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.”

Teads, an adtech platform that helps web and mobile publishers monetize their digital content, is suing Google, claiming some anti-competitive advertising practices that hampered competition continue to this day. 

In an 85-page lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York, Teads claims that when Google tied its Google Ads ad platform to its ad exchange AdX, rival exchanges lost out on about 6.88 trillion impressions between 2017 and 2023. The complaint does not disclose the methodology behind that estimate.

“We believe Google’s practices artificially suppressed fair competition and hindered innovation,” Teads CEO David Kostman told ADWEEK.

The company is suing now with the aim of “recovering lost value and establishing a transparent, fair environment where independent ad tech providers and publishers can thrive,” he added.

Teads did not specify a figure, but its complaint requested “treble damages, punitive damages, and/or restitution in an amount to be determined at trial.”

A Google spokesperson called the allegations “meritless” in a statement to ADWEEK, adding, “Advertisers and publishers have many choices, and when they choose Google’s adtech tools it’s because they are effective, affordable, and easy to use.”

Teads is the fifth supply-side platform (SSP) to sue Google over the last year, joining a roster of litigants that includes Index Exchange, Magnite, OpenX, and PubMatic. 

These lawsuits were sparked by an April 2025 landmark federal ruling that determined the tech giant used unlawful, anti-competitive practices to maintain its dominance in the open web advertising market.

These include the claim that Google forced publishers to use its ad server to access AdX’s advertiser demand, and that some of Google’s auction mechanics, called ‘First Look’ and ‘Last Look,’ boxed out rivals. 

Google previously told ADWEEK these practices have since been retired. But Teads’ lawsuit claims some of these practices are ongoing.

“Google now claims that it ended Last Look in 2019,” the lawsuit says. “Its assurances are false….Google has enacted additional auction rules across publisher inventory that substantively parallel Last Look.”

The adtech company also accuses Google of continuing to operate a secretive bid-rigging scheme, originally called Project Bernanke. Google has previously said its 2019 shift to first-price auctions would create a “fair and transparent” market, but Teads claims that the same Project Bernanke scheme “continued to work” after this shift, and that “Google continues to update the Bernanke/Algorithm to this day.”

Teads wants court-ordered changes that would support healthier competition in the market and require Google to put an end to what it calls “deceptive practices.”

Teads will report its second-quarter earnings on Aug. 6. Its stock is down nearly 68% year-over-year, and the company warned the lawsuit could create more risk for investors.

“The Google lawsuit may be costly, protracted, and divert management’s attention and resources from our business operations,” the SSP said in an SEC filing this week.

Like many adtech companies, Teads and Google have a complicated relationship. Despite the lawsuit, they are also partners in other aspects. In February, the company said it was working with Google TV to extend its connected television ad inventory in the U.S. and the U.K. 

Elon Musk’s X has dropped its lawsuit against the advertising trade group the World Federation for Advertisers (WFA) after nearly two years, the organizations said Wednesday.

A joint statement published to the X Business account and the WFA website said that they are both “putting the litigation…behind them,” adding that “this resets the relationship between the two organizations.” 

In August 2024, X levied an antitrust lawsuit against the nonprofit group and several of its member organizations, including Mars, CVS Health, and Unilever (eventually adding Shell, Lego, Nestlé, Tyson Foods, Colgate-Palmolive, and others). The case alleged that the advertisers illegally colluded in a politically motivated effort, through the WFA’s Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), to boycott X and steer advertising investment away from right-leaning media platforms.

X claimed that the exodus of ad spend cost it billions in lost revenue. The platform’s 2024 ad revenue was $1.7 billion, down more than 62% from pre-Musk acquisition levels, per an S-1 filing made by X’s parent SpaceX in May.

The battle raised broader questions about advertisers’ ability to leverage investments across various media platforms, questions that the industry is still grappling with.

The WFA and the advertisers maintained that no illegal coordination occurred and that each brand independently decided where to advertise according to their own brand safety preferences.

Nonetheless, the dispute forced WFA to shutter GARM just days after X’s initial complaint was filed, citing the cost of defending itself. GARM was a voluntary cross-industry collaborative effort dedicated to mitigating digital safety risks. 

The case was dismissed by a federal judge in March, determining that X was unable to demonstrate an antitrust violation. X appealed that decision in April. 

Now, it has dropped the claims.

In their joint statement, the organizations said they are “fully aligned in the view that brands, platforms and consumers will all benefit from brand-safety innovation.”

They added that “WFA reiterates its commitment to freedom of speech, a principle first included in WFA’s founding constitution back in 1953, and a principle it shares with X.”

The spat between X and WFA incited wider concerns about advertisers’ ability to influence media. Last summer, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission under Trump appointee Andrew Ferguson launched a probe into whether advertising groups, ad verification firms, and media-rating organizations illegally coordinated to shape advertising investment choices. The agency has issued Civil Investigative Demand (CID) letters, similar to subpoenas, to organizations including Media Matters for America, Ad Fontes Media, NewsGuard, Global Disinformation Index, and, as first reported by ADWEEK, Integral Ad Science.

In April, advertising agency giants Publicis, WPP, and Dentsu settled with the FTC and a group of U.S. states over allegations that, since 2018, they illegally colluded to implement brand safety standards that would direct advertisers’ budgets away from certain media platforms and publishers. The government determined that collusion on these standards stifled conservative media.

The Trade Desk has appointed Kristi Argyilan as its new chief commercial officer.

Argyilan, an advertising and commerce industry veteran, joins the popular demand-side platform from Uber, where she helmed the advertising business globally. She’s held previous leadership roles at Target, Albertsons, and IPG. 

At The Trade Desk, Argyilan will be responsible for driving growth as the company adapts to an ad landscape increasingly shaped by AI. Argyilan steps into a position vacated last summer by Tim Sims, who held the role for under two years. 

She will take the post officially later this month and will report directly to the company’s CEO Jeff Green. 

Green signaled his support for Argyilan’s appointment in a press release Wednesday, highlighting her “exceptional ability to bring together customers, partners and teams around a shared vision—and then turn that vision into measurable business growth.” She’ll focus on helping clients “seize the opportunities created by AI, commerce, and the open internet,” Green added, “while strengthening the ecosystem that makes that innovation possible.”

Argyilan, for her part, believes The Trade Desk is “uniquely positioned to help marketers navigate what’s next,” she said. She expressed support for The Trade Desk’s “commitment to innovation, transparency and the open internet,” and said she’s excited to help clients and partners “unlock new opportunities for growth.”

She will leave Uber after about a year and a half at the ridesharing giant, where she helped to scale the advertising business globally and establish the company as a more serious commerce media player. Josh Butler, general manager and global head of sales at Uber for Business, will take over Argyilan’s responsibilities on an interim basis. 

“We are grateful for Kristi’s contributions to growing this business and wish her the best in her next chapter,” an Uber spokesperson told ADWEEK. The spokesperson said that Uber’s ads business “continues to fire on all cylinders,” noting that it’s generated over $2 billion in annualized revenue in a year-over-year spike of more than 50%. 

Argyilan’s move arrives in the midst of a wider leadership shakeup at adtech company.

Last month, it brought on Zendesk alum Sarah Gavin to serve as CMO following the departure of longtime marketing leader Ian Colley, and also appointed Nate Olmstead as chief financial officer—the company’s fourth finance chief in the span of roughly a year. Earlier this week, The Trade Desk named former Google and LinkedIn ad exec Penry Price to its board.

Meanwhile, a string of top leaders have exited the company in recent months, including Sims and Colley as well as chief revenue officer Anders Mortensen, chief strategy officer Samantha Jacobson, chief financial officer Alex Kayyal, and three board members. 

Now, the company said in today’s press release, The Trade Desk is entering “its next phase of growth.”

“The leaders we’ve welcomed over the past month bring world-class experience, fresh perspectives and an unwavering commitment to our customers,” Green said. “As AI transforms advertising and the open internet enters its next phase of growth, their leadership will help ensure we continue building the products, partnerships and capabilities our clients need to succeed for years to come.”

Argyilan will have her work cut out for her; The Trade Desk has in recent months undergone high-profile scuffles with clients and platform partners, reworked its platform, and seen its financial growth plateau. It was the worst-performing stock in the S&P 500 in 2025.

Both Argyilan and The Trade Desk declined to comment beyond the press release.

LiveRamp, which has for years helped brands, publishers, and platforms connect and activate customer data, is launching its first brand campaign on connected TV. The message, one of trust and flexibility, arrives amid a pending Publicis takeover that has the ad industry questioning whether the platform can remain neutral. 

The adtech company will air 15- and 30-second ads for its services on Netflix for the next five months, targeting executives with a promise to help marketers connect data sources seamlessly and “deliver experiences customers want, maximize marketing returns, and drive more revenue.” 

The core message: Marketers can rely on LiveRamp in the era of AI. “AI is only as valuable as the data that it sits upon, and only LiveRamp has the foundation in data ethics, identity, cleanroom technologies, along with our broad network, which together enable marketers to scale AI-powered workflows and business performance in a way that’s durable and defensible and secure,” the company’s chief marketer Jessica Shapiro said. 

Trust is likely to be a valuable differentiator in light of increasing automation in the industry. When marketers start handing the keys over to autonomous systems to handle campaign planning, audience creation, measurement, and optimization, quality and governance of the underlying datasets will only become more important. 

The promise, right now, is also an opportunistic one for LiveRamp. The company’s claims of neutrality are under heightened scrutiny after French advertising giant Publicis in May announced plans to acquire the platform for $2.2 billion. Since then, some ad industry leaders have not just expressed concern about giving a competitor access to their identity and data infrastructure, but have said outright that they will drop the platform. Among them are Omnicom CEO John Wren. Meanwhile, former Dentsu exec Doug Ray told ADWEEK recently that, as with IPG’s 2018 takeover of Acxiom, there will be a “slow erosion” of clients off LiveRamp.

The new campaign could help do damage control on the perception of LiveRamp’s neutrality and trustworthiness in the market. But the campaign is not a direct answer to concerns about Publicis’ takeover of the platform; it was in the works before news of the acquisition broke and is designed first and foremost, Shapiro said, as a “response to the acceleration of AI.” She added: “It’s, in general, the message people need to hear, and it reinforces what we stand for in terms of neutrality,” Shapiro said. “Being trustworthy and making sure that the data is secure is something that is in the roots of our company.”

Asked whether LiveRamp expects to see Publicis competitors like WPP, Omnicom, and Dentsu using its platform in a few years’ time, Shapiro said: “We maintain that we will be neutral, and we have always been neutral and worked with companies and agencies across the board. And we’re not expecting a change on that front.”

Publicis did not comment by press time.

The decision to position LiveRamp as a trusted platform for activating data in AI workflows builds on the company’s strategic shift. It no longer wants to be seen as just an identity and cleanroom provider; it wants to be seen as a trusted data and governance layer that can undergird a variety of AI marketing tasks. It aligns with recent moves by the company, which last month launched a program to bring more external, partner-run AI agents onto its network and also established an arrangement with OpenAI that lets marketers assess the performance of their ChatGPT ads using LiveRamp’s Conversions API. 

Rooting its CTV campaign in a message of trust, Shapiro suggested, could drive the point home. Marketing decision-makers, she said, need to “make tough choices about which AI solutions to invest in, and so we need to keep reinforcing why LiveRamp is the right solution and drives the right outcome.”

LiveRamp developed the new campaign with Archetype, an agency owned by London-based Next 15 Group that counts Airbnb, Pizza Hut, and Nvidia as clients. The ads debut on Netflix, one of LiveRamp’s top advertising partners, with additional activation on YouTube and across social media. The adtech company is hoping that the push will generate positive engagement, increase the brand’s share of voice in the market, and help it win new business.