How a whistleblower lawsuit, an allegedly failed audit, and decade of debated fee pyramid blew up programmatic advertising's most important relationship leaving industry's self-proclaimed moral guard
This is a thorough piece and the agency hypocrisy argument is real and documented. But it misses the client perspective entirely, so here it is, from direct experience.
TTD charged fees without notifying us or getting approval from our media buyers. Not a billing dispute discovered in an audit. Real-time, active charges for tools we hadn’t authorized, added on top of contracted fees. When I raised this directly with their team, multiple calls, senior level but
their response was unambiguous: this is how the platform works and we won’t change it. The effective fee rate ran 10-15% above what we had contracted.
We stopped working with them within weeks.
The agencies being non-transparent doesn’t make TTD transparent. What Publicis named in their audit, some of us experienced directly and decided not to wait for an audit to resolve it. The honest broker framing doesn’t survive contact with that conversation.
Great point and worth talking about. I guess if you can put this same view on LinkedIn post, it might drive some conversation and get some answers too. Here is the LinkedIn post URL if you’d like to comment there.
Thanks man... I just wrote down what I really believe... and substantiated with data and facts... something that media people don't like... because facts are not juicy enough to get traction (or should I say eyeballs/clicks in advertising terms).. anyway, if you liked it, please feel free to share with adtech community on linkedin or anywhere else
here is the link to the next article that I thought of writing after loads of conversations got kicked off from this one. and I started thinking adtech from first principles.
This is a thorough piece and the agency hypocrisy argument is real and documented. But it misses the client perspective entirely, so here it is, from direct experience.
TTD charged fees without notifying us or getting approval from our media buyers. Not a billing dispute discovered in an audit. Real-time, active charges for tools we hadn’t authorized, added on top of contracted fees. When I raised this directly with their team, multiple calls, senior level but
their response was unambiguous: this is how the platform works and we won’t change it. The effective fee rate ran 10-15% above what we had contracted.
We stopped working with them within weeks.
The agencies being non-transparent doesn’t make TTD transparent. What Publicis named in their audit, some of us experienced directly and decided not to wait for an audit to resolve it. The honest broker framing doesn’t survive contact with that conversation.
Lookout for my TTD earnings analysis on May 8th. I know how this movie ends.
Great point and worth talking about. I guess if you can put this same view on LinkedIn post, it might drive some conversation and get some answers too. Here is the LinkedIn post URL if you’d like to comment there.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/amitreversed_this-whole-adtech-saga-of-publicis-vs-the-activity-7440070806338023424-IPHh?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAAAz3-QBGW80PN2J-HAM-NzMYhuBjAeOFxs
Already commented quite a bit on another LinkedIn post don’t want to overdo it
Amazing deep dive. Thorough.
Excellent analysis, Amit. THANK YOU! Very well written, very well researched, very fair.
Thanks man... I just wrote down what I really believe... and substantiated with data and facts... something that media people don't like... because facts are not juicy enough to get traction (or should I say eyeballs/clicks in advertising terms).. anyway, if you liked it, please feel free to share with adtech community on linkedin or anywhere else
here is the link to the next article that I thought of writing after loads of conversations got kicked off from this one. and I started thinking adtech from first principles.
https://blog.careerplot.com/p/everybody-got-paid-including-the
The Turd Desk writing it's defense lol