Met during his visit to Cannes Lions, Lukas Fassbender, senior vice president for the EMEA region of The Trade Desk, defends the financial situation of the platform, which relies on measuring the performance of premium inventories on CTV, audio and DOOH to attract more budgets.
JDN. The Trade Desk is going through a turbulent period: operating margins under pressure, share prices falling sharply, three financial directors (CFO) and three revenue directors (CRO) who have succeeded one another in one year. What can you tell us about this?
Lukas Fassbender. The analysis of the current situation must take into account the whole picture and not just an extract. TTD has been operating for advertisers for almost 20 years. If you look at the landscape around us, you won’t find many companies that have achieved what we have managed to achieve all these years. In 2025, more than $30 billion in advertising investments passed through our platform, which is a more than considerable sum, especially in an environment as fragmented as that of advertising inventories. Many DSPs have gone through this without succeeding: Appnexus, Mediamath, Turn.
The first quarter was certainly less spectacular than expected but we still recorded growth of 12% year-on-year. Growth is never a smooth process and every business goes through this type of situation at one time or another. And if you look at the last 16 years, The Trade Desk’s growth has always been strong.
How then do you explain the drop in your stock price?
I cannot analyze our stock price because many factors can explain these movements.
Faced with the decline in advertising investments, competition from LLMs and the dominant position of GAFAM, what remains for the open web, which is at the heart of your activity?
The size of the market is considerable. Worldwide, every second, TTD sees 20 million requests on the open Internet, that is to say 20 million opportunities for brands to display an advertisement to an Internet user. This massive supply, much greater than demand, makes the situation very comfortable for brands who, with our technology, can choose the most relevant and efficient inventory for them. Of course, LLMs put additional pressure on publishers, particularly those positioned on the long tail. Think for example of recipe sites, their economic model is particularly threatened as long as they continue to offer only this type of content. But you have other publishers who bring considerable aggregate value to the open web, who continue to gain significant market share, and whose inventories brands have every interest in seizing. I am thinking, for example, of television channels and streaming services, whose context is premium, such as TF1, Netflix, Disney+ and Spotify.
What about the news media?
The media continue to encounter difficulties, in fact, they do not only date from the rise of LLMs. Meta, for example, used newspaper content extensively and paid only a tiny fraction in return. This must change. The situation of the editorial offices is not easy to finance their activity, they cannot rely solely on subscriptions and must not remain focused on Gafam to earn money.
To develop their advertising revenue, media must have as many signals as possible because these are the elements that allow brands to decide what to buy. If you look at the advertising strategies of the most premium publishers, they are successful.
The same goes for measurement: brands want proof that their campaigns are performing well. We have partnered with retailers who provide us with sales data so that we can connect it with ad campaign delivery data. Enough to provide the advertiser with concrete information on the results obtained.
Where is TTD looking for growth now?
CTV, audio, mobile and DOOH are strong growth drivers. TTD is an omnichannel platform, it responds to advertisers’ strategy of being present at all points of contact with their targets. We are building significant capacity to measure the real impact of advertising campaigns thanks to our partnerships with major retailers and now also with players in the travel sector. (including Booking, Marriott Media and Uber Advertising, editor’s note). This is precisely what brands are looking for when they engage with Gafam: an easy-to-use platform and performance data. The problem with the latter is that they monopolize attribution by often claiming the last point of contact. By showing advertisers proof of the contribution of open web publishers to attention, engagement, and even sales, we encourage the growth of advertising budgets towards them.
On a technical and operational level, including agents, what is TTD’s roadmap for this year?
AI has always been present in our platform. When you’re processing 20 million opportunities per second, it’s machines talking to machines. Our industry is the one where AI is most ubiquitous to allow us to read signals and make purchasing decisions. In 2018 we launched Koa, our AI engine designed to help optimize campaigns and support traders in their decisions. Koa was rolled out across our entire platform in 2023, with Kokai.
AI is integrated into our platform on two levels: in infrastructure and for user experience, including with an LLM-based chatbot that is in beta testing with a select group of advertisers. For advertisers connected via API, we set up agentic connections, to allow them to interact with the LLM of their choice. Stagwell is the first advertiser to test an agentic connection with The Trade Desk via MCP. We hope to open this type of connection to all our agency and advertiser clients again this year.
What can you tell us about the Publicis soap opera?
We do not comment on internal negotiations we conduct with our clients. All I can tell you is that everything is going well with Publicis, which remains an extremely important partner for us both in Europe and around the world.
