• by June 23, 2004

DoubleClick has named Craig Calder, the former VP of marketing at NYTimes.com, to spearhead sales and marketing efforts supporting DART Motif, the company's one-stop shop for rich media campaigns. Motif, introduced last year, is designed to handle online campaign creative, ad trafficking and delivery, and reporting, as well as billing and reconciliation functions.

As director, sales and marketing, rich media, Calder reports to Ilona Nemeth, general manager-VP, rich media. "Motif has been out for a year, and the first year has been focused on creating awareness for the product," Calder says, adding: "DoubleClick thought it was critical to bring in someone who could speak from the creative and marketing side and get buy-in from the creative community."

Prior to his nearly five years at New York Times Digital, Calder was a creative director at Modem Media and Viacom's Nickelodeon.

Calder, who began his post at DoubleClick on June 1, says he's focusing on working closely with publishers so that they're comfortable running Motif. "It's in publishers' best interest to support all rich media platforms. Coming from the publisher side, it's been a bit of a rocky road working with all the vendors," Calder explains. He will also spend much of his time with agency rich media gurus.

DoubleClick certifies publishers to run Motif creative. Currently, more than 40 publishers are certified--including eBay, NYTimes.com, CBS, Cox Interactive, MIT Technology Review, and MTV Networks.

"The real goal is to get the Big Three [America Online, MSN, and Yahoo!] certified," Calder says, adding: "They all accept Motif ads right now in varying degrees, and on a case-by-case basis, but each of them has unique issues depending on their ad-serving systems and their individual technology and content needs." DoubleClick, he says, is "very close" to certifying them. All three portals are either running, or are set to run Motif campaigns.

To a large extent, Calder says:"We're playing catch up with the other rich media players ... The Eyeblasters, the PointRolls, and the Unicasts ... They've had four years to go out and promote their products. We're coming in late to market," he adds. Calder expects to mount an aggressive marketing campaign for Motif early next year.

As for the competitors, he notes that their products tout features that are "inherently built into Flash anyway." Motif's point of differentiation, Calder says, is that it's not a single ad format. "It's really a full suite of tools that allow advertising agencies and publishers to create rich media ads on their own without having to send it back and forth to the vendor to do the coding. It's a streamlined process that cuts down the production cycle," Calder notes. Because Motif was created with Macromedia, the creator of Flash, it can track any ad that's created in Flash.