The ClickZ Blog rightly takes the Financial Times to task for a downright silly article on their site today. The article, covering Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick (which is “oddly named”) includes pearls of wisdom such as this…

Google plans to acquire the oddly named Doubleclick - most web adverts land you in an online casino with one or sometimes zero clicks - for $3.1bn. Doubleclick specialises in animated “display” ads rather than the text-based “search” ads that are Google’s bread and butter.

Whaaaa? Most online adverts take you to gambling sites with either one or (sometimes) zero clicks??

If it was April 1st, I’d chalk this up to an April Fool’s Day Joke. Perhaps Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska (”The internet is a series of tubes!“) composed this piece as a ghost writer. Or perhaps this piece was scraped from The Onion.

Regardless, here are a few other gems…

Google and Doubleclick are different kinds of business. Google is like a TV station, attracting viewers and then selling their attention to advertisers. Doubleclick is more like a media buying agency, buying space from broadcasters on behalf of advertisers. Buying Doubleclick does not increase Google’s share of the total web audience, a more meaningful measure of the market.

The real questions are why Google wants to be in advertising, and whether agencies such as WPP should be worried. Google is good at wacky stunts and has unusual office furniture, both advertising staples, but its laid-back computer engineers probably lack the necessary lunching skills. The right career advice for Silicon Valley’s finest: an adman’s pointy calfskin loafers are all very well, but the real money is in search engines.

Just goes to show that “Big Media” can print things worthy of the worst blogs in the blogosphere.

Is there really this big of a dividing line between online and offline media?