Publicis at war with TTD over ‘transparency’. But who’s supplying the bullets?
Opinion
Publicis and The Trade Desk seem to be arguing about hidden fees. It is actually a battle over who controls programmatic spend.
In a world where most brands’ top marketers have vanishingly small tenures, P&G’s CMO Marc Pritchard has been in situ for something close to 1,000 years.
I admit that I haven’t fact-checked that, but it’s been a while. For example, he said this all the way back in January 2017: “[we have] an antiquated media buying and selling system” built on a “non-transparent media supply chain with spotty compliance to common standards, unreliable measurement, hidden rebates” and something he called “methbot fraud.”
He gave the industry a year to fix it, or P&G would pull its money.
So what did the industry do? It formed a task force.
Weaponising transparency
Nearly a decade later, I can report that little has meaningfully changed. Shocker.
But hold on. New battle lines are being drawn in the ongoing fight for media transparency.
Publicis Media has told its clients to stop using The Trade Desk (TTD) after an independent audit found that TTD applied its DSP fee to charges clients hadn’t authorised and refused to provide the data needed to verify that media costs were invoiced at cost.
TTD’s billionaire chairman/CEO Jeff Green fired back on LinkedIn: the industry, he wrote, is full of people who “wave the flag of transparency publicly but run from it in practice.”
Oh la la, as they say in some parts of the world. La ironie, of course, you’ll know, is that Publicis has spent three years building out “principal-based buying”—acquiring inventory as principal, marking it up, and reselling it to clients at margins those clients cannot easily audit.
So the holding company demanding transparency from TTD has its own structural reasons to control where programmatic money flows next.
Two parties. Both are using transparency as a weapon. Both with margin models to protect.
Which tells you this isn’t a scandal about hidden fees. It’s a power struggle over who controls programmatic spend and on whose margin model it runs.
The framework that left the buy side unexamined
The industry’s response to Pritchard was genuine and serious.
When I reported on the ISBA/PwC programmatic supply chain study in 2020, the finding that landed hardest was the “unknown delta” — 15% of advertiser spend that auditors simply could not attribute to anyone. A cross-industry taskforce formed. A financial audit toolkit was launched, a follow-up study reduced the delta to 3%, and ISBA’s US counterpart, the ANA, ran the equivalent exercise in the US.
All of it focused on the supply chain — the pipes between buyer and publisher. But none of it on the buy-side platform that those pipes fed into.
You know, the demand-side platform. The tool that, in theory, sits entirely on the advertiser’s side of the transaction. Nobody audited it seriously because TTD had spent a decade positioning itself as the solution to opacity — the independent, buyer-aligned, honest broker of the open internet. The principled alternative to Google’s walled garden.
You don’t audit the hero. And so the transparency project, for all its genuine rigour, left one door unlocked — and Dentsu, WPP, and Publicis all found it. Separately. In private.
That is, before one of them went public. The holding companies most vocal about TTD’s opacity had, in the meantime, been quietly building their own.
What the holding companies are actually doing
Publicis seems to be making a commercial land grab with ideological cover.
Principal-based buying has been accelerating across the holding companies for the past three years. Agencies buy inventory as principal, take on the risk, mark it up, and resell to clients. Publicis’s Epsilon and its media investment capabilities have been explicitly built around this model. It is not a secret; it is their growth strategy.
What the TTD dispute gives Publicis — and by extension WPP and Dentsu, who made the same move quietly — is a transparency argument they can deploy to clients who ask why spend is moving away from an independent DSP and toward agency-controlled inventory.
The audit findings may well be legitimate, but the solution is not more “transparent”. It is differently opaque, in ways that happen to be considerably more profitable for the agency.
What to do about it
If principal-based buying wins this dispute, the unknown delta doesn’t shrink.
It moves upstream, into a commercial structure that sits above everything the ISBA task force and the ANA working groups have ever mapped.
Agency-owned inventory means the margin is baked in before the brief lands, the pricing is set before the auction begins, and the audit rights — if they exist at all — cover a transaction the client was never really party to.
The industry spent six years reducing the unknown delta from 15% to 3%. It is about to create a larger one, upstream of everything those taskforces examined, in a model whose opacity is structural rather than accidental.
For media owners, this is the one that should keep you up at night.
Principal-based buying concentrates spending decisions in fewer hands, on terms that publishers have even less visibility into than a straight auction. The transparency argument is being won by the side that needs it least — and the prize is control over inventory allocation and pricing that currently sits with independent platforms.
For brand CMOs and agency leaders, the question is not whether TTD passed its audit. Why don’t you ask Publicis what its margin model is on the inventory it’s recommending instead, and what your audit rights over that model actually are?
Those are not the same question. Conflating them is precisely what both sides of this dispute are counting on.
Lay down your weapons and fix this already
Given that Pritchard will be selling Pampers and Head & Shoulders for another 1,000 years, I’m sure our industry will eventually get around to fixing this media-transparency issue.
It just won’t happen through a task force, a toolkit, or a politely worded audit of the supply chain — not when they’re just used as weapons in a long-running game of ‘hide the markup’.
The disease Pritchard named in 2017 hasn’t been cured. It just learned to speak the language of the cure.
Omar Oakes was the founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years.