Inside The Trade Desk’s Google Attack Ad

Yesterday, The Trade Desk revealed a brand new ad campaign attacking the biggest player in the world of digital advertising — Google.

While launching campaigns is de rigueur for many brands, for a primarily B2B business like The Trade Desk, it marked a bit of a departure, especially in the manner in which it went about attacking Google.

Titled “Unbreak the Internet,” the campaign was conceptualised and designed in-house at The Trade Desk and will run across a litany of channels — connected TV, online video advertising, digital out-of-home, display, and paid social executions. And it was certainly punchy.

“It’s largely a B2B campaign but we think that consumers have got as much to gain and lose from an open, transparent internet as much as anyone else,” James Bayes, The Trade Desk’s country manager ANZ, explained to B&T.

“We think that this is an opportune time for consumers to get a better understanding of the quid pro quo of the open internet. As an industry, we’ve historically done a really poor job of explaining to them that advertising pays for the content that they consume. And, if that funding model becomes endangered then their access to that content similarly becomes endangered.”

The Trade Desk’s James Bayes

In the release material for the new campaign, Bayes said that if brands continued to invest their ad spend into the walled gardens of Facebook, Amazon and Apple, as well as Google, then they inadvertently reduced the amount of money that the internet needs to produce content.

“The way we think about it, the open internet is made up of news journalism, streaming TV, audio streaming, podcasting and independent content creation. It’s the home of Australian storytelling,” Bayes told B&T.

Google is currently facing an antitrust lawsuit in the US that is seeking to split up its all-encompassing digital advertising business into its component parts. Of course, the case will not be settled for months to come — Google’s lawyers are very expensive and the complexity of anti-competition law and programmatic advertising do not lend themselves to a speedy settlement. But, despite previously writing for B&T that Australian advertisers should keep an eye on the case, Bayes denied that his company’s new campaign was a result of, or reaction to, the case.

“I don’t think that the campaign was necessarily driven by any particular investigations or regulatory dynamic or anything like that. I think as much as anything, it’s driven by the wider economic environment if you think about global economic conditions, interest rates, GDP, those sorts of things.

“As the economy slows down, advertisers become more accountable for every dollar that they invest to help them grow and connect with their customers… And, as digital becomes an increasingly big part of the overall advertising ecosystem, which is in part driven by that economic contraction, the importance of an open and transparent marketplace only becomes more important.”

Of course, The Trade Desk is not a neutral participant in the digital advertising sphere. If advertisers began to eschew Google’s ad network, The Trade Desk would be a major beneficiary. But, of course, you could say that about any business running an ad campaign. Again, Bayes remained coy on the topic when asked what the ambitions for the campaign were.

“We would like to see an industry that believes in, advocates for and that acts in a way that supports a free, open and transparent marketplace that underpins the continued success of independent content creators, journalists and storytellers. We think that stuff is really important socially, not just as an advertising concept,” he said.

When B&T pointed out that, if advertisers would leave behind the walled gardens, The Trade Desk would likely see more transactions on its platform, Bayes simply replied:

“We all want to grow.”

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