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Day Two of the Google antitrust trial in Alexandria, Virginia on Tuesday was just as intensely focused on the intricacies of ad tech as on Day One.

It’s not often one gets to hear sworn witnesses in federal court explain the intricacies of header bidding under oath. But that’s what happened during the first day of the Google ad tech-focused antitrust case in Virginia on Monday.

What do Hercule Poirot, Ben Bernanke, Star Wars and C.S. Lewis have in common? If you’re an ad tech nerd, you’ll know the answer immediately.

Wonderful hadn’t done an out-of-home (OOH) marketing push in more than 15 years. That is, until a week ago, when it began a campaign across six major markets to promote its new no-shell pistachio packs.

Google doesn’t want AppNexus founder Brian O’Kelley – you know, the godfather of programmatic – to testify during its ad tech antitrust trial starting on September 9.

Publishers trafficking in pirated movies, TV shows and games sold programmatic ads alongside this stolen content, while using domain cloaking to obscure the “cashout sites” where the ads actually ran.

Starting last week and into this week, hundreds of court-filed documents have been unsealed in the lead-up to the Google ad tech antitrust trial – and it’s a bonanza.

Ever since Nielsen was dinged for undercounting TV viewers during the pandemic, its competitors have been fighting to convince buyers and sellers alike to adopt them as alternatives. And yet, some industry insiders argue that alt currencies weren’t ever meant to supplant Nielsen.

In the past year, Baby product and mattress brand Newton Baby has put all its media channels through a new testing regime for incrementality. It was a revelatory experience.

Colgate-Palmolive redesigned all of its consumer-facing sites and apps to make it easier to collect opted-in first-party user data.

History can be a burden for a brand, if it means that company is too set in its ways to pivot and try new things. Just consider e.l.f. Cosmetics, the digitial-first, social-native brand that made good.

Digital-native brands need to figure out how to win in retail shelves. They’re finding it difficult, to say the least.

A group of 20 web app developers sent a letter to the CMA claiming the regulator’s proposed remedies for increasing competition among mobile browsers do not address barriers to entry for mobile web extensions on iOS and Android.

“There are billions of additional screens outside of mobile phones,” says Dan Page, TikTok’s global head of partnerships and new screens. “We want to be in all of them.”

The Trade Desk delivered another smash earnings report. Meanwhile, Unified ID 2.0, the open-source identity initiative, has “reached a critical mass of adoption,” CEO Jeff Green told investors.

Many of Publicis’ fastest-growing and most strategic business units – including CitrusAd, Profitero, Epsilon and Conversant – earn a large chunk of their revenue from other agencies. Is that a problem?

In the crosshairs this time: media sellers with masses of user-generated content, including movie and video review forums with unmoderated comment and discussion sections.

“Google is a monopolist.” No need to say “allegedly” anymore, because that’s a direct quote from Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling against Google and in favor of the Department of Justice.

A major Google glitch caused unencrypted customer and product info to be shared between Google Merchant Center accounts for at least two weeks.

Amazon’s Advertising Services segment is delivering the dough. It generated $12.8 billion last quarter, up by a cool $2 billion year over year.

Q2 was relatively ho-um for Criteo. Its revenue ticked up by just 1%, although the company did move from a net loss of $2 million in the year-ago quarter to a $28 million profit.

In the past couple of weeks, many of the world’s biggest CPG and grocery store brands have reported their latest earnings. One thing is clear: CPG brands are under pressure by retailers to squeeze their margins, lower prices and spend more on ads.

What do Pepsi, Ulta Beauty and AB InBev have in common? A year ago, they were Moat clients. Now they’re in DoubleVerify’s camp.

For some, Chrome’s news that it’s keeping third-party cookies was a moment of vindication. But was it a cruel blow to partners that tested the Privacy Sandbox in good faith?

The FTC is ordering data from eight companies, which Commissioner Lina Khan describes as part of a “shadowy ecosystem of pricing middlemen,” in pursuit of visibility into “surveillance pricing.”

Alphabet is so big that, even when it’s growing slowly – YouTube, for example, disappointed with a lower-than-expected growth rate – it’s still outpacing competitors.

You read that headline right: Google is seriously considering scrapping its plans to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome. Instead, it’s proposing some kind of TBD opt-out tool for third-party cookies.

In January, the Chrome browser removed third-party cookies for 1% of users, to facilitate testing of the Privacy Sandbox –  and a new controversy was born.

For CFOs and CEOs, we’ve entered a kind of open hunting season on martech SaaS.

If you were wondering whether Brian Lesser was planning to take some time off after handing the CEO reins of InfoSum to Lauren Wetzel last week – here’s your answer.