Why The Trade Desk has come out swinging against the press, Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and Amazon

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The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green is entering his Elon Musk era.

Green has spearheaded the adtech giant's newly combative communications strategy, throwing rhetorical punches at the media, Wall Street, Amazon, and Madison Avenue.

Last week, on LinkedIn, Green took aim at the advertising trade press, saying reporters were too focused on "drama and cynicism" over "curiosity."

In a post on The Trade Desk's own ad news site, The Current, Green laid out why he recently purchased about $150 million of company stock, and dinged ad reporters for not covering the news.

Green wrote that "Wall Street is wrong" in its bearish stance toward software companies like his as AI tools gain prominence.

The context: The Trade Desk's stock has fallen more than 50% over the last year.

Green also doubled down on his view that Amazon's rival demand-side platform isn't a Trade Desk competitor, calling it "overrated" and predicting the Amazon DSP won't exist in five years.

Green's approach fits into a trend of "going direct" and bypassing traditional media. It's an increasingly popular communications strategy in Silicon Valley, employed by notable figures including Musk, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Carla Bevins, a professor of business management communication at Carnegie Mellon University, told me that a direct, defensive strategy can rally supporters and reinforce the company's identity as a disruptor. Think Apple's privacy marketing or Netflix's framing of streaming as the future, both of which challenged prevailing industry narratives.

However, Bevins warned that The Trade Desk's more adversarial approach could be "high-risk" in the long term, as "conflict can become the story rather than the company's innovation or performance."

Despite its stock drop, The Trade Desk is certainly a top player in the adtech set. Last year, it posted an 18% lift in annual revenue to $2.9 billion and a net profit of $443 million. The company said it had a 95% customer retention rate, and it's grown with limited M&A.

The company may have further sparring partners yet.

On Tuesday, Publicis Groupe said it was no longer recommending The Trade Desk to clients, following an independent audit. A Trade Desk spokesperson said in a statement that any notion it had failed an audit was false and that it had enjoyed a long and successful relationship with the ad agency group.

Green delivered a forceful LinkedIn post in response as well.

The Trade Desk CMO, Ian Colley, told me in an interview before the Publicis news dropped that while correcting the record can create "a bit of drama," it doesn't represent the bulk of what the company is trying to do from a communications perspective.

In the interview, Colley said the company wants to focus its marketing on the future of advertising and how he's positioning The Trade Desk as a brand.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Lara O'Reilly: Has there been an intentional shift in comms?

Ian Colley: No, I don't think so. There were a few stories in which some products we've been launching were misunderstood by the people covering them.

When that happens — and even though you try to explain how these things work — it still gets misrepresented. We just felt there was a need to correct that.

It does seem as though the tone has changed somewhat. "Defiant" and "defensive" are words people have used.

Jeff has never been afraid to call out where he sees value shifting in the market. He was the first to say he never thought Google would deprecate cookies. He was alone in saying that. That proved to be true.

He predicted Netflix would ultimately have to accommodate advertising, and he was alone in that for many years, but it ended up being true.

He understands the macro shifts in the market and then tries to interpret what those mean for us and for programmatic advertising.

Amazon has a DSP, but Amazon also owns a ton of inventory. We don't own any inventory. Amazon will always prioritize its own inventory. There will always be a difference in what you're buying. Our value proposition is that you get to pick whatever ad impression makes the most sense for you, wherever it is on the open internet.

Yes, we exist broadly in the advertising market together — so we're competitive in that regard — but when you actually look at where buyers put us on their media plan versus an Amazon or a Google or a Meta, they're different.

Cars and airplanes are in the transportation industry. If you're shopping for a car, you're typically not looking at airplanes. Unless you're Elon Musk.

One comms expert I spoke with recently said they thought The Trade Desk should be careful not to get mired in the minutiae. Would you agree?

If you look at a lot of our marketing and where we show up on stages, we're talking about where value is shifting and what the impact of AI will be on the marketplace.

I spend the vast bulk of our time talking about where the industry is heading, and that's, frankly, what we'd love to spend all of our time doing.

Another comms expert I spoke to said that there can be a risk in correcting the record. That the conflict becomes the story. How do you strike the right balance?

Maybe the times when you do poke your head above the waterline and say, "Oh, maybe what was written there wasn't quite right," by nature, those things get a little bit more attention because there's a bit of drama involved in that. I don't think it represents, remotely, the bulk of what we're trying to do from a communications perspective.

If you were to sum up in a word or a phrase what the Trade Desk stands for as a brand, what would that be?

It's about objective decisioning on the open internet. By not owning inventory, we can be objective. By building as rich a platform as possible, we can bring maximum decisioning.

We can help you decide what an ad impression is worth, and how much you should bid for it. We look across the open internet, which is where consumers spend the bulk of their time.

We believe, especially when you compare us to Big Tech platforms, that's a compelling value proposition, and I do believe it's why clients come to us and where they value us in their media plan.