The premium internet: where brands can reach audiences and activate first-party data

Why prioritizing quality matters for effective advertising 

People spend 75% of their time on the open internet, consuming premium content across channels like connected TV (CTV), audio, and display — an incomparable opportunity for audience reach.¹ That’s why marketers are increasingly turning to the open internet and away from walled gardens to connect their messages with the audiences that matter most to them. 

Here, brands can advertise alongside premium streaming TV shows and movies, reputable journalism, top digital audio streamers, and more. 

Our platform cultivates the best of these inventory sources while prioritizing premium reach, value, impact, decisioning, and objectivity on behalf of our advertiser clients — so you can optimize your media investments. Our platform solutions, like the Sellers and Publishers 500+ marketplace, are designed to give you access to a collection of top-quality inventory sources made up of curated, premium publishers and placements. 

On the premium internet, you’ll find the most impactful and brand-suitable content to power effective advertising. This isn’t just better for marketing results — it helps advertisers reach real humans consuming engaging content​and fosters a better internet and healthier information ecosystem overall by rewarding publishers that craft high-quality content. 

Where to find high-quality audiences on the premium internet 

If you run ads with and on platforms that deprioritize a premium advertising experience, you risk wasting ad spend, exposing your brand to low-quality — even nonviewable — inventory, being placed on MFAs, or worse.² So, where can you find that premium experience? Media buyers using our latest platform update, Kokai, can access all the benefits of the highest-quality content on the open internet. 

Our platform not only excludes low-quality inventory, fraud, and content we deem unsafe, but enables you to onboard and match your first-party data to that of premium publishers to find your audience as efficiently as possible. 

Take Goodway Group, for example. The agency helped its fast-casual restaurant client combine the power of the premium internet with first-party data. 

Here’s what it did: 

• First, it leveraged our Sellers and Publishers 500+ to find the best premium inventory for its client 

• This resulted in Goodway Group’s very own Blue List​, a customized marketplace of premium inventory. 

• It then ran an o​mnichannel campaign to reach high-value potential customers where they spend their time.⁴ 

As for the results: 

• 18% reduction in CPM for both the CTV and audio campaigns 

• 25% reduction in cost per unique household for CTV 

• 27% reduction in cost per completed view for audio 

While costs decreased with its Blue List, Goodway Group and its client didn’t have to sacrifice scale and still drove incremental reach. 

Data activation and transparency on the premium internet 

Of course, to help maximize the value of the premium internet, you need to be able to match not only your first-party data but also third-party and retail data to that of premium publishers. That way, you can find your audience as efficiently as possible and maximize the utility of each ad dollar. Our platform has several solutions that activate and capitalize on the data you have, including audience seeds and Galileo. 

Seeds are segments you define that represent your most valuable customers and can be used to build audiences that will be most valuable to your campaign. Galileo is your all-in-one solution to onboard, activate, and scale your customer data across the open internet. During campaign setup, you can match your audience across ID types, publishers, platforms, devices, and channels. Following your campaign flight, your data is portable: You can export campaign exposure data via logs. 

If you’re wondering how this works in practice, take power tools manufacturer Bosch Professional as an example. Bosch Professional wanted to reach the right audiences with a CTV campaign and used its existing customer data to model a broader audience of like-minded tradespeople.⁵ 

Its solution was to: 

• Use its own first-party data to identify, reach, and engage audiences on CTV 

• Onboard its shopper data on our platform and leverage our household graph to group audiences and devices into households — and reach them accordingly through CTV 

• Set a three-ads-per-day-per-household frequency cap that led to measurable media savings, which the brand was able to reinvest to meet net-new households 

As for the results:

• 93% view-through rate 

• 214% frequency savings reinvested to reach 3x more households 

<sub>Sources:
1. GWI, H1 ’23. 
2. Zac Wang, “In the Shadow of Google’s Antitrust Trial, Marketers Debate the Future of the Open Web,” The Current, September 16, 2024. 
3. “Two-Thirds of Consumers Worldwide Now Buy on Beliefs,” Edelman, October 2, 2018. 
4. “Goodway Group Unlocks New Ways of Optimizing Media Buying with Blue Lists,” The Trade Desk, January 22, 2025. 
5. “Bosch Builds Robust Connected TV Campaign Using First-Party Data,” The Trade Desk, June 20, 2024.</sub>