Global advertising technology company The Trade Desk has announced ‘Deal Desk’, a new pillar of its Kokai platform that enables advertisers to manage their strategic one-to-one deals and upfront commitments with publishers.
Deal Desk gives both advertisers and publishers unprecedented transparency and insight into the performance, quality, and pacing of their deals, and showcases premium internet alternatives when deals underperform.
Digital advertising deals between advertisers and publishers (and other inventory aggregators) command a large percentage of programmatic spend, but today many deals underperform thanks to lack of visibility into impression quality and pacing. ‘Deal Desk’ leverages advanced AI to help advertisers and publishers understand deal performance, so they can address campaign optimisation. ‘Deal Desk’ also helps advertisers consider premium internet alternatives in the open market or in premium marketplaces such as the Sellers and Publishers 500 Plus*.
“The Trade Desk is committed to improving the supply chain for digital advertising on the open internet, and improving deal performance is a vital element of this work,” said Will Doherty, SVP, inventory development, The Trade Desk.
“Deals have not kept pace with advances in AI and transparency that savvy media buyers and sellers have come to expect. ‘Deal Desk’ represents a long overdue innovation for our industry and will help advance the strategic relationships between advertisers and their premium publisher partners.”
Deal Desk incorporates a range of powerful new features and innovations, including:
- Advertisers can inspect the health and value of their deals, using Deal Quality Scores to understand when a deal offers unique value for their campaigns and when they can find better value in the open marketplace.
- Publishers can use new APIs or a UI to propose deals that fully describe their inventory with rich metadata and clearly defined terms. They can use the same Deal Quality Scores their buyers see to gain insight into the market for their inventory and discover actionable recommendations to help improve the value of their deals.
- ‘Deal Desk’ will help automate deal activation and prioritisation so that both advertisers and publishers can spend less time troubleshooting pacing and more time on strategic analysis and optimisations.
- New built-in expansion and cancelation features create mutual accountability and help advertisers easily include more relevant inventory when a deal is unable to deliver within the original terms.
- Initial publishers who have adopted ‘Deal Desk’ for their private marketplace deals include industry leaders such as Disney.
“As more buyers shift toward biddable activation, we’re focused on ensuring they have the tools, access, and flexibility they need to drive results,” said Jamie Power, SVP of addressable sales, Disney.
“We continue to put our advertisers first, and our relationship with The Trade Desk reflects our commitment to meeting advertisers where they are and evolving how we transact to deliver greater efficiency and performance.”
‘Deal Desk’ will be available for beta testing in Q3 2025.
