When a company that built its fortune selling access to advertising inventory decides to start buying pieces of the companies that make that inventory more valuable, it is worth paying attention to where the chips are being placed.
The Trade Desk, the demand-side platform that has positioned itself as the independent alternative to the walled gardens of Google and Meta, has been quietly building an investment portfolio through TD7, its corporate venture arm. The unit recently took a stake in Hightouch, a data startup that helps marketers move customer information from their warehouses into the various platforms where advertising actually happens.
Michael Guptan, who leads TD7, sat down with Ad Age to discuss the investment and what it suggests about where programmatic advertising is headed. The short answer, as these things usually are, involves data — specifically, the challenge of making first-party data useful at scale in a world where third-party cookies have been dying a slow and much-chronicled death.
Hightouch occupies the kind of territory that would have seemed impossibly arcane to Madison Avenue a generation ago: it is, in essence, plumbing. But plumbing, as any homeowner knows, matters rather a lot when it stops working. (And in ad tech, something is always threatening to stop working.)
The investment reflects a broader pattern at The Trade Desk, which has spent recent years building or backing the connective tissue of the open internet — identity solutions, streaming television infrastructure, and now the pipes that carry marketer data from point A to point B. Whether this constitutes a coherent strategy or simply a series of educated bets on the general direction of the industry remains, as with most venture investments, a question that will answer itself in time.
For now, The Trade Desk continues to build a portfolio that looks less like a demand-side platform and more like a holding company for the programmatic age.
Original story published in adage.com: "What The Trade Desk’s investment strategy means for ad tech - Ad Age"