The Trade Desk lifts the lid on Deal Desk a ‘hub for PMP management’
By Ronan Shields • June 4, 2025 •
Ivy Liu
The Trade Desk is poised to launch Deal Desk, a new capability within the demand-side platform aimed at easing the structural inefficiencies in the Deal ID ecosystem.
Deal Desk’s official announcement is expected imminently, although Will Doherty, svp inventory development, The Trade Desk, teased the launch on stage at the IAB Tech Lab Summit, hosted in New York City, June 4.
In discussion with IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur, Doherty outlined the pending launch explaining that it was aimed at addressing structural inefficiencies in the Deal ID or private marketplace ecosystem.
“About 90% of the Deal IDs that are set up and sent To The Trade Desk will never scale,” he said, recounting his conversations on the matter with media-buyers, publishers and supply-side platforms. “They’ve effectively failed.”
Such inefficiencies mean that only 10% of such deals generate the vast majority of revenue traded on the DSP, according to Doherty, meaning the system requires better management, especially as deals become more ubiquitous within programmatic media trading.
“There seemed to us to be an urgent need to upgrade the system in order to have a more successful and less operationally cumbersome system,” he said, adding that some traders regularly spend 20-to-40% of their week creating Deal IDs.
Doherty added, “We call it Deal Desk, which will be, the hub for PMP management within The Trade Desk. Partners will be able to set out and create deals and be able to understand the right metadata so that we can ensure a higher success rate.”
Doherty further outlined how the scheme aims to lessen the “acute pain” of trial and error, whereby most deals are conducted via emails, and not within the systems designed for such transactions.
“We can upgrade our platform so that it makes it easier for publishers and SSPs to put in the right metadata so that we know how many avails, and win rates, bid rate are going to be required… whether that’s genre or contextual taxonomy, we can take that to the deal itself,” he explained. “We can see if the deal avails actually match to the credentials of the deal itself, and we can make it easier for marketers and publishers to expand those considerations.”
Testing of the Deal Desk is scheduled to start in the coming weeks.
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