Color us with the ‘unsurprised’ crayon, neither Yahoo nor global advertising power WPP want to see Google walk away with the queen of the ad network homecoming ball.
Yahoo Unenthused About Google, DoubleClick
No one is real happy about the idea of Google inhaling DoubleClick and filling itself with a treasure trove of personal data, on top of Google’s dominant position in online advertising.
A few of the would-be roadkills on the information superhighway continued the anti-Google drumbeat. ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley said the discussion at the MiXX 2007 IAB conference panel, “The Changing Landscape,” had some of Google’s competitors biting their tongues when prompted by New York Times editor Saul Hansell for opinions on the DoubleClick deal.
Yahoo’s Right Media, and WPP’s 24/7 Real Media, presented opinions that the proposed acquisition merits further government oversight. Foley noted the positions made by those companies’ respective CEOs were worded “carefully and vaguely.”
It seems there was some entertaining banter between Microsoft’s new company, aQuantive, and DoubleClick. The topic of competition came up, with Hansell noting Microsoft is a “proven monopolist.”
After that, Foley noted a comment by DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt regarding personal data, that sounded somewhat odd to us:
Rosenblatt emphasized that “in terms of data, (DoubleClick’s) customers own all of their data, one hundred percent. Any customer can take their data whenever they want. I find it unlikely any M&A (merger and acquisition) activity would change that. … To believe somehow that a Google-DoubleClick deal would make this market less competitive than is today stretches common sense.”
Is Rosenblatt suggesting that any customer can take their data from DoubleClick, to the point of requesting DoubleClick completely eliminate any data held about a given individual? That would be an amazing privacy policy at work. It also makes DoubleClick much less of a great deal for the $3.1 billion price tag.
