I am just barely back in Phoenix after SES New York and what do I see all over the place in my feeds this morning? News that Google has won the acquisition of DoubleClick. The price tag rivals their recent acquisition of YouTube – $3.1 billion in cash!
I don’t typically like to rehash news but this is big. So what does this mean for Google advertisers? What does it mean for their competitors? A few summaries from various sources that might provide a clue.
DoubleClick provides a suite of products that enables agencies, advertisers, and publishers to work efficiently, that will enable Google to extend our ad network and develop deeper relationships with our partners.
This new partnership represents a tremendous opportunity for us at Google to broaden and deepen our inventory of available ads and to better serve both our publishers and users. Together, Google and DoubleClick will empower agencies, advertisers, and publishers to collaborate more efficiently and effectively, which will, in turn, provide a better experience for our users.
We believe our combined efforts will give you more places to target your ads and more ways to help your online campaigns perform better.
Official Google Press Release:
“It has been our vision to make Internet advertising better – less intrusive, more effective, and more useful. Together with DoubleClick, Google will make the Internet more efficient for end users, advertisers, and publishers,” said Sergey Brin, Google’s Co-Founder and President, Technology.
“DoubleClick’s technology is widely adopted by leading advertisers, publishers and agencies, and the combination of the two companies will accelerate the adoption of Google’s innovative advances in display advertising,” said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google.
“This transaction will strengthen our advertising network by expanding our access to publisher inventory and enabling us to serve the needs of a broader set of advertisers and ad agencies,” said Tim Armstrong, Google’s President, Advertising and Commerce, North America.
The sale brings to an end weeks of a bidding battle between Microsoft and Google. Microsoft has been trying to catch Google in the online advertising business, and the loss of DoubleClick would be a a major setback.
Obviously it means wider distribution of Google’s already dominate ad network. It will also help them expand their reach into display advertising. For their competitors such as Microsoft who was also bidding to acquire DoubleClick, it strikes yet another death blow in the race to become the winner in online advertising.
