At the same time, the platform is almost certainly feeling squeezed by increasing consolidation in the digital ad industry—a shrinking divide that’s pitting demand-side and supply-side platforms against one another while forcing them to continue working as partners.
Taken together, investors have cooled on The Trade Desk.
Nonetheless, The Trade Desk has enjoyed a few bright spots of late, including an expanded retail and commerce media push bolstered by a new partnership with agency holding company Dentsu and integrations with Booking.com, Priceline, Marriott, and United Airlines. The company has also recently doubled down on its connected TV efforts, making Netflix inventory available in its Sellers & Publishers 500+ marketplace in its Kokai platform, and allowing advertisers to buy home screen ads on Samsung smart TVs.
Meanwhile, the company is investing more resources in AI-focused ad innovation. It is testing AI campaign creation with Anthropic’s Claude and is piloting autonomous workflows with Stagwell via its Koa agents. It is also an early backer of novel industry-wide efforts to standardize agent-to-agent media transactions.
