Global adtech company The Trade Desk (TTD) has unveiled a range of new products to help advertisers plan, forecast and buy digital media more effectively than ever before.

Collectively referred to as the ‘Next Wave’, the release consists of three transformative products.

Built on TTD’s data set, Koa is a predictive AI engine that enhances decision-making so advertisers can extend audience reach and spend more efficiently.

The AI allows TTD to use data to predict the same user across devices and identify publisher and SSP ‘games’, and thus get the same inventory for lower prices.

The second new feature is Trade Desk Planner – a data-driven media planning tool that delivers audience insights and informs ad strategies across channels and devices.

Finally, Megagon is an intuitive new user interface that proactively surfaces tailored insights and offers recommendations from Koa to help advertisers make real-time optimisation decisions.

Speaking to B&T, TTD’s general manager for Australia and New Zealand, Mitch Waters (pictured above), said it took the company two years and almost 40 per cent of its engineering resource to develop the new products.

“A lot of The Trade Desk’s features have had AI all along. Audience predictor is one example, but what we’ve done is build out a broader portfolio. This is AI with insight,” he said.

“Even the likes of Google and IBM admit it’s hard to sometimes show what the machine learning found, but we’re really good at not only that, but surfacing the insights back to the client.

“We’re merging the best of human and machine to give advertisers access to massive amounts of data and distil it down to one screen where they can plan, buy and optimise.

“On our platform alone, we see nine million impressions every single second. Multiply that by possible bid factors such as budget, time of day, demographic information and device and you’re dealing with quadrillions of permutations every second.”

Waters said AI was powering the future of media buying, and that the Next Wave will usher in “the next generation of advertising”.

“This is the most powerful forecasting tool the advertising industry has ever seen, giving advertisers visibility to help them plan, forecast and buy media more efficiently than ever,” he said.

“Some might wonder why this hasn’t been solved previously, but that’s because it is a really hard problem to solve – and that’s why we’re so excited by what we’ve achieved.”