On the investor call, Green underscored strong customer relationships, specifically the joint business ventures the company operates with over 200 clients, which grew six times faster than the company’s overall revenue.
Green also teased a forthcoming upgrade to Kokai, its primary buying platform. Called Zuma, the version is designed to improve navigability across workflows and employs more automated features to help advertisers run campaigns. The Trade Desk sunset its controversial periodic table-inspired Kokai interface earlier this year.
The key quote
Addressing investors’ concerns about the long-term relevance of the DSP business in the AI era, Green said: “A DSP is a platform built to decide which of those [ad] impressions you buy and which you don’t, and of course, that is enhanced by AI….I wouldn’t say that the DSP model, if you will, is going to be disrupted by AI. It is AI.”
He added: “Agentic is one of the biggest opportunities that advertising will ever see. It is a huge opportunity for us. We are already seeing massive advantage from it. Some are using agentic to just build yesterday’s business model all over again, if you will. They’re building ad networks out of agentic-like technologies. That’s not going to work because it doesn’t leverage the very best of decisioning, which is what a DSP does.”
Separately, Green addressed The Trade Desk’s relationships with agencies following a public spat with Publicis.
“We built this business on our relationship with the agencies,” he said “They’ve been a phenomenal partner to us over the years. All of them have been critical to our success. They’re all in periods of transition right now, but overall, our partnership has been phenomenal with each of them, and that includes Publicis. They’ve been an important partner for us for over a decade. Of course, there were some public disputes about what was essentially a negotiation, but that’s behind us.”
