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The Big Story: Blood In The Water

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The Big Story is a breezy podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about the biggest stories from the past week. It is available wherever you subscribe to podcasts.

This week on “The Big Story,” the AdExchanger team takes a good long look at how GDPR has impacted Google and its policies, which, in turn, have impacted the rest of the digital ad ecosystem.

In case you missed it, James Hercher connected the dots between disruption with the Google ID and Google’s participation with IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework. In today’s podcast, he’ll explain what it all means and the outlook for all partners, marketers and publishers that rely on Google to target and measure.

Obviously, many of Google’s actions are specific to Europe, but what are the chances that US marketers will also have to adapt? Google is set to change how it shares its ID (née DoubleClick ID) at the end of 2019. What will happen when and if that comes to fruition?

For now, marketers are frustrated because when Google enters a holding pattern, they do, too.

But you know where Google isn’t in a holding pattern? TV advertising.

In its earnings call earlier this week (Newsflash: Google is rich), the digital media giant noted revenue was up, but expenses were, too, partly due to Google’s investments in the TV space.

It’s no secret that Google has had aspirations to grab TV spend for quite some time. But with the advent of connected TV and the very gradual transformation of how TV is bought and measured, Google clearly sees inroads. Poaching Disney from Comcast’s FreeWheel certainly helps Google make its case.

And finally, there’s been a culling among digital publishers. Sarah Sluis takes the pulse of all the pubs that recently announced layoffs – BuzzFeed, Gannett and Vice, to name a few – and diagnoses what happened, why and what might very well happen next.

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