Why the Industry Needs to Stop Talking About Neutrality

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. 

In an AI-powered world, siloed solutions will be at a disadvantage.  Unified advertising will favor interdependent technology that enables core parts of the advertising process to work together with less friction. It requires advertisers to use modular pieces of a stack that connect cleanly and transparently. 

A more unified, transparent stack gives advertisers a clearer view of how the system works, as well as its costs. Data flows are easier to trace. Economics are easier to understand. More of each dollar reaches working media. And performance is judged by whether the business is actually growing, rather than by vanity media metrics that look good in a dashboard. 

With AI-driven advertising, marketers are choosing more than vendors. As first-party data and campaign learnings become a source of intelligence, they’re choosing where their data teaches the system—where it’s capable of sharpening their own competitive advantage, but also strengthening a broader ecosystem beyond their control. Every advertiser should understand that trade-off.

Performance and transparency

Too often, marketers are presented with a false choice: accept opacity in exchange for performance. Let the machine optimize. Trust the platform. Focus on outcomes. Don’t ask questions. 

All based on the false promise of neutrality and independence.

But in the future, platforms must deliver both performance and transparency at the same time. 

Neutrality matters less if transparency is the standard that determines who deserves trust. If a platform cannot show how data moves, how money flows, and how results are made, advertisers should keep pushing until the technology is fully visible.

The industry does not need another round of neutrality pledges. It needs a higher bar.