By Zero. That is the number of agency media buyers, out of four surveyed by Digiday this week, who said they had changed their DSP roster in response to The Trade Desk's audit fallout with Publicis. The most expensive transparency crisis in programmatic history, and the switching cost so far is a bunch of LinkedIn ads and some vendor lunches nobody asked for.
Let me walk you through the receipts.
The audit that started it all
In mid-March, Publicis sent a memo to select clients advising them to stop using The Trade Desk. The trigger: a FirmDecisions audit that, according to a leaked memo reported by Adweek, found The Trade Desk had "improperly applied their DSP fee to other fees" and auto-enrolled clients into fee-based tools without evidence of authorization.
The Trade Desk disputed the characterization. WPP and Dentsu had already exited OpenPath in February, citing fee visibility concerns. Then Omnicom piled on with its own audit, reportedly conducted by KPMG.
TTD stock is down roughly a third in 2026, according to Digiday. But here is the number that actually matters: The Trade Desk disclosed in 2025 that joint service agreements, meaning direct contracts with advertisers that bypass agency master services agreements, account for more than 60% of its revenue. Needham estimates 70% of Publicis's brand clients have direct Trade Desk deals. The real revenue at risk? Roughly $87 million against a $2.9 billion base, per Digiday's analysis.
That is not an existential threat. That is a rounding error with good PR.
The rivals circle (with the same pitch deck)
I have seen this pitch before. Every time a DSP stumbles, the mid-market fires up the outbound engine. StackAdapt, Tatari, Ilumin, and Quantcast have been running paid LinkedIn ads explicitly highlighting their differences from TTD, according to Adweek.
Viant has been the most aggressive. The CTV-focused DSP grew revenue 19% to $344.2 million last year, according to Digiday, and its reps have been restating commercial offerings while contrasting their transparency credentials against The Trade Desk's.
The buyers are not impressed.
"They were mostly generic and focused on their transparency, which from my perspective is no different whatsoever than The Trade Desk," one media buyer told Digiday. "In fact, I [ended up with] more questions than answers from that."
RTBHouse's experience tells the same story. Roy Geva Olmert, SVP of client services, told Digiday the inquiries have been low-volume and more curious than urgent, the kind of tire-kicking that follows media coverage rather than genuine alarm. His summary was blunt: "Transparency is a means to an end. CMOs don't really care about how you go about running your business. What they do care about is that you do right by them."
Is anyone actually switching? Not according to the evidence.
Nexxen bets on features, not fear
While most rivals are running the transparency playbook (again), Nexxen is doing something slightly more interesting. The DSP and SSP provider launched AI agents in open beta in March, designed to help buyers with pre-campaign QA, deal troubleshooting, and campaign optimization.
CPO Karin Rayes told Digiday the agents present multiple scenarios rather than funneling users down a single path. "It doesn't need to be a black box," he said. Crucially, users can switch the AI agents off (a direct response to buyer complaints about AI feature creep across DSPs lately).
The pitch is consolidation savings, not poaching. Rayes described it as "leveraging our data, leveraging our media, leveraging our demand... we're able to consolidate fees and ultimately save them money and also drive better performance."
Does it work? Too early to say. The agents just hit open beta and there is no published performance data yet. But the approach, lead with product value rather than competitor drama, is at least strategically coherent. The governance questions around AI-driven ad buying remain wide open.
Verdict: Nexxen earns credit for shipping product instead of attack ads. But AI agents in a DSP are a feature, not a moat, until the performance data proves otherwise.
This is not about transparency. It is about margin.
Here is the part nobody puts in the sales deck.
Digiday framed it clearly: Publicis vs. The Trade Desk is not really about transparency. It is about who gets the margin. OpenPath routes around agency trading desks, compressing the margin agencies extract from supply-path optimization. That is the real offense. The fee audit is the weapon. Transparency is the branding.
One senior industry source told Digiday: "It's not necessarily about more margin. It's about how they can maintain closer ties to the client." The Trade Desk has been (in their words) "very savvy with the commercials" in ways that pull the brand relationship toward the platform and away from the agency.
Meanwhile, TTD is tightening its grip on the supply side too. As of March 31, The Trade Desk is overhauling Identity Alliance payouts from a volume-based model to one centered on "incrementality," rewarding data partners who contribute unique signals and deprioritizing duplicative data. Some partners were reportedly given a short timeframe to agree to new terms or leave the program. The Identity Alliance generates tens of millions of dollars annually, according to multiple Digiday sources.
This is a company consolidating control over identity economics while its agency partners argue about fee transparency. The holdcos are fighting over who gets the margin on the open web. TTD is fighting to own the infrastructure underneath it.
Which side of that fight would you rather be on?
What we do not know yet
- Whether any major brand (not agency) has actually reduced Trade Desk spend in response to the Publicis audit. The $87 million revenue-at-risk figure assumes full Publicis influence, which Needham's 70% direct-deal estimate suggests is overstated.
- How Nexxen's AI agents perform at scale. Open beta launched in March, but no third-party benchmarks or campaign performance data exist yet.
- Whether Omnicom's KPMG audit will produce findings materially different from FirmDecisions', or simply validate the status quo.
- The full financial impact of TTD's Identity Alliance payout restructuring on mid-tier data partners who may lose revenue under the incrementality model.
What is next
The holdcos will keep auditing. The mid-market DSPs will keep pitching. And The Trade Desk will keep signing direct deals with brands while everyone argues about its fee structure.
The real question is not whether TTD survives the Publicis breakup. (It will. $87 million does not sink a $2.9 billion company.) The question is whether the holdco model of margin extraction through supply-path control survives in a world where DSPs are signing directly with advertisers and restructuring identity economics to suit themselves.
If you are a media buyer reading this, here is what to do Monday morning: ignore the vendor cold emails. Run your own fee audit on every DSP you use, not just TTD. Compare promised CPMs to invoiced CPMs across your entire stack. The transparency problem is not a Trade Desk problem. It is a programmatic problem. And no amount of LinkedIn ads from mid-market DSPs will fix it.
Mira Castellano covers ad tech for The Daily Vibe.
