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The Trade Desk, A Fast-Growing Ad-Tech Company, Opens For Business In China

Search engine Baidu partners with the Trade Desk in China. 

• The Trade Desk, the fast-growing programmatic advertising platform, flung open its doors in China on Tuesday
• Several months after announcing partnerships with key Chinese Internet players, officially offer global brands a shot at the country’s 800 million Internet users.
• (That’s 20% of all internet users in the word.) And, 788 million of them are mobile.

Jill Goldsmith Contributor

The Trade Desk, the fast-growing programmatic advertising platform, flung open its doors in China on Tuesday. Several months after announcing partnerships with key Chinese Internet players, it can officially offer global brands a shot at the country’s 800 million Internet users. (That’s 20% of all internet users in the word.) And, 788 million of them are mobile.

Marketers are eager to tap the massive opportunity of China’s 1.4 billion population and expanding middle class. In an announcement, the Trade Desk described an active period of beta testing that delivered multi-channel campaigns to Chinese audiences in sectors ranging from hospitality, luxury retail and education to food, beverage and biotech.

Trade Desk clients can tap into China on the same proprietary Trade Desk platform they use for the rest of the world.

Programmatic advertising automates buying and selling. The Trade Desk’s platform helps marketers analyze, locate and target audiences and optimize pricing across markets and devices. The platform’s capabilities, user interface and planning tools were updated last summer in an AI-driven package called the Next Wave that’s had quick uptake by clients and helped drive robust financials in 2018.

The ad-tech company reported full-year revenue of $477 million, up 55% year-on-year. Net income jumped to $88 million from $50 million. It expects revenue to continue rising this year to $637 million. The Trade Desk was founded in 2009 in Ventura, California. It went public in 2016.

International accounted for 15% of total sales. That’s a big jump from three years ago, CEO and founder Jeff Green told investors this month, but it’s well short of where the company wants to be. China’s a major step in that expansion. “We have made a significant investment in the country over the past few years,” Green said in the statement, “and are confident in our ability to be the trusted programmatic partner to help multinational brands grow in China.”

At the Mach 6 investor event, Green described an even bigger mandate he sees. “We are not just there to ride the wave [of a rising middle class], but to empower it. Helping people decide for the first time what kind of laundry detergent to washing machine to buy.”

The Trade Desk now has some 50 employees in offices in mainland China and Hong Kong and is looking to hire about 20 more. According to its latest 10k, it has 724 clients around the world, mostly advertising agencies or divisions within them.

In an interview, Tim Sims, SVP of inventory partnerships, shrugged off Wall Street jitters over China’s slower growth because the market is just so big and the number of connected consumers growing so fast. “What’s so incredible to me is that, in a relatively short period of time, in less than a generation, [the population equivalent of] two United States are getting access to the internet.”

Sims said myriad deals beyond those with the big four partners the company announced had to be set up over the course of a challenging several years. In the US and Europe, he noted, media, tech and data companies often serve multiple markets. “In China, every single partner is new to us,” he said.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jillgoldsmith/2019/03/26/the-trade-desk-opens-for-business-in-china-with-alibaba-baidu-tencent/#62139ad23601

Tags: adtech, China, programatic advertising, stocks, tsx-v