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A U.S. District Court has delivered a verdict in a major antitrust case, finding Google liable for monopolizing key segments of the digital advertising technology market. The ruling, which followed a three-week bench trial, concluded that Google unlawfully acquired and maintained monopoly power in the markets for publisher ad servers and ad exchanges for open-web display advertising. Furthermore, the court found that Google illegally tied its publisher ad server, DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), with its ad exchange, AdX.

The ruling, which marks Google’s latest antitrust loss following its Search case, states that the tech giant’s anti-competitive practices in two key markets “substantially harmed” publishers and users on the web. According to the U.S. government, Google collects monopoly profits at the expense of publishers and advertisers, who suffer from a degraded experience with limited alternatives.

Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a 115-page ruling that Google broke the law to build its dominance over the largely invisible system of technology that places advertisements across the web. The Justice Department and a coalition of states had sued Google, arguing that its monopoly in ad technology allowed the company to charge higher prices and take a larger cut of each sale.

The court found that Google engaged in unlawful tying by conditioning effective access to its powerful AdX exchange (the tying product) on the use of its DFP ad server (the tied product). Specifically, Google restricted AdX’s ability to submit real-time bids—essential for publishers to maximize revenue—only to publishers using DFP.

AdX provides access to a unique and vast pool of advertisers using AdWords (especially small and medium-sized businesses attracted through Google Search), publishers felt compelled to use DFP to avoid losing significant revenue, effectively locking them into Google’s sell-side stack.

This tying arrangement, the court ruled, stifled competition in the publisher ad server market, contributing significantly to DFP maintaining over a 90% market share and forcing rival ad servers to struggle or exit the market.

“In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” said Judge Brinkema, who also dismissed one portion of the government’s case.

Lee-Anne Mulholland, Vice President of Regulatory Affairs at Google, commented: “We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half. The court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions, such as DoubleClick, don’t harm competition."

“We disagree with the court’s decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers have many options, and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable, and effective.”

Earlier, US President Donald Trump had signalled that his administration will continue taking a tough stance on antitrust for the tech industry. 

U.S. Court finds Google guilty of monopolizing digital AdTech market

One month after a judge declared Google’s search engine an illegal monopoly, the tech giant is facing another antitrust lawsuit, this time focused on its advertising technology. This latest lawsuit, filed by the Joe Biden administration, has the potential to reshape the global Adtech industry.

In court, the Department of Justice, joined by several states, argued that Google has built and maintains a monopoly over online advertising technology. Regulators claim that Google controls both the buying and selling sides of online ads, allowing the company to keep up to 36 cents for every dollar spent. They also allege that Google dominates the ad exchange market, which connects advertisers with publishers.

“It’s worth saying the quiet part out loud,” said Justice Department attorney Julia Tarver Wood. “One monopoly is bad enough, but what we have here is a trifecta of monopolies,” she added, as quoted by the Associated Press.

Google, however, argues that the lawsuit is based on outdated technology. Google’s attorney, Karen Dunn, likened the government’s case to “a time capsule with a Blackberry, an iPod, and a Blockbuster video card.” She cautioned that actions taken against Google may not help small businesses and could instead benefit other large tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and TikTok.

Notably, Google’s revenue from its ad tech division has actually decreased in recent years, dropping from $31.7 billion in 2021 to $31.3 billion in 2023, according to its annual reports.

The trial, which began on Monday in Alexandria, Virginia, is being overseen by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema.

This case follows a recent ruling that declared Google’s search engine a monopoly, along with another case where its Android app store was found to be monopolistic. The government has yet to propose specific remedies for the search engine ruling.

In the Virginia trial, witnesses for the government are expected to include executives from major newspaper publishers and online news sites. They argue that Google’s practices harm publishers by imposing high fees, which forces them to place more ads on their sites or put content behind paywalls.

Tim Wolfe, an executive at Gannett Co., testified that despite the high fees, Gannett feels compelled to use Google’s ad tech products because they provide access to a large pool of advertisers.

In a 2023 blog post, Google stated, “No one is forced to use our advertising technologies—they choose to use them because they work.” The company also highlighted increasing competition in the ad industry as evidence that the market is still dynamic and not solely dominated by Google.

Google disputes the claims of excessive fees and argues that its integrated technology ensures faster ad delivery and improved security. Additionally, the company asserts that the government’s case fails to account for the rise of mobile and social media advertising.

Google faces new antitrust battle over advertising tech monopoly

Last week, a leading supply side platform, threw its version of the “end to end” stack into the digital advertising ring. Whether it is from the demand side or the supply side, all end-to-end solutions say that they: 

- Put advertisers in control of their media buying strategy, while simultaneously driving more revenue to publishers.

- Significantly increase spend going towards working media, make it easier for brands and agencies to securely share data, and helps publishers generate more revenue.

- Give a simplified, direct connection to the publishers across the open internet; by supporting an objective, transparent supply path; maximising value for everyone.

- Help trade through the most direct and efficient path to premium omnichannel supply with their demand side to supply side (DSP-to-SSP) architecture. 

- Fully integrate commerce media platform that offers end to end stack bringing consumers to brands, audiences to publishers and brands to retailers.

No prize for guessing who these companies are. With this, the commoditization of Open Web advertising is all but near complete.

When the IAB TechLab launched Project Rearc in 2020 in response to the deprecation (or limitation) of third-party cookies and other identifiers; a set of five initiatives was proposed to address the need. First and foremost was the Global Privacy Platform (GPP) protocol designed to streamline the transmission of privacy, consent, and consumer choice signals from sites and apps to brand, platforms and ad tech providers. IAB TechLab also proposed fresh accountability standards, seller defined audiences, tokenization frameworks for user enabled identifiers and privacy enhancing technologies. For nearly three years, since 2020, the AdTech industry has tried to build various solutions, including the Privacy Sandbox from Google. While there are different solutions that are being developed there is one area where there is absolutely no solution in sight and that related to the “transmission of consent and consumer choice signals”. 

The emergence of the end-to-end stack from all the leading AdTech providers must be seen in this perspective. Transmission of consent and consumer choice signals across the fragmented digital supply chain is not possible in the current form. It requires an alarming level of trust, transparency and compliance sync up from all the participants in the supply chain. The industry has chosen to “centralize and pack up” than to “rebuild and collaborate”. This has resulted in the commoditization of the AdTech supply chain, with no real differentiation. Value exchange and the related value creation has now totally shifted to advertisers and publishers, as they own the consumer choice signals and their consent.

Read more: <a href="https://www.storyboard18.com/quantum-brief/madtech-point-decoding-the-role-of-account-aggregators-15121.htm">MAdtech Point: Decoding the role of account aggregators</a>

Assume for a moment that advertisers and publishers have fixed their consent management obligations and let us play out what next. From an advertisers perspective their ad monies will now be distributed across 10-15 walled gardens and/or end to end stacks, with no common or consistent metrics to compare each one of them. Optimizing media monies between these 10-15 initiatives is not possible, as all of them have centralized their respective tech stacks. Even as advertisers offer their first party data for collaboration to all these 10-15 initiatives, they will struggle to find out which one of them have done better than the other. Cross media/platform measurement will become the most important requirement in the future. 

The industry has only postponed the collaboration agenda. By packing the digital advertising supply chain into an end-to-end stack, they have only temporarily fixed the problem that came with the deprecation of third-party trackers but left the measurement agenda wide open to solve. So far, the advertisers have largely remained silent or at best reacted to the technological changes brought in front of them by platforms and publishers. Now is the time for them to push the measurement agenda. This is the only missing piece in the digital advertising supply chain today. World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) have clearly enumerated the global and local architecture that is required for measurement. Big Tech platforms have all agreed and aligned to participate. It is now left to the local market to adapt and build it. 

Will the AdTech ecosystem and the industry body in India take the mantle and deliver it? 

Gowthaman Ragothaman is a 30-year media, advertising and marketing professional and CEO of Aqilliz, a blockchain solutions company for the marketing industry.

MAdtech Point: Why digital advertising supply chain needs to focus on measurement

When one steps in, the other one takes leave – that’s what the cycle of AdTech and MarTech is all about. Today, consumers have the option of interacting with brands through a surfeit of channels and they expect a seamless experience. It has become even more essential for brands to acquire the right set of customers at the minimal acquisition cost, engage with them, retain them, and maximize their lifetime value.

For businesses to be able to achieve this, traditional ways of approaching Month In Focus Int Logo voottechnology investments do not suffice. Companies need new technologies that can help navigate the complex customer journeys.

Shedding light on this convergence called MadTech, Neeraj Pratap Sangani, CEO, Hansa, Cequity says, “AdTech and MarTech projects are interdisciplinary and collaborative but very few organisations and senior leaders understand or act on this with any urgency. Today everyone talks about delivering a connected customer experience, but a customer experience is not only about AdTech, MarTech and automation. The piece that all organisations need to also focus on equally is about data - its availability, quality, architecture and much more.”

“Both AdTech and MarTech need to work in unison to deliver a superlative customer experience. I keep saying – it takes a lot of hard work to make your customer’s life easy. The fact is that technology has changed the business of marketing forever. Effective calibration of AdTech, MarTech and Data together is a potent combination to enable business impact,” he adds.

Marketing and advertising have been on a trajectory of convergence for a while now - they’ve moved from two sides of the same coin to being ever present in each other’s lives. Pooja Jauhari, Group CEO, VMLY&amp;R Network, India, and Sunder Madakshira, CEO, Rezolve India and ex-CMO, Adobe, cannot help stressing on MadTech being about hyper personalisation.

Jauhari says, “While what we’re termed marketing technologies were always focused on personalised and targeted efforts, broader ad tech was focused on broader data sets to communicate with. In its simplest form, the combination of the two, aka MadTech, is about personalisation at scale.”

Madakshira opines, “The constant search for one source of truth, building a unified profile across channels, a desire to have hyper personalisation and maintaining a strong brand essence are drivers for this.”

From a brand point of view, Arpanarghya Saha, chief digital officer, Nippon India Mutual Fund, says, “Well, we are in the business of money and that puts us in a space where we have to be very, very responsible. So, while brands in other categories are getting gung-ho about MadTech, our endeavor is to build SmarTech. We believe in creating lucid digital solutions and immersive experiences that have intelligence embedded at the core and those which empower our investors to take smarter and well-informed decisions related to their investments.”

With the antitrust lawsuit being filed against Google and Google being asked to segregate its ad business from its other businesses, what kind of a reality check or threat does it provide to other AdTech and MarTech platforms?

Sangani of Hansa Cequity likes to look at this issue differently. “I believe that it is a logical progression, and it brings to fore the monopolistic ecosystem that Google has created, curated, and meticulously cultivated over the years.”

Data went through many years of unregulated usage, and with both the Google lawsuit as well as the privacy measures that Apple has taken, the ability to use data freely has taken a major hit. “And while the focus on first party data by brands has negated this to a certain extent, the only way to move beyond this threat for AdTech and MarTech is to combine forces and focus as much on broader brand building as data driven personalisation. This will drive a growing focus on using brand connections with consumers without over reliance on cookies and will scale the growth of MadTech,” says Jauhari.

At the heart of the matter is a subject of great relevance – how does one reduce data domination of Google? How do we enable transparency in pricing? And, how do we ensure that privacy and personalisation co-exist?

This calls for a huge change in approach and mindset across the ecosystem. Sangani and Madakshira reiterate that brands and organisations will have to recalibrate some pieces of their data and tech strategy to meet their business objectives – customer privacy needs to be preserved, total transparency needs to be ensured in the way technology is deployed, data collected and protected and used to engage with the consumers.

Madakshira points out, “This means that some of the past paradigms and assumptions that platforms made will have to be changed. For instance, you need to follow the most stringent of the laws on the topics and make them global standards for the companies and not try and use different approaches by country that they operate in. This is the time to relook at the business models which served in the past but will simply not work in the future owing to the lack of societal trust in platforms anymore.”

“The lawsuit may come up for hearing in 2023 and nobody knows the outcome but it’s time that we work towards creating a more level playing field,” brings out Sangani.

With the exchange of digital and consumer data, and the blurring lines between AdTech and MarTech, privacy infringement is a major concern for most consumers. How do brands deal with this matter?

Brands believe that such concerns are rooted in the way the commercialization of consumer data has shaped up over the past years and how everyone in the ecosystem has tried to leverage available touchpoints to reach out to their customers.

“However, as can be seen today, the ecosystem is also evolving and appropriate checks and controls are being brought in and there is soon going to be a balance with the power finally resting with the consumers on how, when and where they want to be reached or not reached at all. Taking consent and abiding by it has been our fundamental construct with respect to our consumers. As a brand, our focus is to build our own capabilities which will help us assimilate, analyze, understand and utilize our proprietary data in such a way that we are able to serve our investors in the best way possible and make their investment journeys more fruitful,” says Saha of Nippon Mutual Fund.

Note to readers: Storyboard18’s new Month In Focus initiative spotlights themes and topics that are pushing marketers to reshape and rethink how brands interact with today’s customers. Our theme for this month is Stacks &amp; Strategies, a martech and adtech spotlight on how decision makers and marketers are advancing the adoption of new technologies and tech-driven strategies in the brand marketing ecosystem. From the defining trends and preparing for a cookiepocalypse to how progressive martech strategies help fast track business and brand growth. Catch this special on Storyboard18.

Stacks & Strategies | The Game of MadTech and Data

A state of flux. That is what the business of influencer marketing has been like since its inception in India. Expected to grow at a CAGR of about 25% in the next five years, it is certain that the only constant is a rapid and swift change. Neither brands nor agencies have the privilege of doing the ‘hygiene influencing’ campaign for broader awareness.

Today, many innovative startups are mushrooming each day, and they are observed to be investing heavily in social media marketing via influencers and content creators. Mostly driven by young minds, every marketing initiative means business to them.

Like startups, today, many leading brands also target direct business and revenue results via marketing. And rightly so! Living in a highly competitive world, why would one not focus on growing financially. After all, every company and brand needs sales for survival. Therefore, be it Instagram Shops or YouTube’s shoppable ads, social media today has truly emerged as a ‘shopping experience’ for consumers and ‘point of sales' for retail brands. From bait and click to influence and click; and cost per view to cost per click, the world of influencer marketing briskly changed over the last few years.

When Influencer Marketing met AdTech

he best things happen when the emotional intelligence of a human and tech-enabled experiences meet. While AR and VR are the leading testament of this in the broader world, shoppable ads and live-commerce are trending examples in the world of influencer marketing. While content creators bring in the emotional appeal, the social media platforms upscale their technology to provide the best experiences for the brands, consumers, and creators.

Shoppable ads come with an opportunity for brands to add a shopping link and provide a complete 360 shopping experience: grab the attention – influence – click – buy. However, while the creator’s role is only to influence ‘clicks’ it is the brand’s UI and UX that ensures the purchase. Hence, to convert an audience to a lead, and a lead to a customer via influencer marketing, it requires – a great story/narrative, a unique purchase link, and immersive UI and UX.

Live shopping is one of the latest disruptions in the world of e-commerce. This concept was first widely practised and accepted in east Asian countries. It started with fashion and beauty creators conducting YouTube and Instagram live sessions to influence and sell a product. Such activity garnered immense response amongst audiences and pushed them for ‘instant buys’ during the live stream. Brands, influencers, and the platform have largely capitalized on the ‘FOMO culture’.

Will Influencer Marketing meet programmatic ads?

Programmatic ads emerged as the most preferred accelerator for brands to get quick and scalable results. Alongside, influencer marketing has thus far helped many brands to build their brand value and awareness. What would happen when two legacy mediums meet? With many startups now creating AI-driven influencer marketing platforms, integration of ‘programmatic influencer marketing’ service will only help in bringing the much-needed disruption. Programmatic branded influencer marketing content will reduce manual labour, scale the brand’s reach and sales, and speed up the entire process.

Challenges we must fight

With the introduction of tech in influencer marketing, creators will have constant pressure to ‘persuade to click’. Hence, the brands will have to be rational with their ask and a common ground of views and clicks will have to be made before each campaign. Brands must understand that influencers aren’t their sales associates and expecting direct conversion from them is unrealistic. Moreover, brands today lay very stringent content guidelines with limited room for creativity. Therefore, pushing creators to create direct selling and TVC-like content will help no one. As it is the content that will lead to clicks, getting room for some creative content creation will be the biggest challenge.

In a nutshell

While social media platforms are constantly evolving to provide direct sales opportunities; influencers, marketing managers, and brands must understand and embrace the correlation between the content, clicks, and conversions. Irrespective of how advanced the adtech gets, the ultimate push factor will be the ‘persuasive content’.

Note to readers: Storyboard18’s new Month In Focus initiative spotlights themes and topics that are pushing marketers to reshape and rethink how brands interact with today’s customers. Our theme for this month is Stacks &amp; Strategies, a martech and adtech spotlight on how decision makers and marketers are advancing the adoption of new technologies and tech-driven strategies in the brand marketing ecosystem. From the defining trends and preparing for a cookiepocalypse to how progressive martech strategies help fast track business and brand growth. Catch this special on Storyboard18.

Stacks & Strategies | Influencer marketing meets ad tech

Note to readers: Storyboard18’s new Month In Focus initiative spotlights themes and topics that are pushing marketers to reshape and rethink how brands interact with today’s customers. Our theme for this month is Stacks &amp; Strategies, a martech and adtech spotlight on how decision makers and marketers are advancing the adoption of new technologies and tech-driven strategies in the brand marketing ecosystem. From the defining trends and preparing for a cookiepocalypse to how progressive martech strategies help fast track business and brand growth. Catch this special on Storyboard18.

As India's digital economy strengthens, the merging of marketing and technology better known as martech is expected to witness significant growth too. This trend has further been accelerated by the shift in consumer behaviour due to the global pandemic. Digital has become a key channel not only for customer acquisition and engagement but also for conversion, and retention.

Today, martech plays a pivotal role in automating processes and making marketing easier for businesses. The global martech spending in 2021 was around $344.8 billion, which is not surprising given that martech is used in almost every organisation.

Storyboard18 spoke to digital experts to understand and identify key martech trends that will define the India market in 2022 and beyond.

Focus on first-party data

With Google announcing the phase-out of third-party cookies, advertisers have been pushing brands towards an "owned-data-first" strategy in marketing. Gone are the days when one can simply rely on a code embedded on computers by websites in order to track consumer behaviour, thanks to growing awareness around online privacy. Marketers will now have to create their own digital assets, devise content to drive traffic to their websites and retain users.

“Using first-party cookies, marketers can identify the visitor's behaviour as long as they are on their website, including the user journey, the number of website visits, and other fundamental metrics. However, marketers can't access data related to their visitor's behaviour on other websites that aren't affiliated with their domain,” says Himani Agrawal, vice president - media &amp; analytics at OML Entertainment.

Proliferation of walled gardens

In the absence of third-party trackers, without robust first party data, publishers stand to lose nearly 50% of the advertising revenues due to poor targeting, says Gowthaman Ragothaman, CEO, Aqilliz.

“Local publishers will need to make heavy investments in building a functional CDP (customer data platforms). This will be at least a 3 to 5-year capital expenditure. I am not sure how many of them will have the appetite to invest in this,” he adds.

Ragothaman also points out that there will be rampant proliferation of many more walled gardens with large publishers attempting to behave like the Big 5 in creating a closed loop ecosystem where they can create a safe environment for data sharing that will help them provide better targeting.

“This will logically lead to the emergence of clean rooms. This to my mind is the second most important tech trend in 2022,” he notes.

AI- and Machine learning-based marketing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the capability to analyze huge amounts of data for behavioural patterns of consumers and predict future trends. Using machine learning and deep learning algorithms, marketers can seamlessly gather, analyze, and integrate key data into their strategies and craft personalised messages to customers at every stage of the marketing funnel.

Machine learning-based marketing models are set to transform the marketing industry with risk prediction, better return on investment (RoI) and better targeting and personalisation.

“AI-based marketing is set to utilise detailed information on the buying pattern of customers. It is crucial to predict user requests and increase sales. Consumers have already managed to get used to personification on the Internet, with platforms like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, etc., developing robust algorithms for deep personalisation. This trend is only going to strengthen going forward,” says Amit Wadhwa, CEO, Dentsu Creative group India.

Voice-technology

As people like communicating through speech, marketers rely on voice channels to build immersive consumer experiences.

OML Entertainment’s Agarwal points out that brands like Estée Lauder and Johnnie Walker have already started building relationships with consumers through interactive voice experiences.

“Another facet of voice technology in marketing is that voice searches now impact SEO. Content marketers will have to evolve and adapt to this new technology and incorporate it into their marketing strategies,” she adds.

Building micro-moments and hyper-personalisation

Micro-moments are selling opportunities that may last just a few seconds. They can now be identified by brands, owing to the increasingly sophisticated tools available for measuring and predicting customer behaviour.

“Developing the ability to spot and respond to these moments with personalised marketing approaches, will be a key priority for many marketers in 2022,” says Dentsu’s Wadhwa.

Today, consumers expect brands to understand and respond to their needs as individuals, offering them something unique and at the time and location that they need it.

“Technology, including AI and machine learning, can be used to identify these moments at scale and make personalised approaches, directing consumers towards goods or services,” he concludes.

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