Ad Tech Briefing: The DSP wars — a game of finance over features?

In a June 8 blog post, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green announced plans to share around 10 product and partnership updates over the next two weeks — no doubt to mark the advertising industry’s marquee event, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Digiday understands this PR strategy has been labelled “rolling thunder,” with Green’s LinkedIn post also previewing a global roadshow of trader summits across several cities to promote Kokai’s pending updates, such as Deal Desk, as it aims to make good with its core customer base: media agencies.

Of course, the slower-than-expected adoption of Kokai was singled out as the main operational misstep behind the Q4 shortfall (and stock price crash), although, given recent murmurs from sources, reading between the lines may be warranted. 

As detailed in multiple Digiday articles in recent weeks, Amazon wants its DSP to be seen not as a tool for buying ads on Amazon but as a top-tier gateway to the open web. And yes, that puts The Trade Desk directly in the crosshairs, especially in light of Amazon’s recent moves to undercut the ad tech rival.

In multiple conversations with sources in recent weeks, sources have discussed the impact of Amazon’s DSP on the ad tech market, particularly its potential to undercut Trade Desk, as well as Google’s DV 360. Some have noted Amazon’s competitive advantages, including its no platform fee policy and access to first-party data. This is a stark contrast to the media buyers’ attitudes about The Trade Desk, as expressed to Digiday in recent months.

However, sources have also highlighted Amazon DSP’s perceived disorganization, technical shortcomings, and lack of customer support — these aspects have long been considered a cornerstone of The Trade Desk’s rise on Madison Avenue, although there is a growing cognizance of this within Amazon towers. 

Some sources even believe that this may prompt the e-commerce giant to ameliorate its earlier intransigence over rebates — surely music to the ears of media agencies — in its bid to overcome the (widely perceived) technical advantage of The Trade Desk’s Kokai.  

So, it seems, one of the key questions that will be pondered by scaled media buyers over their meetings with large-scale DSPs at Cannes Lions center on: do financial incentives matter more than campaign features?  

What we’ve heard 

“Any LLM that is effectively ransacking publisher content, and not paying for it, that’s an intellectual property theft.” 

— IAB Tech Lab Anthony Katsur explains the standards body’s efforts to galvanize the publishing sector to pressurize the latest, and arguably most threatening, wave of Big Tech to restore some degree of parity to the online media sector.

Numbers to know 

• “Core four”: the number of SSPs Stagell-owned Assembly now works with, down from 20 earlier this year 
• 21,000: the number of U.S. job roles the advertising and media industry fell by in May 
• 78 million: the number of Perplexity search queries in May, according to CEO Aravind Srinivas at Bloomberg Tech
• 90%: the number of Deal IDs that are “effectively failed” on The Trade Desk 

What we’ve covered: follow these key stats

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