The Trade Desk is muscling its way into the TV operating system business with its Ventura OS – but the real story isn’t the product itself. It’s what TTD’s ambitions reveal about conflicts of interest within the industry and the inherent mismatch between consumer and advertiser needs.
Ventura launched in November 2024 to try and capture some of the ad dollars flowing to smart TV makers reinventing themselves as ads businesses. TTD sells the idea of Ventura to device manufacturers as a way to boost monetization, while the pitch to publishers and buyers is the offer of a transparent ad model without any favoritism. Or so the story goes.
“We do not have our own content service, nor do we re-bundle and aggregate other people’s content,” which would create a conflict of interest between publishers and distributors, said Rob Caruso, Ventura’s SVP of consumer products, speaking on a panel at StreamTV Show in Denver this week. I was there.
Caruso’s remarks are a shot fired at Google, Amazon and Roku, all of which operate video distribution, content and advertising businesses simultaneously. If a brand buys media through Amazon’s DSP, for example, Amazon is arguably incentivized to funnel more of those dollars toward Prime Video and Fire TV Channels to grow its owned-and-operated properties.
These conflicts of interest could also exist in deals that distributors strike with streaming platforms. During an unrelated session at StreamTV, analysts from Hub Entertainment Research and TVRev acknowledged that the unique relationship programming distributors broker with streaming services may start to affect how and where distributors steer ad budgets.
So how exactly is The Trade Desk, a demand-side platform, staying neutral when running an operating system with advertising? And is it possible that The Trade Desk’s relationships with individual publishers could influence how Ventura manages ad commitments for its OS?
“Emphatically, no,” Caruso responded when I asked him those questions after Wednesday’s panel. “At Ventura, we don’t manage those inventory partnerships,” he said, “and they don’t factor into Ventura’s ad product.” From the OS perspective, he added, “when you start trying to shape” the flow of ad dollars based on publisher relationships, “you lose objectivity.”
Instead, Ventura passes ad engagement data from its OS environment to The Trade Desk’s DSP to help buyers make more informed decisions about the ad inventory they’re buying based on their own objectives. The data only flows in one direction between the DSP and the OS.
Go big or go home screen
During a different session at StreamTV, Ed Lee, VP of business strategy and partnerships at Ventura, said that TTD’s goal for its OS is “creating better signal for both advertisers and publishers, so publishers get a sense of where a [bid] is coming from and advertisers get a better sense of where their ad dollars are being spent.”
In other words, Ventura wants to appeal to both the buy- and sell sides by promising them their two deepest desires: transparency and performance.
Both sides can make better media decisions if they get more details about campaign goals and delivery, which in turn increases ad effectiveness. Ventura executives seem optimistic that the OS is well-positioned to meet these needs because it can access the full TV viewing journey, including exposure on smart TV home screens, the next frontier for CTV ad dollars.
Many smart TV device makers are keen to sell more ad space on the home screen interface. Samsung announced last week that it’s making its home screen ad inventory available programmatically, for example, and Roku relaunched its home screen interface last month in an effort to appease both advertisers and consumers.
Ventura’s team has also zeroed in on an increasingly familiar consumer complaint, which is that home screens are starting to look like digital billboards.
“Just because there is a canvas for advertising doesn’t mean you want to just jam more ads in,” Lee said. “We don’t believe that more ads are better, we believe more targeted ads are better because we don’t want ads to be viewed as an intrusion.”
While that sentiment conveniently supports Ventura’s “Switzerland of TV operating systems” sales pitch, Lee isn’t wrong. Plenty of smart TV owners complain that their screens are being overwhelmed with ads.
As an OS operator, getting in the way of letting consumers discover content is a major no-no, Caruso said, otherwise you “deviate from what users are looking for.”
What’s next?
Ventura has a tidy story for the ad ecosystem, but what’s less clear is how The Trade Desk plans to generate scale and boost adoption when the OS ecosystem is already so saturated.
For hardware manufacturers, “there is a significant cost of swapping out the software that powers these devices,” Caruso told AdExchanger, which means device makers need a very compelling argument to make the switch.
But Ventura isn’t quite as boxed in as it appears. Some popular OEMs use multiple OS partners to power their device lines, Caruso pointed out. TCL is one example because it uses both the Android TV and Roku OS to build its TVs. Plus, Caruso said, programming distributors can use customized versions of the Ventura OS that caters to their objectives. For example, The Trade Desk and DirecTV announced plans late last year to develop a custom Ventura OS version that integrates DirecTV’s own streaming interface.
When I asked Caruso about Ventura’s scale and adoption today, he said “the dots are starting to connect.” Most recently, in February, Ventura unveiled its Ventura Ecosystem to make its monetization features more accessible for existing and prospective clients. Collaborators include V, the OS formerly known as VIDAA, and programmatic ad platform Nexxen.
Ventura has more updates cooking, but they still need more time to simmer, according to Caruso. Ventura OS is in user testing, he said, and there are “a number of folks lined up” for possible integrations down the line.
It will take time, he added, but Ventura is playing the long game.
