AOL Plans To Add Marketing Tools For Advertisers
spacer
By Antone Gonsalves
Courtesy of TechWeb News

spacer
America Online Inc. said Friday that it would provide more DoubleClick Inc. marketing tools to help advertisers develop and execute more complex ad campaigns and promotions.

The Dulles, Va., subsidiary of Time Warner Inc. said it would adopt DoubleClick's ad management platform DART for Publishers across all its brands, including AOL, AOL.com, AOL Instant Messenger, Compuserve, Netscape, Mapquest, Moviefone, Time Inc. Interactive, CNN, CNNMoney and ICQ.

The entertainment and commerce portal is currently testing DART on its Mapquest brand. DART tools will be offered through AOL Media Networks, which handles ad sales on all AOL brands.

AOL currently offers some DoubleClick marketing products that are available through the latter company's Performics division. Financial details of the latest deal were not disclosed, but the financial impact of the agreement is scheduled to be released when DoubleClick reports its first-quarter earnings April 21.

The latest announcement follows AOL's $435 million acquisition last summer of Advertising.com, which works with more than 800 advertisers and online publishers and licenses technology for offering pay-for-performance marketing. At the time, AOL said it planned to combine its advertising inventory with Advertising.com's network to reach more than 140 million Internet users.

AOL operates Baltimore-based Advertising.com as a separate company.

AOL has struggled to rebuild its advertising business, which plummeted in the collapse of the dot.com bubble. At the same time, rivals have been adding to their own marketing tools to try to grab a bigger share of the hot Internet-advertising market.

Microsoft last month unveiled its next-generation online advertising platform for MSN, called AdCenter. The ad and marketing management system is expected to launch MSN into the keyword-advertising market dominated by Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.

Microsoft is testing AdCenter in Singapore and France. A timetable for general availability has not been disclosed.

Online advertising last year was just under $9.6 billion, a 32 percent increase over 2003, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.