Prebid's Auction Flip: the open market swaps places with Google

Last month a federal court ordered Google to integrate with Prebid but did not say how, so Prebid is writing the instructions itself. AdExchanger reported the group's proposal, previewed at the Prebid Summit in New York, to have ad servers bid into Prebid rather than the reverse, which would let publishers access Google AdX demand without running Google's ad server and effectively unbundle GAM even though the court declined a breakup. The working group hopes to formalise it by the end of Q1 after a public comment period. Future Media's Ricky Sutton launched a series explaining the projects that built Google's ad tech monopoly, starting with Project Poirot, which he says was designed to choke header bidding and steer campaigns onto Google's own exchange.

The crux

Google was ruled a monopoly and ordered to integrate, but the remedy's shape is now being written by the open market, which wants to reverse the auction's direction of travel to break Google's chokehold on demand.

Sell-side read

If ad servers bidding into Prebid becomes the default, publisher yield stops routing through one ad server's auction, which is the single biggest structural shift in programmatic supply since header bidding itself. Teal CTO and proposal co-author Olly Burns told AdExchanger publishers should be "less dependent on GAM", and he was blunt about why Prebid should lead: "Google's got a bit of a track record of screwing ad tech stuff up."

Watch

The public comment period and the end-of-Q1 formalisation, plus whether Google plugs into Prebid Server or the browser-based Prebid.js, which Microsoft's Brian Sardo flagged as the escape hatch.