Ad Tech Briefing: Pragmatism, not idealism, will determine the fate of Google’s ad tech empire

After months of testimony and a final day of unusually pointed questioning, Judge Leonie Brinkema used the closing arguments phase of the U.S. Department of Justice v. Google to give the clearest indication yet of how she is weighing up an appropriate remedy after ruling the defendant a monopolist earlier this year.

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After Friday’s proceedings, she has now retired to her chambers to mull over a decision over the coming weeks, but for many, a complete divestiture of Google’s ad exchange or ad server (i.e., the entity formerly known as DoubleClick For Publishers within Google Ad Manager) appears increasingly unlikely.

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‘We got scared’: Confessions of an ad tech exec’s AI agent experiment

Agentic AI is the ad industry’s favorite buzzword. 

Companies present in every niche of the media industry are working to build and test their own AI agents. Ad tech firms hope the tech can help them cut costs and add value; agencies and advertisers hope they can use the tech to leapfrog those same ad-tech middlemen; and publishers hope the tools can grant them a greater degree of control over their fortunes.

It will probably take a while to translate those ambitions into reality. Along the way, there’s plenty of scope to make costly mistakes and, hopefully, learn from them. In this candid conversation, an ad tech exec talks us through their company’s early efforts to build an agent that could execute media buys — and which did so, in a limited test staged in February — as well as their decision to terminate the pilot when their team realized the potential for misuse.

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