the trade desk

Jeff Green doubles down on OpenPath’s value; Amazon wants Perplexity to disable agentic shopping; and the creator economy takes on political fundraising.

It can be hard to measure the effect of advertising on in-person sales. Men’s Wearhouse partnered with measurement agency Ovative to see what was working.

The divergence between the DSPs reveals shifting buy-side priorities. Advertisers have grown wary of how The Trade Desk earns margin, where its algorithm steers inventory and how these strategies compete with buyer goals.

DS-1, a new agentic AI interface developed by audience platform Dstillery, aims to reduce manual inefficiencies within audience curation.

The Trade Desk has OpenPath, OpenAds, OpenSincera and, as of today, a new platform portal called OpenTTD.

PubMatic says adoption of its AgenticOS, combined with strong CTV and mobile demand, set the stage for double digit growth in the second half of this year.

The Trade Desk, once a Wall Street darling, now faces the challenge of rebuilding goodwill across the investor community and the ad tech industry.

What’s the deal with viral apps?; Dentsu and WPP are off of OpenPath; and AI coding has its downsides.

Freestar CEO Kurt Donnell explains why transparency in programmatic advertising is the open web’s best bet for survival in the AI search era.

Evertune’s new feature allows advertisers to run programmatic ad campaigns directly on the sites and pages most often cited by AI chatbots.

The MRC’s auction transparency standards aren’t intended to force every programmatic platform to use the same auction playbook – but platforms do have to adopt some controversial OpenRTB specs to get certified.

Q4 earnings reports are heating up; Private equity firms get squeamish; and AI data centers are harder to build than ever.

Supply-path optimization may not be the trendiest three-letter acronym in ad tech anymore, but the SPO trend is still playing out – especially in the CTV category.

Democracy dies in darkness, but also in newspaper layoffs; The Trade Desk loses its CFO (again); and start saving up for ChatGPT ads now.

AdMonsters is officially joining AdExchanger, unifying content under one site on AdExchanger’s domain to further connect our audiences.

Bold, accountable leaders who publicly embrace conflict and challenge industry fraud are essential to spark innovation in digital advertising and ad tech, writes Alessandro De Zanche.

From headline to punchline, AdExchanger’s weekly comics distill ad tech industry news into something our readers can laugh about. These are our faves of the year.

The generative AI trend generated endless hot takes this year, but the ad industry also had plenty to say about growing competition between DSPs and SSPs. Here are AdExchanger’s top 10 most popular guest columns of 2025 and why they resonated.

Unauthorized ID stuffing, rampant reselling and misaligned signals inflict incredible damage on the programmatic ecosystem. If publishers want to compete with the walled gardens, we must raise our standards. 

Publisher comment sections remain an untapped source of intent-based data, according to Kelly Andresen, who recently left USA Today to head up comment monetization platform OpenWeb’s direct sales efforts.

On Google and Meta platforms, AI search becomes the default; TTD might cut its costs; and apparently, toddlers like AI slop on YouTube.

Spencer has exited The Trade Desk after 12 years, marking another major leadership change amid friction with ad tech trade groups and intensifying competition across the DSP landscape.

Broadsign may actually be building a platform that will make an attractive acquisition target down the road. And one of the major cross-platform Big Tech players feels like the most likely buyer.

Enjoy this weekly comic from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem … and happy Thanksgiving!

The Trade Desk gets insistent with Korai again; the EU is rethinking hashed IDS; and is the AI industry becoming a cartel?

Competitive tensions and ad tech drama have flared all year. And this drama has rippled out into the investor circle, as evident from a slew of recent ad tech company earnings reports.

Two sources at ad tech platforms that observe programmatic bidding patterns said they’ve seen Omnicom agencies shifting spend from The Trade Desk to Amazon DSP in Q3. The Trade Desk denies any such shift.

With its latest funding, Agentio plans to expand its team and to establish creator marketing as part of every advertiser’s media plan.

In July, PubMatic saw a temporary drop in ad spend from a “large” unnamed DSP partner, which contributed to Q3 revenue of $68 million, a 5% YOY decline.

Traffic-starved publishers are hopeful that their long-undervalued audience data will fuel advertising’s automated future – if only they can finally wrest control of the industry narrative away from ad tech middlemen.