DoubleClick Unveils Upgraded Tools, New Group

Building on its acquisition of SmartPath earlier this year, DoubleClick has bundled the marketing resource management application with its own campaign management tool. The result has led to the formation of DoubleClick’s Enterprise Marketing Solutions group, designed to provide customers with a single workspace for managing campaigns.

DoubleClick’s director of product management, Marc Felsen, says that the recent purchase was done with an eye toward the future. “When we did the acquisition we knew we wanted to create an Enterprise Marketing group,” said Felsen, adding that SmartPath’s capabilities presented a lot of opportunity for the company.

The SmartPath application offers configurable marketing resource management (MRM) functionality that allows marketers to plan, track, enter objectives, assign targets, and budget. It also possesses a document review and approval system.

“Our SmartPath product is essentially a platform that provides functionality and is easily configured for specific customers and their business workflow and processes,” said Felsen.

The latest version of the application capitalizes on existing capabilities by adding enhancements such as charting and reports, pop-up task lists, and a comprehensive calendar system. Another valuable feature comes in SmartPath’s ability to allow users to isolate just the components of a marketing campaign that are relevant to their needs.

A simultaneous upgrade to Ensemble, DoubleClick’s campaign management tool, brings the two applications together, creating an integrated solution for end-to-end quality control, tracking and segmentation.

“We realized from talking to our customers that this was going to be something that they were looking for – a comprehensive workflow that spans the enterprise and can be integrated with campaign management,” said Felsen.

Some of the points of integration include: single sign-on, single permissions and synchronization of passwords. Also, campaigns created in SmartPath can be automatically duplicated in Ensemble, and tasks that are viewed and completed in SmartPath are reflected in Ensemble.

SmartPath and Ensemble can be purchased and deployed separately, but Felsen said that more than half of DoubleClick’s customers are interested in the integration.

“The SmartPath platform is an enterprise-wide platformintegrating with Ensemble brings all the power to the direct marketing group,” said Felsen, adding that companies can have over 1,000 simultaneous licenses.

Felsen said the integrated solution was installed over the summer at Folksam, a Swedish insurance company, because the company wanted a roadmap for greater functionality going forward. “They are able to manage operations more cleanly and have more control. They understand workflow and they understand the campaign performance process,” Felsen said.