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- A field guide to the Google antitrust trial
The Monopoly Report is a new free newsletter from Marketecture covering everything relating to Google’s ad tech antitrust trial.
A field guide to the Google antitrust trial
I looked back at one of my last newsletters and was shocked at how often I had to use parentheticals to explain which companies and Google products were which since they changed names multiple times. For those of you planning on sitting in the audience at the trial in September it can be downright confusing!
So like a bird watcher’s little notebook, I’ve assembled a “field guide” to help understand what the heck everyone’s talking about.
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A couple of years ago I published a diagram showing how all the Google supply and demand matches up. There are many other similar diagrams, but they usually omit the detailed product names, making them a little hard to map to various evidence and documents.
“Simplified”
Google product names
I’m not a conspiracy theorist. But sometimes I think there’s a plan within Google to change their product names in the most confusing way possible just to throw people off their trail.
I will do my best to help you out with this glossary. This more or less tracks with the diagram above, but moving from right-to-left. I may have missed some things, let me know.
Product | Current Name | Context |
|---|---|---|
Publisher ad server for larger paying publishers | Google Ad Manager (“GAM”) | Formerly known as DART for Publishers (“DFP”). For a hot second Google called the paid version “Google Ad Manager 360” then retreated back to GAM. There is virtually no trace of the “360” except this help article. |
Free publisher ad server for smaller publishers | Google Ad Manager (“GAM”) | Formerly known as Google Ad Manager Small Business. |
Ad exchange | No name | Google claims the ad exchange formerly known as “AdX” is now just a feature of GAM, so doesn’t need a name. It refers to the buyers as “Authorized Buyers” and sometimes uses this phrase as short-hand for the product. |
Publisher monetization platform | This may be the most consistent product name in the suite. | |
Mobile monetization platform | Google uses this brand for mobile endemic publishers and advertisers. But if you are a mainstream GAM publishers that also has an app, you use the “Mobile Ads SDK”, which is the same thing. | |
Server-side integration with external exchanges | Formerly known as Exchange Bidding, or Exchange Bidding in Dynamic Allocation (“EBDA”). | |
Managed ad network | Google Display Network (“GDN”) | This term is very confusing since sometimes Google seems to refer to all image and video ads from Google Ads as GDN and other times just the high-touch ad network part. |
DSP | Display and Video 360 (“DV360”) | Formerly DoubleClick Bid Manager (“DBM”). This was known as Invite Media before being acquired by Google in ~2010. I feel like they used the letter “D” here to just be confusing vs the old DoubleClick naming convention. |
Buy-side ad server | Campaign Manager 360 (“GCM”) | Previously DART for Advertisers (“DFA”). In some statements Google has implied that this will at some point not be a separate product from DV360. |
Analytics suite for buyers | Google Analytics (“GA”) | Formerly “Urchin”, a really long time ago. |
Overall buy-side suite for larger advertisers | This is the suite of DV360, GCM, Tag Manager and GA. seems more like a marketing term, I don’t think people in real life ever call it this. | |
General ad buying platform | Formerly Google AdWords. (See discussion below) |
Making sense of it all
The biggest source of frustration when trying to navigate Google’s ad products is trying to draw clean lines between use cases and customer types. Someone coming at this new will generally come up with a way of making sense of this such as:
Small: Google Ads, GAM Small Business, AdSense
Large: DV360, GCM, GAM, AdX
Can you think of any large advertiser that doesn’t use Google Ads, though? Also many large publishers use both AdX and AdSense. So that doesn’t work.
How about this:
Search: Google Ads
Display and Video: DV360, GAM, etc.
Nope, Google Ads is a huge source of demand for display and video.
Or maybe this works:
Small: Google Ads (self service)
Large: Google Display Network (full service)
Nope, that’s not reflective of reality.
I hate to break it to you, but these product pretty much all overlap with one another and can’t be easily be broken down by large/small, search/display, geo, or anything else.
Alleged anti-competitive programs
This newsletter will go into some depth on the various programs used by Google to allegedly stifle competition. Here’s a quick reference:
Program | tl;dr |
|---|---|
Dynamic Allocation | Allow AdX to win auctions against other remnant demand in GAM. |
Enhanced Dynamic Allocation | Same as Dynamic Allocation, but also works on premium, reserved, buys. |
Dynamic Revenue Share | Because Google had visibility into both the buy-side and sell-side fees they could dynamically change their margin in order to win auctions they wouldn’t have otherwise won. |
Bernanke | Named after the central banker, the idea was to keep a “bank” per publisher that would be debited or credited across different auctions in order to increase wins they otherwise would not have won. |
Global Bernanke | Same as Bernanke, but the “bank” worked across publishers. |
Poirot | Bid shading in DV360 that systematically lowered bids on rival exchanges to account for 1st price dynamics that were becoming prevalent with the growth of header bidding. |
Bell | Same as Bernanke, but allegedly “punished” publishers who did not give GAM first look at all inventory. |
Jedi Blue | Agreement with Facebook/Meta to allow their participation in Open Exchange auctions and to allegedly preclude the company from entering header bidding. |
Unified Pricing Rules | A set of changes to GAM that limited publishers’ ability to discriminate demand from different sources. Publishers used these rules to give advantages to non-AdX demand even at the same pricing. |
Last Look | Another way of describing Dynamic Allocation — once header bidding starting pushing rival exchange bids into GAM, Google’s AdX would still have the ability to bid $0.01 higher than the highest bid seen. |
Links and docs
Quick reference on the case:
The DOJ complaint (PDF)
DOJ homepage for the case (link)
The docker on CourtListener (link)
The court in Alexandria, VA
The judge, Leonie Brinkema
If you’re getting this forwarded, make sure to subscribe to hear how it plays out.
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