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The CEO of The Trade Desk knows AI is in a hype cycle, but that’s where the company is going anyway.
“I don’t want it at all to be suggested that we’re in AI because it is trendy, because it is the flavor of the month. It is the most hyped technology of the last 10 years,” Jeff Green said during a company event in New York City yesterday.
Of course, it wouldn’t be ad tech without AI—like Google, Meta, and Amazon, The Trade Desk is injecting a bit more AI into its platform. The company has debuted Kokai, a platform that will use AI to help advertisers bid on inventory, optimize budgets, and improve measurement.
Green announced Kokai on CNBC earlier this week, calling it the “biggest upgrade we’ve ever done in our company history.”
Some background: Considered the industry’s largest independent demand-side platform, The Trade Desk is in a bit of an ideological tussle with walled gardens like Google and Meta, preaching the values of an open internet (according to this reporter’s transcription tool, “open internet” was said roughly 40 times on stage by Green).
Two days after Google was sued by the Department of Justice for allegedly operating an ad-tech monopoly, Green published an op-ed. “Nowhere should we be more concerned about the lack of competition, and Google’s seeming nonchalance about it, than the broader advertising market,” he wrote.
To that effect, The Trade Desk has also introduced the Partner Portal, which Green said is similar to Apple’s App Store in that it’ll attempt to make it easier for ad-tech companies to build on top of its platform. It’s something advertisers were asking for, he acknowledged.
“We’ve long held the largest and richest marketplace of the open internet in terms of data, in terms of retailers, in terms of verification and measurement partners. We’ve made it much easier for those companies to build to our technology and offer their data [and] their inventory,” Jed Dederick, The Trade Desk’s chief client officer, told Marketing Brew.
Identity takeoff: Green said the company anticipates that the majority of CTV impressions it sees will include its post-cookie identity solution, Unified ID 2.0, by Q2 of 2024. It also announced whatever this is.