Pitch-deck preachers. LinkedIn prophets. “Strategic consultants” who think DSP stands for Don’t Show Proficiency.

Your boss paid them $5,000 to “upskill” the agency. They used it on bottle service, bad decisions, and a “training deck” stolen from someone else’s keynote. Then they mumbled something about “funnel velocity” and couldn’t diagram a single stage if you handed them crayons.

Now they’re quoting ADOTAT+ like they came up with it.

Meanwhile, DSPs? They’re not platforms—they’re padded cells for aging media logic. They used to command the buy. Now they sit in the corner, taking orders from upstream AI like a middle manager clinging to their last Slack login.

Execution stayed behind. Intelligence left the building.

That’s why we built ADOTAT+.

We expose the underbelly:
🧾 The late payments.
📉 The phantom impressions.
📂 The backchannel whisper campaigns.
💣 The fraud tools that couldn’t detect a bot waving a red flag in Times Square.

This isn’t a newsletter. It’s a crowbar. And we’re using it to pry open the black box of this industry, live on stage, receipts in hand.

So if you’re done pretending your LinkedIn feed is “intel,” and you want real ammo to pitch smarter, spend cleaner, and stop getting punked by your stack—subscribe to ADOTAT+.

Or don’t.
And let your competitor keep quoting us while beating you on every call.

It’s Rosh HaShana — the Jewish New Year — and as you know, Jews don’t work or do business on the holidays. While we’re resting, praying, and spending time with family, we’ve set a few things to run automatically. That means you’re getting some free content this week that’s usually locked inside ADOTAT+.

First up: The Problem We Don’t Want to Admit: DSPs Aren’t the Only Brains in the Room Anymore.

For years, DSPs were the command centers of digital advertising — the dashboards where all the decisions got made, the pipes that stitched together fragmented supply, and the engines that made programmatic scale. They still matter, but the real intelligence is moving upstream.

More and more, contextual filters, curated marketplaces, and agentic AI are making the tough calls before the DSP even wakes up. Instead of every decision happening at bid-time, strategy is shifting to layers above the DSP — where inventory is filtered, meaning is parsed, and context is judged in real time.

DSPs remain the execution layer, but the center of gravity is moving fast. The real brains of the operation — the ones deciding what’s valuable, brand-safe, or contextually relevant — now sit outside the platform.

That shift may take two years… or it may hit by next summer. Either way, when it does, the industry’s playbook will look very different.

It wasn’t supposed to end like this.

Demand-side platforms were once the power brokers of digital advertising — the command centers where advertisers launched campaigns, flexed data muscle, optimized every penny, and measured every click like they were tracking moon landings.

They were the future.

Now? They’re fighting over scraps, selling the same inventory with different labels, and praying no one notices the illusion of differentiation has worn thin.

This isn’t just another tale of budget shifts or industry consolidation. It’s a structural reckoning — and it’s coming for both the titans and the tagalongs.

Here’s the awkward truth: Viant and The Trade Desk (TTD) are, in one crucial way, functionally indistinguishable — they both access the exact same inventory.

Dig through seller.json files, ads.txt lists, or inventory audits and you’ll see it: 90 to 97 percent overlap. Not “some,” not “most” — nearly everything.

They’re both pulling from the same SSPs, the same streaming platforms, the same apps, the same video placements. Buy through Viant, and your ad might take a scenic route straight back through TTD anyway.

It’s the media-buying equivalent of flying coach but changing planes five times just to arrive at the same gate.

There’s no exclusivity. No secret supply pool. No magical targeting tier. Just two logos taped to the same faucet, each charging a “service fee” for the same stream of impressions.

Good question. People are finally starting to ask it out loud.

Viant’s business model is essentially a smaller, louder echo of TTD’s — without the same scale, polish, or UI finesse.

They know how to make agencies feel like VIPs — the kind of treatment where the conversation flows as easily as the champagne. Yachts in Cannes. Rooftop dinners in New York.

Carefully curated experiences that turn “let’s talk business” into “let’s keep talking.”

Call it relationship-building.

Call it brand immersion.

Whatever the label, Viant plays that game better than almost anyone.

Let’s not pretend TTD is strutting around like it’s bulletproof. After 33 straight quarters of growth, Q4 2024 brought a revenue miss—officially blamed on its Kokai UI overhaul. Internally, they’re calling it a “blip.” Externally, it felt like a tremor.

Agencies are tired of the fixed 20% take rate—especially as rivals undercut pricing in the CTV arms race. The complexity that once made TTD feel sophisticated is starting to look bloated. And with Disney, Netflix, and Roku offering direct, simple, high-performing platforms, TTD’s scaled programmatic pitch is increasingly met with a shrug… and a spreadsheet that doesn’t add up.

Feature Comparison: Disney Direct vs. DSPs

Disney doesn’t just win because it owns the content. It wins because it makes buying easy, fast, and transparent. Buyers aren’t chasing “audience extension” layers anymore—they want campaigns that launch today and work tomorrow.

Here’s the big shift: marketers are moving budgets toward platforms that control both content and distribution. Every dollar that leaves TTD or Viant for Disney’s DRAX, Roku’s OneView, or YouTube’s self-serve isn’t coming back to the open programmatic market.

The pie is shrinking. And the platforms that bake their own pies? They’re done selling slices.

That leaves the remaining DSPs fighting over the same pool of duplicative inventory—with thinner margins and more desperation than ever.

Even if TTD and Viant were wildly different—and they’re not—the DSP model has a built-in flaw: negative working capital.

That’s a free loan to the industry every month. Slow down payments, and the whole machine seizes.

And here’s the part no one wants to print on the investor deck: both The Trade Desk and Viant have been late paying bills this year.

This isn’t theory. It’s déjà vu. MediaMath collapsed in 2023 owing $125M to 200+ partners. Xandr quietly exited. Even cash-rich TTD isn’t immune when CTV margins are compressing and the ecosystem is allergic to fees.

That “stable” tag for Viant comes with a massive asterisk. Stability isn’t strength. A tugboat might outlast a speedboat if neither of them has a captain—but it’s still drifting.

If you’re a publisher or SSP, you’re already hedging bets—tightening payment terms, pushing direct deals, and eyeing retail media networks. If you’re a buyer, you’re asking why you’re paying platform fees for inventory you can get cheaper and cleaner elsewhere.

And if you’re running a DSP?
You’re either reinventing your business… or writing your exit deck.

Viant might survive longer by being small, fast, and scrappy. But without exclusive inventory, true tech innovation, or unshakable brand loyalty, they’ll remain TTD’s little cousin—chasing the same clients, with the same pitch, for the same inventory.

Only one of them can afford to stand still. And standing still right now is a death sentence.

The dream of programmatic was simplicity through automation. Instead, most brands ended up buried under a mountain of DSP logins, bloated contracts, and dashboards that require certification-level training just to adjust a budget line. But here’s the twist: many of them don’t need any of it anymore.

We’re not in the era of one DSP to rule them all.

We’re in the era of no DSP at all—at least for some.

With the rise of curated marketplaces, intelligent agents, and direct SSP integrations, the modern programmatic stack is no longer centered on the demand-side platform.

There was a time when using multiple DSPs promised broader reach, platform redundancy, and flexibility. That time is over. Today, it often means you’re just outbidding yourself for the same impressions.

And yet, many brands still insist on multi-DSP setups—for reasons that usually benefit everyone but the advertiser.

Google’s DV360 remains the default DSP for many enterprise marketers—not because it’s the best, but because it’s the safest bet for their jobs.

Inertia wins—even when better solutions are available.

There’s a reason this persists, and it’s not performance.

For most marketers, the ROI of a multi-DSP setup just doesn’t pencil out.

The new wave of buyers—those optimizing for outcomes, not platforms—are ditching complexity in favor of modular, intelligent setups.

Result? A leaner stack: One DSP (if that), one curation partner, one direct SSP relationship. That’s it. The rest is bloat.

The once-clear lines between DSPs and SSPs have fully blurred. Everyone’s building tools for “both sides,” and it’s no longer clear who works for whom.

This convergence creates the illusion of simplicity, but often just leads to more fee layers and less transparency.

It’s the obvious question. If a holding company wants full control, why not own the pipes?

Short answer: they can’t—or won’t.

Take Horizon Media. They’ve done more than most, plugging their proprietary identity solution (blu.ID) directly into OpenX, bypassing traditional data onboarding and achieving faster match rates, better transparency, and fewer hops. It’s cleaner, faster, and smarter.

And yet—they still route final activation through The Trade Desk or another DSP???

Why?

Horizon, for example, achieves near-DSP levels of automation, but they remain buyers, not infrastructure providers. Their AI and automation layers run on top of DSPs, not instead of them. Even with blu.ID, their teams still log in, QA campaigns, and troubleshoot outcomes manually—just with more speed and accuracy than the old model allowed.

If your team is still spending more time logging in than optimizing outcomes, the problem isn’t the DSP—it’s the fact that you’re still using five of them.

I’m not here to pretend I’ve got this all figured out. I don’t.

Half the time, this industry feels like a magic trick where I’m still not sure if I’m in on it or the one being sawed in half.

But you pay me to think about this stuff, so here’s what I’ve been piecing together:
AI isn’t just sitting politely in the ad stack anymore — it’s pulling it apart.

Not with some flashy sledgehammer moment, but with a swarm of tireless, slightly smug little agents who never ask for a coffee budget and never “circle back” on Slack.

Brian O’Kelley — yes, the guy who basically helped build the modern programmatic stack has been my guide… and he says the whole thing’s been running like a teenager who never turns the lights off. “This is an entire industry that’s effectively leaving the lights on,” he told AdExchanger.

And he’s not wrong — millions of servers and data centers, churning away, serving ads to nobody.

The Franken-stack we duct-taped together over the last decade? It’s being eaten alive — one function, one decision, one platform at a time.

For years, our “stack” was a DIY disaster:

It was bloated, brittle, and overpaid — yet somehow underperforming.
Now? AI agents are dismantling it piece by piece, like a raccoon tearing apart a leftover sandwich.

And O’Kelley’s not anti-programmatic — far from it. “No one could accuse me of being anti-programmatic,” he’s said. “I just think there’s so much opportunity out there to create value for this entire ecosystem.”

That’s the part most people miss: this isn’t about killing programmatic. It’s about fixing what it’s become.

Let’s be honest: “inventory curation” used to be bulk shopping in digital drag.
You’d throw everything in the cart and hope the math worked out.

Now?

And the real flex?
They can actually show you why an impression was bought, how it’s performing, and where it connects to KPIs. Try getting that from your old agency without a three-week wait and a 47-slide PDF.

When people hear “automation,” they think: set bids, rotate creatives, pace budgets.
That’s baby stuff.

Agent orchestration is different:

As O’Kelley put it: “Agents, in general, are AI systems that can operate somewhat or fully autonomously… tirelessly optimize, find audiences, and do all the things we think of as the power of programmatic — but with much higher leverage on the amount of time and energy we spend managing them.”

And here’s the kicker: “We can do much more interesting and rich agentic algorithms if we operate inside Index Marketplaces.” Translation? The real magic isn’t just the agents — it’s where and how they run.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Most of what DSPs and SSPs did was middleman work with better branding.

Now…

We’re not headed for a future with “more AI.”
We’re headed for a future with fewer platforms and smarter orchestration.

The winners won’t be the ones with the most acronyms. They’ll be the ones owning or integrating with agent networks that think, adapt, and optimize in real time.

The stack is flattening. The pipes are getting smarter.
And the boxes labeled DSP and SSP?
They’re starting to look like antiques.

This isn’t the death of adtech. It’s the professionalization of it.

And yes — your DSP is being replaced by a swarm of very polite, very fast, very tireless robots.