DoubleClick Launches Ad Campaign

Alley-based ad giant DoubleClick is launching a new advertising campaign designed to boost marketers’ awareness of its full suite of products.

Created by new agency of record Grey Worldwide, the “Smart Tools, Smart Marketing” campaign seeks to communicate the company’s online, offline and mixed media offerings to advertisers, marketers and agencies that might only be aware of a portion of DoubleClick’s products.

“We have very high brand awareness overall … among senior marketing executives, senior corporate executives, agencies and direct marketing executives,” said DoubleClick’s chief marketing officer, Susan Sachatello. “But that said, people only knew us in the business that we had been associated with them. We want them to understand the broader tools DoubleClick offers, and what DoubleClick is all about.”

For instance, Sachatello said direct marketers know of DoubleClick’s Abacus Direct database alliance, but aren’t generally aware of its email list services.

To that end, online creatives will appear in business and trade media, and include rich media banners and larger-than-banner Web ads, Unicast Superstitials and rich media email. That effort is supported with print and direct mail components.

Sporting the company’s familiar color scheme of maroon, black and white, and using a simple layout and muted photos, the ads have a simple message: that DoubleClick offers more efficient, next-generation marketing tools.

In the larger-than-banner (300-by-250 pixel) execution “Chasing,” copy reads, “Mass marketing was about chasing people. Try it.” (As the user mouses over photos of people, they scurry away and stay patently out of reach.) “Smart marketing is having them come to you.”

In the Superstitial ad “Labels,” DoubleClick goes for a different approach. “Mass marketing was about labeling people,” the copy reads, followed by flashes of terms like “cyberpunk,” “generation x,” “investor,” and “empty-nester.” “Smart marketing is knowing what labels people want,” the ad continues. “A recent report found that targeted banner advertising is more cost effective in generating brand recall and interest than print or TV.”

Similarly, an animated banner ad reads, “Mass marketing never expected people to answer back. (More than two thirds of people online participate in a promotion at least one a month.) Smart marketing relies on it.”

Other creatives focus specifically on certain products. For instance, a 120-by-240 pixel vertical banner focuses on the company’s email list services. Copy on that execution reads, “Mass marketing was a lecture. Smart marketing is a conversation. With more than 35 million messages a day, DoubleClick delivers more email than anyone worldwide.”

The print execution, which ran in The Wall Street Journal, continues the idea of a dichotomy between the “old” and “new” marketing with a discussion of individual products: “Smart marketers employ multiple communication channels to better engage and understand customers. They’re using DoubleClick’s vast range of smart tools to do it, from online media and email to offline transactional data, industry-leading targeting technologies and research.”

All the executions include the company’s new tagline: “DoubleClick. Smart Tools. Smart Marketing.”

DoubleClick changes its tone with its rich media email ad campaign, which Sachatello said both positions DoubleClick as an industry thought-leader and serves to educate marketers on the state of the online ad industry (ideally, making it appear more attractive).

The executions include streaming video clips of company executives giving speeches on the state of the industry, including one of chief executive Kevin Ryan at DoubleClick’s recent client and partner event, Insight 2001.

“It’s an interesting email campaign,” Sachatello said. “We recorded content from different meetings and are sending them out in video clips to customers and prospective customers — to share with them not a sales message, but what’s going on in the marketplace today. Customers want to understand … and we’re serving as an educator in the interactive marketing space.”

Additionally, the new ads aim to endorse the industry by actually using many of DoubleClick’s own products.

“We’re using a lot of our own tools,” Sachatello said. “We eat our own dog food here. We use these tools because they allow us to get the performance we want out of our marketing campaign.”

The new push is the largest DoubleClick ad campaign to date, and will continue through the end of the year. Previous efforts included Digital Pulp’s memorable “Clay” trade campaign, ads in which featured a block of red clay formed into different shapes, representing various aspects of DoubleClick’s product line. DoubleClick also previously used Ogilvy & Mather in Europe.

It will also be the first campaign in which a single set of creatives are used worldwide. DoubleClick said when it tapped Grey for its creative work that it had sought a single agency with international offices, to facilitate a single worldwide message. Following a recent reorganization, Grey also includes the online capacities of interactive shop Beyond Interactive, which participated in the campaign.