By Seb Joseph  •  September 10, 2025  •

Ivy Liu

“I think they’re willing to look at SSPs this way is, quite frankly, ignorant,” said Casale. 

Wondering why semantics has Casale fired up? Here’s the rundown: 

When The Trade Desk reclassified SSPs as “resellers” several weeks ago, it wasn’t just a semantic shift — it was a signal. Under its media buying platform Kokai, those resellers are scored as less efficient, meaning they’ll see fewer ad dollars. Instead. The Trade Desk is rerouting more of those dollars through its own curated version of the open market of programmatic auctions and direct publisher deals. 

“The narrative that cutting out an SSP is somehow inherently more efficient is ignorant,” said Casale. 

From The Trade Desk’s point of view, the shift is about cutting out waste. The company has long argued that too many vendors in the supp;y chain were extracting value without delivering it — particularly those who sit further from the publisher and act more like pass-through intermediaries than true SSPs. 

Casale agrees — up to a point. 

“There is some truth to the characterization — that in certain aspects of the supply chain — there are a lot of companies that purport to be an SSP when they’re actually taking more than the value they create,” Casale. “Often, these companies are at a distance from the publisher so you should frame them correctly as a reseller.”

But the problem, he continued, is in applying that framing universally. That, he said, is what misses the mark — and what has other SSPs quietly bristling too. 

“That cohort doesn’t speak universally for the category,” continued Casale. 

In other words, not all SSPs are created equal. Some have direct contracts with publishers. Some serve as real extensions of those businesses. And many of those companies now feel they’re being penalized for the inefficiencies of others. It’s a familiar tension in programmatic: one company’s reform is another’s overreach. The Trade Desk may be trying to clean up the supply chain but in doing so it’s also redrawing the lines of power. 

“The only part of this market that gets to decide whether or not a vendor is a reseller is the customer,” said Casale. “If you ask the media owner what their relationship is to Index Exchange or even say Magnite then I don’t think they would agree that we’re resellers.”

As much as ad execs share Casale’s frustrations, many — begrudgingly — also understand where The Trade Desk is coming from. At the end of the day, its job is to optimize spend based on what it believes delivers the most value to advertisers. And more often than not, that means routing dollars through its own curated supply paths. 

Will Doherty, svp of inventory development at The Trade Desk, stressed that point to Digiday last month — and not for the first time. The Trade Desk has long warned SSPs against pushing questionable inventory into the bidstream. It’s raised the issue repeatedly — privately and publicly — and feels those warnings went largely ignored. 

“The line between SSPs and DSPs is blurring. With The Trade Desk’s OpenPath, Magnite’s ClearLine, and PubMatic’s Activate, the move to full-stack is underway,” said Jeff Hirsch, CEO of boutique consulting firm Executive Guru. ”Ultimately, acronyms define categories, not companies — the players that survive will be those that deliver real value, not just resell traffic. The interesting thing is that much of this may not matter much longer as agentic platforms create the means for supply and demand to directly work together.”

The Trade Desk did not comment in response to this article.