Deal Desk: Designed to bring more visibility and insight to private marketplace buying

With Deal Desk, The Trade Desk platform aims to modernize how private deals are built, measured, and optimized, all so that marketers and publishers can enjoy shared visibility, transparent data, and tools that can help you make smarter media decisions and drive business outcomes. 

PMPs have historically been challenging setup and scale, and their narrow consideration set of included inventory often limits advertisers’ ability to use AI to drive efficiency and performance. Deal Desk is positioned to change that by bringing the power of data and AI to deals with more automation, more transparency, and easier optimization to drive value from your most strategic deals. You’ll be able to review, amend, and activate deals with more transparency than ever before.

Get to know the tool: 

• How Deal Desk will work 

• Potential benefits for advertisers and publishers 

• Aim to maximize the value of your media investments 

How Deal Desk will work 

Deal Desk will be available to buyers in Kokai, our AI-powered media buying platform. For buyers and sellers alike, Deal Desk is a major upgrade designed to offer a centralized, structured place to propose, analyze, and manage deals. That means you’ll spend less time troubleshooting and more time optimizing. 

Deal Desk’s features will include: 

• Clear terms, pricing, and descriptions via standardized deal metadata 

• In-platform workflows to propose, negotiate, activate, and refine deals 

• Deal Quality Scores that help you inspect deal health and quality prior to activation 

• AI-powered suggestions and built-in flexibility to keep deals on track 

Potential benefits for advertisers and publishers

With Deal Desk, advertisers will be able to:

• Identify the unique value and scalability of private deals before activation 

• Accept or amend deals directly in platform — no more endless email threads or phone calls 

• Monitor deal performance through Deal Quality Scores and actionable insights 

• Automatically expand or modify underperforming deals to find scale and drive more business impact

Publishers will be able to leverage Deal Desk to:

• Propose deals that clearly describe the inventory being included 

• Access the same Deal Quality Scores to benchmark performance, discover actionable insights, and understand how buyers perceive your inventory 

• Use automation to streamline operations and strengthen advertiser relationships 

• Increase deal revenue by providing rich data signals to advertising

By making deals more transparent to both sides of the media equation, Deal Desk is designed to help make it easier for buyers and sellers to activate and scale their most strategic media partnerships, maximizing business impact. 

Initial publishers who have adopted Deal Desk for their private marketplace deals include industry leaders such as Disney. “As more buyers shift toward biddable activation, we’re focused on ensuring they have the tools, access, and flexibility they need to drive results,” said Jamie Power, SVP of Addressable Sales, Disney. “We continue to put our advertisers first, and our relationship with The Trade Desk reflects our commitment to meeting advertisers where they are and evolving how we transact to deliver greater efficiency and performance.”

Aim to maximize the value of your most strategic media investments

As the programmatic ecosystem continues to evolve, buyers and sellers will require better tools to manage their deals. Deal Desk aims to bring transparency, collaboration, and control, helping advertisers and publishers get more value from the private deals that already comprise a large share of their programmatic spend. 

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

<sub>Sources:
1. ANA Benchmark Study, December 2024.</sub>