What Does ‘True Transparency’ Even Mean? And Who Is It Actually For?

Neutrality in Advertising: Myth, Mess, or a Missing Layer?

I’ve spent two decades watching money slosh around the advertising ecosystem like an unsteady pint in a tilted glass. Every splash is marketed as “transparency,” yet the weight always seems to settle on one side. Usually, the side that built the pint glass in the first place.

Buy-side platforms, sell-side servers, demand-side optimisers, supply-side gatekeepers: all promise fairness, all champion efficiency, yet each one subtly tilts the flow in favour of its own commercial interests. The result? A trillion-dollar industry still unable to agree on who gets the bill.

AdTech’s founding myth is simple: someone has to win.

If you build for agencies, you shave microseconds off bidding to favour the buyer.

If you build for publishers, you inflate floor prices to favour the seller.

Both sides wave the flag of “transparency,” but the flag is stitched from their own colours. The buyer wants to know the seller’s reserve; the seller wants to know the buyer’s ceiling. Each demands visibility into the other’s hand while palming their own cards. And the technology, obedient to its master, obliges.

The result is two parallel universes of data:

• The DSP shows “estimated clearing price.”

• The SSP shows “average revenue after take-rate.”

Neither number is false, exactly. Both are carefully curated fictions. The buyer celebrates a 22% cost reduction; the publisher mourns an 18% yield collapse. Same auction, different altars.

Transparency for Whom?

Ask any room of ad professionals what they want and the answer is immediate: transparency.

Ask the follow-up question: transparent for whom?, and the room splinters.

Agencies want line-item proof that no mystery fee swallowed their margin.

Publishers want assurance the bidder wasn’t a bot farm in disguise.

Platforms want validation that no one is gaming their black box.

And everyone demands a window, but each wants the window facing their own garden.

This isn’t a swipe at any one player. It’s a call for something cleaner: a truly agnostic curation layer that doesn’t take sides, doesn’t play favourites, and doesn’t make money by nudging the pint one way or the other.

And, I just might happen to know of one; a platform that serves a purpose, not a master.

Aardvark’s answer is radical in its simplicity: the window faces every garden at once. Every fee (ours, yours, theirs) appears in plain text before the transaction commits. No collapsed rows, no “estimated net,” no take-rate buried in a footnote.

You can see everything. You see it simultaneously, in the same pane, with the same font size. 

The economics remain yours to set; the visibility is ours to guarantee.

Designed with clarity. Built for true transparency.

The uncomfortable truth is this: most adtech businesses start with a master and then work backwards to justify its existence.

“How do we lock agencies into our UI?”

“How do we keep inventory exclusive?”

“How do we tilt the economics just enough to keep our side winning?”

Aardvark does the opposite. It started with a purpose - to orchestrate a fair exchange - and rejected any master that would compromise that principle.

Here’s what that actually means:

• We don’t optimise for the buyer’s CPI any more than we protect the seller’s CPM.

• We don’t nudge bids upward to inflate a percentage, nor throttle supply to guard yield.

• We expose the inputs, enforce the rules, collect a fixed toll, and step out of the way.

The transaction belongs to the humans on either side. Because when the curation layer - Aardvark - earns the same modest fee whether the CPM is $2 or $20, the temptation to tilt the pint evaporates. When every participant sees every fee in real time, the excuse of “I didn’t know” becomes about as trustworthy as a lie-detector test on the Jeremy Kyle Show.

A Future of Neutrality. Of, dare I say it, Kinship.

Imagine this: a moment, quiet, almost sacred, when a media buyer and a publisher both hover over the same dashboard and nod. No arm-twisting, no finger-pointing, no post-mortem reconciliation spreadsheet.

Just the clean click of mutual consent.

I have watched hardened trading desks tear up at that click. Four thousand lines of legacy mistrust evaporate in a single transparent frame.

That’s the pure magic of agnostic tech: it returns dignity to every participant. Everyone pays what they agreed, sees what they paid for, and walks away unmanipulated.

Our Modest Manifesto

We do not claim Aardvark will end every grievance in digital advertising. We’re not miracle workers. Greed is inventive, and humans are stubborn.

But we can end the embedded structural incentive for platforms to lie by omission.

Transparency is no longer a feature to be marketed; it is the reason our technology exists. Anything less is just another depressingly empty pint glass with a hidden crack.

In an industry addicted to choosing teams, neutrality feels revolutionary, and it shouldn’t. It should feel like buying a pint poured from a fresh barrel. That’s why @curate built Aardvark to sit in the middle and belong to no side. We are the Switzerland, if you like, of Adland.

The future of advertising is not buy-side, not sell-side. It is decide-side: every participant, fully informed, free to walk away or shake hands.

So why not start now.