Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Curation Nation
Curation is the new hot topic.
Advertisers use curation to avoid MFA inventory, bot traffic and other garbage placements. Publishers, meanwhile – news pubs especially – appreciate the fact that curation is a way to package inventory without getting foiled by keyword blocklists and brand suitability tech.
But curation is also just another incarnation of bundling. And bundling is just a zombie version of … ad networks.
“Ultimately, I don’t like curation, or deal IDs, because I think bundling is bad,” writes Gareth Glaser in his newsletter Gareth Hates AdTech.
Programmatic deal IDs help with billing, and ad exchanges often allow other vendors, like an SSP or another curation service, to insert them into bid requests. It’s a way to take another cut. But this just muddies the water for DSPs, which don’t know why that deal ID was served.
“Deal IDs are a core thing that holds back open web buying from performing as well as it could,” Glaser writes.
But who will rock the boat and rebuild the system rather opting to continue seizing the low-hanging revenue? Good question.
“Oh, and I’ll let you guys know on LinkedIn when/if I have any curation products available,” Glaser closes. “It’ll probably be soon.”
The Long Haul
Google is playing the long game with its US-based antitrust trials, Bloomberg reports.
In a soon-to-be-aired interview on “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer to Peer Conversations,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai pushes back on the idea that the DOJ’s cases pose an immediate threat.
“It’s going to take time for it to play out,” Pichai says.
After the search-focused antitrust trial, Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google does have a monopoly over online search and text-based search advertising. That trial is now in the remedies phase, but Judge Mehta has said it’ll take until August 2025 to determine the appropriate fixes.
Google plans to appeal the decision, of course, which Pichai anticipates will take “many years.”
In the ongoing ad tech case, Judge Leonie Brinkema may take months to render her decision. And if Brinkema rules against Google, Google will also no doubt appeal.
So how long are we going to wait for the antitrust fallout?
To set expectations, Pichai pointed to Google’s successful appeal of a $1.7 billion fine by the European Commission over AdSense’s alleged anticompetitive practices. The EC levied this fine in 2019 – and its ruling was just overturned by the EU’s General Court in Luxembourg last week.
What’s another five years in the fast-paced world of ad tech?
Address The Unaddressable
After Google announced that third-party cookies in Chrome would not be deprecated after all, Hearst Magazines – which had been investing big in first-party data – “paused for about five seconds,” according to Jen Dorre, SVP of ad products and data.
But it didn’t take long for Hearst to press forward, she tells Digiday.
The future isn’t totally cookie-free, nor will there be the same scaled, persistent access to cookie data going forward. Publishers will need to stitch first-party data together with third-party data – and hope that advertisers begin trusting probabilistic modeling and not just user-level deterministic results.
Publishers are in a tough spot. They know that they’re serving ads and reaching more people. But the certifiable data to prove it is running dry.
“We’re all trying to figure out measurement,” Dorre says. “And so I think of measurement in two parts: us as a publisher knowing that we’re delivering what we say we will deliver, and then there’s what the advertisers are willing to accept for measurement.”
But Wait, There’s More!
Koch Equity Development is rumored to be in talks to buy Forbes. [Axios]
Google cache is fully dead. [Search Engine Roundtable]
X brings back its transparency report for the first time since 2021. [Digiday] Speaking of, X claims in its report that it complied with 76% of all government requests for user data in the US, up from about 40% between 2020 and 2021. [WaPo]
Google files an antitrust claim with EU regulators accusing Microsoft of abusing its dominance in the cloud market. [Bloomberg]
