Trade Desk Reports Q2 Revenue of $715 Million, Issues Q3 Outlook

Trade Desk (NASDAQ: TTD ) held its second-quarter earnings conference call on Thursday. Below is the complete transcript from the call. This transcript is brought to you APIs. For real-time access to our entire catalog, please visit for a consultation.

Access the full call at Summary Trade Desk Inc. reported Q2 2026 revenue of $715 million, a 3% year-over-year increase, and an adjusted EBITDA of $241 million, maintaining a 34% margin. CEO Jeff Green highlighted macroeconomic challenges impacting key advertising sectors like autos and CPGs, while noting the company underperformed its own expectations due to these pressures and internal execution issues. Strategic initiatives include the launch of new products like Audience Unlimited and a measurement framework, both designed to enhance decision-making and optimize advertising spend.

The company reported significant growth in EMEA and APAC regions, with China growing over 100% year-to-date, and emphasized strong performance in CTV and Audio channels. Future guidance projects Q3 2026 revenue of at least $650 million and adjusted EBITDA of $160 million, with a focus on high-priority growth initiatives and disciplined investment. Trade Desk is optimistic about leveraging AI and maintaining its position as a trusted, objective platform, despite industry shifts and competition from walled gardens. New leadership appointments aim to drive growth and operational efficiency, with a focus on enhancing data partnerships and strategic business relationships.

Full Transcript OPERATOR Greetings. Welcome to the Trade Desk Inc. second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode.

A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone requires operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Chris Toth.

You may begin. Chris Toth, Investor Relations Thank you, operator. Hello and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Trade Desk second quarter 2026 earnings conference call.

On the call today are our CEO and co-founder, Jeff Green, and our new Chief Financial Officer, Nate Olmsted. com. Please note that, aside from historical information, today's discussion and our responses during the Q&A may include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties and reflect our views and assumptions as of the date such statements are made.

Actual results may vary significantly, and we expressly disclaim any obligation to update the forward-looking statements made today. If any of our beliefs or assumptions prove incorrect, actual financial results could differ materially from our projections or those implied by these forward-looking statements. For a detailed discussion of risks, please refer to the risk factors mentioned in our press release and our most recent SEC filings. In 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 and investor presentation. 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 over to CEO and co-founder Jeff Green. Jeff Green, CEO and Co-Founder Thanks, Chris, and good afternoon, everyone.

Thank you for joining us. I want to start by sharing some of the same perspectives that I've shared with our team over the past several weeks. Next month we will celebrate 10 years as a public company. Over that time we have grown revenue at roughly a 34% CAGR, our annual net income has increased 20x, and our team has grown from just over 400 people at the time of our IPO to thousands.

Over the last 16 years, Trade Desk has made a number of industry-changing accomplishments. Yet throughout that entire time we have always tried to learn as much from our mistakes as we do from our successes. We spend a lot of time at Trade Desk reviewing the pivotal decisions that we've made over the years, understanding what worked and what didn't, and how we can become a better company as we continue to map out plans to grow our position and improve our revenue growth. We reflect on what we have learned from past quarters and especially from this last month.

Our revenue growth is below our expectations and below the standard we hold ourselves to. These numbers are not a reflection of our company or the long-term opportunity in front of us. We underperformed our own expectations for two main reasons. First, the macro conditions have made it more difficult for some of the world's largest brands to grow.

Of course, this is bigger than advertising and it's bigger than our company. In this economic environment, there are pressures on lower-income consumers. As a result, some affected advertisers have become more focused on buying cheap media rather than the best media. Secondly, we didn't execute as well as we could have, which I'll elaborate on in just a minute.

But first, let's start with the macro. We continue to see a unique blend of macro pressures on several categories of advertising. Of course, our business is very unique among the large advertising-focused platforms. Our business is largely a sophisticated buying platform for the biggest brands and advertisers.

Almost all of the spend on our platform comes from large Fortune 500 companies, their brands. Over the long term, our focus on large advertisers is both a strength and a moat. We have partnered with the biggest, most resilient, and most loved brands in the world. Nevertheless, some of them are experiencing difficult times.

Right now. All of our customers are operating in a fundamentally different environment than they were even a year ago. CPGs and FMCGs are experiencing unique pressures. These categories were once the biggest in advertising, and they are still one of the biggest.

P&G has described the environment as volatile and challenging and recently stated on their earnings call, we anticipate continued pressure from commodity and related costs and the crisis in the Middle East. If the conflict eases and oil comes down, trade lanes open up. That will help. If it goes the other way, it will hurt.

CPGs and autos are two of the sectors of the economy that are most overrepresented on our platform. Around 25% of our business is generated by those two categories alone. Autos and CPG have both been set back by tariffs and oil prices. General Motors described a multibillion-dollar impact from tariffs in addition to plans to onshore production to avoid future tariff risk.

Both of these categories of advertisers almost unanimously have described a change in the macro where the consumer wealth bifurcation is creating a squeeze on their customers that is highly uneven consumer behavior, where the high-income consumers are doing well and the lower-income consumers are not. For CPGs, this is causing change across everything from packaging to advertising allocation, promotion strategy and of course go-to-market. This uneven consumer pressure is impacting autos.

Remarkably, both Ford and General Motors highlighted in recent earnings reports the growing dependence of auto sales on affluent consumers, and industry research from Oxford Economics shows earners in the top 20% of households currently represent more than 50% of new vehicle sales. Both categories are having to create new approaches to advertising. In some cases, budgets have been temporarily reduced as they formulate new plans to go to market. In other cases, some brands are falling prey to low-cost, low-decisioning methods like Programmatic Guaranteed and fixed price.

Doing so essentially means buyers will give away their decisioning in a great buyer's market to the sellers in exchange for lower cost of transactions. This approach is often deliberately shortsighted. Still, we continue to see the growing market leaders in every category optimize for business outcomes, not simply the lowest-cost buying platform or the lowest-cost media. It is important not to overstate the impact of these dynamics on our business.

While these are affecting some of our largest categories and clients, most of our clients are performing well and growing. In fact, many categories are experiencing secular tailwinds. Financial services, some parts of technology and pharma are growing well and thriving, and we are seeing most of the leading brands in those categories deepen their partnerships with us. One of the leading indicators we watch most closely is our joint business plans, or JBPs.

We had JBPs with 217 clients as of Q2, representing 38% growth year over year. Most importantly, revenue under JBPs grew at a rate of 6 times higher than overall revenue. JBPs are much more than commercial agreements. They create a structured framework for brands, their agencies and Trade Desk to plan, innovate and measure success together.

These partnerships grow faster than the rest of our business because they're built on long-term alignment rather than just individual campaigns. Additionally, the majority of our top 100 accounts are growing double digits year over year. Outside of our top 500 advertisers, the remainder are growing over 50% year to date, which represents green shoots from smaller, up-and-coming and challenger brands. Our EMEA and APAC regions both have grown almost 30% year to date.

China is growing over 100% year to date. Some of our clients are experiencing headwinds, but the majority are growing. Even in CPGs and autos, about half of them are growing very well with us, even if they are all experiencing cyclical pressures. While there are unique macro pressures, we are very focused on the things that we can control, and we continue to grow our customer base, including high growth among mid-sized businesses and agencies, starting with our product.

I'm extremely excited about our roadmap and the innovations we are building to make media buying better. We say all the time that every product we ship has to be better for our clients, it has to be better for us and our shareholders, and it has to be better for the ecosystem. Through that lens, let me share a few of our plans, starting with the products that we are pointing at what might be the biggest problem in our industry: measurement. Real brand building, which is required for categories like autos and CPGs, cannot thrive while measurement standards are broken.

As long as last click and last view are the standard of measurement, brands will struggle to understand what drives their growth, and the most premium parts of the open internet will always look expensive and ineffective. Our new measurement framework, which is currently in alpha, is designed to more fairly assign value across the entire customer journey, giving marketers greater confidence in where their advertising is creating incremental business results, whether that's in the top of the funnel or at the bottom.

This is not a problem we can tackle alone, which is why we're working in close partnership with some of the largest media companies, the largest measurement companies and the largest data companies to bring it to life. Secondly, we are ramping up Audience Unlimited. Audience Unlimited dramatically simplifies how marketers discover and activate third-party data. Instead of navigating millions of segments and manually analyzing potential impact, marketers leverage AI models with their own proprietary data to select data.

Our new pricing approach with this product makes it so that price becomes a non-issue. We are essentially doing to data what Spotify has done to music. We are creating an all-you-can-eat system that makes it easier to apply more data for a simple subscription percentage. As Audience Unlimited moves to open beta, we are seeing very encouraging results.

In a recent campaign, a global advertiser used Audience Unlimited to reach incremental households more efficiently. Compared with a prior campaign, the advertiser reduced its cost per unique household and also reduced its data CPM. Both reductions were more than 25%, demonstrating the potential of AU to improve efficiency as we roll this out to new customers. Lastly, on the product front, later this month we will launch a significant upgrade focused on platform usability.

We're calling this version Zuma. We are enhancing navigation, streamlining workflows and troubleshooting, and delivering a more intuitive user experience from end to end. This upgrade improves workflow efficiency, leverages even more AI, enhances design and improves the dialogue between human and machine. We are listening to our clients and responding with innovative upgrades at a faster pace than we have been in years.

Ultimately, with success in measurement and Audience Unlimited and Zuma's upgrades, it will be easier to demonstrate the value of decisioned buying, which directly drives revenue growth. Furthermore, we will win more hearts and minds among CMOs and the upper ranks of the largest advertisers and agencies. This is how we help create universal understanding at every level of our client's company about the difference between buying based on price and buying based on value. Some of our competitors, big and small, have been focused on producing products for Programmatic Guaranteed, fixed-price transactions and simple deals with approaches that do not leverage buyer decision.

Some are even wrapping these in agentic technologies. They argue that their cheap fee will compensate for their lack of objectivity and their decisions that favor publishers rather than the buyer who is footing the bill. These approaches look more like ad networks of 2006 than reflect the progress that our industry has made in the last 20 years. Decisioned buying and Programmatic Guaranteed are fundamentally different products.

Programmatic Guaranteed can solve for certainty, simplicity and upfront price. But decisioned buying optimizes for the highest business outcomes, utilizing data, measurement and real-time optimization. We are focused on the latter. The encouraging part is that periods like these create opportunities for change.

The world's most sophisticated marketers don't simply look for lower prices. They become more deliberate, and they ask better questions. They demand better measurement. They focus on outcomes rather than inputs.

And when marketers become more data-driven, Trade Desk creates even more value for our customers, which are the biggest brands and the biggest agencies in the world. The success of our platform is in our control, and we are in the lead. We have the most premium and sophisticated buying platform in the space. Our goal isn't simply to support media execution; it's to continue being a strategic business partner to the world's leading marketers.

Lastly, we brought in a number of new leaders to help take this company to the next level. Leaders like Vivek Kundra, our COO Nate Olmsted, our CFO Christy Argelon, our Chief Commercial Officer Ron Lambrek, our Chief Business Development Officer, Sarah Gavin, our CMO or Vinny Rinaldi, our VP of Client Strategy and Growth. We've also added some amazing industry leaders to our board. We have enhanced dramatically our company's leadership in the last few quarters, especially this last one.

These leaders have built and scaled organizations much larger than ours. They bring operational discipline, fresh perspectives and deep experience, partnering with senior business leaders around the world. Just as importantly, they bring a willingness to challenge assumptions, including my own. But building a better company doesn't stop with our executive team.

Over the past year, we have also invested heavily in strengthening the leaders throughout our commercial organization. We've recruited hundreds of experienced general managers, vice presidents and customer-facing leaders who know how to build strategic relationships with the world's largest brands and agencies. That reflects an important evolution in how we go to market. As marketing decisions increasingly move higher up in the organizations, at times even into the C-suite and executive ranks of global advertisers.

And of course, we have to meet our customers where those decisions are being made. Before I conclude, I want to spend a minute talking about why I remain so excited about the opportunity in front of us. Today we estimate the global advertising market approaches $1 trillion annually. Even after everything we've accomplished, we believe we participate in only about 1% of that opportunity.

What makes me most excited isn't simply the size of the market or the TAM that remains. It's how the market itself is changing. For years, search has largely been defined by a single dominant platform. That is beginning to change.

As LLMs reshape how consumers discover information, we expect a much more competitive landscape to emerge. Just as connected TV expanded opportunity by creating more premium inventory and more choice, AI has the potential to expand the addressable market for digital advertising. By creating entirely new surfaces for marketers to engage consumers and give more competition to market share that was once locked in traditional search marketing, AI is creating exponentially more data, more choices, and of course, more complexity. In the new AI world, our decisioning capabilities are better than ever.

They're fueled by AI. And objective decisioning is even more valuable. Brands don't need another platform trying to sell them media.