Our President & Founder, Kym Insana, recently broke this down for Advertising Week. Programmatic transparency is at the heart of this discussion. Here’s the story for our audience, with the questions we think every buyer should be asking.
Every few months, programmatic transparency blows up in the trade press again. This time it’s The Trade Desk and Publicis. Next time it’ll be someone else. The headlines change, but the underlying math doesn’t.
Here’s the part that gets lost in the noise: the fight over who takes the margin isn’t the same thing as the fight over what advertisers actually get for their money. A holding company recommending its own trading desk instead of a dominant DSP might shift where the fee lands — it doesn’t automatically shift more budget into working media. Fees are fees, no matter whose logo is on the invoice.
Markup isn’t the problem. Not knowing the size of it is.
There’s no version of programmatic where nobody gets paid. That’s not realistic, and it’s not the goal. The real question buyers should be asking isn’t “is there a markup?” — it’s “how much of my budget is actually buying media, and how much is buying overhead?”
That distinction matters more than the sticker price on a contract.
Where this actually costs brands money
Picture two agencies pitching the same $1 million campaign.
Agency A quotes a 5% fee and routes everything through its own DSP. Sounds like a bargain — until DSP fees start stacking on top of that 5%, sometimes eating 50% or more of media cost. We’ve seen deals where less than 40% of the budget — under $400,000 on a $1M spend — actually reached inventory. The client saw a low number up front and lost the difference to line items buried in the platform.
Agency B quotes a flat 20% fee on the whole campaign, no hidden layer behind it. The number looks bigger on paper. But 80 cents of every dollar is going toward media that’s actually in front of consumers — nearly double what Agency A delivered.
Same budget. Wildly different outcomes. Performance doesn’t lie: when twice as much money is working, results follow.
To be fair, this isn’t always a clean split. Data costs for targeting and measurement are real and often necessary. The goal isn’t to eliminate every ancillary cost — it’s to know exactly what you’re paying for and why.
What we tell clients
The transparency conversation shouldn’t stop at “are there fees.” It should go to who’s charging them, where they sit in the budget, and when they come out. Fees pay for execution. They don’t drive performance. Every dollar that isn’t working media is a dollar not working for the brand.
This is exactly the audit we walk clients through before we ever put a media plan in front of them — because the biggest lever in programmatic performance usually isn’t the platform. It’s the fee structure sitting underneath it.
Want a clear-eyed read on where your programmatic budget is actually going? Talk to AlwaysOn Digital — we’ll show you the math.
Read the original piece on Advertising Week.
