As holdcos sour on The Trade Desk, Stagwell goes all in

The deal was also a display of confidence in an ad tech kingpin that’s seen agency goodwill leak away in recent months. “We’re in [it] together,” said Matt Adams, global CEO of Stagwell Media Platform.

His attitude sat in contrast to that taken by the agency network’s holdco rivals. Publicis Groupe, you’ll recall, kicked off the most recent season of discontent among TTD agency partners when it recommended clients avoid its DSP (demand-side platform) following an audit that alleged discrepancies in fees, consent and cost transparency.

Transparency concerns over the fee structure imposed on TTD’s premium OpenPath inventory have provided another source of friction in recent months.

Stagwell doesn’t share those concerns, said Adam. If anything, OpenPath provides a common ground between the two companies, both of which position themselves as supporters of the open web and the free press (Stagwell boss Mark Penn, for example, referred to advertisers avoiding news publishing as “censorship” last year).

Related Insights

The Programmatic Marketer

The Trade Desk remains the dominant DSP but its advertisers are starting to shop around Read More

Jordan Rost, vp of product marketing at The Trade Desk, emphasized the company’s commitment to the initiative. “It’s a full company effort to bring to life across all phases of our leadership, our partnerships, our commercial teams, our research and development teams,” he said.

That focus from its chief partner — the project is being personally overseen by chief exec Jeff Green — and the opportunity to exert its own influence over that development were key factors in Stagwell’s choice, Adams said. 

He noted Stagwell was also working with Google on a project embedding its Gemini LLM into its DSP, DV360, but that owing to the tech giant’s size Stagwell expected “less customization” compared to the partnership with TTD. 

In short, Stagwell’s execs think they can lead, rather than be led into the agentic era.

“[Agents] allow us to have data faster and to make better decisions, and that will yield better results for clients. Performance will get better because [we’ll] see and spot things quicker and traders will be freed up to think more strategically,” he said.

Choosing partners

Agencies, brands and ad tech companies are pairing off together, or seeking to build bridges with the new class of AI startups, as they attempt to solve for problems like zero-click search, faster media measurement, or agentic media planning and buying.

Agencies like Stagwell have a range of potential partners to choose from. Yahoo DSP, for example, emerged as an early leader among DSPs earlier this year when it released a clutch of media AI agents. Meta purchased Singaporean start-up Manus at great cost and rapidly began stitching its agentic tools into the platform’s ad manager (an effort the Chinese government may be poised to stymie).

Indie media houses like Butler/Till and Brkthru in the U.S., as well as Abovo Maxlead in the Netherlands, have chosen to partner with SSP firm PubMatic to develop AI buying tools using the AdCP framework. Magnite has teamed up with Publicis Media Exchange and Kepler, while Omnicom Media Group has been working with Equativ to develop media planning agents that can help guide media strategy and take traders all the way up to the point of a bid.

Ad tech firm MiQ is another programmatic player looking to shape the direction of agentic development. It’s working with PubMatic, Scope3 and as of this week, Magnite to develop and test a range of agents aiding programmatic media planning and direct ad buying.

“Our industry has run on OpenRTB for 15 years. This feels like the first major step change,” said Georgiana Haig, global strategy and partnerships director at MiQ.

In Stagwell and The Trade Desk’s case, the AI agents won’t be making media buys on behalf of Stagwell’s traders. Instead, they’re intended to speed up campaign configuration and set-up; users will interact with them via a text dialogue (like ChatGPT), through which they can upload briefs and query elements of the configuration. The system relies on Koa, AI software already woven into its main Kokai interface, and Open Agentic Kit, a software framework designed to enable AI agents from different companies and systems to interact with The Trade Desk’s infrastructure.

“We’re surfacing the insights and the options in a faster and better way,” said Adams. “You’ll still need the traders’ judgement,” he added.

The Trade Desk recently began trailing a largely automotive “Performance” setting and an entirely manual mode within its UI dashboard Kokai, partially in response to agency criticism that the platform’s software funneled traders into using unnecessary (and costly) features.

Rost framed the agentic integration as a middle ground between the two approaches, providing the speed of an automated workflow with the control of a manual steer. He said the companies were already testing agents designed for audience development, segmentation, and troubleshooting. 

“It is our intent to have agents across every facet of The Trade Desk’s platform and foundations,” he said.