Media Mandible

Reports that Google is interested in acquiring DoubleClick come to me like an apparition of my favorite bushy-tailed puppy bending forward to slurp up a rancid cat turd.

The story more or less behind the story: DoubleClick is releasing a new “ebay-like” ad auctioning platform that will compete with Right Media’s Remix. Google is no doubt looking to expand its own auction-like AdWords system anyway, and could use DoubleClick’s old-guard customer base.

Memo to Google: Don’t do it. DoubleClick is not a threat, it is a flea on your windshield. DoubleClick is a dinosaur; you are a spaceship. You are the vanguard, the progressive force that keeps people feeling good about where the industry is going; DoubleClick is a bastion of mediocrity.

Google executives: Have you ever used a DoubleClick product? Have you encountered the slow, tedious, counterintuitive IE-only interfaces that are the opposite of everything the world has come to expect from you? Have you ever sat through one of their insane client productivity workshops, in which they attempt to convince you that all the problems you’re having with their product are your fault? Have you made a suggestion, for the fifth time in a year, to a room full of DoubleClick employees, about an easy way to make you happier, and seen the way they all drop what they’re doing and pretend to scribble it down? Have you searched through their online knowledge base, to find ancient and incorrect documents as a matter of course, to the point that you start, well, googling the relevant keywords, in hope that someone outside the company has explained common uses for the product more clearly than the people who make it and sell it?

Don’t be fooled by the fact that DoubleClick is finally doing something that the trades are interpreting as progressive. This is not progress; it is the last swipe of a geriatric giant’s arm as it stumbles drunkenly off a cliff. The people who run DoubleClick don’t understand what it means to think outside the box. They are the fucking box.

Far away in another industry, there’s something called a “page-one rewrite.” It’s a euphemism used to explain that someone with money bought a piece of property because of its hypothetical marketing value, not its quality, and then handed it off to an artisan tasked with actually doing the work. And that artisan looked at the property, recognized it as essentially worthless, smashed it into a million pieces, and started fresh on a new work that would eventually bear the same name as the first one.

That’s what’s going to happen if you buy DoubleClick. It’s going to be a page-one rewrite. Get out now, or sharpen your pencil.