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The Trade Desk Reframes Its Open Internet Vision As ‘The Premium Internet’
Source: AdExchanger
May 9th, 2024
Summary: The Trade Desk, the industry’s largest demand-side platform (DSP) is drawing a line in the sand between the garbage content that proliferates on the open web and the high-value, premium content that is monetized by The Trade Desk and other third-party ad tech. During its Q1 earnings call with investors (see results in the earnings sections below), The Trade Desk essentially rebranded the reputable side of the open web as ‘The Premium Internet’ while highlighting how walled gardens (like Google and Amazon) are major purveyors of spammy content and made-for-advertising (MFA) inventory, with too-high ad-to-content ratios and brand suitability issues.
Their story goes like this: the walled garden quality issue, fueled by cheap, low-quality sites that siphon ad revenue while providing near-zero value to readers or advertisers, is fueled by simplified attribution. When the walled gardens grade their own homework, the results are tilted in their favor without giving advertisers visibility into how their advertising campaigns contributed to their business goals or even where their ads appeared. Walled gardens still command the bulk of digital advertising spend due to their ability to reach consumers at mass scale and their (over)simplification of performance.
On its Q1 earnings call, The Trade Desk also scored a win for Unified ID 2.0, its cookieless identifier. LG Ad Solutions is integrating with UID2, allowing advertisers to use their own first-party data across LG's audience network to target viewers with relevant ads. The Trade Desk’s Q1 revenue was up 28% to $491M, beating estimates.
Opinion: The Trade Desk continues to deliver consistent growth, quarter after quarter, regardless of industry headwinds and macroeconomic challenges. And they’re doing it without having to partake in the dark arts of open web ad monetization. Incredible work, and a great example for the industry.
Here’s the rub: we can’t help but wonder about the side effects of their reframing of the open web between ‘The Premium Internet’ and ‘garbage content'. While it’s true that garbage content is generally a waste of time and money, it’s also true that when narratives about garbage content on the open web proliferate, spooked marketers retreat to what they know best: the walled gardens. They move their money from the open web to the owned and operated ad inventory of the walled gardens that ‘performs’ well without exposing their brands to perceived risk. They don’t necessarily move their money from open web ‘garbage’ to ‘The Premium Internet’. As the story usually goes in digital advertising, a noble cause leads to a perverse outcome. Open web publishers suffer and the walled gardens benefit.
So let’s just be careful here about the story we’re telling and who we’re taking to task…
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