Jed Dederick’s Post

As we approach the season of gratitude in the US I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has paid more attention to ad tech since the google trial(s) have made our industry a bit more mainstream.   Around 2017 I remember sitting with a family friend who was a lawyer in antitrust (not in media/ads) over a thanksgiving holiday. I was five years in at ttd and it had really dawned on me the impact google was having on the industry. I remember explaining those dynamics to this lawyer friend, and when i started to break it down - how google products were offered as a package - how inferior technology was dominating advertising - how google sales and partnerships would do things like send links to wikis for RFP requests and then expect to win them - she couldn’t believe it. It was so obvious to her they were breaking the law. But there was this veil of complexity between what was happening in ad tech and the broader understanding of our society.   Fast forward to 2024 I sat in a courtroom in VA and watched some of the smartest and most powerful people in our country talk about those exact dynamics. I watched as lawyers, judges and the press broke through some of the veil of complexity to understand and then explain what was going on.    So my thanksgiving gratitude today goes to everyone who spent part of 2024 squinting at the words “header bidding” or “dynamic price floors” or the people who for the first time spent hours to understand how linking a dominant source of search demand exclusively to a publisher ad server limited choice for those publishers and limits value for the advertisers who want those ads.    Thank you for paying attention. Thank you for what you did this year. I know you probably got a few headaches. I’m really sorry on behalf of my industry for using so many stupid acronyms. We’ll try to make it easier to understand - it’s really just buyers and sellers participating in one of the oldest practices known to human civilization. It shouldn’t be that hard to understand. I just wanted to say thanks for working hard to break through bs. No matter what happens next I think the fact that you’re all paying more attention will make advertising and media better.