DoubleClick Inc and AdKnowledge, two providers of package software to web advertisers and publishers, have announced a strategic partnership intended to make life easier for the companies behind web banner ads. AdKnowledge is a venture capital baby, formed from the merger of ClickOver and FocaLink and funded by the Mayfield Fund and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, among others. The company’s product line reflects its mixed parentage. It inherited its ClickWise system from ClickOver, and MarketMatch and SmartBanner from FocaLink. ClickWise competes more or less directly with DoubleClick’s DART product, so the first part of the alliance is to move the 50 or so ClickWise customers onto DART. Both companies will provide incentives to the ClickWise customers so as to smooth the transition. The other aspect of the alliance is an agreement to develop industry-standard ways of doing things, as AdKnowledge marketing VP John Mracek put it, to make it easier for advertisers to spend their money on the web and measure the results. For example, reports from DART-enabled sites will be produced in MarketMatch-compatible forms. Similarly, a campaign managed in SmartBanner should be able to go into effect on the DART network as soon as client approval comes through. The effect of the partnership is to divvy up the market for web advertising services between the two companies. Relinquishing its ClickWise customers is supposed to leave AdKnowledge free to focus on the buy side of the market – that is, selling SmartBanner and MarketWatch to agencies and others with cash for media space. DoubleClick gets the sell side, meaning publishers, portals and so forth. That means two layers of middlemen between web content sites and big-company advertising dollars; three if you count the agencies. Still, web ad revenues are probably big enough to cover them all. AdKnowledge retains full technology rights to ClickWise, and CEO Scott Kauffman deftly eludes questions about whether that product will be abandoned indefinitely. If the partnership doesn’t work, AdKnowledge may lose its fifty customers but it will still have the rights to its software. DoubleQuick, by contrast, doesn’t seem to have staked that much at all. รก
