Here’s the heart of it:
Kokai’s distributed AI capabilities build on The Trade Desk’s pioneering AI work with Koa, launched in 2018. While Koa assisted the marketer in setting up campaigns based on business objectives and optimizing based on performance, Kokai distributes the power of Koa’s AI across various aspects of media buying on The Trade Desk platform. This includes predictive clearing, which ensures traders make bids at the optimal level; scoring every ad impression based on relevance to the advertiser; upgrading measurement and forecasting; increasing resilience, even in the absence of identifiers; budget optimization; and KPI scoring.
“The Trade Desk benefits from a rich yet highly complex dataset with very high integrity. With Kokai, we are able to help our clients make sense of that data with AI, and help the marketer make the best decisions at every turn,” said Jeff Green, Founder and CEO, The Trade Desk.
Of course AI is all about the data and, like other large platforms, TTD has a ton of data. Others on this board are better equipped to evaluate the technical aspects of this announcement, but the release describes what seems to me to be a very robust and helpful tool for its customers.
I’m noting in the language that Kokai is the not just the release of an additional module or program. They are releasing an entire platform. This makes their already-wide moat much wider, imo.
There’s apparently a launch event in NYC today, which I’ll have to try to find and watch later.
Included in the new platform is a Partner Portal…
where thousands of new partners will be able to integrate directly with The Trade Desk using simple, standard adapters. As a result, advertisers will have access to a wide array of trusted partners and services, creating an essential innovation hub of the open internet. At launch, the Partner Portal will incorporate standard adapters for key areas such as OpenPath, Unified ID 2.0, retail onboarding, measurement and third-party audience data and contextual targeting. In alpha phase, the Partner Portal has successfully helped more than 400 partners integrate seamlessly over the last two quarters.
TTD is currently sitting as my top position at 16.88% and is one of only three of my companies with total gains in the green, up 11.03% since I bought it in August of 22.
The other two with total gains in the green are GLBE (up 28.47% since I bought back in–also last August–and now 15.28% of my portfolio) and Braze (BRZE), which is up 12.59% since I bought last month and is an 8.22% position.
JabbokRiver