The Current

The Google ad tech monopoly case is winding down. Over the course of several hours today, attorneys for Google and the U.S. Department of Justice presented their closing arguments before Judge Leonie Brinkema, who expressed skepticism about the DOJ’s proposed structural remedies — specifically, a forced divestiture of Google’s ad exchange, AdX.

Tension between the buy and sell sides? A sign of a healthy market, “not an existential crisis,” says PubMatic’s chief revenue officer. Plus: Social media is getting (AI) sloppy. What does it mean for advertisers?

Circana's Cara Pratt thinks there's a trust problem in retail media. And if that trust is not rebuilt on the measurement side, growth is going to slow down. She explains why to our Editor-in-Chief, Stephanie Paterik, on 5 minutes With: https://bit.ly/3XCZATp

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has long been the ad industry’s pinnacle. And with the worlds of creatives and the data-driven ad tech crowd inching closer together, Cannes seems to be acknowledging that shift with its announcement of a new award: the Creative Brand Lion. But that’s not all.

This week on The Big Impression, we're joined by Emily Prazer, president and CEO at Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix & Grand Prix Plaza. She shares how the once-European circuit is building its global presence and gaining momentum with American audiences: https://bit.ly/49tsWeb

AI slop has already been surging on video platforms like YouTube, raising alarms for advertisers and creators alike. Now with new dedicated platforms for AI-generated short videos like Sora 2 and Vibes, social media's AI-slop era might be upon us.

PubMatic and The Trade Desk recently announced a new partnership in which the former would be the first sell-side platform to go live with The Trade Desk’s Price Discovery and Provisioning (PDP) API to better scale commitment deals, illustrating that the supposed rift between buy and sell sides may be greatly exaggerated.

Ahead of their closing arguments in the ad tech remedies trial this Friday, Google has proposed “immediate” changes to its ad tech products in an effort to avoid an EU-mandated divestiture. The proposed fixes aim to address two key issues in the commission’s antitrust case: Google’s self-preferencing practices and its inherent conflicts of interest.

In an era of rapid automation and machine learning, The Female Quotient’s second annual AI Summit delivered a powerful message: Humans must remain at the heart of the creative process. That missing human factor is apparent, and potentially dangerous, when it comes to the changing world of social media where feeds are now embedded with AI-created content that merges real-world with simulations.

The European Commission announced it is investigating whether Google Search unfairly demoted web publishers' pages containing third-party commercial content, such as affiliate links and sponsored editorial articles.