Marketers keen to partner with the open internet: Tejinder Gill, The Trade Desk

As it comes close to completing two years in India, The Trade Desk has become a harbinger in the programmatic advertising landscape of the country. While we hurtle towards a cookie-less future, organizations like TTD are coming to dominate the conversation as multiple industries look to navigate the ever-increasing open internet.

“The Trade Desk has definitely become a loud DSP (Demand Side Platform) in India. Advertisers are loving us, and we’re capturing ground because we entered the market at the right time,” says Tejinder Gill, General Manager, The Trade Desk, adding: “If you take a step back, there was always a very big potential for fast-growing ad opportunities in an open internet, whether it was social media and UGC platforms. And when we are talking to marketers, they're very keen to partner with the open internet because that has more to do with broadcasted content.”

Gill notes that everyone is very sure that this is where media is booming and, “a lot of broadcasted content is already filtered. It is brand safe and all the marquee brands want to be there.” He adds that globally, as well as domestically, TTD is holding a lot of conversations and exploring solutions with leading brands for omnichannel integration.  

On the home front, apart from the head office in Delhi, TTD launched a business and engineering office last year in Bengaluru, a major milestone for the company. Gill notes that in less than two years, TTD has on-boarded around 100 major advertisers, grown its market presence to the point that India has the second highest number of TTD followers on Linkedin after its home market of the US, and perhaps most significantly, issued over 4000 TTD Edge certifications.

“That means every day, three marketing professionals are becoming TTD Edge certified and bring to their organizations newly acquired skills in media planning, trading and other vital areas,” elaborates Gill.

However, what is most important perhaps is how TTD is transitioning the India market, and that the CPG sector is taking a lead in this. Referring to previous conversations with e4m, Gill says “We spoke a lot about decisioning and price discovery and how India is basically a programmatic guarantee market. We feel price discovery decisioning is the right way forward. We have established ourselves as leaders of the open internet, having our first report around the open Internet earlier this year and educating the media, clients, and industries.”

Then, earlier this month TTD launched Kokai, a new approach to digital advertising that incorporates major advances in distributed artificial intelligence (AI), measurement, partner integrations and a revolutionary, intuitive user experience. Kokai distributes deep learning algorithms across all aspects of the digital media buying process.

While the idea was always for an open internet, Gill says that, in reality, it has become more closed over the last three decades. But now advertisers, consumers, and other stakeholders of the digital ecosystem are moving out of these walled gardens, and setting up marketplaces out in the open internet. And The Trade Desk is the platform, according to Gill, which is the glue bringing these omni-channels together and providing customised solutions to their customers.  “If you look at any other DSP globally, they do multiple things, and this focus on walled gardens is, let's say, 20th or 29^th on their priority list. We do one thing well, which is we solve objectivity for our advertisers. So we have a very single point focus. We do not play in the rest of the supply chain at all. And that's why we are able to make that objectivity very, very clear.”

“All these global brands love us because of our transparency. They love to engage with us. And now after two years of operations, we have been able to prove ROI to advertisers, and bring in efficiencies in net media investment so we are helping them make media more workable for them,” he concludes.