Are your ad dollars reaching the audiences you think they are? 

Research from The Trade Desk shows that the answer might not be what many advertisers think it is. The company’s 2024 Open Internet Report reveals that while 81% of all Canadian digital ad spend stays within the walled gardens – a small group of tech giants who not only own their content and the media but also have full control over how technology is used to target and measure ads – only 46% of consumer time is spent there. 

Contrast that with the open internet, which attracts 19% of ad dollars, despite research showing that consumers spend 54% of their time there. It’s also accessible to everyone, operates independently and control is shared by the participating partners, offering a vast amount of choice for both brands and consumers.

It’s part of the reason why The Trade Desk has spent the last few months working on a comprehensive overhaul of its media-buying platform. The new offering, called Kokai, offers an easier-to-navigate user experience that “puts a lot of the power in the hands of those building and monitoring the campaigns,” explains Bob Cornwall, General Manager of Client Services for The Trade Desk. 

Bob Cornwall, Canada GM of client services, The Trade Desk speaking at Forward ’24 about the recently launched Kokai platform.

“From a media standpoint, the privacy landscape that we operate in Canada is changing rapidly,” says Cornwall. “So we were thinking ‘What does a really good platform solution look like for advertisers who want to reach their audiences in the places where they are spending the majority of their time?”

“We’ve built Kokai, in part, to make sure that we are constantly staying ahead of all of the privacy and regulatory needs for advertiser clients as well as our inventory partners in Canada. It’s also about giving advertisers access to the data and tools they need to reach their audiences across the premium internet like in CTV or audio.” 

At the heart of Kokai is the concept of “seeds,” or high-quality data points and audience segments that serve as the foundation for campaign targeting and optimization. Seeds come from a brand’s first-party data – CRM databases, site pixels, app data or even contextual and third-party data – and they allow advertisers to define their target audience with more precision to create campaigns that are highly-tailored to consumer behaviours and preferences.

By initiating every campaign with a seed, Kokai helps ensure that advertising strategies are grounded in robust data insights, which can lead to more relevant and effective advertising. “That’s what our Kokai launch is all about,” Cornwall explains. “It’s more transparent, open, and accessible to everybody and the control is shared among the participating players, [giving them] more control over designing what the future of their business looks like.”

Headquartered in California with a hub in Toronto, The Trade Desk offers a self-serve, cloud-based platform that ad buyers can use to create, manage and optimize omnichannel programmatic campaigns. Integrations with major data, inventory and publisher partners, meanwhile, aim to ensure maximum reach and decisioning capabilities, while enterprise APIs enable easier custom development on top of the platform. 

And the offering continues to grow. In the last year alone, The Trade Desk has added a new roster of premium media partners, including Netflix, Roku and Paramount+. Further, the CBC, which has exclusive Canadian broadcast rights to the 2024 Paris Olympics Games, is partnering with The Trade Desk and will offer, for the first time, its Olympics inventory for programmatic decisioned buying.

Those deals signal a changing of the guard, Cornwall notes. 

“We’re starting to see that streamers who weren’t historically ad-supported are really opening up and wanting to create an ad-supported solution. Their inventory is being made available through our platform and advertisers will be able to access it in a fair and agnostic way,” he says.

“You’re going to see a lot more players come into the open internet,” he adds, “folks that haven’t historically been there but want to be participating, both from an advertiser and a publisher standpoint, as well as from a consumer time standpoint. You’re going to see a lot more activity happening.”