Google used a secret program called “Project Bernanke” for years to increase its customers’ chances of winning bids for competitive advertising space, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, referring to court documents filed in the Texas-run antitrust case against Google. The state argues that the program gave Google an unfair competitive advantage over competing ad-buying tools and paid publishers less for winning bids.
Ironically, the company spilled the beans on its own secret program. The Journal confirms that the court documents in question – which have been reviewed by the point of sale, although Google has since resealed them –were submitted by Google earlier this week in response to the Texas lawsuit and were not edited correctly when uploaded to the court’s public reel Google acknowledged the existence of Project Bernanke in its response.
For anyone unfamiliar with the complex digital advertising world, here’s a very simple breakdown. Publishers, or the technical name of a website that displays ads, sell ad space on their website. Advertisers place bids for a particular ad space on ad exchanges, which are similar to auction houses where the one offering the highest price wins the coveted ad space. You can find a more detailed and technical explanation here
Now back to Google. In the court documents, Google explains that Project Bernanke used data about historical bids made through Google Ads to customize the customer, which refers to advertisers who work with and pay for Google.bids there and tip the odds in their favor at ad auctions, according to the Journal. These efforts increased Google customers’ chances of winning auctions that would otherwise have been won by competing advertising tools and also generated millions of dollars in revenue in Google’s pockets.
Google did not notify publishers selling ads through its ad purchasing systems about the existence of Project Bernanke.
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Exactly how many millions of Google has made with Project Bernanke is not mentioned in the Journal report. However, Google confirmed that the project is expected to generate $ 230 million in revenue in 2013.
According to the Journal, in the filing Google denied that there was anything wrong with using the exclusive information it was supposed to inform it client bids. The company said this was “comparable to data tracked by other purchasing tools.”
The unveiling of Project Bernanke will undoubtedly lead to greater control for Google, which has a strong grip on both the seller and buyer side of the digital advertising market with its products. In a House Judiciary Committee antitrust meeting on big tech in the summer of 2020, lawmakers quoted a study who found that Google controlled between 50-60% of the publisher market, or the players who sell their ad space, and 50-90% of the advertiser side, referring to those who buy that ad space. The most of Google’s revenue comes from his advertising business.
In fact, Google’s dominance in the digital advertising market is the subject of the Texas antitrust case. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who also has his own legal troubles, is claim that Google has repeatedly abused its monopolistic power to control the way ads are priced and manipulate ad auctions. This behavior, Paxton claims, allows Google to “continuously make illegal profits by taking money from those web pages and putting it in their own pockets.”
“In this advertising monopoly in an electronically traded market, Google is essentially trading on ‘insider information’ by simultaneously acting as pitcher, catcher, batter and umpire,” Paxton said in a statement. statement in December. “This is not the ‘free market’ at work here. This is anti-market and illegal under state and federal law. “
The documents also shed light on Google’s Jedi Blue to deal with Facebook, the deal where Facebook held back from going all-in on the header bidding business and instead running that ad business through Google’s advertising platform. The Journal stated that the agreement required Facebook to spend $ 500 million or more on Google’s Ad Manager or AdMob auctions in the fourth year of the deal, among other things.
Gizmodo reached out to Google on Sunday for comment on the Journal report, but received no response at the time of publication. We will definitely update this blog when we hear back.
In a statement to the Journal, Google spokesman Peter Schottenfels said the complaint “misrepresents many aspects of our ad technology business. We look forward to taking our case to court.”