The arbitrary Echidna

Yes, we all have arbitrary moments, this is not mine. Yet something woke up in me when Reuters gave me ‘Google’s advertising tech targeted in European publishers’ complaint’ (at https://www.reuters.com/technology/googles-advertising-tech-targeted-european-publishers-complaint-2022-02-11/) and I took a look. So there were a few issues and the part of “alleging Google has an adtech stranglehold over press publishers” is merely window dressing. So as I went to a few of these sites, I saw German, Swedish and no English. Now, this is not a stranglehold for me, so I dug deeper. And I looked in a few publications, seeing that there advertisements were a mess, I could not even apply for advertisements in Die Welt, Das Bild and so on. I did not check them all, but the laughable setting is that they seemingly have no idea what they are doing. See the image below

I go to www.google.com and this is the first thing I get in the left lower corner. It was not rocket science, it was precise and clear. And the Advertising gives you:

Simple, precise and direct, NONE of the publications I saw offered anything like that. I got to a page on advertising with Das Bild (I needed Google search to find it), these players are hopelessly lost, they are conceited and running after the facts. Advertising should be a main option at the bottom of Das Bild and Die Welt and it is not there (or better stated, I never found it). The most basic of settings and two of Germans largest circulations are lost beyond hope. So as I personally see it, it is not ‘Google has an adtech stranglehold over press publishers’, as I personally see it, it has become ‘press publishers are hopelessly outdated in the digital environment’, the ‘information’ page I found had one mention of pricing and no relevant actual pricing information. How is that possible in this day and age? Google Ads gives you options, Price per click, price per impression, and many other options and you can select your preference and set how much you are willing to pay. And the Google system is unsurpassed. You might bid $20, yet in the end you ONLY pay one cent more than the previous bid winner. So if we see the following bids:

Before Google the advertiser was NEVER given this and it changed the game, the ‘exploiters’ suddenly lost all traffic, they lost their customers and they lost their revenue. This is not a stranglehold, this is giving the customer proper treatment, perhaps EPC Chairman Christian Van Thillo might take notice of that. If we publicly set the advertisement prices over the last six years from Axel Springer, News UK, Conde Nast, Bonnier News and Editorial Prensa Iberica, what will we see then? Even now I could not find precise advertising prices in Die Welt and Das Bild. I get a presentation who they work with, but a consumer wants to know what it will cost them. So when you all go cry at the desk of the European Commission consider that the consumer and the consumer advertiser is given a clear picture and a clear understanding and the stage of what comes next. In addition, when we take “When publishers choose to use our advertising services, they keep the majority of revenue and every year we pay out billions of dollars directly to the publishing partners in our ad network” and we set that against “Google has achieved end-to-end control of the ad tech value chain, boasting market shares as high as 90-100% in segments of the ad tech chain” it is because Google offered and showed value for money from the very beginning, something most advertising agencies have never done. In addition, Google Ads has driven technology that made the advertisers more clever in the way they advertised, something others have never done. 

And in all this, when we see the EPC make claims like: ‘Freedom to earn advertising revenue’ and ‘Freedom to innovate’ whilst two of the partner clearly are lost on innovation, they might embrace earn advertising revenue, but without innovation it becomes meaningless and in that, the advertisers that require visibility see that Google Ads delivers whilst keeping cost down, optionally setting a stage to a new path that is cheaper for the advertiser, so how did the EPC approach that? This is not stranglehold, this is as I see it the path of exploitation and many advertisers have had enough of that and they were willing to try Google Ads and those who did remained in Google Ads, clearly the EPC needs to look up the word innovation, let me help them out: “the introduction of something new”, so where is that innovation in Die Welt and Das Bild? 

Seems that it is another chihuahua crying that they no longer matter, a waste of my time as I see it, not the people that could ever qualify for my 5G solution, that is (as I personally see it) true advertising power, in the hands of the retailer.