"As described in the complaint, Amazon has represented to prospective advertisers for years that Amazon runs “second price” auctions where the winner of the auction would only pay “one cent more than the next highest bidder” for each successful bid for an advertising keyword. However, in practice, the complaint alleges that Amazon has charged its Sponsored Products advertisers their own winning bid close to 80% of the time and has effectively converted its nominally “second price” auction into a first price auction."

Interesting case about adtech, programmatic, and transparency. I don't have high hopes about anything meaningful, but we got a case.

TTD CEO Jeff Green announced today that the company will reduce its global headcount by around 15%, with affected employees being notified immediately and departures taking place tomorrow (Sept 4).

Interestingly, the announcement stresses that the cuts are not driven by financial pressure - The Trade Desk says it has ~$1.5B in cash, no debt, and generated more than $2.9B in revenue last year.

Green says the restructuring is intended to create smaller, more focused teams and allow TTD to move with greater agility while reinvesting in growth and innovation.

Given The Trade Desk's position as one of the largest independent DSPs, the scale of the cuts is pretty significant. Curious to hear what people in the ad tech/programmatic space think this means for TTD and the wider market.

Let’s hear it for the real MVPs still working while our uninformed bosses sip rose and talk shit that can’t be delivered anytime soon but come back with laundry lists of ‘must do it now or we will miss out on this $1M+ oppty’ Cheers to you my friends

TTD got shellacked today from earnings yesterday. The call itself sounded like the ramblings of someone who has no idea what is going on. Constantly repetition, selling Wall Street on scrum counts, praying DV360 gets spun off and saves their growth for another year.

Well today it looks like Wall St heard all that and said fuck this mess, we’re dumping our money into AppLovin. They see AppLovin as the next Facebook because AppLovin has focused on performance advertising for mobile apps and is allegedly going to open that up to SMBs. I’m skeptical that they can pull that off, I don’t see SMBs trusting a random ad tech company that sounds like it’s name is a bad play on a Judd Apatow joke, but Wall St is gonna fuck that chicken for a bit and they bought more time with it today.

TTD down 30% APP up 24% in the same day. APP is worth 4x TTD today.

So the future of Wall St investment in ad tech is performance. Well programmatic can’t compete with FB and Search on that front. They don’t own any inventory. Strength for neutrality but a kick in the balls for economics and performance media math.

So what’s a tech company to do to make the street happy? Time to get into the oil business.

Essentially TTD is a refiner: they don’t own the mineral rights, but a lot of folks that do will send their oil to TTD for processing. Problem is the pipelines they have in place are hitting capacity. Sure you can shift some oil going to another refinery over to your (DV360 losing Google benefits) but that doesn’t change the total oil you have access to.

And looking at the last year, Wall St loves to hear the refinery tapped into more oil pipelines.

In May of last year, TTD got a nice boost in their share price from one simple announcement: Netflix. An app with minimal supply and supply that TTD was sharing with DV360 made a nearly 15% bump in a matter of days.

Jeff talks about the TAM for TTD being $1T. Well sorry man, but no that is not your TAM. That $1T includes linear, Social, and Search/YouTube which you can’t touch. In fact those are the majority of that TAM. 20% of it is Meta and YouTube alone, of which YouTube is $30B a year globally. $30B. As in almost 3x what TTDs total global spend is.

Netflix inventory? Maybe $50M. It’s a wild guess. But that tiny rounding error to the Global advertising industry is worth 15% to the stock price. How much would an untapped $30B market be??????

Now I know what everyone’s saying and yes, it’s almost impossible. Except for one gap in the Google Armor: Influencers.

YouTube isn’t produced by Google, it’s a distribution and auction platform. No one wants to go compete with them on the distribution front, granted, but that latter front is an unchallenged market. As in the same kind of unchallenged market digital media was when programmatic kicked off its journey over a decade ago.

You’ll never lobby Google to open up the inventory, but influencers could have standing to sue Google into having to do so. Influencers are being ripped off by Google every day that goes by. Every impression on YouTube is essentially valued the same in their auction logic. A YouTube channel with pubescent teens making farts noises is getting the same auction value as a fully produced piece of content from another channel that took months to create. Why? Because Google has tried to artificially keep CPMs in YT low to keep the dollars flowing for their growth targets. They keep opening up more and more inventory every year to more and more channels and more and more formats. So YouTubers are making most of their money off of the platform by custom sponsorships and selling merch.

But what if the channels making the best content could actually be valued higher than the channels making dick all content? Why can’t that happen now? Because YouTube is as much a monopoly against the influencers as it is against the advertisers.

So you could goad the influencers to start taking legal action to force the issue on their behalf but that is like herding cats.

Or you could centralize your efforts in one push: Spotter Media.

Those guys have paid a boat load of investor money ($1B) buying the future rights to YouTube channel content. They say they have a solid business model, but color me skeptical. Maybe they are the JG Wentworth of influencers, but there’s no chance in hell JG Wentworth would pass on the change to increase the interest rates of the annuities they bought upfront. They have a lot of hold on a lot of content, and they stand to return a lot more money to their investors and themselves if they can increase the CPMs that content is generating.

So go drink that milkshake Daniel Plainview. Figure out which straw you want to use, but start drilling now. Even if you tap a 1/3 of the inventory in YouTube, you’ve potentially doubled your global revenue in one year. The ad format is the same, it’s the largest CTV app there is, and you save this stock growth for another 5 years at least.

Just a letter from a concerned shareholder.....can you please get him to focus on growing the share price without leaking OpenAI conversations to the press, having his CMO try to plant fake acquisition rumors on LinkedIn, parlaying half is equity grants from last year into a purchase this year after he's made hundreds of millions selling the stock at record highs and like you know, actually focus on competing with Amazon who he refuses to admit is in the room sleeping with his girlfriend??? Please?????????

This is kind of a big deal; the domain being blocked is part of how TTD fundamentally serve their ads which if kept in place could cause huge issues and some timely development work.

Interestingly, Google and other DSP's are unaffected - it could be a mistake, but it seems unlikely.

Wonder how Jeff Green is gonna take this

One of the most asked question on this sub is -"Where can I learn programmatic?" I've thrown all of the videos I had created for a website I own called programmatic academy on to youtube. You can find them here- there is also a link a the top of this sub. Now, to be clear, the programmatic that is covered in these courses is from the demand side- meaning the buy side.

The caveat is that some of the information may be outdated, but the fundamentals are still there.

As I explained briefly in a recent comment I just don't have the time to update and continue the courses. In fact, I am selling the domain (programmaticacademy.com) if anyone is interested - along with other programmatic themed domains.

Hope this helps some of you!

Long time coming but very bad!

Be Jeff Green -> Layoff 15% of the company prior to a long weekend by sending an email and making it so people can't login -> Congratulate self and talk about how much cash the company has in the note sent to laid off employees ->Turn around and days later award self and other executives lower strikes on option grants -> Pocket $$$.

For being in the marketing world, this company is terrible at presenting themselves. Maybe the executives responsible should be held... responsible?

"Never bet against Jeff......"

So the industry is a chatter about TTD stock shitting the bed for the second time in a year today. What's not being discussed is how major of a stumble this is relative to a major corporate event about to take place behind the scenes.

5 years ago the clock was up on JG's stranglehold on the company and they needed to initiate a vote to extend the dual class share structure. Back then in summer 2020, the stock was lighting a fire like all tech companies, and everyone saw fit to let Jeff keep the wheel and re-examine the issue in five more years.

Times up.

The letter screenshot above went out to shareholders fairly recently. I don't know who from the C Suite on down thought it was a good idea to send this out with this language prior to Q2 earnings hitting the street but they were.......misguided at best. It glosses the Q4 speed bump with the assumption that all things are pointing up up up as we head into the vote being locked in September, but then yesterday happened and well.......this all screams red alert something ain't working.

In the five years since Jeff retained his total control of the company the stock is up as of today a whopping....20ish%. The S&P over the same time? ....93%

Over 4 years the stock is DOWN 26% while the SP is up over 40%.

Since TTD started spending over $1B of investor money that could have been a 1 time dividend, is we assumed they had the best timing ever and bought at the lows they'd be up 20%, but if we assume the worst and say they bought at the peak they'd be down.......60%. Odds aren't strong they're up on that buyback right now that you could have put into the SP500 if they had just paid it out.

Suffice to say: if you're not a TTD shareholder you might say so what who gives a fuck, Kokai still stinks worse than my dog's asshole. Well fair trader, keep an eye on this vote. Hard to say how its going to end up, I'm sure TTD Corp relations is on overdrive tossing blow and hookers at institutional investors to shore this up. But the numbers today paint a pretty clear picture that the last 5 years were not good by any measure, they're barely above stagnant when you realize inflation is about the same in those 5 years as TTDs stock growth. And if the vote doesn't go Jeff's way, he's going to have a new board of directors to answer to, and we'll see how that changes the companies strategies moving ahead.

Google doing google shit. What was the reason for this? All my templates are now useless!! Any Google employee seeing this, what's going on over there? lol

As someone who’s been in the industry and has worked across the big 3 agencies and various brands for 10 years now… It’s insane to me that people still don’t realize everything is being bought programmatically, essentially… I’m sure people will argue this, but if you’ve been in the industry since Programmatic started, I’m sure you get it.

It’s really annoying when a rep will either go behind our backs or constantly reach out and bombard us with their “latest and greatest0 offerings as if it’s something they can only do… it’s actually comical and the amount of bullshit that is thrown out and then sales reps are wondering why some of us don’t take calls or respond to emails… Stop bullshitting, I get it, you have goals to reach but at the end of the day you guys need to realize the top agency Programmatic decision makers basically started this industry from the ground up 10+ years ago and there is a reason you’re not hearing back… honestly at least do your homework and who you reach out to at least… know that community is tight across the country. It may work for smaller brands or you may get lucky here or there, at the end of the day… You guys end up losing more by doing this.

Hi all, I'm the global head of programmatic at the LEGO Group and I'm hiring an expanded programmatic team over the next few years. My hiring is starting in Boston and Copenhagen with two roles currently being open. You can find the roles on the LEGO careers site. Search for "Programmatic" on the site and you'll see them.

The Boston role is manager level and the salary range is $100,906.00 - $151,360.00. The Copenhagen role is senior manager level and the salary band is likely to be 680,000-770,000 DKK. Both roles will require you to be in the office a minimum of three days a week.

Over the next month or so there will be additional roles opening in both Boston and Copenhagen, ranging from entry level up to manager. Send me a DM if you have any questions.

Update 24th November - The manager-level Programmatic Enablement role in Copenhagen is now also live.

NSFW if you work at Google