Inside indie agencies’ DSP gripes and the rise of agentic media buying

As indie agencies understood it, the path was simple: Spend enough and land a direct relationship with the DSP, thus bypassing reseller fees. In reality, indie agencies say that hasn’t happened.

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There’s a long list of gripes small to mid-sized agencies have with tech platforms — namely the The Trade Desk, which agencies dubbed as the Spirit Airlines of the DSP world at last year’s Programmatic Marketing Summit. At the top of that list, indie agencies say they’re paying steep financial penalties to access demand side platforms.

But the ad tech landscape is shifting. The lines between demand side platforms (DSPs), supply side platforms (SSPs) and unified ad platforms (UAPs) are becoming less clear. Emerging AI agents are increasingly automating workflows, promising streamlined media buying and negotiating. 

The question becomes: who needs a DSP anyway?

On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, senior marketing reporter Kimeko McCoy (who also penned this article) and executive editor, video and audio Tim Peterson weigh up indie agency grievances and the future of DSPs.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Competing with the tech behemoths that aren’t turning down ad dollars

Peterson: The experience on websites is getting porous. More than 50% of the traffic going to websites is bot traffic at this point. They don’t care to look at display ads. And so it makes me wonder for these independent agencies, how much they or their clients really then need to be working with a Trade Desk or an Amazon DSP as opposed to just saying, “You know what, Google search, Meta Ads, TikTok, now we’ve got ChatGPT. We can do that through Criteo. Let’s just do a full walled-garden strategy. Because as far as I can tell, Google, Meta, they aren’t turning away money.”

McCoy: I questioned that myself when I was doing this reporting, right? How much do you actually need The Trade Desk when you’re looking forward ahead in terms of the open web being a much different place than what it used to be?

More comfort with AI agents buying and negotiating

Peterson: Meta’s done this where you can be using Claude or ChatGPT to manage your Meta buys — where then I, as an independent agency, don’t need to be working directly with The Trade Desk or Amazon DSP. I can just be working through Claude or ChatGPT, or Gemini or Copilot. 

McCoy: I think there’s starting to be more comfortability with that. We talked to Scott Ensign over at Butler/Till not too long ago about their own media buying efforts, and how those are becoming more agentified… So obviously the comfort and the appetite is there for using AI agents to handle the negotiating. It’s only a matter of time, if not already, you get to the point where you put your dollars down and let the AI handle that as well.

DSPs, SSPs and UAPs blur the lines

Peterson: Now DSPs are trying to be SSPs, SSPs like Magnite and Pubmatic and Index Exchange are trying to work directly with the buy-side. They’re trying to become DSPs in a way. And they’re all kind of blurring into this unified ad platform in the middle. Then you throw AI agents into the mix, which kind of calls into question how much do any of these companies need to be, or how much are any of these companies needed?

McCoy: I did talk to some of the execs that I had conversations with and they were more willing to test these platforms. On the one hand, it forces you to have this Frankenstein tech stack of DSPs to be able to do our immediate buying. But to your point, if there are now AI agents that are handling this, and then the unified ad platforms…at what point do I need this Franken stack or to go to any of these if I could just have an agent or one and done, single key to be able to do all of this