The Trade Desk, Inc. Price & Performance (TTD)

We For a detailed discussion of the risks please refer to the risk factors mentioned in our press release and in our most recent SEC filings.

Addition to our GAAP financial results, we present supplemental non GAAP financial data A reconciliation of the GAAP to non GAAP measures is available in our earnings press release. We believe that presenting these non GAAP measures alongside our GAAP results offers a more comprehensive view of the company's operational performance.

With that, I will now turn the call to Co Founder and CEO, Jeff Green. [indiscernible] Thanks, Chris, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. 2024 was a record breaking year for The Trade Desk. Total spend on our platform exceeded $12,000,000,000 the highest in our history. Revenue for the year surpassed $2,400,000,000 growing nearly 26% year over year as we continued to significantly outpace the broader digital advertising market. We generated over $1,000,000,000 in adjusted EBITDA and delivered more than $600,000,000 in free cash flow. These accomplishments underscore both The strength of our in the fast evolving digital advertising landscape. While we're proud of these milestones, I want to acknowledge upfront that for the first time in thirty three quarters as a public company, we fell short of our own expectations. During COVID, we revised our expectations once along with the rest of the market but for the first time in eight years, we missed the expectations we set and it was our fault. When we were first contemplating going public about ten years ago, many people advised me not to IPO. The most common reason was the valuations would be too low because no ad tech company had ever won Wall Street trust and confidence for any reasonable period of time.

I did that as a challenge then and I still do now. I knew we had the business model, the TAM, the vision, the grit, and the people to break that mold. To do something that had never been done before. Was to make promises and keep The. Many people told us it couldn't be done. Our success to this point has been fueled at least in part by our ability to win trust with investors, partners, our industry and our customers. There are very few things that rival that in importance to us. I want you to know that we take this moment seriously And we want to assure our investors, partners and customers that their trust is well placed and deserved. Our brightest days are still ahead of us.

But before I talk about that, I want to spend a few minutes sharing what we got wrong, and the changes we are making to meet this moment and maximize our unique and growing opportunity. Starting off, let me explain it as I see it. What falling short of our own expectations does not represent This didn't happen because the opportunity isn't as big as we thought. In this case, it isn't because of our competition either. For Q4, the reality is that we stumbled due to a series of small execution missteps while simultaneously preparing for the future. If this were a sporting event, we'd still have a championship caliber team But in this particular game, we turned over the ball too many times. That said, we see a larger and faster growing market than we originally expected, which is why we have been making changes and will continue to do so. Simply put, as you've seen before, as companies grow and become increase We are recalibrating our larger company for an even stronger future In that effort, I want to highlight four major changes we've made at the Trade Desk in the last few months and some related initiatives that accompany them.

First, we did the largest reorganization in company history in December. While we often make structural changes at the end of the year to improve our business, This was bigger than usual. For most people in the company, we provided a much clearer view of their roles and responsibilities And for most, that also meant a change in reporting structure. Additionally, we streamlined client facing teams, reducing complexity and clarifying responsibilities. Some team focus on brands, while others focus on agencies, our commitment to agencies remains strong particularly through joint business plans grow 50% faster than the rest of our business.

The second beyond structural improvements, we placed a stronger emphasis on internal effectiveness and scalability. Over the past two months, leadership has spent more time to While we've historically been focused on external opportunities, we understand that this moment requires us to scale our internal operations and continue hiring senior talent to support long term growth. These changes position us to execute at a higher level and capitalize on the expanding market opportunities ahead. Third, we have increased our resource allocation on brands. A broader shift is occurring in the industry. Advertisers are becoming more strategic and data driven in their media buying decision. And that's great for us. While The shift has caused short term fluctuations, it's ultimately aligned with our long term strengths. We recognize that advertising will ebb and flow. At the same time, as advertisers prioritize precision and efficacy, our programmatic data driven platform is becoming more essential than ever to brands and agencies. This is evident in the growing number of joint business plans or JVPs that we've secured with over 100 of the world's leading brands many of them in the second half of last year. JVPs provide a structured mutually beneficial framework for brands their agencies and The trade desk and they reinforce the long term value we bring to the industry.

They also historically grow faster than the rest of our business. Fourth, we revamped our product development process shifting back to smaller agile teams that release updates weekly instead of drifting towards waterfall methods. Which are less conducive to our fast paced and changing industry. Our engineering team is now divided into nearly 100 scrum teams with assist with the business team on what has shipped and what will ship and when. I expect this to continue to accelerate co pay enhancements and complete the transition of 100% of our clients from Solimar to Kokai, during this calendar year. In Q4, there were a series of decisions we could have made to enhance the short term performance of the company and neglect the long term. We consistently choose to focus on the long term opportunity and maximize our market share over the long term As I believe this is in the best interest of all of our stakeholders. We are keeping our focus on the massive TAM and long term opportunity. That makes this a good opportunity to bring up two other important and related initiatives. First, we continue to improve and protect the supply chain.

First, we announced the Ventura operating system for connected television. Which will create a better supply chain for all OEMs content owners, consumers and advertisers. Secondly, we announced in January the acquisition of Sensorra, Sensora is a metadata company that is dedicated to improving the supply chain of the open Internet.

Joining Sincera's work with ours will accelerate a cleaner supply chain for the open Internet and accelerate the work of OpenPath which is one of our biggest efficiency efforts both internally and externally. A better supply chain will free up resources internally and improve the ecosystem. The second major accompanying initiative I want to talk about is the investments we're making in AI. Of course, AI is providing next level performance in targeting and optimization but it is also particularly game changing in forecasting and identity and measurement. We continue to look at our technology stack and ask, where can we inject AI and enhance our product and client outcomes. Over and over again, we are finding new opportunities to make AI invest These changes have helped us start 2025 on solid footing. Not only is our platform the most advanced data driven decision making industry, the ramping of Kokai is advancing the ability of advertisers to find value and precision as they expand their audiences and grow their businesses. In last quarter's earnings report, we itemized 10 macro conditions Today, I want to briefly highlight 15 big things we're doing to benefit from those secular tailwinds. Last time we talked about trends, today I want to talk about what we're doing about it.

First, we're focused on scale.

More accurately, we're obsessing about scale. We control $12,000,000,000 of ad spend in an approximately $1,000,000,000,000 advertising industry. With every success we have, and with every efficiency we find, operationally and technologically, we follow it with a question. How can we make that scale quickly? While our share is growing faster than perhaps any scaled competitor, our opportunity is growing too. We can accelerate growth when we sufficiently orient around scale. Second thing, we are preparing for a world where Google exits the open Internet. I'm confident that one way or another Google will exit the open Internet. I think they should.

Most of their antitrust and regulatory problems come from the draconian ways they have engaged with the open Internet in the past. In April of twenty twenty four, Facebook shut down their news program, thereby distancing itself further from one of the most important pillars of the open Internet. Some evidence suggests The substantial majority of spend going through DB three sixty the gross DSP is routed to the Google owned and operated platform of YouTube.

Regardless of what happens with the pending trial decision, Google will likely distance itself from the open Internet. If and when Google exits the open Internet, they will leave a big hole and a big opportunity for the rest of us. Relatedly, let's move to number three.

Third, we will promote and protect our objectivity more than ever. More and more, the only competitors we encounter today have the worst objectivity problems. Amazon is asking advertisers big and small for their advertising budgets. Meanwhile, Amazon competes with most of the Fortune 500 companies In some way, whether we're talking about Microsoft and cloud or P and G and CPG products, or UPS or Nike or all the rest in our very first business plan fifteen years ago, we argued that the objective independent DSP should get the lion's share of the marketplace. They'd be the only company that can be trusted We have a mantra that we've repeated again and again internally for years. And it's The, every day that goes by, objectivity matters more and more. The fourth thing we'll do leverage the supply and demand imbalance to make the ecosystem better. In advertising, there is more supply than demand. There always has been and there always will be. This by definition makes it a buyer's market. By focusing exclusively on the buy side, we are in The Unlike so many players in tech, we are not using our position of strength to become draconian. We are trying to use our ever growing influence and impact on the industry to make it better and to improve the supply chain.

This is why we expect 2025 to be the year OpenPath enters the steep acceleration phase of its S curve growth. This is because many of the major CTV players around the world are aggressive They understand that a more efficient supply chain means more money in their pocket. Would argue that higher CPMs through more efficient supply chains are the only way most of the streamers will get to sustainable and scaling profitability.

To this end, Disney was among the first of the CTV scaled players early last year to embrace Openpath when they deployed it as part of Disney's real time ad exchange or Drax, As Disney's SVP of Addressable Advertising said recently, they are working towards 75% of their ad sales being automated by 2027. With the vast majority of those impressions being biddable. Media leaders like Disney realize that the best way to fund their incredible content is through biddable programmatic advertising. Which of course is great news for us and our partnership. And the best way to help advertisers value impressions and show publishers what they're willing to pay is an open market and it is through a clear supply chain with tools such as OpenPath, that that can be realized. This also extends to the OEMs. Another CTV leader that has embraced OpenPath is VIZIO, which has more than 24,000,000 active devices in The United States, and more than 300 ad supported CTV channels. VIZIO wanted clear line of sight into advertiser demand with as few intermediaries as possible. They deployed OpenPath and immediately saw impressive results including 39% improvement in revenue from our platform and an 8x improvement Relatedly, Goodway Group is one of our largest independent agency clients.

They've been working in Kokai to create a Blue List which is a custom market that they can curate using our tools on our platform, to provide their customers to the best opportunities in the market as they see it. With their blue list in clearer signal around factors such as genre, show title and content quality, In addition, they were able to measure the number of supply chain hops in those transactions They found that 94% of the impressions they bought had only one supply chain hop. Which is well ahead of the industry benchmarks. All of this means that more campaign dollars can now be put to work more [indiscernible] in driving incremental reach. These examples provide great background for the pending acquisition of Sensoro, which we announced a few weeks ago I don't think there's any other company in the AdTech ecosystem that thinks about the digital advertising supply chain as passionately as sinceera. [indiscernible] Over the past few years since Sarah has established itself as an objective data company for the entire ad ecosystem. All with The mission of shining a much clearer light on where the value is where value is being obscured and what signals advertisers value the most in making effective decisions.

For us, embedding those data signals into our platform will help encourage the right behaviors that The the best outcomes for our clients. For example, one of the most compelling use cases is showing in our platform which signals advertisers want publishers to provide so they can value ad impressions as accurately as possible. Using these data signals to improve the supply chain for digital [indiscernible] could not be more important as we head into 2025. And of course, that's even more important as Google likely becomes less involved with the open Internet. The fifth action we'll take make CTV the most effective channel in programmatic advertising by layering more data better option mechanics and capitalizing on the fact that CTV is the only channel that has nearly 100% of traffic logged in. CTV is the kingpin of the open Internet. CTV should be the first place all brand advertisers spend. Not Walled Gardens. If we expand Sensara's charter and capabilities to CTV and audio, CTV and premium video can reach its potential as a channel. It can be half the pie of the advertising TAM.

So many companies like Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Max, Fox and Peacock need to get the best out of programmatic advertising in order to maximize their opportunity. In order to do that, almost all of the streaming leaders have deployed UID2 as a way of providing advertisers with precision and addressability. This has laid the foundation for them and us to continue the expansion of CTV advertising around the world. CTV continues to be our fastest growing channel and as you know, it is also our largest channel. However, neither us nor any content owner thinks the status quo is anywhere close to what end state looks like. The sixth thing we'll do make 2025 the best year audio has seen yet. I maintain that audio is still the most on sale corner of the open Internet. Companies like Spotify have been making changes to embrace the potential of programmatic advertising. They're making changes and we're using AI partnerships to bridge the creative creation gap. I think this is one of the biggest opportunities in programmatic and one of the biggest opportunities for companies like Spotify to take their company to the next level.

The seventh action item will move 100% of our clients to Kokuy this year.

Now the majority already have, but today we're maintaining two systems, Solimar and Kokai. This slows us down.

Kokuy is more effective in almost every way. We are producing case study after case study as clients continue to lean in to the features of our Kokai platform. Every one of them showing the enhancements and effectiveness that goes up with the use of Kokai.

As you know, Kokai represents our largest and most important Some clients are still transitioning from our previous platform Solimar But well before the end of this year, I expect that all of our clients will be using Kokai In all of the case studies coming out of Kokai, the consistent theme is accessing and acting on better data and signal. In CTV, advertisers act on authenticated logged in user data rooted in UID2. The same is also happening in digital audio. Where companies such as Spotify, SiriusXM, Pandora, and iHeartMedia have all recently embraced UID2 so that advertisers can act with precision on their logged in audiences. And with retail data, advertisers can understand conversion rates, and the impact of every ad dollar more clearly. Eight we will change the way the industry manages deals. Will help advertisers and agencies avoid bad deals which generally consider too few ad impressions and force advertisers to buy impressions that they wouldn't otherwise want. And we can avoid these bad deals by using AI powered forecasting. To do this, we are enhancing Kokai, some of the most game changing parts, like Deal Manager, which lays groundwork for the forward market. Which we think in the future will change the ecosystem and eventually upgrade the upfronts.

Ninth, we will continue to invest in AI with provable upgrades and auditable results. We started our ML and AI efforts in 2017 with the launch of CoA, But today, the opportunities are much bigger. We're asking every scrum inside of our company to look for opportunities to inject AI into our platform. Hundreds of enhancements recently shipped and coming in 2025 would not be possible without AI. We must keep the pedal to the metal not to chest them on stages, which everyone else seems to be doing, but instead to produce results and win share. Tenth, we will simplify our retail So far, it's been powerful and a significant driver of our growth. But it has often been too complicated. We've studied what works and understand the changes needed to help retail media continue to meaningfully outpace our business.

Achieving this will require a closer collaboration with our retail partners. In Kokai, we have the industry's richest retail data environment, including data from many of the world's leading retailers to help advertisers understand the connection between campaign spend and consumer action. We will make this easier to adopt for our clients both endemic and non endemic to our retail partners.

Consider the fact that our object [indiscernible] where retailers are reluctant to partner with walled gardens who are competing with them. While of course, our objectivity as well as our clear mission which makes it easy for them to know how we will partner and what our motives are. Makes it easy for us together to create the greatest environment of retail data for advertisers on the open Internet. We have some great case studies in Q4 around the world Boiron, a world leader in homeopathic products was able to measure a 267% return on ad spend [indiscernible] On Kokai, when using Kroger retail conversion data, this was well ahead of their typical benchmarks In addition, of the almost 2,000,000 households that their recent campaign reached on our platform, 94% of them were new to the brand. In Hong Kong, high end skincare brand, Sulawassu, leveraged UID2 in Kokai to look alike model prospective new audiences based on their most loyal customers, In doing so, they were able to engage with those prospects across the customer journey at all steps of the marketing funnel, across a range of digital channels. As a result of this campaign approach, they were able to measure a six 6x improvement in physical store visits a 380% improvement in conversion rates and an 80% lower cost per acquisition.

Number 11, we will simplify our platform. As platforms mature, they add features that can make it more complex. We will continue to add features and powerful controls for the most sophisticated buyers in the world. However, we're finding ways to improve the experience and make decisions easier as also more intuitive for our users. 12, we'll use more data. We have another mantra, data driven buying is better than guessing. Across all parts of our platform, we're using AI to help clients make better decisions. Whether it is in making sense of complex data in real time when it may have previously taken weeks, or bringing retail conversion data to bear more often enriching bid requests. 13, as I said at the beginning, we will focus on joint business partnerships or JBTs. JBTs are joint innovation partnerships where agencies and brands collaborate with us to grow our relationship and drive programmatic innovation. They grow about 50% faster than the rest of our business. Brands will generally continue to work with agencies but they also understand that programmatic is becoming a larger and more important element of their campaign plan. As a result, programmatic decision making is happening at a higher and higher level within brands and this presents a tremendous opportunity for The Trade Desk to grow our brand relationships and share.

Number 14 on our action item list we have already revised and will continue to revise our product process As we grow, it is essential that our product development process remains agile. Even as it has to ingest more inputs for more stakeholders. We'll do this with a clear focus on what we're delivering week by week, which continues to be at the bleeding edge of AdTech innovation. And then lastly, number 15, we'll hire senior leadership to take us to the next level. I believe that over the next few years, we will double the number of senior leaders in the The. At the VP level and above especially. Including some very key senior level appointments In my work, This is a natural part of a high growth company's journey. We want to scale the Trade Desk significantly in the years ahead. And that means ensuring we have the right kind of leadership rigor across the company while preserving the best elements of what we've done so well so far. To wrap up, the opportunity is bigger than ever. We need to keep evolving our company structure to meet that opportunity and realize our potential and the potential of the open Internet.

We The obsessing about ways to drive differentiation and growth. We are constantly innovating our platform in order to do that. Most recently with constant upgrades to Kokuy. We're able to make these investments because of the profitability of our business model. That focus on constant innovation ensures that we are always prioritizing value for our clients and never standing still. We will always have a long term view of where the value in our industry is shifting and how we can then innovate to deliver that value to our clients as rapidly as possible. I believe 2024 will be remembered as a pivotal year for our industry. Where the premium open Internet was beginning to transform as the clear choice for advertisers seeking data driven precision and performance. But we've only just turned the corner on this shift and it is why we are adjusting the company to be bigger and move the market in positive ways. I'm not happy with our results in the fourth quarter but there is so much opportunity in 2025 and the years ahead to help our clients take full advantage of data driven advertising on the premium Internet to drive growth and brand loyalty for their businesses.

And that's why I'm confident The Trade Desk will eventually resume its and continue the path we've been on for over thirty three quarters as a publicly traded company. We are also the clear leader in the DSP race and perhaps the leader of the open Internet. Thank you. And with that, I'll hand it over to Laura to discuss our financials.

Thank you, Jeff.

Before discussing our results, I want to expand on Jeff's sentiments about some of the significant strides we made over the past year. Positioning us well for the future. 2024 was a year of landmark partnerships. Particularly in CTV, [indiscernible] Retail media continued its rapid expansion. Establishing material foundation for the years ahead. International growth accelerated showing promising momentum beyond The U. S. Additionally, 2024 marked our largest and most successful year ever for political ad spend. The biggest year for UID two since its launch four years ago, and a leap forward for digital audio and programmatic. When I look across our list of growth drivers, most of them are still in their early stages compared to where we expect them to be in the next five to ten years. CTV advertising remains a small fraction of total TV ad spend relative [indiscernible] Retail media is scaling rapidly. Evolving from an emerging trend into a core digital advertising channel as brands are recognizing its ability to drive both performance and measurement. And in most global markets, Decision Programmatic is still in early stages of adoption. Turning to our results. Q4 revenue was $741,000,000 a 22% year over year increase.

We generated $350,000,000 of adjusted EBITDA during the quarter, representing a 47% margin.

However, for the first time in our eight point five years as a public company, excluding the first quarter of twenty twenty, our results came in below our expectations. As a company, we take great pride in our ability to forecast accurately and we take full ownership of this shortfall. Importantly, this miss was not due to a lack of opportunity or increased competition, it was on us. We are implementing the strategic changes Jeff outlined in our business, and I believe that will give us an opportunity to continue delivering strong revenue growth throughout this year and beyond. For 2024, we ended the year with $12,000,000,000 in spend on our platform and $2,400,000,000 in revenue.

Representing a 26% increase in revenue year over year. Full year adjusted EBITDA margin was above 41% and full year free cash flow over $630,000,000 As expected, our take rate in 2024 once again remained within a very shift of advertising dollars to CTV continues to be a core driver of our business. From a scaled channel perspective in Q4, video, which includes CTV, represented a high 40s percentage share of our business and continues to grow as a percentage of our mix.

Mobile represented a mid-30s percentage share of spend during the quarter.

Display represented a low double digit share of our business and audio represented around five Geographically, North America represented about 88% of spend and international represented about 12% of spend for the fourth International growth again outpaced North America for the eighth quarter in a row. CTV growth across international regions was particularly strong during the fourth quarter and throughout 2024. In terms of verticals that represent at least 1% of our spend, growth was broad based again this quarter.

We saw strong performance in the majority of our verticals. Particularly in automotive, shopping and technology and computing. Political spending was also strong in Q4 as expected. Home and Garden and Pets were both below average. We continue to believe there is significant opportunity for us to gain share in all of the verticals we serve. Turning now to expenses. Q4 operating expenses excluding stock based compensation were $416,000,000 up 23% from a year ago. During the quarter, we continued to make investments in our team and platform. Particularly in areas like sales and marketing and technology and development. As we position the organization for long term growth. Income tax expense was 39,000,000 the fourth quarter, driven primarily by our profitability and stock based awards. Adjusted net income for the quarter was $297,000,000 or $0.59 per fully diluted share.

Net cash provided by operating activities was $199,000,000 and free cash flow was $177,000,000 in Q4.

DSOs exiting the quarter were ninety seven days down four days from a year ago, DPOs were eighty days, down three days from a year ago. We ended the year with a strong cash and liquidity position. Our balance sheet had about $1,900,000,000 in cash, cash equivalents and short term We have no debt on the balance sheet. In Q4, we repurchased $57,000,000 of our Class A common stock via our share repurchase program. As you saw in our press release, we announced an additional authorization under our share repurchase program bringing the total to $1,000,000,000 inclusive of the amount remaining from the existing authorization. Given our strong balance sheet and consistent cash flow generation, we plan to continue opportunistic share repurchases, while also offsetting dilution from employee stock issuances. Now turning to our outlook for the first quarter. We expect revenue to be at least $575,000,000 reflecting Our Q1 growth estimates also reflect the impact of lapping the extra day from the 2024 leap year as well as political ad spend, which contributed approximately 1% of our Q1 twenty twenty revenue. We estimate adjusted EBITDA to be approximately $145,000,000 in Q1, Turning to our expense outlook for the year.

While we are not providing a full year expense guidance, anticipate a modest increase in the growth rate of our operating expenses in 2025 compared to previous years.

As a result, we would expect modest deleverage for the year.

Our investments are focused on key areas such as infrastructure and talent. Our incremental investments align with the recalibration efforts Jeff outlined in his remarks. Our capital intensity remains low and we expect CapEx to be approximately 5% of our total revenue. We expect another strong year of cash flow generation. We continue to manage the business with a balanced perspective that allows us to weigh investment opportunities while retaining flexibility for margin improvement. In closing, while the back half of 2024 did not end exactly as we had hoped, our long term trajectory remains strong. I'm optimistic about 2025. We continue to lead in a rapidly growing industry delivering profitable growth and gaining significant market share. Our momentum is fueled by a strong set of growth drivers, including the ongoing secular shift to CTV international expansion, our robust identity framework supply chain improvements and the ability to drive long term leverage in our model. As we look ahead, we remain confident in our ability to sustain this growth and capitalize on the opportunities before us. While we are not providing a full year 2025 revenue outlook, we expect that our recalibration efforts and strategic investments will position us for continued strong growth throughout 2025 and beyond.

That concludes our prepared remarks. And with that, operator, let's open up the call for questions.

Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. The first question comes from Sean Patel with SIG. Please proceed.

Hey, Jeff. As you know, I've been covering you guys since you've been public and following the company long before that. And until now for over eight years, guys have had an amazing run you've hit your guidance every single time Just wondering, can you just talk about what went wrong in the fourth quarter The you guys came in below your expectations Thank you.

Yes. Thanks, Sean. Really appreciate the question. So first, let me own that we missed.

And that we missed our own expectations as you point out, which is in my mind very different from missing Wall Street's expectations. So when we when we set our guide and set our expectations, I view that as a commitment. It's understandable at a moment like this for those outside the company, especially shareholders to be wondering what does this mean? Is the opportunity not as big as the trade desk claims or Is it different than what they thought? Is the company not executing There's something wrong If so, is it big or is it small? And I just want to be super clear, we missed because we had a series of small execution missteps. We needed to execute while simultaneously trying to prepare for our future and we made a number of small mistakes. But and trade ups that compounded To again compare it to a pro sports team, we have a championship We've proven that for the last eight years as a public company. But we turn over the ball too many times in this game and that's why we lost the game. The opportunity is not smaller than we thought. In fact, it's the office My focus the last quarter and now about recalibrating the company to become a bigger company because we're facing a bigger opportunity faster than we thought.

So I just want to reiterate some of the changes that we've made and we're we're making those to make certain that this doesn't become a patent. So here's a couple of those. First, for most people in the company, we provided a much clearer view of roles and response and that also meant a change in reporting structure. In what was the biggest reorg in the history of the trade ship product, our overall product process. And we've implemented a process of smaller agile teams who ship products every week. Some teams have drifted to be a little bit too waterfall like The we strive for big milestone releases like Kokai and we've structured to be more agile again. And in most cases, we've created two pizza teams ship products every week. As I mentioned before, these are roughly 100 scrum teams, very small teams to be very agile that are shipping frequently. We've historically been one of the most focused and most productive engineering teams ever pointed at AdTech. I think we still are but we can be more efficient than we are today. Third, we also restructured our client facing teams.

As we've grown, we've started to overlap between our agency and brand teams and that's become complicated and in moments not very helpful or useful. A result, we simplified.

Some people focus on brands, some people focus on agencies. We've created much clearer engagement between them. And relatedly, I want to reinforce that we are loyal to the agencies and our strategy to support them and partner with them continues into our future.

We will continue to be great partners to the agencies. But we also will continue to expand our brand direct conversations and continue to focus on JVPs and especially given that JVPs grow about 50% faster than the rest of our business we naturally want more of those and this is one of the pockets where we're investing most with new people. And then fourth, in December and January, we've spent more time to For most of the last fifteen years, we focused most of our efforts on addressing The Lately, we've been discussing how to make our own people operation more efficient and more scalable. The process has been very good for our long term and it's also highlighted that we need to continue to hire very senior people who can help our company [indiscernible] On a final note on your question, Shyam, For much of 2024, we were faced with some big strategic decision. Honestly more than usual. And some of these were questions where the long term and the short term Do we focus on the short term revenue or build the long term?

And I just want you all to know that my bias is always towards capturing the long term opportunity. I'd rather miss a quarter than betray the long term. Kokuy enhancements continue to inject more AI more sophisticated buying techniques and massive enhancements to the supply chain which is the motivation for acquiring Senseira a The company that will start being accretive to Trade Desk before the end of this year. As you know, this is only the third acquisition in the history of the company And while we never want to get distracted with acquisitions that make headlines and then never integrate, the way so many others do. We will look for companies that enhance our long term opportunity. That's why we made this acquisition And that's why we're so optimistic about what it can do for our future. Sean, I really appreciate the question.

Thank you.

Okay. The next question comes from Vasily Karasyov with Cannonball Research. Please proceed. Thank you. I wanted to follow-up on the first The So going into your earnings report, there were a lot of concerns, I heard about weaker brand spend post election, budget flush. [indiscernible] issues with Kokuy rollout pace But then other ad funded company haven't reported anything results similar to yours. So can you probably share a little more detail about what you observed about the difference between you and the industry. And to what extent did factors like polarized political environment, for example, The New York Times [indiscernible] Quite a lot, lowered Q4 GDP print or any product rollout issues impacted the shortfall in Q4? Thank you.

Thanks, Vasili for the question. I just want to point out, in 2022, macro was a factor. The advertising was sharply decelerating and yet we were agile The. And we were efficient and we still significantly outperformed The market.

And beat expectations, our own specifically. I bring that up to say that we've had challenging invite environments before and we still outperformed. The GDP unusual election uncertainty continued pricing pressure on some consumers and some companies doesn't create an ideal environment. And this one wasn't a perfect environment. But we've outperformed in environments like this one before, as I point out, in 2022. But we didn't this time. Political put some advertisers on the sidelines, that's absolutely true.

But it also brings out budgets, especially of course the political budgets. And on the net, was it a positive or a negative? To me, it's too close to call. The environment wasn't perfect. But we knew that when we guided. Even if it was slightly harder than we thought. We've navigated that before. [indiscernible] And I know there's going to be a thousand The. A bunch of you you've actually already started a couple of them and I know there will be more. Because we've done so well for so long. Setting expectations.

And when we talk about the missteps specifically, many of them involve people mistakes that aren't appropriate to discuss publicly, especially when people are already learning from these mistakes. One of those, you're right, that Kokai rolled out slower than we anticipated, but much of that was for good reason. We've seen moments and places to inject AI like improving the foundation of our forecasting and performance models. The is a short term negative.

For sure.

But it is a long term negative. We're working I'm sorry, it's a long term positive. Sorry. Sorry. We are working really hard to get the deals right and lay groundwork to move the upfronts to digital. Again, long term, I think this is amazingly good for us.

And I'm confident we're building the right things.

In other words, in some cases, the slower HOKI rollout was deliberate. A quicker rollout would result in more short term spend. And we don't always build what the customers want. Instead, we're trying to understand what the customer needs.

Elevating us and them together is a much harder task than simply taking orders. So as it relates to the internal changes, I think it's best to operate a company with our talent to build The org and the team of the future as fast as possible, so that we capture the most market share possible at EndState. As I said in the prepared remarks, from the beginning, I argued that the objective independent focused DSP is the one that should get the largest market share, the lion's share.

Not the walled gardens who are full of conflict of interest.

We're fighting hard to get there first. Our focus, our objectivity and our agility are essential I want to get bigger and I don't want to slow down, but to do that requires us to change. The silver lining if you want to call The, and I do is that we believe that this is in our control, it's ours to lose and we will be a better company as a result of the changes that we're making and it will be a long term positive Okay. The next question comes from Justin Patterson with KeyBanc. Please proceed.

Great. Thank you very much.

Jeff, really appreciate that degree of detail. I guess as you step back and move through this recalibration period, how do you view the company's potential to sustain a 20% plus compound growth rate over the next several years? I know you don't provide annual guidance or long term targets, but I think that would be just helpful for us to kind of think through what the business looks like as you come out of this period. And then Laura separately, should we think about the investments required to get us to that point?

Justin, thanks for the question. Really appreciate actually all the questions. I feel like we're getting to the heart of the issues. So this is also giving me a platform to talk about the things that I think matter most. So on this one, I think it really comes down to how we approach our business.

In my view, we have to obsess about making the open Internet better than Walled Gardens. Walled Gardens have cheap inventory. And I think there's a lot of people that are chasing cheap even if it doesn't help them in the long term.

But we have the best of the entire open Internet On our side and via our platform. Our supply chains are very different from others, especially the Walled Garden. They control their small ecosystems But I think we have something way better going for us.

If you just look at any trade media today, you'll see that brands are increasingly wary of the dangers of cheap reach. Meanwhile, we have access to all the media that people love most, CTV, movies, journalism, all of music, that's all the premium open Internet. And while we don't control the supply chain end to end the way walled gardens do, by the nature of walled gardens, I think that's a way better long term for us and for the markets. Because competitive markets become more efficient over time.

The of our markets are working for us and we're in a very strong position being on the buy side.

But there is so much to do to make the supply chains more efficient and to make our company I just want to remind everybody that last quarter I outlined 10 macro facts factors or secular tailwinds that are driving our business. Those have not changed. We believe that while our share has been growing faster than any of our scaled competitors, I also believe The opportunity growing too and that's why we're recalibrating now. I believe that we can reaccelerate our growth again. Focus on for us, we need to focus on what we're doing about it. And that's the 15 The that we outlined. And just to summarize a couple of those We need to focus on scale. We need to focus on the whole that Google and Facebook are leaving as they turn their attention away from the open Internet We need to promote our objectivity against cheap reach We need to improve the supply chain. In fact, we're obsessing about it. We need to grow CTV and right behind that we need to grow audio, [indiscernible] the biggest opportunity, audio might be one of the most untapped and [indiscernible] We need to grow our JVPs or in other words get closer to brands and maintain our closeness with the agencies we have proven for years now that we can do both and we need to ship product for the future.

And that includes AI, that includes getting Kokai to 100% before the end of the year.

So we have a lot of work to do. And we're incredibly focused on it. We are all in agreement on what needs to happen in order for us to take the company to the next level. But Laura, I know there's a lot that you can elaborate on Justin's second part of his question from financial perspective.

Laura? Yes. Thanks, Justin. On the investments required for 2025, first, just looking back at 2024, we delivered an incredibly strong year in terms of profitability and cash flow generation, and we exited the year with a strong balance sheet. So as I mentioned in the script, we anticipate a modest increase in the growth rate of our operating expenses in 2025 compared to previous years. And as a result of that, we would expect some deleverage for the year. Our investments are going to focus on key areas such as infrastructure and talent, and those incremental investments align with the recalibration efforts Jeff outlined in his prepared remarks. So we continue as we always have to be very deliberate about our investments in our hiring. Our capital intensity also remains low. We expect CapEx to be approximately 5% of total revenue. And when I look across our growth drivers, frankly, I believe nearly all of them are still in their early stages compared to where they will be in five to ten years. So if we generate significant revenue gains, we'll continue investing. If not or if the current environment significantly changes, we'll have the flexibility to adjust our investment pace accordingly.

I also just want to point out that today we announced an additional share repurchase As of the end of twenty twenty four, approximately $464,000,000 remained on the authorization So as I've always said, we take an opportunistic approach to our share repurchase program, We're guided by market conditions and our capital priorities. So that's how I would summarize our 2025 investments. Operator, we can move on to the next question.

Thank you. The next question comes from Youssef Squali with Truth Securities. Please proceed.

Awesome. Thank you guys for taking the question. So Jeff, I'm very curious about your Google comments. So are you already observing a significant shift in in advertiser sentiment or is the transition a occurring at a much more gradual and measured manner? And if it is, how do you frame and size that longer term opportunity? And then Laura, just quickly, was the political contribution in Q4 please?

Thanks for the question. So I'll try to be a little more brief on this one, so Laura can answer, we can continue on. But so let me just frame what I think is happening with Google and first start by just talking about what's happening right now and has for the last little while. The network business at Google has been shrinking on shrinking for years. And to me, The is evidence of the deprioritization. Google continues to focus on Gemini and The and AI and search and YouTube I think that makes sense for them to do if you look at where the money comes from. I think the network and open Internet business is way less important to them than it has ever been. So as a result, I'm confident that one way or another, Google is going to exit the open Internet. And I think that makes sense.

Actually for The.

If you think about most of their antitrust and regulatory problems come from the ways that they have managed the open Internet in the past. And that has created a lot of baggage for them today. Especially it relates to interactions with governments and markets around the world, as they look to really grow in places like Gemini and Cloud and AI and Search and YouTube. So if you then look more closely at where we compete specifically and I've often said we don't compete with big Google. We compete with the twenty seventh highest priority of Google which was one DB The sixty And now I believe that has been downgraded when you compete with something like the forty seventh highest priority at Google. But that is less and less becoming a competitor because the majority of spend that is going through DB360 seems to be routed to YouTube or at least that's what the evidence suggests. So I believe that regardless of what happens with the pending trial, Google will distance itself from the open Internet. The trial could make it so that they leave quickly and with some sort of announcement or they could keep backing away slowly.

But either way, the trends suggests that there is a hole and it is getting bigger.

I think Google will leave a very big hole eventually and that is a big opportunity for the rest of us The the open Internet. I think it makes us possible to continue to service the open Internet and The deprioritization creates more room for us I think we can benefit from it more than any other company. But in my humble opinion, Google has been the biggest hindrance to the effective supply chain of the open Internet than any other company. And an abrupt change could happen this year or next and The would be good for us, but at the same time, we have to be positioned well to capture the opportunity.

I do believe that opportunity is getting bigger and I you ask me what I'd lose sleep over, I lose sleep over missing the opportunity of being ready for that opportunity And it's part of the reason why I'm actually excited about all the changes that we're talking about today. Because I believe that the changes that we're making are helping to make this company more scaled so that we can respond to the hold that's being left from these very big companies paying less and less attention to the open Internet. Laurence, the second part of the question.

Yes, thanks, Yousef. Just quickly on political, it was about 5% of the business in the fourth quarter and that was a peak. So for the year, it was in the low single digits. Thank you.

Okay. The next question comes from Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Please proceed.

Thanks for taking the question. So Jeff, I just wanted to ask a bit about Amazon. It's gotten a lot of investor attention, a lot of press as far as The company making improvements to their DSP. Getting aggressive with Prime Video ads, How do you view The in the competitive landscape? Did you see any kind of change in the fourth quarter? And just I guess how do you think about them as a competitor going forward? Thank you.

Hubert, thanks for the question. So Of course, when you go through a recalibration and in a moment like this, I think it calls for a reflection and retrospection And I've spent a lot of time thinking about sort of what are we sure of, what are the bets that we double down on?

And as I wrote in the first business plan, And have been saying for fifteen years at end state, there's only going to be a handful of DSPs I think one of them probably one, maybe two, but today's visibility, I would say there's likely to be one is going to be an independent and objective DSP. And that should get the lion's share.

As it relates to Amazon's DSP, objectivity matters more than it ever has. Every day that goes by, it matters more and more. And Amazon's objectivity problem is way worse than Google's. Because Amazon competes with nearly every company in the Fortune 500 or at least the majority of them. But I know there's a lot of focus that goes to Amazon as it relates to advertising And I think it's really important that investors parse out the three roles that Amazon plays in in advertising. The biggest one by far is that they are a search engine. Competing with Google's core business, if you will. And that is the biggest source of revenue for them in advertising. The second is probably Prime Video, [indiscernible] think that was very interesting because I think that the right way to look at them is is somebody like Paramount or like Fox, they are creating premium content and they've created a lot of ads as a result of that.

But I see no reason why that shouldn't join the premium open Internet and that we shouldn't partner with them on that. And I do think long term that's in their best interest and ours as they think to monetize that And as we've talked about before, I believe Amazon tends to look at things separately and try to get every department to be profitable on their own And I do think that that creates a big opportunity for us. As it relates to the DSP itself, again, they have an objectivity problem That's a much, much smaller business than the other two The. And I think that particularly the second one represents an opportunity for partnership The third is a competitor that I don't view nearly the competitor that most of the other players in the space are simply because of their objectivity problem. That over time, I think gets worse for The.

So I'm excited about what that means for us and for our future and our prospects in what I think will be a more and more competitive market as the TAM gets bigger. Thanks, Jason.

The next question comes from Jessica Reif Ehrlich with B. A. Securities. Please proceed.

Thank you. One for Jeff and one for Laura, The.

It seems like OpenPath is at its tipping point this year and it was one of your top five priorities or focus.

Can you talk a little bit about the details the plans for the coming year and also how the acquisition of Sensero will contribute to OpenPath adoption. And then for Laura, I just can you give us some color on the expense ramp? Your Q1 guide implies Pretty significant margin compression. So is that indicative of a full year margin deleveraging as you said. Or is Q1 kind of the biggest impact in the operating expense ramp?

Thanks, Laura. Appreciate the question.

So let me just first remind everybody what OpenPath is.

Basically, we've made it possible for the biggest content owners in to integrate with us directly. So if they choose to do their own yield management or build it themselves, they don't need to use an SSP. They can be an SSP themselves if they'd like to. We expect that many of the biggest content owners in the world will take this route, especially in CTV and audio. Because it's financially worth it for them To do it, and they want to control their own fate as it relates to yield optimization.

So we've made it possible for them to plug into us directly. It's taken us a little bit of time to get them to do so because we've historically not partnered on that level as well as mostly it's because they have to build technology in order to do that on their own. We've had that option available for a couple of years. As streaming wars and competition heats up as well as the fact that SSP's business models have become more and more at odds with CTV content owners and with streamers of all kinds, including audio. It makes it so that The are all interested in doing a direct integration with us and managing their own yield management. And so because of the number of deals that we've signed recently, we're extremely confident that 2025 will be the year that we enter the steep part of the S curve. And that we've been paying our dues for years and that this will pay off this year. As it pays off this year, we think that means a more effective supply chain And in order to ensure that that happens, we also bought Sensera the metadata company that helps us evaluate what's happening across the entire supply chain, to make certain that we have visibility as well as we provide visibility to the open Internet so that they can know what changes to make in order to make the supply chain more effective.

It's not something we're trying to keep for ourselves, but to use to make certain that everybody in the ecosystem knows how to make a more effective supply chain. The is what I was talking about before where I believe that we have a more difficult burden than other players in the space in the sense that we are leading the open Internet and can make the entire supply chain more effective if we play the right role And I think we found a way to do that with the Sincera acquisition. Which will create more price discovery, create better standards and we'll make it so that we are only buying The from those who describe it best and describe it accurately And if they don't, we won't buy it.

And that is a luxury that we have as the supply demand imbalance grows every single day.

Laura, you're part of that. Yes. Jessica, with regard to your question about Q1 EBITDA, I did mention the script that we do anticipate a modest increase in the growth rate of our operating expenses in 2025. And that we'd see some deleverage for the year. I wouldn't recommend thinking about it linear Typically, in our business, EBITDA improves as the year progresses, which is just driven by our investment choices and seasonality in the business.

Thanks, Jessica. And John, we have time for one more question. Thanks, Jessica.

Yes, our last question comes from Mark Mahaney with Evercore. Please proceed.

Okay. Thanks. I don't know of another company that's 32 for 33. So you've obviously been doing something right. Two questions I wanted to The.

Jeff, you mentioned senior leadership that you want to hire. So you can riff on that a little bit like in what areas? And then second, you mentioned resuming acceleration in revenue. So at a high level, forget about the numbers and specific timing, what factors like could you triage The, what factors would most contribute to a reacceleration in revenue at some point? Thanks a lot.

Thanks, Mark. Really appreciate it. One of the I'll highlight one of the areas where I think that we can hire.

Let me first just say, I appreciate the compliment. I am super proud of the fact that we have have done this 32 quarters in a row. And while I'm disappointed that we didn't do it this time, we knew at some point we would have to miss and as I've said to the team, I'm excited for the opportunity to prove to the world what happens [indiscernible] that we know that people will be responding or looking to see how we respond. And I'm actually grateful for the opportunity [indiscernible] on that level, I think one of the things that we have to do is we have to keep adding to our team and looking to how we can enhance our go to market One thing we make The sports analogies but one thing that's very different about that is, if you're playing basketball, you put five guys on the court. That's different.

In business where you can just add to the team.

And I think there are some opportunities for us to get more efficient We've done all of The. Without a COO for some time. There is absolutely no reason why we shouldn't add a world class COO to the team. And The of course, as we're looking to be operationally more rigorous we want somebody to come help us do that. That scenario that I think is fairly obvious for us to add. There are others as well but I just offer that as a suggestion where we can can definitely level up in our operational efficiency the second part of the question, Factors that could cause reacceleration? Yes, the factors that that caused acceleration. There are so many and it's really hard to sort of put coefficients on all of the 15 The that we said in this quarter, and all of the 10 that we highlighted in terms of secular tailwinds from before. But big picture here, we have a trillion dollar TAM We currently control a little over 1% of it. We think we have 98% of the TAM left. And the CTV should be fast growing Outside The United States should be growing faster than The United States.

For obvious reasons Audio is untapped. I think Spotify highlighted this in their earnings. I think there's a tremendous opportunity for them and for us and for the open Internet that can come from that. I think there's a lot of inefficiencies in the supply chain but now we're just at the right size where we can change it.

Where we're big enough to create changes And those are are four of The. But honestly, I think I'm leaving off a whole bunch of them. Okay. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks, Mark.

John, we can close out the call.

Thank you. We have reached the end of the question and answer session. Concludes today's conference and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you.