TTD is doing a little M&A.
On Wednesday, The Trade Desk announced its plan to buy Sincera, a startup that aggregates and supplies metadata and media telemetry data to ad tech companies. TTD declined to share a deal price.
This is The Trade Desk’s second-ever public acquisition. The first was identity graph company Adbrain in 2017. A third deal happened in between then and now, but the name of the company was never disclosed and remains unknown.
Hold up, though, what the heck even is ad tech metadata and media telemetry data?
That’s a question a lot of people had back in 2022 when Mike O’Sullivan and Ian Meyers co-founded Sincera.
Since then, however, the company has established itself as a reliable and independent source of ad tech metadata which, in short, is data about data.
Staying objective
You can learn a lot from the code running on a website: which identifiers are being included in bid requests, how often the ads on a page are refreshed, true inventory quality and whether consent is being properly collected.
But one of the reasons Sincera’s customers, which include publishers, advertisers and ad tech vendors, value this data is because it comes from an independent source. There’s “no spin on the ball,” as O’Sullivan and Meyers like to say.
Which begs the question: Will Sincera remain independent after the acquisition?
It’s fair to ask, O’Sullivan said, but there’s nothing to worry about. It’s in TTD’s best interest for everyone to have actionable insights they can use to improve the supply chain overall.
“We’re still us – the W2 changes, but the mission doesn’t,” said O’Sullivan, who will report directly to CEO Jeff Green. “Data and insights are inherently objective and independent.”
But there are certain valuable signals that Sincera hasn’t been able to access before, including transaction data on bids. That will change when the acquisition closes later this quarter.
For instance, Sincera can already see which alternative identifiers a publisher deploys, such as The Trade Desk-backed Unified ID 2.0, ID5’s identifier and Yahoo ConnectID. But what Sincera hasn’t been able to determine is whether deploying a certain ID enriches a publisher’s inventory and at what rate.
“That kind of insight isn’t available to either party independently,” O’Sullivan said, “but if you couple the data, there are actions a publisher can undertake to have a potential outcome on ad spend and revenue.”
‘Kindred spirits’
And publishers need all the ad revenue they can get. It’s a little cold out there on the open web. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
“Sincera and The Trade Desk have a shared vision about the importance of the open internet,” said Tim Sims, TTD’s chief commercial officer. “The insights they bring to the table, both for our clients and our supply partners, will continue shining a light on the potential that exists there.”
Speaking of clients, The Trade Desk itself started out as one of Sincera’s clients. TTD used Sincera’s data to inform its ranking of the top 100 publishers and partnered with Sincera on made-for-advertising detection.
In 2023, The Trade Desk participated in Sincera’s $4.2 million seed round through its TD7 venture group, marking its second-ever investment. (The first was Chalice Custom Algorithms in 2021.)
“It’s like we found kindred spirits,” Sims said. “People who care as deeply about the open internet and the supply chain as we do.”
More whiteboards, please
Sincera will keep working with its existing customers and they’ll be given “a very long period of time” to transition off of its products, O’Sullivan said.
“We won’t necessarily have the same feature set and end points, but we’ll continue working with the same types of customers and companies,” he said. “It’s just that how we work together will change and evolve.”
For example, The Trade Desk has deep partnerships with its supply partners, and Sincera will build tools to support them.
Although O’Sullivan and Sims wouldn’t share anything specific about TTD’s road map, O’Sullivan said that he and Meyers are excited about the new data they’ll get access to.
“What kind of alchemy can we brew up when we mix this data together?” O’Sullivan said. “That’s what keeps Ian and me up at night and sketching on whiteboards.”
Well, now it’s up to The Trade Desk to supply those whiteboards.
