Arbitrage
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
Legal, common, and the reason 'transparent' is a loaded word in this industry. The test is simple: can you see what the media cost, separately from what you were charged? AdBuyMCP's fee engine is built with no spread — one ledger entry per delivery row carrying that row's date, campaign, channel, spend and fee — and the terms commit to media passed through at cost with no undisclosed margin or rebate. Being precise about the status of that commitment: it is contractual and architectural, not yet demonstrated, because no rail has ever spent and therefore no invoice has ever been reconciled against it.
What this one connects to
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
Take rate
The share of an advertiser's media budget retained by the platform rather than spent on media, whether that share is disclosed or embedded in the price. The word is neutral about disclosure, which is why the useful question is the figure rather than the policy.
Ad tech tax
The cumulative share of an advertiser's budget taken by the intermediaries between advertiser and publisher — demand platform, exchange, supply platform, data vendors, verification — none of which individually looks large.
Working media
The portion of an advertising budget that actually buys advertising, as opposed to the portion consumed by platform fees, data costs, agency fees, ad serving and production. Usually expressed as a percentage of total spend.
More on buying and commercials
How media is transacted and where the money goes. The terms in this group are the ones a fee conversation turns on.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. You describe one audience and watch it compile into seven targeting specifications, each with the score for how much of the definition survived.
Talk it through