Key points
- Digiday reports indie agencies say spending enough to earn direct DSP relationships, and skip reseller fees, has not happened in practice.
- Agencies say they pay steep financial penalties to access demand side platforms, with The Trade Desk singled out among their gripes.
- Digiday's podcast hosts discuss AI agents handling buying and negotiating, with DSPs, SSPs and unified ad platforms blurring together.
- Butler/Till's Scott Ensign told Digiday the agency's media buying is becoming more agentic.
Why it matters for marketers: If agents can buy across platforms, agencies may lean less on a stack of DSPs, which could shift fee negotiations and platform choices for small and mid-sized shops.
Digiday's latest podcast episode and accompanying article look at a growing complaint from independent agencies: they have client budgets to spend, but say demand side platforms are not making it easy to access them on good terms. Agencies had understood that spending enough would earn a direct relationship with a DSP and cut out reseller fees. According to the report, that has not happened.
The Trade Desk is the most frequent target of those gripes. Agencies say they pay steep financial penalties for access, and Digiday notes they jokingly compared The Trade Desk to Spirit Airlines at last year's Programmatic Marketing Summit.
The discussion then turns to what AI agents could change. Digiday's Tim Peterson points to Meta's setup that lets buyers manage campaigns through assistants such as Claude or ChatGPT, which could let an agency avoid working directly with a DSP. Reporter Kimeko McCoy says comfort with agents handling negotiating is rising, citing Butler/Till, whose media buying is becoming more agentic.
For marketers and agency teams, the practical question is how many separate platforms a buying setup really requires. The hosts note DSPs, SSPs and unified ad platforms are drifting toward each other, and some agency executives are more willing to test them. One host also raises the trend of web traffic that is more than 50% bots, which strengthens the case for walled gardens.
What to watch: whether agentic tools give small agencies real leverage in fee talks, and whether DSPs respond with new terms. Teams weighing their stack may want to compare what each platform costs against what an agent-led workflow could replace.
Sources
This brief is our own summary. Read the full reporting at the source.
