The business practices of both Facebook and Google came to light in unflattering ways over the past week.
Last Friday, a judge unsealed the 173-page antitrust complaint against Google – and there was a lot of interesting info underneath those black squares. Many of the details allege that Google manipulated the auction to ensure market share and well-padded fill rates. Some of the changes were prompted by header bidding, which the suit says threatened to unseat Google’s dominant position as an ad exchange.
Then there’s Facebook. It’s losing billions of dollars of revenue thanks to Apple’s privacy changes, but the figures aren’t disastrous, at least not for a mega social giant. Still, the moral charges against Facebook continue to mount, as leaked documents reveal its inability to curb the spread of misinformation and graphic imagery on its platform, stamp out human trafficking or cut down on hate speech. (And that’s not even the half of it.)
We finish with a quick recap of Programmatic IO, our live event that took place in New York City this week. One key takeaway: Identity has reached its “realism” moment, whereby people are problem-solving and uncovering solutions. There’s no more time to be a Pollyanna – or take a doomsday outlook on the problem.
And then there’s the connected TV parachute, which many ad tech companies are strapping on as they chart their cookieless future – but we predict they’ll have mixed results in-flight.
