The Trade Desk Launches Kokai Media Buying Platform

Advertising technology provider The Trade Desk launched Kokai, a media buying platform that brings artificial intelligence to digital marketing.

Kokai distributes deep learning algorithms across all aspects of the digital media buying process. With access to more than 13 million advertising impressions every second, Kokai's AI serves as a co-pilot to help advertisers buy the right ad impressions, at the right price, to reach the target audience at the best time.

Kokai's distributed AI builds on The Trade Desk's AI work with Koa, launched in 2018. While Koa assisted the marketer in setting up campaigns based on business objectives and optimizing based on performance, Kokai distributes Koa's AI across media buying on The Trade Desk platform. This includes predictive clearing, which ensures traders make bids at the optimal level; scoring every ad impression based on relevance to the advertiser; upgrading measurement and forecasting; increasing resilience, even in the absence of identifiers; budget optimization; and KPI scoring.

"The Trade Desk benefits from a rich yet highly complex dataset with very high integrity. With Kokai, we are able to help our clients make sense of that data with AI and help the marketer make the best decisions at every turn," said Jeff Green, founder and CEO of The Trade Desk, in a statement. "Building on our ground-breaking work with Koa, we are distributing AI across our platform so that it can serve as an expertly trained co-pilot to today's modern marketer."

Kokai will also feature innovations in digital advertising measurement, including the following:

• Added-value retail measurement data from retailers, including Albertsons, Walgreens, and others when audience data is turned on;
• The Retail Sales Index, a benchmark for measuring online and offline retail sales against retail ad spend.
• The TV Quality Index, measuring the quality of the ad experience across all streaming platforms and streaming content.
• The Quality Reach Index, helping marketers expand their loyal customer bases by targeting the most relevant customer profiles.

Kokai will also feature the Partner Portal, where thousands of partners will be able to integrate directly with The Trade Desk with standard adapters for key areas such as OpenPath, Unified ID 2.0, retail onboarding, measurement and third-party audience data and contextual targeting.

Kokai will incorporate the Programmatic Table, a cockpit that harnesses programmatic and allows users to move through the media buying proces with all campaign information and relevant data surfaced on the main campaign view.

"Programmatic advertising has evolved rapidly over the last five years, and we need to ensure that we surface the full power of data-driven decisioning for all marketers as intuitively as possible," Green said. "Kokai's innovations in areas such as advanced measurement, collaborative innovation, and a radical new UX will ensure The Trade Desk remains at the forefront of programmatic innovation in service of value for marketers."