Publicis’ $2.2 billion acquisition of LiveRamp last month reawakened an old industry debate about neutrality.
But I believe we’re having the wrong conversation.
While neutrality gives advertisers and agencies comfort that their tech partners are fair and open, it doesn’t provide insight into how their data is being used: how audiences are built, how identity is resolved, where data flowed, or whether their first-party data is strengthening their own advantage or someone else’s.
For years, the industry has treated independence as a shortcut for trust. If a company sat outside platforms, agencies, or media owners, it was assumed to operate as neutral infrastructure.
That logic made sense in a simpler market. But as advertising becomes increasingly algorithmic, data, identity, activation, supply, measurement, and optimization are interdependent. In that environment, neutrality becomes impossible to define.
In an AI-powered world, transparency is what actually matters. The industry should move from asking who owns the asset to asking who can clearly prove what the asset is doing.
The stack has too many hiding places
The current ad tech stack was built in layers. Together, they create a maze. Every handoff adds a tax. Every hop creates signal loss. Every partner makes it harder to understand where performance came from, where money went, and where data ended up.
Neutrality does not address this. Transparency does.
Recent research conducted by Cadent and Winterberry Group found that for every media dollar spent, 38 cents is absorbed by machinery in the middle, with just 47 cents going to actual working media.
The system should be getting more efficient. Instead, too much money is still disappearing between the advertiser and the publisher.
This is where neutrality becomes a distraction. A neutral system can still be expensive and opaque. It can still force marketers through too many steps, upcharges, and black boxes. Every hop introduces signal loss because the systems weren’t designed to work together.
