We may never know what Dentsu Aegis Network paid to acquire independent agency trading desk Accordant this week, but whatever the price was, its Tokyo-based parent Dentsu will likely need to depreciate a significant part of it because they have effectively lost one of Accordant’s key assets: independence. At least that was one of the core positions the Accordant team sold to differentiate themselves in the market versus the big agency holding companies they competed with, including Dentsu Aegis’ Amnet, which Accordant is being folded into.

Don’t get me wrong — Dentsu Aegis is acquiring strong technical, data and people assets. Over the years that I have been meeting with and trying to understand the culture of trading desks, I have come to believe that Accordant was truly best-in-class. But much of the reason for that was its independence. It was a main point that founder and CEO Art Muldoon made with me every chance he could from the moment they launched, to our initial conversations that led to Accordant’s quarterly market tracking reports, to our coverage of those reports over the years. Art’s contention was that Accordant’s visibility into the programmatic marketplace was better than others because it was independent and neutral.

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