The Trade Desk Investor Relations Material

The Trade Desk is a leading global technology company that specializes in programmatic advertising, a method that automates the buying and selling of digital advertising space in real time. Founded in 2009 by Jeff Green and Dave Pickles, The Trade Desk provides media buyers with a platform to manage data-driven digital advertising campaigns across various channels, including display, video, audio, and social media. By utilizing data analytics and algorithms, the platform allows advertisers to target specific audiences, ensuring that ads reach the most relevant viewers while optimizing the advertiser's spend.

The Trade Desk was founded in 2009 by Jeff Green and Dave Pickles who met when they both worked for Microsoft. The duo recognized the evolving landscape of digital advertising and the potential of programmatic buying. Their idea was to revolutionize the way media is bought and sold by using real-time bidding technology. Green, with a background in online advertising, combined his industry insights with Pickles' technical expertise to create a platform to address inefficiencies in the market and offer greater transparency to advertisers.

The Trade Desk operates as a sophisticated digital platform tailored for programmatic advertising. At its core, it offers advertisers a centralized dashboard from which they can design, execute, and analyze ad campaigns across various digital channels. By integrating vast amounts of data, the platform facilitates precise targeting, ensuring ads reach specific audiences based on a myriad of attributes like demographics and behaviors. Throughout, advertisers are presented with a transparent view that provides comprehensive analytics, offering insights into how their campaigns are performing.

Real-time bidding (RTB) has transformed the digital advertising landscape completely. Instead of pre-purchasing ad space, advertisers, via platforms like The Trade Desk or one offered by their competitors (primarily Meta and Alphabet), bid on ad impressions in real-time, vying for the chance to display their ad to a specific user. Each of these bidding events happens in milliseconds, as a user loads a web page or app. The advertiser willing to pay the highest price wins the bid and their ad is promptly displayed to the user. RTB ensures that advertisers can tailor their messaging to the right audience at the right time, optimizing ad spend. For publishers, it translates to maximizing the revenue potential of their ad spaces by always selling to the highest bidder.