The Trade Desk Q3 营收同比微降利润大跌，增长押注智能体平台与海外市场

In Q3, The Trade Desk beat the admittedly pessimistic revenue forecast it set for itself earlier this year. But growth has stalled.

The Trade Desk’s total revenue last quarter was $736 million, down a smidge from $739 million a year ago. Profit, however, fell far more sharply, from $116 million to $38 million.

The ground is rapidly shifting beneath The Trade Desk’s feet. Take, for example, who is now calling the shots on media buys.

“Decisions about what advertising to buy that were once made primarily by hands-on-keyboard traders are increasingly being made by senior agency leaders, procurement groups at large brands and senior executives,” TTD CEO Jeff Green told investors on the company’s Q3 earnings call Monday evening.

Meanwhile, the knowledge gap has narrowed. It was not that long ago when a CMO might not have known their own brand’s programmatic setup or even what a log file is.

Nowadays, though, even CFOs and CEOs often know, or are quickly learning, “the esoteric details of programmatic advertising,” Green said.

All of this matters for TTD because it’s now dealing with new types of people within the marketing and leadership orgs.

Where those buyers put their money is changing, too. Video, which includes CTV, online video and mobile video, is now a low 50% share of total spend. Mobile is in the high 20% range, while display is only a low double-digit percentage. Audio, which Green said was TTD’s fastest-growing channel by percentage, was close behind display at 7% of the business in Q3.

Notably, CTV and retail media, which normally dominate investor calls, barely came up. Instead, Green, other TTD execs and investors focused on smaller channels and business lines.

Political spend on the platform this year, for example, didn’t top the last presidential race (no surprise), but given the growth since the last midterm and the prospects for the presidential race in two years, “you can argue this was our best political cycle yet,” Green said.

TTD’s newly appointed CFO Nate Olmstead told investors that The Trade Desk “saw particular demand strength in medical health and the political election business.” The company also touted healthcare measurement partnerships with Veeva Crossix and IQVIA Digital, as well as an integration with OptimizeRx for medical ad inventory and targeting.

Then there’s the global business. TTD has always indexed heavily toward North America and US Fortune 1,000 marketers. But as growth in that region has plateaued or even tipped downward, the company’s APAC business was up 30% in the first nine months of the year versus last year, led by 45% growth in China. EMEA is up more than 20%.

And then, of course, there’s the agentic revolution.

“AI has produced a tremendous opportunity for us,” Green said. Thanks to AI, he said, TTD is refining its product faster than ever. “AI is helping us operate, AI is helping us build product and AI is in the product to help our clients manage their advertising.”

To be fair, Green also had more tangible metrics. Clients are setting up workflows faster, and time spent creating a campaign is down 9% on average, with a 15% reduction for ad group creation and another 9% for uploading creatives. The agentic platform is in beta, Green said, but “early adopters highlight meaningful time savings.”

And buyers would be wise to get familiar with it. The new agentic UI “is a good example of where the platform is heading,” Green said, and programmatic is one of the best business use cases for agentic chatbots and AI optimization.

Green described the platform as an advertiser API that gives “people quadrillions of permutations for every single campaign,” adding that it can be “overwhelming for you to figure out what dial to turn and what to do.” In simple terms, he said, the value prop of an agentic platform is a data feed, a few easy controls and AI that manages the thousands of dials that can be tuned a million different ways.

With the agentic future (the agentic present?) in mind, even TTD’s hitherto reserved approach to M&A could change. (The Trade Desk has two known acquisitions, Adbrain in 2017 and Sincera last year, both more like small acqui-hires. But a third acquisition came between those two deals, and its details remain undisclosed.)

But the company is “always looking,” Green said, even if it hasn’t been an active acquirer.

“I will just transparently say we’re looking more now than we historically have,” Green added. “Partly because I just think there’s a bunch of opportunity in the market that there hasn’t been in the past.”

Investors on the call seemed pleased that The Trade Desk had surpassed its low forecast, though they remain wary of the programmatic open web.

“Our growth is still below the level we expect from ourselves and what we think we are capable of,” Green told them, “and, honestly, what the ecosystem needs from us.”