The Trade Desk CEO talked up a new advertising partnership with Amazon but also downplayed the e-commerce giant’s own growing ad business

The Trade Desk’s CEO Jeff Green said a new deal with Amazon could be a big source of revenue growth while downplaying the e-commerce giant as a threat to his ad business.
Green said Amazon has an "objectivity problem" with advertisers that sell on its platform.
That will make it hard for Amazon to compete with The Trade Desk for advertising, he said.
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The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green said a new deal with Amazon could be a big source of revenue and maintained that he’s not concerned about Amazon’s own growing ad business.

Two weeks ago, Amazon announced a new partnership that allows ad-tech firms The Trade Desk and Dataxu to sell ads in publishers’ Amazon Fire apps. The Trade Desk buys ad space in connected TV apps like Disney’s ESPN Plus and publishers’ Amazon Fire apps. The partnership lets the ad-tech companies set up private marketplaces with publishers. The deal is specific to Amazon Publisher Services, an arm that helps publishers manage their ad inventory.

Green’s comments underscore how Amazon’s growing ad ambitions post a threat to ad-tech companies. He made his comments on a second-quarter earnings call. The Trade Desk reported $159.9 million in revenue in the quarter, a 42% increase year over year, which it credited to a 250% increase in OTT ad spend during the quarter.

Green said with the partnership, The Trade Desk can’t access Amazon’s lucrative shopper data that it pitches to advertisers. Instead, Amazon is providing The Trade Desk with an anonymous ID similar to Apple’s mobile ID that can measure and control reach and frequency of OTT ads. The anonymous ID makes Amazon less of a so-called "walled garden" than companies like Facebook and Google, he said.

The partnership also means ad-tech fees charged to publishers will be reduced "significantly," Green said, without being specific.

"They’re being more aggressive in economics from what I can tell than anybody else on the sell side for connected TV," Green said.

Amazon is also encroaching on The Trade Desk’s turf

Most of Amazon advertising revenue comes from ads that run on its own app and website, but it has a growing programmatic business, including a demand-side platform similar to The Trade Desk’s that buys ads on publishers’ websites.

Asked by an investor how The Trade Desk competes with Amazon’s ad business, Green said for consumer-packaged brands that sell products and compete against Amazon’s private-label lines, Amazon "can be a little bit more scary than any distributor they’ve ever had."

As a result, Amazon will be challenged to get advertisers to use its demand-side platform, he said.

"Amazon has gotten into so many businesses, including selling CPG products," he said. "The conflict that they have can create some pause. I think it’s a really hard pitch for Amazon to go to a CPG company or most of the biggest advertisers in the world and say, ‘We know you give us a lot of money and you trust us for distribution but we would also like for you to give us all of your marketing budgets to do all of the spend off of Amazon.com.’ Because of that, they have a bigger objectivity problem than anyone in the world."

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