Indie agencies pay DSP penalties as AI agents reshape media buying

Independent agencies say they are paying steep financial penalties just to access demand-side platforms, despite spending enough ad dollars to expect direct relationships that would bypass reseller fees. That expectation has not materialized, according to indie agency executives speaking at Digiday's Programmatic Marketing Summit, set for Dec. 1–3 in Nashville.

At last year's summit, agencies dubbed The Trade Desk the "Spirit Airlines of the DSP world," a label that topped a long list of gripes small and mid-sized agencies hold against tech platforms. The core complaint: the promised path — spend enough, earn direct DSP access, cut out reseller fees — has not delivered in practice.

How much do indie agencies actually need DSPs?

Digiday executive editor for video and audio Tim Peterson framed the problem around traffic quality. More than 50% of traffic going to websites is now bot traffic, and bots do not look at display ads.

"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,'" Peterson said on the Digiday Podcast.

Senior marketing reporter Kimeko McCoy, who reported the story, said she questioned the same thing during her reporting: how much agencies actually need The Trade Desk when the open web is becoming a very different place from what it used to be.

The takeaway: for indie agencies, the walled gardens may now offer a cheaper, simpler route to spend than the open-web DSP stack.

Are AI agents taking over the buying?

Peterson pointed to Meta as an early example of agentic buying in practice, where advertisers can already use Claude or ChatGPT to manage Meta buys. An independent agency, he argued, may no longer need to work directly with The Trade Desk or Amazon DSP — it can work through Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot instead.

McCoy said comfort with this model is growing. She cited conversations with Scott Ensign at Butler/Till about the agency's media buying efforts 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," McCoy said.

The takeaway: negotiation is the first workflow to move to agents; placing the dollars themselves may follow close behind.

What happens when DSPs, SSPs and UAPs blur?

The traditional ad tech map is redrawing. Peterson noted DSPs are trying to be SSPs, while SSPs like Magnite, PubMatic and Index Exchange are working directly with the buy side — effectively trying to become DSPs. All of them are blurring into a unified ad platform in the middle. Add AI agents, and the question becomes how much any of these companies are needed at all.

McCoy said executives she spoke with are increasingly willing to test these platforms. On one hand, that forces agencies into what she called a "Frankenstein tech stack" of DSPs for immediate buying. On the other, if AI agents and unified ad platforms can handle the work, the calculus changes.

"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," McCoy said.

The takeaway: if a single agent plus one unified platform can replace a stitched-together stack, the DSP's middleman role loses its footing — and the penalties indie agencies pay to access it become harder to justify.