I used to be head of gross sales for unbiased adtech firm MediaMath till 2019, throughout which era the corporate was thought of a prime participant within the house.
Our tech was licensed by large manufacturers and premier company holding firms in main media markets globally. Although I stay happy with MediaMath’s progress, I believed it was at all times bounded by Google.
However I didn’t consider this was attributable to being pretty outsold. As a substitute, I noticed how Google’s heavy-handed technique of paying lavish rebates for the biggest chunks of advert {dollars} gained it outsized advertiser budgets, which compounded through the years. The scraps left over had been for unbiased adtech to battle over. Many of those methods had been described by knowledgeable witnesses and in courtroom paperwork through the lately wrapped antitrust trial.
In the present day, in fact, we marvel at Google’s glistening advert and tech product advertising, mammoth person scale, huge gross sales and repair groups, unique advert stock, and immediately recognizable model picture. However from my tenure main groups who offered towards Google, I bear in mind properly the way it constructed that edifice: It could purchase off advert consumers in trade for advert budgets.
Google would reward the proper organizations, on the proper occasions, in the proper locations, with the proper packaging, and in the proper quantities for first dibs on advert budgets. In response to an inside memo, $445 million in rebates had been paid out in 2018, securing greater than $15 billion in spend commitments. The memo acknowledged: “For 2019 we intend to ship ~$20B in offers with $550M in incentive worth,” for a price of “~2% of whole qualifying spend.”
Google’s search enterprise was the mom of all leverage, and through the years, Google was in a position to develop this leverage to incorporate its advert server and YouTube.
Certainly, to draw greater show and video budgets, Google used these merchandise with a purpose to, per a doc it filed in courtroom, “drive non-search progress with a deal with YT and [Google’s ad] Community.” Companies would then spend these show and video budgets disproportionately on Google’s personal properties or networks, no matter marketing campaign efficiency, which represented far richer margins for the corporate than spending on third-party publishers.
