With Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick now cleared by the FTC, the search king’s interactive marketing arm may gain a lot of muscle that puts its competitors even further behind.

Though DoubleClick didn’t directly compete with Google’s pay per click cash cow, it did provide indirect competition by allowing publishers to manage their own interactive marketing system.

According to Wikipedia “the company’s main product line is known as DART, which is designed for advertisers and publishers. DART automates the administration effort in the ad buying cycle for advertisers (Media Visor) and the management of ad inventory for publishers (Sales Manager). It is intended to increase the purchasing efficiency of advertisers and to minimize unsold inventory for publishers.”

This opens a new market for Google that’s still closely related to their AdSense and AdWords offerings. Integration between the currently disparate products could quickly result in an all-encompassing interactive marketing solution.

Meanwhile Yahoo is still considering using Google’s search engine to power its site, and Microsoft is struggling to get traffic numbers up on its Live search engine. Take a look at the traffic numbers from Compete below.

Google’s stance is that “the FTC’s decision publicly affirms what we and numerous independent analysts have been saying for months: our acquisition does not threaten competition in what is a robust, innovative, and quickly evolving online advertising space. In fact, we firmly believe the transaction will increase competition and bring substantial benefits to consumers, web publishers, and online advertisers.”

To back up their argument, Google published several specific points:

• Google and DoubleClick are not competitors.
• Third party ad serving markets are highly competitive.
• Data combination wouldn’t pose problems.
• Advertisers and publishers aren’t concerned.

Now the only thing holding back Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick is the European Commission, which is currently conducting its review.

Related:

Entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 5:26 pm under Advertising, Google, Internet.

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