• by Nate Elliott , January 10, 2005

Recently I caught up with two adserving titans, each of which is aggressively pushing into the rich media market: DoubleClick and Atlas.

Both companies are trying to solve the problems that are fundamental to the rich media business. Both want to make it easier for designers to build rich media ads, and for agencies and sites to traffic those ads. Most importantly, both want to improve the reporting on rich media. DoubleClick and Atlas believe that rich media tools that are built into an adserver, as opposed to provided by a third-party rich media firm, simplify and improve reporting by consolidating agency reports and using a single counting methodology. And they're right.

Beyond their goals, however, DoubleClick and Atlas share little common ground, and their strategies bear little resemblance.

DoubleClick built their rich media tool, DART Motif, from scratch. The company partnered with Macromedia to create a special plug-in for the Flash authoring tool and develop a custom file format to simplify trafficking. The companies worked under a strict self-imposed deadline, and in July 2003 rushed an incomplete product to market. DoubleClick has spent the last 18 months adding features to the product that they had initially left out - such as multiple-interaction tracking - and working towards certification by major Web publishers.

Early on, Motif struggled to gain traction. But Doug Knopper, DoubleClick's senior vice president and general manager of advertiser and publisher services, says he's happy with the product's recent performance. The initial problems have been addressed, he told me, and Motif's functionality is now at parity with every other product in the market. Both revenues and impression volume have been doubling each quarter. And in the second quarter of 2005, DoubleClick will release a new version of the tool intended to further simplify the authoring process.

While DoubleClick built their tool from scratch, Atlas decided to buy. In May 2004, nearly a year after DoubleClick came to market, Atlas bought a small third-party rich media company called Ad4Ever. Since then, Atlas' Jos Stella and Saar Safra told me, that the company has been hard at work building upon and refining the Ad4Ever toolset, which will relaunch this year as Atlas Rich Media. Although Ad4Ever has had little presence in the United States over the last five years, the company's ad formats had already secured crucial site approvals from Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL.

For the most part, Atlas is keeping their tool under wraps. Although they walked me through the features of Atlas Rich Media, it was all off the record. And they've yet to confirm a release date. But make no mistake: they're working aggressively to get their product out the door. Major sites and agencies are already testing the tool. In talking to the company, I was truly impressed by their desire to release a great product. I would've guessed they were busy just integrating the Ad4Ever technology into Atlas. Instead, they're putting together a tool that they think can lead the market.

In the end, I don't think either DoubleClick or Atlas will "win" this battle. There's plenty of room for both products to do well. The simple fact is that rich media tools that are integrated into adservers make more sense than standalone tools. And while both companies have come to the rich media market late, they'll each have a lot to say about the future of this industry.

Correction: Last week's Rich Media Insider, "Will 2005 Be the Year of Rich Media?," was written by Mookie Tenembaum, the founder of United Virtualities. Due to a technical glitch, he was incorrectly identified. We regret the error.