Welcome to our Tweet of the Week, where we spotlight insightful, thought-provoking, and sometimes even weird tweets from the world of adtech. Every Monday, we’ll highlight the best tweet from the previous week—one that captures important trends, shares valuable data, or offers unique perspectives on the market.
This week’s Tweet of the Week goes to Joe Zappa, who raises a good question against the backdrop of an Omnicom + Interpublic world: What are the arguments “for and against holdcos buying DSPs, especially as AI accelerates and ‘the agency’ as a biz model is challenged by the AI agent?”
Great question. At first, we weren’t sure – but then adtech Twitter/X set us straight with no shortage of thoughtful responses. Here are a few of the best, though we encourage you to check out the entire thread:
That said, Ryan Verklin, Paid Media & Retail Media Senior Lead at Bayer, arguably had the most interesting response/responses. He outlines why it doesn’t make business sense for a holding company to acquire an adtech company, particularly a DSP:
Loss of Market Appeal: Once a DSP is acquired by a holding company, competing holdcos will avoid using it, shrinking its Total Addressable Market (TAM) from all programmatic advertisers to just the holding company’s clients.
Conflict of Interest: Ownership raises questions among clients about whether their media dollars are spent on the DSP due to its quality or simply because the holding company owns it and benefits financially.
Anyway, check out Joe’s tweet here and dive into his thread to explore more about agencies buying DSPs. We also found it both humorous and understandable that curation took over part of the thread. (PS, Speaking of, why not just buy an SSP, which would be cheaper than a DSP and has broad DSP connections?)
