TMT

TMT Weekly: The Shift to Programmatic – TTD vs The World

December 8, 2022|6 min

Austin Moorhead
Content Marketing for Stream by AlphaSense

TMT Weekly: The Shift to Programmatic – TTD vs The World

Imagine the best possible expert to interview about the shift to programmatic digital advertising. Ideally they would work at a leading programmatic advertising company and manage the account of the largest advertiser in the world.

Last week we published the transcript of an interview with a former Senior Account Manager at TTD (The Trade Desk), who managed one single account, Procter & Gamble. Bam! Nailed it.

Do I really need to convince you that the full transcript is worth a read? Either you’re in for highly efficient knowledge gain, or you’re out. If you’re in, then you can request access to Stream’s expert transcript library here.

This week’s featured transcript, Former Sr. Account Manager Believes TTD Still Has Strong Growth Potential, echoes points made by another expert about TTD’s strong position for OTT / connected TVs. Here’s a tangible example of the benefits of programmatic advertising through TTD: extending the reach of TV ad budgets.

“If you’re buying direct with CBS, ABC, and NBC and you put $250,000 on each one for a month-long campaign or a flight, Nielsen might show you that you hit the same people a bunch of different times just because they don’t talk to each other, NBC, CBS and ABC.

If you put $750,000 into The Trade Desk to spend across those three channels, your reach is going to balloon exponentially because we’ll be able to show you, “Oh, we hit this IP address on NBC last night, so we’re not going to hit the IP address on ABC tomorrow night because we already hit them. Your frequency is once a week or once a day or whatever it is.” Just by virtue of that, you’re able to expand your reach without expanding your budget.”

When I used to work in digital advertising, there was a fair amount of grumbling about how TTD was selling vaporware, and secretly they employed thousands of hands on keyboards to run campaigns like every other performance marketing agency. Even if there was some truth to that, it doesn’t appear to be the case now.

“The product itself is so good that you really don’t need that much actual support from a client services perspective. What you need is just a bunch of evangelizers.”

Wait… I’m basically an evangelizer. This post needs some balance. Here’s the expert on the competitive environment…

“When I first started, it was AppNexus [now XANDR, owned by MSFT] and Verizon and MediaMath and Criteo for retargeting. MediaMath, I stopped hearing about them.

Basically, everyone advertised on YouTube and so they would have some dollars that went to YouTube, but everything that was off YouTube was through The Trade Desk.

Amazon and Verizon became the bigger players that we were competing against. The only time I heard about losing to someone like Verizon was because of their data sets, because they had cell phone data that we didn’t. At the time, Amazon was not competitive in PTV or audio.”

GOOGL, AMZN, MSFT, VZ… that’s a terrifying list of competitors. There are still good reasons to believe in TTD, which you can find in the full transcript (Former Sr. Account Manager Believes TTD Still Has Strong Growth Potential).

Fresh Webcast – Nov 17

Yesterday we opened registration for our next webcast, The Dark Matter of Finance: How Intangible Assets Influence Modern Markets. Look at this killer lineup. It’s live and includes a Q&A session at the end.