Doubleclick Inc - Offered Real-time Targeting

DoubleClick had its roots in the New York advertising firm Poppe Tyson, a subsidiary of Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon & Eckhardt Inc. It was established by Poppe Tyson, Kevin O'Connor, and Dwight Merriman. O'Connor and Merriman had enjoyed success with Intercomputer Communications Corp., a software company that O'Connor sold for $25 million when they were in their early twenties. In 1995 Tyson's interactive unit was trying to find ways to place online advertising. The firm contacted O'Connor, who was in charge of the Internet Advertising Network at the time. He was in the process of developing software to position ads on the World Wide Web for maximum effect. O'Connor and Tyson then joined forces to create a network of Web sites that they could represent to potential advertisers.

DoubleClick launched its network in January 1996, representing about 30 Web sites. O'Connor and Merriman developed software for DoubleClick that could match online banner ads to a user's demographic and psychographic profile in a matter of milliseconds. This gave the firm a powerful tool to deliver targeted ads to highly segmented audiences. In its first year of operation DoubleClick quickly built a database of some 10 million user profiles. Among the first sites represented by the DoubleClick Network were Travelocity, excite.com, and AltaVista.

Investors were attracted to DoubleClick's business model. Initially, the company raised more than $2 million from Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon & Eckhardt. In mid-1997 it raised another $40 million from six venture capital firms. At the end of 1997 the company filed for an initial public offering (IPO), which took place in February 1998 and raised $62.5 million. Its IPO filing revealed that DoubleClick had $30.6 million in revenue for the first nine months of 1997, 43 percent of which was accounted for by AltaVista. Advertisers accounted for about 30 percent of the company's revenue. DoubleClick also had begun to expand internationally, opening sales offices in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. DoubleClick Japan was formed in September 1997 as a joint venture with three other Japanese firms.

Another innovation credited to DoubleClick was introduced in mid-1998. DoubleClick Local was a new service that allowed advertisers to target Internet users on a regional and local basis by tracking their IP addresses. The new service used the geographic targeting capabilities of DoubleClick's DART technology. DoubleClick had mapped out the individual points of presence for major national Internet service providers (ISPs), but not for America Online users.

Later in 1998, DoubleClick launched a new business unit, Closed-Loop Marketing Solutions, that offered three new services for advertisers. One service, DART for Advertisers, helped them to manage and traffic ads and easily change their creative content. DataBank was a reporting service that anonymously tracked shoppers' patterns and provided the information to advertisers. A third service called Boomerang gave advertisers the ability to create distinct lists of people on their site and what they did, and to continue the relationship after they left the site.