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There’s a quiet theory taking hold in ad circles: The Trade Desk, they say, isn’t exactly enamored of curation — a targeting strategy that could divert valuable ad spend elsewhere. This week’s Sincera acquisition added fuel to the narrative. But The Trade Desk dismissed the rumors outright.
As Vice President of Inventory Development Will Doherty made clear, “We don’t think much about curation.”
Instead, according to Doherty, the deal is aimed at something much more ambitious.
“From a decision-making point of view, we were limited by the signals in the bids,” Doherty said. “It worked well for avoiding bad practices, but fell short in evaluating what makes for a truly quality ad experience.”
Sincera changes that. Where bidstream provides transactional data, Sincera’s analytics dig deeper and track the quality of data signals from publishers and content owners. By integrating this supply-side information with buy-side data, Trade Desk closes a critical gap in how it reports and analyzes ad inventory.
If the exchange is successful, it will allow The Trade Desk to go beyond simply filtering out bad impressions. It can now proactively identify and recommend inventory that stands out for its quality. As Sincera CEO and co-founder Mike O’Sullivan said, it’s no longer just about what inventory isn’t, but what it could and should be.
“We want to create something that really optimizes, underlines and makes recommendations about what a great offer is and what a great publisher experience looks like – that’s where all of our conversations [during the acquisition] they were really focused,” continued O’Sullivan.
This could prove to be of particular interest to publishers – The Trade Desk group is looking to get further into the tent. By providing insights into which data signals are most valued by advertisers, publishers can adjust their ad sales strategies to match demand.
Doherty described it as forging a “lingua franca” with publishers – a shared language for defining and understanding value within an ecosystem. While the specific syntax of this remains unclear, the potential applications are vast.
For example, alternative identifiers such as The Trade Desk UID 2.0 were historically difficult appraise. With Sincera, it may soon be possible to generate reports that track which bid requests have been monetized by specific IDs, including details about advertisers, campaigns, bid rates, and CPM.
“What Sincera gives us is a more complete view of the ecosystem than bidsteam alone,” Doherty said.
The view could not be more critical. Business counter cleanup of pages made for advertising (MFA). – those shoddy, spammy sites that siphon advertising dollars from legitimate publishers – made it all too clear. While that battle has been won, the rise of more sophisticated attempts to game the ad tech system has revealed a disturbing reality: another MFA-style crisis is always on the horizon in ad tech.
“We realized we needed a more aggressive and comprehensive view to stay ahead of these issues,” Doherty said. “The supply chain is getting more complex, and I would say the number of middlemen we’ve seen come into the supply chain has grown astronomically over the last two to three years.”
Recent data from Sincero supports this, he continued, revealing a 20% increase in delivery routes over the open internet in just a few months. He refused to provide exact numbers.
The more these paths become split and fragmented, the more ad tech vendors like The Trade Desk need to consolidate their spend through the highest quality channels. Without this focus, advertising dollars become increasingly vulnerable to bad actors thriving on the opacity of the system. At the same time, the increasing complexity of fragmented markets significantly increases costs for DSPs trying to navigate and bid effectively.
To avoid some of these issues, The Trade Desk builds proprietary routes to publishers, broadcasters and other media owners. Data from Sincera could accelerate that effort and help The Trade Desk solidify its position as one of the largest repositories of advertising dollars outside the walled gardens.
“We already know that the best of the open internet is outside the walled gardens – that’s where all the premium inventory lives,” said Doherty. “We now have the data set and partnership opportunities to express that value back to publishers.”
Which goes back to the chicken point. No, it wasn’t the driving force behind it, but it reinforces The Trade Desk’s already significant ad-targeting advantage – strengthening its influence at a time when challenges to its dominance are mounting.
“Curation can be an empty term that can mean many different things depending on who you talk to, but when it comes to data and media volumes, it’s nothing new — in fact, it’s as old as time itself,” Doherty said. “We’re interested in how you get data that might not be available in the offer stream and then use that data to empower buyers’ decision-making versus brokering it out of the process. I think there are companies that are broadly in the curation space that are thinking about it in an interesting way.”
With these remarks, Doherty effectively quashed months of speculation regarding The Trade Desk’s curation. Amidst the noisy obsession with ad tech, the ad tech vendor is remarkably quiet.
Yes, it’s busy elsewhere (hello, Ventura), but for the biggest ad tech company outside the walled gardens, this one has — as rivals have chimed in — raised eyebrows. Insiders said the hesitancy boils down to one thing: SSPs are getting better at mimicking DSP performance with a curator. It is said that this prospect is one that the Trade Desk cannot afford to ignore. However, Doherty dismissed the concerns and made it clear that the company remains firmly focused on defining its own path.
According to him, curation generates more headlines than actual advertising dollars.
“Most of it [industry noise around The Trade Desk and curation] is industrial Kremlinology at The Trade Desk,” Doherty said. “I think there are some versions of curation that run counter to our desire to have a fully transparent supply chain, so I understand that they may interpret that as a threat to that business model.”