¡Kokai Caramba!
Buyers are once again raising the alarm that The Trade Desk is forcing them to adopt its new Kokai interface.
Three anonymous media buyers tell Adweek they’ve recently been unable to create new campaigns in TTD’s legacy Solimar interface. The DSP directs them to launch in Kokai instead.
It’s a familiar story. Buyers have been speculating all year about The Trade Desk’s plans to sunset Solimar, given TTD’s publicly stated goal of achieving 100% Kokai adoption this year.
But a source close to TTD told AdExchanger in July that plans to reach total Kokai adoption in 2025 are tenuous, since some of Kokai’s features are not fully baked.
However, in August, an anonymous buyer said TTD was indeed forcing them to create new campaigns in Kokai instead of Solimar. In response, a source familiar with Kokai’s development said any decision to switch to Kokai was up to agencies, not TTD.
Either way, buyers insist the choice is being made for them. And Kokai seemingly isn’t much more fully baked than it was in July. The latest crop of buyers being pushed to use Kokai report campaign glitches, and they’re fuming over disruptions to Q4 marketing plans.
It’s a bad look for The Trade Desk, which is facing stiff competition from Amazon DSP and others. One buyer tells Adweek, “I’m personally looking to switch to a different DSP.”
The Wheels On The (Omni)Bus
The EU is proposing to narrow the definition of “personal data” as part of its Digital Omnibus proposal, Digiday reports.
Once enacted, some identifiers, like hashed IDs, will no longer be banned under certain GDPR requirements.
The idea behind the proposal is to consolidate the mess of standards around privacy, data and AI use. The EU is betting that if it can minimize confusion and unnecessary complexity, the EU can remain competitive during the AI boom.
The proposal also featured good news for AI companies, allowing their systems to train on “personal or pseudonymized data when safeguards are in place,” per Digiday. But there’s hesitation here – specifically regarding AI’s ability to accurately distinguish between personal data and general web content.
But the results won’t be immediate. The Omnibus will become law soon, but different parts apply at different times. Sources estimate that it will take one to three years to see noticeable impact.
Beware of the Blob
Have you ever noticed how the biggest AI industry players all seem to be working together across various, densely interconnected partnerships?
Wired editor at large Steven Levy argues that this “Blob” of businesses is starting to coalesce into a full-blown monopoly, albeit one with full backing from the current White House administration.
In particular, Levy cites a recent deal between Nvidia, Microsoft and Anthropic, through which Anthropic gets to scale its Claude LLM on Microsoft’s Azure cloud using architecture from Nvidia. (And, of course, all three companies send each other a few billion dollars in the process.)
On its surface, this circular arrangement seems like a conflict of interest for Microsoft, which has long been partnered with OpenAI for its AI development. But it makes a lot more sense when you consider the collective dominance these three companies will end up commanding as a result. As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in the announcement video, “We’re in every enterprise in every single country.”
So what does this mean for ad tech? Sure, the industry has weathered the storm of previous monopolistic behaviors – but unlike, say, open web display ad servers, AI isn’t technically a load-bearing pillar of the digital advertising economy.
Well, not yet, anyway.
But Wait! There’s More!
Netflix, Comcast and Paramount vie for the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. [New York Times]
The latest version of Grok insists that Elon Musk is the … best piss drinker of all time? [404 Media]
Roblox’s CEO gets squirrely about the company’s age verification, child safety measures and if the platform would ever add online betting. [New York Times]
After a two-year gap, BravoCon returned to Vegas with 19 brand sponsors. [Cablefax]
You’re Hired!
Suraj Gandhi joins PMG as global head of content & studio. [release]
