It's Go Big Or Go Home For Online Marketer

It's a dog-eat-dog world in Internet marketing, and DoubleClick intends to be the baddest dog in the pen. The online-marketing company, whose strengths have long been in online distribution of advertising, would become the biggest E-mail-marketing message distributor after its announced buyout of Canadian E-mail distributor FloNetworks.

The companies refused to disclose financial details of the proposed deal, which is expected to close in the second quarter after shareholder and regulatory approval.

DoubleClick already delivers E-mail through its DARTmail, which was launched last October and which distributes 150 million E-mails per month. FloNetworks can send 540 million E-mails monthly. It also has relationships with over 125 advertisers and Web publishers, including InformationWeek.

"One of the attractive things about the acquisition is that they bring us a bunch of new customers that hopefully we'll be able to sell some of our other products to," says Court Cunningham, VP and general manager of DARTmail Technology at DoubleClick.

The acquisition also would make DoubleClick a stronger competitor in an interactive-advertising market that has been dissolving in the ongoing dot-bomb. "DoubleClick has an organically grown E-mail capacity, but they wanted to bump that up by a large magnitude and offer the broad suite of services that are needed to compete in this market," says Laura Mitrovich, a Yankee Group analyst.

Push marketing is looking more attractive than traditional banner ads in hitting target audiences. Forrester Research surveyed 50 E-mail marketing managers who said they plan to triple their E-mail-marketing spending by 2004. And Jupiter Media Metrix forecasts that the distribution of E-mail marketing will see a compound annual growth rate of 111% between 1999 and 2005, growing from 3 billion to 268 billion.