The Trade Desk, Inc. (‘The Trade Desk’) offers a self-service, cloud-based ad-buying platform that empowers our clients to plan, manage, optimize and measure more expressive data-driven digital advertising campaigns.
The company’s platform allows clients to execute integrated campaigns across ad formats and channels, including connected television (‘CTV’), and other video, display, audio, and native, on a multitude of devices, such as televisions, streaming devices, mobile devices, computers, a...
The Trade Desk, Inc. (‘The Trade Desk’) offers a self-service, cloud-based ad-buying platform that empowers our clients to plan, manage, optimize and measure more expressive data-driven digital advertising campaigns.
The company’s platform allows clients to execute integrated campaigns across ad formats and channels, including connected television (‘CTV’), and other video, display, audio, and native, on a multitude of devices, such as televisions, streaming devices, mobile devices, computers, and digital-out-of-home devices. The company’s platform integrations with major inventory, publisher, and data partners provide ad buyers reach and decisioning capabilities, and the company’s enterprise application programming interfaces (‘APIs’) enable clients to customize and expand platform functionality.
The company’s clients are advertising agencies, advertisers, and other service providers for agencies or advertisers, with whom it enters into ongoing master services agreements (‘MSAs’). The company generates revenue by charging clients a platform fee generally based on a percentage of clients’ total platform spend, and from providing value-added services and data to support their advertising campaigns.
Digital Advertising Ecosystem
The digital advertising ecosystem is divided into buyers, sellers, and marketplaces.
The company empowers ad buyers by providing a self-service cloud-based ad-buying platform that enables them to plan, manage, optimize, and measure data-driven digital advertising campaigns. The company’s platform allows clients to execute integrated campaigns across various advertising channels and formats, including CTV, and other video, display, audio, and native, on a multitude of devices, including televisions, streaming devices, mobile devices, computers, and digital-out-of-home devices.
Platform
At the core of the company’s platform is its bid-factor-based architecture that allows users to define desirable factors, and the value associated with those factors.
The company’s platform is powerful and user-friendly:
Easy to Use, Open, and Customizable: The company’s platform includes easy-to-use tools and interfaces that help users focus on managing the key elements of their campaigns. The company’s platform also enables clients to integrate custom features and interfaces for their own use through its APIs.
Expressiveness: The company’s platform allows clients to easily define and manage advertising campaigns with multiple targeting parameters that could result in quadrillions of permutations, which it refers to as expressiveness.
Integrated, Omnichannel, and Cross Device: The company’s platform provides integrated access to a wide range of omnichannel inventory and data sources, as well as third-party services, such as ad servers, ad-verification services, and survey vendors. The platform’s integration of these sources and services enables clients to deploy their budgets through a wide variety of channels, device types, and formats, targeted in their desired manner, all through a single platform.
Some of the key features of the company’s platform are:
Auto Optimization: The company provides auto-optimization features that allow buyers to automate their campaigns and support them with computer-generated modeling and decision-making. In addition, by giving clients full reporting, budgeting, and bidding transparency.
Advanced Reporting and Analytics Tools: The company provides a comprehensive view of consumers’ interactions with the ads purchased through its platform, with robust reporting of performance insights across multiple variables, such as audience characteristics, ad format, site category, website, device, creative type, and geography. Better reporting results in better learning, enabling better campaign optimization and outcomes.
Data Management and Measurement Tools: The company’s platform enables clients to optimize campaigns with numerous highly relevant data sets, including from an extensive selection of third-party vendors, in a seamless and easy manner. The company also empowers clients with an extensive set of measurement capabilities, both through a number of proprietary benchmarking tools and indices, and through integrations with a broad selection of third-party measurement partners.
Artificial Intelligence: Koa, the company’s predictive algorithmic tool, utilizes artificial intelligence to process complex data sets and make recommendations for campaign optimizations. These recommendations help platform users make data-driven decisions without sacrificing control or transparency, and empower users to choose which optimizations make sense for their campaigns. Koa’s artificial intelligence capabilities are used across various aspects of the platform, including predictive clearing, ad impression relevance scoring, measurement and forecasting, budget optimization, and key performance indicator scoring.
Informed Media Planning: The company’s platform enables clients to use audience insights and strategic goals to help optimize campaign planning, with the ability to generate, analyze, and launch data-driven, programmatic media plans. The company’s tools analyze the actions of existing core audiences with the data it sees across the open Internet to deliver fully transparent, performance-focused, and ready-to-activate campaigns.
Private Marketplace Support: For clients who wish to transact directly with individual publishers, the company offers a comprehensive user interface for discovering and transacting via a wide variety of private contracts. Additionally, it offers a solution for advertisers to access publisher inventory via a direct tag in a publisher’s ad server where there is no other programmatic access to such publisher’s inventory.
The company’s platform enables advertisers and agencies to purchase digital media programmatically on various media exchanges and sell-side platforms, as well as directly from publishers; acquire and use third-party data to optimize and measure digital advertising campaigns; integrate and deploy their proprietary first-party data within the platform to optimize campaign efficacy; monitor and manage ongoing digital advertising campaigns on a real-time basis; link digital campaigns to offline sales results or other business objectives; access other services, such as the company’s data management platform and publisher management platform marketplace; and use the user interface and APIs to customize and expand platform functionality.
Technology
The core elements of the company’s technology are:
Scalable Architecture: The company’s platform infrastructure is hosted in data centers around the world. Its core bidding architecture is easily adaptable to a variety of inventory formats, allowing the platform to communicate with many different inventory sources.
Predictive Models: The company uses campaign data captured by its platform to build predictive models around user characteristics, such as demographic, purchase intent, or interest data. Data from the platform is continually fed back into these models, which enables them to improve over time as the use of the platform increases.
Performance Optimization: During campaign execution, the company’s optimization engine continually scores a variety of attributes of each impression, such as website, industry vertical, or geography, for their likelihood to achieve campaign performance goals. The bidding engine then shifts bids and budgets in real time to deliver optimal performance. Additionally, the platform enables clients to set multiple, simultaneous optimization goals for their advertising.
Real-time Analytics: The company’s platform continuously collects data regarding inventory availability. Real-time campaign delivery and spend totals are used to manage campaign budgets and goal caps, as well as campaign reporting. This data is fed back into the optimization engine to improve campaign performance and into machine-learning models for user demographic predictive modeling.
Growth Strategy
The key elements of the company’s long-term growth strategy include increasing its share of existing clients’ digital advertising spend; growing its client base; expanding its omnichannel capabilities; extending its reach in CTV; ensuring access to quality inventory; further enhancing identity solutions, including unified ID 2.0; continuing to innovate in technology, data, and measurement; and expanding its international presence.
Clients
The company’s clients consist of purchasers of programmatic advertising inventory, value-added services, and data. The clients are advertising agencies, advertisers, or groups within advertising agencies that have independent relationships with the company, manage budgets independently of one another, are based in different jurisdictions, and are served by unique Trade Desk teams. Many of these advertising agencies are owned by holding companies, where decision-making is decentralized such that purchasing decisions are made, and relationships with advertisers are located, at the agency, local branch, or division level.
The company’s clients typically enter into MSAs with it that give users constant access to its platform. The clients are loyal, as reflected by their client retention rate of over 95% in each of the last eleven years. In addition, the clients typically grow their use of the platform and related offerings over time.
Advertising Inventory and Data Suppliers
The company obtains digital advertising inventory from over 220 directly integrated ad exchanges, publishers, and supply-side platforms, providing it with access to a breadth of programmatic advertising inventory across televisions, streaming devices, mobile devices, computers, and digital-out-of-home devices.
Sales and Marketing
Given the company’s self-service business model, it focuses on supporting, advising, and training clients to use its platform independently as soon as they are ready to transact.
Once a new client has access to the platform, it works closely with the company’s client service teams, which onboard the new client and provide continuous support throughout the early campaigns.
To help train clients, suppliers, and other digital media participants, the company has created an e-learning program called The Trade Desk Edge Academy.
The company’s marketing efforts are focused on increasing awareness for its brand, executing thought-leadership initiatives, supporting its sales team, and generating new leads. It seeks to accomplish these objectives by presenting at industry conferences, hosting client conferences, publishing white papers and research, engaging in public relations activities, expanding its social media presence, and launching advertising campaigns.
Seasonality
Historically, the fourth quarter of the year (year ended December 31, 2024) reflects the company’s highest level of advertising activity, and the first quarter reflects the lowest level of such activity.
Competition
The company competes with other demand-side platform providers, some of which are smaller, privately held companies, and others are divisions of large, well-established companies, such as Google and Amazon.
Development of International Markets
The company has been increasing its focus on markets outside the United States to serve the global needs of its clients.
Regulation
The General Data Protection Regulation (‘EU GDPR’) and the United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protection Act 2018 (the ‘UK GDPR’) (the EU GDPR and UK GDPR are hereinafter referred to collectively as the GDPR), apply to the company.
History
The Trade Desk, Inc. was founded in 2009. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 2009.