Competitive SSPs will either buy or build their own ad servers. Some already have some ad server tech in-house, and they’ll likely be augmenting those teams in advance of whatever happens on the Google antitrust front. Ad serving on its own isn’t a great business, so it’s likely only going to be successful if you can bundle programmatic demand with it, which is why Google did it.
Quickly, the publisher adtech market becomes much more competitive. Publishers with heavier direct businesses or more business processes tied into GAM will take longer before considering another ad server. GAM is very feature-rich, and a competitor getting to that level of features and integrations—like with DMPs and OMSes—will take time. But publishers that are lighter on direct sales will quickly start to look into options.
While changing market dynamics is a good thing, it doesn’t necessarily mean that publishers’ businesses will improve overall. For business to be positively impacted, either or both of two things need to happen: The first is that adtech fees need to go down; the second is that advertisers need to spend more money on the web.
Regarding fee reduction from the adtech ecosystem, I’m not confident that these remedies make much of a difference. The adtech market outside of Google is already quite competitive, and while Google’s fees are among the highest, most of their competitors’ fees are also quite high. Additionally, many other adtech companies earn fees unaffected by these changes—curation fees, data fees, technology fees, verification fees, etc.
Advertiser spending is the more critical lever: Can these remedies make the web a more attractive platform for advertiser budgets? This is a harder question to answer. Does Google being broken up help The Trade Desk, Amazon, or other large DSPs not just steal share from Google, but also help them actually “grow the pie?”
Maybe. If buyers feel that the market is more competitive, they’ll be more likely to invest in the web. Those other DSPs must convince advertisers that this is true and prove it with results. A significant component could be The Trade Desk and other major DSPs taking an even stronger stand on market transparency; with Google no longer the proverbial 800-pound gorilla, it will be on others to fill the gaps. The Trade Desk has already been doing a lot of this, but they’ll need to do even more, and others will need to step up.