Paul Evans, founder and chief positioning engineer, V2RSION, looks at the opacity in ad tech, and why the battle for transparency is an uphill struggle…

As many of you will have read recently, an FTC complaint against Amazon showed – through evidenced internal communication – that the company acknowledged their approach to ad auction pricing had been a 'clever non-transparent way to charge first price' and that it had proved 'incredibly effective for driving revenue'. 

The FTC alleges Amazon's 'soft reserve price' functioned as an invented auction participant, manufacturing a higher number for advertisers to beat. By 2024, winning bidders were paying near their full bid price roughly 80% of the time in what was supposed to be a second-price auction. Of the 1.2 million advertisers affected, more than 500,000 were small and medium-sized businesses.

The Amazon news is clearly not a shock to the system. The industry's response has been typically benign: no outrage, but instead a collective shrug. Agency executives described it as 'business as usual.' Bad practice – deliberately concealed but occasionally revealed - has apparently become a normalised and inevitable thing over time.

A pattern of systemic bad practice

Let’s consider what has surfaced in just the past year alone. Amazon accused of extracting USD$20bn (£14.9bn) through concealed auction mechanics. Google found guilty of maintaining illegal ad exchange monopolies, manipulating auction advantages to let its own exchange win even when competitors submitted higher bids. The Trade Desk facing hidden-fee allegations from Publicis, WPP, Dentsu, and Omnicom. 

And a former WPP executive has claimed that client rebates were being illicitly retained through intermediary brokers – supported by a client (Sony Pictures) conducting its own investigation, which allegedly found that 80% discounts on media were funded by undisclosed 'black box' rebates.

The logical and reasoned conclusion from these surfaced examples - across walled gardens, the open web, ad tech intermediaries, and the agency layer - is that this industry is endemically flawed.

Danny Spears, the now-COO of Ozone - and someone I have long respected for their operating principles and values - wrote in ExchangeWire back in November 2018 that the ad tech supply chain suffered from 'opacity by design.' 

His argument was that buyers and sellers were unable to reconcile transactions ultimately because obfuscation had been engineered into the market deliberately. Reporting was fragmented by construction, transaction IDs stripped to prevent meaningful analysis, and the architecture ensured that investors could never determine what proportion of their spend converted into actual advertising. 

The milestone ISBA/PwC programmatic supply chain study confirmed this assertion in 2020, showing that 15% of advertiser spend vanished into an unattributable 'unknown delta,' with publishers receiving just 51% of gross spend. The ANA put programmatic waste at USD$26.8bn (£19.9bn) globally in 2025, up 34% in two years. None of this evidence is in dispute. So the question worth asking is not what keeps happening, but why it keeps happening - despite everyone knowing it does.

The commercial logic of looking away

Every participant in the supply chain profits from opacity. Platforms earn more when auction mechanics are hidden. Agency holding companies survive on undisclosed margins. Agencies, as Jay Friedman, formerly of Goodway Group, has argued, pitch on disclosed margins so thin that hidden fees become structurally necessary. Nobody in this chain has a commercial incentive to introduce full transparency, because doing so compresses their own margins.

Then consider who actually pays. Around half of Amazon's affected advertisers were SMEs – businesses least equipped to understand auction mechanics, least likely to demand log-level data, least able to fund independent audits. The same customer profile is likely to be true for the other walled garden platforms.

The ecosystem's customer base is overwhelmingly fragmented: a long tail of advertisers who lack the education, the leverage, and the commercial weight to demand anything at all. That knowledge and influence gap is disproportionately profitable.

Larger enterprise advertisers are better resourced, but often no better placed to change things. Marc Pritchard at P&G cut USD$200m (£148.4m) in digital ad spend in 2017, slashed programmatic by 90%, and declared that 'the days of giving digital a pass are over.' P&G's reach went up 10%. Growth was unaffected. Pritchard demanded full transparency, third-party verification, and auditable transactions by end of 2017. 

None of it materialised across the industry. P&G quietly increased its programmatic spend again that summer. The largest advertiser in the world proved that opacity was commercially unavailable, proved it could operate without it, and then went back to operating within it. 

Enterprise advertisers know the system is broken. They have the budgets to force structural change. They could vote with their wallets, but they choose not to because the switching costs of rebuilding and operating transparent planning and buying infrastructure feel larger than the known losses absorbed from opacity.

The future looks different, but it’s the same story

What comes next should concern the industry more than what has already surfaced. Buying is continuing to migrate to Performance Max, Advantage+, and Amazon's algorithmic bidding - auction mechanics that are not just opaque but structurally unknowable. The buyer's role is narrowing to setting a target outcome and trusting the platform to deliver it. Then we have agency HoldCo's moving to new 'outcome' based models underpinned by 'proprietary' media that is – yet again – undisclosed in provenance and value. 

Agentic AI will accelerate this further, with autonomous agents negotiating at speeds that make human oversight impossible – again by design. The industry is not solving its transparency problem. It is engineering the next iteration of it.

Opacity persists because it pays at every layer, for every participant. The only constituency that loses is the advertiser funding all of it, and they have shown a remarkable tolerance to support the status quo - as long as apparent performance and outcome metrics hold up. 

The question is no longer whether the industry will fix this. It's whether anyone with the power to do so actually wants to.