Open-web champion
The Trade Desk has positioned itself as a champion for the open internet. It has helped the industry adopt quality standards, from enforcing new video classification protocols from the IAB Tech Lab, to eliminating Google Open Bidding in 2022 to make programmatic buying more efficient. SP500+ stems from this philosophy, Doherty said.
“We want to be able to say that the open internet on its worse days is better than anything the walled gardens are going to offer you,” Doherty said. “How do I give meaning to that statement? Let’s start with the 500 best publishers.”
Doherty compared the transparency of SP500+ with popular artificial-intelligence-powered media buying tools from walled gardens, like Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+. Buyers and independent research have accused both products of placing ads in unsavory locations and not spending advertiser dollars efficiently.
“Pmax and Advantage+ are black box by design,” Doherty said. “[The platforms say] we’re not going to tell you where your inventory runs. We think this [SP500+] is an opportunity when you marry rich audience data with the world’s best content.”
Publishers at the center
A buyer that wants to buy specific publishers would have trouble in most DSPs today, several sources said.
“Publishers are very secondary,” said Chris Kane, founder of Jounce Media. “They’re not central to the buying process.”
The primary focus of DSPs is audience data. Typically, publishers only factor into buying decisions when brands want to avoid buying them because of brand-safety filters, Kane said.
If a brand wanted to target a specific publisher, like Hearst, for example, on the open web, the best way today would be to set up a PMP with Hearst, said Kane. This process takes time and planning. If a brand wanted to activate immediately, it could create an allow list in the open auction with all of the domains Hearst owns, but that would require a lot of research on the part of the media buyer, Kane added.
While the inventory available in SP500+ does not include anything new to The Trade Desk, Doherty said, it does include premium publishers that have been previously hard for buyers to access, a source familiar with the product said.
Doherty said The Trade Desk has been working internally to determine which publishers are high-quality to inform the SP500+, and the list of publishers will be informed by real-time data.
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