The Trade Desk

Last updated
The Trade Desk, Inc.
Company type Public
Industry
Founded2009;15 years ago (2009)
Founders
Headquarters Ventura, California, U.S.
Key people
  • Jeff Green (CEO)
  • Dave Pickles (CTO)
Products
  • Digital advertising
  • media buying
RevenueIncrease2.svg US$1.95 billion (2023)
Increase2.svg US$200 million (2023)
Increase2.svg US$179 million (2023)
Total assets Increase2.svg US$4.89 billion (2023)
Total equity Increase2.svg US$2.16 billion (2023)
Number of employees
3,115 (2023)
Website thetradedesk.com
Footnotes /references
[1]

The Trade Desk, Inc. (stylized as theTradeDesk) is an American multinational technology company that specializes in real-time programmatic marketing automation technologies, products, and services, designed to personalize digital content delivery to users.

Contents

The Trade Desk is headquartered in Ventura, California. It is the largest independent demand-side platform in the world, competing against DoubleClick by Google, Facebook Ads, and others. [2] [3] Unlike traditional marketing, programmatic marketing is operated by real-time, split-second decisions based on user identity, device information, and other data points. It enables highly personalized consumer experiences, and improves return-on-investment for companies and advertisers. [4] Demand-side platforms, like The Trade Desk, work with ad exchanges to deliver such tailored digital experiences.

The company continued to grow since its founding in 2009. As of 2021, it offers a self-service publishing platform for brands & advertisers, a data management platform for advanced analytics & segmentation, and enterprise APIs that enable advanced integrations. It has over 225 partners worldwide, and is responsible for delivering personalized content on Spotify and more. [5]

The Trade Desk has been recognized for its omni-channel approach to programmatic marketing automation, with strong data analytics capabilities, fast response-times, and support for various connected devices, online platforms, and media formats. It reported a 95% customer retention rate for 27 straight quarters in 2020, and an annual revenue of US$836 million in the same year. [6]

The firm currently employs around 3,100 people in 25 office locations worldwide. [1] [7] It was ranked among the 100 Best Medium Workplaces by Fortune in 2018, and have been continually named in the list since then. [8]

History

Early years

The Trade Desk was co-founded in 2009 by Jeff Green and David Pickles. [9] [10] They met at Microsoft after it had acquired Green's real-time digital advertising auction firm, AdECN, in 2007. [10] [11] By 2012, the company was included as an alpha partner in Facebook’s launch of the real-time bidding (RTB) advertising platform, Facebook Exchange. [12]

In 2015, The Trade Desk was named among the top 10 of America’s Most Promising Companies by Forbes . Founders Green and Pickles were also named as Ernst & Young Entrepreneurs of The Year 2015 in the Greater Los Angeles region. [12] [13]

Initial public offering

On September 21, 2016, The Trade Desk became a public company with an $18 offering price. The company's opening day was reported as a "vote of confidence for the demand-side platform, whose S1 filing revealed healthy financials: Triple digit revenue growth and profitability — rare in a sector that is seeing much of its growth chomped away by the duopoly Google and Facebook." [14] The company continued to experience tremendous growth, and reached a market cap of US$40 billion by 2021.

Post-IPO growth

In 2017, The Trade Desk integrated connected TV buying and measurement directly into its platform; [15] acquired marketing insights firm AdBrain; [16] and partnered with fraud prevention firm White Ops to block fraudulent ad traffic prior to purchase. [15] [17] The firm also improved transparency in programmatic buying by enabling buyers to see all selling or reselling parties to a bid request. [18]

In 2018, the firm began investing heavily into the Asia Pacific region with the launch of its programmatic ad buying platform in China, giving access to Chinese media companies, such as Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu Exchange Services. [19] [20] It also launched new AI tools: an AI forecasting engine named Koa, a new user interface, new tools for mapping strategies called The Trade Desk Planner, and a proprietary global user identity resolution tool called Unified ID. [21] [22]

In 2019, Amazon opened connected TV (CTV) Apps integrated with Amazon Publisher Services, enabling the purchase of ad inventory for third-party TV content provider The Trade Desk, through Amazon Fire TV devices. [23]

In September 2019, The Trade Desk launched an advertising campaign, "Media for Humankind", to position itself as a "more transparent digital advertising" [24] alternative to Google and Facebook. [25] [26]

In mid-2020, Unified ID 2.0 (UID 2.0) launched as a second iteration to leverage a post-cookie internet using encrypted email and phone number data to create a secure identity standard. [27] The identity resolution software was adopted by Disney [28] and Paramount, [29] as well as by major advertisers, including Procter & Gamble and Unilever. [30] In early 2022, The Trade Desk launched OpenPath, granting advertisers direct access to its premium digital advertising inventory. [31] Publishers using OpenPath include Conde Nast, Reuters and The Washington Post. [32]

The company has consistently been named to annual lists by, among others, Fortune magazine, [33] and was included with the Forbes Global 2000 in 2022. [34]

Financials

The Trade Desk raised $2.5 million of venture capital in March, 2010. Investors included venture capital firms Founder Collective and IA Ventures, and angel investors Jerry Neumann and Josh Stylman. [35]

The Trade Desk went public on September 21, 2016, [36] with an initial stock price of $18.00; its IPO closing market price gained to $30.10 per share. [37]

In 2017, revenue rose 52 percent to $308 million, [9] then rose to $477 million in 2018. [19] In 2019, third-quarter revenue was reported as $164 million, attributed to the growth of connected TV advertising. [38]

On June 17, 2021, the company completed its 10–1 stock split, with a trading price of $68. [39]

The Trade Desk finished 2022 with a record total spent on the platform of $7.8 billion, [40] and annual revenue of over $1.5 billion. [41]

See also

Related Research Articles

LiveRamp Holdings, Inc., is a San Francisco, California-based SaaS company that offers a data connectivity platform whose services include data onboarding, the transfer of offline data online for marketing purposes.

Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising that uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. Online advertising includes email marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, many types of display advertising, and mobile advertising. Advertisements are increasingly being delivered via automated software systems operating across multiple websites, media services and platforms, known as programmatic advertising.

Microsoft Advertising is an online advertising platform developed by Microsoft, where advertisers bid to display brief ads, service offers, product listings and videos to web users. It provides pay per click advertising on search engines Bing, Yahoo! and DuckDuckGo, as well as on other websites, mobile apps, and videos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Infillion</span> American digital advertising company

Infillion, formerly known as TrueX, Inc. and SocialVibe, is an American digital advertising company founded in 2007 by Joe Marchese, Brandon Mills and David Levy. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles and New York City. It was previously owned by 21st Century Fox, from 2014 until Disney's acquisition of 21st Century Fox in 2019, and The Walt Disney Company from 2019 until 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim Armstrong (executive)</span> American businessman

Timothy M. Armstrong is an American business executive. He was formerly the CEO of Oath Inc., then a subsidiary of Verizon Communications that served as the umbrella company of its digital content subdivisions, including AOL and Yahoo!. Previously, he was the CEO of AOL Inc. from 2009 until its purchase by Verizon in 2015.

A demand-side platform (DSP) is a concept that combines various software solutions for advertisers to automate the process of buying and selling ad impressions in real time.

Adform is a global digital media advertising technology company specializing in real-time programmatic marketing automation technologies. Its operations are headquartered in Europe. The company specialized in the creation of technology that helps digital advertisers, agencies, and publishers create, target, buy or sell, and display digital advertising across internet-connected device. The company claims to provide technologies for each stage of the digital advertising process.

InMobi is an Indian multinational technology company, based in Bangalore. Its mobile-first platform allows brands, developers and publishers to engage consumers through contextual mobile advertising. The company was founded in 2007 under the name mKhoj by Naveen Tewari, Mohit Saxena, Amit Gupta and Abhay Singhal.

Outbrain is a web recommendation platform founded in 2006 by Co-Founder and Co-CEO Yaron Galai and Co-Founder, Chief Technology Officer and General Manager, Ori Lahav. The company is headquartered in New York City. Yaron Galai resigned in February 2024. The company generates revenue for online publishers by displaying feeds of content and ads, or boxes of links, known as chumboxes, to pages within a website or mobile platform. Advertisers pay Outbrain on a pay-per-click basis and a portion of that revenue is shared with publishers.

Digital Remedy is a New York based digital media execution and technology company, founded in 2000 by Michael Seiman who is serving as CEO since its inception. The company was ranked by Forbes as 69th America's Most Promising Companies in 2015.

Chartboost is a San Francisco-based mobile game in-app programmatic advertising and monetization platform. Chartboost SDK enables developers to monetize on their mobile apps and connect advertisers to global in-app inventory. Chartboost's platform allows video game developers to create customized interstitial and video ads to promote new games. Developers have direct access to game data derived from Chartboost-enabled games. As of 2016, Chartboost had been integrated into more than 300,000 games with 40 billion game sessions per month.

TubeMogul is an enterprise software company for brand advertising.

PubMatic, Inc. develops and implements online advertising software and strategies for the digital publishing and advertising industry. PubMatic's sell-side, real-time programmatic ad transaction advertising software puts publishers of websites, videos, and mobile apps into contact with ad buyers by using automated systems, while allowing users to opt-out of having their personal information collected on internet searches. PubMatic has a number of offices in countries around the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Woobi</span>

Woobi, formally known as TokenAds, was a digital marketing company based in Tel Aviv, Israel. It provided in-game advertising services for online games, including supply-side platforms and real-time bidding. The company's technology monetized non-paying users through value-exchange advertising, integrated into gameplay.

Tremor International Ltd., comprising Tremor Video and Unruly, is a publicly traded advertising-technology company. Founded in 2007, it focuses on digital advertising including video, mobile, native, display technology, and connected TV. Its stock trades on both the Nasdaq and London Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol TRMR.

Videology is an advertising software company based in New York City. It was founded in 2007 as Tidal TV and launched a Hulu competitor in 2008. In 2012, it was rebranded as Videology and now develops software that sends ads to specific demographics within an audience of video viewers, performs analytics, and other functions.

Innovid is an American online advertising technology company that offers services used by advertisers and publishers for the distribution and management of digital ads. Originally launched as a video marketing platform, the company expanded its offering to include display and digital out-of-home when Herolens was acquired in 2019.

Zeta Global Holdings Corp. is a data-driven marketing technology company which was founded in 2007. Zeta offers companies a suite of multichannel marketing tools focused on creating, maintaining, and monetizing customer relationships.

Taboola is a public advertising company headquartered in New York City. It provides "content recommendation" sponsored links to advertising partners.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeff Green (businessman)</span> American billionaire businessman

Jeffrey Terry Green is an American billionaire businessman, who co-founded AdECN, a demand-side advertising platform, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2007. Following two years at Microsoft, Green left to co-found buy-side digital advertising platform The Trade Desk, of which he is chairman and CEO.

References

  1. 1 2 "The Trade Desk, Inc. 2023 Annual Report (Form 10-K)". U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. 15 February 2024.
  2. ↑ FED. "Forrester". Forrester. Retrieved 2022-02-16.
  3. ↑ Frankenfield, Joseph (August 15, 2018). "Ad Tech Firm Poised to Surge 50%" . Retrieved November 18, 2018.
  4. ↑ Panel®, Expert. "Council Post: Where 2022 Ad Spend Is Going (And How To Get Ahead Of The Trends)". Forbes. Retrieved 2022-02-16.
  5. ↑ "The Trade Desk Partners with Spotify and More for Audio Programmatic – Lovely Mobile News" . Retrieved 2022-02-16.
  6. ↑ "Trade Desk Revenue 2015-2021 | TTD". www.macrotrends.net. Retrieved 2022-02-16.
  7. ↑ "Office Locations | The Trade Desk". www.thetradedesk.com. Retrieved 2023-02-15.
  8. ↑ "100 Best Medium Workplaces". Fortune. Retrieved November 23, 2019.
  9. 1 2 Tom Metcalf (31 August 2018). "Ad Man Inspired by Goldman Becomes a Billionaire". Bloomberg.com. Retrieved 19 September 2018.
  10. 1 2 Chowdhry, Amit. "How Jeff Green Took The Trade Desk From A Simple Idea To A Programmatic Ad Giant". Forbes. Retrieved 19 September 2018.
  11. ↑ Martinez, Arlene (July 21, 2019). "Ventura's The Trade Desk returns to where it all started". Ventura County Star. Retrieved 2019-07-22.
  12. 1 2 "The Trade Desk Inc. (TTD), Interview with Jeff Green, CEO". Nasdaq. November 8, 2016. Retrieved November 22, 2019.
  13. ↑ "The Trade Desk, Inc". UNITED STATES SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION. February 22, 2019. Retrieved 2019-11-20.
  14. ↑ O'Reilly, Lara (September 21, 2016). "Trade Desk CEO hopes IPO will rebuild 'trust' between ad tech companies and Wall Street". Business Insider. Retrieved November 23, 2019.
  15. 1 2 Heine, Christopher (September 21, 2017). "The Trade Desk's New Product Helps Advertisers Reach Consumers on TV and Digital" . Retrieved November 22, 2019.
  16. ↑ "The Trade Desk acquires the assets of Adbrain Ltd". Reuters. October 25, 2017. Retrieved November 22, 2019.
  17. ↑ Shields, Ronan (September 1, 2017). "The Trade Desk and White Ops ink deal to block fraudulent traffic before it is bought". The Drum. Retrieved November 22, 2019.
  18. ↑ "Trade Desk Clashes With Google Over Transparency Initiative". AdExchange. July 22, 2019. Retrieved November 22, 2019.
  19. 1 2 Graham, Megan (May 31, 2019). "This US ad tech company is cracking into the Chinese market, and Wall Street loves it" . Retrieved November 18, 2019.
  20. ↑ Jhonsa, Eric (March 26, 2019). "The Trade Desk Remains a Pretty Unique Story – Tech Check" . Retrieved November 20, 2019.
  21. ↑ Shields, Ronan (May 21, 2019). "How The Trade Desk Is Integrating With Prebid to Boost Its Unified ID" . Retrieved November 18, 2018.
  22. ↑ "Our industry needs a common cookie language. Let's talk" . Retrieved November 22, 2019.
  23. ↑ Graham, Megan (July 26, 2019). "The Trade Desk hits 52-week high on deal to sell video ads on Amazon Fire TV" . Retrieved November 20, 2019.
  24. ↑ Murphy, Paige (September 24, 2019). "The Trade Desk takes aim at Google and Facebook in a new campaign". AdNews. Retrieved November 23, 2019.
  25. ↑ Wodinsky, Shoshana (September 26, 2019). "The Trade Desk Focuses on People, Not Programmatic in Latest Campaign". AdWeek. Retrieved November 23, 2019.
  26. ↑ Graham, Megan (September 26, 2019). "The Trade Desk's new ad campaign pokes Google and Facebook in the ribs". AdWeek. Retrieved November 23, 2019.
  27. ↑ "The Trade Desk Is Building Version 2.0 of Its Unified ID" AdWeek
  28. ↑ "Unilever first to test Disney’s identity integration with Trade Desk" Marketing Dive
  29. ↑ "Paramount Enables Unified ID 2.0 for Connected TV Ad Sales" NextTV
  30. ↑ "Procter & Gamble Is Doing The Unified ID 2.0 Thing" AdExchanger
  31. ↑ "SPO Is Evolving Thanks To Direct Publisher Connections And A Push For Sustainability" AdExchanger
  32. ↑ "Trade Desk to counter Google's ad grip with tool for publishers" Reuters
  33. ↑ "The Trade Desk" Fortune
  34. ↑ "Trade Desk" Forbes
  35. ↑ "The Trade Desk CEO Green Announces Funding And Investors". AdExchanger. March 23, 2010. Retrieved April 30, 2020.
  36. ↑ O'Reilly, Lara (September 15, 2016). "Trade Desk CEO hopes IPO will rebuild 'trust' between ad tech companies and Wall Street". Business Insider. Retrieved November 21, 2019.
  37. ↑ "UNITED STATES SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION Form 10-K". SEC.gov. February 16, 2017. pp. 46, 88. Retrieved December 11, 2019.
  38. ↑ Sleffo, George P. (November 7, 2019). "THE TRADE DESK BETS BIG ON CONNECTED TV AS REVENUE JUMPS 38 PERCENT". Ad Age. Retrieved November 15, 2019.
  39. ↑ "The Trade Desk Announces a Ten-for-One Stock Split". nasdaq.com (Press release). 10 May 2021.
  40. ↑ "The Trade Desk’s bumper quarter has some important caveats" DIGIDAY
  41. ↑ "Trade Desk Revenue 2015-2023" Macrotrends
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.