The Practical Effects of the Google Antitrust Remedies

Welcome to Marketecture! Today, Ari Paparo outlines the implications of the Google antitrust remedies for the various parties of the digital media ecosystem.

I’ve spent a lot of keyboard time speculating about the likely Google antitrust remedies, and their pros and cons. Now that the final ruling is out (see my tweetstorm analysis), I’m getting the inevitable question: So what?

I’m going to lay out how I see the implications on various parties of the digital media ecosystem.

Publishers are the aggrieved party in this dispute, so you would hope the remedy would help them in some way. Well, good news! If – and this is a big if – you want to switch away from GAM to another ad server, you should theoretically be able to do so in about six months.

Currently (before the remedies take hold), switching ad servers would sacrifice the ability to optimize AdX against other exchanges and demand sources since AdX would only bid with a price within GAM. Since AdX is most publisher’s largest source of demand, making it bid blindly would cause significant revenue risk. Now (or soon) we expect AdX to bid directly into other ad servers and into Prebid, meaning you can get the price and optimize.

The ad server migration process is thus something like this:

There are major caveats here. Importantly, this won’t really work for CTV or native inventory. However, for most publishers, AdX is not a majority demand source in those areas. And, for in-app, I believe they already participate in unified auctions from AppLovin and others.

Secondly, and more immediately, publishers will regain the ability to manipulate demand pricing in GAM once the hated Unified Pricing Rules (UPR) are removed. Publishers currently are unable to give one exchange a pricing edge over another in GAM, after the Prebid auction takes place. Being able to once again make these pricing changes should allow publishers to extract better pricing, guarantees, or other business terms from their preferred exchanges, which should increase yield. This can also be used to manage quality by forcing lower-quality exchanges to bid more for the same inventory. 

In this category, I’m lumping in vendors that currently have an ad-serving solution, exchanges and SSPs, and other publisher-facing vendors. The question for all of them is the same: Should they try to migrate publishers off of GAM onto their own solutions?

To answer this question, we need to start by asking another question: Is publisher ad serving a good business to be in? The answer is no. On its own, offering a publisher ad-serving solution has been a pretty terrible business. Consider:

So, why do it? The reason is, and has always been, to get preferential access to publisher media and data. That’s why Google did it, and it was so successful it got sued by every jurisdiction west of Moscow (except Mexico). But you’re not Google, so feel free to bundle an ad serving solution with media access all day. 

Will there be a bunch of new entrants to the ad-serving world? Unclear. But the areas I would look out for are in retail media, where GAM was never a great fit, and in long-tail publishing, where existing vendors like Raptive, Sovrn, Jumptap, and others play.

The second area where publisher vendors should certainly push forward is in preferential exchange deals. This is the inverse of the UPR change described above. Exchanges currently vie to be the preferred exchange with lower take rates, better functionality, and guarantees, but now they have a more concrete ask for publishers: Let us win more.

The remedy with the biggest potential impact for exchanges is access to AdWords (Google Ads) demand, which currently flows almost exclusively to AdX. The remedies require that this bidding become “non discriminatory,” which should mean that bids move over to other exchanges. 

This is going to be hard work, and I’m very skeptical that these dollars will move naturally without a bunch of technical, operational, and legal effort. If I were running an exchange, I’d put together a “tiger team” that just spends all of its time trying to get the Google bidder the cleanest, fastest, most data-rich QPS imaginable to forestall and prevent any friction in bringing their demand over. Even if Google acts in the spirit of compliance (questionable, at best), the pure inertia of getting their bidder to effectively buy your inventory is going to be a huge barrier to seeing revenue. This AdWords bidder (codename AWBid) has been around for over 10 years and still barely works, as far as I can tell. 

Buyers can choose to keep their heads in the sand and ignore all of this, which is more than reasonable. However, there are real opportunities for taking advantage of these changes. First, for those agencies with active supply-path optimization strategies, the UPR change once again provides more leverage. Relationships with both exchanges and publishers can be enhanced with preferential pricing.

Second, the court very explicitly excluded DV360 from the remedies. This means that there could emerge a distinct bidding methodology difference between the Google DSP and the Google ad network in terms of bidding aggressiveness and supply mix. Advertisers at scale on both of these platforms should watch this to see if there are risks or opportunities around pricing and quality.

People like me have now run out of things to write about. Joking! Actually, as the remedies roll out, this will be full employment for folks who help the ecosystem to adapt to change. The ad server migrations alone will pay for someone’s kids’ orthodontics.

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