The Trade Desk ($TTD) – Case Study – June 22, 2024
The Trade Desk’s take rate of roughly 20% is among the highest in business-to-business enterprise software. It has been remarkably stable since it went public nearly a decade ago, and that makes perfect sense. The company simply provides superior value to its customers. They do this by infusing more customer data into every ad-buying decision. It’s morphing the purchase of millions of impressions, months in advance to buying impressions a few at a time and in real-time. It pushes advertising from “spray and pray” to being able to precisely connect dollars spent to revenue generated.
It pairs this superior targeting with a cross-channel identifier, which means buyers know who to reach and how to reach them. Whether it’s television, audio, mobile, desktop, gaming etc. The Trade Desk “buys the entire open internet” on behalf of its customers and makes sure client campaigns are more successful than they can be anywhere else. That is The Trade Desk value proposition in a nutshell.
The effect is cutting impression booking costs in half, or said another way, doubling the return on ad spend (ROAS) that it delivers to its buyers vs. others. The ROAS boost is often even higher. When considering this, of course it makes sense that TTD demands a durable 20% take rate with near-perfect gross revenue retention. And while that formula is clear at this point, it’s still nice to reiterate it with more case studies. This week, TTD published a new case study with U.S. Cellular. The vendor wanted to bolster its advertising reach across premium programming.
With TTD, it raised conversion by 71%, reach by 66% and lowered cost per customer acquisition by 24%. Not only does this bode well for TTD’s value proposition overall, but also for the continued shift away from walled garden, user-generated content (UGC), to premium content (TTD’s specialty). UGC has a way of driving risky scenarios for quality brands that don’t want to be associated with inappropriate materials. TTD’s premium TV quantity index (TVQI) ensures companies remove these impressions from their campaign bidding to eliminate brand safety concerns. Yet another reason why all publishers, agencies and retailers are flocking to this platform.
