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I’ll start where I always do: I’m not into drama. I think it’s childish, exhausting, and usually bad for business. I don’t pick sides between CEOs like this is some weird fantasy league for tech bros. I like ideas. I like arguments. I like the kind of fight where someone actually bleeds ego.

So before anyone messages me again to ask why I’m “anti–Trade Desk,” let’s clear this up: I’m not. Jeff Green isn’t the villain of programmatic. He’s not hiding cookies under his Patagonia vest or plotting to enslave the open internet. He’s just an absurdly driven man who genuinely believes he can code morality into capitalism.

That’s why this whole Brian O’Kelley versus Jeff Green moment isn’t gossip — it’s a rare argument about what truth actually means in adtech, and who gets to define it.

Adtech doesn’t do feuds. It does “summits.” It does “working groups.” It issues whitepapers about cooperation and unity, and then quietly buys its rivals.

And then Brian O’Kelley logged on.

The founder of AppNexus, now the CEO of Scope3, posted a short video — part roast, part TED Talk, part nervous breakdown filmed under a ring light. It skewered Green’s holy war for “the open internet,” the kind of sermon that sounds noble until you remember it’s also a quarterly earnings narrative.

What made it brilliant wasn’t the joke — it was the precision. It was the moment O’Kelley looked into the camera and, without saying it outright, reminded everyone that if you’re going to build the infrastructure of openness, you have to let other people hold the blueprint.

It landed like a mic drop in a boardroom allergic to unscripted moments.

Everyone in adtech already knows the subtext. The Trade Desk has spent a decade selling “transparency” while quietly deciding who’s allowed to see through the glass. It’s not paranoia — it’s physics. There’s only one direction the money flows.

I’ve had people — smart ones, powerful ones — message me privately to say they can’t even “like” a post that questions The Trade Desk. They’re afraid of being iced out of budgets. One media exec told me, “He doesn’t just control the money; he controls the echo.”

And yet, when Jeff Green talks about his company, it’s not with arrogance; it’s with the calm of someone who truly believes he’s right. He doesn’t deny The Trade Desk’s dominance — he recasts it as supreme benevolence. The company isn’t controlling the marketplace, he insists; it’s stewarding it. It’s not profit, it’s purity.

He once described his mission as “building the most fair auction that has ever operated in our space.” In Green’s theology, inefficiency is sin, and he’s the reformer sent to cleanse it, your opinion be damned.

O’Kelley’s virtual grin, and his roast, cut right through that sanctity. He wasn’t mocking Green’s intellect — he was mocking his gospel. The quiet, unshakable faith that one company’s scale could somehow equal everyone else’s salvation.

Within hours, the post became the Super Bowl of self-awareness.

Will Luttrell chimed in to say the quiet part out loud — that people have been muttering about this for years. Melinda Zürich, The Trade Desk’s comms diplomat, stepped in to defend her boss, because that’s her job, reminding everyone that Green “engages critics.” Jim Michaels and Lucas Schaerf dissected contradictions between the rhetoric and the reality.

Then came the peanut gallery — Andrea Tortella, Julian Frachtman, Barry Adams — posting like it was adtech’s “Succession” crossover episode.

And somewhere in the chaos, Gabriel DeWitt and Craig Flynn showed up like weary grownups at a frat party, pointing out that two billionaires arguing on LinkedIn wouldn’t fix CPM decay.

They weren’t wrong. But they also missed the point.

For one glorious, unfiltered day, adtech stopped pretending. The masks slipped. People actually said what they thought — out loud, in public. It was messy and human and better than anything the IAB has published in a decade.

The people cheering O’Kelley had something in common: they’d all been blocked by Jeff Green. So have journalists, analysts, and even a few partners.

The Trade Desk has mastered the art of polite stonewalling — answering difficult questions with riddles, or silence. Ask about UID2 or OpenPath and you’ll get the corporate equivalent of a long sigh.

That’s why O’Kelley’s roast hit harder than any exposé. It wasn’t scandal; it was catharsis. It was the punchline to a truth the whole industry already knew but didn’t have the nerve to say out loud.

Here’s the thing about Jeff Green: he’s not wrong. He’s just right at scale, and scale changes everything.

He built one of the most successful companies in advertising history. He made programmatic cool again, and he did it without the arrogance of Big Tech. But somewhere along the way, “open” stopped meaning shared and started meaning licensed through Jeff Green.

That’s the crack O’Kelley exposed — the invisible line between idealism and empire.

And maybe that’s what made this moment feel poetic. O’Kelley playing the philosopher, Green playing the technocrat, both auditioning for the role that Terry Kawaja already perfected: the man who makes dysfunction entertaining.

Except O’Kelley’s not turning chaos into comedy. He’s turning it into conscience.

This isn’t a soap opera. It’s a referendum on the future of adtech’s soul — on whether this industry keeps worshipping efficiency, or finally stops to ask what it’s actually efficient for.

Fifteen years ago, Jeff Green was the insurgent voice of adtech — the founder of a small, independent DSP promising to help advertisers escape the gravitational pull of Google and Facebook.

He called it The Trade Desk. Sounds official, and sorta cool, no? It was meant to be the Switzerland of programmatic: neutral, data-driven, fiercely independent.

Today, Green is no longer the insurgent. He’s the system’s central banker, you know: the man who effectively sets the interest rates of digital advertising. Nearly every agency, brand, and publisher touches his pipes, whether they realize it or not. And not everyone wants to touch Jeff’s pipes.

The transformation didn’t happen overnight. It was the result of a decade-long strategy that turned “openness” from a principle into a moat — a brand so synonymous with transparency that no one noticed when the windows started tinting.

The Trade Desk’s narrative has always been about access: open internet, open auctions, open collaboration.

Yet, in practice, it has built what one executive recently described as “a walled mansion with glass walls — everyone can look in, but no one gets a key.”

The company’s core programs illustrate this paradox:

Collectively, these programs have created what insiders now call “structured transparency.” It’s a system where everything appears visible, but the logic — the prioritization, the optimization, the power — remains proprietary.

Jeff Green still insists that The Trade Desk is the “independent” alternative — the defender of the open web against Big Tech.

That positioning has fueled massive investor confidence; it’s why the company trades at valuations and have Cannes parties most adtech firms can only dream of.

But independence, in practice, now looks more like dominance. According to multiple analysts, The Trade Desk influences as much as 80% of open-internet ad transactions. Its SDKs, IDs, and integrations form a de facto operating system for programmatic advertising. Read that again if you didn’t get it.

Few publishers can afford to ignore it. Fewer agencies dare to. The question is no longer whether The Trade Desk is independent. It’s independent from whom? The company’s power doesn’t come from owning content or audiences — it now comes from owning consensus.

When Jeff Green speaks, the market moves. When he builds a new framework, the rest of the industry scrambles to integrate. Again, this is not hyperbole. These are facts we can’t ignore.

Even The Trade Desk’s critics admit that Green’s strategic vision is unmatched. He’s charismatic, relentless, and unflinchingly data-literate.

He understands not just how markets move, but how to narrate them. That narrative — of saving the open internet, has become one of adtech’s most successful pieces of branding. The problem is that branding, unlike governance, doesn’t require accountability. We need to think more about that.

Inside the company, Green is known for his founder’s gravity: a presence that bends every conversation toward alignment with his vision.

Outside, competitors describe him as “brilliant and ruthless,” capable of simultaneously championing openness while enforcing a near-total reliance on his platform’s APIs. It’s why former AppNexus founder Brian O’Kelley’s satire struck such a nerve. His video didn’t attack Green’s intelligence — it challenged his monopoly on virtue.

The field that once swarmed with “independent DSPs” has largely evaporated. Turn, MediaMath, AppNexus, Rocket Fuel — gone or absorbed.

What remains are a handful of cool niche players and one gravitational center: The Trade Desk. TTD. JEFF GREEN Even former rivals now orbit it. Agencies build workflows around its tools. Publishers build strategy decks that cite its data. The regulators who once examined Google’s dominance haven’t yet realized that a new monopoly, something more subtler, friendlier, more quotable — may have taken its place.

Which leads to the new constant conversation in adtech circles: Can a company still call itself independent when the entire ecosystem depends on it?

No one disputes Jeff Green’s brilliance. He is a genius.

The Trade Desk’s execution is flawless, its scale breathtaking, its balance sheet enviable. Jeff “Thanos” Green.

But there’s a growing unease underneath the applause — the sense that “openness” has become another word for ownership. As one industry veteran basically put it privately to me, “Jeff didn’t close the internet. He just made sure you need his permission to open it.” I’m not 100% sure what that means, but it did sound good.

That tension — between admiration and disbelief — defines the current era of adtech.

The Trade Desk remains both the hero we look up to admire and the hazard of the open web.

The Brian O’Kelley Issue Everyone’s Talking About — Except You

If you’re still reading the free version, you’re standing outside the glass, watching the real conversation happen inside.

Inside ADOTAT+, Brian O’Kelley finally breaks his own mythology.

The man who built AppNexus, accidentally broke CNN, and now runs Scope3 doesn’t just talk about fixing adtech — he shows the receipts.

He told us, “Adtech doesn’t have a measurement problem; it has an honesty problem.” Then he proved it, turning carbon emissions into KPIs and waste into math.

Meanwhile, Jeff Green keeps preaching the gospel of “fair auctions” and “open internet salvation.”

In ADOTAT+, we broke down their full philosophical rivalry — the data scientist versus the evangelist, the engineer versus the preacher, the empiricist versus the optimist.

Who’s right? Depends on whether you believe in metrics or miracles.

Subscribers got the full fight card — O’Kelley’s quiet rebellion, Green’s moral PR campaign, and the blunt question keeping both men up at night:

What happens when efficiency stops feeling holy?

You can scroll LinkedIn and watch the sermon, or you can get inside the story that’s defining adtech’s next decade.

👉 Go ADOTAT+ now — because the future of this industry isn’t being told, it’s being debugged.