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Google monopolized online advertising and the remedy is a code of conduct. 

Seventeen months of post-verdict wrangling brought the industry to this point. Judge Leonie M. Brinkema ruled the online ad behemoth had indeed come by its dominance illegally last April. Then came the remedies trial, testimonies from 26 witnesses, briefs from both sides, a two-page order this September that rejected breaking Google up, and finally the full opinion this week spelling out what Google actually has to do. All of it traces back to a complaint the Department of Justice and 17 states filed three and a half years ago. 

At the heart of it was a concern that Google controlled both sides of the pipe ad money flows through, the tool publishers use to sell their ad space and the marketplace where those ads are actually bought, and used that control to rig the game in its own favor. Advertisers and publishers couldn’t avoid Google even if they wanted to, and Google steered the money toward itself at their expense. 

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WPP is set to win Coca-Cola’s global media, data and tech business. For CEO Cindy Rose, the timing couldn’t be better. A year into trying to fix the holdco, a win of this size, from a brand with Coke’s stature, is the kind of thing a CEO points to as proof the turnaround is real.

But the win comes with an asterisk. Publicis was the only other agency group in the running and it dropped out before the process finished. Nobody found out whether WPP could have beaten it straight up. Instead, the field just narrowed to one name, and that name happened to be WPP’s.

Some might call that winning on a technicality. But that reading discounts how close the head-to-head between WPP and Publicis actually was before the latter walked away. One source, who spoke to Digiday on condition of anonymity because they work with the team that was competing for the account, described it as close. 

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