Last week's news that Erika Sheldon has come aboard Venice, Calif.-based production house Wild Plum
Last week's news that Erika Sheldon has come aboard Venice, Calif.-based production house Wild Plum as its West Coast sales rep/head of sales gave the impression that she is no longer handling Los Angeles-based Moo Studios. She is in fact continuing to represent Moo while taking on her new responsibilities for Wild Plum….Char & Associates is now representing Brokendoll exclusively in the West and Texas. The Stockholm-based Brokendoll is a design/animation hybrid company….Production company Little Red Robot has secured San Francisco-based Sandra Riley of Riley Represents to cover the West Coast. Headed by creative director Seth Shukovsky, Little Red Robot has turned out such recent work as “A Girl Story” for the Mahindra Foundation and StrawberryFrog, as well as campaigns for Sony and Ubisoft, and an experimental project featuring the Lincoln MKS….615 Music, headquartered in Nashville with offices in Los Angeles, has retained Danielle Wade to rep its extensive catalog throughout the U.K….
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More