Google to Acquire DoubleClick - Final.

Original Source: FD (FAIR DISCLOSURE) WIRE

OPERATOR: Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Google Inc. conference call. This call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I'd like to turn the call over to Ms. Kim Jabal, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

KIM JABAL, DIRECTOR OF IR, GOOGLE INC.: Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. On the call today to discuss the announcement are from Google, Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer, Larry Page, Co-Founder and President of Products, Sergey Brin, Co-Founder and President of Technology, David Drummond, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development, Susan Wojcicki, Vice President of Product Management, and Tim Armstrong, President of Advertising and Commerce for North America. We also have today David Rosenblatt, Chief Executive Officer of DoubleClick.

First we'll share some thoughts on the news today and then we will take your questions. This will be a 45-minute call. A Webcast of the call, as well as the press release, are available on our Investor Relations Web site.

I do need to remind you that some of the comments we will make today are forward looking, including statements regarding Google's and DoubleClick's prospects for improving their services and creating new business opportunities and the expected timing of the close of this acquisition. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual factors, actual results to differ from those anticipated, including regulatory factors and changes in economic, business, technological, and competitive factors. Please refer to Google's SEC filings, including Google's report and Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2006, for additional risk factors that may affect the outcome of these forward-looking statements. Copies of these documents may be obtained from the SEC or at the Investor Relations section of Google's Web site. These forward-looking statements speak as of today, and you should not rely on them as representing our views in the future. We undertake no obligation to update these statements after the call.

And now I'll turn it over to Eric.

ERIC SCHMIDT, CEO, GOOGLE INC.: Well, thank you very much, Kim, and I want to thank everybody for joining us on the call with such short notice. We managed to get our deal done, and we wanted to make sure people knew it immediately. I'm actually calling from Argentina, where Google is opening its latest sales and support office, and I wanted to call in because we're so excited about this.

As you have seen in the press release, we've come to an agreement to purchase from Hellman & Friedman and a couple of other investors, DoubleClick, something we've thought about for a very, very long time. And I want to make sure I thank H&F and the other investors, as well as the leadership of DoubleClick, for working so very hard this week to put this deal together. From our perspective, DoubleClick is in a unique position to strengthen advertising and the advertising business of Google. But more importantly, we think this benefits advertisers, partners, and end users.

The first, and in many ways, the most compelling argument for this from a Google perspective is it is accelerating our display advertising business. By virtue of this both acquisition and the subsequent integration of tools and technologies between the two companies operating as one, we'll be able to offer integrated tools to solve interesting problems. And more importantly, perhaps, people will be able to use unified metrics. As you know, Google is all about performance and measurability. It turns out DoubleClick has some of the very best tools in the world. We can now use those across the many different services that Google and DoubleClick offer.

For publishers, more tools simply means that they have more choices. And more choices and more ways of publishing information, essentially building businesses, makes those businesses more profitable. The combination generates a very interesting yield management platform, and this yield management platform is itself going to provide new services for publishers in addition to agencies and advertisers. And the ability to using this platform that people will have will allow them to monetize much more and perhaps even all of their inventory. Again, a big solution that publishers have been asking for.

For agencies, you're going to see more efficiency. Agencies are huge partners right now of DoubleClick and also of Google. By operating with this integrated solution, it will be a more efficient transaction. They'll be able to do their work even more, even better and satisfy their customers even better than they already have. It allows the agency to offer the integration of search and display. That integration is something that people have been asking us for a very long time. We at Google are very committed to preserving people's privacy, the privacy of advertiser and publisher data, and this merger allows us to do that.

Not to forget, of course, we want to talk about advertisers. Advertisers will receive many benefits--inventory, targeting, buying options to choose from. One console for search and display, as I emphasized before, and many more innovations to come by virtue of the combination of the technology and the technologists at DoubleClick, and of course the technology and technologists at Google.

Users will also see a significant benefit. In fact, in many ways, great benefits, because the whole system will run faster. Users benefit from more targeted ads. They don't waste their time looking at ads that aren't relevant. This combination will generate that. I'm very, very excited about this, and I think what we should do, if it's okay with you, Kim, is let's go right to questions. People have comments and questions, and let's see what people …