Trade Desk Allows First-Party Data Onboarding In Solimar Trading Platform

The Trade Desk has announced a new trading platform, Solimar, that will allow clients to integrate first-party data to guide media-buying strategies, eliminating the need for a separate customer-data platform (CDP) or data-management platform (DMP). 

By the virtue of this move, the Trade Desk will be able to build the UID2 ecosystem while offering users identity-based targeting as the first-party data will be transformed into Unified ID 2.0 (UID2s) from e-mail addresses. 

One of the most significant improvements of the new user interface, Solimar, is the inclusion of client data. To include client feedback in the launch, The Trade Desk performed two months of private beta testing with a limited group of its major clients.

Coming from the Spanish words, ‘ sol y mar’ meaning ‘ sun and sea’, Solimar, for the Trade Desk, symbolizes the “perfect moment” when the sun and the sea meet during sunrise/sunrise. 

Trading specialist Dawn Chan said in a briefing call – 

This is what our release represents—it’s the perfect moment in our industry as we head into a new age of advertising, one that is digital and data-driven and also moves beyond the complexities of our ecosystems around siloed data and single-channel strategies

He added that the company wants to concentrate on enhancing advertisers’ capacity to do what’s best for their business as well as for consumers. 

Mitch Waters, The Trade Desk’s SVP of Southeast Asia, India, and ANZ, told Campaign Asia-Pacific in a briefing call that it has been two years approximately since the development of Solimar first began. 

The Trade Desk had three important areas of attention for Solimar, in addition to easy onboarding of first-party data: strengthening the user interface, putting goals at the forefront of campaigns, and including enhanced planning and optimizations.

Koa, an artificial intelligence application that gives suggestions throughout the campaign development and while it is running, is used to optimize campaigns. 

According to Waters, this combined with what the business says is a more simplified and intuitive platform design intends to free traders from the tedious work of setting up campaigns and line items, allowing them to focus more on insights. Both agency and in-house teams have been considered when developing the platform.

Solimar launched on 7th July’21, comes three years after Trade Desk released its user interface, Megagon. 

Waters said – 

Essentially we had to build the plane while flying it [since] we had our old platform to stand up. We have the vision of what we want to achieve…then what we do is work backwards in terms of resourcing and everything else we have to do on an everyday basis. We release product every week, and our team have requests every other week that we need to prioritise

He added – 

It was about working together to keep the pace of everyday innovation, as well as building something scalable and meaningful

The Solimar Platform

To help buyers make smarter choices, the Solimar platform starts with a ‘Live flight summary,’ which displays what The Trade Desk considers to be the most significant data for growth, such as:

• Goals: Does the client have a suitable marketing mix?
• Pacing: Is the client on schedule and expected to spend the full amount?
• Channels: Is the channel mix suitable, or is there space for diversification through emerging channels such as DOOH? 
• Data: Is the client successfully utilizing data? This section shows how many campaigns are based on first-party, third-party, or no data.

Advertisers may now measure against many KPIs, categorized as primary, secondary, and tertiary, using the new campaign creation tools.

Adbrain’s campaign insights, such as reach and frequency, can be examined at the household, individual, or unique-ID level.

Also, planners can use a forecasting tool to adjust targeting settings and observe how it affects the reach and frequency of a campaign.

Waters, who sees this technology as particularly useful in APAC because of the dispersion of platforms between markets, says – 

One area where we have seen a lot of demand is within OTT. If you are buying individually, you don’t have complete view of what an OTT opportunity might look like. Being able to see holistically what an OTT opportunity is across major partners within Indonesia

Koa

Solimar’s performance-enhancing features are powered by the Koa AI engine. When a client develops a new campaign, Koa will recommend KPIs based on the customer’s given objectives, cross-device vendors, a budget split by channels, retargeting, lookalike audiences, and contextual techniques, among other things.

Furthermore, the Koa Identity Alliance is a cross-device graph that integrates leading and new ID solutions such as LiveRamp IdentityLink, Oracle Cross Device, Tapad Device Graph, and Adbrain Device Graph, removing clients’ “guesswork” about identity resolution. 

The Trade Desk intended to make Koa’s decisions visible, so clients may see which CPMs, tactics, and data segments the AI chose, and change or disregard Koa’s suggestions as needed. 

First-Party Data

One of Solimar’s main advances is incorporating the value of a client’s first-party data or third-party audiences to inform their media purchase.

Clients can identify their target consumers in the campaign setup in the form of first-party or third-party data, which will act as a seed audience for Koa to build when making suggestions.

Brands can submit first-party data such as pixels, app data, and IP addresses directly into the platform or import data from a third-party DMP or CDP via a data section.

If a client decides to import CRM data as email addresses, they will be translated to UID2s automatically. After the UID2s have been converted, the platform will scan them to see how many are ‘active UID2s,’ or how many of these users have been active in the programmatic universe in the previous week. 

If the client decides to act on those UID2s, they will be transmitted into the programmatic environment to match the publisher side, resulting in a synchronized UID2 ecosystem.