‘We just did the math’: The new baseline for ad tech transparency 

The open internet didn’t grow opaque because of a single bad actor or decision. Marketers chased cheap scale, and the ecosystem expanded around that demand. New intermediaries, auction layers and resellers piled on, creating complexity that no one fully intended. Even earnest transparency pushes on the demand side were diluted as the sell side sprawled into a maze of MFA inventory and supply routes no one could reliably audit. 

That blend of incentives and structural sprawl is now showing cracks. The strain was evident at this week’s Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in New Orleans, where agency execs said the industry is shifting back toward a renewed transparency push driven as much by day-to-day operational pressure as by principle. 

And the problems aren’t confined to a single link in the chain. 

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