We are wrapping up week 2 of trial shenanigans with Arielle in Virginia, covered in real time — continue to follow along by following Arielle on LinkedIn, our trial updates at USvGoogleAds.com, or sign up for the Google-specific newsletter where daily recaps are shared. Check out some highlights below:

• Day 1 of USvGoogle was opened by DOJ’s Julia Tarver with a Winston Churchill quote: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” An encapsulation of the warning that Google will continue to have the power and the means to monopolize the market unless structural measures are put in place to prevent it.
  • Day 1's Standout Witness Testimony: Grant Whitmore of Advanced Local, a publisher, shared just how difficult it is to work with Google because how they don’t accept contract redlines. Companies are left agreeing to things they otherwise wouldn’t, to avoid losing access to AdX.
• Day 2 of USvGoogle is witness-heavy, with 3 out of 4 witnesses from the buy side. They had a lot to say touching on the cost (and profit for Google) of migrating from AWS to GCP, AdX nonnegotiable rates being hidden in contracts, and lack of transparency pain-points from a buyer’s perspective.
  • Day 2's Standout Witness Testimony: Jed Dederick, CRO at The Trade Desk (TTD), injected some much needed levity, and said that if the DOJ’s remedies are not imposed, there will be a sense of “they got away with it.” That of course, ended in an objection.
• Day 4 of USvGoogle, Tim Craycroft, VP & GM of Google Advertising, was deposed. This is one where a TLDR won’t suffice, and a read you definitely won’t want to miss.
• Day 6 of USvGoogle, Scott Sheffer, VP of Global Partnerships, Sell-side Monetization at Google, took the stand, thus bringing Buzzword Bingo back 😈
• Day 9 of USvGoogle, 2 current Google employees, 1 economic expert, and 1 tech expert (paid by Google) enter the chat and testify as witnesses.
  • Day 9’s Standout Witness Testimony: Heather Adkins, VP of Security Engineering at Google (who owns millions in Google stocks), discusses Google’s Core infrastructure. The Core and the systems that rely on it are like “interlocked fingers”, or a “bowl of spaghetti” — bringing the adtech spaghetti mess back.

Reminder: tell your mom she is right

OpenAI is building an in-house ad infrastructure, ramping up its positioning in the advertising world.

To give some insight, OpenAI was originally established as a research nonprofit but was relaunched in 2025 as a for-profit entity. They posted a new position that calls for a candidate responsible for “developing campaign management tools, integrating with major ad platforms, building real-time attribution and reporting pipelines, and enabling experimentation frameworks to optimize our objectives.”

OpenAI’s adtech build-out could give them the ability to run marketing at scale without relying on agencies or third-party tools.

So, remind your folks to stop putting personal information in ChatGPT, as that information could be harvested to target you with ads.

Kokai no longer means regret for the Trade Desk

Kokai, The Trade Desk’s programmatic buying platform, is being partially sunsetted. The most noted part of the platform, the periodic table, is being partially retired. It'll be kept it at the ad group level, and in the campaign level's UI, a return to simplicity: a simple user interface with a central toolbar and single-page campaign workflows.

While buyers have been divided on the unique layout since its launch in 2023, with some critics attributing a loss in revenue in part due to the complicated-to-use design. Losing clients and millions in ad spend to rivals like Amazon, it was time for the Trade Desk to make a change.

Big brands are critiquing adtech — a win for us all

For years, Check My Ads has been shouting from the rooftops, “but where are your ads showing up?” and now, giants like P&G and Bayer are demanding transparency and accountability in how their ads are purchased. This will hopefully incite a wave of others looking for receipts on just where and to whom their ad budgets are going.

P&G, while re-evaluating its media dollar spend and where exactly its ads go, reduced its spend by over $300 million globally.

Bayer is in a similar boat. While P&G is pushing for receipts on where their spendy ads go, Bayer is focused on transparency and “adherence to quality and brand safety standards”. Bayer is rewriting its vendor contracts to guarantee adherence.

All of this boils down to: brands want accountability, transparency, and due diligence from their ad tech partners.

Video Ads — coming to a gas station near you.

Gas Station TV (GSTV) and Casey’s, the midwest gas station and convenience store chain, have partnered to bring video ads to over 1,800 gas stations nationwide. GSTV’s current reach is pushing 115 million people across the US. This will increase their reach by an additional 10%, or 14 million folks.

As new models for advertising continue to emerge, digital ads are becoming truly unavoidable in a day-to-day setting.

Hide yo wallet, Meta is ok with scamming everybody

Meta has profited upwards of $49 million from Americans being scammed. Meta is aware of AI-enabled scams on Facebook, but is not performing rigorous Know-Your-Customer diligence to prevent them and seem to only get involved once the scam has been reported by netizens, typically following a successful scamming incident.

Our Director of Intelligence, Iesha White, was quoted in the New York Times article exploring this. Meta, she said, effectively crowdsources its enforcement, waiting for users or researchers to report fraud. “It should be identified before the ads ever run.”

Meta is facing new pressure globally, most notably a $770k fine in Singapore if online scams aren’t cleaned up, because of the rise in online fraud. However, in the United States, they are arguing that they do “not owe a duty to users” to prevent and address fraudulent content.

 

Love,

The Check My Ads Team