It’s one thing to have data. It’s another entirely to optimize it across the media landscape. That’s where partners like The Trade Desk (TTD) come in.
TTD is a digital advertising trailblazer. Through its self-serve, cloud-based platform, ad buyers can create, manage and optimize omnichannel programmatic campaigns. Integrations with data, inventory and publisher partners ensure maximum reach and decisioning capabilities, while enterprise APIs enable custom development on top of the platform.
It’s been a busy year for TTD as it launched a new media buying platform, upgraded the power of its AI tool, Koa, and added measurement and partner integrations. This follows Galileo, launched at the beginning of 2023, enabling advertisers to onboard and activate first-party data – in addition to growing its OpenPath partnerships, a proprietary product designed to provide advertisers with direct access to premium digital inventory.
The company also announced new and expanded partnerships, including Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform and pumping up the company’s certified service partner program with Ventura Growth.
Christos Nikitopolous, Canada GM, The Trade Desk speaking at Forward ’23 on the future of TV in Canada
Here in Canada, the company has added experts from some of the biggest digital media companies in the world. Most notable was general manager of business development, Christos Nikitopoulos, who joined from Google. TTD also welcomed two senior directors of business development – Jennifer Fields from Yahoo, and Erwin Joaquin from TikTok – and new director of data partnerships, Joshua Nathan, arrived from Bell.
Joshua Nathan, director, data partnerships, The Trade Desk.
“There’s been a recognition that Canada is an innovation and tech hub,” says Nikitopoulos. “Our data partnerships have grown exponentially. The past twelve months have seen a huge lift for our customers, our platform and to the market. We’ve been deliberate and purposeful in how we partner with the ecosystem.”
All that change is really reflective of the seismic shifts that have been happening in the market.
As digital was growing into a powerful marketing tool in the mid 2010s, there was tension between traditional and ‘new’ media. A common complaint from digital was that traditional media was simply tweaking last year’s plan and over-using the ‘save as’ feature in Excel to create the new plan.
Connected TV (CTV) and broadcasters now have the ability to target and match audiences like never before. The open internet and its emerging channels offer quality, reach and audiences that weren’t available a few years ago. Identity solutions like Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) allow for precision and interoperability, providing an accurate and holistic view of consumers and working media.
“The quality of data through partners like Environics, Moneris and others provide unparalleled outcomes driving higher ROI,” says Nikitopoulos. “With TTD service teams and engineers having a singular focus, clients consistently describe our platform and service as best in class. Those that stick to doing what’s ‘easy’ may be missing out on better outcomes for their brands and experiences for their customers.”
He says the fundamentals haven’t changed: It’s about reaching the right person at the right time with the right message. What has changed is the ability to reach an audience in a more precise way that delivers better ROI on programmatic campaigns.
The convergence of TV and digital advertising offers a transformative pathway forward, he notes. Embracing a “better together” narrative allows users to harness the collective potential of both communities and drive progress for marketers and publishers providing improved addressability. Nikitopoulos suggests the industry start thinking about CTV more strategically – as a driver of business outcomes that can reach all parts of the funnel.
He points to one client that TTD recently worked with in the home renovation space. It was primarily focused on programmatic guarantee buys, but was struggling with suboptimal reach, and frequency that was too high. Working together, they tested decision media campaigns to run alongside their existing programmatic guarantee buys.
“They really took advantage of Koa using things like predictive clearing, predictive analysis, taking historical prices and win rates to optimize the bid.” Says Nikitopoulos, “We saw that decision media allowed them to reach 330% more unique households. Frequency was about 73% lower and had a 62% lower average cost per unique household. Now all their campaigns are running through decision media.”
TTD recently worked with a CPG brand to help it embrace the power of dynamic creative optimization. The goal of the campaign was: optimize creative messaging based on the target audience and maximize viewable impressions. The brand leveraged The Trade Desk Categories to craft a media strategy engaging consumers in a personalized and relevant manner. Dynamically optimizing creative elements in real-time combined with targeting audience segments created impactful campaigns that resonated with its diverse customer base. The brand effectively connected with its target along with layering TTD proprietary category targeting without impacting scale. They saw 31% higher completion rates vs. benchmark and a 22% lower CTV CPM vs. goal.
Nikitopoulos says the way to approach this new world is to test and learn, lean on value, and take that first step forward. “It’s easy to rely on historical metrics or to copy and paste last year’s format. Those who dare to be bold will win.”
