Category: Doubleclick

Leading Ad Exec on Googleclick: Deal Should Raise “Privacy Concerns”

Omnicom Group is a global advertising/marketing powerhouse, controlling such well known “brands” as BBDO, DDB and TBWA. They represent PepsiCo, P&G, Apple, Fedex, McDonald’s, etc. etc. They know the business. Here’s what Omnicom’s president John D. Wren said yesterday about Google’s Doubleclick deal, in a story written by Reuters (my bold and italics):
“What it’s going to raise – and this will be a very good conversation in the marketplace – are privacy concerns. The technology that exists far exceeds the laws and thinking of the people that are going to be impacted by it,” he told investors on a conference call. Wren welcomed what he said would be a healthy debate that will ultimately clarify privacy laws when it comes to consumer information on the Internet.

“I’m encouraged by the deal, because I’m most encouraged by the discussion that the deal is going to cause the marketplace to have. Any definition will be positive for us.”

In other words, even the ad industry recognizes that the powerful and intrusive tools they have developed require safeguards, rules, policies, limits. For both privacy and the interactive ad market.

Red Herring: “DoubleClick’s cookie cache is a treasure trove for Google”

excerpt: “Without a doubt, DoubleClick’s historical data is very valuable,” says Jupiter Research analyst Emily Riley. “Every time you’re online, every page visit, and every ad you see comes with the possibility that a cookie is placed on your machine. DoubleClick has all the data.”

How much data? Ms. Riley’s back-of-the-envelope calculation puts it into the fifteen figures: with more than 100 million web users viewing a quarter million pages a year, it hits the 2.6 quadrillion mark—and that’s just U.S. users. If DoubleClick’s ad network touched even half of those interactions, it amounts to the kind of database advertisers would drool over. “What it does is complete the picture for Google about what’s happening on publishers’ web sites,” Ms. Riley says.

From: “Crunching the Cookie.” Sean Wolfe. Red Herring. April 19, 2007

No More Doubletalk from Doubleclick. A Public Challenge

Doubleclick is claiming it doesn’t really know anything about us, and that its data is controlled by its clients.

Let’s get to the truth. Doubleclick should immediately make public the entire range of data, including behavioral and profiling information, that it now holds on its own (versus what it claims is owned by clients). This should include what it collects from DART and every other product available in the U.S. and abroad. Doubleclick should also fully disclose its complete data-related plans for its new Media Exchange. Let’s find out what information about all of us is available to Doubleclick from its servers. Doubleclick should turn over this information to the FTC, the European Commission and an independent panel of academic computer experts who have no affiliation with the online ad industry. Ask the panel and the FTC/EC to conduct an intensive review of its data holdings and capabilities from a personal privacy perspective. Arrange for these experts to conduct inspections at the Doubleclick Technology Group’s facilities in “New York, Colorado, Chicago, San Francisco and Europe.” Make all of the findings public as soon as possible.

This is something Google should insist on, as part of its own public interest due diligence.

excerpts from product overview of Doubleclick’s Dart Motif:


“audience interaction metrics: Motif’s exclusive Audience Interaction Metrics Package lets you gather data on more than 100 unique interactions in every creative unit including multiple exit links, counters, timers and video metrics. You’ll automatically get metrics on how long each ad was displayed or how the viewer interacted with the ad. Plus, you can customize additional events to track based on your creative concept….
* Ad Interaction Time: Tracks the average amount of time a user interacts with your ad, so you know what works best.
* Interactive Impressions: Shows how many Motif ad impressions generated user interaction for better understanding of audience response.
* Ad Display Time: Tracks the average amount of time each Motif ad is displayed to help measure brand exposure and optimize site placements.

track more than 100 metrics

* Exit Links: Let you track multiple click-throughs within a single rich media ad. Essential for when you’re promoting more than one offer in an ad. Motif makes tracking multiple exit links easy and eliminates click commands.
* Event Counters: See exactly what your audience is interacting with by tracking customizable events like rollovers, mouse-overs and drags.
* Timer Events: See how much time a user spent viewing or interacting with specific elements in your ad, like an interactive game or video.
* Motif Streaming Video Metrics: Motif provides the same in-depth reports for your video ads as it does for other rich media features. You can track audience video plays, completions, pauses, stops, restarts, mutes, average view time, and custom video interaction metrics.”

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U.S. Search Market is Consolidated. Google to Have 75% Share

eMarketer’s release on its new report that: “There are two giants in the space, and they are getting bigger! Saying that search engine marketing is a highly concentrated industry is an understatement… [my bold]


“Google and Yahoo!’s share of U.S. Paid Search Advertising Spending”
2007 (estimates)
Google: 75.6%
Yahoo!: 16.3%
Total Market Share of the two: 91.9%


“… according to comScore, US Internet users performed 75.8% of their January 2007 searches on Google or Yahoo!, and Nielsen//NetRatings put the combined total at 76.4%… “In fact, over 90% of US paid search ad spending will go to the two search giants in 2007…”
“US spending on search advertising will rise by more than $3.2 billion from 2006 to 2008 alone… Paid search is currently the key driver of US online advertising, and spending on paid search in 2008 will exceed the $9.6 billion that was spent on all online advertising in 2004.”

from: “The Unstoppable Surge of Search Advertising.” April 20, 2007

FTC Filing today on GoogleClick First in a Series of Steps

Today, the Center for Digital Democracy joins with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) in a complaint to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission about new threats to privacy arising from the proposed takeover of Doubleclick by Google. A copy of the filing can be be found here.

It is critical that both U.S. and E.U. antitrust authorities investigate the impact of this deal on the growing consolidated online advertising marketplace. My group and allies are working on the competition and market structure issues, in addition to concerns about privacy (in the case of the online advertising market, of course, issues related to personal privacy are almost totally intertwined).

The merger between Google and Doubleclick, along with other interactive ad industry consolidation, has greater implications beyond concerns over advertising competition and privacy. Whomever controls the online ad market will determine the range and diversity of content creation and distribution online (through their ability to invest in content sources and services). Antitrust regulators must intervene to protect civil society, including ensuring the funding and availability of news and civic discourse for the digital realm.

Faster Than You Can Say Doubleclick: Google’s YouTube to Collect More Data

From Advertising Age:

excerpt: “Coming this fall from YouTube: richer demographic information.

“We’ll never have had that much data about that much content,” said Suzie Reider, chief marketing officer at YouTube. She was speaking to a group of advertising research executives in New York at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Rethink conference.

“By Q3 we’ll have a tremendous amount of metrics and data around every video,” she said. “There’s lots you can glean from looking at who’s looking at what. It’s a real-time focus group that happens all day, every day.”

“At ARF: YouTube to Get Richer Demo Data.” Abbey Klaassen. Advertising Age. April 17, 2007 [sub required]

Industry Insider Describes

“DoubleClick serves more display ads for more advertisers and more agencies and more publishers than any other company in the world. With this deal, Google now controls more display advertising than any other company, which nicely complements their other businesses where they control more search and contextual advertising than any other company in the world… DoubleClick currently processes more online ad campaigns and more ad transactions than any other company in the world, by far, particularly at the high end of the market. This data is a treasure trove. If Google wanted to, it could know exactly how much money its AdSense distribution partners make from other ad distributors, be they Yahoo! or Advertising.com or MSN. This is very powerful data.

Even if they don’t ever access the data itself, the metadata (the data about the data) is incredibly valuable. It is as if the world’s biggest stock broker just bought the world largest stock exchange. Plus, DoubleClick probably sets more cookies on more consumer browsers than any other company in the world as well.

Just the analysis of this data could yield for Google the keys to dramatically improving the targeting of all of their ads.”

From: “Google/DoubleClick: It’s About Display, Data And Defense.” Curt Viebranz, Online Media Daily. April 16, 2007.

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From Doubleclicks’ March 2007 study on what it collects via broadband video (my italics):
“DoubleClick…announced the results of its recent research of online video ad placements, illustrating that video is a highly effective format for online advertising. Findings show that audiences have high interaction rates with video ads, users click the “Play” button more than they click on image ads, video ads are typically played two-thirds of the way through and video ad click rates are far higher than those of image format ads.

DoubleClick conducted its analysis of more than 300 online video ad campaigns that were placed by more than 130 advertisers over a four-month period in 2006… The interaction rate is the “all in” metric, including the sum total of all interactions that people have with the video ad units. Those include mouseovers, expansions, interactions with the video control buttons, clicks and other events…. “The best standard data you get on audience measurement of TV commercials is limited to reach and frequency or specialized brand studies. However, online video metrics available today, like interaction rate, play rate, video completion rate and so on, give advertisers much greater insight into how consumers are actually engaging with the ads and their brands,” said Marianne Caponnetto, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer for DoubleClick.”

And from Doubleclick’s Dart Motif product:

“Deliver an emotional brand experience with video.
Convey your brand message with believability and emotion by adding Video to your Motif rich media ads. Ads including Video deliver nearly three times higher brand awareness and message association, and more than 100 percent higher purchase intent and online ad awareness than non-rich media ads.”

“Audience Interaction Metrics: Motif’s exclusive Audience Interaction Metrics Package lets you gather data on more than 100 unique interactions in every creative unit including multiple exit links, counters, timers and video metrics. You’ll automatically get metrics on how long each ad was displayed or how the viewer interacted with the ad. Plus, you can customize additional events to track based on your creative concept.”

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We Need FTC to Protect Privacy. Privacy Groups Should Be Calling for Real Action–not Industry Friendly “Workshops”

My organization and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group have asked the Federal Trade Commission to swiftly act and protect our privacy online. Last November, we filed a lengthy complaint asking for an intervention to stop behavioral targeting [pdf from Doubleclick] and associated spyware. But it seems that some groups aren’t that interested in action. They want the industry bigshots (who may be their funders) to come into the FTC and agree on “best practices.” That will likely mean no real privacy protection. Here’s the excerpt from a CNET story:

“The CDT has urged the FTC to hold a workshop on behavioral targeting to set best practices in the industry and get players like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo to agree on them. The organization wants to ensure that people have control in the event that these companies begin to merge consumer information from search and Web-surfing records to personalize ads.”

Privacy groups need to demand that the FTC finish its investigation (it launched one last November as a result of our complaint). We have provided the FTC with so much additional information, they should be able to act by now. Workshops are a delaying tactic designed to help out the special interests. If you want to see just a small fraction of what we’ve sent the FTC investigative team, go to adwatch.

PS: Here’s the blog post from the Center for Democracy and Technology on its request for a FTC workshop. Read its letter to the FTC. Then ask yourself. Shouldn’t public interest groups identify in such a letter the companies which fund them and engage in behavioral targeting? Shouldn’t they acknowledge that one of their key supporters, Microsoft, is the subject of a related complaint now before the FTC? Follow the money and the data mining it helps bring.