Ad tech firm The Trade Desk (TTD) has launched an AI-powered media buying platform aimed at unlocking the full power of programmatic advertising.
Kokai, which TTD describes as ‘a new approach to digital advertising innovation’, distributes deep learning algorithms across the digital media buying process, helping marketers to more easily make sense of the thousands of signals involved.
The new platform builds on TTD’s Koa AI engine, which was unveiled in 2018. Koa was built to assist marketers in setting up campaigns based on business objectives and optimising based on performance, while Kokai distributes the power of the Koa AI across all aspects of media buying through TTD.
“The Trade Desk benefits from a rich yet highly complex dataset with very high integrity. With Kokai, we are able to help our clients make sense of that data with AI, and help the marketer make the best decisions at every turn,” said Jeff Green, Founder and CEO at The Trade Desk. “Building on our ground-breaking work with Koa, we are distributing AI across our platform, so that it can serve as an expertly trained co-pilot to today’s modern marketer.”
Features promised include predictive clearing, which ensures traders make bids at the optimal level; scoring every ad impression based on relevance to the advertiser; upgrading measurement and forecasting; increasing resilience, even in the absence of identifiers; budget optimisation; and KPI scoring.
Kokai will also see TTD introduce features dedicated to measurement around connected TV and retail media, including added-value retail measurement data, a Retail Sales Index, a TV Quality Index, and a Quality Reach Index.
“Programmatic advertising has evolved rapidly over the last five years, and we need to ensure that we surface the full power of data-driven decisioning for all marketers as intuitively as possible,” said Green. “Kokai’s innovations in areas such as advanced measurement, collaborative innovation, and a radical new UX will ensure The Trade Desk remains at the forefront of programmatic innovation in service of value for marketers.”
