The Trade Desk loosens its grip on pricing amid buyer pressure

A company that built its business on firm pricing doesn’t start floating incentives because it feels generous. It moves because something else is moving. In this case, Amazon has been grinding down fees and selling agencies on a DSP built for speed and efficiency across the open web. Its pitch has become hard to ignore. 

“There’s a battle between the three big DSPs now, and we’re weighing up whether to spend more with Amazon, especially when it comes to non-endemic advertisers,” the exec said.

Which makes their conversation with The Trade Desk more than line-item housekeeping. Really, it marks pricing’s return as a competitive front in the DSP wars pushed forward by Amazon’s fee pressure and Google’s aggressive terms over the last year. Agencies were always going to see that movement and ask the same questions of The Trade Desk. 

They know why The Trade Desk takes its cut. Once data, identity and measurement layers are fully loaded, the effective platform fee can run from the mid-teens to roughly 20%. That cut underwrites the machine — the bidding models, optimization systems, identity infrastructure, fraud and suitability tooling — that gives them access to better inventory.

But at scale, those basis points aren’t abstract. They determine how far a budget stretches and where it lands.

More often lately, that edge belongs to Amazon. 

Buyers have told Digiday throughout the year that it’s still a challenger in overall programmatic share, but one that’s catching up on the established players. The Trade Desk retains advantages Amazon can’t mirror: global scale, more mature bidding algorithms and deeper reach beyond commerce-driven media. Yet the momentum behind the company is shifting.

Not that Jeff Green is conceding that. The Trade Desk CEO spent the past several months underscoring something else entirely: that Amazon’s ownership of commerce and streaming creates conflicts his platform sidesteps. In his telling, The Trade Desk is the neutral marketplace in a media economy running short on neutrality. Whether that message resonates more than Amazon’s simpler formula – of lower fees and cleaner attribution because it owns the checkout – is the part buyers say remains unsettled.

One media buyer at a large independent media agency said they had been able to procure 1 to 2% reductions in tech fees on a client-by-client basis, if the agency surpassed preset spending thresholds, in this case, a target of $500,000 past the agency’s earlier projected investment for Q4.

“They are coming to the table and being receptive to things that they’ve never bore, never before been receptive to,” said the buyer. It’s a small percentage reduction, they said (without revealing specifics), but one that could translate into large dollar savings when set against a big budget. 

Another buyer told Digiday they had negotiated post-auction discounts, in return for hitting incremental spending thresholds beginning at $750,000 in Q4. The Trade Desk’s reps added strict conditions that meant the kickbacks had to be passed directly to the agency’s client, they said.

Both said their new arrangements were settled within joint business plans (JBPs) — bespoke agreements established around a single client’s spending expectations — and were unusual in their experience dealing with The Trade Desk, “historically inflexible” according to the latter exec.

According to a spokesperson for The Trade Desk, those JBPs account for an increasingly large proportion of the spend flowing through its platform. (The spokesperson, however, didn’t comment on the company negotiating on fees or post-auction discounts within the scope of those agreements).

“More and more of our business is managed through joint business plans, and each of these plans is tailored to the needs of that client and based on their business growth objectives. We’ve earned our clients’ trust in these plans by consistently delivering more value and better performance, and as a result, winning their investments,” the spokesperson said in an email.

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But it’s not just discounted fees on the table. 

A holding company media exec said that, rather than financial incentives, The Trade Desk had offered “development credits” — in basic terms, time and resources from the company’s internal development team to work on tailored programmatic solutions, gratis.

Other agency buyers said they hadn’t received financial incentives, but told Digiday that TTD reps had redoubled service efforts in recent months. “They’re much more willing to come to the table and be a real partner,” said one.

Taken together, the fee concessions, the extra dev support and the more hands-on posture from reps point to a company shoring up its agency relationships at a moment when the story around The Trade Desk is being tested, even if its underlying model isn’t. 

Its Q3 numbers underscore the tension. The company pulled in $739 million in revenue, up 18% on the same period a year ago. Even so, its stock is down roughly 65% this year, weighed down by tough comparisons to last year’s growth and a widening narrative that Amazon is becoming a real threat. 

The next year may see that pattern become more pronounced. Agencies and advertisers often spend the final weeks of the calendar firming up their investment plans for the new year. While programmatic and investment leads will have tried their luck prising a fee reduction or post-auction discount from The Trade Desk in the past, now they’ll be going into negotiations knowing that the company’s reps can, in fact, be moved.

“We constantly push… it’s a tenet of how we operate,” said one buyer. “The most important thing is the dollars I extract out of what I put into the market.”