The Trade Desk proves the ad industry’s need for new solutions

The news: Programmatic ad firm The Trade Desk reported strong earnings this week, a sign that the industry thinks its post-cookie solutions and streaming measurement partnerships could provide a way to tackle addressability challenges.

• Q4 revenues rose 24% year over year to $491 million, and yearly revenues rose 32% to $1.58 billion.

The programmatic boom: The ad industry has found itself in a tough position over the last year, with advertiser spending shrinking due to up-in-the-air addressability across multiple channels, looming ad privacy regulations, and a tightening economy. But amid the chaos, channels that provide flexibility like programmatic stand to benefit.

• The effectiveness of many ad channels has come into question due to a lack of standards around measurement and historic pivots away from TV and other reliable formats. Through programmatic platforms like the one The Trade Desk offers, advertisers feel they can place their dollars where they can get the best results.
• The Trade Desk has struck high-profile partnerships that revolve around its post-cookie ad solution, Unified ID 2.0. Disney brought The Trade Desk on board to manage the ad-supported tier for Disney+ in July, combining its clean room data with Unified ID 2.0.
• But before Disney, other major advertising partners had used The Trade Desk’s tech, including Nielsen, Liveramp, Criteo, and FuboTV, which revealed in October that its use of Unified ID 2.0 had increased ad impressions by 25% and advertiser spend by 61.5%.

Our take: The Trade Desk’s strong results show the industry’s hunger for solutions that can clear up the addressability cloud over multiple channels and the sunsetting of browser cookies. With several successful partnerships under its belt, Unified ID 2.0 could become a leading solution in the new advertising landscape.