Buying programmatic media through The Trade Desk (TTD) has become untenable. We knew this long before Publicis made their recommendation to clients to avoid it two weeks ago or Omnicom decided to pursue their own audit last week. We even knew before Dentsu and WPP quietly left OpenPath in February. The truth is, 99% of our media clients were out of TTD by June of last year. The final client finished a campaign that had already started, and all clients were officially out by the end of the year.    

And we haven’t gone back.   

There are many reasons we’ve chosen to move away from TTD as an agency (shockingly, none of them are the … unique user interface they’ve chosen to adopt), but what it really comes down to for us is: What’s driving value for our clients? Is this platform best serving our clients’ media dollars? In the end, the answer was no. So, what led us to that answer?   

You’re often automatically opted into new tech or features without clearly knowing how much of your working dollars will be spent on it or how to opt out of the features easily (or at all). Monthly invoices just list “feature cost” without explicitly assigning costs to specific features. At the point where we started seriously discussing pulling our clients, about 30% of our total programmatic budget was being spent on fees and costs every month – budget we felt should be working harder for our clients, not the platform.   

We’ve always considered ourselves agnostic when it comes to platforms. To ensure we can move dollars elsewhere if we are not getting the results we need, we never want to lock ourselves into one partner. We constantly pit channels and DSPs (whether managed, self-serve or hybrid) against each other. TTD was no longer stacking up against these other channels. We were seeing better success not only in the walled gardens but also in smaller, simpler DSPs. By shifting dollars into more streamlined (read: more intuitive) DSPs, optimization workflows became easier and results improved. Reporting was more straightforward and easier to pull and automate; therefore, results improved. The simpler DSPs required less manual input (read: time) to achieve equal – or, often, better – results. All these changes allowed our nimble team to be more efficient with their time in platform (or managing a partner or some hybrid version of this), which in turn drove bigger thinking for our clients. The overall impact was larger, without all the bells and whistles.   

TTD touts itself as the transparent DSP, but when it came down to it, it was incredibly difficult to validate where impressions ran, or the quality of inventory impressions ran on, especially on the open exchange. Of course, on inventory reports, the normal big sites showed up most often (you know, the news sites, the entertainment sites, A LOT of weather sites, etc.) but digging deeper often showed tons of long-tail sites or, even worse, made-for-advertising sites. No amount of blocklists or brand safety filters (which, naturally, cost our clients more money to use) could stop this. About 5%-15% of impressions ended up on these types of sites.  

Yes, not being a large holding company, our team is smaller. We wear many hats.  Our clients would much prefer we spend our time driving measurable outcomes, refining strategy, and uncovering insights that move the needle for their business – not manually curating inventory lists. Of course, we worked with partners to use custom deals or private marketplaces (PMPs), which helped – but it also, as you would expect, increased the overall cost of media.  

Eventually, we found partners that would work with us at a lower cost, no minimums, and validated that every single impression was being served to a human before the impression was ever placed. And, wouldn’t you know it, performance improved.   

The bottom line is that our clients’ best interest is what always drives decision-making for our team. It became clear to us last year that The Trade Desk was no longer what was best for our clients, especially given the economic pressures they’re facing. Every budget is scrutinized, every dollar has to stretch further, and advertising needs to prove its worth.