• by Joe Mandese , January 14, 2004

The online ad services industry is fond of platitudes and testimonials, so it was not surprising to see yet another pronouncement Tuesday of support for the latest version of some online advertising tool. What made Tuesday's announcement - that Starcom IP has designated DoubleClick as its "preferred" rich media provider - special were the players involved. Starcom is a serious, client service-oriented shop not known for doling out simple accolades about its vendors, while DoubleClick is primarily an advertising management and ad-serving company that is providing a rich media solution simply as a means of enhancing and simplifying its core businesses.

While Starcom will continue to work with other rich media providers such as Eyeblaster, Pointroll, and Unicast when dictated by client preferences in specific situations, Jeff Marshall, senior vice president and director Starcom IP, says DoubleClick has built a better mousetrap that simplifies the complexity of producing, managing, and reporting on a rich media advertising campaign and improves its efficiency for interactive marketers.

Unlike independent rich media systems, Marshall says DoubleClick's DART Motif system provides a one-stop approach for agencies because it is also tied directly into DoubleClick's ad serving and reporting systems.

"In our world there are a lot of little details that need to be pieced together that make it incredibly complicated and labor-intensive. If the rich media campaign is produced by one company and served through another third-party server, the agency has to work harder to report the results," says Marshall, noting that some of the campaign's data might come from users interacting with the rich media itself, while another part might come from users interacting with the server. In those situations, Marshall says interactive agencies must piece together data that is often not directly comparable or "is missing" to create customized reports for clients.

DART Motif "solves that issue, because it's all being done by DoubleClick," explains Marshall, noting that other advantages include standardized rich media templates that don't require agencies to "start from scratch" every time they create a new campaign, as well as some cost efficiencies in driving bandwidth costs down by working through a high-volume ad server.

But the biggest advantage of the system, he says, is reducing the amount of agency labor associated with creating and managing rich media campaigns. That, says Marshall, will ultimately benefit marketers by driving down the cost of their campaigns.

"From start to finish, almost everything is more efficient from a man hours point of view," he says, adding, "And that is really important for the industry, because we've always been knocked that interactive is too cost-intensive to be efficient from an advertising dollars point of view. By making the process more standardized, it will make it most cost-efficient, and thus more dollars will flow into the space."

On the downside, Marshall says that to be so standardized DART Motif also by definition must be somewhat generic, meaning that some marketers will still want to work with other rich media providers who offer the latest "bells and whistles" for innovative rich media campaigns.

On a more pragmatic level, Marshall says it also will be imperative to continue supporting other rich media players simply to keep competition alive in the marketplace: "Competition is good. It leads to innovation and it helps keep our costs down."