DoubleClick

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DoubleClick
Type Private
Founded New York, New York (1996)
Headquarters New York, New York
Key people - David Rosenblatt, CEO
- Stephanie Abramson, Executive VP and General Counsel
- Stuart Frankel, Senior VP of DoubleClick & GM of Performics
- John M. Rehl, Senior VP, Global Technical Services
Industry Online advertising
Products DART for Publishers/Advertisers, DART Search, DART Motif
Website www.doubleclick.com

DoubleClick is a provider of internet ad serving software. Its clients include agencies, marketers (Universal McCann Interactive, AKQA etc.) and publishers who service customers such as Microsoft, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Motorola, L'Oreal, Palm, Visa USA, Nike, Carlsberg and many more.

Formerly listed as DCLK on the NASDAQ, and purchased by private equity firm Hellman and Friedman in July 2005, DoubleClick was founded in 1996, and is well established in internet marketing. Unlike many other dot-com companies, they survived the busting of the dot-com bubble.

Doubleclicks headquarter is located in New York.

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DoubleClick was founded in 1995 as Internet Advertising Network by Kevin O'Connor and Dwight Merriman [1]. DoubleClick was initially engaged in the online media business, meaning it helped web sites sell advertising to marketers. In 1997 the company began offering the online ad serving and management technology they had developed to other publishers as the DART services. During the internet downturn, DoubleClick divested its media business, and today DoubleClick is purely involved in ad management from the technology end — uploading ads and reporting on their performance.

In 1999 a $1.7 billion merger with data-collection agency Abacus Direct, a company that works with offline catalog companies, raised fears that the combined company would link anonymous Web-surfing profiles with personally identifiable information (name, address, telephone number, e-mail, address etc.) collected by Abacus. This merger made waves and was heavily criticized by privacy organizations. The controversy increased when it was discovered that sensitive financial information users entered on a popular Web site that offered financial software was being sent to DoubleClick, which delivered the ads. Much of the controversy around privacy at this time was generated by statements made by Jason Catlett of Junkbusters, claiming that DoubleClick was or intended to do things that the company had never mentioned or included in any planned or announced service. As a result of the the negative press, the company dropped any integration of their services with those of Abacus, and instigated stronger privacy policies and oversight.

In April 2005, Hellman & Friedman, a San Francisco-based private equity firm announced its intent to acquire the company and operate it as two separate divisions with two separate CEOs for TechSolutions and Data Marketing. The deal was closed in July 2005. Hellman & Friedman announced in December of 2006 the sale of Abacus to Epsilon Interactive.

DoubleClick is sometimes linked with the controversy over spyware because browser cookies are set to track users as they travel from website to website and record what commercial advertisements they view and select while browsing. However, the company maintains that it is important to understand the difference between DoubleClick's ad serving tags and the spyware/adware companies.

The companies which are most often referred to as spyware or adware practitioners usually install programs external to the browser that may engage in activities such as: monitoring keystrokes or movement on the Web, examining files and programs installed on the user's hard-drive and generally behaving similarly to a virus. DoubleClick's DART, on the other hand, is well-governed within the framework of the browser. DART's opt-out policies are very straightforward and DoubleClick cookies are easy to identify and deactivate, but inexperienced users may still have difficulty with this.


In order to create profiles non-personally identifiable information such as IP address, domain, browser, operation system, local time and date, page viewed are collected.

Doubleclick's tools could be used in ways that would mean that it holds personally identifiable information. The company explains that "the personal information collected is used only for the purpose for which it is requested". The information stored on DoubleClick servers belongs to DoubleClick's clients. According to DoubleClick, it generally uses the data only as a "statistical or aggregate information" source. The clients themselves promise contractually not to use information that "DoubleClick could recognize as either sensitive or personally identifiable" to target ads source".

DoubleClick offers technology products and services which 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 known as DART.

Primary competitors include:

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:

In addition, the cookie information may be used to target ads based on the number of times the user has been exposed to any given message. This is known as "frequency capping".

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