Trade Desk, Inc. (TTD) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Greetings. Welcome to the Trade Desk, Inc. second quarter, 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Chris Toth. You may begin.

Thank you, operator. Hello and good afternoon to everyone. Welcome to the Trade Desk Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. On the call today, our CEO and co-founder, Jeff Green, and our new Chief Financial Officer, Nate Olmsted. A copy of our earnings press release is available on our website in the Investor Relations section at thetradedesk.com. Please note that aside from historical information, today's discussion and our responses during the Q&A may include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risk and uncertainties and reflect our views and assumptions as of the date such statements are made. Actual results may vary significantly, and we expressly disclaim any obligations to update the forward-looking statements made today. If any of our beliefs or assumptions prove incorrect, actual financial results could differ materially from our projections or those implied by these forward-looking statements. For a detailed discussion of risks, please refer to the risk factors mentioned in our press release and our most recent SEC filings. In addition to our GAAP financial results, we present supplemental non-GAAP financial data. A reconciliation of the GAAP to non-GAAP measures is available in our earnings press release and investor presentation. We believe that presenting these non-GAAP measures alongside our GAAP results offers a more comprehensive view of the company's operational performance. With that, I will now turn the call over to CEO and co-founder Jeff Green.

Thanks, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I want to start by sharing some of the same perspectives that I've shared with our team over the past several weeks. Next month, we will celebrate 10 years as a public company. Over that time, we have grown revenue at roughly a 34% CAGR. Our annual net income has increased 20x, and our team has grown from just over 400 people at the time of our IPO to thousands. Over the last 16 years, the Trade Desk has made a number of industry-changing accomplishments. Yet throughout that entire time, we have always tried to learn as much from our mistakes as we do from our successes. We spend a lot of time at Trade Desk reviewing the pivotal decisions that we've made over the years, understanding what worked and what didn't, and how we can become a better company. As we continue to map out plans to grow our position and improve our revenue growth, we reflect on what we have learned from past quarters and especially from this last month. Our revenue growth is below our expectations and below the standard we hold ourselves to. These numbers are not a reflection of our company or the long-term opportunity in front of us. We underperformed our own expectations for two main reasons. First, the macro conditions have made it more difficult for some of the world's largest brands to grow. Of course, this is bigger than advertising and it's bigger than our company. In this economic environment, there are pressures on lower-income consumers. As a result, some affected advertisers have become more focused on buying cheap media rather than the best media. Secondly, we didn't execute as well as we could have, which I'll elaborate on in just a minute. But first, let's start with the macro. We continue to see a unique blend of macro pressures on several categories of advertising. Of course, our business is very unique among the large advertising-focused platforms. Our business is largely a sophisticated buying platform for the biggest brands and advertisers. Almost all of the spend on our platform comes from large Fortune 500 companies and their brands. Over the long term, our focus on large advertisers is both a strength and a moat. We have partnered with the biggest, most resilient, and most loved brands in the world. Nevertheless, some of them are experiencing difficult times right now. All of our customers are operating in a fundamentally different environment than they were even a year ago. CPGs and FMCGs are experiencing unique pressures. These categories were once the biggest in advertising, and they are still one of the biggest. P&G has described the environment as volatile and challenging, and recently stated on their earnings call, We anticipate continued pressure from commodity and related costs to the crisis in the Middle East. If the conflict eases and oil comes down, trade lanes open up. That will help. If it goes the other way, it will hurt. CPGs and autos are two of the sectors of the economy that are most overrepresented on our platform. Around 25% of our business is generated by those two categories alone. Autos and CPG have both been set back by tariffs and oil prices. General Motors described a multi-billion dollar impact from tariffs, in addition to plans to onshore production to avoid future tariff risk. Both of these categories of advertisers almost unanimously have described a change in the macro where the consumer wealth bifurcation is creating the squeeze on their customers that is highly uneven consumer behavior, where the high-income consumers are doing well and the lower-income consumers are not. For CPGs, this is causing change across everything from packaging to advertising allocation, promotion strategy, and of course, go-to-market. This uneven consumer pressure is impacting autos remarkably. Both Ford and General Motors highlighted in recent earnings report the growing dependence of auto sales on affluent consumers. And industry research from Oxford Economics shows earners in the top 20 percent of households currently represent more than 50 percent of new vehicle sales. Both categories are having to create new approaches to advertising. In some cases, budgets have been temporarily reduced as they formulate new plans to go to market. In other cases, some brands are falling prey to low-cost, low-decisioning methods like programmatic guaranteed and fixed price. Doing so essentially means buyers will give away their decisioning in a great buyer's market to the sellers in exchange for lower costs of transactions. This approach is often deliberately short-sighted. Still, we continue to see the growing market leaders in every category optimized for business outcomes, not simply the lowest cost buying platform or the lowest cost media. It is important not to overstate the impact of these dynamics on our business. While these are affecting some of our largest categories and clients, most of our clients are performing well and growing. In fact, many categories are experiencing secular tailwinds. Financial services, some parts of technology, and pharma are growing well and thriving. And we are seeing most of the leading brands in those categories deepen their partnerships with us. One of the leading indicators we watch most closely is our joint business plans, or JVPs. We had JVPs with 217 clients as of Q2, representing 38% growth year over year. Most importantly, revenue under JVPs grew at a rate of six times higher than overall revenue. JVPs are much more than commercial agreements. They create a structured framework for brands, their agencies, and the trade desk to plan, innovate, and measure success together. These partnerships grow faster than the rest of our business because they're built on long-term alignment rather than just individual campaigns additionally the majority of our top 100 accounts are growing double digits year over year outside of our top 500 advertisers the remainder are growing over 50 percent year over year year to date which represents green shoots from smaller up-and-coming and challenger brands our emea and apac regions both have grown almost 30 percent year-to-date. China is growing over 100% year-to-date. Some of our clients are experiencing headwinds, but the majority are growing. Even in CPGs and autos, about half of them are growing very well with us, even if they are all experiencing cyclical pressures. While there are unique macro pressures, we are very focused on the things that we can control, and we continue to grow our customer base, including high growth among mid-sized businesses and agencies. Starting with our product, I'm extremely excited about our roadmap and the innovations we are building to make media buying better. We say all the time that every product we ship has to be better for our clients, it has to be better for us and our shareholders, and it has to be better for the ecosystem. Through that lens, let me share a few of our plans, starting with the products that we are pointing at what might be the biggest problem in our industry measurement real brand building which is required for categories like autos and cpgs cannot thrive while measurement standards are broken as long as last click and last view are the standard of measurement brands will struggle to understand what drives their growth and the most premium parts of the open internet will always look expensive and ineffective. Our new measurement framework, which is currently in alpha, is designed to more fairly assign value across the entire customer journey, giving marketers greater confidence in whether advertising is creating incremental business results, whether that's in the top of the funnel or at the bottom. This is not a problem we can tackle alone, which is why we're working in close partnership with some of the largest media companies, the largest measurement companies, and the largest data companies to bring it to life. Secondly, we are ramping up Audience Unlimited. Audience Unlimited dramatically simplifies how marketers discover and activate third-party data. Instead of navigating millions of segments and manually analyzing potential impact, marketers leverage AI models with their own proprietary data to select data. Our new pricing approach with this product makes it so that price becomes a non-issue. We are essentially doing to data what Spotify has done to music. We are creating an all-you-can-eat system that makes it easier to apply more data for a simple subscription percentage. As Audience Unlimited moves to open beta, we are seeing very encouraging results. In a recent campaign, a global advertiser used Audience Unlimited to reach incremental households more efficiently. Compared with a prior campaign, the advertiser reduced its cost per unique household and also reduced its data cpm both reductions were more than 25 demonstrating the potential of au to improve efficiency as we roll this out to new customers lastly on the product front later this month we will launch a significant upgrade focused on platform usability we're calling this version zuma we are enhancing navigation streamlining workflows and troubleshooting and delivering a more intuitive user experience from end to end. This upgrade improves workflow efficiency, leverages even more AI, enhances design, and improves the dialogue between human and machine. We are listening to our clients and responding with innovative upgrades at a faster pace than we have been in years. Ultimately, with success in measurement and Audience Unlimited and Zoom as upgrades, it will be easier to demonstrate the value of decision buying, which directly drives revenue growth. Furthermore, we will win more hearts and minds among CMOs and the upper ranks of the largest advertisers and agencies. This is how we help create universal understanding at every level of our client's company about the difference between buying based on price and buying based on value. Some of our competitors, big and small, have been focused on producing products for programmatic guarantee, fixed price transactions, and simple deals with approaches that do not leverage buyer decision. Some are even wrapping these in agentic technologies. They argue that their cheap fee will compensate for their lack of objectivity and their decisions that favor publishers, rather than the buyer who is footing the bill. These approaches look more like ad networks of 2006 than reflect the progress that our industry has made in the last 20 years. Decision buying and programmatic guaranteed are fundamentally different products. Programmatic guaranteed can solve for certainty, simplicity, and upfront price, but decision buying optimizes for the highest business outcomes utilizing data, measurement, and real-time optimization. We are focused on the latter. The encouraging part is that periods like these create opportunities for change. The world's most sophisticated marketers don't simply look for lower prices. They become more deliberate, and they ask better questions. They demand better measurement. They focus on outcomes rather than inputs. And when marketers become more data-driven, the trade desk creates even more value for our customers, which are the biggest brands and the biggest agencies in the world. The success of our platform is in our control, and we are in the lead. We have the most premium and sophisticated buying platform in the space. Our goal isn't simply to support media execution. It's to continue being a strategic business partner to the world's leading marketers. Lastly, we brought in a number of new leaders to help take this company to the next level. Leaders like Vivette Kundra, our COO, Nate Olmsted, our CFO, Christy Argelon, our Chief Commercial Officer, Ron Lambrecht, our Chief Business Development Officer, Sarah Gavin, our CMO, or Vinny Rinaldi, our VP of Client Strategy and Growth. We've also added some amazing industry leaders to our board. We have enhanced dramatically our company's leadership in the last few quarters, especially this last one. These leaders have built and scaled organizations much larger than ours. They bring operational discipline, fresh perspectives, and deep experience partnering with senior business leaders around the world. Just as importantly, they bring a willingness to challenge assumptions, including my own. But building a better company doesn't stop with our executive team. Over the past year, we have also invested heavily in strengthening the leaders throughout our commercial organization. We've recruited hundreds of experienced general managers, vice presidents, and customer-facing leaders who know how to build strategic relationships with the world's largest brands and agencies. That reflects an important evolution in how we go to market, as marketing decisions increasingly move higher up in the organizations, at times even into the C-suite and executive ranks of global advertisers, and of course, we have to meet our customers where those decisions are being made. Before I conclude, I want to spend a minute talking about why I remain so excited about the opportunity in front of us. Today, we estimate the global advertising market approaches $1 trillion annually. Even after everything we've accomplished, we believe we participate in only about 1% of that opportunity. What makes me most excited isn't simply the size of the market or the TAM that remains. It's how the market itself is changing. For years, search has largely been defined by a single dominant platform. That is beginning to change. As LLMs reshape how consumers discover information, we expect a much more competitive landscape to emerge. Just as connected TV expanded opportunity by creating more premium inventory and more choice, AI has the potential to expand the addressable market for digital advertising by creating entirely new surfaces for marketers to engage consumers and give more competition to market share that was once locked in traditional search marketing. AI is creating exponentially more data, more choices, and of course, more complexity. In the new AI world, our decisioning capabilities are better than ever. They're fueled by AI. And objective decisioning is even more valuable. Brands don't need another platform trying to sell them media. They need a platform that can evaluate the millions of opportunities available every second on the internet and objectively help them make better decisions. That's exactly what we've been building since the day we founded the Trade Desk. Our objectivity also makes us a better partner. As more of our competitors prioritize their own owned and operated inventory, our independence becomes even more valuable to advertisers, publishers, retailers, and technology partners alike in the long term. That's one of the reasons why our partnerships continue to deepen. Today, we work with many of the world's leading media companies, including Disney, Netflix, NBCUniversal, Fox, Paramount, Spotify, and News Corp. We also partner with the infrastructure of the open internet through companies like Snowflake, Databricks, LiveRamp, and HighTouch, helping brands activate their data wherever it creates the most value. For most of them, we are among, if not the largest, programmatic partner. We got to this place by minimizing the conflict of interest and creating clear, mutually beneficial partnerships. The same is true in retail media. Participating retailers on our platform now represent more than 80% of U.S. retail sales. This includes our recently renewed partnership with Walmart, the largest retailer in the world. We believe our objectivity uniquely positions us to help retailers collaborate with brands in ways that vertically integrated competitors simply cannot. We're also seeing this modernization play out globally. Our investments across Europe and APAC and other major international markets are creating new opportunities as global brands increasingly adopt data-driven decision advertising. Most importantly, our customers are telling us that this strategy is working. General Mills is a great example. They recently ran a campaign for its Nature Valley brand in the UK. They were interested in pairing retail data and real-time optimizations to measure the impact on sales and return on ad spend. The campaign used retail data from Tesco, Sainsbury's, and Ocado, as well as in-flight COA AI optimizations, predictive clearing, and cross-device targeting. Over four months, the campaign drove a 5x uplift in sales, a 92% lower CPM compared with the benchmark, and a 2x ROAS improvement versus without using retail data. This is a great example of a leading global brand embracing AI and decisioning to drive more outcomes for their business. When I think about everything that we've discussed today, that's ultimately what gives me confidence. The market opportunity is expanding. Our competitive advantages are becoming more relevant. Our partnerships are becoming deeper, and our customers are increasingly choose to build their brands for the long-term using our platform. In a market with more pressures, objectivity matters more. Let me conclude by saying this. While we have some near-term challenges, my conviction about the trade desk has never been stronger. Our team, our business model, and our partners keep getting better for the opportunity ahead digital advertising continues to gain share globally connected tv continues to shape the largest media market in the world retail media continues to mature and expand ai will create entirely new ways for marketers to use data and drive growth and as advertising becomes more measurable more open and more data driven the value we deliver becomes even greater None of that changes today's results, but it enforces my confidence that we're focusing on the right opportunities and making the right long-term investments. Over the rest of the year and into 2027, we're going to be more disciplined than ever about where we invest. We'll focus our resources on a small number of high priority growth initiatives where we believe we can create the greatest long-term value for our clients and our shareholders. That means some teams will continue to grow while others will not. Every investment we make will be measured against a simple question. Does it strengthen our ability to serve our customers and drive long-term growth? If the answer is yes, we'll invest aggressively. If not, we'll reduce those resources to higher impact opportunities. Over the coming quarters, you'll see these priorities reflected in how we execute. You'll see us continue to make our platform easier to use while expanding its capability through a Gentec workflows. You'll see Audience Unlimited and our measurement framework help advertisers connect more of their spending to business outcomes. And you will see our commercial strategy mature as deeper relationships and joint business plans with the world's largest brands and agencies translate into stronger, more durable growth. With that, I'm very pleased to introduce our new CFO, Nate Olmsted. Nate joined us last month and brings with him extensive experience as a finance leader from his career at Penguin Solutions, Logitech, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I could not be more excited to have him on our team and for you all to get to know him. With that, over to Nate.

Thank you, Jeff, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm excited to be joining the Trade Desk. While I'm still early in the process of learning the business, part of what attracted me to the Trade Desk was its large market opportunity, its reputation for innovation, and its long track record of helping advertisers achieve better business outcomes. As CFO, my focus is straightforward, ensuring we invest behind our highest priority opportunities, allocate capital with discipline, and build the operational rigor needed to scale effectively. With that, on to our results. In Q2, we delivered revenue of $715 million, up 3% year-over-year. We generated $241 million of adjusted EBITDA during the quarter, representing a 34% margin. CTV and audio exhibited double-digit growth once again in Q2. Video, which includes CTV, represented a low 50% share of our business in Q2. Mobile represented a high 20% share of the business during the quarter, while display represented a low double-digit share. Audio represented around 7% of the business and grew year-over-year at a higher rate than any other channel, as it has for the past four quarters. Geographically, the United States represented approximately 83% of our revenue in Q2, and international represented approximately 17%. Our strong momentum in both EMEA and APAC reflects the investments made in these regions over the last several years, and we delivered over 50% CTV growth year-over-year in each region during Q2. Among verticals that represent at least 1% of our business, we saw strong growth in medical health, automotive, and travel. We continue to see pressure in the food and drink and home and garden sectors as CPG brands navigate geopolitical uncertainty, consumer softness, and input cost inflation. Automotive remains an area of strength overall, though we believe this business could be growing faster absent the impact of increased tariffs on the industry. We also benefited from political spending related to the U.S. midterm elections during Q2. Q2 operating expenses were $613 million, up 6% from a year ago. Excluding stock-based compensation, Q2 operating expenses were $504 million, up 12% from a year ago. The increase in Q2 was driven primarily by platform operations as we optimize platform infrastructure, implement more AI-powered tools on our platform, and continue to evolve our various decisioning and data offerings, Over the past two years, we've transitioned critical workloads from third-party public cloud environments to owned data centers. This has strengthened our platform infrastructure, reduced our reliance on external cloud providers, and provides us with greater flexibility to support AI and machine learning workloads. While this transition creates an increase in platform operations expense in 2026, it positions us to benefit from greater efficiency and operating leverage over time. Income tax expense was $49 million in the second quarter, driven primarily by our pre-tax profitability and the impact of stock-based awards. Net income for the quarter was $64 million, or 14 cents per diluted share, or about 9% of revenue. Adjusted net income for the quarter was $158 million, or 34 cents per diluted share. Net cash provided by operating activities was $154 million, and free cash flow was $136 million in Q2. We ended the quarter with a strong cash and liquidity position. Our balance sheet had about $1.5 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments at the end of the quarter. In Q2, we used $78 million of cash to repurchase our Class A common stock via our share repurchase program. At the end of Q2, we had $269 million remaining on our program authorization. Turning to our outlook for the third quarter. For Q3, we expect revenue to be at least $650 million. We estimate adjusted EBITDA for Q3 to be approximately $160 million. Before I wrap up, I'd like to provide additional context on how we are thinking about our investment priorities for the remainder of 2026. Looking ahead, we'll continue investing with conviction in our highest priority opportunities while building a more disciplined and scalable operating model. By improving how we operate, we can move faster and create additional financial capacity to reinvest in those opportunities. We believe that combination of focused investment and improved execution will position the trade desk to deliver stronger, more durable growth, and improved profitability. We look forward to updating you on our progress. That concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, please open up the call for questions.

Certainly. At this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Once again, please press star 1 if you have a question or a comment. And our first question comes from Sean Patel with SIG. Please proceed.

Hi, Jeff. You described well the factors that you're seeing with pressure on the business from macro, pricing pressure, your own execution. But if we shift to thinking about the remainder of this year, what are the, you know, what are the top, you know, two or three priorities that you guys have to stabilize the business?

Thanks for the question, Shom. So let me just first acknowledge that, you know, what we've shared in terms of our performance as well as our guide is below our expectations, and we don't think a reflection of the long-term potential. and I do worry that I that we don't want to overstate while there are a couple pockets overall the business is growing and overall the every division or every sector that we represented the economy most of them are doing very well and of course we can't control the macro but we're overall very positive so in terms of the things that we can control and the things that I'm most excited about and that we have to get right in order to do well going forward. First, we have to upgrade COCHI and we'll, as I mentioned, we'll launch Zuma later this month and this represents substantial platform usability upgrades and helps us get the best out of AI, which we've already added. Second, we just want to continue to innovate in some of our key products and this is definitely not all of them, but some of them that we're most excited about and most focused on are a product in measurement, which just helps the biggest brands in the world see where incremental business outcomes are truly coming from, that this will help us ascribe much better credit for what we're actually producing, which are, in most cases, dramatically understated today. We'll also ramp up Audience Unlimited. This has been in just early phases, but the early results have been remarkable. And to get that in the hands of a lot more customers, we think we'll just spin their flywheels even faster. Measurement will spin everyone's flywheel faster on the platform. Audience Unlimited will do the same and both of them are just in the hands of very few customers today and the results are extremely positive. We've also been introducing the concept of Enterprise COCHI where we have some massive growth rates with companies who negotiate features up front and then use every one of our products. We sometimes do this through through JBPs, where, as you might find, over 200 JBPs through Q2, which represents 38 percent year-over-year growth. But JBPs grow, at least this year, than overall revenue growth, which I just think might be the most bullish number that we can share and have shared today, is that as we continue to double down on JBPs and getting closer to our partners and developing plans to grow well into the future that we see just a tremendous opportunity. To that end, we have a team that's just dedicated to growth, which in some cases is actually winning back customers that we've lost at some point. That team has grown their book of business over 250% year over year and is the fastest growing individual team in our business development. Of course, of the top 100 accounts, the majority of them are actually growing in double digits. Again, just underscoring that most parts of our business are in a very healthy place. And then the last thing, and I can't overstate the importance of this, we have added an amazing number of industry leaders to our leadership team. And most of them have been here a very short period of time. And so we, of of course, are giving them the room to get things up to speed and to continue to help accelerate our growth. But in order for us, we need to help them get back up to speed. And I look at that as important of any. It is as important as any of the initiatives that I've talked about today. So we believe that all of these together, regardless of the macro environment, be even stronger and get back to more durable growth when the conditions change. Thanks for the question, Sean.

The next question comes from Matt Swanson with RBC. Please proceed.

Great. Yeah. Thank you for taking my question. Jeff, I wanted to get your thoughts on something maybe a little more high level, kind of an existential question that I think is top of mind for a lot of investors right now in the age of AI. So, I mean, as AI is kind of reshaping the digital advertising landscape, can you just give us some insight on kind of what gives you confidence in the DSP business model as we know it remaining relevant over the next several years or what needs to happen to stay relevant?

Yeah, I really appreciate this question. I think this is actually a very important theme for us to be talking about. So in order to talk about AI, let me just remind you of the backdrop. So first of all, supply outpaces demand by more than ever. So it is the ultimate buyer's market. But in order to take advantage of that buyer's market, you have to compare every ad opportunity to all the others. And, of course, that is an amazing job for AI because we're looking at 20 million ad opportunities every single second. This decisioning, and it is very important to understand that the job of a DSP, like what actually is a DSP, in order to answer your question, we, of course, have to be super clear on what we're even talking about. But a DSP is a platform built to decide which of those impressions you buy and which you don't. And, of course, that is enhanced by AI. And that's why we've been investing in AI for years. So I wouldn't say that the DSP model, if you will, is going to be disrupted by AI. It is AI. And what's really important is as we enter into the new phase, and this is part of the reason why we spend so much time talking about objects, is that you have to get the biggest brands in the world to trust you with their data and then reassure them that you are going to preserve their data so that their insights from buying are put to use for them and exclusively for them. And most of the biggest platforms in the world are not doing that. They are asking the biggest brands in the world to give them their data and then they use that for all of their clients and and especially their competitors so we view this uh the injection of ai is not a question or not a disruption but in fact the very essence of what it means to be a dsp it that said i just want to also add that i think agentic is one of the the biggest opportunities that advertising will ever see it is a huge opportunity for us. We are already seeing massive advantage from it. Some are using Agentec to just build yesterday's business model all over again, if you will. They're building ad networks out of Agentec-like technologies. That's not going to work because it doesn't leverage the very best of decisioning, which is what a DSP does. So not only do I not think AI will disrupt developed the DSP model, if you will, or will there be DSPs, the only winners left will be people that leverage, or platforms that leverage AI to lead them into the next chapter of this race. Thanks for the question.

The next question comes from Vasily Karasiyav with Cannonball Research. Please proceed.

Thank you. Good afternoon. My question is for Nate. Given the outlook for Q3, which I think also means that that weakness will persist into q4 at least as well how should we now think about your long-term profitability framework how you approach um that side of the business given the revenue trajectory and what's your philosophy in terms of investment internally um would appreciate your thoughts on this thank you yeah sure thank you for the question listen i think you know we have a very long-term focus and continue to see great opportunity to drive long-term growth and profitability.

I think in terms of the investment philosophy, as mentioned in the prepared remarks, we're going to invest with conviction in areas where we see attractive returns. I think importantly, we will be equally disciplined everywhere else. So we'll apply a lot of rigor to how we evaluate investments and then allocate resources. And I think if we do that well, we believe that we can drive stronger long-term growth and profitability. So stay tuned as this work progresses. We'll keep you updated on our long-term profitability framework and overall operating objectives. Thank you.

Next question comes from Justin Patterson with KeyBank. Please proceed.

Great. Thank you. Jeff, I know you don't disclose take rate, but I'm curious how your pricing philosophy is changing in response to brand advertiser needs in the environment.

As we look stabilizing the business how are you thinking about the right level of pricing and take rate from here thank you uh thanks for the question justin uh so first uh i just need to give you a little bit of history that we gave to our own employees to be the cheapest platform it is our goal to be the best definitely been our mantra for more than the last decade if you look at us as funny and you just scrutinize the take rate more or less over the last decade the take rates gone up five of the ten years and it's gone down five of the ten years and the reason why it stayed within a few points of that that that middle line if you will is because we started by saying everything about our product on both a relative basis and absolute basis meaning and the absolute being the starting point meaning that we need to make certain that if our it's better value than if it wasn't in the middle. And in fact, the more obvious you can make that mathematically, obviously the better it is for us to go win customers. We've done extremely well over the last 16 years with that. That said, we've always looked at this as if we can win more business by changing that price or changing the approach, we'll always look at it and always consider it but we tried to do it in a way that it didn't uh make it uh too volatile because we always knew that we could lean on the fact that we were adding more value than we ever cost i mean really confident in our business model and in our pricing philosophy but i will say that over the years even though the take rate has stayed mostly the same wave solomar kochi we've added tons of ai capabilities over recent years uh you know the price has not changed much since we introduced things like uid2 and open path all of those have created efficiencies and enhancements for our customers that we think ultimately add to the consumer surplus that we provide to our customers all the time we're looking for opportunities for us to grow and look for ways for us to simplify where i do think is the biggest opportunity is for us to simplify the way that we price but i don't think that the net number has to change dramatically because we're extremely confident that we're adding more value than we cost. Thanks for the question, Justin. Thank you.

The next question comes from Yusef Squally with Truist. Please proceed. Great.

Thank you so much, Jeff. There seems to be somewhat of a disconnect between the opportunity as you presented in terms of growth across the various modalities and at least the short-term guide, which I think implies about 12% decline year-on-year for Q3, and I'm assuming that will probably sustain itself into Q4. Is there a way to kind of parse out the impact of what you control versus what you cannot? I think in your prepared remarks, she talks about two areas. One is macro, the other is execution. So any way to kind of help us maybe quantify both to kind of see what You can turn around even if the macro continues. And just very quickly, maybe just provide us an update on the status of your relationship with some of the big agencies, maybe the publicists in particular. Thank you.

Yeah, so a lot to unpack in all those. So let me just parse between first the things that we can control and the things that we can't. Obviously, we can control the things that we ship and the product that we put in market, and we, of course, can control the team. We spend a lot of time already on this call talking about how we've enhanced both. We've enhanced both our product and our team. And then, of course, we can look at all the ways that we're executing, all the operations, all the things that we do internally, how we allocate resources, and just scrutinize all of it and make sure it's all pointed in the right direction and pointed towards growth that we're doing every single day with a higher degree of rigor than we ever have before on the macro of course there are some places where there are just amazing secular tailwinds there are parts of technology that have amazing tailwinds uh some of our pharma clients to all who have glps they're all doing really well there are a whole bunch of parts of the economy they're doing really well and In fact, I would say most of them are. You know, we've made references to things that are affected by whatever amount of bifurcation is happening inside of the economy where lower income consumers are under some amount of pressure. And we definitely see in some of the brands that are targeted at products that are more toward that part of the market where they're also seeing some pressures, Not just in the CPGs, where of course that shows up, and not just in the autos where some of that shows up as well, but in some of the other categories, that also shows up a little bit. But overall, those are doing very well. Of course, the macro isn't in our control, but because we're growing in so many other areas, we're extremely confident that we're focused on the right things. As it relates to your question about the agencies, I was actually hoping that this would come up, because I think it's really important to note we built this business on our relationship with the agencies. They've been a phenomenal partner to us over the years. All of them have been critical to our success. They're all in periods of transition right now, but overall our partnership has been phenomenal with each of them, and that includes Publicis. They've been an important partner for us for over a decade. Of course, there were some public disputes about what was essentially a negotiation, but we've spent a lot of time on this call already talking about our joint business plans. It's really important to me that I explain or express that joint business plans with brands and strong agency partnership are not mutually exclusive. In fact, many of our brand JVPs are developed in collaboration with their agencies. So when we talk about that being one of the most bullish things that we're doing, that's in part because of better integration inside of the agencies and better partnerships. And then lastly, as it relates to the agencies, one of the things that we're doing together in many cases is working on white-label products of both Audience Unlimited as well as Agentec AI products. So when I put those in the roadmap as well, things that we can do with them to leverage their data assets as well as improve decisioning for them using Agentec AI where they find efficiencies, and of course we do too, and enhance decisioning along the way, we didn't really have time in the prepared remarks to talk extensively about some of those investments and some of the advancements that we're making in Agentec with our agency partnerships, but it's yet another reason to be really bullish about the future. It's going to take some time for those to pay off in meaningful ways, but that's part of the reason why we're being so deliberate about our own discipline as well as where we make investments. Thanks for the question.

Thank you. The next question comes from Tim Nolan with SSR. Please proceed.

Thanks for taking the question. Jeff, you've had a lot of announcements about some management additions over the last year, really, but especially even in the last month or so. And you mentioned this a bit in the preparator marks. I was wondering if you could give us a bit more color into what some of these people can bring to the trade desk. Some of these are high-profile names from high-profile companies. Just wondering kind of what skills do they bring, what capabilities, and how might they be able to affect some change at the trade desk? Thanks.

You bet. So it's actually hard to answer this question, partly because there are so many people, and they all have such different backgrounds and different expertise. And I also, I feel like I'm trying to recognize so many people that we've added that we don't have enough time to actually talk about all of them and why I'm excited. I'm nervous about leaving somebody out. But let me just talk about a couple of them that we've added of late that are directly impacting our go-to-market approach. So the first is Christy, who joined us as Chief Commercial Officer. She really is leading, among other things, our data partnerships. She has a long history of having worked in building some of the very first retail media networks. She most recently was running all of advertising at Uber, managing a go-to-market team that's almost the same size as ours overall. Her org size here is much smaller, focused on the data partnerships because of how that will enhance audience unlimited, how that will enhance our measurement product. And those two things together we look at as game changers. So does she. That's part of the reason why she's here. I talked about Ron in the prepared remarks, who also joins us at C-level in business development. Many of the conversations that we're having today are at much senior levels. And I talked about a minute ago enterprise career levels of the organization so that we get much longer adoption as well as much deeper integration into some of the biggest brands and biggest companies in the world. We need a greater ability to talk at the most senior levels of the org, as well as to think about new deal structures. Ron had a role that was bigger than advertising at Amazon, where he did that very thing. Looking at all the assets across Amazon, how can we create a more holistic partnership framework that are often custom? I think Ron's one of the best in the world at this, and I'm super excited to have him on board. And then I'll just highlight one other, Vinny Rinaldi, who was the VP of Customer Experience at Hershey's and now joins us to do something very similar with Ron, which is Vinny might be one of the best advocates in the world for why people should buy the premium internet. He was an advocate both at the agency that he worked at before as well as at Hershey's about not pursuing cheap reach. And he did a lot of analysis while he was leading media buying at Hershey's to show that cheap reach wasn't worth it, that user-generated content, while it appears to be on sale, actually doesn't even move the needle for brands like Hershey's. And because he's understood that and has been promoting the pursuit of premium and better measurement as an alternative to simple measurement and cheap reach, we've positioned him with a role to help us talk to the biggest brands in the world and do the very same things that he's done inside of brands himself. So those are a couple of examples. Again, I feel bad for the number of people that I've left off of that, but those are the sorts of people that we're adding with the task at hand that we are extremely confident will change the game. It's quite important to recognize that, of course, in the numbers, especially in the forecast, we're trying to create room for them to get up to speed and make a meaningful contribution, and we're extremely confident that they will. Thank you.

This question comes from Dan Salmon with New Street Research. Please proceed, Dan.

Okay, great. Good afternoon. Thanks, everyone. I have one for Jeff and then one for Nate. Jeff, can you just talk a little bit more about why you're confident that, as you laid out, an independent premium platform focused on objective decisioning, that's really at the heart of your business, That's why that can continue to win market share when you've got walled gardens combining exclusive live sports inventory, like what Amazon has with their DSP or bring really simple programmatic guaranteed style transactions with low pricing with like what, say, Google's new buyer direct program looks like.

Why does that independent premium platform continue to win share? and then just for nate can you maybe just provide a little bit more context around the assumptions in your q3 outlook and just a little bit more on your overall guidance philosophy thanks guys you bet uh i appreciate the the direct question uh let me just uh give as always just a little bit of context before i just get very direct um there there will be many winners uh there have to be. Otherwise, this whole ecosystem that we've created that is actually not that dissimilar from the stock market in structure. There's some massive differences in fungibility and probability of winning. But in terms of structure, it's fairly similar. And an auction with only one bidder isn't an auction. So it's quite important that we have a number of players. And the fact that there are only a few of us that have reached meaningful scale is part of why we're so excited. A ton of TAM ahead, and there's not that many players in the ecosystem. That said, we have by far the highest market share in the programmatic space, especially as we're looking at the open internet. So it's just really important to remember that we're way ahead of our other competitors especially when it comes to buying the open internet because if you want to say well yeah but google buys a lot of youtube i would say well i would hope so and amazon buys a lot of amazon prime and sponsored listings well i would hope so they're the only place where you can buy them so of course they do but at the end of the day the reason why i believe why this model works is because, number one, in an AI-fueled world, you have to fuel those AI models with first-party data, and you have to have the trust of the biggest advertisers in the world. You will not get that if you are not objective and not representing their interests and protecting their data for the long haul. I also think that this comes down to an issue of math, and there's two parts of this that are really important to understand. A lot of times in the press, and this is trade press as well as even in Wall Street, there's, I think, a misunderstanding about the effect of platform rates, especially given that where most of our competitors make all their money is by bundling it with the media. So it's not platform rate versus platform rate. So it becomes really important to aggregate that and say, because you can wrongly conclude, So if Trade Desk charges, let's say, 8% and our competitor charges 4%, then the Trade Desk has to be twice as good. But if you look at it as, no, when you add that to the media, Trade Desk buys an impression for $1.08, and they buy a piece of media for $1.04, where the underlying media in both cases cost $1. did we buy a piece of media that was better for that brand and that comparison at $1.08 versus $1.04 is meaningfully different and then there's also the math that comes down to how they decide how to make money when you have something like YouTube where their cost of goods sold is almost zero and they if they get a dollar they can spend it on YouTube and keep the whole dollar or they can spend it on disney plus and they keep a dime well of course it would be better for google or amazon to buy their owned and operated inventory that's what they do because they make more money that way none of these companies are are in the community service business if you will they're not giving things away so when things come come out as free they are not really free they're just moving the cost somewhere else so we're extremely competent activity matters more today than it did yesterday and it will matter more tomorrow the premium on trust people are looking for partners that they can trust and i think you're going to see over time more and more of a separation between those that align their interests with their clients and those that don't. It doesn't mean that those companies can't have great products. It doesn't mean that they won't have an ancillary business, but at the core, they're selling owned and operated inventory. Both of them make most of their money from their owned and operated inventory. I don't think any of us foresee that changing in any dramatic way in the future. We do believe that decisioning especially when unlike the stock market where if you buy stocks at random you can still often do pretty well if you buy media at random you will get your ass kicked every single time so it becomes quite important that the decisioning engine that we have to help our our customers the biggest brands and biggest agencies in the world make decisions that we give them the tools that leverage the objectivity, that protect their data, that leverage AI to make the very best decisions possible, and then also give them measurement and audience insights that make it so that they are truly proving the incrementality. It's that last piece where I think we've missed a little bit in the last few years, and that's part of the reason why we're so excited about the products ahead. So we're quite bullish on our future, despite the fact that we need a little bit of time to get some of our leaders and some of our products up to speed. But the future is very bright for us and the opportunity ahead.

Hey, Dan, it's Nate. Just quickly on the guidance and the philosophy. So really no change in the approach to guidance. It's very data-driven, and I would say it just reflects the trends that we see in the business today. I would probably add that visibility is somewhat more limited than it has been in recent history. And given that, we're not assuming any meaningful improvement in the environment during the quarter. In general, we don't think that guidance should really be considered conservative or aggressive. The goal is really to be credible and I think grounded in the data. We'll call it like we see it, and then we'll go execute with a lot of rigor and a lot of discipline.

Final question comes from Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Please proceed.

Thanks. I'll try this too. I mean, is there, when you think about the, you know, the business change from 1Q to 2Q, now as it implies that you've got, is there a way to unpack it and kind of be like, this is what we think kind of like the macro slash, you know, auto CBG impact. This might be the, let's say, impact from maybe some risks with certain agencies or something like that So, like, we call it, like, temporary, and then is there a third bucket of, I don't know, what we, you know, like, other related issues, and maybe it's some of the things you alluded to with clients kind of making, you know, poor buying decisions, but ultimately, you know, could be convinced to see the light of your way. So, I don't know, just maybe help folks kind of break it down. And then I guess the other question is when you think, I don't know, two or three years from now, could we be thinking about this as a, I don't know, a smaller organization that relies a lot more on, you know, automation tools to kind of accomplish the goals?

Thanks for the question, Jason. And so I'm actually really glad that you've asked this question because it can help paint the picture of sort of where we're seeing opportunity and where we're seeing some pressures. What we've tried to really highlight is that most of our customers and most of our business is doing very well. I do think you can say we have some customer concentration. And by the nature of the fact that we service the top 500 advertisers in the world, it already has some concentration, if you will. And the fact that we're adding so much to the growth team, which includes some middle market, as well as some of the brands that we've been winning back, it just underlines that we're winning in almost everything. But there are a handful of businesses, often large, that are under pressure. And sometimes when you're under pressure, you try to pursue something that is cheaper. You try to cut costs. You try to do things that can get you through that. In some of those cases, they recognize that they're making decisions that don't help them in the long term. So that's part of the reason why we try to highlight and give so many numbers about the different categories of business and then highlight some of the categories is to just make sure that we were isolating those that were struggling from those that are doing really well. And we highlight that just because obviously our results are lower than we wanted them to be and our guide is lower than we wanted to be. So we just spend a little bit more time talking about the problem, but we don't want anyone to walk away from this thinking there is a systemic problem. This is more a cyclical issue with a handful of customers, and it's not hard to look at their earnings and see that they've had some challenges. So we tried to highlight that. But it's really important that the bigger takeaways are that we signed over 200 JVPs through Q2, and that represents 38% growth year over year. The JVP growth rate is six times higher than overall revenue. The majority of our top 100 accounts are growing double digits. CTV and audio grew double digits once again in Q2. audio actually became our fastest growing channel and now represents over seven percent of our business. And we just continue to expand our partnership with Spotify, which we're extremely excited about. I don't think we gave enough word count to the fact that EMEA and APAC have both grown at almost 30 percent year to date. So both of them have done really phenomenal where in recent years, that hasn't been the case. So the fact that those are now paying off is amazing. And the fact that the second largest market in China is now growing over 100% year to date for us is fantastic. And then, of course, we had over 50% CTV growth year over year in both EMEA and APAC, where historically those were mostly mobile first markets. And to see CTV doing so well in each of those markets. It's just underscoring that we've made the right investments. So there are green shoots all over the place, but there are a few large customers that are under pressure. We've tried to highlight that, but please don't walk away from this thinking that that's affecting everyone. It's actually just a couple of them. And then overall, we have most of our departments, most of our business, most of our customers, and most of our geographies doing really well, with the brightest future being in things like CTV, inside of audio, in our retail partnerships, in our data partnerships. And when you fuel that or when you funnel that into our measurement product and our audience unlimited product, we think that there's a way to really accelerate that flywheel. And if you get rid of just a little bit of some of those macro pressures, a lot of things change. And the answer to your question is we have an unbelievable leadership team. Most of them are new. And so we're just trying to give them enough runway to get up to speed and really make a substantial contribution. And we're convinced that they can and they will. So I'm really excited to see what we can all do together and excited for the next chapter. And while days like today hurt, they're going to make the comeback story even more exciting the more impressive. Thank you.

Thank you. This concludes the question and answer session. This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.