Adtech heavyweight The Trade Desk has inked deals with a handful of key Chinese partners, dangling before global marketers potential access to the nation’s 753 million mobile Internet users.
The agreements — with Baidu Exchange Services; iQIYI, Baidu’s video streaming service; Tencent Social Ads; and Youku, Alibaba’s video streaming service — will let The Trade Desk’s participating clients use its platform to reach a massive Chinese audience directly. It said China has 772 Internet-connected adults and 400 million people in its growing middle class.
The announcement came as an upbeat report Stateside depicted digital advertising as a veritable halo of shooting stars, with surges in total spending, mobile, video and just about every other metric in the first half of 2018. The Trade Desk is a pioneer and innovator in a competitive and confusing space where an army of digital advertising players are tumbling over each other for this business.
The name of the company, based in Ventura, Calif., is a pun on Wall Street trading desks, offering a self-service, cloud-based platform for ad buyers. Clients can create, manage, and optimize data-driven digital advertising campaigns across ad formats — from display to video, audio, native, and social — and across devices. Partners in data, inventory, and publishing ensure reach, and programming interfaces allow companies to customize the platform.
Last summer, The Trade Desk announced a trio of new upgrade products it collectively called The Next Wave: Koa is an artificial intelligence technology to improve advertiser decision making and speed up performance; The Trade Desk Planner is a data-driven media planning tool; and Megagon is a user interface to proactively deliver customized insights and recommendations.
The firm, with offices across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, had also indicated that China would be a particular focus.
Founder-CEO Jeff Green said during a conference call last week to discuss quarterly earnings, that 42 percent of clients have upgraded to the new products and all have seen improved performance.
Next Wave is “the best explanation as to why the data spend was up so much more," Green said, "because we just made it easier for them to make data-driven decisions and when they do that, it just increases efficacy that increases retention and the flywheel spins faster.”
The Trade Desk saw revenue surge 50 percent to $119 million and earnings per share jump 86 percent for the latest quarter.
