TTD's reliance on DeviceAtlas helps verify mobile & OTT devices of incoming bid requests, reaching 15M queries per second

Overview

The Trade Desk provides today’s digital advertisers with the tools to reach consumers in meaningful and impactful ways. Through continuous innovation and product development, The Trade Desk is paving the way for the future of media, with the mission to make digital advertising better.

Their self-service, cloud-based platform enables ad buyers to create, manage and optimize digital advertising campaigns across devices and ad formats, including display, mobile, video, audio, native and TV. By maintaining a purely buy-side focus, The Trade Desk delivers on branding and performance for clients worldwide.

The Trade Desk has been recognized for multiple awards, including winning ‘Best Demand-Side Technology’ and 'Innovator of the Year' at the AdExchanger Awards. In 2021, The Trade Desk broke into the top 20 on the Top 100 Software Companies list. 

The Challenge

A common question posed to advertisers has always been “how much is an ad worth.” It has always been a very difficult one to answer but in the digital world and with an influx of data, advertisers are now better informed when it comes serving appropriate ads to the right audiences.

With this influx of data comes new challenges, however. The Trade Desk gets a lot of bidding traffic from a wide range of supply vendors and publishers which means they get a lot of data in a variety of formats. This made it difficult to reliably identify different devices and normalize device data across various sources.

At the time, The Trade Desk were using a homegrown solution but the never-ending job of having to continually maintain a library of the latest devices that could be identified on their platform made for a resource-intensive exercise. The Trade Desk needed a partner that could offer guaranteed performance for accuracy and speed of device detection.

The Solution

The Trade Desk selected DeviceAtlas to accurately detect and better classify device types. This helped them normalize the device data that was coming through various suppliers for their own internal systems. With DeviceAtlas, The Trade Desk are able to capture various properties of devices, including Device Make and Model, Browser Name and Version, OS Name and OS Family. Advertisers can use these to define campaigns, enrich their targeting options and then measure campaign effectiveness across different devices.

DeviceAtlas is the only device detection solution that follows the OpenRTB specification which means that The Trade Desk was confident in this solution meeting the requirements of their customers.