Exclusive: The Trade Desk's Media-Quality Product, SP500+, Puts Publishers at the Center

Demand-side platform The Trade Desk began letting buyers test a new product called SP500+, which lets brands target a group of premium publishers, ADWEEK has exclusively learned. SP500+—Sellers and Publishers 500+—is a new interface for buyers that lets them target users across around 500 premium publishers, including The New York Times, Disney+, Hulu, ABC and The Wall Street Journal, according to documents viewed by ADWEEK. Spotify and other audio publishers are currently not available via SP500+, but the TTD intends to include Spotify, according to TTD. The Trade Desk confirmed that the product is in beta and advertisers have just started testing it. There is currently no time frame set for its general availability rollout, a spokesperson said. The product announcement is significant because DSPs like The Trade Desk have historically been much more focused on helping buyers find the perfect audience, rather than finding the perfect media partner or environment. DSPs do not feature publishers prominently to buyers, outside of private marketplace deals that buyers must independently arrange with a publisher, several sources said. As cookies deprecate, addressable audiences on the open web are harder to find, and the pendulum is swinging in favor of the media environment. Some Cookieless Alternatives ... Still Use Cookies “The original sin of programmatic is that we made inventory selection tertiary to everything else,” said The Trade Desk vice president of inventory development Will Doherty. “Publishers get obfuscated from the conversation in all these suboptimal ways. We’ve known for a while that it creates challenges for buyers to invest in the open internet.” Most publishers included in the initiative did not respond by press time. The New York Times had not yet heard about SP500+, said executive director of ad products and platforms Sasha Heroy. SP500+ is part of Kokai, a wider suite of solutions The Trade Desk announced last year, which intends to make it easier for advertisers to partner with third-party vendors. It is a completely separate product from OpenPath, which lets brands buy publishers without a supply-side platform. Publishers don't need to be part of OpenPath to be part of SP500+, a spokesperson said. Open-web champion The Trade Desk has positioned itself as a champion for the open internet. It has helped the industry adopt quality standards, from enforcing new video classification protocols from the IAB Tech Lab, to eliminating Google Open Bidding in 2022 to make programmatic buying more efficient. SP500+ stems from this philosophy, Doherty said. “We want to be able to say that the open internet on its worse days is better than anything the walled gardens are going to offer you," Doherty said. "How do I give meaning to that statement? Let’s start with the 500 best publishers.” Doherty compared the transparency of SP500+ with popular artificial-intelligence-powered media buying tools from walled gardens, like Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+. Buyers and independent research have accused both products of placing ads in unsavory locations and not spending advertiser dollars efficiently. “Pmax and Advantage+ are black box by design,” Doherty said. “[The platforms say] we’re not going to tell you where your inventory runs. We think this [SP500+] is an opportunity when you marry rich audience data with the world’s best content.” Publishers at the center A buyer that wants to buy specific publishers would have trouble in most DSPs today, several sources said. “Publishers are very secondary,” said Chris Kane, founder of Jounce Media. “They’re not central to the buying process.” The primary focus of DSPs is audience data. Typically, publishers only factor into buying decisions when brands want to avoid buying them because of brand-safety filters, Kane said. If a brand wanted to target a specific publisher, like Hearst, for example, on the open web, the best way today would be to set up a PMP with Hearst, said Kane. This process takes time and planning. If a brand wanted to activate immediately, it could create an allow list in the open auction with all of the domains Hearst owns, but that would require a lot of research on the part of the media buyer, Kane added. While the inventory available in SP500+ does not include anything new to The Trade Desk, Doherty said, it does include premium publishers that have been previously hard for buyers to access, a source familiar with the product said. Doherty said The Trade Desk has been working internally to determine which publishers are high-quality to inform the SP500+, and the list of publishers will be informed by real-time data. This article was updated to clarify that Spotify is currently not yet available in SP500+