Live from Advertising Week New York: Google, commerce networks and quality media

More than 17,000 marketers gathered this week in Midtown Manhattan for the annual Advertising Week New York, which comes in the wake of the U.S. v. Google antitrust trial. Inevitably, the biggest story in ad tech this year drove conversations on the ground. The lid was off and marketers felt emboldened to share their thoughts on Google as they looked ahead to the future.

Beyond the trial's ripple effects, other talking points across panels included the emergence of commerce networks and the valuation of premium content over cheap reach.

But let’s start with Google.

Whether or not the judge in the trial will declare Google a monopoly, as the DOJ alleges, is not expected until December. But that hasn’t stopped marketers from opening up about the tech giant. One person likened it to a culture of silence being lifted.

“Being able to talk about this stuff openly, it's been very cathartic because our process of discovery and everything allows people to talk openly about things that everyone kind of suspected,” Will Luttrell, a veteran product and technology leader, said onstage.

Luttrell said one of the U.S. government’s attorneys reached out to him years ago as the government was putting together its case when he was the founder and CEO of Amino Payments (Luttrell was the CEO from 2017 to 2021), but because Luttrell had $10 million of investors’ money tied up in his company, he felt like he had to pass on talking altogether. But he wasn’t alone in the sentiment.

“They [Google] own and control the market,” Matt Wasserlauf, CEO and co-founder of connected TV company Blockboard, said during the panel. “If you’re running any business or agency, you don’t want to piss off the company that controls your advertising.”

Wasserlauf said the outcome of the trial will likely set the direction for the future of the digital advertising industry. But Justin Choi, CEO and founder of Nativo, believes the trial arrived too late and is a missed opportunity to change the market for the better.

“The sad part is that I think the DOJ is now fighting yesterday's war,” Choi said onstage. “And no matter what the result is, the damage is done. By the time they have a remedy, the environment is going to be so different.”

One of the DOJ’s key witnesses, Stephanie Layser, worldwide head of publisher ad tech at AWS, noted that a growing number of publishers have been building their own ad servers to exert more control in response to Google’s market force over the years.

One of the big takeaways from the trial, according to Layser, is that when publishers lose the ability to control their ad decisioning, they can be taken advantage of.

With more companies looking to the future, Choi spotlighted retail media and commerce networks as a positive development for marketers, which allow for the integration of privacy-conscious identity solutions that aren’t beholden to Google.

Commerce networks flex their muscles

Uber, Lyft, United Airlines and Chase were all featured on different panels speaking to how they built their respective ad businesses. A number of these commerce networks have sprung up in the past two years as nontraditional advertising companies are realizing the power of brands to leverage their consumer data. These commerce networks are riding the momentum of retail media’s growth.

A panel on Uber’s ad business revealed that 38% of Americans have made a purchase with a brand after seeing an ad in a ride-share app, according to a consumer sentiment survey from NCSolutions. And that’s paying off, with Uber projecting its ad revenue to surpass $1 billion this year after launching in 2022. Still, Uber marketers say that their ad business is in the very early stages of its growth.

“We’re building a startup inside of Uber,” Megan Ramm head of the Americas at Uber Advertising, said during a panel.

So why are all these nontraditional companies starting up their own ad networks? The answer is simple, according to Mark Wagman, managing director at MediaLink. The technology and data that now exists is enabling rapid growth.

“As more of these companies need to grow and they look at growth drivers, this is an easy one,” Wagman tells The Current.

Chase Media Solutions is months into launching its commerce network, the first type of network in its industry. It’s anchored on the strong purchase data they’re able to garner from their customers.

“We took a step back and [realized that] if we own the platform and the data never left us, then suddenly we can actually leverage that data to really give our customers even greater value and in exhchange, drive sales,” said Rich Muhlstock, Chase Media Solutions’ president said. “That becomes the great differentiator. And it’s not just one type of retail data, it’s every retailer online and offline.”

These troves of banking data can strengthen marketers’ consumer signals. It’s an opportunity that could inspire more networks from nontraditional advertising companies to enter the market.

“I think every major brand in the world is sitting on top of an unmonetized resource probably in the range of the total economy of billions of dollars,” Charlie Neer, co-CEO of programmatic partner MiQ, said during a panel focused on unlocking the potential of media networks beyond retail.

Quality content is at a premium

Quality and relevance in media were key themes across almost every panel this week. As brands battle fragmentation, it can be easy to think about leaning into a strategy based purely on reach. There was a clear shared opinion among many panel speakers that moving toward quality, not quantity, is a key to success.

“We've been in a world where everyone is just focused on blasting as much media out there,” Good-Loop Head of Product Erez Levin tells The Current. “And if we start to differentiate the quality of different media […] you can drive both results for your business as well as align to some of these other brand values and social goods that you care about.”

Part of that quality is placing ads next to quality content like trusted news sources, which AWS’ Layser said too many advertisers are blocking because of brand safety — a mistake and missed opportunity, in her view.

“Sitting there and continuing to follow down this path and not embracing signal loss as an opportunity for publishers that create high-quality, good content is really a loss for the industry,” Layser — who spent 10 years in the business side of the news industry, from News Corp to MailOnline — said during a panel. “It’s a loss for advertisers and it’s a loss for consumers.”