The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk is a demand-side platform for buying display, CTV, audio and video ads. Access is arranged with the vendor, not by self-serve signup.

The Trade Desk is a demand-side platform that advertisers and agencies use to buy digital advertising across the open internet. It answers a plain problem: audiences now sit behind dozens of separate buying tools, and a campaign meant to reach the same person on a phone, a laptop and a television needs one place to plan, bid and measure. The platform is built and run by The Trade Desk, Inc., a public company based in Ventura, California, and it is the only product the company sells. Because the company owns no media itself, it presents its bidding decisions as independent of any publisher. The current generation of the platform is Kokai, extended in August 2026 by the Kokai Zuma release. Koa is its artificial intelligence layer, and Koa Agent adds a conversational assistant and automated audience creation inside the campaign workflow. Buying covers display, online video, audio, native, mobile, digital out of home and connected TV from the same campaign. Identity Solutions carry Unified ID 2.0 and EUID, OpenPath shortens the path between a buyer and publisher inventory, and Retail Data brings retailer audiences into targeting. Reporting runs through Report Builder and conversion lift studies, beside a marketplace of outside measurement partners, and enterprise APIs let teams build on top of the platform. The platform is built for agency trading desks and for brands that employ programmatic buyers, because a campaign here is configured rather than picked off a template. Companies working across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific are served from offices in all three regions. Engineers belong to the audience too, since the APIs are open to custom development and the developer documentation sits beside the product. It is bought as one platform under one contract, arranged through the vendor's contact form, and the site publishes no plan page or rate card. Day to day the work is to plan a campaign across channels, bid for it, and then read what it did. Buyers reach streaming television households, audio and podcast listeners, and readers of news and commerce sites from one brief. Data teams bring their own audiences alongside retailer data and the suppliers listed in the partner directory, and outside measurement partners return the results the next flight is adjusted against. Around the platform, Edge Academy certifies the people who trade on it and the OpenTTD documentation supports the teams building against its APIs.