Top 10 Stories of 2025
This year, programmatic companies faced tough decisions about privacy, awkward acquisitions and the cookie die-off that never quite happened.
This year, programmatic companies faced tough decisions about privacy, awkward acquisitions and the cookie die-off that never quite happened.
Inside Omnicom’s shift in spend from The Trade Desk DSP to Amazon DSP.
Shortly after Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green said the DSP would splinter off from Prebid, he showed up at the Prebid Summit. Then, at ScreenShift, we learn what the TV industry thinks about AI.
With its PubDesk wrapper, The Trade Desk is putting roots into ad tech’s sell side. But publishers are wary.
Change can be bumpy. From The Trade Desk’s Solimar-to-Kokai transition to Nielsen’s transition to its Big Data + Panel offering, we go inside customers’ challenges with these two transforming platforms.
M&A started off with a bang in 2025. T-Mobile bought Vistar Media, and The Trade Desk bought Sincera. With a special guest from LUMA Partners, Conor McKenna, we explore the rationale for these ad tech acquisitions.
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. To The Core Nielsen is trimming its workforce – again – and by quite a lot this time, Ad Age reports. On Wednesday, the TV ratings giant announced plans to cut its global personnel by around 9% “in an effort to bring costs […]
AppLovin wants Unity – but only if Unity calls off its planned acquisition of ironSource. Why doesn’t AppLovin want ironSource? And how is Apple’s ATT driving consolidation in mobile ad tech? Listen in. Plus: The Trade Desk claims to benefit whenever a regulator starts investigating Google.
The app-based phone service TextNow, which offers free calls and texting subsidized by ads, is especially vulnerable to the ongoing deprecation of mobile device IDs. So TextNow started testing alternate IDs, turning to InMobi’s UnifID and LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS) and RampID.
Wall Street can’t get enough of ad tech – creating a hot market for stocks and making quarterly earnings a who’s who of ad tech companies. Not so long ago, the ad tech bellwethers were The Trade Desk and Magnite, but earnings season now features a parade of companies young and old: PubMatic, DoubleVerify, Viant, […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Opening The Books Amazon is acquiescing to an audit by the Media Rating Council of the online retailer’s ad tech. Amazon’s demand-side platform saw tremendous growth in Q1 as ad revenue soared nearly 90% year over year. Sponsored Products – Amazon’s cost-per-click product listing […]
The sun hasn’t been shining on Wall Street this week as tech stocks dipped precipitously – The Trade Desk among them. Despite turning in decent earnings, TTD’s stock dove by more than 25%, making it one of the most affected of the ad tech bunch. It was a surprising development after more than a year […]
The Trade Desk beat its own expectations for Q1, but Wall Street wasn’t pleased. The stock is currently tumbling, down more than 25% in the hours after the earnings call. The Trade Desk reported revenue of $219.8 million and adjusted EBITDA of $70.5 million, which is 32% of revenue. The company said its adjusted EBITDA […]
A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…
On Thursday, Publicis-owned Epsilon became the latest company to support Unified ID 2.0. UID 2.0 is an open-source industry initiative, originated by The Trade Desk, that aims to develop an alternative to third-party cookies by replacing them with hashed or encrypted email addresses. Specifically, Publicis clients can activate Epsilon’s proprietary CORE ID (which stands for […]
This week, The Big Story records live at AdExchanger’s digital conference: Innovation Labs. While our April 20 one-day event will focus on Ecommerce, and our May 18 event will focus on CTV, our event on March 16 was all about Identity. And the big story around identity, no pun intended, is that it’s still a […]
Despite the pandemic, The Trade Desk’s year over year Q4 growth accelerated in 2020, increasing revenue 48% to $320 million. In Q4 2019, the demand-side platform’s revenue grew 35%. In 2020, marketers using the Trade Desk’s sent $4.2 billion in ad spend through the demand-side platform. Spurred by the pandemic, they doubled the amount they […]
Walmart is building infrastructure to support its fast-growing retail media business. After more than a year of testing, it settled on a custom-built version of the Trade Desk DSP. AdExchanger first reported last January that Walmart was testing two rival DSPs, the Trade Desk and Xandr. Walmart’s DSP is a separate, walled-off version of the […]
Holy stock market obliteration, Batman! The Trade Desk continued its meteoric trajectory, when it reported Q3 revenue of $216 million on Thursday, a 32% YoY increase, and a 45% leap from the previous quarter. Its stock price Friday morning was more than 25% and still on an upward trajectory, and it has a market cap […]
The quest to figure out the future of online identity continues. Between Google’s birdcage and the indie ad tech solutions under development, a lot of smart minds are coming together to try and solve the problem with their own twist. But could these solutions end up creating new privacy challenges? One underreported problem is the […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Unified Criteo and The Trade Desk might be competitors by day, but the future of identity, privacy and the open internet calls for collaboration. The day after TTD partnered with LiveRamp on the Unified ID 2.0 initiative, Criteo said that it too will lend […]
The coronavirus pandemic brought everyone online, leading to a surge in traffic. But it’s expensive to process all the programmatic ad requests that come with that traffic. Plus, CPMs are falling industrywide. So two weeks ago, The Trade Desk asked exchanges to stop sending duplicate bid requests for the same ad impression. The request initially […]
The advertising industry today is largely the product of tremendous M&A activity. AdExchanger looked at the acquisitions that made the biggest impact in the past decade. Impact can mean many things. Some of these startups flourished under their new owners, showing worth far more than their deal price. Others, purchased during their downfall, reflect the […]
How does a smaller DSP survive, as the largest buying platforms command more of the marketplace? For Dstillery, the answer is to become a data company. Dstillery officially shut down its bidder and stopped operating a DSP on July 1. Its focus now is selling custom audience segments through the buyer’s DSP of choice. Since […]
The Trade Desk and Google are locking horns on pending industry specifications designed to bring transparency to programmatic buying. Why? The Trade Desk, rather than Google, is the one throwing its weight around for a change. As one of the originators of the Open RTB SupplyChain object spec, The Trade Desk has been gunning to […]
Linear TV may provide massive reach, but WD-40 had a particular audience in mind for its most recent campaign: a subset of millennial workers with jobs in hands-on industries. And so WD-40 turned to connected TV, focusing on a branding message celebrating “doers.” Executing its branding campaign programmatically allowed WD-40 to target that high-level message […]
Demand-side platforms (DSPs) make money by taking a percentage of the media buys that flow through their technology – and from lots of other hidden extras they charge for. Interviews with more than a dozen sources reveal that even as marketers make progress in understanding what they’re paying for, nontransparent fees abound in the DSP […]
Oracle DMP has always had a comfortably high perch in terms of advertiser recognition and adoption. And make no mistake – it still does. But Salesforce DMP has reached some pretty high branches in the year since the Krux acquisition, according to Advertiser Perceptions’ Q3 Programmatic Intelligence Report, released Wednesday. The findings come from a […]
Despite the amount of attention Facebook Exchange generated when it was released way back in 2012, today it’s mostly focused on retargeting desktop users. Consequently, some ad industry insiders are skeptical of its future. When asked directly about FBX’s future at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview conference, David Fischer, Facebook’s VP of business and marketing partnerships, said […]