Covering Google’s ad tech antitrust trial in Virginia is surreal for anyone who’s been in ad tech as long as Ari Paparo.
Paparo, who decamped to Alexandria for the first two weeks of the trial, watched as a parade of his acquaintances, personal friends and former colleagues were called to the stand to get grilled by the Department of Justice.
“I’m one degree of separation from virtually everything that was discussed in this entire event,” ad-tech-entrepreneur-cum-ad-tech-journalist Paparo says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
As he sat alongside the press on an uncomfortable wooden bench scribbling notes in a pad (no recording devices are allowed in the courtroom), he was particularly struck by the DOJ’s email evidence.
“Some of the emails among the Google folks are pretty damning in that they’re making decisions that appear to be against the best interests of their publisher customers,” Paparo says.
Although no one writes, “How are we going to spin this?” that’s the “vibe” one gets, he says, from certain email exchanges between Google executives about changes they knew wouldn’t be popular with publisher customers.
In Paparo’s view, some of the most compelling testimony in the trial so far came from Stephanie Layser, News Corp’s former ad tech product leader.
“She just laid out in stark terms how she felt that they weren’t really a partner,” Paparo says, “that [News Corp] tried to switch off DFP and they couldn’t, because it would cost them so much money.”
And when Layser protested about the unilateral release of Google’s controversial unified pricing rules, she was rebuffed in an insulting manner.
“Her objections weren’t listened to, and she was condescended to by her account managers,” Paparo says. “It was as dramatic a testimony as you’re going to get in an antitrust trial.”
Also in this episode: Decoding Google’s ad tech take rate, evaluating Google’s defense and analyzing Neal Mohan’s testimony about the 2011 acquisition of Admeld. Plus: Find out what an “ad potato” is.
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