In the digital advertising market there is a growing need for transparency and competition is becoming stronger over time. Marketers are confronted with rising expectations and lower budgets to invest, all this while having to guarantee a better return-on-investment. The demand-side platform The Trade Desk tackles these problems with a robust technological platform that arms you with various competitive benefits in the market of programmatic advertising.
Transparent all-in one tool
The Trade Desk is a DSP or demand-side platform that enables agencies and brands to place digital advertisements in the form of mobile advertising, native advertising, digital audio, video and social across different devices desktop, mobile and connected TV included. The company is recognized as the most successful DSP after Google and positions itself as an alternative to Facebook and Amazon. The biggest difference with other DSPs is that TTD is an open platform that is not tied to a publisher network and thus they can’t prioritize their ad inventory, unlike Google who has possession over the biggest publisher network across the industry with its ad server AdX. This enables the ad-tech company to operate more transparently in everything they do - from pricing and ad inventory to measurement and reporting.
The tool’s capacity goes way beyond that of a demand-side platform it also contains a data management platform (DMP) and a publisher management platform (PMP). The DMP enables you to manage your first-party data, buy third-party data and customize your audiences. With the publisher management platform you can create and monitor private deals all in the same platform. Besides an omnichannel tool, they want to power advertisers with a strong set of features such as cross-device targeting, KOA artificial intelligence, Planner, enterprise APIs and HD reporting in order to manage their programmatic advertising activities more efficiently.
Data Management Platform
The key to making smart decisions lies in the data. The fully integrated DMP of The Trade Desk enables you to reach relevant audiences with first- & third party data and to take real-time well informed decisions. Their integrations with leading data providers such as BlueKai and exclusive access to The Data Alliance, a combination of data providers composed by TTD.
You can activate your first-party data easily by putting a universal pixel on the advertisers’ website so you don’t have to put separate tags to measure each specific action on your website. This makes it convenient to segment audiences and to retarget them based on interests and behaviour on your website. Furthermore, with the DMP and the Audience Predictor, you are able to configure lookalike-modeling in order to find undiscovered audiences en target them based on the characteristics of your online users and customers. This way you have in no time access to highly-valuable prospective users using your first-party data.
Besides, the data-management platform gives you the option to access third-party data to discover new segments to target your audience on a broader and deeper scale. In one click you have access to more than 100,000 premium datasets. With their project, ‘The Data Alliance’, you can enter data segments that are precisely selected and continuously controlled on relevance, precision and cohesion. Segments are priced based on a percentage of your media cost instead of on a CPM basis. This is recommended to be used for campaigns with high CPM as % media cost is most likely lower than a fixed CPM price.
Cross-device targeting en measurement
Reaching the right customers at the right time throughout the customer journey is a priority for any marketer. But there are only so many opportunities to deliver your message on a single device. As people access media on more and more screens, delivering a holistic brand experience has become a must. With TTD’s cross-device targeting and measurement features, you can show your ads to the right audiences on the right devices and at the right frequency. Moreover, you can gain greater insight into the customer journey by analyzing which devices and browsing environments lead to the best conversion paths. To do so, a unique ID gets appointed to a user browsing on different devices and channels so that you can show your ads when they are most relevant.
KOA Artificial Intelligence
Nowadays, you have more data at your disposal than ever before. But all that information only becomes valuable if you know how to analyze it and apply it to your campaigns. The TTD has created a built-in artificial intelligence tool, named KOA, that analyzes nearly 9 million impressions every second and over 600 billion queries each day, to make your campaigns more accurate and efficient. The tool surfaces real-time recommendations to help improve campaign performances or you can let it automatically optimize your campaigns for you. Every action KOA takes is visible in the platform, which makes it easy to understand the impact of each optimization and update KOA does.
Planner
Budgets are handed down to digital teams, and data only comes available after a campaign has already started running. The built-in planner tool changes all that using data-driven insights from the AI engine, KOA. With Planner you can create pre-optimized campaigns before you spend a single euro. It can be seen as a supercomputer to optimize your campaigns. You give your parameters like budget, goals, dates, geo-locations, and planner does the rest: identification of your most valuable audiences, the most efficient way to allocate your budget and development of ad groups that are ready to go live in a click. This way you can use data to inform your campaigns, not the other way around.
Entreprise API
Whether you are jumping into real-time bidding for the first time or looking to become more competitive in the market, the Trade Desk’s APIs is completely custom and lets you build a customized omnichannel bidding platform. The API equips you with competitive benefits in the innovative market of programmatic advertising: access valuable data from the data management platform, score individual users/cookies, optimize your campaigns en target based on IP address, use dynamic creative optimization and make insightful reports all in a single tool.
What is next?
Recently, the Trade Desk reported that they will invest more in connected TV: they want to change the way you can connect with your audiences completely. Connected TV brings the advantages of programmatic into TV advertising, enabling you to connect with your audience wherever they’re watching. This is a big step within the industry, it enables advertisers to connect with highly-valuable audiences in new ways.
For who is this tool?
It is clear that the Trade Desk has a lot to offer to advertisers that are looking for new ways to make their campaigns more efficient, use their data more accurately or discover new audiences. It is a fantastic platform for advertisers that are, next to their traditional display advertising, in need of new innovative opportunities and want to bet more on audio, video and connected TV to create unique brand experiences. Advertisers with a strong global presence should definitely look into using the Iphone of the DSPs.
Interested in the Trade Desk? You can get certified on www.training.thetradedesk.com!
Emile Cras
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