Then, late last year, the streak ended. After 33 consecutive quarters of meeting or beating expectations. The Trade Desk missed its revenue target. The market responded with all the tenderness of a firing squad — its stock plummeted by as much as 30% and the aura of inevitability that once surrounded the company began to crack. 

What followed has only deepened the uncertainty. 

Media agencies, long reliant on The Trade Desk’s platform, have begun voicing frustrations that had previously been contained to whispers. The growing sense isn’t the trusted partner it claims to be, but rather a frenemy — one that plays nice while consolidating more control over the ad dollars agencies once commanded. A prime example: The Trade Desk publicly reports a 20% take rate, but agencies and other platform users suggest the real number is closer to 30%. 

Then came an unexpected blow from Sonos. The speaker company scrapped its plans to launch a television, a device that would have been the first to carry The Trade Desk’s ambitious bet for CTV: an operating system that might have reshaped the flow of streaming ad dollars. The plan hinged on one crucial factor: getting onto devices. The problem is it has none lined up. 

Add to that an alternative to third-party cookies that most buyers aren’t interested in, ongoing tensions with publishers and growing issues with Kokai — its much-hyped AI-driven data platform upgrade — and The Trade Desk suddenly finds itself on shaky ground. For a company that spent years rewriting the rules of digital advertising, the shift is jarring. Instead of dictating the terms of the industry’s future, The Trade Desk is, for the first time, being forced to defend its own.

And yet, despite the chorus of hot takes and schadenfreude on social media. The Trade Desk still has something many in ad tech don’t: a real business. It remains the dominant independent player in programmatic, pulling in billions in revenue with deep (if strained) ties to agencies. UID 2.0, while hardly the game-changer it was pitched as, is still in the mix as third-party cookies fade. Kokai’s rollout has been bumpy, but The Trade Desk has weathered stumbles before.

The irony, of course, is that the narrative machine that once propelled The Trade Desk to new heights is now working against it. The story of an unstoppable ad tech powerhouse has been replaced by a different one — the first crack in a shaky foundation. And in an industry that thrives on momentum, sometimes the narrative is all that matters.

“The Trade Desk was unsustainably strong in 2024 and so coming into the fourth quarter its expectations, along with those of Wall Street, were out of whack with the fact that it was in a saturated market,” said Brian Wieser, principal at industry analyst firm and consultancy Madison and Wall. “And then they [The Trade Desk] go and talk themselves down. It played into the narrative that was there waiting,”

Still, let’s not forget, the only reason The Trade Desk finds itself the subject of so much scrutiny is because of a single bad quarter — one that hit most of the industry. 

As Wieser has pointed out, the company’s struggles have less to do with internal missteps and more to do with shifting external forces. The Trade Desk is still a formidable operator, but programmatic advertising has matured into a commoditized and forever competitive baseless. With $12 billion in gross ad spend already flowing through pipes, the real challenge is clear: where does the next $12 billion come from?

If CEO Jeff Green has an answer, he hasn’t shared it yet.

A fifteen-point turnaround plan doesn’t exactly exude confidence, and it collides with three fundamental challenges.

First, the CTV market remains deeply fragmented, making it difficult for The Trade Desk to secure large swathes of premium inventory. Second, the future of third-party cookies — critical for tracking, targeting and optimizing programmatic campaigns — remains unresolved. And then there’s Google, which is quietly rearranging the web with AI Overviews. If users get their answers directly from Google’s summaries rather than clicking through to actual pages, the digital real estate available for The Trade Desk to buy ads shrinks. 

There’s also the matter of Mediaocean. A few months ago, agencies took a financial stake in the company, giving them a direct incentive to push a rival. That’s likely one reason Kokai hasn’t caught on directly at the holdcos — The Trade Desk needs agency buy-in to thrive, but agencies now have skin in another game. 

Mediaocean’s dominance in agency workflows makes it hard to displace, no matter how sleek the competition, said Matt Barash, a longtime ad tech exec. While Kokai was designed to shift linear budgets into programmatic, agencies aren’t eager to juggle another platform, especially when their core operations are so tightly woven into Mediaocean’s systems, he continued. That’s why the recent investment from WPP, Omnicom, and IPG was more than just a financial move, said Barash. It signaled a deeper alignment between the holdcos, Mediaocean’s founding CEO Bill Wise and industry matchmaker Michael Kassan, reinforcing the company’s role as a key cog in ad tech. 

“This is more about the power of Mediaocean across the hold co than the failed execution of TTD,” added Barash. “They own workflow across the board and act as the business system of record for the hold cos which makes them incredibly sticky. The utility they provide is foundational to any agency employee.”

At the moment, The Trade Desk doesn’t seem to have a definitive answer to all these challenges. But maybe it doesn’t need to. At its scale, all it takes is for one or two bets to pay off and suddenly the story changes

That bet could be its ambitions in CTV, particularly if the company can carve out a meaningful foothold beyond the U.S. — Europe, the Middle East and North Africa — regions where the opportunity remains both sizable and, crucially, uncontested. Or it might be a renewed focus on courting programmatic advertisers. Already, the company has shed key executives from its agency-focused business, reallocating resources to strike deals directly. 

No doubt these moves will bring in more ad dollars, but whether it will be enough to shore up a business on shaky ground remains to be seen. 

One thing The Trade Desk definitely won’t be doing is using its vast $1.9 billion in cash reserves to buy Roku. That particular piece of ad tech fan fiction has been making the rounds for years, but one of The Trade Desk’s corporate development execs (Rohit Dube) recently shut it down on social media. It would trample the company’s much-prized objectivity credentials, he argued, and reduce it to selling long-tail content with low fill rates. 

“This is a company that has the resources to do anything they want to do but its unclear what they must do to protect their flank,” said Wieser. “The thing is if one thing every 10 years works then that can turn into a pretty sound business.”

“I’m bullish on The Trade Desk,” said Karsten Weide, an industry consultant and head of digital advertising research firm W Media Research. “Its a solid business. One bad quarter doesn’t change that.”

What did change, however, was the level of scrutiny on The Trade Desk’s next movies. The company faces a trio of challenges: sustaining CTV’s momentum as a programmatic channel outside the walled gardens, weathering Google’s antitrust trial without collateral damage to the open web’s ad economy and hoding its ground as Amazon and retail media networks tighten their grip on digital advertising. 

That’s what makes The Trade Desk’s predicament hard to nail. 

On the one hand, it’s clear it’s nowhere near as bad as the rhetoric around it is. On the other, there are still way too many ifs, buts and maybes to call its resurgence a sure thing. Look at its acquisition of Sincera, for example. At a glance, it could be a shrewd move by Green and his team to choke off measurement vendors from their hedged garden approach to measuring the value of an impression with something more transparent and granular.