Digiday+ Presents: Ask Our Editors on Google trial outcomes, M&A activity

Google trial outcomes

On whether the trials would result in Google breaking up — both Joseph and Shields poked at whether it was too late. For publishers’ reliance on their ad tech, “It doesn’t necessarily affect publishers in any meaningful way given that their ads businesses are struggling at this point,” Joseph said.

As far as who could be Chrome’s next owner? Shields noted Digiday’s reporting, calling out popular names OpenAI (which could be moving into ads) and Perplexity (which isn’t offering ads at scale fast enough). “[The end result] will be more about behavioral remedies in terms of how Google is allowed to operate moving forward whenever this stuff is finally resolved,” Joseph said.

M&A activity

The Trump administration has not produced the level of M&A activity that execs once hoped it would, Shields and Joseph raised.

“This previously anticipated gold rush of a second Trump administration bring[ing] a flurry of M&A deals and IPOs — a lot of that is on hold because of the uncertainty. The tariff situation, everything flows into the ad and daily ad tech market,” Shields said.

Despite this, MNTN made a splashy introduction on the New York Stock Exchange last week. To some extent, “It’s just telling a good story,” Shields said.

Privacy workarounds

Shields argued that privacy is nearing a moot point — now that we’re several U-turns into Google’s decision on third-party cookies in Chrome and the pace in which technology (ChatGPT, et al.) is developing.

Cooper asked: Do marketers even want a new Google? It evokes FOFO (the fear of finding out), Shields quipped.

“What do marketers want? They want to show that they have results. The CMO is the most vulnerable exec in the c-suite. .. until you can get real, deterministic data to show this data drove this sale, it’s about as good as they’ve got. A lot of marketers just want things to work — work on paper at least,” Shields said.

Watch the full conversation: