DSP Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Holdcos

The programmatic advertising industry had a very public moment the last few weeks. Publicis — one of the world’s largest advertising holding companies — told its clients to stop using The Trade Desk, citing a failed audit over fee transparency and unauthorised billing. The Trade Desk denied the characterisation and its CEO Jeff Green published a Linkedin post calling out agencies who wave the flag of transparency publicly but run from it in practice.

It was messy. It was pointed. And it was almost certainly not really about the audit. This is a story about the structure of the programmatic market — who owns the infrastructure, who profits from it, and whether that structure is capable of producing good outcomes for advertisers regardless of the intentions of the people inside it.

To understand what is actually happening, you need to see that what looks like a single product category — the DSP — is actually three fundamentally different business models wearing the same software clothing.

The first is the pure-play DSP. The Trade Desk is the primary example. Revenue comes from a percentage of media spend — typically 15-20% in platform fees. The model is structurally aligned with advertiser outcomes: if campaigns perform and you buy more, they make more money. There is no proprietary inventory to push, no principal position to protect, no inventory owner sitting on the other side of your auction. In 2024, The Trade Desk processed approximately US$12 billion in gross spend while maintaining customer retention above 95% for eleven consecutive years. You do not hold that retention figure in a market as competitive as programmatic buying by systematically working against client growth incentives.