Author: Tim Peterson

Think transparency is hard to come by in programmatic advertising? Well, get a bunch of brand and agency executives in a room, and they’ll get super transparent about how opaque the digital ad market has become.

That’s exactly what happened at the most recent Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in Palm Springs, Calif. The Trade Desk was the subject of many grievances, which is unsurprising given that a lack of transparency was cited as the reason Dentsu, Publicis and WPP decided to pull ad dollars away from the demand-side platform in March.

But TTD’s transparency troubles are almost quaint in the face of the black boxes that ad buyers are having to deal with in the form of AI-powered ad platforms like Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+.

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To some, agentic media buying tools could fix some of programmatic advertising’s oldest headaches — ad-tech taxes, supply-chain murkiness, even the decline of the open web’s appeal and addressability. To others, it risks doing the opposite: adding another layer of opacity and pushing an already complex system into even greater chaos.

The debate resurfaced recently after Omnicom CEO John Wren said the holdco was testing agent-to-agent media buys designed to create more direct publisher relationships and reduce what he described as the “toll” taken by ad-tech intermediaries. Stagwell and Butler/Till are among the other agencies notably pushing ahead with similar tech.

And while that may sound good to publishers, open-exchange programmatic advertising has also taught them not to trust the upside.

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