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Demand-side platform The Trade Desk began letting buyers test a new product called SP500+, which lets brands target a group of premium publishers, ADWEEK has exclusively learned.
SP500+—Sellers and Publishers 500+—is a new interface for buyers that lets them target users across around 500 premium publishers, including The New York Times, Disney+, Hulu, Spotify, ABC and The Wall Street Journal, according to documents viewed by ADWEEK.
The Trade Desk confirmed that the product is in beta and advertisers have just started testing it. There is currently no time frame set for its general availability rollout, a spokesperson said.
The product announcement is significant because DSPs like The Trade Desk have historically been much more focused on helping buyers find the perfect audience, rather than finding the perfect media partner or environment. DSPs do not feature publishers prominently to buyers, outside of private marketplace deals that buyers must independently arrange with a publisher, several sources said. As cookies deprecate, addressable audiences on the open web are harder to find, and the pendulum is swinging in favor of the media environment.
“The original sin of programmatic is that we made inventory selection tertiary to everything else,” said The Trade Desk vice president of inventory development Will Doherty. “Publishers get obfuscated from the conversation in all these suboptimal ways. We’ve known for a while that it creates challenges for buyers to invest in the open internet.”
Most publishers included in the initiative did not respond by press time. The New York Times had not yet heard about SP500+, said executive director of ad products and platforms Sasha Heroy.
SP500+ is part of Kokai, a wider suite of solutions The Trade Desk announced last year, which intends to make it easier for advertisers to partner with third-party vendors. It is a completely separate product from OpenPath, which lets brands buy publishers without a supply-side platform. Publishers don’t need to be part of OpenPath to be part of SP500+, a spokesperson said.
