Our Take
Neutrality is a red herring. In an opaque ad tech stack where 38 cents of every dollar vanishes in the middle, asking who owns the plumbing matters far less than demanding to see exactly how it works.
Why it matters
Marketers are spending billions through fragmented ad tech stacks that hide data flows, costs, and performance drivers. As AI automation deepens these dependencies, transparency becomes the only reliable measure of whether a vendor deserves trust.
Do this week
Procurement: audit your current ad tech stack and demand from each vendor a written description of how your first-party data flows through their system before renewal, so you can evaluate whether it strengthens your competitive advantage or someone else's.
The Publicis-LiveRamp deal resurfaces an old question
Publicis acquired LiveRamp for $2.2 billion last month, reigniting industry discussion about whether ad tech vendors can remain neutral when tied to holding companies with media and agency interests. The deal forced a familiar question: whose side is the technology on?
That framing is the problem. The industry has long treated "independence" as a proxy for fairness. If a company sat outside platforms, agencies, and media owners, it was assumed to operate as neutral infrastructure. But as advertising has become increasingly algorithmic and data-dependent, this assumption no longer holds.
Neutrality masks a deeper opacity problem
A neutral system can still be expensive and opaque. For every dollar spent in media, only 47 cents reaches actual working media, with 38 cents absorbed by ad tech machinery (per Cadent and Winterberry Group research). The remainder is lost to signal decay, upcharges, and black boxes at every handoff.
This layered stack was designed before AI automation required tight interdependency. Each hop between data, identity, activation, supply, measurement, and optimization creates signal loss. Neutrality does not address friction or inefficiency. It simply does not measure visibility.
In a transparent system, an advertiser should be able to trace where their data goes, how much each step costs, which vendor benefits from each decision, and whether their first-party data is sharpening their own competitive advantage or strengthening a broader ecosystem beyond their control. Neutrality cannot answer these questions.
Demand both performance and transparency
Marketers are often presented with a false choice: accept opacity in exchange for performance. Let the algorithm optimize. Trust the platform. Focus on outcomes. Skip the hard questions.
This trade-off is no longer acceptable. AI-driven advertising requires platforms to deliver both performance and visibility at the same time. A vendor's ownership structure is irrelevant if the technology is fully visible. A neutral vendor is irrelevant if the technology is opaque.
The industry does not need another round of neutrality pledges. Advertisers should push for a higher bar: platforms must show how data moves, how money flows, and how results are made. If a vendor cannot demonstrate this, it should not have access to your first-party data, regardless of its ownership or claimed independence.