the-trade-desk
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The Adtech Rivalry Hiding in the Fee Model
The Trade Desk and Criteo both help marketers buy ads, but their contracts point in different directions. One earns from buyer spend; the other also helps retailers sell inventory, creating an incentive tension worth understanding.
Brian Stempeck
Brian Stempeck is the CEO and co-founder of Evertune AI, a New York startup that helps brands measure and improve how they show up inside AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. He spent 11 years on the executive team of The Trade Desk as employee number eight, serving as Chief Client Officer and later Chief Strategy Officer and a board member, and helped grow the company from a tiny team to a public company worth tens of billions. Before adtech he was a management consultant at Bain & Company and, earlier still, a political journalist. He founded Evertune in 2024 with former Trade Desk colleagues to build the category he calls Generative Engine Optimization.
Dstillery
Dstillery is a New York-based predictive AI audience-targeting company for the advertising industry. It builds custom, model-driven audiences that let brands and agencies reach the right consumers programmatically, including through its patented ID-free cookieless technology and its DS-1 agentic AI platform that turns audience building into a natural-language chat. It works across major demand-side platforms such as The Trade Desk, Yahoo, and Microsoft Advertising, and counts a large share of the Fortune 100 among its users.
Tim Mahlman
Tim Mahlman is the CEO of Narrative I/O, a New York-based data collaboration platform that lets companies buy, sell, and share data as easily as sending an email. He took the top job in May 2023 after a 25-plus-year run through the plumbing of digital advertising: founding member of one of the first ad networks in 1996, co-founder of the video exchange Vidible, president of platforms at AOL and then Verizon Media where the division grew from $1.5B to $4B, and president of the pet-health startup Petabyte before it was acquired by Chewy. He splits his time between New York City and the Bay Area.
Jonathan Carson
Jonathan Carson is the co-founder and CEO of Antenna, the company that turned the messy guesswork of streaming subscriptions into a market standard. Two decades earlier he built BuzzMetrics, the company widely credited with inventing social media analytics, then sold it to Nielsen and ran Nielsen Digital. He has been chief revenue officer at both Vevo and The Trade Desk, and now spends his days explaining to studios, networks and Wall Street why people sign up for streaming services - and why they leave.