Indie agencies want The Trade Desk and Amazon DSP to acknowledge their buying power with negotiating leverage

Smaller agencies are told resellers are the way in. Spend enough and a direct seat follows, with a lighter fee load to match. But 10 media buyers who spoke to Digiday on background describe something closer to a toll booth with no exit. Buys on The Trade Desk and Amazon’s DSP carry two sets of fees, and the route to shedding one of them keeps shifting for the little guys.

It’s just another way the tension in programmatic advertising has reached a fever pitch over the past year. When asked for comment, both Amazon and The Trade Desk touted availability to all advertisers. According to an Amazon spokesperson, there’s no minimum spend threshold for Amazon ads although some advertisers prefer hands-on help via a service partner for things like setup, strategy and optimization. Meanwhile, The Trade Desk says direct seats come with commitment levels agreed-upon with each client.

“Should clients want to work with The Trade Desk without a direct agreement for whatever reason, they are welcome to use our certified resellers, such as Goodway Group and Mogl, and still see the benefits of our Kokai Zuma platform,” a Trade Desk spokesperson told Digiday.

Indie agencies have long hoped that spending big with the biggest DSPs in advertising would mean a seat at the table. Working through a reseller can mean higher costs as agencies are expected to pay the intermediary as well as the main DSP. Sometimes, working through a reseller means less support, as one Washington state-based agency exec said.

“We are having to pay some more of those platform and tech fees to go through the reseller without a lot of support there,” per the exec.

Meanwhile, a direct relationship with DSPs means cost savings by eliminating intermediary or reseller fees, greater negotiating power and control around fee structures.

At the Washington agency, the 25-person staff is currently working via a reseller that offers little support while charging a 10% reseller fee on top of Amazon’s 15% fee. Now, they’re trying to get a direct relationship with Amazon — but it’s unclear what those exec’s expectations are to do so — as well as Amazon’s. While Amazon says it doesn’t require a spend minimum, the agency has been told a committed spend threshold is the way to a direct seat.

“It’s basically just a committed spend,” the exec said. “And we’re in conversations with them right now to try to eliminate that middleman fee.”

Another Texas-based agency has about 20 full-time employees and a similar experience to the Washington agency. The agency exec says the experience has been like “shifting sand.” To buy via Amazon, the agency is working through a reseller and is negotiating a direct seat with the tech company’s DSP. The agency exec did not name the reseller.

“From even three or four months ago with Amazon DSP, they were pushing everybody to reseller, and then they said ‘minimum,’ and now they’re saying ‘you don’t have to have that minimum’,” the Texas-based exec told Digiday.

Amazon does not require a minimum spend for direct access to its DSP. Advertisers who need assistance with setup, strategy and optimization may work with a service partner, per the company. Service partners can often include third party resellers.

The ad industry has not been quiet about its love-hate relationship with The Trade Desk this year — including Publicis’ very public fall out with the DSP in March over a lack of fee transparency. Indie agencies have also griped about The Trade Desk’s fee structures and perceived preferential treatment toward holding companies.

In The Trade Desk’s defense, the higher upfront costs are justified by its performance. On its August 6 earnings call, CEO Jeff Green called out its competitors essentially arguing advertisers are buying on price rather than value. 

Competition in the DSP marketplace has only gotten more heated, giving buyers confidence to structure media buys beyond the tech behemoths of Trade Desk, Amazon and even Google’s DV360. The ad tech ecosystem is changing, and indie agencies are waiting to see if it will become more equitable or if they’ll continue to be squeezed out by toll-booth-style resellers.