The Trade Desk remains the dominant DSP but its advertisers are starting to shop around

“The complexity of the global advertising market is not a weakness for The Trade Desk,” CEO Jeff Green told investors on the company’s latest earnings call. “It is a moat.”

Some of his advertisers aren’t so sure.

What follows is a ground-level account of how that’s playing out, drawn from interviews with more than 10 ad executives. Some spoke on the record. Most didn’t — not because they lacked conviction, but because they were wary of how their views might land, and what that might trigger. The Trade Desk has grown increasingly combative with partners and press alike, and few who work closely with the company are eager to find out what pushback looks like.

Tom Wigley, director of digital at VCCP Media U.K., put it plainly: his agency’s spending on The Trade Desk had kept pace with the rising tide of CTV dollars. The problem is that rivals captured more of the same wave. “Amazon DSP is front and center,” he said, “because of the combination with retail media and Prime Video”. 

Tucker Matheson, co-founder and managing partner at Markacy, has already acted on that logic. His team has moved spend toward direct buys, retail media networks and other DSPs — anywhere measurement is cleaner and easier to defend to clients. 

“We can prove better results given the nature of more tailored buys versus always-on programmatic,” he said. The Trade Desk hadn’t done anything egregiously wrong, he added. The alternatives had simply grown up.

In an emailed statement, “The Trade Desk’s CMO Ian Colley said: “The Trade Desk has always believed that a healthy, competitive marketplace is optimal for brands, so we welcome competition from companies of all sizes. Big tech platforms will always prioritize their owned-and-operated inventory as a way to generate revenue and monetize their content. The Trade Desk doesn’t own any inventory so we can objectively select buy from all ad impressions across the open internet, and help clients maximize decisioning and select those that are most relevant and performative for their specific campaigns.  Indeed, in recent head-to-head tests against the Amazon DSP, The Trade Desk achieved greater reach, at a lower cost, with higher performance.”

Three years ago, The Trade Desk wouldn’t have needed to run that test. For years, The Trade Desk’s dominance rested as much on the weakness of its rivals as on the strength of its own product. Now, that gap is closing.

“I have seen far more desperation from their leadership,” said David Dweck, president at Go Fish Digital. “And I think they’re then loosening the reins on some of the things that they’ve been tighter tied around historically.”

The evidence isn’t hard to find. Features that used to require hitting significant spend thresholds are showing up in standard agreements. Measurement credits are appearing with fewer strings attached. John Davis, founder of ad tech vendor CrowdLouder, said the platform had started courting clients it would previously have turned away as too small — and that the unlocking of previously gated features had become almost routine.

One senior agency partner read none of this as distress. Clients want performance above everything else right now, they said, and when The Trade Desk’s incentives line up with that priority it feels less like concession and more like alignment. They were constructive about the restructured agency teams too — better resourced, more responsive than before. “They’ve absolutely listened,” they said.

Both readings have merit. Maturation and desperation can look identical from the outside, and one episode from roughly ten months ago illustrates why. 

An agency executive said The Trade Desk threatened mid-contract rate increases when their spending was pacing slightly below its agreed annual target. When the agency pushed back and threatened to move spend elsewhere, The Trade Desk backed down. “We just told them this is not how we want to partner,” the source said. “And they relented.” The episode ended without lasting damage. What it left behind was a question about a platform so confident in its own indispensability that it would lean on a long-standing partner over a shortfall that barely registered.

The bigger irritant, for some, has been simpler. A media director at one mid-sized agency said their company had cycled through three separate Trade Desk account teams in under a year. Three sets of introductions. Three rounds of re-explained priorities. Three attempts to rebuild working trust on a platform complex enough that continuity isn’t a nicety — it’s how they extract value from the thing at all.

None of that tipped them toward the exit. But it did open the door to others. “It means expanding the number of DSPs we work with,” the media director said.

The media boss of an independent agency described a similar period of uncertainty earlier this year. Their reps flagged a restructure was coming but couldn’t say who the new point person would be or when they’d arrive. The timing couldn’t have been worse: Google and Amazon are actively courting agencies with joint business plans right now — multi-year spending commitments engineered to make it structurally harder to route dollars elsewhere. The Trade Desk is trying to build something similar. Weeks of account uncertainty in the meantime aren’t helping that case.

“We’re not getting rid of them or anything,” the executive said. “But I just don’t feel like they’re making very good decisions.”

In an emailed response, Colley wrote: “More and more of The Trade Desk’s business is transacted through joint business plans, where brands and agencies partner with The Trade Desk on a range of factors, including innovation and growth. These JBPs represent some of The Trade Desk’s fastest growing clients and we’re proud and excited about the growth we are helping to drive for these brands. “

It is a plausible account. Who is telling the other one matters as much as what they are saying. Agencies have their own reasons to push back on a platform that, at its most assertive, routes spend more directly to brands and bypasses agency margin. Rival DSPs benefit from a narrative that The Trade Desk is slipping. Even publishers and SSPs have skin in the game. The Trade Desk’s OpenPath initiative, which cuts more efficient direct lines to inventory, has made enemies across the supply chain. 

Whatever the motives, the underlying tension doesn’t go away. Is The Trade Desk’s moat as deep as Green insists? The company’s own actions haven’t settled it.

“Everyone in the programmatic space is feeling the same pressure,” said Dweck. “Uncertainty in efficacy, high costs, very hard to measure — and 800-pound gorillas continuously trying to push you out around the edges.”

The longer doubt is structural, and harder to resolve. 

As AI lowers the cost of executing programmatic buys via API, the sophistication of any given platform’s interface becomes a less compelling reason to stay. Switching costs fall. The DSP function — the thing The Trade Desk has spent fifteen years making indispensable — risks becoming infrastructure: invisible, commoditised, competed on price.

“It will be a race to the bottom when it’s easier for buyers to switch,” said Davis.

The Trade Desk has the balance sheet and the market position to navigate that shift. Whether it does so from genuine strength, or from a posture of confidence it has grown too comfortable wearing, is the question its partners are starting — quietly, carefully — to ask out loud.

Colley wrote: “Last year, we went through the biggest re-org in our history. Our agency partnerships are the bedrock of our business, and we are committed to providing them with the highest level of service. As we scale, we are evolving from a generalist model to a Specialized Business Unit structure to ensure our clients have direct access to experts who can navigate these increasingly complex channels. While any transition involves a period of adjustment, this new model is designed to provide deeper technical support and more strategic continuity for the long term.”