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Technology Stocks : Engage Technologies Inc - (Nasdaq - ENGA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lance who wrote (276)	7/21/1999 11:41:00 PM
From: Techplayer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 754

From Smartmoney.. Engage Technologies Most Web users have already discovered those "cookies" lurking in their hard drives and realized that they are not invisible online. Engage Technologies (trading under the ticker ENGA), however, is taking the gathering of Web data to a whole new level. And on Tuesday, its unique traffic-tracking technology earned the company a market value of a cool $2.73 billion. Engage packs online advertising, marketing and traffic-tracking under the same roof -- thanks to parent-company CMGI's (CMGI) strategic acquisitions. But the company's main attraction is its detailed database called Engage Knowledge, which currently has more than 30 million Web-user profiles. It's the biggest targeted marketing database out there. Engage is hoping that its technology will win wide acceptance because it protects users' anonymity. The company collects no names or email addresses. But it does gather an array of useful marketing facts from your behavior online -- stuff like your geographic location, your hobbies, preferences and online habits. Each detailed profile is matched to the user and updated whenever that user visits any participating sites. Based on this ever-expanding profile, Engage's corporate clients can target specific ads to specific users. Engage is seen as the leading target marketer, but DoubleClick's (DCLK) pending acquisition of NetGravity (NETG) will give it a comparable database. DoubleClick's DART technology is not as thorough as Engage Knowledge, but not everyone is convinced deeper profiles are better. Tara Long of CE Unterberg Towbin -- who publishes a weekly e-marketing report -- questions, for instance, Engage's inclusion of how much time Web users spend where. "I'm just not convinced that's useful," she says. "I answer the phone and stay on a site all the time. It shouldn't add to my marketing profile." (Long has a Strong Buy rating on DoubleClick, but her firm has never done underwriting for the company.) The bigger problem with Engage Knowledge is that it hasn't contributed to Engage Technologies' revenues thus far. In the company's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, it says Engage will begin selling subscriptions in late July. In its last fiscal year (ended July 1998), Engage lost $13.8 million on revenues of $2.2 million from various marketing products and services. In addition to Engage Knowledge, the company offers Web traffic reports (the specialty of I/Pro, which CMGI purchased this spring) and advertising management solutions (the specialty of Accipiter, which was purchased by CMGI in March of 1998). The idea is to integrate all of these marketing and advertising services and offer a better package than the competition. But DoubleClick's management seems to have the same thought, having recently acquired both Abacus and NetGravity. Looks like a horse race from here.