• by Rob Williams , Yesterday

The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green speaks at the POSSIBLE conference.

MIAMI BEACH, FL – The digital advertising industry is under pressure to justify every middleman, said The Trade Desk Chief Executive Jeff Green, describing how  supply-chain inefficiencies, opaque business models and agency compensation tensions are reshaping the market.

Speaking with media executive Michael Kassan on Tuesday at the POSSIBLE conference in Miami Beach, Green said the current disruption presents one of the biggest opportunities he has seen in years for companies promising transparency and efficiency.

“This moment is one of the greatest opportunities that I think any of us will ever see in this space,” Green said.

Green, whose company built its reputation as an independent demand-side platform championing the open internet against larger rivals such as Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple, said The Trade Desk still views itself as a challenger despite its scale.

“We are absolutely still a challenger,” he said.

Supply Chain Cleanup Accelerates

Green said recent pressure across the industry has sped up efforts to remove waste from the adtech supply chain, where thousands of intermediaries sit between advertisers and publishers.

“In the last month, we’ve done more to clean up the supply chain than we did in the last year,” Green said. He added that the past year had already seen more progress than the previous 15 years.

The comments come as marketers increasingly question how much of their media spend reaches publishers and what value is created by vendors taking fees in the middle.

Green framed the issue bluntly: every company between advertiser and publisher “needs to earn its fee.”

That line may resonate with brands scrutinizing agency models and tech stacks as budgets tighten.

Publicis Rift Lingers

The remarks also arrive weeks after reports in March that Publicis Groupe had stopped broadly recommending The Trade Desk to some clients, highlighting growing tension between large holding companies building their own technology layers and independent ad-tech providers.

Neither Green nor Kassan directly addressed Publicis by name during the discussion, but Kassan asked how the industry should view agencies that increasingly operate their own data and technology infrastructure.

Green said the strongest agency model of the future will be one that aligns its interests closely with clients while clearly demonstrating value.

“We all have to have more conversations about value instead of price and cost,” he said.

He added that the industry has become overly fixated on cutting fees.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a moment in our industry’s history where we’ve been more obsessed with cost than we are right now,” Green said.

Open Internet Versus Walled Gardens

Green returned repeatedly to one of The Trade Desk’s longstanding themes: that advertisers need a competitive alternative to closed ecosystems run by tech giants.

He argued that premium media, journalism, sports and entertainment depend on a healthy open internet rather than what he called “half a dozen walled gardens.”

“A powerful open internet is way better for the world than one that is just controlled by half a dozen walled gardens,” Green said.

He said concentration of power in a few dominant platforms would weaken competition and reduce quality media incentives.

For media buyers, that argument translates into a practical question: whether more ad dollars flow through open-web inventory, connected TV and premium publishers, or continue concentrating inside large self-contained platforms.

AI Seen As Productivity Tool

Green also weighed in on artificial intelligence, dismissing exaggerated fears that it will simply eliminate jobs.

Instead, he described AI as a productivity tool that could help buyers and marketers process massive data flows and improve decision-making in programmatic advertising.

“I don’t think there is an industry that will benefit more from agentic AI… because of the fact that we can reason across very complicated decisions,” Green said.

That could be especially relevant to media buyers navigating fragmented audiences, multiple channels and real-time optimization demands.

What It Means For Buyers

For advertisers and agencies, Green’s message was clear: complexity is no longer an excuse for opacity.

Brands are demanding clearer economics, stronger alignment and better performance from every intermediary touching their budgets. At the same time, major agency groups face pressure to prove that proprietary tools and bundled models serve clients first.

The result could be a new era of consolidation and cleanup across ad tech, with fewer tolerated toll collectors in the middle.

Or as Green put it, the market is asking a simple question of everyone in the chain: earn your fee.