Is The Trade Desk’s Turnaround Push Officially Underway?

A version of this story was originally published in AI, Tech & Money, a free, weekly newsletter packed with news and exclusive analysis on all things tech, platforms, and deals in advertising and media. Sign up for it here. I’m flying from New York to L.A. today, a commute during which I’ll be listening to Dolly Parton and Dolly Parton only in my headphones. (If you, too, are In Your Feels about the passing of Miss Dolly, make sure to check out our recap of her most fabulous ad appearances over the years.) In other news, Meta is facing the most material consequences to date over claims that its social platforms put children at risk with addictive features. The tech giant on Wednesday not only agreed to pay up to a record $17.1 billion as part of a settlement with 47 states, but also agreed to limit features like beauty filters and Like counts, and to enforce a new two-hour daily limit for kids using Instagram and Facebook. The changes threaten to impact its core advertising business, as brands will have fewer opportunities to market to minors. No doubt more to come on that. Speaking of advertising, it’s a big week for one of the industry’s most influential players, The Trade Desk. The company this week bid adieu to its top engineer, Aravind Chandrasekharan, adding to an expanding roster of high-profile exits from the demand-side platform. Also this week, the company is unveiling a reboot of its central ad-buying platform Kokai; the update integrates new agentic features and aims to assuage media buyers’ long-standing complaints about its clunky interface. Paired with a leaked deck obtained by ADWEEK detailing the company’s H2 plans, these may be early signs of a turnaround effort after months of flailing. I’ll get into it in my feature below. Finally, a quick reminder that entries are now open for ADWEEK Tech Challengers to Watch, a new award dedicated to spotlighting up-and-coming tech companies making waves in adland. Learn more and enter here. As always, replies to this email go straight to my inbox, so please share feedback or tips. Alternatively, reach me securely at kendra.16 on Signal. The Top Line Omnicom quietly offloaded hundreds of the engineers and product staff behind its central AI platform to a third-party contractor. OpenAI is testing exclusion targeting in its nascent ads system. Streaming now accounts for 48.2% of the total ad-supported TV market, continuing to eat into linear. The Quant Marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart are officially the first place consumers go to shop for new brands, according to recent research from ecommerce fulfillment company Radial. Its research found that 44% of adults in the U.S. usually purchase a new brand via marketplaces, compared to just 21% who transact on the brand’s website and 17% who shop in person. Deep Learning: Is The Trade Desk’s Turnaround Push Officially Underway? The Trade Desk, adtech’s Wall Street darling-turned-flounderer, would seem to be gearing up for a concerted rebound effort. The demand-side platform, which enables advertisers to buy ads programmatically across the open web, is focused on investing in and commercializing new agentic tools, according to a leaked H2 roadmap deck obtained by ADWEEK this week. The company’s big push is centered on a new central AI assistant that advertisers can turn to for help with a range of tasks; the assistant can tap into a suite of specialized Koa agents to aid users in campaign setup, audience building, frequency capping, performance measurement, and more. That AI assistant is being given a privileged new home within Kokai, the company’s core ad-buying platform. This positioning is part of The Trade Desk’s larger makeover of Kokai, unveiled today in a refresh significant enough that the company felt the need to give it its own branding, Kokai Zuma. As part of the Kokai Zuma refresh, The Trade Desk is also swapping the divisive periodic table-inspired interface for a more standard dashboard design as the platform’s default view, confirming ADWEEK’s previous reporting. It’s a change made in response to advertisers’ negative feedback about the navigability of the interface, leadership has implied. On the company’s second-quarter earnings call earlier this month, CEO Jeff Green said the company is "listening to our clients and responding with innovative upgrades.” The changes arrive after an extended downturn for the ad giant. After hitting a staggering $69 billion market cap in late 2024, the company has been knocked down by pricing pressures from rivals Amazon and Yahoo, critical product feedback, rising tensions with supply-side partners, and a public battle with one of its biggest clients, the agency holding company Publicis. This month, the company posted its weakest quarterly growth since 2020, with revenue up just 3% to $715 million, and its Q3 guidance of $650 million coming in well under analyst expectations of $840 million. Green said the figures were “not a reflection” of the company, while pointing to a bevy of headwinds that included tariffs, inflationary pressures, and weak consumer spending. What People Are Saying https://twitter.com/SteadyCompound/status/2085537099802120691 But Green also used the opportunity to highlight The Trade Desk’s fresh focus on agentic AI. “Agentic is one of the biggest opportunities that advertising will ever see,” he said, adding that in the coming quarters the business will “continue to make our platform easier to use while expanding its capability through agentic workflows.” He criticized the approach of some competitors to The Trade Desk, who he suggested are slyly repackaging standard programmatic guarantees and fixed price deals with shiny “agentic” wrapping: “They argue that their cheap fee will compensate for their lack of objectivity and their decisions that favor publishers rather than the buyer who is footing the bill.” The comments fit with Green’s broader criticism of some supply-side platforms' practices. Earlier this year, he likened some SSPs to house flippers who sell at a markup without necessarily having sellers' best interests at heart. Tensions between The Trade Desk and some SSPs also flared last year when the company made the unusual decision to relabel all SSPs as “resellers.” Now, Green appears to be taking a twofold dig at some of those players: suggesting they have misaligned incentives when they offer buying tools, while also accusing them of slapping an “agentic” label on basic programmatic offerings. PubMatic has been aggressively positioning its AgenticOS platform as an alternative for buyers; the system is integrated with its programmatic guaranteed and private market deals. Magnite, meanwhile, now offers a buyer agent and an agentic orchestration layer spanning buy- and sell-side functions. And this spring, Kargo launched Project Kera, an AI-backed planning and buying interface. As a vote of confidence in The Trade Desk’s potential in advertising’s agentic future, Green bought back some 6 million shares of his company’s stock in March. The company is also stacking its ranks with a fresh executive cohort that could help it execute a turnaround. In the past three months, the DSP has welcomed Kristi Argyilan, the mastermind behind Target’s Roundel retail media business, as chief commercial officer; Nate Olmstead, who joins as CFO from AI firm Penguin Solutions; ex-Zendesk exec Sarah Gavin as CMO; and former Google and LinkedIn exec Penry Price as board member. Paired with a refreshed Kokai platform and a new conversational AI layer, these may well be early indicators of a more concerted rebound effort. Deals, Deals, Deals Anthropic will shell out $45 billion to rent AI computing power from Nscale. AI developer platform Hugging Face is reportedly weighing a possible $13 billion sale. Public adtech company Perion will acquire in-store retail media company PRN for up to $12 million in cash. Amazon’s AWS will acquire DuckLab, which operates a popular open-source analytical database. Nvidia is reportedly in advanced talks to invest in datacenter player Cloverleaf Infrastructure. Revolving Door The Trade Desk’s senior vice president of engineering Aravind Chandrasekharan is exiting the DSP after 12 years, with plans to join Branch, a mobile attribution platform. Peter Doolan is the second OpenAI enterprise sales exec to leave the company for Salesforce. Wendy's tapped Tariq Hassan, former McDonald's U.S. CMO, as its new chief marketing and customer growth officer, succeeding Lindsay Radkoski. One of Netflix’s top ad execs, Jon Whitticom, is reportedly headed for the exit. Buzzy AI marketing startup Hightouch poached Google’s U.S. agency whisperer Jitendra Kumar to serve as its head of commercial for advertising. A top leader in OpenAI’s efforts to expand its datacenter footprint, Chris Malone, is leaving the lab. Former BBC News CEO Deborah Turness will launch a creative studio within Independent Talent Group to build content around its clients. Bits from the Ether https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/2092409266640752765

Ad Tech Industry News

Is The Trade Desk’s Turnaround Push Officially Underway?

The Trade Desk is betting that a streamlined buying platform, a new C-suite, and a concerted push into agentic AI can reverse its fortunes

UNLOCK FULL ACCESS

Kendra Barnett

Programmatic

Google Gets to Keep Its Adtech Stack Intact. Does The Trade Desk's Pitch Lose its Punch?

Runway’s AI Video Agent Creates and Measures Ads Across Platforms

The Trade Desk's 10 Years on Wall Street: Booms, Busts, and the Battle for What's Next

Apostra Wants to Be the Agentic Ad Layer. Does the Industry Need One?

Scope3’s Rebrand to Apostra Solidifies Shift from Sustainability to AI

ADWEEK Tech Advantage: AI Agents Are Increasingly Getting Their Hands on Ad Dollars

Former Magnite Exec Adam Soroca Named PebblePost CEO

Is The Trade Desk Running Out of Room to Turn Around?

Advertisers Want More Brand Safety, Prompt-Matching, Incrementality Tracking From ChatGPT Ads