The Trade Desk is the eponymous flagship product from the company headquartered in Ventura California, a demand-side / data management hybrid platform (DSP / DMP).
After extensive research of DSP and DMP platforms in the market, our agency made the wise decision to license TTD's platform and develop a long-term partnership. TTD continues to innovate and offer cutting-edge media buying solutions, access to more audience data segments, and access to new and emerging media channels like CTV/OTT and digital-out-of-home. We couldn't be happier with TTD's technology and is one of the most advanced agency users of TTD is a key differentiator for our agency.
The vendor needs to fit the client so the reason I worked with them was that they were not too big or too small for our organization. Also, they were more likely to adapt to our workflow which is great as some vendors in this space wanted us to conform to their processes, which was not wanted.
Campaign set up in our ad server at the time, 27/7 Real Media's OAS platform.
Post-campaign reporting.
Our main point of contact, I believe her name was Nafisa, was extremely friendly and became an extension of the team. She really was fun to work with and professional.
Reporting platform leaves a lot to be desired. Requires a lot of trial/error to pull exactly what you need to drive optimizations/learnings.
The "stop"/"continue bidding" feature for sitelists, devices, player sizes, etc is awful. When you set something up specifically, you should not have the AUTOMATIC option to serve beyond those parameters.
Trafficking video (VAST/VPAID) tags requires a manual insertion of a click URL. Completely redundant ask and is not provided by advertisers as that URL lives within the ad tag. Should not require multiple actions traffic a video tag.
Creative approval process (manual) doesn't seem necessary and is not a part of peers' platforms. There is no "pause/deactivate" feature for creative, you remove them or adjust the end date.
They had their own ad server and there were regular efforts to get us to move to that ad server which was not industry standard at the time. We already an agreement in place with OAS and also used DFP via agency access but they pushed to use this server and it was not something I really needed to keep discussing with them.
It's very intuitive. We had some training materials, but found that users were able to navigate through the software without needing many resources. Our only suggestion would be to add hover-over capability in the browser, so users can see a pop-up message further explaining what each button does.
We noted no issues with our limited interaction with support. The software operated just as expected and we found that we were able to navigate needs on our own. We understand that The Trade Desk offers excellent support, so we believe it will be a good resource to us in the future.
The Trade Desk is a much better product than AppNexus. Even though both products showed promise awhile back, AppNexus stopped innovating and The Trade Desk became specialists on data, cross site tracking and CTV inventory thus having a better and more unique product that actually adds value to your advertising efforts.
I worked with a company called Asentech whose core competence at the time was not campaign management. Zedo replaced them and did a great job. I have since evaluated Theorem, OAO and YourBow and Zedo offers as much if not more than those companies.
The good thing about having an agency account is The Trade Desk lets you add your markups to the client billing.
We had a very positive response from clients regarding their perceived ROI on their ad spend through The Trade Desk.
We did not have many national clients, mostly local dealerships, so it was difficult for them to allocate a lot of funds to display advertising, even though the ROI yield was acceptable.
At the beginning of the month, we had a crush of new campaigns to launch and they stepped up their game to get this accomplished. Also, reporting was done very quickly with a lot of insight into campaign optimization.
