The Leadership Letter

Real correspondence from the people running real companies — and what it reveals about leadership.

When Your Own Plumbing Becomes The Problem

If your product's integration advantage forces the market to build ugly workarounds, the workarounds eventually become the market.

Google's DFP is the dominant ad server for publishers in the US marketplace. Google has configured the ad server to work in a more integrated manner with its own ad exchange AdX. This has the unintended effect of preventing, technologically, the creation of a truly open RTB marketplace with 3rd party exchanges: the integration of DFP and AdX via dynamic allocation results in Google as the exclusive indirect demand source that can 'see' (and then bid on) booked impressions. These inequities have led other exchanges (and therefore publishers) to develop workarounds that compromise user experience — heavy tag usage, pre-bidding — leading to higher load times, reduced mobile device battery life for consumers, increased data usage for consumer mobile plans. If Google reconfigured DFP to permit open 3rd party auctions on all impressions, including through dynamic allocation, advertisers would reduce the number of exchanges through which it tries to purchase a single impression and publishers wouldn't have to install additional ad tech that worsens user experience just to increase yield on impressions. Is perhaps the solution to ad blocking cured if Google can somehow configure dynamic allocation to service 3rd party exchange systems in a manner comparable to the integration with AdX?

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Court Exhibit
United States v. Google LLC (Ad Tech)
1:23-cv-00108 (VAED), Doc. 1247-9, filed 2024-08-24
October 11, 2015
Public domain
View the primary source →