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The Big Story: Google’s Legal Drama Laid Bare

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More than a year after 17 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, the hits keep coming.

A newly unredacted version of the suit – now ballooned to 242 pages – dropped on Friday and provides quite the scratch-off surprise.

AdExchanger has been busy polling the industry and reading up on the latest allegations about how Google ran auctions with undisclosed data advantages, dynamic floors and dynamic take rates.

Together, these tactics shifted hundreds of millions of dollars from publishers and rival exchanges to, who else, Google – allegedly. So tune in to learn more about Project Bernanke, RPO (reserve price optimization) and DRS (dynamic revenue share).

After our Google rant, we shift to another sore spot in advertising: the ad experience on streaming.

Because CTV is younger (and programmatic makes manual review impossible), all kinds of funky ad experiences proliferate. We talk through three of the biggest offenders: high ad frequency, ads that interrupt a scene midsentence and “We’ll be right back” slates that run for minutes while viewers twiddle their thumbs. Though the ad experience is starting to get better, CTV still has a ways to go before it offers as smooth of an experience as lean-back linear.

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