Drive better outcomes with the latest platform innovations

Drive better outcomes with the latest platform innovations 

Since its launch, The Trade Desk’s latest platform experience, Kokai, has evolved to include robust enhancements that deliver on the goal of helping advertisers drive better outcomes. With numerous new features and updates, Kokai is not only more powerful — it’s more connected, consistent, and easier for media buyers to use.

Our hardest-working platform yet 

We’ve long believed that pushing the boundaries of digital advertising would lead to better outcomes for advertisers. It’s why we built Kokai — a bold reinvention of our demand-side platform (DSP) designed to rethink the media buying experience to help you achieve better performance.

With AI at its core, campaigns running through Kokai have delivered, on average, 43% lower cost per unique reach (CPUR), 24% lower cost per click (CPC), and 27% lower cost per acquisition (CPA).¹ Brands like McDonald’s and Sky drove CPA reductions of 40%² and 84%³, respectively. A U.S. food and beverage brand achieved 103% higher ROAS.⁴

Whether you’re reaching the next generation of customers, driving sales, ROI, or anything in between, Kokai’s new features and advanced AI-driven capabilities are designed to help get you there faster. Learn more about these updates to make better buying decisions, stretch your media dollars, and deliver stronger campaign results. 

User experience and usability improvements 

Powerful technology should also be intuitive and efficient. A bulk of platform upgrades are centered around streamlining workflows, enhancing navigation, and improving transparency across the platform. Some of the biggest updates include: 

Streamline campaign management with the upgraded Programmatic Table view 

Reviewing and optimizing campaigns in Kokai is now faster and easier, giving you more time to focus on strategy. An enhanced Programmatic Table view provides instant visibility into key settings, making it easy to spot what’s configured (or missing), verify settings at a glance, and seamlessly navigate to tiles for adjustments.

We’ve also introduced visual enhancements to make the UI clearer. Active tiles pop with color when configured, while inactive tiles remain outlined — so you can instantly see what needs attention. You can also see where you’ve applied manual optimizations, where you’ve enabled Koa^TM to make optimizations for you, and where no optimizations have been applied. This signal helps ensure you’re not leaving performance on the table, providing a clear view of where to make optimizations. 

Simplify campaign and ad group quality assurance with an all-in-one view

For traders, quality assurance (QA) is a daily necessity — whether it’s a final check before launch or a quick gut check on a live campaign. Now, with the redesigned Campaigns (Ca) tile and Ad Group (Ag) tile, verifying settings is faster, easier, and more intuitive. 

The Ca tile provides an in-depth view of your campaign settings, while the Ag tile lets you zoom in on settings across all your ad groups — allowing for accuracy at every level. These enhanced views bring everything into a single, scannable layout, making reviewing and confirming your settings easier. 

Key improvements:

• Real-time validation: Instantly verify settings and configurations while setting up or adjusting campaigns all in one place — helping you catch errors early on. 

• Streamlined workflow: Easily navigate to take action and make edits — no need to export data or toggle between spreadsheets, so you can save time and simplify setup. 

• Enhanced visuals: A new look and feel that aligns with the new Programmatic Table, providing a more consistent, intuitive experience.

These updates are designed to streamline your workflow and help you take action with ease so that you can improve both speed and precision as you manage your campaigns.

Omnichannel activation enhancements

Reaching audiences wherever they are has never been more critical. Kokai has expanded the capabilities of omnichannel buying, so advertisers can seamlessly activate and optimize campaigns across channels. Key enhancements include: 

Drive stronger performance with omnichannel optimizations

Your audience moves across media channels — now your optimizations do too. Our latest omnichannel optimization feature uses AI to analyze your entire media mix, identifying the highest-performing channel paths and strategically balancing reach, overlap, and impact. 

Early testing shows it helps deliver measurable improvements in CPA performance. With omnichannel optimization, you can: 

• Unify your cross-channel efforts into a single, cohesive strategy 

• Prioritize the most effective channel mix to maximize performance 

• Guide users down the funnel with a strategic mix of touchpoints 

Optimize your forecasts with channel recommendations

Planning just got more powerful — and more omnichannel. New channel recommendations within the Forecasting (F) tile can help you discover high-impact media channels before launching a campaign. 

Here’s how it works: If you’re forecasting a display conversion campaign and our data shows that adding audio could improve performance, Kokai will surface that recommendation and make it easier to run an audio forecast with the same settings in just a click. 

It’s a smarter way to plan, powered by real performance insights. 

Refine your audio strategy, from creation to delivery

Kokai’s latest updates make it easier than ever to create high-quality audio ads and fine-tune where they’re heard. 

• Create high-quality audio ads: Need audio ads fast? Our new in-platform audio creative generation workflow — powered by Bunny Studio — lets you produce professional-quality audio assets directly within Kokai. Whether you’re scaling your audio creatives, need a quick turnaround, or are new to digital audio, this tool streamlines the process, making it both efficient and cost-effective. 

• Align your audio ads with the right content: You now have more control over where your audio ads play. With the ability to target, block, or optimize toward specific audio feed types — like music streaming, podcasts, radio, and more — you can ensure your message is delivered in the listening environment of your choice. With this update, you can also access podcast inventory more easily by targeting the Sellers and Publishers 500+.

Strengthen your targeting and measurement across devices

Reach your audience with greater precision and scale across key channels and regions. Our enhanced cross-device graph, Identity Alliance, reduces reliance on IP addresses and third-party cookies — helping you engage more people and households where it matters most, especially in APAC and EMEA. 

With strengthened Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) and European Unified Identity (EUID) connections and expanded connected TV (CTV) and mobile coverage, you can get more durable targeting, better measurement, and seamless omnichannel reach across premium inventory. 

In-platform reporting and insights

Better media buying decisions start with better insights. Kokai offers elevated analytics and data visualizations that provide deeper visibility into performance and audience behaviors. This enables you to fine-tune strategies with real-time, actionable data. 

Gain greater visibility into pacing and performance from the portfolio view

Tracking the performance of your media investment on your terms is key. An upgraded portfolio view with new hourly tracking and usability enhancements is helping traders make faster, smarter decisions. 

• Track spend and performance by the hour: Traders need real-time insights to optimize fast-moving campaigns — especially for live sports and political campaigns. The new “Last 24 hours” lookback window within the platform’s portfolio view is one of many time frame options, providing hourly aggregated spend data so you can track performance and get real-time visibility into campaign spend by the hour. Whether you need hourly insights to troubleshoot early performance or a longer-term view to analyze portfolio trends over time, these flexible filters can help you adjust spend efficiently and make sharper, data-driven decisions.
  

• Enhanced usability: With sortable columns, more adjustable filters, and overall improved navigation, it’s now easier to analyze spend and performance on your terms. 

These updates can help you stay ahead of the game with smarter, more efficient decision-making. 

Gain actionable insights faster from the Reports tile

Instant access to key performance metrics is essential for traders who want to optimize their campaigns quickly and effectively. That’s why we’ve upgraded the Reports (Rp) tile — making it easier to gain actionable insights. The best part? You don’t even have to run a report. The updated, customizable performance table and graph offer a clearer, more detailed view of your campaign’s performance, empowering you to make data-driven decisions faster. 

Here’s what the new experience delivers: 

1. A new default view at the advertiser, campaign, and ad group levels, with a performance overview graph and performance summary table for easy access to critical data. 

2. The flexibility to tailor your views with dozens of metrics to choose from. Select any two metrics to plot side by side in the performance graph and customize the table below with the metrics that matter most to you. 

3. Persistent customization — your changes to graphs and tables will be saved, so you can pick up right where you left off, even after closing your browser. 

What’s next

Kokai is transforming how advertisers leverage data and AI to help maximize the value of every impression — and the platform continues to innovate to meet advertisers’ needs. This keeps up the promise The Trade Desk CEO and Founder Jeff Green made at Kokai’s launch event in 2023, “You’re going to see us ship product like the way we have today, which is more often, with more innovation more rapidly and frequently.” 

Many more platform upgrades and enhancements are on the road map, and we’ll continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. You can keep up to speed with the latest updates and enhancements here on The Resource Desk.

Here’s to shaping the future of media buying, together! 

This information is provided solely for background and is not a representation or guarantee of any future performance.

<sub><sup>Sources:
1. Aggregate results shown are spend-weighted average performance improvements recorded in beta period. Tests compared same-campaign KPI performance pre- and post-Kokai adoption.
2. The Trade Desk, platform data, June 22, 2024 to July 25, 2024.
3. “Sky saw 84% lower CPA with Kokai seed-based audiences.”</sup></sub>