Confessions of a media buyer on Google’s stranglehold on the industry

The following interview has been edited for space and clarity.

How long have you suspected Google of having cornered the business? And have you ever felt like there’s something you can do about it, or does everyone just have to play along?

I I think that there have been suspicions for the last 10 years that there are thumbs on the scale in various ways. There have been perspectives that, in some ways, Google is giving itself first right of refusal, whether that be in the ways that it does ad distribution, whether that be in the ways that it thinks about monetization, or it sets the floor for various bid auctions and things of that nature.

To the second part of your question, Google is a functional machine that does work. So it’s really difficult to say it’s not leaving tangible results. It’s immediate production. I can have a campaign live in a self-serve model in less than an hour, right? They have end-to-end management. They made a user interface that’s very robust. They have no issues dedicating computing power, engineering resources, or solutioning. They want to be collaborative. They have a robust infrastructure when it comes to research teams.

Now, when Google moves more and more into the analytics space and the measurement space, they’re rolling out different solutions that are going to compete with the next wave of things that they see as competition. If Google is setting up X, Y and Z, think about infrastructure that potentially exists where Google is the end-to-end management system and then is grading its own homework.

The problem isn’t that they have their thumb on the scale in every single way. The problem is that there’s been the perception that they’ve had their thumb on the scale — and now there’s an apprehension to whether or not you start to say, could this be legit? They might have the best mathematical model on the planet, and it might be validated by people from MIT. And it could be totally standalone and isolated from any kind of media buy whatsoever.

The major advertisers that have challenged the ways that Google incentivizes investment are challenged to believe that the model will come back with anything other than, “The Google investment is sound — do more!”

It sounds like they’re just unavoidable.

It’s difficult when you’re a verb, they are a verb. There’s Google, there’s Xerox, there’s Kleenex — that’s pretty much it. From an infrastructure standpoint, you just go Google it, and it’s become a verb that’s ubiquitous in conversation. The other side is because of the talent that Google has at senior levels of their infrastructure, they have access to executives pretty much everywhere.

Sometimes it seems agencies and brands are a bit complicit in that they acknowledge Google has gamed the system successfully and dominates — but they’re all making enough of a buck. In other words, the industry loves to rail against Google, but then doesn’t really do anything about it.

I think the biggest challenge that you have is, you need to have an understanding of where investment can lie. When we talk about who’s on the take or what the understanding is, I think it’s less around the motivation of an individual or an agency, and it’s a lot more around the understanding and desire for more cleanliness. However, as we all know, the thing that matters is money — money talks.

I don’t see anyone major backing away so drastically and making a stand [against Google]. There is no impetus for change outside of government intervention. Until there’s an alternative that really becomes this massive option, nothing’s going to change.

What would you change if you had the power to break up Google? And would you even want to?

I think that there are enough alternatives that, over time, can develop. The challenge you have with an environment like Google and being the monolith that it is, it’s an incredibly large infrastructure that has found ways to enable things to play well together. By fracturing it and adjusting it, you now have to hope that whatever steps into that power vacuum will play nicely together again. And I don’t know that it necessarily will.

I don’t know what the alternative currently looks like. The government’s argument is Google has created an environment where there can’t possibly be anything that competes with you, and that alone is the problem. … The position the government has is you have stifled competition so much so that no one else can enter the market. If they are now broken up — the ad server lives over here, YouTube has to live over there, the display network lives over here, and search lives over there. Right now, there’s a selling point for those things all working together, and it’s one of the reasons that they are who they are, and why Alphabet is who it is.

The challenge is really, if they go fragmented and segmented, the burden starts to go back to the advertiser, to the ad agency, and to all of these other participants, to now stitch it back together again. It’s not that it’s a bad thing but it’s something where you start to have to plan for. And it hasn’t been something we’ve had to plan for in 10-plus years.

So, be careful what you wish for.

Half of Google’s business model for a long time was to buy it and close it — over and over and over. And so they did it over and over. Most companies couldn’t have a failure like Google Glass and continue. That, I think, is almost more of a challenge in some ways: They’re able to fail very quickly because they have such tremendous scale. And one thing won’t sink them.