Media Buying Briefing: Two years later, media buyers still aren’t fully sold on The Trade Desk’s Kokai platform

But a slower than anticipated rollout of the software on The Trade Desk’s side, and a lukewarm reception from buyers on the other (despite enthusiastic suggestions from the company’s agency reps), means that hasn’t gone entirely to plan. A lack of progress on Kokai adoption was cited by Trade Desk execs as one of the reasons behind the firm’s rare earnings miss in the first quarter of this year.

Now, after just over two years of updates and post-launch development, the company’s top execs say Kokai is in an all but finished state — and that they expect every one of the company’s customers to be using it by year’s end.

Whether they’re able to achieve that will depend on how confident buyers are that their concerns over its unusual periodic table design are being heard — and how well they’re able to show its benefits relative to the tried and trusted Solimar tool, which many buyers still prefer to use when placing client dollars through The Trade Desk’s demand-side platform.

Form vs. function

When Kokai launched, it bundled a range of existing features, including AI tool Koa together with partnership integrations including measurement data drawn from Albertsons and Walmart’s retail media networks, and measurement indices for retail media and TV spending. In theory, this package would address brands’ ever-increasing programmatic investments, especially in channels such as CTV and audio, which have come relatively late to the programmatic party.

Frequent users say the underlying tech delivers. Coleman Winner, TV, audio, and display senior strategist at Tinuiti, said he uses the platform daily and told Digiday, “I think what they were looking to accomplish and what they’ve highlighted as the value of the tech is there.”

The Koa AI tools and the platform’s streamlined measurement reporting have also gained fans among users. “Those are great features [that] you don’t really have in the typical DSP setup,” said Jack Polis, vp of programmatic at Assembly.

The Trade Desk has said publicly that Kokai has resulted in 24% lower cost per conversion and 20% lower cost per acquisition for clients.

‘It gives me PTSD from high school’

One major difference between Kokai and the tools offered by other DSP providers is its user interface. Dubbed a “Programmatic Table” and modeled after the classic periodic table of elements, the design was the brainchild of The Trade Desk’s CEO Jeff Green. 

According to Ian Colley, The Trade Desk’s CMO, it’s an attempt to grant users a birds-eye view of trading activity. “We believe that marketers should be owning their advertising, owning their destiny to some extent, and the Programmatic Table is an attempt to give them a full sense of everything,” he told Digiday.

But dissatisfaction with the UI has been one of the biggest gripes leveled at Kokai’s developers. “Kokai is wildly different [than Solimar] when you first go in,” said Kendra Tang, programmatic supervisor at media agency Rain the Growth. “It does take a lot more clicks to get to certain things, so that adds time to our workflow,” she added. 

Polis estimated that Assembly, which lets staffers choose which software they use for media activation, was still using Solimar 60% of the time — primarily because of reluctance among practitioners to get to grips with Kokai’s UI.

Sharp-tongued attendees of Digiday’s recent virtual town hall, speaking under the Chatham House Rule, were scathing about the interface. “I always joke about how it gives me PTSD from high school chemistry,” one participant quipped.

Other gripes were raised in the town hall — over The Trade Desk’s pricing, the initial state of Kokai when it first shipped in 2023, and over its API documentation — but the Programmatic Table is the element that’s taken flak most consistently. “There is definitely a strong learning curve on the new platform,” said Sara Lemmerman, vp of investment services at KSM. 

Buyers that have been able to make the time to get to grips with the system’s nuances say it’s worth the work, though. Lemmerman said her agency had migrated its client roster into Kokai in January, after testing the platform last year. 

“While we ran into some challenges when it comes to usability, we did see strong performance after migrating over,” she said, without providing specific figures.

‘You’ll always have laggards’

Although participants at a virtual June town hall felt Kokai was “not really finished” when first launched, agency execs say The Trade Desk’s been receptive to feedback from agency users as it’s built the tool out.

The company altered the way agencies are able to manage relationships with supply-side platforms through Kokai in February, a switch that made the lives of users grappling with supply-path optimization easier, according to Tom Swierczewski, vp media investments for Goodway Group.

“I certainly give them a lot of a lot of credit for that, [for moving] things forward in the right direction,” he said.

Kokai is gaining traction, even if it is through sheer force of will from The Trade Desk’s reps, according to Karsten Weide, an ad tech veteran-turned-consultant who helps inventors appraise the media market at W Media Research.

“I was super-skeptical of Kokai when it first came out, the reason was that… you never want to break with user expectations, and Kokai was such a radical break [from Solimar],” he said.   

In recent months, the platform has undergone iterative updates, including the introduction of OpenSincera in May and of Deal Desk, a tool for managing one-to-one relationships with publishers. These were buttressed with a series of updates unveiled at June’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, including a product placement partnership with creative AI firm Rembrand, plus the integration of Bell Canada’s marketing platform. 

“All of this is designed to fend off, or out-innovate, the trends,” said Weide.

The Trade Desk’s Green told analysts during its last earnings call (in May) that the company expects its entire customer base to be using Kokai by the end of the year. It’s taken two years to reach two-thirds usage, though — converting the final third in under six months might be a tall order.

“You’ll always have early adopters who are enthusiastic, and you’ll have laggards too,” said The Trade Desk’s Colley of the software’s lukewarm takeup. He said the introduction of Deal Desk would speed up holdout adoption. “A lot of clients have been waiting for Deal Desk… That inhibitor will be removed as [it] scales beyond beta,” he said.

He didn’t provide a date for when the feature will leave beta status, and a spokesperson for The Trade Desk declined to share when Solimar would be wound down.

Should The Trade Desk meet its end of year target, there will be other battles to fight. 

While AI Overviews and zero-click search tools undercut traffic to publisher sites (and the value of ad inventory therein), the company is also being flanked by Amazon in the DSP market, and Mediaocean in the agency planning and workflow tech space.

Completing its drawn-out rollout of Kokai might help The Trade Desk’s leadership rewrite the narrative surrounding the firm, but it won’t make the other threats on the horizon vanish.

Ronan Shields contributed to this report.

Color by numbers

PR agency Walker Sands surveyed 300 U.S.-based senior B2B marketers about the changing media priorities. Unsurprisingly, they’re belatedly moving into the creator marketing space, and 57% say they’re investing more in “non-traditional” channels compared to last year. Among the findings:

• 76% were investing in YouTube partnerships.
• 65% are spending on LinkedIn “thought leadership”, but only 48% were putting money behind newsletters and 49% behind influencers.
• 44% were investing in podcasts.

Takeoff & landing

• WPP Media’s specialist health and pharma unit CMI appointed Andy Shaughnessy as svp of data analytics. Staying with pharma, Digitas Health, appointed Craig Romanok as chief commercial officer.
• European agency group SAMY Alliance has dropped the “Alliance” in a rebrand; it’s just SAMY now. The group, which is backed by private equity firm Bridgepoint, owns paid media firm Thyga and digital agency MDS.
• The Tokyo Olympics bid-rigging scandal is still dragging on. Last week Dentsu and Hakuhodo, alongside four other businesses, were fined to the tune of $33 million by Japan’s Fair Trade Commission; Dentsu is appealing the decision.

Direct quote

“It’s almost like [pulling] over one person on the highway because everybody else is going to see it.”

— eMarketer analyst Jeremy Goldman discussing the FTC’s unprecedented Omnicom-IPG consent order

Speed reading

• Last week was a busy one in media buying world. First of all, the FTC granted a conditional approval to the biggest merger of the year. I looked at the strings attached, and outlined why they’re so unusual.
• I spoke to some legal experts about the regulatory roadblocks still in the way of the Omnicom-IPG merger, following the launch of a formal inquiry by Britain’s CMA.
• Meanwhile, Jess Davies looked at why the CMA has signalled it’ll be taking a stronger line on Google in the UK.  
• Seb Joseph and Krystal Scanlon charted a 20% year-on-year drop in CTV ad prices – a consequence of supply continuing to outstrip advertiser demand.
• Finally, I wrote about why nobody seems all that surprised about TikTok’s latest stay of execution. Spending is up and confidence is high, despite the chaos and the caveats.