The numbers
$715 million: The Trade Desk’s second-quarter revenue, representing 3% year-over-year growth but the company’s slowest growth rate since 2020.
$241 million: Adjusted EBITDA, representing a 34% margin.
More than 95%: The company’s customer retention rate for the quarter.
$0.34: Earnings per share, coming in 17% lower than Wall Street projections.
$650 million: The Trade Desk’s third-quarter revenue guidance, below a consensus analyst estimate of $804 million.
The watercooler talk
CEO Jeff Green acknowledged the company’s lackluster financial performance during the earnings call with investors. “Our revenue growth is below our expectations and below the standard we hold ourselves to,” he said. “These numbers are not a reflection of our company or the long-term opportunity in front of us. We underperformed our own expectations.”
Green attributed the sluggish growth to two key factors: macroeconomic hurdles including tariff headwinds, inflation, and weaker consumer conditions; and issues with The Trade Desk’s own execution. “Some brands are falling prey to low-cost, low-decisioning methods like programmatic guaranteed, and fixed-price [buying],” he said, suggesting that the company has not been able to capture enough of the dollars that have shifted to cheaper buying methods.
Shares of The Trade Desk tanked nearly 25% in after-hours trading.
In 2024, The Trade Desk’s market cap hit a high of $59 billion and has since fallen 86% to around $8.3 billion.
The platform, which has consistently positioned itself as the anti-Google, voicing a commitment to transparency in open web advertising, has strained under intensifying competition from Amazon, critical product feedback from clients, and a fallout with one of its biggest clients, French agency holdco Publicis.
It’s also undertaking a reorganization of its leadership ranks, bringing on a new chief commercial officer, a chief marketing officer, a chief finance chief, and a board member this summer. The changes arrived after a steady executive exodus that included former chief commercial officer Tim Sims, CRO Jed Dederick (and Dederick’s successor Anders Mortensen), chief strategy officer Samantha Jacobson, CFO Alex Kayyal, longtime CMO Ian Colley, and others as well as three board members.
At the same time, the platform is almost certainly feeling squeezed by increasing consolidation in the digital ad industry—a shrinking divide that’s pitting demand-side and supply-side platforms against one another while forcing them to continue working as partners.
Taken together, investors have cooled on The Trade Desk.
Nonetheless, The Trade Desk has enjoyed a few bright spots of late, including an expanded retail and commerce media push bolstered by a new partnership with agency holding company Dentsu and integrations with Booking.com, Priceline, Marriott, and United Airlines. The company has also recently doubled down on its connected TV efforts, making Netflix inventory available in its Sellers & Publishers 500+ marketplace in its Kokai platform, and allowing advertisers to buy home screen ads on Samsung smart TVs.
Meanwhile, the company is investing more resources in AI-focused ad innovation. It is testing AI campaign creation with Anthropic’s Claude and is piloting autonomous workflows with Stagwell via its Koa agents. It is also an early backer of novel industry-wide efforts to standardize agent-to-agent media transactions.
On the investor call, Green underscored strong customer relationships, specifically the joint business ventures the company operates with over 200 clients, which grew six times faster than the company’s overall revenue.
Green also teased a forthcoming upgrade to Kokai, its primary buying platform. Called Zuma, the version is designed to improve navigability across workflows and employs more automated features to help advertisers run campaigns. The Trade Desk sunset its controversial periodic table-inspired Kokai interface earlier this year.
The key quote
Addressing investors’ concerns about the long-term relevance of the DSP business in the AI era, Green said: “A DSP is a platform built to decide which of those [ad] impressions you buy and which you don’t, and of course, that is enhanced by AI….I wouldn’t say that the DSP model, if you will, is going to be disrupted by AI. It is AI.”
He added: “Agentic is one of the biggest opportunities that advertising will ever see. It is a huge opportunity for us. We are already seeing massive advantage from it. Some are using agentic to just build yesterday’s business model all over again, if you will. They’re building ad networks out of agentic-like technologies. That’s not going to work because it doesn’t leverage the very best of decisioning, which is what a DSP does.”
Separately, Green addressed The Trade Desk’s relationships with agencies following a public spat with Publicis.
“We built this business on our relationship with the agencies,” he said “They’ve been a phenomenal partner to us over the years. All of them have been critical to our success. They’re all in periods of transition right now, but overall, our partnership has been phenomenal with each of them, and that includes Publicis. They’ve been an important partner for us for over a decade. Of course, there were some public disputes about what was essentially a negotiation, but that’s behind us.”
