What B2C can learn from B2B

• The Rebooting is conducting research into the progress and challenges news publishers see in developing sustainable business models. We will publish the results later this month. Take the survey. Thanks to Outbrain for partnering on this project.
• On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I took a trip down memory lane with Ari Paparo about how the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google for monopolizing ad tech stems from events in 2007. 
• For TRB members: what B2C publishers can learn from B2B.

Google on trial

This week marks an important moment in the history of digital advertising as the U.S. Department of Justice presses its case that Google is a monopolist in ad tech. 

The seeds of this case were planted in 2007, when Google bought DoubleClick, a critical piece of internet advertising infrastructure that was widely used by advertisers and publishers in running ad campaigns. I covered it at the time, saying that the addition “could help Google control even more of the Internet advertising market” and “the data going through Google could, however, give some publishers pause.” You don’t say.

With DoubleClick in the fold, Google methodically grew to dominate all phases of digital advertising by piecing together a full stack solution for ad tech, supplying the tools used to both buy and sell ads as well as the exchange used for transacting. And Google was the biggest source of demand for the exchange. The go-to comparison of this situation is if Goldman Sachs owned the New York Stock Exchange. 

On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Ari Paparo, a former DoubleClick executive and ad tech veteran who now runs Marketecture. Ari, in addition to being the funniest person in ad tech, knows the history. We go back in time to when the Google-DoubleClick deal took place, just as programmatic advertising was becoming a reality, and get into the weeds about why controlling the plumbing of digital advertising created an unavoidable set of misaligned incentives.

These antitrust cases tend to drag on no matter the outcome. There will be appeals. Google will press its case that it won on the merits of its tech stack and, of course, it is on the side of Small Business. That’s going to be contrasted by the embarrassing details of the hard ball Google played in trying to kill header bidding, “incentivizing” ad agencies (not kickbacks!)  and other tactics that ultimately disadvantaged both publishers and advertisers, not to mention competitors. 

Check out the episode on Apple | Spotify | other podcast platforms 

What B2C can learn from B2B

The worlds of consumer publishing and business-to-business publishing often existed in parallel, much like brand advertising and direct response marketing did. They were notionally the same, only the dynamics were different, even the language used was different. Like brand advertising, consumer publishing always carried more clout than the often dowdy world of B2B, home of the webinar.

That’s all changed. B2B models turned out far more resilient, just as DR morphed into performance marketing and ate most of the ad industry as it digitized. Nowadays, the most resilient publishing models tend to have B2B at their heart or at least in their mix. 

Just as B2B needed to take lessons from consumer brands, B2C publishers can stand to understand the core dynamics that have made B2B publishing models on a whole far more resilient than consumer models that are now being retrofitted. (Time is a B2B business!)