“This is a perfect example of how they’re able to pull the strings to direct money wherever they want to,” Garcia said.
The documents show Google planning to use the incentive programs to move money toward Waze, preferred deals, and programmatic deals on AdX, Google’s publisher-centric ad exchange now called Google Ad Manager.
There is also a lengthy discussion of whether incentives should be used to encourage buying from Universal App Campaigns, a campaign type for app advertisers now called App Campaigns that was one of the company’s first forays into AI-driven buying that is now increasingly common across Google.
“At the core, we’d like to determine whether incentives are required for formats with [machine-learning] based, automated buying that optimize toward a specific return on investment, or if the performance of these formats alone should enable them to effectively ‘stand on their own’ and not require additional incentives,” the documents read.
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