Confessions of an anonymous media buyer: "The Publicis Media - The Trade Desk affair forced every media agency to justify to its clients that fee-control protocols exist... over very little."

Two months after reports that Publicis Media US had stopped recommending The Trade Desk following an unfavourable audit, Open Garden spoke to a media buyer to get his read on the affair and on what it changed in his day-to-day work.

Frankly, yes. The Trade Desk's commission model is structurally different from its competitors' and can look ambiguous for that reason, but it is well known to insiders. It rests on a compounding fee structure: costs applied not only to media, but also to additional features, which are themselves paid.

The Trade Desk is an ecosystem with its own rules: some features are on by default, others are not, some cost money, others do not. But those rules are in the contracts, the reporting and the platform. Once you have that in mind, all that is left is negotiating the fees and whether those features are on by default.

Knowing what you switch on and what it costs is precisely an agency's job. Realising how the mechanism works after ten years of use, through an external consultancy, is therefore fairly surprising. So is the fact that the grievances appear confined to the United States.

If The Trade Desk had a real structural transparency problem for Publicis, why are the other regions not affected? That certainly gives ammunition to those who also read it as an attempt to destabilise a direct competitor of Epsilon-Conversant, the in-house programmatic technology, in a segment and a geography where the two are in head-on competition.

Either way, it took only a leaked Publicis Media US memo to clients to weaken further the reputation - and the share price - of an already pressured The Trade Desk.

For a DSP whose positioning rests largely on transparency and neutrality, simply casting doubt on its integrity can do major damage: the stock lost 13% in two days, before OMD launched an audit of the platform in turn.

I agree. Take Amazon, which is eating into The Trade Desk thanks in part to a hyper-aggressive pricing policy: bear in mind that Amazon also makes money on the media itself, through its own inventory. Same for Google with DV360.

Correct, though it is worth noting that a feature like OpenPath, which lets The Trade Desk connect directly to a publisher's inventory without going through an SSP, does raise questions.

Charging fees on the publisher side is relatively openly acknowledged today. But at 4% of profit on every transaction, the neutrality of the decisioning deserves to be questioned. Especially when The Trade Desk presents itself as a player that is not trying to bypass SSPs.

When you buy programmatically through a DSP, you expect to deal with four big families of fees: platform fees, feature fees (integrated third-party or proprietary solutions), sell-side fees (SSP, resellers, unknown delta), and "miscellaneous fees" such as exchange rates or the digital services tax.

On the major DSPs, transparency on features is generally well handled. The cost is often displayed directly on the activation button and available in reporting. That is the bare minimum.

Of course. Even if the rollout of the new Kokai interface - whose ergonomics have been widely criticised - has made switching certain features on or off far less intuitive than in the Solimar era. That, for once, is something you can hold against them.

Checks are run regularly, at our shop as at most of our competitors'. Both globally and locally. That lets media agencies spot anomalies quickly.

What we really challenge is the actual value of these features relative to their cost. Because switching on all of The Trade Desk's features systematically, with no considered trade-offs, can quickly push fee levels close to 30%. There is a reason the industry calls The Trade Desk the "Ryanair of DSPs".

In France, every paid button has to be sold and defended to the client, which forces discipline in feature selection. I suspect that is less true in the United States, where media agencies are not subject to the Sapin law and where the "click and see" approach is probably more widespread.

No specific instructions... because there is no real issue on our side.

What is clear, though, is that this affair forced every media agency to justify to its clients, through memos, that fee-structure control protocols exist. All that over an article that ultimately says very little the industry did not already know about The Trade Desk's billing model.

If the facts were established, the question would certainly arise. But in this case, there is no issue.

Platform business models remain an important factor in choosing which systems get activated, beyond USPs such as exclusive inventory, obviously. The opacity of some platforms is clearly a barrier to their adoption.

Objectively, I do not really see any obstacles. The only grievance I would raise with The Trade Desk here is that the platform requires SSPs not to share their data with buyers without its prior agreement, which rules out any surprise audit.

Where opacity does become real is with the performance platforms - no, I will not name them - that bill you on outcome, the buzzword of the moment.

In that case it is the platform that takes the risk and arbitrates inventory selection to hit the goals you set it, which mechanically means a loss of control on your side.

Access to DSP logs has never been a real issue. You generally just have to ask. What holds back their use is the volume and the processing complexity, not the access itself. Plenty of agencies have them without ever really using them.

The real difficulty is the lack of symmetry in dimensions between buy-side and sell-side systems, and the absence of consistent fields across sell-side platforms. Some do not store key data or generate their own identifiers instead of using the DSP's, which makes reconciling data considerably harder in some cases.

Forgive me for saying so, but we are not talking about the same thing. SCID addresses a different issue from the one raised by Publicis. One is about structural transparency in the supply chain, the other about applying fees to features.

That said, let's talk about SCID. It runs into an existential problem everyone knows about: transparency does not suit everybody. The standard requires every player - DSPs, SSPs, resellers - to pass a unique identifier in the bidstream.

Some of those players do not even make data as basic as the amount bought per seat available to their clients, because doing so would expose margins that are hard to justify (since they are easily reconciled)... and that would be enough on its own for a reconciliation exercise.

Betting on SCID looks like a lost cause to me. Adoption will not follow, as it never has, because it runs directly against the interests of players who have no reason to play along.

It would be more useful to standardise the granularity of information available on the SSP side and force them to use the identifiers provided by the DSPs. And as the IAB Tech Lab used to like pointing out, it is more the plumber than the police of digital advertising. It proposes protocols, it cannot impose them.