The Trade Desk is phasing in the latest iteration of its programmatic buying platform. The new platform called Kokai, which means ‘open for business’ in Japanese, distributes AI learning algorithms across all aspects of the digital media buying process. It also incorporates advanced measurement, partner integration and intuitive user experiences.

The previous version of the platform, launched in 2018, also used AI called Koa. It helped marketers set up campaigns based on business objectives and was optimized on performance while Kokai distributes the power of AI across the platform. This includes predictive clearing, ensuring bids are made at the optimal level and scores every ad impression based on relevance to the advertiser.

Josh Nathan, The Trade Desk’s senior director of data partnerships, says the guiding notion of the new platform is an audience-first approach to media buying. “One of the goals of making that come to life is just giving our customers and marketers the ability to meet their business goals in more relevant ways. One of the drivers of that is to enable them to leverage their first-party data as seen on the platform so they’re very interconnected.”

Nathan says what Kokai does that the previous platform didn’t is to organize programmatic capabilities in a more relevant and visual way. This makes discovery of different capabilities more accessible for those with little experience in programmatic buying.

Other innovations built into Kokai include added value retail measurement data from retailers when audience data is turned on. The Retail Sales Index is a new benchmark for measuring online as well as offline retail sales against retail ad spend. In addition, a new TV Quality Index measures the quality of the viewer’s ad experience across streaming platforms while the Quality Reach Index helps marketers target the most relevant customer profiles.

A key part of the Kokai platform are Seeds, which aid in targeting specific audiences. A Seed represents a segment of a marketers most valuable customers, with the characteristics and behaviours of the audience they want to target.

There are a few ways advertisers can create a Seed. If clients have their own CRM data, such as purchase data from relationships with customers that they’re storing in their own data warehouses, they can take that as a segment and push it over into The Trade Desk. “We have a bunch of partners that help facilitate that,” Nathan  says. “A brand that doesn’t have a lot of first-party data or all the customer connections they would like to have, can leverage third-party data partners who do have good data that can be used as a Seed.”

Nathan adds that cookie deprecation aside, there are media channels such as connected TV where cookies have never worked. “The way that we see this evolving into the future is on the first-party data side, when marketers have their own CRM data. We see more and more clients in preparation for cookie deprecation bringing across their first-party data in the form of UID 2.0. The second component is our third-party data marketplace with 200-plus data partners. When we think about future proofing, audience targeting through to execution, we’re at a very kind of mature stage now on the deployment of UID 2.0 as a kind of future forward approach to thinking about audience solutions.”