Why transparency, AI, and supply quality are converging for buyers and sellers

Supply quality matters more in the age of AI

The Trade Desk platform AI analyzes up to 20 million ad opportunities every second. The value of each impression depends on many variables, including audience, context, price, format, timing, and supply path.

AI can help assess these variables more quickly than humans, but only if the system around it is clean enough to support better decisions. Unnecessary hops, opaque auctions, or weak signals between buyers and publishers reduce the reliability of information available to AI to act on.

That makes supply quality a foundational issue. The goal is not only to buy more efficiently today, but to create conditions for better AI-driven decisioning tomorrow.

For buyers, cleaner supply paths can help: 

• Reduce waste from unnecessary intermediaries 

• Improve visibility into where dollars are going 

• Strengthen performance by prioritizing higher-quality paths 

• Make optimization decisions easier to understand

For publishers, cleaner supply paths can help:

• Improve visibility into advertiser demand 

• Give premium inventory a fairer opportunity to compete 

• Reduce friction between high-quality content and buyer decisioning 

• Support a healthier open internet marketplace 

OpenPath and Ventura support a cleaner supply chain

A throughline of many of our solutions is improving the efficiency of the supply chain. OpenPath and Ventura may solve different problems, but both are aimed at creating a more direct and transparent connection between buyers and premium supply.

OpenPath is designed to help buyers access trusted publisher auctions more directly. The goal is not to replace every supply path, but to set a higher standard for efficiency, transparency, and trust.

Ventura applies a similar principle to connected TV (CTV). As streaming becomes a larger share of media investment, operating systems and distribution layers can shape how buyers access inventory, how media is priced, and how publishers and content owners monetize ad-supported viewing. A more efficient CTV supply chain allows buyers to reach audiences with greater confidence while giving publishers and content owners a stronger foundation for ad-supported growth.

Together, these efforts reflect a broader goal:

• Make high-quality supply easier to access 

• Reduce unnecessary complexity between buyers and sellers 

• Improve transparency into how media is bought 

• Help premium publishers compete based on audience and content value 

Kokai uses AI to help advertisers make better campaign decisions

The Kokai platform experience was designed to help traders manage the complexity of programmatic advertising. Instead of requiring teams to manually interpret every variable, our platform AI, Koa, helps surface which campaign levers are more likely to improve performance, including:

• Audience strategy 

• Frequency 

• Inventory quality 

• Bid strategy 

• Budget allocation 

• Campaign constraints and goals 

Tools like Decision Power help traders understand whether a campaign has enough flexibility to optimize effectively. Relevance checks if the targeting matches the intended audience before a campaign goes live. Koa Optimizations and Performance Mode help translate those signals into in-flight decisions, guiding campaigns toward the outcomes advertisers value most. With Koa Agents, now in alpha testing, buyers will enter campaign goals and audience, and the AI-powered agents will activate and optimize campaigns in real time.

Together, these AI capabilities reduce the manual workload of campaign execution without sacrificing control or performance. 

AI performs better when goals and inputs are clear. If a campaign is optimizing for a narrow or incomplete signal, AI may reinforce the wrong behavior more quickly. By defining appropriate goals, using trusted signals, and giving the system enough room to learn, traders can use Kokai to help them plan, optimize, and adjust with more confidence.

For advertisers, that means using AI to:

• Evaluate whether a plan has enough optimization flexibility 

• Identify where targeting may be too narrow or too broad 

• Understand which campaign levers are most likely to affect performance 

• Adjust spend in-flight based on real-time signals 

• Balance reach, price, quality, and outcomes more effectively

Kokai’s AI tools give traders better decision-making capabilities, clearer signals, and more ways to improve performance across the full campaign lifecycle.

Transparency helps buyers and publishers build trust

In programmatic advertising, better visibility helps buyers understand what they bought, where their spend went, and which supply paths contributed to performance. While this visibility can lead to greater scrutiny, it also gives advertisers the information they need to make better decisions.

This becomes more important as AI plays a larger role in campaign planning and optimization. Buyers need confidence that platforms like The Trade Desk are working from clean, high-quality signals. Publishers need confidence that their inventory can be evaluated on quality, audience, and context, not hidden behind unclear paths or incomplete reporting.

Products like Raw Event Data Stream (REDS) help advertisers access event-level data for more granular analysis, while OpenAds is designed to support more transparent, auditable auctions. For publishers, tools like PubDesk can help surface the signals buyers value, making it easier to understand how inventory is evaluated.

For publishers, transparency helps:

• Show the value of their inventory 

• Compete on quality, audience, and context 

• Build stronger relationships with buyers 

• Support a healthier open internet

Transparency can help buyers:

• Audit campaign delivery 

• Understand supply path choices 

• Evaluate partner value 

• Improve optimization over time 

• Build more confidence in AI-enabled decisioning

When transparency, AI, and supply quality align, our platform can help make better decisions when campaign inputs are cleaner and more complete. Buyers can trust those decisions more when they have visibility into the path and the outcome. Publishers benefit when quality is visible enough to be recognized and rewarded. 

What this means for the open internet

Better outcomes depend on better inputs: cleaner supply paths, clearer signals, and more transparency into how media is bought and valued. As AI becomes more central to campaign decisioning, The Trade Desk platform helps bring these pieces together so buyers can optimize with more confidence and publishers can compete on quality.

To learn more about how our platform combines supply quality, transparency, and AI-powered decisioning, reach out to your representative today. Not yet working with The Trade Desk? Contact us.

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