By Seb Joseph • September 11, 2024 •
Ivy Liu
Rumors are swirling that The Trade Desk is cooking up a smart TV operating system, sparking speculation it’s ready to square off with heavyweights like Roku, Amazon, Google, Apple, and TV makers like Samsung (Tizen), LG (WebOS), and Vizio (SmartCast). But The Trade Desk’s CEO insists that’s not the game they’re playing.
Speaking earlier today at Exchangewire’s ATS conference in London, Jeff Green dismissed any notion of competing with those companies, stressing that they’ll remain partners, not rivals.
“They’re wrong,” Green said when asked on-stage about rumors — first reported by the smart TV newsletter Lowpass — that The Trade Desk wants to compete with Roku. “You can see that in our partnership with Roku.”
That partnership, announced earlier this year, is a data deal giving The Trade Desk’s advertisers the insights needed to deliver targeted ads to Roku viewers at just the right moment — hardly the sign of brewing tension.
Yet, it’s easy to see why the more tantalizing notion of The Trade Desk launching its own smart TV OS overshadowed these collaborations. Companies like Roku and Samsung use their own operating systems to drive ad sales, so it’s not a stretch to imagine The Trade Desk eyeing a piece of that pie.
But Green hinted that even if The Trade Desk was to dive into the smart TV OS space, it wouldn’t necessarily mean cutting into someone else’s profits. He pivoted his response toward a broader vision: infrastructure. Green seemed to suggest that the real focus isn’t competition but building a bigger, shared foundation for the future of TV advertising.
“We have to make certain that the supply chain of the open Internet is better than that of wall gardens,” said Green. “That’s the one thing those walled gardens have going for them — that by controlling the whole supply chain, you can make it short. That’s how Amazon became successful — Jeff Bezos was obsessed about supply chains. We have to obsess about that.”
This doesn’t mean The Trade Desk is aiming to control both the buy and sell sides of that supply chain, as Green pointed out later in his panel discussion, that’s exactly why Google’s ad business is under the microscope. Instead, Green suggested The Trade Desk’s goal is to continue streamlining the supply chain, helping advertisers access premium content outside the walled gardens without the complexity.
“We have to obsess about the supply chain while never leaving the buy side,” said Green. “We do not want to own content, because the way we’ve competed with Google is we’ve said ‘we are going to objectively buy the internet. So we don’t care if we buy Yahoo or Hulu, we just want to objectively figure out, on behalf of Nike, which one to buy.’”
Over the years, The Trade Desk has consistently pushed this approach, whether through initiatives like UID2.0, OpenPath, or its list of over 500 sellers and publishers it believes represent the best of the open web. In many ways, a smart TV operating system could seem like a natural extension of these efforts.
And the limited rumors about this operating system seem to support that. The Trade Desk appears to be aiming for a more foundational role in the connected TV ecosystem, embedding itself within the devices that power connected TV (CTV) apps. This would allow the company to gain greater transparency and control over how ads are delivered, optimizing the supply chain just as it has done before.
“Nothing is more effective in making you want to feel something than moving pictures and sound as it relates to ads,” said Green. “So, it’s because of the effectiveness of video ads, and we saw that with programmatic, where you can personalize those. That really has the potential to be the most effective advertising at scale, potentially in the history of the world.”
These comments underscore why CTV continues to be a key growth driver for ad spending. Whether it’s time spent, ad dollars, or users, the trend is undeniable: CTV is booming. In fact, CTV ad spending surpassed $20 billion for the first time in 2023 and is expected to grow 12% to $22.7 billion in 2024, according to the IAB, outpacing total media growth by 32%. While much of this investment comes from reallocations — particularly from linear TV and traditional media — 31% of the increased spending comes from advertisers expanding their overall budgets.
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