The past few weeks have produced one of the most theatrical transparency disputes in programmatic advertising history. Three of the six major holding companies have left or are auditing The Trade Desk. Shares of the dominant independent DSP are down by about a third in 2026. And everyone involved claims, with varying degrees of conviction, to act in the interests of clients.
A cynic might note that transparency has always been the industry’s most useful weapon – applied selectively, against anyone currently threatening your position in the chain. Ultimately, the only thing the supply chain agreed to was that someone else had to open their books first.
Arrangement
In February, WPP and Dentsu dropped out of OpenPath, The Trade Desk’s direct-to-publisher initiative. Concerns raised were cost visibility and placement clarity. An unstated – widely understood – concern is that OpenPath sits around agency trading desks, thereby squeezing the margins agencies take from optimizing supply lines.
Then in mid-March, Publicis sent a memo to certain clients advising them to stop using The Trade Desk. The company commissioned FirmDecisions, a specialist media auditor at Ebiquity Group, to review The Trade Desk’s fee structure. According to Publicis’ explanation of what the audit found, The Trade Desk had improperly applied DSP fees to other fees and charged clients for tools they had used without proof of authorization. The Trade Desk disputed Publicis’ characterization – FirmDecisions declined to comment publicly – and said the requested data would violate confidentiality agreements with clients and other partners. This week, Omnicom announced its own audit, reportedly conducted by KPMG, after an initial internal review found no problems.
Observers call it a transparency dispute. Our reporting indicates that this is a control measure.
What really happened
One senior industry source with direct experience of how this relationship operates dismissed more dramatic data. “I don’t think any of this is a big deal,” they said. “It’s the marketer who decides the platform. It’s not the agency that says we’re going to use The Trade Desk. It’s the X brand that says ‘The Trade Desk is our purchase recording system’.”
That is the structural reality that continues to be obscured by this discourse. The Trade Desk revealed in 2025 that shared services agreements – direct contracts with advertisers that bypass the agency’s master services agreement structure – accounted for more than 60% of its revenue. Needham estimates that 70% of Publicis brand clients have direct deals with The Trade Desk, meaning Publicis recommendations are unable to drive much of that spend. Real revenue at risk is about $87 million versus baseline revenue of $2.9 billion. And even that figure exaggerates Publicis’ leverage, because many of those contracts are not actually with Publicis — they are with Publicis clients. The agency executes. Marketers decide.
The same source reframed OpenPath’s exit and audit pressure as less about extracting margins from vendors and more about keeping clients close.
“It’s not about bigger margins. It’s about how they can maintain closer relationships with clients,” they said. The Trade Desk’s real commercial offense, in their understanding, was not a fee lapse – they were “very familiar with advertising” in a way that pulled brand relationships onto the platform and away from the agency.
This does not make the alleged costs irrelevant. But this changes the real meaning of the audit: it is not a coordinated strategic attack, but rather a blunt instrument taken by organizations that have lost sight of the commercial ground they were meant to defend, the sources said.
Strategy and frustration cannot be separated from each other. Very rare.
What The Trade Desk’s defense reveals
The Trade Desk’s response followed a clear sequence: dispute the findings, attack the auditor’s credibility, and request confidentiality. The confidentiality argument is the most telling part. The Trade Desk says it cannot share certain data because doing so would expose its agreements with other parent companies – meaning different parent companies may have materially different commercial terms, and The Trade Desk uses confidentiality to protect that. This is not a new defense. This is what holdcos say when advertisers ask about major media margins.
It’s worth sitting through. The firms currently auditing The Trade Desk’s fee structure are the same ones that CEO Jeff Green described in The Trade Desk’s full-year 2025 earnings report when he said that some institutions “fly the flag of transparency publicly but in practice ignore it.” Court documents from the Foster v. WPP points out that GroupM recorded more than $1 billion in what WPP calls “non-product related revenue” – its term for mainstream media revenue – in 2023. No one has commissioned an independent audit of that.
What no one deciphers
Two years ago, IPG, WPP and Omnicom all took small stakes in MediaOcean – worth $20-25 million each, according to AdAge – as part of a new certified services partner program. At that time coverage was minimal. In retrospect, things look different: three companies are now auditing or distancing themselves from The Trade Desk investing in the underlying infrastructure layer.
“Any platform or service provider that tries to be the middleman between publishers/media and client marketers is a threat to the big three,” said Steve Boehler, founder of marketing agency and consultancy Mercer Island Group. “The Trade Desk continues to succeed where agency trading desks failed. This threat cannot continue. The three giant holding companies each appear to want to rebuild their digital trading desks – and The Trading Desk taxes – back to 2016 and earlier levels. Holdcos can’t really control the giant walled garden of media, so continuing to lose control of the open web may be considered a bridge too far.”
It turns out the bridge was always theirs to burn.
—Jess Davies contributed to the reporting of this article.
Numbers you need to know
70%: The percentage of downloads of OpenAI’s AI content app, Sora, plummeted in March 2026, according to Sameweb.
3: The number of hours it takes Snapchat users to post more Snaps than the total number of songs on Spotify.
500: The total number of subscribers a YouTube creator must have to access the YouTube Shopping affiliate program, now the company has lowered the barrier to entry.
90%: The percentage of people surveyed for Sprout Social’s Q1 Pulse Survey said that AI-generated content has eroded trust in social media news.
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What are we reading
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OpenAI dropped AI video tool Sora, surprising Disney, sources said
On Tuesday, March 24, OpenAI announced that it was shutting down Sora, despite having previously signed a three-year licensing agreement with Disney, and receiving a $1 billion investment from the company, according to Reuters.
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PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.