All programmatic media will be bought by media agencies instead of specialist VivaKi

Publicis has become the first agency holding company to openly abandon the ubiquitous — and much-maligned — agency trading desk.

On Friday, Publicis told Advertising Age that its ad technology arm, VivaKi, no longer handles programmatic media buying on behalf of all Publicis clients. Instead, its trading operations have been broken up, and its 120 U.S. trading staff assigned to dedicated units at Publicis media agencies Starcom MediaVest and ZenithOptimedia.

VivaKi continues to operate, but as a technology development and support layer for the media group.

“If you’re a marketer, do you want your programmatic decisions siloed and balkanized from everything else that you’re doing? No. You want it integrated,” ‎CEO of Starcom MediaVest Laura Desmond told Ad Age.

Until recently, every major holding company has funneled all of its programmatic trading through a single specialized agency, usually called an agency trading desk. Omnicom handles all of its trading through Accuen, while IPG uses Cadreon and WPP uses Xaxis.

Over the years, marketers have accused agency trading desks of lacking transparency and of being a way for holdcos to deliberately conceal large margins on programmatic trading and media partnerships. There have also been concerns raised about brand conflicts, since trading desks merge operations and trading data across all agencies (and their possibly conflicting clients) within their holding companies.

Publicis’s move to dissolve its trading desk doesn’t come as a complete surprise, since it has been backing away from centralized trading for the past year. The restructuring reportedly began last summer, with the division of trading teams into audience-focused units. Its most well-publicized move came in June, when Starcom formed a dedicated in-house unit to buy programmatic video for Mondelez.

“Spreading its programmatic buying talent out of VivaKi and into its media agencies … is surely tantamount to saying that RTB is no longer a stand-alone speciality,” wrote Sean Hargrave in Media Post.

“With clients clearly taking to the new technology so quickly, it makes sense to have expertise within agencies rather than held within a specialist, separate unit.”