The Trade Desk investor day was March 6 and the slides from several different presentations are available on their investor page or stringed together in its entirety on Seeking Alpha.
Some interesting data in there about the total US ad spend on programmatic CTV spend which was $1.75B in 2018. That TTD believes CTV will be their #1 channel by spend eventually. That TTD has 46,000 advertisers using their platform, up from 37,000 in 2017. Mostly through their ad agencies of which 742 use the trade desk.
I think an interesting discussion can be had around one set of slides titled “the mindset of a cmo in the digital age”
https://thetradedesk.gcs-web.com/static-files/dce05346-2f82-…
Slide 26 of 29 shows the market makeup of demand side platforms in terms of awareness, usage, and intention to use in future.
What stands out is that TTD is the leading DSP that is media independent. IE Amazon advertising platform and google’s DoubleClick. Starting with Amazon because they seem to be a thorn in most of our companies’ side. There is an older report of this where TTD was number 5 or 6, and they have moved up solidly to #3.
Amazon DSP is not quite the same comparable to TTD. It appears to exist largely for the benefit of Amazon. It is the only place to DSP for Amazon supplied media. Such as Amazon.com, iMDB, FireTV, Prime Video, etc. That alone probably makes up the majority of their inventory and the bulk of where their usage numbers get filled from. The other caveat is that the supply can’t be used to direct to a competitor’s website but only to the brand website or to Amazon market place.
For instance if Apple(just as an example) wants to advertise an iPad on abc.com the ad link could redirect to an iPad on Amazon marketplace or to Apple.com but not say to bestbuy.com or another retailer. Here’s a discription of what I mean.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kirimasters/2018/06/08/a-simple…
It enables advertisers to reach Amazon’s audiences on third party sites and apps through ad formats
An AAP media buy is the only way advertisers can specifically target Amazon shoppers off of Amazon, and AAP is also the only way advertisers can buy ad space on Amazon’s own websites.
AAP campaigns can be effective with building brand and product awareness. But if a company’s intention is to spend on advertising with a direct impact on sales, AAP may not be the most effective use of their marketing dollars.
They show an example on Forbes.com. You can see the ad linked on the right side to a product in Amazon marketplace. Amazon DSP is the only way to display that on that or any website because of Amazon’s walled garden.
It’s rather brilliant for Amazon getting other companies to pay for advertising products on Amazon’s own platform. Kind of like shared marketing. Both the supply and the demand tie into Amazon space.
Haven’t look too much into DoubleClick and if they have have a similar dynamic where a bulk of their usage is tied to Alphabet owned supply. The point being if you boil it down to the pure part that is really non Amazon or non google supply or demand what would that portion of the usage look like.
Darth