In 2018, DV360 demand on OpenX’s exchange plummeted without warning. It was bad – down by more than 40% – and baffling.
Tim Cadogan, OpenX’s then-CEO, wrote an email to Google, its largest partner, asking for an explanation behind the sudden decline.
“I don’t need to belabor the significance of this for us,” Cadogan wrote. “How can you help here?”
No one from Google ever responded to his message.
OpenX ran experiments for months to try and understand what the heck was happening, but was never able to figure it out – until Project Poirot was revealed in the DOJ’s 2023 complaint against Google for monopolizing the digital advertising market.
Project Poirot was a secret initiative within Google that began in 2017 to shift transactions toward AdX and away from exchanges, like OpenX, that were using header bidding.
Eventually, OpenX was forced to lay off 210 employees between October 2018 and March 2019, which was nearly half of its workforce at the time.
Accountability doesn’t have an expiration date
OpenX details this anecdote in a federal lawsuit against Google filed earlier this week in the very same court in Virginia where Google was declared an ad tech monopolist just a few months ago. (You can read OpenX’s full complaint here.)
But why sue Google now, when so many years have passed and some might say it’s water under the bridge?
Because “it’s never too late,” said John Gentry, OpenX’s current CEO.
“The pattern of anticompetitive behavior continues,” Gentry said. “And without remedies or, in our case, a judgment, I don’t see that changing.”
Gentry spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: Your lawsuit spends a lot of time talking about the negative impact of Poirot on OpenX’s business. What would the world look like for you and for publishers if Google hadn’t purposely undermined header bidding?
JOHN GENTRY: Even though we’re doing well now, the entire industry would be different if we’d had a free and open run.
OpenX had a really rough stretch. We laid off a lot of our employees. It was an incredibly tough time for the company. But we fought our way back by focusing on improving our product suite.
We invested in the first supply-side identity graph. We have a curation platform called OpenXSelect that’s doing well in the market. And, more recently, we created an AI-based performance suite for buyers.
What was it like back in 2018, on an emotional level, when DV360 spend went into free fall and you guys had no idea why it was happening?
It was incredibly confusing and extraordinarily difficult on multiple levels.
The first, obviously, is that your business is being disrupted precipitously and you don’t know why. You’re doing everything possible to try and figure out what’s going on; you think maybe something’s broken or wrong on your side.
And then you’re in a financial position where you have to lay off 50% of your staff by the time it’s all done.
Your lawsuit also talks about Unified Pricing Rules, which simplify how ads are priced and managed in Google’s ad stack but also eliminate variable pricing floors within Google’s ad server. What do you think of Google’s argument that UPR is actually good for publishers?
I can’t think of another time in my career where a company providing software to a customer tells that customer how they can price their product and how they can use the software – and then keeps changing the rules on them.
It’s a very problematic thing that directly impacts the number of impressions that exchanges, like OpenX, can win, and it changed the fundamentals of how publishers were running their auctions.
Let’s play a little game of alternative history: Where do you think OpenX would be if Google hadn’t engaged in monopolistic behavior?
A much larger company that’s thriving, and we would still have a lot of the employees we had to let go in 2018.
What are you trying to achieve with this lawsuit beyond just monetary damages? A little vindication?
It would be very rewarding to see change and be able to compete fairly after years of not being able to do so. We want to fight for clear competition in the marketplace and hopefully get a judgment that will stop this kind of behavior going forward.
How does this lawsuit impact your partnership with Google, though, even if not officially? We’re all adults, but I imagine it might get a little awkward.
I can’t speculate on how Google will respond to the lawsuit, but we value our partnership with DV360 and we’re completely in on Google Cloud. For us, it’s business as usual.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
For more articles featuring John Gentry, click here.
