The growing shift in spending from linear to connected TV resulted in another quarter of major gains at The Trade Desk.
Revenue grew by 21% year-over-year. In a call with investors, founder and CEO Jeff Green said the company was able to outperform other ad-reliant digital companies because of its platform’s relevance to advertisers today.
“Even as most brands and advertisers continue to deal with some level of uncertainty, they are increasingly shifting more of their campaign dollars to decisioned, data-driven opportunities where they can have more confidence that those dollars are working as hard as possible,” he said.
Green said that connected TV, in particular, would continue to be the company’s largest area of growth for some time.
During the call with investors, Blake Grayson, chief financial officer at The Trade Desk, said that while the company had growth across channels, the shift of linear TV spending to connected TV was a major driver of the company’s business. He added that video – which includes connected TV and other video channels – now represents “a mid-40s percentage share” of the company’s revenue, and continues to grow rapidly. Mobile is in the mid-30s percentage range, with display in the low-double digits and audio at roughly 5%.
Green also said that UID2, the company’s post-cookie measurement and targeting option, continued to see widespread adoption: the company has already reached its goal of having 75% of the third-party data ecosystem activating on UID2.
But another area of focus at the company is OpenPath, a recently launched offering that allows for ad buying directly from publishers, sidestepping both SSPs and Google’s Open Bidding.
Green reiterated the company’s position that this was not an effort to enter the supply side of the business, but rather an effort to bring more transparency to the programmatic ecosystem, improve publisher revenues and address other issues that have arisen due to “Google’s dominance of the supply side, and the draconian measures they’ve taken.” Green said that “thousands of media properties across CTV, mobile and display” have either integrated or are in the process of onboarding OpenPath, and it has seen advertisers prioritize direct channels when they are given a clear image of the value provided.