The Trade Desk and Dstillery Link AI Agents to Reshape Audiences Mid-Campaign

The Trade Desk is connecting Ask Koa, its conversational agentic platform, with adtech firm Dstillery’s agentic platform, DS-1, to help ad buyers create custom audiences in minutes rather than days. The integration lets the two companies’ AI agents communicate during live campaigns, using performance insights and an advertiser’s targeting goals to identify and build new audiences that can be activated through The Trade Desk. Advertisers could already buy Dstillery's custom audiences through The Trade Desk, but building them required manual coordination and typically took four days, said Taejin “TJ” In, Dstillery’s chief product officer. “Sometimes a lot of buyers feel it's not worth it,” he said, noting that buyers would often default to an off-the-shelf audience instead. This integration, In added, is a first-to-market deal with The Trade Desk, though buyers can still use DS-1 on other platforms. The setup highlights a key difference in how The Trade Desk is approaching agentic advertising. Unlike Amazon and Yahoo, which have their own media properties, audience data and ad inventory, The Trade Desk operates as an independent buying platform. It doesn’t own any audience segments in its marketplace and relies on third-party providers such as Dstillery, said Jaime Nash, senior director of product marketing at The Trade Desk. That makes those partners central to how Koa builds audiences. The push also carries a business imperative for the company. On its second-quarter earnings call, CEO Jeff Green told investors that agentic is “one of the biggest opportunities that advertising will ever see.” Three ad buyers interviewed for this story acknowledged the potential time savings from this integration, but questioned whether this would lead to an increase in ad spend. “Anything that reduces the friction between audience builds and time to activation is a good thing,” a brand executive who spends with The Trade Desk told ADWEEK, speaking on condition of anonymity to preserve industry relationships. Other adtech companies have been building agentic capabilities across different parts of the media-buying process. PubMatic launched AgenticOS in January, while Magnite built an orchestration layer, connecting external buying agents to its seller agents. Yahoo DSP launched Agent Network, connecting advertisers to agents from 23 partners. Amazon opened its ads API to outside AI agents in February. But building agentic capabilities is becoming increasingly common across adtech. Bill Gordon, founder of Yosemite Consulting, said the integration in and of itself would not set The Trade Desk apart. “Every DSP is going to get its own agent for this type of natural language media campaign building,” he said. How the setup works The setup connects Koa with Dstillery’s DS-1 through Model Context Protocol (MCP), so buyers never leave The Trade Desk. An advertiser running a used-car campaign, for example, could ask Koa to find people looking to buy a vehicle. DS-1 then identifies relevant signals, such as visits to AutoTrader, and builds a custom audience that returns to The Trade Desk for activation. “Instead of building custom audiences before a campaign, our agents can talk to each other in the middle of a campaign,” said Nash. The goal, she notes, is to change how advertisers approach targeting. Buyers tend to reuse the same segments across campaigns; Koa lets them find new audiences based on campaign performance and their targeting goals. The integration is available to advertisers enrolled in Audience Unlimited, The Trade Desk’s data-access program. Advertisers pay a flat fee instead of paying on a per-CPM basis, Nash said, and participating data partners receive a usage fee. The Trade Desk said it's been testing the setup for a few months with a handful of advertisers but declined to share specifics. It declined to share whether Ask Koa has driven more ad spend through the platform. The Trade Desk reports earnings on Nov. 9. “Taking a process that previously required multiple platforms, teams and days of work and turning it into a conversation is meaningful,” said David Nyurenberg, svp of Digital, InterMedia Advertising. “But I think we're getting a little too excited about agents doing what traders already do, just faster." Nyurenberg said he doesn't want platforms like The Trade Desk, Google or Meta deciding his entire marketing strategy. "The intelligence that determines where a brand should invest needs to sit above those systems and remain with the brand," he added.

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The Trade Desk and Dstillery Link AI Agents to Reshape Audiences Mid-Campaign

Ad buyers acknowledged the potential time savings, but question whether this would lead to increases in ad spend

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