CATEGORY: Most Influential Net Advertising Executive
WINNER: KEVIN O'CONNOR Cofounder and CEO, Doubleclick
Kevin O'Connor learned the value of mistakes at a young age. He was 13 when he launched a model hot-air balloon in his garage and nearly burned the house down. Instead of punishing him, O'Connor says his dad marched him back to the drawing board and, later, to the safety of an open field.
"Innovation," O'Connor says, "is all about making mistakes."
He made a doozy last year, when he decided to match individual names and addresses to the Web surfers whose online habits
DoubleClick has documented in its huge database. The revelation raised the menacing specter of DoubleClick compiling secret dossiers on American consumers.
The press, privacy advocates and investors jumped all over the company. From a healthy $128.63 on Jan. 11, DoubleClick's stock swooned to the double digits.
O'Connor, perhaps recalling his childhood misadventure with the hot-air balloon, held a press conference March 2 to say that DoubleClick was backing off its plan to mesh online and offline databases. His explanation? "I made a mistake."
A week later DoubleClick's stock was back up to $118.88.
O'Connor, 39, has made a career - and a fortune - out of such savvy changes in course. DoubleClick was originally conceived as a network of subscription sites. But when it became apparent that advertising would fuel free content, O'Connor and partner Dwight Merriman reshaped DoubleClick into an ad-space broker. From a two-man outfit in an Atlanta basement in 1995, DoubleClick has grown into a company with 1,800 employees in 22 countries. It claims to deliver more than 1.5 billion banner ads a day.
"It's not an accident," says
Kevin Ryan, DoubleClick's president and COO, who notes that O'Connor founded software company ICC right out of college and sold it for $25 million, and later helped launch Atlanta-based ISS, which is now a $5.5 billion company. "You can't be involved with this many successes and just be lucky."
You can't be stupid, either, and O'Connor is far too smart to walk away from targeted advertising. He knows marketers are hungry to increase their knowledge of consumers. DoubleClick will undoubtedly continue its push toward true "one-to-one" marketing, as will the many companies now scrambling to imitate DoubleClick.
A fan of author Ayn Rand, who extolled the virtues of selfishness, O'Connor is an agile manager, adept at aligning his interests to the interests of others - and vice versa. He learned the power of persuasion while coaching high-school wrestling in Cincinnati from 1988 to 1992. "Being a wrestling coach was the best management-training course ever," he says. "If you can get a 17-year-old to do what you want, then running a company is easy."
RUNNERS-UP: GERRY GRAF AND DAVID GRAY, Copywriter and Art Director, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
In a world suffering from dot-com ad nauseam, Graf and Gray's E-Trade campaign captured attention. Its purple-and-green billboards and wry television vignettes sent a clear message: Buy stocks from a broker? There's gotta be a better way.
LAST YEAR'S WINNER: IBM'S "@" CAMPAIGN
