DoubleClick in Web movie deal

Internet ad sales network DoubleClick has signed a deal with the Internet Movie Database (www. IMDb.com) to sell European banner ads for the movie Website.

The site, estimated to generate 2 million page impressions a month from the UK, and a monthly total of 5 million page views across Europe, will continue to be represented in the US by San Francisco sales house Cybereps.

IMDb is operated from London and currently attracts over 40 million page impressions a month, most of them in the US.

The deal with DoubleClick follows a move by the site to strip out non-US traffic which, according to IMDb’s business and marketing director Alan Jay, was largely “dead inventory” for many US advertisers.

“To date, 100 per cent of our advertising has been sourced from the US through our San Francisco-based sales team,” says Jay. “But if you talk to US marketing people, they only have a budget for their audience and they only want to buy US traffic.”

Much of the site’s advertising is generated from cinema distributors but the site has also managed to build a growing roster of mainstream consumer advertisers, including Ford, The Gap and Panasonic.

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