The Trade Desk sees increased value in data-driven media buying over IOs

Business objective

Finding the right audiences for the right markets

The Trade Desk was built with a simple theory in mind — that data can help marketers make better advertising decisions. Over the past 14 years the company has kept true to that mission, growing to 30 offices globally while maintaining a 95% client-retention rate. This growth has come with a new challenge: creating a strategy to reach advertising professionals in new markets.

When we launched our “What Matters” campaign in APAC, the primary objective was to introduce and create awareness of the brand for this new audience by showing how our solutions could help improve the media buying process. What better way to start than by using our own platform for the campaign. The Trade Desk set up tests to learn which targeting strategies would have the greatest impact across Singapore, Australia, India, Hong Kong, and Japan.
 

Solution

Partnering with data and inventory partners to maximize reach 

Since The Trade Desk didn’t have enough first-party data in APAC to scale the campaign, we worked with local data partners that had a better grasp on the target audience. These partners helped construct an audience pool of agency and brand professionals.

Next, to ensure that we were able to engage with our audience based on their unique interests and behaviors, we implemented a comprehensive inventory strategy, including direct and programmatic buys. While the direct deals were set up on contextually relevant sites, the programmatic strategies helped reach target audiences based on their unique online behaviors and preferred websites.

Finally, the company relied on CPMs and CTR to track the success of their awareness play.

The programmatic approach ultimately proved to be a more impactful approach. It not only allowed The Trade Desk to find additional insights and opportunities that were not available on direct buys — particularly ad frequency, unique reach, and cross-channel opportunities — the company also saw notable improvements across a variety of vectors:

Cost efficiency: Direct buys had a CPM that was a staggering 50 times more expensive than programmatic buys.

Engagement: Programmatic buys were twice as effective in driving CTR compared to direct buys, indicating a significant difference in audience engagement.

User journey optimization: Programmatic buys offered the advantage of extending the campaign to new channels, reaching 8.2 million households and generating greater transparency into all relevant performance metrics.

In the pursuit of reaching a highly valuable audience of advertising professionals in APAC, The Trade Desk team was determined to employ the most effective methods. This case study highlights the outstanding performance gap between direct buys and programmatic buys. The decision to leverage programmatic advertising through its own DSP not only delivered substantial cost savings, but also doubled engagement rates and provided invaluable insights for future marketing endeavors.

Contact us today to learn how our platform can help you reach your audience with both precision and scale.