Soundtrack:

Table of Contents

• My Villainous Youth

• The Trade Desk’s Two Clear Moral Positions

• Stop Caring About The Stock Price

• Unconditional Love And Money

• But Performance!

• Hot Garbage and the Bad Haircut

• But Audience Data!

• Would Saving TTD Help The Good, Free Internet?

• The Cautionary Tale For Us All

My Villainous Youth

Digital media investment people are nihilists. It takes one to know one, and I have literally been called a “Digital Media Nihilist.”

It’s my second favorite insult ever aimed at me, right behind “pathologically charismatic.”

An agency trading operations leader I will call “Go Off” lobbed this nihilist epithet at me when I was at Moxie / Zenith in 2015 or so, and while I can’t remember exactly what we were arguing about in that moment, I can tell you counter positions we took very relevant to this week.

Mr. Go Off was a big fan of $TTD ( ▼ 0.44% ) because he felt it gave his team at Vivaki or Audience On Demand or whatever they were calling the programmatic desk at Publicis at that point the best tools to use their expertise and context to make good, human-informed programmatic buys.

I was in the process of getting ready to put Google’s DSP in play, which was essentially in direct defiance of my employer’s longstanding unofficial policy to give the big G the cold shoulder.

I thought this Google DSP abstinence was kind of silly and purely theatrical, because our clients already spent insane gobs of money with Google on paid search. Ah, to be young and foolish again; I later took a stance of “the bare minimum I can do to stop this dominance is abstain from using Google tools to buy non-Google inventory.”

Bringing on major ad platforms that were either not as ubiquitous, or even dare I say, nascent, had kind of been my whole deal at this job.

The Amazon DSP was then known as AAP and, believe it or not, had little adoption, especially among brands that weren’t selling goods on Amazon. I learned the only thing my team had said was preventing them from trying it before I arrived was that they weren’t integrated with IAS, to which I let loose a hearty:

My main client became, I think, one of the largest non e-com spenders on Amazon’s DSP, piloted their self-service model for our own desk, and their sales team ended up so comfortable that when they got a shot to pitch every other buying team in our building, they came without slides and the core of their pitch was “it just works.'“

While you’re getting mad I should give you some additional context and fuel for that fire: this was after I had already aggressively blown out our Meta spend because I was much more familiar with that channel from my previous role as a biddable media buyer than all these wacky DSPs I had only recently learned about.

A senior leader some of us affectionately referred to as Uncle A had already told me I should be careful where I spent the insane gobs of money we had, because in the amounts we dispensed it, we were shaping the landscape and the future of digital media buying technology.

Sage words, Uncle A! Unfortunately, here is who he was talking to:

I didn’t care! I was getting paid $75k to manage hundreds of millions of dollars of media spend, which I had saved clients tens of millions of dollars on, and I had just moved to NYC and I just wanted to black out at St. Vitus all the time.

This was a problem for any media buying platform attempting to appeal to me on altruistic, ideological grounds.

The good news for me is that I changed, and I now have much greater consciousness of how my professional and personal choices affect the internet and the world.

The bad news is nobody else changed; they mostly got worse, and a lot of them were only pretending to care about anything in the first place.

Let’s talk about why this matters for TTD and what people should do about it if they think they do care.

The Trade Desk’s Two Clear Moral Positions

The first and most important position TTD take is that news and journalism and freedom of information are important, and this means The Open Web (or “The Premium Web”) is important, and their company’s mission is to support that.

This is hard to disagree with if you don’t work at one of the tech + media megaplatforms, and so all quibbles with it, my own and other peoples’, generally hinge on “how sincere is this, or how achievable is this?”

I have always thought the latter-that it was a morally wonderful but absolutely delusional idea-was the greater issue, and that’s what we’re seeing manifest.

This manifestation has been accelerated by TTD going back on their other major position: support for ad agencies over direct relationships with brands.

I will get to how I think this was a terrible idea in the long run in a moment, but I have to say that at the time, this was brilliant.

It was brilliant because media agencies, and most ad platforms’ opinions of them, were much worse even back in 2015 than I think most people remember.

Big 6 stocks weren’t constantly swan diving into the toilet like they are now, but there was already a very real feeling that media agencies’ place in the world was beginning to erode in ways that seemed serious and irreversible.

It really was a bet on the opposite side of the table from a lot of money to favor agencies for TTD to make at the time.

At the same time, the 2010’s was definitely a better time for media agencies than it is now, even if signs had begun to appear that things were souring. There were lots of viable revenue sources on the media agency side for TTD to tap into, even if those cash piles had a whiff of doom about them.

So in this regard, I think it was truly one of the great short term bets I have seen made in American business, just the right mix of safe and risky.

The problem, of course, is the other half of their mission, and their status as a company that requires people to have some kind of altruistic belief in said mission and the betterment of the world.

While I have already referred to two people at media agencies who were more forward thinking and for-the-good-of-all oriented than I was in 2015, and noted that they even tried to guide me towards a better path, here’s the thing: these people were the extreme exception to a pretty ironclad reality.

That reality is that there is probably no class of business it’s worse to count on to take up some kind of moral cause to better the world, at personal cost to itself, than media agencies.

It’s not that they’re morally or ethically worse than many similar industries. I wouldn’t expect management consultants, or accountants, or lawyers to support their industry equivalent of The Trade Desk.

It’s that their business models were so clearly under pressure and ready to come apart that they were clearly going to lack the capacity to lose so much as a single penny in the name of Defending the Open Internet and Journalism.

So, TTD did the inevitable: they abandoned their agency favoring ways to go brand direct, losing the goodwill of the former and failing to gain traction with the latter as quickly as they would have hoped, especially among anything but the world’s largest advertisers.

I think ultimately, this betrayal came too late. It was a good idea to start with that agency focus, but I think the scuttling of being the large media agencies’ favorite toy in favor of going brand direct should have happened very quickly.

What I would have done is, while maintaining those large agency relationships, build out an organization to sell to smedium and medium brands, a class of advertiser TTD relegated to their reseller program, and still are sorely absent from.

Large agencies can’t get mad at you for recruiting brand direct clients too small for them to even care about, and large agency budget floors are quite high. They could have loaded up a large client roster spending up to $25MM annually, building out revenue in an entire new market sector poised for more growth than the average business.

Of course, this advice is easy to give from 2025, but I have for a long time told people I think TTD’s focus on Very Large Advertisers Only was a disappointing mistake. This kept a big part of the CTV market open for things like MNTN, Vibe, Tatari, Viant and the like.

Anyway, if we still love their mission and support them, what could we do? I’m not saying I’m in that camp, but I can answer the question.

Stop Caring About The Stock Price

It’s wild how many ad buying people write huge screeds in which all they do is talk about TTD’s stock performance, and then disclose they neither own any of the stock nor are shorting it.

What are you doing with your life? Why do you care this much?

I think some of them would say they need the company to be healthy and grow in order to build a competitive feature set, but that’s horse hockey.

An ad platform’s reach doesn’t drop when it misses earnings, and when they’re cash flush, it leads to stock buybacks or ill-advised M&A more often than smart investment in the platform’s features.

Also, my dear readers-it’s never going to be as high a number as you’re hoping.

The only way to become a titan of digital advertising is to be a fully-contained consumer media platform that exerts total control over inventory, data, user graphs, etc.

No exceptions to the rule.

This means that TTD’s very mission was a declaration that they would never challenge the valuations of Google, Meta, and Amazon’s ad platforms.

The thing is, they were purportedly doing that on behalf of the media investment people who have been abused and made less relevant, and in many cases driven to the brink of extinction, by these massive ad platforms.

TTD’s whole selling point was they would never become a behemoth that would carelessly swallow your livelihood whole.

“Oh, look,” you chortle. “It looks like TTD has failed to grow to such a point that it can wantonly destroy me! Eat shit, Jeff Green-looks like I’ll be keeping my job for another year, you buffoon!”

This is how some media and agency people sound to me to when they gleefully post about TTD missing earnings and I don’t know who they think they are or how they think the world works.

Unconditional Love And Money

You could simply give The Trade Desk your money in any case where there’s even basic business rationale to do so, foregoing consideration of their competitors that care less about.

Need to run a CTV campaign? Don’t put Amazon on your consideration list, do not consider YouTube to be CTV, don’t invest in weird little DSPs owned by global corporations as evil and soulless as any even though they’re still small.

Make yourself a B Corp or a Public Benefit Corporation so you have legal cover to do this. If I am being honest, that’s probably entirely unnecessary-I am not an attorney and this is not legal advice but I think you’re allowed to spend some money to not destroy the world even as a regular corporation.

In fact, somewhat distressingly to me, everyone in ad tech seems to have agreed that this is 100% allowed, and in fact their moral obligation, but ONLY FOR ONE COMPANY AND PRODUCT, which is this Borg Cube called Scope3 that I have no comment on at this time.

But Performance!

So let’s go back to the Villainous Lee of 2015.

The reason I did those things that had some of you booing me was exactly this: “performance.”

I had been hired to work on digital acquisition for the agency’s most important client, where the growth goals had been missed for consecutive quarters, and people were very mad and upset.

I fixed it! Doing so involved dumping a bunch of independent open web DSPs and upping spend on Meta, Google, and Amazon. Almost everyone was happy with me, in the end.

Then, a strange thing happened that validated many theories me and my team had discussed only in hushed tones.

Hot Garbage and the Bad Haircut

We had developed an automatic regression analysis tool called Hot Garbage.

What it did was simply find mathematically viable clusters, in terms of curve fit, among the many acquisition campaign line items we worked with.

It also allowed you to make custom, human-informed buckets, and easily see the curve fit and the equations of the resulting curve.

Basically, it helped us do all the grunt work on creating a mathematically sound media plan, or making mathematically sound adjustments, in about an hour, so we could get to the human informed strategy and context parts.

This was meant to be aimed at various segments we had created, of many kinds: Web Retargeting, Meta Video, Amazon On-Site Inventory, etc.

The thing was that when you first opened it, before you selected anything to look at in the view tab, it simply showed you the various regression analysis curves for our client’s entire acquisition program.

We knew and often told people this wasn’t what it was for; this was too much data that was too disparate, and this was meant to help us slice and dice investment, not recommend the actual budget size for all digital acquisition.

That being said, the thing pretty consistently had a P Score over 6, and said cutting 34% of the budget would lose us less than 1% of our conversions.

It was fun to think about, but we knew the client would never cut this budget at all, let alone 34%, so we would never know how true this was.

Then, an insane legal and financial perfect storm happened, such that we had to cut the budget a full 42%. We were kind of excited and ran our little model and cackled, seeing this would probably lose us only 5% of our conversions.

When the dust settled and the plan had run and the attribution windows had closed, conversions had gone up 18% on that 42% budget cut.

There’s a lot more to this story but let me stop here to make the point:

Performance in the way most ad tech people still talk about it and approach it is a complete fucking fiction, and yes, that means you, Mr. “I’ve Been Saying It’s The Outcomes Era” man.

There are many things you could take this to mean, but here’s one suggestion:

If you’re actually any good at your job, you can spend a lot of money with TTD instead of Amazon or DV360 or whatever the comp is and be just fine.

But Audience Data!

The only extremely useful marketing data in the world has always lived inside the platform that originally generated it and hos only been effective when been deployed directly on the ads that platform owns.

I discussed this in another piece, but Google search data cooks only in search, Meta data cooks in real apps like Facebook and Instagram, and Amazon data only cooks on Amazon owned (maybe aligned in Roku’s case, we will see) properties.

So by eschewing ownership of inventory or data entirely-again, a core FEATURE of their whole purportedly noble cause, not a bug-TTD made themselves not so much a place for audience data.

Again, good news: third party data sucks, always has, and data based audience targeting and the whole concept of “personalized” ads is, to date, maybe the most disappointing thing in advertising history as a result.

I know TTD buying Sincera is a whole bet against that, but sometimes loving someone means going against their will to save them, and so if I were trying to save them, I would ignore that and focus on broad reach within high attention placements and measure it against their excellent suite of brand and sales lift tools.

Would Saving TTD Help The Good, Free Internet?

I think among all the digital media buying platforms we have today, more than any other, TTD are still at least in some small way still committed to part of a vision that’s better for publishers and media owners and the free internet than any other major platform.

Lots of people are saying they’ve totally betrayed everything they stood for, but I think those people are saying this because they’re much more focused on them throwing media agencies aside in order to court brands, and to reiterate: I think that was a good idea that they waited too long to do and I don’t care if anyone saves today’s media agencies.

That being said, if this is as good as it gets, I don’t think better ad buying platforms, at least as we seem to be capable of building them currently, will ever do much for us.

The Cautionary Tale For Us All

Do not create something plugged into the regular capitalist modes of moneymaking and then bet your profits on a future that relies on people going against standard capitalist incentives to make some sort of moral choice you deem to be correct.

I hope TTD makes it, I guess, relative to the other buying platforms, but I don’t have much besides faint praise at this point; I think it would be a better idea in a better world but that doesn’t matter.

We could do well to remember Machiavelli’s analysis of unarmed prophets vs. armed prophets, and their comparative results in both the short term and the long term.

The point of being a prophet is to change hearts and minds, and to have that change last for hundreds or thousands of years, living on long past your own death.

Jesus was an unarmed prophet who accomplished this. However, other prophets, some of them coming later and perhaps taking this as a lesson, decided they would also like to get the most possible done in their own lives and not have them cut short by any means, such as armed opposition aiming to suppress their message.

Thus, Machiavelli concluded, it was probably best to be an armed prophet. You can learn more about this here:

For a corporation, which is an organism that lives or dies on a quarterly cycle if public, or on raise round cycles if not, no path but that of the armed prophet makes any sense.

For anyone starting a company that has a vision of improving the internet or the world, this means one thing: being prepared to administer some sort of beatdown, in a capitalist mode, to anyone who opposes you, completely independent of whatever righteous values you embody.

I think the “S&P500” is something of a cudgel, but it’s aimed at publishers and other DSPs, who aren’t really TTD’s key enemies, at this point. It would be better if they had been prepared to deploy something mean to keep their large agency partners in line and buying in the wake of their efforts to go brand direct.

If you’re starting an industry group aiming to improve the behavior of brands in terms of how they procure creative and/or media services, in addition to whatever joyous gospel you preach, I would probably conceive of some kind of way to actually apply pressure to the situation, maybe through something like a powerful CMO Search Consultancy that adds the stick of “don’t you want a decent career” to the carrot of “it feels good to save the ad industry.”

Similarly, if you’re just making new ad tech or martech product that has some sort of principals that make people feel good for using it, I would prepare to play as dirty as, or dirtier than, any of your non-principled competition when it comes to everything but your holy mission.

If you want to upend the whole world of paid media or marketing measurement to save the news, it’s a lot more likely you’re going to need to do some corporate espionage than the average platform trying to lazily make a buck or two.

Your path will be hard, and unpleasant, and may even cause some people to vilify you, but that’s the nature of really changing things for the better.

Anyway, here’s a podcast a little bit about all of this I did years ago that still holds up: