Call just ended, I wasn’t able to sit and take notes, but if you own shares or are thinking of buying some, I recommend listening to at least the beginning of it when they put the recording of the replay on the investor relations site. The first 15 minutes or so Jeff Green really explains well why the opportunities and TAM for them will be so huge and why TTD is so well positioned (and hence why TTD is one of my biggest holdings).
http://investors.thetradedesk.com/news-releases
It’s actually worth listening to the whole call and the Q&A if you are able to just throw on headphones in the office tomorrow while you’re working on something, as there really wasn’t anything that was overly techy-speak or too ad-industry focused, it’s easy to follow everything they are talking about, especially compared to some of the calls they do for the other cloud companies we follow.
Couple things I found interesting
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they talked about how when baseball games go into extra innings, that is sometimes the most watched, highest ratings part of the game, yet traditionally the station has had to almost give away the ads during extra innings since nobody would predict in advance that the game would go for an extra hour and place an advertisement purchase based on that. As connected tv becomes more mainstream, they can check real-time demand for those slots (and vice versa advertisers can check out real-time supply for ad space that suddenly looks a lot more valuable) and connect buyers and sellers to get the right ads in front of the right eyeballs for pricing that is good for the content owner (tv station) and also valuable to the advertiser.
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the last question of the Q&A was about their audio (non-video) ad business, which I don’t typically think about much with TTD, but apparently is growing very fast (the caller said almost as fast as connected TV). Apparently those ads are valuable because the times that people are listening to audio ads (when working out at the gym or driving in a car, etc) are times when they are less likely to skip through an ad, or to ignore the advertisement, so better engagement which is great for advertisers, compared to if they are sitting at their computer watching videos on youtube, etc.
-mekong