Case 6 The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk, Inc. is a global technology industry leading media-buying platform for data-driven marketers. The self-service cloud-based platform offered by the Trade Desk supports advertisement buyers to create, manage, and optimize expressive data-driven digital advertising campaigns across different advertising formats and channels which include display, video, and audio on devices such as computers, mobile devices, and connected TV. Trade Desk’s platforms are integrated with major inventory, publisher, and data partners and enable advertisement (ad) buyers to reach the scale and develop effective decision-making capabilities. The enterprise application programming interfaces (APIs) offer competitive benefits for the ad buyers. The Trade Desk is a Delaware corporation which was established in Ventura, California, in the year 2009. In 2011, the company had officially launched the platform. The clients of the company are basically the advertising agencies and other service providers. Trade Desk enters into continuous master service agreements (“MSAs”) with the clients. Trade Desk charges the client a platform fee which is estimated on the basis of a percentage of a client’s total spend on advertising. The other sources of revenue are obtained by means of providing data and other value-added services and platform features. Trade Desk invoices their clients for the cost of advertising inventory purchased, plus data, and any add-on features purchased through the platform. The company had a total holding period return of 3211.9% during the 5-year period, Dec 31, 2016, to Dec 31, 2021. The total revenues and total assets increased by 36% and 48% on an average basis during the period 2019–2021.