Omnicom and The Trade Desk co-develop new data solutions to optimize CTV budgets

Digiday has learned that Omnicom Media Group already put the solution to use in planning this year’s expected upfront video expenditures for 40 clients, said Megan Pagliuca, Omnicom Media Group’s chief activation officer.  It’s all in an effort to break through the cluttered mess that a lot of CTV investment still remains — and connect investments to outcomes. The Trade Desk alone offers 3 trillion streaming impressions per month, according to Omnicom.

“We have engineers working on their side, and on our side within Annalect [the unit that operates Omni] to create bespoke solutions for our clients. One of these is around video planning, which was used this year in how we approached the upfronts,” said Pagliuca, who added that audio and out-of-home will be optimized this way in the future. “We’re optimizing The Trade Desk [data], we bring in Flywheel commerce cloud signals, then can optimize based on sales. That’s a big deal in terms of how The Trade Desk has changed their engagement to create bespoke solutions.”

“We used this to help plan our budget,” added Clarissa Season, chief experience officer at Annalect. “We’ll continue to play it out through the upfront. What is different is we have both invested so much into this relationship. This is probably daily meetings between different levels throughout both organizations, from product to engineering to senior leadership — to make sure we’re creating something that’s unique but also is going to provide value and differentiation to our clients.”

Reducing redundancies is another big part of this solution, explained Season. “A lot of people watch both linear and CTV, and a really important element for us is to dedupe that,” she said. “We don’t want to double-buy them. We want to understand the places where we’ll get truly new reach. We’ll be able to plan so we can get rid of over-frequency, but then we’re also going to be able to measure the impact on the back end to make sure [the client] got the sale.”

For its part, The Trade Desk hopes the work it does will only increase the flow of dollars into not only CTV but also digital audio and OOH.

“When our clients — and in this case Omnicom — are using good data for CTV forecasting, they’re seeing how their customers and how their advertisers’ customers are really consuming streamed content, which is growing more and more,” said Jed Dederick, TTD’s chief revenue officer. “It’s only been natural to help advertisers follow the consumption behaviors of their customers, who are certainly engaging with more and more streamed content over time. As every aspect of the advertising industry becomes more data-driven, the tools we’re co-building with Omnicom will unlock value through greater efficiency and precision before campaigns even run.”

Pagliuca said the partnership also enables an update on the old “bring your own algorithm” practice in early-generation programmatic to where it’s now “custom bid optimization, where instead of the standard components that are in DSP algorithms, you can bring in sales signals that gives you more accurate ongoing optimization.”

“We are excited about the developing partnership between The Trade Desk and OMG,” said Lee Walsh, global head of media at client Uber. “As the video media landscape has become more fragmented, we are confident that being able to better manage planning, buying and frequency across a range of publishing partners will deliver tangible benefits to our business.”

Another solution coming out of the partnership and the data shared between the two companies, added Pagliuca, is Omnicom creating inclusion and exclusion lists on steroids, which will not only incorporate URLs to either buy into or avoid, but will also include supply path optimization. “It’s looking at an individual placement but also looking at the supply chain to access that,” she said. “A publisher may be working with multiple SSPs, so it’s looking at the right supply path more granularly.”