The Trade Desk

Gourmet Ads is fully integrated with The Trade Desk, providing programmatic buyers with seamless access to our Managed and Curated food and grocery inventory. This integration supports multiple advertisers bidding for ad space in real time, fostering a competitive and open marketplace. Our direct integration is powered through Microsoft Advertising (formerly Xandr), enabling a high-performance connection between advertisers and our premium supply, and connecting to supply side platforms for broader inventory access.

While Programmatic Buyers can transact through both Open Exchange and Private Marketplace (PMP) Deals, preferred activation is via PMP Deals. This approach provides greater transparency, operational efficiency, and full buying control, offering more transparency for advertisers and building trust, alongside enhanced access to detailed reporting. With visibility into deal performance, impressions, and spend, advertisers can make real-time optimizations to improve outcomes.

We support a broad range of media types—Display, Mobile, Video, Native, Connected TV (CTV), and Audio—aligned to specific campaign goals and audience strategies. All Gourmet Ads PMP Deals are automatically synced to your The Trade Desk account, ensuring rapid activation and a streamlined buying experience.

This integration supports very high user match rates, significantly improving targeting accuracy and media efficiency. By leveraging Xandr’s robust identity graph, we deliver higher addressability and better reach across campaigns—ensuring advertisers connect with high-intent food and grocery audiences at scale.

This direct, frictionless integration ensures consistent delivery, fast ramp-up, and optimized performance for programmatic advertisers looking to drive results.

Key Features and Capabilities of The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk stands out as a leading platform for programmatic advertising campaigns, offering a robust suite of features designed to help advertisers reach their campaign goals. With advanced data management tools, advertisers can harness powerful segmentation and audience insights to drive campaign performance. Real-time bidding capabilities ensure that ad placements are both efficient and effective, while contextual targeting allows for highly relevant advertising that resonates with target audiences. The Trade Desk provides access to premium inventory from top publishers and supply side platforms, giving advertisers the reach and flexibility needed to connect with audiences across multiple channels. Its transparent approach and data-driven decision-making tools enable advertisers to optimize campaigns, maximize performance, and maintain full control over their advertising investments.

Key Features:

• Real-time bidding engine capable of evaluating millions of ad impressions per second

• Full integration with first-party and third-party data via leading Data Management Platforms (DMPs)

• Identity resolution through Unified ID 2.0 for privacy-compliant, cross-device targeting

• Access to premium inventory across display, mobile, video, audio, CTV, and DOOH

• AI-powered optimization using Kokai and Koa to improve pacing, bidding, and performance

• Transparent reporting and attribution tools that support outcome-based campaign measurement

Kokai is The Trade Desk’s AI-powered media buying platform, launched in June 2023. It represents a significant upgrade to the company’s DSP infrastructure by shifting from a centralized optimization model to a distributed AI architecture. Kokai is designed to process more than 13 million ad impressions per second, using thousands of real-time data signals to evaluate and prioritize each opportunity.

The platform introduces improvements in forecasting, budget pacing, and bid decisioning through advanced machine learning models. Features like predictive clearing and impression scoring allow advertisers to make smarter, faster decisions within identity-constrained and high-volume environments.

Kokai also expands access to real-time analytics and media quality insights. It integrates new indices to evaluate campaign performance, media value, and audience impact—all within a streamlined interface.

A core part of Kokai is the Programmatic Table, a redesigned user experience modeled after the periodic table. It consolidates campaign controls, KPIs, insights, and recommendations into a single dashboard—giving media traders greater transparency and control over strategy and execution.

Kokai enhances integration with identity, measurement, and contextual partners through a new Partner Portal, enabling scalable, privacy-conscious campaigns across channels. It reflects a shift toward more intelligent, responsive, and unified programmatic buying.

By continually evolving its platform, Kokai positions The Trade Desk at the forefront of the future of programmatic advertising, ensuring ongoing innovation and industry leadership.

The Trade Desk integrates retail data and shopper insights from leading U.S. retailers, enabling advertisers to connect media exposure to verified purchase behavior. Through partnerships with companies like Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, Target, and Albertsons, advertisers gain access to anonymized transactional data that reflects real-world shopping activity across the United States.

This data can be activated directly within The Trade Desk to build high-intent retail audience segments based on SKU-level purchase behavior, category preferences, and brand loyalty. These segments are regularly updated, privacy-compliant, and fully interoperable with other targeting tools in the platform.

The Trade Desk also supports integration with major Data Management Platforms (DMPs), allowing advertisers to onboard first-party CRM data and enrich it with third-party audience signals. These audiences can then be modeled, segmented, and synced directly into the platform for precise targeting and real-time campaign activation. Whether sourced from retail partners or DMPs, all audience data is actionable at scale.

Advertisers can use this retail data not only for targeting but also for campaign measurement. The platform supports closed-loop attribution by tying ad exposure to point-of-sale data, enabling performance metrics such as Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), incremental sales lift, and purchase frequency, all of which contribute to increased revenue for advertisers by directly linking campaign effectiveness to business growth.

For grocery, CPG, and household brands, this integration offers a powerful way to align programmatic advertising with actual shopper outcomes—improving targeting precision, measurement accuracy, and budget allocation across U.S. retail environments.

Data-Driven Decision Making

At the core of The Trade Desk’s platform is a commitment to data-driven decision making. Advertisers benefit from seamless access to a wide array of data sources, including first-party and third-party data, as well as integrations with external partners. This wealth of data powers advanced analytics and audience segmentation, enabling advertisers to create highly targeted programmatic ad campaigns that drive superior campaign performance. The Trade Desk’s data management platform (DMP) gives advertisers the flexibility to create and manage custom data segments, allowing for precise targeting and greater control over ad campaigns. By enabling advertisers to leverage data at every stage, The Trade Desk ensures that programmatic advertising campaigns are both effective and efficient.

Campaign Monitoring and Optimization

The Trade Desk equips advertisers with powerful tools for campaign monitoring and optimization, ensuring that programmatic advertising campaigns deliver optimal results. Through a unified dashboard, advertisers can track campaign performance in real time, monitoring key metrics such as impressions, clicks, and conversions. The platform’s advanced optimization features enable advertisers to make data-driven adjustments to ad placements and strategies, helping to achieve campaign goals and maximize ROI. By leveraging data-driven advertising and real-time analytics, advertisers can continuously refine their campaigns, improve performance, and ensure that every advertising dollar is working as hard as possible.

Expanding Reach through Connected TV

Connected TV (CTV) has emerged as a vital channel for reaching audiences in the evolving digital landscape, and The Trade Desk supports advertisers in capitalizing on this opportunity. The platform provides access to premium inventory from leading publishers and supply side platforms, allowing advertisers to deliver impactful ad campaigns on the big screen. With advanced data management and targeting capabilities, The Trade Desk enables advertisers to reach specific target audiences on CTV, ensuring that ads are both relevant and effective. Advertisers can create and manage their own CTV ad campaigns, leveraging the platform’s tools and features to optimize ad placements, enhance campaign performance, and achieve their campaign goals. The Trade Desk’s transparent approach and data-driven capabilities make it an ideal choice for brands and agencies looking to expand their reach and drive results through connected TV advertising.

OpenPath is a direct integration framework developed by The Trade Desk that allows advertisers to access premium publisher inventory without relying on traditional Supply Side Platforms (SSPs). Unlike walled garden platforms like Google, which restrict third-party access and control both content and ad delivery, OpenPath emphasizes openness and neutrality in the ad-tech ecosystem. Launched in 2022, OpenPath enables direct connections between The Trade Desk and publishers, reducing the complexity and costs associated with intermediary ad tech layers.

By bypassing SSPs, OpenPath offers buyers improved transparency, greater control, and enhanced efficiency in the supply chain. Advertisers gain real-time access to publisher inventory with full visibility into pricing, auction dynamics, and bid outcomes. This direct path allows for better fee alignment and ensures that more media spend reaches the publisher.

OpenPath is fully interoperable with The Trade Desk’s existing targeting, measurement, and identity tools, including Unified ID 2.0. Campaigns delivered through OpenPath benefit from the same audience segmentation, AI optimization, and cross-channel reporting available within the broader DSP.

From a technical standpoint, OpenPath operates via server-side integration with publishers via Prebid and uses industry-standard bid request formats. This setup ensures low-latency access and real-time decision-making, while maintaining publisher controls such as pricing rules and brand safety parameters.

OpenPath reflects The Trade Desk’s effort to create a more transparent, efficient, and accountable programmatic ecosystem by simplifying how buyers and publishers transact.