• by Amy Corr , Staff Writer, October 24, 2002

It’s not easy to please the online advertising crowd these days. The dot-com implosion has turned them into a bunch of skeptics who couldn’t care less about a company’s mission statement, even if the boilerplate language promises to place agencies’ needs on the proverbial pedestal. They want to see results, and nothing else matters. That’s why Atlas DMT is so unique. It actually delivers on that promise. “Our core mission is to make agencies more profitable at doing Internet media,” says Tom Sperry, president of Atlas DMT — a company hailed by many online ad professionals as simply the best ad server out there.

Atlas DMT was born as a technology company about four years ago and is probably better known for building an interactive agency, Avenue A, around its ad serving technology. But there’s much more to the story, namely its Atlas Digital Marketing Suite, which boasts a stellar client list that includes Tribal DDB, FCB, TBWA/Chiat/Day, and Lot 21. Naturally, Avenue A (which was spun off from Atlas DMT in 2000 to become one of the top 10 interactive agencies in the U.S.) is also a client.

One of the most attractive features of the Atlas Digital Marketing Suite is the Media Console, a 4,000-website-strong searchable database that allows Atlas’s advertising clients to choose sites based on demographics, creative capabilities, and even past performance ratings submitted by other advertisers. If demographics are not as important, advertisers can turn to the behavioral planning tool, which allows targeting by user surfing habits. The Atlas Digital Marketing Suite claims to have 90% of all Internet users cookied, which translates into an abundance of surfing habits to target by, allowing advertisers to buy the audience and not the website. How do they do it? Action tags (tiny GIFs embedded in web pages) gather anonymous cookie IDs, page descriptions and the date and time of the page view, which then make up a database.

Another function unique to the Atlas Digital Marketing Suite is the optimization advisor. This tool takes performance data from campaign reports and makes appropriate recommendations to current advertisers, such as whether to keep or drop a waning campaign.

As for upcoming Atlas DMT developments, the company plans soon to announce the introduction of Reach and Frequency reports (geared mostly toward traditional advertisers moving online), which would give advertisers the ability to gauge R&F by site, placement, and creative, not just by campaign. Another planned feature is a processing language tentatively called PVM. According to Young-Bean Song, director of analytics at the Atlas Institute, “PVM is a processing language developed to process online campaign and customer data many times faster than normal, generating a new level of marketing insights and effectiveness. With PVM, the Atlas Suite can analyze data over longer historical periods, revealing the truths about customer behavior and campaign effectiveness that only emerge over time.”