• by Masha Geller , July 14, 2003

There is a flurry of activity in the online advertising industry today, thanks to two major announcements. The first is the official launch of DoubleClick's DART Motif product, which has most of the rich media vendors scratching their heads in wonder about where it leaves them; and the second is the announcement of Yahoo's plans to acquire Overture for $1.6 billion, which signals the beginning of the wave of consolidation that's sure to engulf the search field soon.

What the Motif product does is effectively eliminate a step in the rich media process with its Macromedia Motif Ad Kit, which allows designers to create rich media ads and then package them into standard rich media ad formats for easy delivery. The tool also allows for previewing the ad in context on the target page (Eyeblaster actually offers this feature, too,) as well as allows the ad designer to specify the desired ad tracking and actions without the need to know about complex click tracking commands or scripting language. Moreover, DART Motif reporting includes the same reporting metrics available in the DART products, including impressions and clicks, post-click and post-impression activities, unique users, Advanced Reports, and lets advertisers view results of rich media and non-rich media campaigns side-by-side.

Basically, Motif is a one-stop shop that makes rich media as easy to work with as a .gif. While only time will tell if DoubleClick gets adopted as quickly as everyone is predicting, but it's clear that the work is cut out for all of the existing rich media vendors, who now have to figure out a way to leverage their agency relationships and product enhancements to compete with this powerhouse.

The Yahoo/Overture announcement is equally interesting, not only due to the amount of money changing hands, but also because this is the first sign of search consolidation. Just recently ValueClick bought Search 123, but Yahoo is the first portal to align itself with a search provider so closely.

Looks like Looksmart's Vice President Dakota Sullivan is on the right track, predicting that "Eventually, we'll get to a point when the major outsourcers [search services providers] will be lined up behind the major sources of traffic [MSN, AOL, Yahoo]."

The deal is still subject to regulatory approvals of all sorts, which seem like a formality in this case, but I'd like to see what happens next and how Overture will deal with existing clients. We'll keep you posted.