Can the Trade Desk remain ‘king’ of the open web?

It’s been more than 10 years since The Trade Desk was named to Forbes’s list of America’s Most Promising Companies. This year, despite industry-wide challenges and a belief among some in the industry of a widespread contraction of the open web, the largest independent demand-side platform in the world is looking to keep that promise alive.

Amid a crowded DSP landscape and slowing growth in the programmatic ad-tech space, questions about the company’s future viability are unavoidable, and investors have taken a critical eye to the company’s value proposition as rival DSPs Google DV360 and Amazon DSP continue to grow. More recently, both Omnicom and Publicis have undertaken agency audits to review The Trade Desk’s fee structures, according to reports.

But The Trade Desk is forging ahead. Jeff Green, the company’s founder and CEO, recently said he bought about $150 million of The Trade Desk stock to signal his confidence in the company. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the company posted about 19% YoY revenue growth (excluding political ad spend), on par with the 18% YoY revenue growth it reported in Q3 2025 and 19% YoY revenue growth in Q2 2025. The company attributed the revenue growth to product innovations, including upgrades to its AI-based ad platform Kokai.

This year, the ad-tech company is focusing on strengthening its relationships with advertisers by building more direct relationships with brands and catering to performance-obsessed CMOs looking for more robust measurement, Ian Colley, The Trade Desk’s former CMO and EVP, told Marketing Brew last month.

But it will also do so under new leadership: On Tuesday, Colley and two other executives, VP of Communications Melinda Zurich and SVP of Consumer Products Matthew Henick, announced that they were leaving the company as part of a broader “changing of the guard” at the top of the company. VP of Marketing Anna Sayre, who has been at The Trade Desk for seven years, will take over for Colley as interim CMO.

There’s “this growing skepticism that major marketers have around last-touch attribution and wanting a much clearer way to understand the impact of digital advertising on actual market outcomes,” he told Marketing Brew. “I think clients across industries are very, very focused on that, because there’s a lot more pressure than ever on the performance of digital advertising. Being able to show how it’s working is becoming a priority for all CMOs.”

Following the executive changes, company marketing strategy will remain the same, Olivia Balog, a spokesperson for The Trade Desk, told Marketing Brew.

Point A to Point B

The Trade Desk has been increasing the number of advertisers it has direct relationships with, removing overlap between brand and agency teams, Green told investors on the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call. That move comes as a response to CMOs and their teams wanting a better understanding of programmatic, according to Colley. (US programmatic spend will exceed $200 billion this year, per Emarketer.) While agency relationships are still crucial to The Trade Desk, Green noted on the earnings call, it has increased the number of joint business plans (JBPs) it has with agencies and advertisers.

“Exiting 2025, JBPs accounted for well over half of our business, and our JBP pipeline has more than doubled over the past year,” he told investors.

The Trade Desk is also responding to marketers’ growing desire for programmatic data and measurement through its product rollouts. “Increasingly, clients want to understand the impact of campaign spend on consumer purchase or action,” Colley told us in an email, noting that The Trade Desk has worked with retail data sources and AI-powered algorithms to help measure conversion rates and consumer intent across industries.

This year, he added, “we’ll be working with our clients to drive even more innovation around measurement.”

The company is leaning into AI beyond algorithms. In September, it debuted Audience Unlimited, a product that “will leverage AI to score data segments by relevance to an advertiser’s campaign,” a press release read, which is part of a “much bigger effort to reform measurement,” Green said on the earnings call. There are other tools, too, including Deal Desk, a feature that “uses AI to forecast how a deal is likely to perform relative to the open market and then highlights where things may go off track,” Green told investors.

“In 2026, you will see us continue to close the gap between media dollars and real business outcomes like sales, lifetime value, and brand health,” Green said on the earnings call.

The Trade Desk has also been spending significant money on marketing. The company’s sales and marketing expenses increased 18% in 2025, according to a SEC 10-K filing from February, a jump that was driven in part by increases in marketing campaigns, sponsorships, and related undertakings. The company’s marketing, Colley told us, “spans top-of-the-funnel brand awareness all the way to lower-in-the-funnel performance marketing.”

The bigger picture

As The Trade Desk invests in courting clients and addressing measurement asks, it is also contending with overall slowing growth in open web advertising, Luke Stillman, managing director at advisory firm Madison & Wall, told Marketing Brew. Companies in the space are “thinking, if we want to keep growing at the rates that we historically have and that our investors perhaps expect us to, we need to start taking share of new budgets or expanding our client base,” he said.

Based on the current marketplace, it’s possible that a strategy focused on performance and measurement could benefit businesses like The Trade Desk, he said.

“For The Trade Desk, specifically, we have this belief that what advertisers want right now is performance and price at the expense of everything else,” Stillman said. “Advertisers are happy to spend on platforms that are potentially opaque and that give them not that much control over what they’re buying, so long as it delivers good performance and the measurement is credible.”

But competition is fierce. In the fall, Amazon DSP inked new partnerships with Netflix and Spotify, and Amazon lets advertisers use Amazon Marketing Cloud to connect sponsored ads data on its site with DSP activity, which has been useful for analysis for certain clients, according to Matt Larson, VP of, media and connections strategy at the agency Collective Measures.

Nichole Maggio, director of media at Luquire, said a “vibe shift” is happening across the ad-tech landscape, noting that “when you're looking at the DSPs, it's no longer about who has the most reach, it's about who has the cleanest data.” Amid that shift, Maggio said she hasn’t seen a use drop-off of The Trade Desk.

“They’re still king of the open web,” she said.