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Google’s Balancing Act, With VP Tara Walpert Levy

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Google’s size and fragmented company structure mean it is constantly buffeted by dueling incentives on a range of issues impacting marketers, agencies, publishers, tech and consumers – not to mention emerging regulatory pressure.

This week on the podcast, Tara Walpert Levy, VP of Americas for Google’s agency and brand solutions, discusses the high wire act.

Important caveat: This interview was recorded and published before Google announced its two-year stay of execution for the third-party cookie (though Walpert Levy does seem to tease the news when she says, “We will switch over when we have solutions that we and our customers are comfortable with.”)

At the outset of the interview, Walpert Levy addresses the European Commission’s just-announced anti-trust investigation of Google, which will focus on the company’s ad business – and which notably mentions its policy of disallowing third-party DSPs from bidding on YouTube inventory.

“The idea that the ad tech sector is lacking in competition is simply not true,” she says. “This is a famously crowded industry and a very complex one. We look forward to continuing our work to contribute to the open web.”

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