I spend a lot of time with marketing leaders who, on paper, are doing personalization right. With experienced staff, robust data sets, and strategic campaigns, they should be influencing profitable growth.

Instead, they’re seeing wasted marketing spend, minimal momentum, and disjointed customer experiences. They may be personalizing, but it’s lacking relevance. 

Relevance means the message, design, and channel not only make technical sense, but they actually “land” with the target audience. 

The precision gap

The core difference between personalization and relevance is the question they answer: Personalization is the result of solving for “Who is this person?” Relevance forces marketers to ask themselves a tougher one: “What should we do right now? And what happens if we don’t?”

This is where I’m seeing many brands struggling. They often send more messages—or focus on further refining their segments—in an attempt to improve outcomes. But it doesn’t work. 

The real solution requires a connected system that combines identity, customer behavior, and business signals. This foundation and context allow marketers to see intent early, decide what will be effective in that moment, and act before that window of opportunity closes.

What relevance actually requires

Peeling back marketing buzzwords, the core of relevance is:

1. Who are you talking to? Brands need a clear and consistent understanding of who their audience is. I’m not talking about basic personas or segments, but strong identity resolution. If your customer data is fragmented across different databases and platforms, the experience will fracture. 

For example, the dreaded email promoting running shoes that the customer already bought. This often happens because browsing, purchase, and loyalty data are disconnected. It may feel like a technology problem internally, but externally, it feels like an irrelevant and frustrating experience.

2. What matters most? Signals are highly valuable for relevant marketing, but not every click, scroll, search, or site visit implies intent. Brands need to parse the signals to separate meaningful actions from low-value activity. 

For example, a customer who clicks on one winter coat in October has much different intent than someone who reviews sizing guides, checks inventory on different styles, colors, and brands, and adds one to their cart. Distinguishing between passive interest and purchase intent (and being able to respond accordingly), is the key to success.

3. What do you do next? Brands have to be able to act on high-intent signals quickly. Even the strongest signals lose value if they sit in dashboards or require human hours to identify. Timing is an important part of the relevance conversation, and the window of influence is much smaller than anticipated.

For example, if a shopper abandons a cart and doesn’t get a relevant follow-up until a few days later, you’ve likely lost that customer to a competitor. 

Relevance is the personalization multiplier

Moving toward relevance requires intention. Start by focusing on the data and signals that can create measurable value. If something doesn’t have a direct impact on action, it probably doesn’t belong at the center of your strategy. 

This might require you to get comfortable pulling back. Not every signal or moment needs a responding message. Knowing when not to engage is part of building trust with customers and ensuring they have a positive experience.

And above all, make sure these decisions connect across the lifecycle. Messages should build on each other, not compete for attention.

This may require a review of your tech stack. Relevance depends on a connected system of intelligence that brings data and context together, not a patchwork of disparate tools. 

The brands that outperform are the ones that offer the most relevant experience.

If you want to dive deeper into how CMOs are navigating the shift to relevance, check out The CMO’s New Mandate: Proving Marketing’s Impact in the Age of AI.

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.”

Measurement giant Nielsen is getting bigger. The company said it plans to acquire ad verification and brand safety provider DoubleVerify for $2.15 billion in cash.

If completed, the acquisition would fill a gap in Nielsen’s business, which has relied heavily on audience measurement, most notably through its ratings for linear TV and streaming. 

DoubleVerify’s technology is designed to show whether ads actually ran in digital environments, and whether they were shown on sites deemed safe by advertisers.

In a statement, Nielsen CEO Karthik Rao said, “Joining forces with DoubleVerify will extend our capabilities deeper into the digital media industry, ensuring that the spend flowing between buyers and sellers is reaching real people in brand-suitable environments, through verified channels.”

Rao was not available for an interview as of press time.

DoubleVerify CEO Mark Zagorski, who held the role of evp of Nielsen Marketing Cloud from 2015 to 2017, said in a statement: “I’m proud of the strong momentum we’ve built for DoubleVerify as the leading media effectiveness platform, the strength of our AI-powered measurement and optimization platform, and the exceptional work of our team.”

Simultaneous to the acquisition announcement, DoubleVerify reported second-quarter earnings. The company reported $193.8 million in revenue, a 3% year-over-year increase. Revenue came from three areas: activation ($107.7 million), measurement ($66.8 million), and supply-side ($19.3 million).

This story is developing.