Multiple Google witnesses, including Craycroft and senior director of engineering Nirmal Jayaram, said the company doesn’t use first-party data from products like Search or YouTube for ad targeting on open web display. Google’s attorneys also asked a buy-side witness, Jay Friedman of Goodway Group, if he had evidence that Google uses its first-party data for ad targeting, and he also said he does not.
Instead, the company said, it relies on cookies and third-party exchange match rates for targeting. The claim aimed to prop up Google’s argument that it doesn’t use its vast stores of data to maintain an unfair advantage in the adtech space.
The assertion, however, baffled some industry experts, who’ve suggested that the argument appears to be contradictory or simply a semantic twist, given how heavily Google markets its first-party data and targeting capabilities to advertisers. The skepticism centers on how Google defines “using first-party data” and how it defines “open web”—whether media transacted on AdX and then DFP is considered “open web,” for example, was unclear to some.
There are “two plausible, non-mutually-exclusive possibilities: One, Google has been overselling the benefits of its robust first-party data trove to advertisers, and two, Google is playing gold-medal-level semantics to be able to deny its use of first-party data to the court with a straight face,” Arielle Garcia, chief operating officer at adtech watchdog Check My Ads, told ADWEEK. “It could be that Google is drawing disingenuous distinctions, for example, around the definition of first-party data or between ‘targeting’ and ‘personalization.’”
Goodway Group’s Friedman, who served as a DOJ witness in the case, told ADWEEK: “The more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the evidence required is. It falls on Google to prove [this claim], given the vast evidence of other improper actions and behavior that were shown throughout this and other trials.”
3. Oracle, Adobe, and The Trade Desk were named as potential AdX buyers
An assessment by investment bank Lazard identified a handful of possible AdX buyers, according to testimony last week.
Lazard was tapped by the tech giant in 2020 to help map a potential sale of AdX. The bank named a handful of organizations that might be interested in acquiring the platform, including Oracle, Adobe, Salesforce, SAP, and The Trade Desk. It also suggested that some private equity firms might be open to the deal.
Top execs at Google acknowledged that the tech giant had considered selling or possibly shuttering AdX for a number of years.
4. Google tried and failed to block a key DOJ witness from testifying
On Oct. 2, the night before Stephanie Layser, a former News Corp exec and programmatic expert who was in the header bidding vanguard of the 2010s, was set to take the stand, Google filed a motion to block her from testifying.
The company argued in court filings that Layser wasn’t technically savvy enough, writing that she “has no personal knowledge of the technical feasibility of any of the proposed remedies in this case, as she has never examined Google’s source code and has no knowledge of Google’s technical infrastructure.”
