What Is Markup in Advertising? The Fee Layer Behind the Principal Media Debate
· 35m ago · Originally reported by PPC Land
Markup is the amount an agency, trading desk or reseller adds on top of the cost of media or services it buys on a client's behalf. When these add-ons are not disclosed, they fuel the ongoing principal media controversy, where agencies re-sell inventory to advertisers as principals.
Why it matters
Understanding markup helps advertisers see where their budgets actually go and why undisclosed agency fees have become a major trust issue in media buying.
Explain it like I’m new here
It's like a reseller buying concert tickets at one price and charging you more without telling you how much extra they kept.
Terms in this story
Agency
An agency is a company that plans, buys, creates or manages advertising on behalf of advertisers, in exchange for fees, commissions or a margin on the media it buys.
Trading desk
A trading desk is a specialist team, usually inside an agency or advertiser, that plans and executes programmatic buying on DSPs on behalf of campaigns and clients.
Reseller
A reseller is a company authorised to sell a publisher's ad inventory through an ad system account that it controls, rather than the publisher's own account, and labelled RESELLER in ads.txt.
Principal-based buying
Principal-based buying is when an agency buys media for its own account and resells it to clients at a price it sets, instead of buying at cost as the client's agent.
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