EXCLUSIVE: Media Buyers Are Being Pushed to Switch to The Trade Desk’s Kokai—and Hitting Glitches on the Way

The Trade Desk’s ad buying platform Kokai has been the source of some advertisers’ and publishers’ frustrations this year, leading the adtech firm to overhaul parts of its design in September, as ADWEEK first reported. Now, some buyers say the company has “forced” them to use Kokai and they can no longer create campaigns in the company’s older interface, Solimar. Three buyers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that they discovered recently that while they were able to manage existing campaigns in Solimar, setting up and launching new campaigns required them to use Kokai. “We have been locked out from creating new campaigns in the legacy Solimar UI, despite assurances we would have indefinite access to it,” one agency media buyer, speaking on condition of anonymity, told ADWEEK. The buyer spends an average of around $40 million annually on The Trade Desk. WHAT'S HAPPENING IN THE WORLD OF BIG TECH, ADTECH AND AI By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy . You may opt-out anytime by clicking 'unsubscribe' from the newsletter or from your account. Another buyer, who said they spend approximately seven figures each quarter on The Trade Desk, told ADWEEK that at their agency, all private guaranteed (PG) deals were migrated to Kokai on Monday of this week. "Moving forward, we can accept and manage PG deals in both UIs, but if we do so in Solimar, The Trade Desk is migrating those to Kokai on a weekly cadence whether we want it or not," they said. "Once it’s migrated, those ad groups are viewable but no longer manageable in Solimar." For non-PG deals, this buyer said, their agency is “forced to clone or create campaigns only in Kokai,” which requires budget changes that can only be made within Kokai or the use of Koa Optimizations, The Trade Desk’s machine learning algorithm for prioritizing high-value media. That change was instituted for the buyer on Oct. 28. They added that The Trade Desk’s ad groups—targeting bundles within a campaign that control how, where, and when ads run—are also “no longer manageable in Solimar.” The changes are part of The Trade Desk's larger plans to migrate all of its clients to the Kokai platform. It bills Kokai as an AI-enabled system that can lower costs for advertisers, optimize campaigns with machine learning, provide real-time validation, and improve the accuracy of media measurement. A spokesperson for The Trade Desk declined to comment on plans to sunset Solimar, but the company has implied goals to close the interface as soon as this year. On a February call with investors, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green said that the company planned to “move 100% of our clients to Kokai this year,” noting that “today, we're maintaining two systems, Solimar and Kokai. This slows us down." On its third quarter earnings call earlier this month, the adtech giant said that 85% of clients are now using Kokai. “The vast majority of TTD clients have already shifted to [Kokai] and are seeing major performance improvements as a result,” a spokesperson for The Trade Desk told ADWEEK. Glitches and bugs Part of the frustration to buyers was the periodic table-inspired Kokai interface, as ADWEEK previously reported. That view has been partially removed following complaints, but buyers have continued to run into challenges navigating the platform. One buyer called Solimar “far more intuitive to use” and said, “Kokai has become so complex that logic loops are creating roadblocks to building campaigns and making optimizations.” But it’s not just the interface that’s gotten on buyers' nerves. Buyers told ADWEEK they’ve run into bugs that have impeded their ability to use Kokai effectively over the last few weeks. These issues have included campaign launch hiccups, delayed API connections, inability to save a specific audience segment, inability to add a new ad account, disruption to data integrations that reduced visibility into ad delivery, and the inability to select specific KPIs. One of the buyers, who manages six figures in spend on The Trade Desk for two clients monthly, said they recently missed launch dates for both clients due to campaign setup issues on Kokai. “After being told I could stay on Solimar, I woke up one day and couldn’t generate new campaigns, essentially being forced to migrate to Kokai,” they said. This buyer raised concerns to The Trade Desk. In an email reviewed by ADWEEK, a company representative told the buyer that they had attempted to set up campaigns with a specific pacing and flight schedules that were incompatible with campaign launches—but that the buyer had regularly used in Solimar. But then the representative acknowledged that the issue was attributable to a system bug and said the problem had been resolved. This person called the entire experience “a f---ing disaster going into holiday campaigns,” and said it “speaks to how half-baked Kokai is even after all this time and pushback from customers.” “I’m personally looking to switch to a different DSP over this disaster,” they added. The Trade Desk's spokesperson did not respond to a question about bugs with Kokai, but said, “As has always been the case, TTD ships products weekly, which includes ongoing Kokai innovations and new innovations on top of Kokai, such as Deal Desk.” Increased competition For The Trade Desk, the bigger drama playing out in the foreground this year has been its battle with Amazon. Amazon Ads’ exclusive partnership with Roku, inked in June, read to many like a direct challenge to The Trade Desk’s dominance in CTV. Then, this summer, advertisers moved millions in spend from The Trade Desk to Amazon, as ADWEEK previously reported. The battle appears to be intensifying still. By all accounts, most leading demand-side platforms are feeling increased competition on pricing and capabilities. Some are also starting to spar more directly with supply-side platforms. While SSPs like Magnite and PubMatic have built out buy-side tools, The Trade Desk rolled out a sell-side prebid wrapper called OpenAds designed to enhance transparency in ad auctions. Earlier this year, it also began labelling all SSPs as “resellers” in a change that outraged some SSP leaders like Index Exchange’s Andrew Casale.

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EXCLUSIVE: Media Buyers Are Being Pushed to Switch to The Trade Desk’s Kokai—and Hitting Glitches on the Way

Advertisers say they can no longer create campaigns in the Solimar interface as The Trade Desk looks to move all customers to Kokai

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