The Trade Desk-Publicis Fight Is Really a War Against Transparency

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.

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.