An Urge to Merge
Inquiry over, Doubleclick seeks to mingle on/offline data
NOW THAT THE Federal Trade Commission has ended its investigation of DoubleClick Inc., the New York-based Web advertising company is considering how to combine the data it came under fire for in the first place.
The data is personally identifiable information (such as name and address) from Abacus Direct Corp.’s file, which DoubleClick bought in November 1999, and clickstream data gathered by placing cookies on consumers’ hard drives when they visit DoubleClick clients’ Web sites.
Company executives have always admitted that using combined offline and online data remained very much in the firm’s business strategy and plan to have a procedure in place by the second or third quarter, a DoubleClick spokesman says.
