Plagiarized Content Still Eluding Ad Tech Filters; DOJ Moves Ahead With Google Ad Investigation

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.

Day Of Reckoning

The Justice Department is plodding ahead with an investigation into Google’s dominance of online advertising, including allegations that the tech giant abuses its control over search advertising to harm competitors, two people familiar with the investigation told The New York Times. State attorneys general will either file their own antitrust suits against Google or join the DOJ’s case later this year. Actions against Google could determine how the DOJ will treat other tech giants such as Apple, Amazon and Facebook.

Easy Money

CNBC reporter Megan Graham set up an ad fraud site with a GoDaddy domain and scores of plagiarized articles. Her project revealed the considerable disconnect between ad tech platforms’ site approval times and how long it takes for automated systems to flag copyright violations. The big three online content violations – hate speech, pornography and depictions of violence – are scanned for at once. But it takes 30 to 60 days for the program to flag blatant plagiarism. “I only put a few hours of work into this site, but I don’t do this for a living,” Graham writes. “Real bad actors can get a lot farther than this with only a little more work.” Read it.

Reseller Magic

Some programmatic resellers add value to advertisers’ media buys, others don’t. How to tell the difference? Jounce Media Founder Chris Kane will present on this topic at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO Innovation Labs this week. Simultaneously, Jounce has released a white paper to help marketers better understand their supply paths and make more informed choices. “The industry discussion about reselling has been framed as a binary choice for marketers – either enable reselling or disable reselling. But this framing is too simplistic and is inconsistent with the ways programmatic marketers have been optimizing supply for the past decade.” Download the paper. (Pay with some PII.)

CMO + CRO = CA&PO

Penske Media Corporation (PMC) named former Forbes CRO Mark Howard as its first chief advertising and partnerships officer. The new role seems to be a hybrid of the traditional CMO and CRO. PMC titles such as Variety, Deadline and WWD have their own revenue or business chief, but Howard will set ad ops and strategy across the portfolio and oversee B2B marketing and events, as well as the use of first-party data. He’ll also work closely on M&A deal-making. Read the release. “The opportunity to drive PMC and its publications to a new level of reach and profitability by leveraging the quality content, data and live events produced worldwide by PMC’s iconic brands is compelling and very exciting to me,” he said in a statement.

But Wait, There’s More!