The Trade Desk Launches Kokai – a New Media Buying Platform that Brings the Full Power of AI to Digital Marketing

Global advertising technology leader The Trade Desk (Nasdaq: TTD) today launched Kokai, a new approach to digital advertising innovation that incorporates major advances in distributed artificial intelligence (AI), measurement, partner integrations and a revolutionary, intuitive user experience. With these innovations and others, Kokai ensures that marketers at all levels can easily benefit from the full power and sophistication of programmatic advertising.

In a major advancement in programmatic AI, Kokai distributes deep learning algorithms across all aspects of the digital media buying process. With access to more than 13 million advertising impressions every second, each of which may contain thousands of distinct signals, Kokai’s AI innovations serve as a co-pilot to the programmatic marketer, helping make sense of that complexity in a few milliseconds – in order to help advertisers buy the right ad impressions, at the right price, to reach the target audience at the best time.

Kokai’s distributed AI capabilities build on The Trade Desk’s pioneering AI work with Koa, launched in 2018. While Koa assisted the marketer in setting up campaigns based on business objectives and optimizing based on performance, Kokai distributes the power of Koa’s AI across various aspects of media buying on The Trade Desk platform. This includes predictive clearing, which ensures traders make bids at the optimal level; scoring every ad impression based on relevance to the advertiser; upgrading measurement and forecasting; increasing resilience, even in the absence of identifiers; budget optimization; and KPI scoring.

“The Trade Desk benefits from a rich yet highly complex dataset with very high integrity. With Kokai, we are able to help our clients make sense of that data with AI, and help the marketer make the best decisions at every turn,” said Jeff Green, Founder and CEO, The Trade Desk. “Building on our ground-breaking work with Koa, we are distributing AI across our platform, so that it can serve as an expertly trained co-pilot to today’s modern marketer.”

Measurement Innovations – Free Retail Measurement from Select Retail Pioneers

Kokai will also feature major new innovations in digital advertising measurement. As more advertisers embrace the power of connected TV (CTV) and retail media marketing opportunities, there is more demand to develop new ways to measure performance in these key channels. With Kokai, The Trade Desk will be launching:

• Added-value retail measurement data from pioneer retailers including Albertsons Media Collective, Walgreens Advertising Group, and others when audience data is turned on.
• The Retail Sales Index – A new benchmark for measuring online and offline retail sales against retail ad spend – in one place.
• The TV Quality Index – Measuring the quality of the ad experience that the viewer is having across all streaming platforms and streaming content, to ensure that every campaign targets the most relevant inventory for any specific audience group.
• The Quality Reach Index – Helping marketers expand their loyal customer base by accurately targeting the most relevant customer profiles.

 

Partner Portal for Simple, Seamless Integrations

Considering the accelerated rate and pace of innovation in advertising technology, Kokai will also feature the Partner Portal, where thousands of new partners will be able to integrate directly with The Trade Desk using simple, standard adapters. As a result, advertisers will have access to a wide array of trusted partners and services, creating an essential innovation hub of the open internet. At launch, the Partner Portal will incorporate standard adapters for key areas such as OpenPath, Unified ID 2.0, retail onboarding, measurement and third-party audience data and contextual targeting. In alpha phase, the Partner Portal has successfully helped more than 400 partners integrate seamlessly over the last two quarters.

The Programmatic Table

In terms of user experience, Kokai will incorporate a revolutionary new design based on the Periodic Table. The Programmatic Table will offer an intuitive cockpit that harnesses the full power of programmatic for all users – from power traders to CMOs. It allows the user to move intuitively through the media buying process, from human decisioning through AI support, with all campaign information and relevant data surfaced on the main campaign view. Already available for select users, The Programmatic Table will launch for all users later this summer.

“Programmatic advertising has evolved rapidly over the last five years, and we need to ensure that we surface the full power of data-driven decisioning for all marketers as intuitively as possible,” said Green. “Kokai’s innovations in areas such as advanced measurement, collaborative innovation, and a radical new UX will ensure The Trade Desk remains at the forefront of programmatic innovation in service of value for marketers.”

The Trade Desk is unveiling Kokai at a launch event today in New York City, featuring Jeff Green, Founder and CEO of The Trade Desk; Kristi Argyilan, SVP, Retail Media, Albertsons Media Collective; Marcy Greenberger, EVP, Managing Partner, UM/IPG; and Diego Vaccarezza, VP, Enterprise Media, CVS Health. The event will also be available via livestream.