Category: Media Mergers

ATT: DoJ, EC and Congress: Yahoo!’s own claims should raise alarms about a Google or Microsoft deal

No one should sit by and let either Google or Microsoft carve-up or take-over Yahoo! without a serious examination of the competition, privacy, and other consumer protection issues. This week, Yahoo! ran a four-page ad inserted in Advertising Age. Here’s some of Yahoo!’s own copy for regulators and the public to ponder:

“Yahoo! delivers the largest audience in the U.S.-the most 18-34 year olds, the most 35-54 year olds, the most women….Today, Yahoo! reaches over half the world’s Internet users. And with our growing network of premium publishing partners, including over 625 leading newspapers, we’re working with the other half…Our insights and understanding of our users lead to smarter targeting, so we can connect the right audience with the most relevant message–yours…With more ways to connect to your customers more deeply than ever, the future is wide open.”

From Yahoo! Advertising Age insertion. June 2. 2008 entitled: “What Happens When You Can Connect To More Than 550 million People From Over 170 countries Who Spend 2 Billion Hours Each Month In One Place?”

A Yahoo! & Google Deal is anti-competitive, raises privacy concerns

Based on news coverage [reg. required], it appears that Google and Yahoo! will attempt to team up in some way. We will await to see the details. But we want to point readers to Yahoo! 2008 annual 10K report. It discusses Google’s role as a competitor–something which would basically vanish in any outsourcing of its search ad business. As Yahoo! explained, “[W]e face significant competition from companies, principally Google, Microsoft, and AOL, that have aggregated a variety of Internet products, services and content in a manner similar to Yahoo! Google’s Internet search service directly competes with us for Affiliate and advertiser arrangements, both of which are key to our business and operating results…Additionally, Google and Microsoft both offer many other services that directly compete with our services, including consumer e-mail services, desktop search, local search, instant messaging, photos, maps, video sharing, content channels, mobile applications, and shopping services.” Yahoo! also made clear that search was an integral part of its business plan: “We believe that we can expand our communities of users by offering compelling Internet services and effectively integrating search, community, personalization, and content to create a powerful user experience. We leverage our user relationships and the social community the users create to enhance our online advertising potential, as well as our fee-based services.” Once Yahoo!, in our view, cedes part of its search ad business to its leading competitor, it will not have the viability to pursue growth relying primarily on building out its display business. Search and display, cross-platform and application, are increasingly inseparable necessities in order to survive in the online ad business.

Why too, would Yahoo!, in essence, neglect its investment to improve its search ad technology–known as Panama. In its annual 10 K, Yahoo! explained that it “launched its new search marketing system, known as Project Panama, in the fourth quarter of 2006. This system provides advertisers with additional tools for budgeting, testing, and optimizing their marketing campaigns. This new system also provides a new ranking model launched in early February 2007 as the second phase of Project Panama that ranks ads by relevance in addition to keyword bid price. We believe the new search marketing system provides a more relevant search experience to users, more valuable customer leads to advertisers, and additional opportunities to our distribution partners. We have completed the global roll-out of the technology across all relevant geographies.”

As Yahoo! told shareholders and the SEC in 2007, “[O]ur Search offerings are often the starting point for users navigating the Internet and searching for information, whether from their computer or mobile device. In Search, our goal is to provide the world’s most valued and trusted search experience for users, advertisers and developers…” Undermining its own business by outsourcing search ads to its leading competitor will weaken Yahoo!s ability to be a “starting point” for both users and advertisers. Permitting Google to operate a portion of its leading competitor’s business would be harmful to online diversity as well. Having Microsoft acquire Yahoo! also raise serious competitive concerns, although they require thoughtful examination in a post `Google now owns DoubleClick’ environment.

Opposition to Google/Yahoo! (or other mergers) Should be Based on Principle: Digital Pawns in Play?

Yesterday, we were contacted by a reporter asking our position on the possible Google/Yahoo! search advertising deal (we are opposed to such an arrangement, on both competition and privacy grounds). When we read the story online, we learned that one of the groups sending a letter to the DoJ was the Black Leadership Forum. That raised our concern, since we know that the Black Leadership Forum has had relationships with phone and cable companies. It has also, in the past at least, worked with Issue Dynamics (a company which helps phone, cable and other interests “organize” support from not-for-profit groups. I cite Issue Dynamic’s role with the Black Leadership Forum on page 75 of my book.).

We have not read the letter to the DoJ. Nor do we know of any financial or other relationship between the Forum and any of the many interests who are fighting Google (phone and cable companies, for example, are opposed to Google’s positions on network neutrality). But we believe that all financial relationships, even from the recent past, need to be identified. I know this is Washington, where too many people “lease out,” as we say around my office. But there are important issues at stake with the new media marketplace. Reporters will need to do more to identify whether there are financial and other relationships with groups from Google, Microsoft, phone and cable, etc. But the real focus should be to examine the state of competition in the online ad market–and what it means for the future of communications in the digital democratic era.

U Penn Prof. Joseph Turow responds to the

Randall Rothenberg of the Interactive Advertising Bureau lobbying group wrote a commentary where he made a number of misleading statements. He incorrectly characterized the work of Professor Joseph Turow. Prof. Turow, a leading academic expert of the online marketing industry, is on the faculty of the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Here is Professor Turow’s response:

“In one sentence, Mr Rothenberg manages to make two fundamental misrepresentations. What I really say on page 2 of my 2006 book Niche Envy (where the quote originates) explicitly relates to marketers use of surveillance technologies without consumers understanding: “Over the long haul, however, this intersection of large selling organizations and new surveillance technologies seems sure to encourage a particularly corrosive form of personal and social tension.” Nor do I anywhere lament the passage of the three network universe. For example, I explicitly state in Breaking Up (on page 199, for example) that three network era had its own forms of social exclusions and state that “that “the proper response to this hypersegmentation of America is not to urge a return to the mass-market world of the 1960s and 1970s.” My conclusion: when I see Mr Rothenberg quote someone I will be sure to check the source to make sure the passage has not been wrenched from its context. I should add, too, that I accept the need that digital interactive media have for target marketing and database marketing. But there are many creative ways to meld data analytics and their implementation with openness and public engagement. I fear that Mr Rothenberg”s policies and writings indicate he will lead this important organization in directions that are misguided for marketers and for society.

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Simpson, Thatcher &

Here’s an excerpt from an article in GCP, the “Online Magazine for Global Competition Policy” by Peter C. Thomas, entitled “Lifting the Fog: Google/DoubleClick Demystified.”
“In the end, both the FTC and the Commission cut through the fog of the complaints surrounding the proposed merger to get to the right answer, namely that Google and DoubleClick operate in different, already competitive markets, and that their complementary services, when combined, will not harm competition in any relevant market.”

But readers should follow the asterisk next to Mr. Thomas’s byline, which reads [our emphasis]: “∗ The author is the Managing Partner of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP’s Washington, D.C. office…Simpson Thacher represented Hellman & Friedman and DoubleClick in the acquisition by Google.”

We love objectivity!

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The EC approval of Google’s DoubleClick takeover

Statement on the EC Decision on Google/DoubleClick
Jeff Chester, Center for Digital Democracy

By failing to impose safeguards, EC regulators have helped strengthen a growing digital colossus that will now be in a dominant position to shape much of the global future of the Internet and other online media. The EC [DG Comp] appears to have embraced the FTC’s flawed analysis of the online ad market. It represents the failure of antitrust regulators to understand and respond to the growing consolidation of control over online ad delivery, data collection, and the funding of content. This decision will have profound and unfortunate consequences for the Internet’s evolving role as a democratic communications medium.

EU and US antitrust regulators have also perversely set the stage for Microsoft’s goal of acquiring Yahoo!, furthering more concentration of control in the new media sector. Instead of ensuring competition, DG Comp and the FTC have literally paved the way for the emergence of a global digital duopoly over online advertising (which is the principal way online content is funded). By permitting Google to dramatically grow in clout, regulators will have to likely enable the further growth of a # 2 competitor to Google—which will be Microsoft.

US and European policymakers must reform the antitrust process to reflect the realities of the digital market era, where competition, data collection, and content creation are seamlessly intertwined. In today’s digital marketplace, the company that controls the most data about consumers and has the global reach to connect to them raises both anticompetitive and privacy concerns. An antiquated and piecemeal antitrust approach fails to protect citizens, consumers, and competition.

The Center for Digital Democracy, which opposed the Google/DoubleClick merger in both the U.S. and in the EC, will continue to press policymakers to play a more responsible forward-thinking approach to competition and consumer protection for online and interactive media.

Microsoft is set to acquire behavioral microtargeting and “marketing automation” specialist YaData. YaData’s software helps identify “behavioral micro-segments” [thats our behaviors, btw]. As YaData explains, “[M]icro-segments may overlap, reflecting the true multi-dimensional nature of customers and their changing habits. The continuous dynamic discovery and management of focused micro-segments allows marketers to understand and act upon changing market trends and gain rapid results for a real competitive differentiator. In order to act upon these changes, it is vital that marketers be able to routinely and autonomously launch the discovery process and manage the entire segment lifecycle…” [the managing, we presume, is of people’s behaviors and attitudes].

“YaData fully believes in the potential of behavioral targeting to enhance the value of online advertising for publishers, advertisers and users,” said Amir Peleg” in the press release announcing the sale. Microsoft officials claimed that as YaData’s technology became part of the company’s “advertising platform” they would “continue to adhere to its high standards for the protection of consumer privacy.” As Microsoft moves closer to acquiring Yahoo!, privacy advocates will need to analyze how the company’s recent acquisitions and developments related to online advertising require real safeguards–not just a reflexive we-care-about-privacy approach.

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Time Warner’s `Platform A’ Data Collection System: 3 billion online ads a day bolstered by $1 B in online ad company acquisitions

Time Warner has been buying up online ad properties to bolster its AOL and Advertising.com subsidiaries. AOL exec Randy Falco, as reported in Advertising Age [Feb. 26, 2008, sub. required likely] told interactive marketers that “[W]e have Platform A, the largest ad network in the world.” Falco said that 3 billion ad impressions were being delivered daily by the AOL networks. He also said that “[W]e spent with the help of Time Warner about a billion dollars to acquire [Quigo, Tacoda, Third Screen Media and AdTech] over the past year.”

IAB’s new “Privacy Principles”=A Failure to Protect Consumer Privacy

The IAB has embraced a `circle the data collection and micro-targeting digital wagon’s’ with its new privacy principles. Instead of embracing a policy that truly protects consumer privacy, IAB members are trying to hide behind the same failed approach they have led to governmental inquiries in the US and the EU. The IAB should have adopted rules so that no data can be collected without full disclosure and prior consent of the consumer, as well as other fair information collection principles. The IAB’s proposed new PR campaign to promote the role of interactive marketing will undoubtedly by slick–but won’t be honest. That’s why my CDD will keep telling the FTC, the EU and the public about what really goes on with data collection and digital marketing. These slightly refurbished fox-watching-the-data-hen-house-privacy principles won’t provide any substantive protections for consumers. The failure of the IAB to acknowledge key issues related to sensitive data–including children, teens, financial (think subprime mortgage-related) and health–is a glaring failure of the group’s ability to do what is required to protect consumer privacy.

The IAB is trying to help its members dodge the digital privacy data bullet. But privacy advocates and officials concerned about consumer welfare in the digital age will eventually force the needed changes. What’s sad is that instead of playing a leadership role in the privacy debate, the IAB is attempting to stick with the past. Don’t they realize that change is coming?