The Trade Desk - OPEN for business
The Trade Desk continues with their support of an open internet
Many are suggesting that the future of the ad-funded internet is a series of walled gardens - thankfully, the CEO of a $36bn adtech company disagrees.
The man, the myth, the adtech legend; Mr Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk (TTD) recently said “There are two kinds of companies right now: those trying to control the open internet and those trying to enable it,” and “Many big tech companies are using (privacy) as a sword and a shield,”. I HEAR YOU. AMEN.
In 2015 I (badly) drew out how an optimal digital advertising strategy should operate at a high-level for an advertiser. 6 years on - I still stand by this. Not because I haven’t listened to alternatives. Not because I’m hiding behind time-investment bias. But because it’s the best way for advertisers to advertise and therefore publishers to monetise.
As Joe Zawadski said to Kirk McDonald in a recent discussion, “It is a requirement that the industry reorganise itself around a new set of principles and work backwards from what it should look like and what it needs to look like.”
Given the above, it’s interesting to me as to why anyone would support an internet controlled by a few. The promotion of walled gardens is the promotion of anti-competitiveness. The promotion of the end of the internet. It’s incredibly short-termist, zero-sum and not sustainable.
We will continue to see the narrative around ‘enterprise data sharing’, ‘clean rooms’ or ‘publishers taking back control’ in the next couple of years, which makes complete sense from a large-advertiser & large-publisher perspective (particularly as those dominate the trade press), but the reality is the internet will struggle to exist for the majority without a viable/scalable/democratised alternative to user-level targeting and measurement.
It’s good to see TTD and other adtech visionaries backing a longer-term and more sustainable plan to solve the industries major challenges. The Internet should not be for the rich, it should be for all.
The Trade Desk supports open and sustainable. So does my two cents.