‘Google doesn’t care that it’s terrible’: Brand, agency execs air frustrations with The Trade Desk, Google’s Performance Max, Meta’s Advantage+

But TTD’s transparency troubles are almost quaint in the face of the black boxes that ad buyers are having to deal with in the form of AI-powered ad platforms like Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+.

“Google’s never been transparent about anything,” said one programmatic marketer in attendance.

What follows is a sample of the conversation among brand and agency executives during one of the event’s town hall sessions, in which attendees are granted anonymity in exchange for candor.

The Trade Desk fallout

“I feel like our [TTD] reps are outreaching more often and trying to assist on strategy more often, since [the news in March of Dentsu, Publicis and WPP advising clients against spending with The Trade Desk overall or on OpenPath specifically], partly because they want to keep the business from the agencies.”

“On The Trade Desk, I think we have seen our reps be a little bit more responsive. There was a shift because there was a reorg. So we were downgraded. We’re an indie agency, so we were just downgraded, and then since the news [in March], we’ve had a little bit more support.”

“When all that news came out [in March], I talk to my reps like every day. Now they are always asking, what do I need, what do I want, how can we help? Last year, the year before, I don’t even think I could tell you who my rep was. Just non-existent. They didn’t care. We were just someone who just sent them money. But now they definitely care a little bit more about customer service.”

“I’ve been getting, and my staff has been getting calls from, I guess, preferred market developers who now represent Trade Desk…. Like an intermediary, like a reseller…. That never happened before March, and we’re getting that outreach more often. So I don’t know how many companies they are now working with to try to bring more business into their ecosystem.”

The Trade Desk’s transparency situation

“Inherently, it’s just overly complicated to get the full supply chain breakdown [through TTD]. You have to pull three separate reports and pivot them all together, and even then, they’re not labeled as such, like Prism is not labeled ‘Prism.’ I’s just an absolute mind fuck. It’s like they’ve been built on this idea of this cost-plus model, so they’ve been trying to break everything down, but it’s actually overcomplicated to a point where then the trust barrier is crossed even more.”

“You can pull the data [through TTD]. It is transparent. It’s just really, really complicated to literally see where does everything in my media supply chain go. You have to pull three different reports and pivot them together.”

“The things I was reading about or how people were talking about, you would think there wasn’t any way to see those fees people were talking about, like ‘Oh, The Trade Desk isn’t transparent.’ It is. You just have to know where to look and what to do. When we went digging for that stuff, we did as The Trade Desk support people, and they helped us get that. They weren’t trying to hide it at all.”

“We signed a deal with The [Trade] Desk, and they give us everything. We just had to build our own platform, basically to ingest all their data and interpret it so we can have it in a format in which works for us. They make you work for it, but we spend a decent amount of money for a company of like eight employees total. So they were willing to work with us.”

“I feel like Kokai felt like it hid the fees more.”

“[OpenPath is] another hand in the cookie jar. It’s just their hand, right? And I understand why they want to eliminate it, but it’s still their hand. There is a financial incentive for them to keep their hand in the cookie jar and remove all the others.”

“You talk about transparency, it’s putting the [Sellers and Publishers 500+ marketplace] on every campaign by default. And your traders don’t even know it, because Kokai is so shitty that when you look at it, you’re trying to read it and make sure your settings are all good, and you have to uncheck [SP500+] in three different spots. That’s going to annoy people.”

Kokai and overconfidence

“We walked away from The Trade Desk back in 2023. Maybe we spend 1% of our programmatic dollars there just to keep the relationship going. But when we walked away, we walked away for a couple of reasons. Kokai was one of them; they were forcing it on us. Number two, we actually ran a test and saw that our bids were going up. That’s not what’s supposed to happen. That’s not a thing. AI or automation is supposed to drive incrementality, quicker, smarter decisions, cost effectiveness, effective, qualified reach and bring your costs down. Kokai did the complete opposite. We had campaigns where our costs went up 10-15% on some of our smaller campaigns where it was noticeable. Some of our larger campaigns, not so much. But that was one of the decisioning factors that made us pull 90% of our budgets out of Trade Desk back in 2023, and that was before they truly forced it on everyone.”

“Several years ago, The Trade Desk [spend] minimum was $100,000 a month. And we had all our conversations, and we offered them $1.2 million a year. We sat down to sign a deal for $1.2 [million] for the year, and they wouldn’t sign it because it was not $100,000 a month.”

“Because [TTD] set themselves up as being the top tier, like, ‘We’re so much better than all these other folk.’ Yahoo’s never come out and like, ‘Oh, we’re so much better than you.’ Google’s never come out saying it out loud, like ‘We’re so much better.’ But that’s how [TTD] came into the atmosphere. And to a point they were better than everybody else. But because they set that bar high, and they were so much better – and for all intents and purposes, I think the [TTD] CEO is a little full of himself because the videos, my God, the certification that’s not really certifications, just him talking at you for how many hours it takes you to certify, watching all those damn videos – I think that’s why they’re getting so much heat. Because that’s how they came out into the world. No other DSP came out like, ‘I’m better than everybody else.’”

“Your CEO can’t spend the last 10 years on LinkedIn saying you’re the only pure player in the space, you’re the white knight and then all of a sudden you try to cut out SSPs out of the environment and things like that. People call you on that bullshit.”

Other DSPs

“Yahoo is probably the most [transparent DSP].” 

“Other DSPs now have reached out and kind of said, like, ‘Hey, if you’re looking to shift money, we’re transparent.’ And one thing we’ve challenged them with is every DSP now has their own bid optimizer, and they say it generates X amount of savings, and if it doesn’t work, you don’t get charged for it. Well, that’s fundamentally what a DSP should do to start with. They just added a little button now they can charge more margin on it. They said, ‘Well, trust us. You know, if it doesn’t work, you don’t get charged. All right?’ Can you prove it in logs?”

“Amazon is another walled garden. To a point with the transparency, you can see a lot of things, and there’s a lot of things they’re just not willing to share because it’s proprietary.”

Google’s DSP

“Google, forget it. Google’s never been transparent about anything. They’re always like, let me get back to you on that.”

“We don’t even work with Google for that reason, because it’s so walled off still.”

“Google’s DSP DV360 is not a preferred DSP. It’s not great – point blank. But I think a lot of media buyers and brands need to take some level of accountability because we created these monsters.”

“Google is still behind. They were the first in and they’re like 6000 steps behind everybody else. And they refuse to move into this century with allowing things to happen. And they’re just still like, ‘No, no, you can’t, because we’re Google, you’re not going to do X, Y and Z.’ And they see nothing wrong with that. And I don’t know how they don’t see how everybody else is starting to really move away from them, because they are so closed off, and they don’t want to share anything, and they don’t want you to bring anything that you know works for you. They’re just like, ‘No.’”

“Run your YouTube campaigns through AdWords. It’s free. You don’t have to pay that 12%, 10%, 15%, whatever percent they’re going to charge you. And it’s easier. And there’s some synchronization or consolidation with your paid search campaigns that will give you more informed audiences. They’re still not great, but hit them where it hurts. Hit them in their pockets from a fee.”

“On the topic of Google, I think DV360 is terrible, and Google doesn’t care that it’s terrible because it’s going to go away soon, and everything’s going to be run through Google Ads. We’ve seen it started with [Google’s Performance Max] and how they’re basically buying across the entire ecosystem through PMax, as it is, completely black boxed, with barely any information telling you what placement you’re running in, and how each individual placement’s running. But that’s going to be the new norm for Google, and they they don’t give a fuck about DV360 because they can do this.”

Black box ad platforms

“[PMax] is unsold inventory. They’re giving us the shit inventory, and that’s what we’re buying. So it doesn’t work. And so we’ve not seen any success with it. Clients ask for it because it’s a sexy thing, but no one sees success with it.”

“Lead gen PMax was garbage. We were like, ‘No, do not run it.’ Now in the e-com industry, though, PMax is one of our biggest revenue drivers. It is insane.”

“They actually changed the way that the geography reports report in there. So you no longer get as much transparency into where those are being reported. You actually have to go into [Google Analytics 4] and reverse-engineer it to see that it’s not serving in the areas that the platform is telling you it’s served in to a substantial degree too. It’s like significantly over 50% of your traffic won’t be coming from the geos that you explicitly put in, unless you also put exclusion audiences for those geos as well.”

“For a PMax campaign, lead gen results are through the roof, but there’s not a single credible lead gen qualifier that’s in there.”

“It’s a hard no for [Meta’s] Advantage+, because the social platform, specifically Facebook, did this thing where they removed our capabilities of targeting specific type of audiences due to sensitivity, but now you roll out a new capability that says, ‘Hey, we can look at your existing campaigns and optimize and tell you who you should target.’ It’s a hard ‘no,’ and it actually did not perform well when we actually tried to test it against one of our other audiences, to where our costs did go up and the engagements weren’t there.”

“We’re heavy on social, so we’ve used Advantage+ Audience quite a bit. And what Meta would do for us is they would hide the different adjustments that you can make. They would hide all the settings. So we would turn on a campaign we would never have Advantage+ Audience on, and then suddenly, two weeks into our campaign, Audience is on, we’ve reached 15 million people, and we’re like, ‘How did this happen?’ And it’s because they were hiding settings. And so we had to fight with that a lot and try to figure out, how can we manually do everything for all of our campaigns and select all of our audiences and all of our settings? So that’s been a huge thing.”

“They don’t send you an email or anything. You just, like, all of a sudden see your ad, and you’re like, ‘That’s not right.’ And you go in and it’ll say, ‘Oh, we turned on “reveal over time.”’”

“[Microsoft] did a rollout about three or four weeks ago, and it a video placement within their ecosystem you could not opt out of. It just was out there. So in pharma, that’s actually a big no-no, because it changed up the way our ad looked and a regulatory person brought it up. Now I also know that I did not see any publication, so they did not outwardly tell people that it was done. So our campaign on Microsoft was paused for about two weeks because we found it. They now are giving people an opportunity to opt out of it, but then I don’t know how transparent that is.”

“Since Google’s been giving out recommendations, the number one recommendation that they’ve been giving out, since before it was called AI and everything was machine learning, it was ‘Spend more money.’ Millions of data points to say if you spend more money, you’ll get more, and that’s like underpinning everything to these AI tools that they have there.”