develops and provides Internet ad serving services. Its clients include agencies, marketers (Universal McCann, AKQA etc.) and publishers who serve customers like Microsoft, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Motorola, L'Oréal, Palm, Inc., Apple Inc., Visa USA, Nike, Carlsberg among others. DoubleClick's headquarters is in New York City, United States.
DoubleClick was founded in 1995 by Kevin O'Connor and Dwight Merriman. It was formerly listed as "DCLK" on the NASDAQ, and was purchased by private equity firms Hellman & Friedman and JMI Equity in July 2005. In March 2008, Google acquired DoubleClick for US$3.1 billion. Unlike many other dot-com companies, it survived the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Today, it focuses on uploading ads and reporting their performance.
Products
DoubleClick offers technology products and services that are sold primarily to advertising agencies and media companies to allow clients to traffic, target, deliver, and report on their interactive advertising campaigns. The company's main product line is formally known as DART, which is designed for advertisers and publishers.
DART automates the administration effort in the ad buying cycle for advertisers (DoubleClick for Advertisers, or DFA) and the management of ad inventory for publishers (DoubleClick for Publishers, or DFP). It is intended to increase the purchasing efficiency of advertisers and to minimize unsold inventory for publishers. DART Enterprise is the rebranded version of NetGravity AdServer, which DoubleClick acquired with its purchase of NetGravity in 1999. Unlike the DFA and DFP products which are both Software as a Service SaaS products, DART Enterprise is a standalone product running on Linux.
In 2004, DoubleClick acquired Performics. Performics offers affiliate marketing, search engine optimization, and search engine marketing solutions. The marketing solutions were integrated into the core DART system and rebranded DART search. DoubleClick Advertising Exchange (released Q2 2007) attempts to go even further by connecting both media buyers and sellers on an exchange much like a traditional stock exchange.
Data Collection
DoubleClick targets along various criteria. Targeting can be accomplished using IP addresses, business rules set by the client or by reference to information about users stored within cookies on their machines. Some of the types of information collected are:
- Web browser
- Operating System
- ISP
- Bandwidth
- Time of day