Justice Department Lays Out Plan to Break Up Google Ad Business

Implications for Optimization and Measurement Are Huge

Late last week, in a court hearing in Virginia, the Justice Department laid out its roadmap to force a divestiture of Google’s ad technology. Quite simply this would mean the end of the Google ad world we all know and hate to love.

Here’s the thing – Google owns the whole kit and boodle of exchange between ad sellers and buyers. That means it can monkey around with supply and demand, with pricing of inventory, with hidden margins. The government says that is anti-competitive. We’ve all known it’s anti-competitive, but it is so, so convenient.

Below is the meaty and truly significant part of the government’s proposed remedy, and many experts believe this is the strongest case the government has against any ad tech firm right now. (Number 2 is a real pain point.)

So what will that mean for brands and media teams? There is the obvious BIG disruption of Google’s ecosystem – the same ecosystem many, many brands and agencies have built businesses upon – going away. And there is:

Changing the Google auction efficacy

• Our first hope is that somewhere in this Google disintermediation, DV360 becomes more user friendly. Inside tip for those who have never worked in the platform: This technology is ridiculously unintuitive. I suspect campaign performance would significantly increase for most brands if the platform was built for media buyers instead of technologists.
• Our second hope is improved auction integrity. With no vertically integrated ownership (domination of sell side and buy side), the risk of bid manipulation is reduced. Or at least there may be more competition, which, in theory, would tamp down bid manipulation.
• Our third hope is for more transparency. We want to better understand how and why we win bid impressions.
• Google makes it easy to bid across inventory of banner ad, video and with data integration. An independent AdX could mean more fragmentation of work flows and reporting. This part will create some short-term pain for brands and agencies already looking for automation, AI solutions and efficiencies.
• But the big question mark for us is data. Data is the crux of audience targeting. It is the crux of audience identification and many attribution methodologies. No surprise Google’s first-party data is powerful and makes its monopoly sticky. The government wants to break that up, too, saying: Google can’t monopolize its own first-party data; it can’t use consumer data to inform AdWords; it can’t preference its product over other products. This could have big implications for common attribution methodologies. 

There’s a lot here. Smart brands and their agencies will have license to other DSPs, like The Trade Desk or Amazon. They will experiment with attribution models not dependent on audience identifiers.