The Trade Desk’s Samantha Jacobson Is Shaping the Future of the Open Internet

It’s only October, and The Trade Desk has seemingly made news this year on every pressing topic in ad tech. As buyers were puzzling over how to make their supply paths more efficient, demand-side platform The Trade Desk cut out multiple middlemen, announcing in February it was removing Google’s Open Bidding as a source of supply and launching a pathway for advertisers to buy directly from publishers, sans supply-side platforms. Then, when Google announced further delays to the deprecation of third-party cookies until 2024, The Trade Desk made steady headway on ushering its alternative, UID2, inking partnerships with Amazon and Procter & Gamble. And as retail media and CTV became the buzziest part of the media budget, The Trade Desk forged partnerships with Walmart, grocery chain Albertsons, HBO Max and Disney+. In the first half of the year—during which CEO Jeff Green said the company has "gained more market share, grabbed more land than any other period" in the firm's history, per comments in its second-quarter earnings call—revenue has grown 39% to $692 million, a reward for The Trade Desk's prescience. The Trade Desk’s prominence in headlines—thanks in part to growing partnerships and making its tech and systems more ubiquitous—isn’t what makes chief strategy officer Samantha Jacobson, Adweek’s Digital & Tech Executive of the Year, most excited about the company’s triumphant year. It’s the opportunity to be a leader in the future of the open web at a time of fluctuation. “The thing that I really like about Trade Desk … is the focus on strategy: How do we make the open internet better?” she told Adweek. According to Jacobson, the possibility to ask big questions is what distinguishes her current role from previous positions in strategy or business development at Oracle, American Express and eBay, where her purview was more narrowly focused on the bottom line. At The Trade Desk, Jacobson is instead focused on making sure the company continues to be an industry leader, which entails thinking about the company's future positioning. One important facet of her job is onboarding advertising and publishers onto UID2, a nonprofit initiative. “It's been a really big pivot from just thinking about the company where I work … toward how do we make the world better?” Jacobson said. “How do we think about what identity could look like in a future state?” It’s a fitting perspective for her, as she's helped The Trade Desk articulate a vision for the internet that allows advertising to exist outside of walled gardens while still protecting users' privacy. (As part of its second-quarter earnings, Green outlined The Trade Desk's goals as: "to be the objective, open-internet alternative to walled gardens.") In its third decade, and under new scrutiny, the internet has never felt so simultaneously overwhelming and full of possibilities. Data about users is more readily available to advertisers (and also to those who may wish to do people harm), but there's also the political and private sector push to regulate the flow of personal information. Jacobson is capitalizing on The Trade Desk's enviable position in third-party ad tech to provide a blueprint for the open internet. But while The Trade Desk has been strategic to earn this role, maintaining it is far from certain. Winning its influence An ad-tech vendor like The Trade Desk advocating for the future of digital advertising might surprise those outside the industry, but the company has been staking out this position for years, said Ana Milicevic, co-founder of programmatic consultancy Sparrow Advisers. “They positioned themselves as the champions of the open internet particularly successfully,” Milicevic said. “The Trade Desk was able to capitalize on their early days working with agencies to give them a particular, significant moat and boost.” Not only has the company been forging critical industry partnerships, but its tech also really works. “If you’re a junior buyer and you’ve just been handed a pretty big advertising budget, the propensity to mess something up while executing a campaign is pretty high—except when you’re using Trade Desk,” Milicevic said. “They’ve built so many guardrails.” The Trade Desk also has built credibility by generally sticking to its lane as an intermediary, as competitors have tried to foist their way into other digital media verticals via acquisitions of content and data assets, said head of programmatic at agency PMG Justin Scarborough. “They’ve been pretty open about their independence and not being tied to proprietary content and being the facilitator,” he said. The company's vision for UID2 applies this statesman-like positioning: The tech is free, open-sourced and designed to be interoperable with other identity solutions. Jacobson said The Trade Desk wants to distinguish itself from other ad-tech companies that sell identity solutions under rigid terms. “We want the ecosystem to be better, and that's so different from how most companies operate,” Jacobson said. “Instead, The Trade Desk has really taken this approach of not just saying that they want to make it better, but truly providing open-source opportunities and transparency as one of the guiding pillars so that the full ecosystem can benefit.” Vision for the open internet meets roadblocks A good reputation helped The Trade Desk get to the point where more in the industry are ready to listen, but it doesn’t make it a dominator in the industry. And not everyone is convinced that The Trade Desk is a visionary. The company has tried to give industry bodies Prebid and IAB the role of UID2 administrator, distancing itself from the idea that it stood to profit from the solution, but both ultimately declined, not wanting to take on the role of "ad-tech police," especially if the identifier should be found to violate the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), per a report in Digiday. A spokesperson from The Trade Desk said the company designed the European counterpart to the solution, EUID2, with a different consent collection and management framework than UID2 to ensure it was GDPR-compliant. The Trade Desk never intended Prebid to serve as UID2's administrator, though the body does support the technology, according to a Trade Desk spokesperson, who added that The Trade Desk is still in talks with the IAB to take on the administrator role, though the job is still open. The industry is still in the throes of debating many of the biggest questions in ad tech, especially identity. There is no consensus yet around even a handful of solutions, making it hard for advertisers to throw their weight behind any option, including UID2. “We can’t bank on it at this point. If it doesn’t pan out the way they’d like, we see tremendous value to working with them as a partner,” Scarborough said. But “nothing as it relates to user privacy is set in stone.” The Trade Desk counters that it doesn't imagine UID2 will ever be the only identity solution and that UID2 doesn't need unanimous support from the ad-tech community to count itself as successful. Some critics also wonder if any ad-tech company at all should have a dominant role in shaping the the future of ad-serving in privacy-centric ways. Milicevic noted that, in the future, brands will need to amass enough valuable first-party data and find places to store it, such that tech solutions would function more at the broader infrastructure level (à la Amazon Web Services) than via any particular transaction technology. "The targeting platform shouldn’t be solving for identity," Milicevic said. The Trade Desk might not be AWS, but Jacobson agreed that first-party data is the new infrastructure for ad tech, only with the ideas and technology of The Trade Desk at its helm. “Whether I'm watching TV or reading something on my phone, I'm still Samantha,” she said. “[Marketers need] to spend their dollars based on consumer reception of their brand, rather than looking at it by channel allocation.” Ultimately, she said, technology and increased data availability will merge together for a "more effective marketing experience but also more enjoyable consumer experience." Check out the rest of the 2022 Hot List here.