The Trade Desk’s (TTD) embrace of the “Premium Internet” has the ad industry wondering just what the heck the largest independent ad-buying platform means by “premium.”
TTD’s FWD25 event, which took place in New York City on Thursday and was subtitled “The Rise of the Premium Internet,” provided some answers, particularly if you read between the lines. The event highlighted how TTD, which once championed the “open internet,” seems to be reacting to buyer concerns about low-quality media on the open web.
TTD is tripling down on CTV, which isn’t news to anyone who’s been following the DSP lately. CEO Jeff Green said CTV is now the platform’s largest media channel as of the end of last year.
With that priority in mind, FWD25’s programming slate was packed with fireside chats with broadcasters and streaming platforms, including NBCU, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery and Tubi. Just two non-CTV publishers – Spotify and The New York Times – were featured onstage.
But TTD is also shifting its focus to highly technical media quality signals, like the types of publisher metadata Sincera, which TTD acquired in January, specializes in analyzing.
And TTD is banging the drum on addressability, touting how even big-name publishers that have adopted its alternative ID, UID2, have seen improvements in advertiser demand.
More addressable = more premium
FWD25’s programming kicked off with a fireside chat between New York Times Global Chief Advertising Officer Joy Robins and TTD CMO Ian Colley.
Although NYT’s monetization strategy centers on subscriptions, the publication has been leaning more into programmatic advertising over the past two years, Robins said. As part of its embrace of programmatic, NYT has been working with TTD on integrating UID2 over the past year, she said.
That’s a reversal from NYT’s previous stance on alternative IDs. Back in 2021, the publication said it had no plans to integrate alternative ID tech, mentioning UID2 specifically.
Now, NYT believes UID2 adoption is key for courting buyers that prefer to purchase media programmatically, Robins said, because it allows NYT to “surface the most important signals of our audiences to our buyers.”
The integration seems to be paying off. According to Colley, demand on TTD’s platform for NYT inventory has increased by double digits in recent months thanks to its UID2 adoption, as well as improvements the publisher has made to its ad experience.
That increase in demand post-UID2 adoption is telling. It demonstrates that, as far as TTD’s buyers are concerned, even a big-name publishing brand like The New York Times can become more premium – namely, by adopting UID2.
Proving media quality with metadata
Colley also said improvements to NYT’s on-page ad experience boosted TTD buyer demand for its inventory.
To offer a glimpse at how TTD will be assessing publishers’ ad experiences going forward, TTD turned to Mike O’Sullivan, co-founder of Sincera, the telemetry and media metadata startup TTD acquired earlier this year.
O’Sullivan said bid requests – which he referred to as “the atomic unit in programmatic advertising” – leave out a ton of context about the publisher’s ad experience. Media quality metrics like viewability and brand safety can be useful for weeding out undesirable inventory, he added, but they don’t really help buyers target premium inventory.
However, more granular signals like ad-to-content ratio – which are based on observations about the publisher’s on-page metadata – are more useful for actually targeting high-end, premium ad experiences, O’Sullivan said.
For example, O’Sullivan shared a publisher page cluttered with overlapping video and display ad placements that he said would likely set off red flags for buyers looking to avoid made-for-advertising (MFA) sites. Sincera calculated that about 58% of the page was taken up by ads, and that there was an average of about four ads on-screen at any given time.
Then O’Sullivan highlighted The New York Times’ homepage from the previous day. In calculating the NYT page’s ad-to-content ratio, Sincera found that it, too, had about 60% of the page taken up by ads. But rather than an average of four different overlapping ads on the page, the NYT page just had one takeover-style ad placement.
So, while the MFA site and the NYT site had similar ad-to-content ratios, Sincera was able to dig deeper into the metadata to determine the qualitative differences between both sites’ ad experiences.
This type of media quality assessment factored into the list of the top 100 publishers on the open web The Trade Desk released last year, as well as its SP500+ offering for targeting premium publishers, O’Sullivan said.
Note that O’Sullivan isn’t saying the NYT inventory is premium because of the publisher’s brand recognition, but because of the ad experience itself. This is very in-the-weeds stuff, but it demonstrates buyer demand for more granular means of assessing media quality beyond simply avoiding “bad” placements while prioritizing publishers with established brand names.
In that sense, TTD’s pivot to the premium internet isn’t about abandoning the open internet, O’Sullivan said. It’s about coming up with a smarter way to classify the wide range of available inventory on the open web, using metadata signals that walled gardens don’t provide to buyers.
“We have all of these additional metrics that allow the system, as well as buyers themselves, to understand more and target more around these premium publishers,” he said. “That really highlights the best of the open internet.”
