By Digiday Editors  •  May 13, 2025  •

Ivy Liu

It’s been a year of tumult for the advertising industry’s largest independent demand-side platform thus far in 2025.

Developments have ranged from novel surprises in its mergers and acquisitions activity to infuriating U-turns to outright devastating judgments outside of its control (see below).

• The February purchase of Sincera, representing the third in its history
• Google Chrome’s U-turn on the fate of third-party cookies
• That earnings miss, which saw its stock price drop precipitously

However, its Q1 earnings results suggest The Trade Desk’s fortunes are back on an upswing, with its stock price value increasing by more than 30% in the days immediately after its latest disclosure.

The Trade Desk hopes to further its road to redemption with the June 6 launch of OpenSincera, a tool with features (see below) that sources compare to UID2, an offering the DSP proffered as an industry-wide ad targeting tool to aid cookie-less ad targeting and measurement.

• OpenSincera is a new, free tool from The Trade Desk that offers macro- and publisher-level data on digital advertising performance.
• It provides transparency into supply chain quality, including metrics like ads-to-content ratio, page weight, ads-in-view and ad refresh rate.
• For the first time, the data is accessible via an open API, enabling integration by any ad tech company — including competitors.
• OpenSincera will also be embedded within The Trade Desk’s Kokai platform, enhancing client-level insights during bidding.

Speaking on The Trade Desk’s May 8, earnings call, CEO Jeff Green, said, “Sincera is a metadata company that crawls the internet looking for insights about the supply chain of advertising and seeks to shine a light of transparency on that supply chain.”

Rising tide to raise all boats

He further noted that the integration of Sincera was one of the key updates aimed at accelerating its Kokai rollout. The slower-than-expected uptake of Kokai, the latest iteration of its trading platform, was earlier fingered as a contributor to its February 12 earnings miss.

Green added, “Following the acquisition, we have been working to invest Sincera data across Kokai, so our clients can have as much data and signal as possible about ad performance… The core of Kokai has been delivered and adoption is now ahead of schedule… the spend in our platform is now running through Kokai.”  

Mike O’Sullivan, cofounder of Sincera, told Digiday the tool aims to optimize ad experiences, support higher ad inventory prices for premium publishers and raise the performance bar for the open internet — or “premium internet,” as The Trade Desk now terms it.

“Our thinking was to see how we can get this [information] into the largest number of hands possible, and raise the waterline for the open internet,” he said, claiming a better understanding of the supply chain means “campaigns can support higher prices because they can drive even better outcomes.”

O’Sullivan further explained to Digiday how OpenSincera is geared towards furthering its bid to steal market share from rival offerings, particularly from Walled Gardens such as Amazon Ads’ DSP or Google’s DV 360. “There is disproportionately more ad spend on walled gardens vs. time spent [on them],” he said. “So the organizing principle is how can we raise the overall performance bar for the open internet.”

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