The Trade Desk is betting part of its recovery on measurement nobody can argue with

It’s fair to say Green has a lot riding on the outcome. 

His company raked in $715.1 million during the second quarter of the year, which was $36 million short of what it was forecasted to be. Green cited a myriad of reasons. Slower spending in CPG and auto, which together make up around a quarter of the business. Competitors undercutting on price. Neither got the airtime he gave to advertisers trading decisioning for lower prices, though. The breadth and depth of his comments on that point said plenty on its own.

“Doing so essentially means buyers will give away their decisioning in a great buyer’s market to the sellers in exchange for lower costs of transactions,” said Green. “This approach is often deliberately short-sighted.”

Simple measurement is what lets them get away with it.

“As long as last click and last view are the standard of measurement, brands will struggle to understand what drives their growth, and the most premium parts of the open internet will always look expensive and ineffective.”

That’s easier said than done when geopolitical uncertainty triggers macro volatility, and macro volatility has a way of hardening into cultural shift. CMOs under that kind of pressure reach for whatever generates the quickest result, meaningful or not. Measurement has become their alibi. It tells them what they want to hear, not what they need to know. One framework won’t fix that. It’s why The Trade Desk isn’t stopping there.

Audience Unlimited is the other half of the bet. It’s still in open beta since launching last year. It folds outcome tracking into audience targeting instead of pricing it separately. So rather than charging per data segment, The Trade Desk moves to a flat subscription, Green’s own comparison being what Spotify did to music. That predictability is what lets advertisers test more segments without worrying about cost creep. It works by using AI-driven scoring to match third-party data segments against an advertiser’s campaign goals, giving a built-in performance signal for each segment. Conversion measurement is included, so advertisers see lower-funnel results without paying extra for them. Reporting tracks how segments perform and get adopted over time. More segments tested means more performance data generated, which makes targeting and measurement sharper as a campaign runs.

“In a recent campaign, a global advertiser used Audience Unlimited to reach incremental households more efficiently,” said Green on the call. “Compared with a prior campaign, the advertiser reduced its cost per unique household and also reduced its data CPM. Both reductions were more than 25 percent, demonstrating the potential of AU to improve efficiency. As we roll this out to new customers.”

What Green is really talking about is advertising’s thorniest problem, and its most enduring, especially on the open web. And he knows it won’t be easy. He spent part of the call laying out the scale of that challenge, including the part of the market with no incentive to bring advertisers the clarity he says he wants.

Yes, the mechanics of measurement are compromised. And sure, buyers don’t care enough about it to do something. But for Green, there’s a third piece too, the enablers. Rivals selling programmatic guarantee and fixed-price deals, some wrapped in agentic branding, betting that a cheap fee outweighs decisions that favor publishers over the buyer footing the bill.

“Some of our competitors, big and small, have been focused on producing products for programmatic guarantee, fixed price transactions, and simple deals with approaches that do not leverage buyer decisions. Some are even wrapping these in agentic technologies,” said Green. 

Broken measurement is what lets that model survive. It doesn’t just let buyers get away with buying cheap, it gives an entire tier of the market a business to sell. Which, for Green, is the opportunity, not the obstacle. Every advertiser buying on price because it can’t prove value is an advertiser The Trade Desk can win over. After all, beleaguered as the business is, its ties to advertisers remain some of the strongest in the industry.

The numbers back that up. The Trade Desk had joint business plans with 217 clients as of the second quarter, up 38% year over year. Revenue under those plans grew six times faster than the rest of the business. Those plans are essentially a shared framework for brands, agencies, and The Trade Desk to plan and measure success together. That’s why they outgrow everything else, said Green. They’re built on alignment, not single campaigns.

“Additionally, the majority of our top 100 accounts are growing double digits year over year,” said Green. “Outside of our top 500 advertisers, the remainder are growing over 50% year over year, year to date, which represents green shoots from smaller, up-and-coming, and challenger brands.”

And yet, The Trade Desk remains in a precarious position. Revenue grew just 3% year over year, missing estimates, and shares fell hard after hours, extending a brutal run that’s wiped out more than half the stock’s value this year. Green called it “not a reflection” of the company’s underlying health. Investors, watching Amazon and Google push harder into the same programmatic and CTV territory The Trade Desk built its name on, clearly see it differently. But the opportunities, from agentic buying to retail media and CTV are also real. However, they all depend on execution The Trade Desk hasn’t yet proven it can deliver at the pace the market now expects.