As Google prepares to travel to a federal court in Virginia to face down its adtech antitrust trial next week, a newly uncovered deck sheds new light on the 2007 DoubleClick acquisition that played a pivotal role in the growth of its advertising business.
The deck was obtained by adtech veteran Ari Paparo, CEO of Marketecture Media, which is producing “The Monopoly Report” newsletter to accompany Google’s adtech trial.
Paparo confirmed the document’s authenticity with two people with direct knowledge of the matter. (Paparo was a DoubleClick employee when the document was produced but didn’t have access to it at the time.) Business Insider has separately confirmed the document’s authenticity with a person with direct knowledge. This person was granted anonymity amid the high-profile and active litigation. Business Insider could not confirm with certainty whether this was a final draft. Five slides from a later version of the deck are also included in the trial’s exhibits, submitted by the plaintiffs in the case.
DoubleClick was pitching itself to potential suitors Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Google — hence references to “YMAG” in the deck — all of which submitted bids for the company, according to a person with direct knowledge. Google won out, paying $3.1 billion in a 2007 deal that officially closed in March 2008.
The US Department of Justice and 17 states claim in their complaint that Google reached dominance in the $300 billion adtech and throttled competition by making key acquisitions and manipulating ad prices. The DOJ and the states are seeking a breakup of Google’s adtech business, which could have big ramifications on the broader digital ad market.
The case concerns the under-the-hood part of Google’s advertising business: The technology that connects advertisers with publishers and that runs the advertising auctions that take place in the milliseconds it takes a webpage to load.
Google didn’t provide a comment for this story. “We look forward to setting the record straight,” a spokesperson for the company told Reuters in June, when a judge ruled the case would go to trial.
Excerpts from the 49-slide pitch deck below outline how DoubleClick was positioning itself as a key asset to help a potential Big Tech acquirer become an advertising giant.
BI has analyzed how the 2007 document could become a central part of next week’s blockbuster trial, which is set to begin on September 9.
Read the full article here
