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How major brands saw success with Kokai

See how brands across industries are using Kokai to improve campaign efficiency, reach more relevant audiences, and drive stronger full-funnel performance.

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Kokai, The Trade Desk’s platform update, is designed to help advertisers reach their most valuable audiences while simplifying the complexities of programmatic buying. Brands around the world are already using Kokai to power campaigns and improve performance across the marketing funnel.

By combining AI-powered optimization, advanced audience targeting, innovative measurement solutions, and access to premium inventory, Kokai helps media buyers make more strategic decisions throughout a campaign. The results below show how advertisers across industries and markets are putting those capabilities into practice.

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Campaigns running through Kokai delivered stronger results on average

The Trade Desk’s platform-wide data analysis found that campaigns running through Kokai delivered the following average performance improvements during the beta period:

Key results

%: lower cost per unique household

%: lower cost per click (CPC)

%: lower cost per acquisition (CPA)*

*Aggregate results are spend-weighted averages recorded during the beta period. Tests compared the same campaign’s
KPI achievement before and after Kokai adoption.

How brands around the world are realizing campaign success with Kokai

McDonald’s Canada lowered CPA by 40%

McDonald’s used seed data to target its most valuable customers and activated Kokai’s AI capabilities. The brand saw a correlation between Quality Reach Index (QRI) and cost per order: The higher the campaign’s QRI score, the lower the cost to drive a new order.¹

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Goodway Group lowered cost per unique household by 25% for CTV campaigns

Digital marketing agency Goodway Group combined its own first-party deals with inventory solutions available in Kokai to decrease campaign cost per unique household.² Using the Sellers and Publishers 500+ marketplace and Blue Lists, the campaign improved across all measured KPIs.

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A U.S. food-and-drink brand increased ROAS by 103%

As an early adopter of Kokai, a U.S. food-and-drink brand used the platform’s advanced value optimizations and new bidding algorithm to improve return on ad spend (ROAS) over the course of its campaign flight.³

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Sky Deutschland lowered CPA by 84%

To attract new subscribers for its TV sports package, pay-TV broadcaster Sky activated a first-party dataset as a seed and used Kokai’s QRI to improve audience relevance by 7x.⁴ On average, CPA was 84% lower when Sky used the campaign seed to find new audiences.

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Cashrewards Australia lowered CPA by 73%

Cash-back platform Cashrewards used QRI to measure the quality of its campaign reach against its seed audience.⁵ First-party, seed-based lookalike audiences with higher QRI scores drove lower CPAs than the brand’s other demographic targeting strategies.

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Drive full-funnel performance with Kokai

These results demonstrate how audience-centered campaigns powered by AI, advanced targeting, measurement innovation, and premium inventory can improve performance across the funnel. Campaign insights generated through Kokai can also help marketers make future media strategies more intelligent and effective.