Women's Connection Online Joins DoubleClick Network

Women’s Connection Online, a Web-based community for professional women and women business owners, said it has joined DoubleClick’s ad network.

DoubleClick will help deliver relevant, targeted advertising to Women’s Connection Online’s community and to secure suitable corporate sponsors and advertisers for the site’s new “Info Centers.”

Nineteen Info Centers have been incorporated into a redesign of the site. They cover business, career, personal finance, and other areas of interest to women. The new Info Centers will each feature an anchor corporate tenant, a publication anchor tenant, and a women’s organization tenant offering complementary information and interactive tools.

Each Info Center will also have interactive chat, bulletin boards and products and services focused on the needs of women business owners and professionals. The first Info Centers, the Business Center, Career Center, and Personal Finance Center, will debut later this month.

Said Susan Williams DeFife, president and CEO of Women’s Connection Online: “Membership in the DoubleClick network recognizes the tremendous power of our community of business women as a consumer base.”

New York-based DoubleClick’s technology will deliver targeted ads to the Women’s Connection Online community and DoubleClick will not know the name, email address, phone number, or home address of anybody who visits the site.

The limited, non-individual specific information collected by DoubleClick will be used only in the context of ad selection, Women’s Connection said. Community members will be provided with a simple procedure to opt out if they do not want the frequency of their ad exposure controlled.

Traffic to the Women’s Connection Online site increased 1,500% since May, 1997, primarily by word-of-mouth referrals, and grows by as much as 40% per week, the McLean, VA-based company claims.