The news: Demand-side platforms (DSPs) are ramping up efforts to draw attention away from The Trade Desk (TTD) as scrutiny mounts against the DSP leader.

The news comes after holding company Publicis began advising its clients that it no longer recommends they use TTD, claiming the DSP failed a third-party audit. TTD was found to be opting users into certain features without consent and improperly charging them. Following this, holdco Omnicom announced plans to conduct its own third-party audit of TTD.

Mid-market DSPs like StackAdapt are reaching out directly to agency media buyers to ask if they will reevaluate their DSP partnership with TTD due to news of the audits, per Adweek. Other DSPs like Quantcast are running ads targeting TTD, highlighting “recently failed audits in the ad-tech space” and prompting buyers to “upgrade.”

Zooming out: DSP competitors could win incremental business from buyers reconsidering their ties to TTD after Publicis’ audit. But the broader challenge facing TTD and its rivals is the industry’s shift away from open, third-party-dependent buying toward closed-loop ecosystems, private marketplaces, and more tightly controlled supply paths.

• Major holdcos like Omnicom are consolidating creative, media, data, and commerce capabilities into unified, end-to-end systems. This transformation is led by the integration of advanced AI tools and the rise of Omnicom’s enterprise genAI capabilities following its merger with IPG.
• Omnicom is positioning itself as capable of offering a single, integrated ecosystem rather than relying on disparate agency teams and external platforms like TTD. The holdco’s Connected Capability model merges platforms like Omni, Flywheel, IPG Interact, and Acxiom ID into a single system.
• Publicis is making similar moves. The company is accelerating its AI investment and reinforcing its CoreAI platform, expanding its first-party data capabilities, and acquiring companies like AdgeAI that enhance its predictive measurement offerings.
• Agencies are broadly turning toward AI tools to maintain power as walled gardens like Meta and Amazon attract more advertiser dollars; US walled garden programmatic ad spending is forecast to grow 16.5% to $142.05 billion this year. Many agencies now directly manage client-publisher relationships, a role traditionally filled by DSPs and supply-side platforms.

Implications for marketers: TTD and other DSPs will continue to face pressure from closed-loop ecosystems that promise tighter integration across media, data, measurement, and commerce and reduce advertisers’ need for standalone intermediaries.

Walled gardens like Meta offer the benefit of an integrated adtech stack to enable streamlined operations, but prioritize their own inventory and content—meaning advertisers lose some transparency that open web DSPs have. For marketers, that means more pressure to balance the efficiency and control of those ecosystems against the flexibility and transparency of independent adtech partners like TTD.