Episode 90: Brian O'Kelley on the Google case, greening ad tech, and Trade Desk's OS

**Ari Paparo** (0:00)
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Welcome to the Marketecture Podcast. I have today a great show with the legend, Brian O'Kelley, along with Eric Franchi. We are continuing our antitrust coverage. We're going to talk about the case. We're going to talk about greening up ad tech. We're going to talk about a lot of really interesting things. We also want to let you know about our continued coverage in the Monopoly Report. The newsletter has been going out daily about the coverage of the case. I'm here in Alexandria, Virginia covering it. We will resume coverage on Wednesday, when Google is going to be giving their rebuttal to the DOJ's case. Also, I want to let you know that this week's vendor interview is with Richie Glasberg of Safeguard Privacy. He's building workflows for companies to stay privacy compliant, and that may sound terribly boring, but actually the interview was really interesting. I learned a lot, so I would recommend listening to it. That is free until next Monday, when it goes behind the Marketecture TV paywall. With all that said, let's introduce the person who doesn't need any introduction, the inventor of the ad exchange, the former CEO of AppNexus, the current CEO of Scope 3, the only person who has ever fired me from a job. Let's come on, Brian O'Kelley.

**Brian O'Kelley** (2:06)
Brian, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me.

**Ari Paparo** (2:10)
Technically, I think I once got fired from a summer job that was really bad at, but I quit, so it doesn't really count. So, thanks so much for recording this early on a Friday morning. So, I just saw your videotape down in Alexander Videos. Virginia, and the real question was, how do you get away with only doing a video deposition, not having to put on a suit and get on the Amtrak?

**Brian O'Kelley** (2:33)
Really good question. They actually told me to expect to be called. So, the whole week, I had this like, maybe Virginia on my calendar. Hang on one second. Five star.
I promised that if we did an early-

**Ari Paparo** (2:50)
O'Kelley is the family man, saying goodbye to those kids in the middle of the podcast.

**Brian O'Kelley** (2:53)
Exactly.

**Eric Franchi** (2:53)
We'll believe that is.

**Brian O'Kelley** (2:55)
But yeah, no, and I actually was, I'm not sure. I think maybe in a jury context, my testimony would have been more interesting. I think from a judge perspective, because I was deposed and the things they wanted me to say were on video, I don't know if I added anything by being there in person.

**Ari Paparo** (3:10)
Yeah. So the one thing that I think people thought was interesting about your testimony, like unique that nobody else had said or reported on previously, was a story about how pre-bid was not allowed as part of the IAB Tech Lab. Can you tell us that story?

**Brian O'Kelley** (3:27)
Yeah. So pre-bid was invented by two rogue apnexians on the publisher team. They basically said, we're going to open source header bidding, because it's, if we want to go, if we don't, Google has a huge advantage. But if everyone in the space were to use the same JavaScript, we could all compete on who can make the most money for publishers as opposed to who can sell them the best JavaScript hack. So they built a whole mockup of prebid.org. They had gotten all the code in GitHub, and they just said, we're doing this. So I said, well, who owns it? Who should be the sponsor? And they said, well, obviously, IB Tech Lab, which had just been started. And so we took it to IB Tech Lab. There's a big meeting with all of the board members, including Tom Shields from AppNexus. And it was the Google team there that said, you know, no, this isn't appropriate. You know, this is, you know, specifically about hacking Google. And, you know, like the IB should be hands off from commercial disputes or, you know, some angle like that.
And they were the biggest, and probably still are the biggest contributor to IAB. And so they said no. And so we said, fine, we're going to make an open source organization. Which honestly, I think prebid.org now is potentially bigger than IAB Tech Lab. It's probably equally influential. It has incredible members. It's completely independent. I have nothing to do with it. I still have a t-shirt, but I'm actually most proud of the fact that I have nothing to do with it. Like the fact that we were able to create something that is bigger than anybody involved in it.