Publicis recently told clients to stop using The Trade Desk following a failed audit. Since the news broke, The Trade Desk’s stock has dropped about 13%. Dentsu and WPP had already exited OpenPath, The Trade Desk’s direct supply path product. 

The pile-on is in full swing.

But step back. This story is not really about The Trade Desk at all. It is about a structural problem that has been compounding for decades, and it is one that nearly everyone in the advertising ecosystem helped create.

French advertising titan Publicis is advising its clients to avoid working with demand-side platform (DSP) The Trade Desk. In an email sent Tuesday to select clients, obtained by ADWEEK, the […]

Opacity has become a business model

The cycle is as follows: Human behavior, and therefore advertising, is really hard to measure precisely. When something isn’t easy to measure, price becomes the proxy. So, the world’s largest agencies now essentially pitch for free and operate on razor-thin disclosed margins. 

To survive, they have to generate profit from hidden fees and undisclosed arrangements. 

Marketers, in turn, reward this by continuing to hire and rehire the agencies that play the game most aggressively. 

This forces increasingly complex schemes and systems, which pulls time, energy, and talent away from the thing the agency was theoretically hired to do in the first place: drive brand growth.

When schemes win, an entire ecosystem of vendors pops up to enable them. And once hundreds of vendors and the world’s largest agencies depend on each other to keep the arrangement going, transparency becomes an active threat to a significant portion of the industry. That is the environment we are operating in today.

How The Trade Desk could fix its problems

Now, look at what The Trade Desk has done. It created OpenPath—a cheaper, more direct way to buy inventory. It offers a free identity solution. It lets buyers choose what they pay for. 

In an ecosystem that depends on opacity, those moves are threatening. The backlash should not surprise anyone.

To be fair, The Trade Desk has made it harder on itself. Its fee structure is transparent in principle, but confusing in practice. It has been slow—stubborn even—in response to legitimate concerns about the Kokai interface. And clients face more bureaucracy than they should when trying to access their own data. 

The Trade Desk would do well to simplify its fee communication and structure, re-innovate on the user interface, and reduce the hoops clients must clear to access its own data, including allowing third-parties access if signed off on by the contract owner. 

Fixing these issues would go a long way toward earning the trust it is asking the market to place in them.

Advertisers say they can no longer create campaigns in the Solimar interface as The Trade Desk looks to sunset it

The Trade Desk is the wrong target

Even if The Trade Desk changes none of this, the bigger question remains: why is the industry’s energy focused on the platform trying to make the supply chain more direct, rather than on the dynamics that created the need for schemes in the first place?

If we actually want to change the trajectory, there are three things we can start doing today.

First, brands should ask their agencies a simple question: What would you need to charge us, fully transparently and above board, to stop playing games? 

That might feel like career suicide for the person asking it. But they don’t have to take the answer directly to the CFO. It can start with just understanding the gap between what agencies charge on paper and what they need to survive. That conversation alone would be a meaningful step.

Second, the industry should stop supporting vendors whose primary business model is built around enabling opacity. 

These companies may deliver short-term results, but they shorten the lifespan of the ecosystem for everyone. They are the ultraprocessed foods of the adtech diet.

Third, and most importantly, we should refocus the entire conversation on brand growth. 

Most major brands have not grown as quickly as the U.S. GDP over the last 30 years. 

There are many reasons for that, but here is one worth considering: Any agency or vendor focused relentlessly on proving brand growth beyond a reasonable doubt wouldn’t have five look-alikes standing behind them waiting to do the work for less. In fact, they wouldn’t have many look-alikes at all. Provable growth is the best antidote to the fee pressure that drives the whole cycle.

We’ve become so caught up in playing the existing game, we forget we’re the ones who can change it.