If competition advocate Adam Heimlich could travel back in time to alter the future of online advertising, he’d go to 2007, he says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Not necessarily to stop Google’s imminent acquisition of DoubleClick, but rather to warn The Federal Trade Commission – which at the time was investigating the proposed merger from an anticompetition point of view – about something Google would do in 2016 years after the FTC had cleared the acquisition.
In 2007, there were privacy-related concerns that Google would combine its own search and cookie data with data from DoubleClick’s publisher customers to get an advantage in the market, Heimlich explains.
The FTC eventually determined this wouldn’t be an issue, and Google made a commitment before the deal closed to not combine the data. There were also contractual clauses in place prohibiting Google from merging its user data from Search, Gmail, YouTube and other properties with data gathered from non-Google sites.
Then, in 2016, Google changed the terms and conditions and combined all user data into a single ID. In the DOJ’s 2023 antitrust complaint – which is being adjudicated right now in a Virginia courtroom – the government argues that this move, referred to internally at Google as Project Narnia, proved “invaluable to Google’s efforts to build and maintain its monopoly across the ad tech industry.”
“In 2016, it wasn’t hard to argue that DV360 was a second-tier DSP that shouldn’t have significant share of trading desk spend,” Heimlich says. But being able to predict intent is really important for top- and mid-funnel display, he says, and, together with low CPMs, DV360 really started to take off.
The DOJ’s antitrust case against Google is focused on its alleged sell-side monopoly. But you can’t say combining the data into one ID didn’t give Google a leg up overall, Heimlich adds.
“I think that was where things really started to spiral toward the state of affairs that resulted in this trial eight years later,” he says.
Also in this episode: An update on Heimlich’s startup, Chalice Custom Algorithms; tips for how to identify when someone’s talking BS about AI; analyzing Google’s defense in its antitrust trial; and Heimlich’s personal Wu-Tang Clan connection.
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