‘Curation can be a vacuous term’: The Trade Desk plans to redefine ad quality outside the walled gardens with Sincera

Instead, the deal, according to Doherty, is aimed at something far more ambitious. 

“We were limited from a decisioning standpoint by the signals within the bids,” said Doherty. “That worked well for avoiding bad practices but fell short in evaluating what makes for a truly high-quality ad experience.” 

Sincera changes that. Where the bidstream provides transactional data, Sincera’s analytics dive deeper, tracking the quality of data signals from publishers and content owners. By integrating this supply-side intelligence with its buy-side data, The Trade Desk is closing a critical gap in how it reports and analyzes ad inventory. 

If successful, the shift allows The Trade Desk to go beyond merely filtering out bad impressions. Now, it can actively identify and recommend inventory that stands out for its quality. As Sincera’s CEO and co-founder Mike O’Sullivan put it, it’s no longer just about what inventory isn’t, but about what it could and should be. 

“We want to build something that really optimizes, underscores and creates recommendations on what is great supply and what a great publisher experience looks like — that’s where all our conversations [during the acquisition] were really focused on,” continued O’Sullivan. 

This could prove particularly intriguing for publishers — a group The Trade Desk is keen to bring further into the tent. By offering insights into which data signals advertisers value most, publishers could adjust their ad sales strategies to align with demand. 

Doherty described this as cheating a “lingua franca” with publishers — a shared language to define and understand value within the ecosystem. While the specific syntax of this remains unclear, the potential applications are vast.

For instance, alternative identifiers like The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0 have historically been difficult to value. With Sincera, it may soon be possible to generate reports that track which bid requests were monetized by specific IDs, including detail on advertisers, campaigns, bid rates and CPMs. 

“What Sincera gives us is a more complete view of the ecosystem than the bidsteam itself,” said Doherty. 

That view couldn’t be more critical. The Trade Desk’s purge of made-for-advertising (MFA) sites — those low-quality, spammy sites that siphon ad dollars from legitimate publishers — made that all too clear. While it won that battle, the rise of more sophisticated attempts to game the ad tech system revealed a troubling reality: in ad tech, there’s always another MFA-style crisis looming on the horizon.

“We realized we needed a more aggressive and comprehensive view to stay ahead of those issues,” said Doherty. “The supply chain continues to get more complex, and I would say the number of intermediaries that we’ve seen enter the supply chain has gone up astronomically in the last two to three years.”

Recent data from Sincera supports this, he continued, revealing a 20% increase in supply paths across the open internet over just a few months. He declined to provide exact figures.

The more these paths splinter and fragment, the more ad tech vendors like The Trade Desk must consolidate their spending through the highest-quality channels. Without this focus, ad dollars become increasingly vulnerable to bad actors thriving in the system’s opacity. At the same time, the growing complexity of fragmented marketplaces significantly raises costs for DSPs trying to navigate and bid effectively.

To avoid some of these issues, The Trade Desk has been building proprietary routes to publishers, broadcasters and other media owners. Sincera’s data could accelerate those efforts, helping The Trade Desk solidify its position as one of the biggest repositories of ad dollars outside of the walled gardens. 

“We already know that the best of the open internet is outside of the walled gardens — it’s where all the premium inventory lives,” said Doherty. “Now, we have a data set and partnership opportunities to be able to express that value back to publishers.”

Which loops back to the curation point. No, it wasn’t the driving force behind this but it does sharpen The Trade Desk’s already significant edge in ad targeting — fortifying its influence at a time when challenges to its dominance are mounting. 

“Curation can be a vacuous term that can mean many different things depending on who you’re talking to but as far as data and media being bundled that’s not new — in fact, it’s as old as time itself,” said Doherty. “What we are interested in is about how you get data that may not be available in the bid stream, and then use that to empower buyer’s decisioning vs. disintermediating them from that process. I do think there are companies that are broadly in the curation space who are thinking about this in interesting ways.” 

With those remarks, Doherty effectively quashed the months-long speculation surrounding The Trade Desk’s take on curation. Amid ad tech’s noisy obsession with it, the ad tech vendor has been conspicuously quiet.

Yes, it’s been busy elsewhere (hello, Ventura) but for the largest ad tech company outside the walled gardens to sit this one out – as even rivals chimed in – raised eyebrows. Insiders said the hesitancy boiled down to one thing: SSPs are getting better at mimicking DSP performance with curation. That prospect, they say, is one The Trade Desk can’t afford to ignore. Doherty, however, dismissed the concern, making it clear the company remains firmly focused on defining its own path.

To him, curation generates more headlines than actual ad dollars. 

“The majority of it [industry noise around The Trade Desk and curation] is industry Kremlinology on The Trade Desk,” said Doherty. “I think there are some versions of curation that butt heads with our desire to have a fully transparent supply chain, and so I understand that they may interpret those as threatening to that business model.”