DEEPDIVE

The ad world has had a busy start to 2025 but from the TTD world, the somewhat unexpected acquisition of any company was not on the bingo card list. It is so rare to see TTD get involved in this space, the last one of notable relevance has to be their Adbrain acquisition, which ultimately started to lay the groundwork as to what UID would become as an alternative identifier in the programmatic space.

But moving back to their latest acquisition in Sincera, this has set the trade press & LinkedIn on fire as to what the intentions are of TTD with buying a slightly unknown solution in Sincera, who effectively have been able to capture meta data across the programmatic ecosystem using a mix of crawlers & their own technologies.

Let’s start with the facts: the last time TTD caused a stir was the release of the SP500 in 2024, where curation was the buzzword of choice. And it has been very public that one of the key sources for curating this list of 500 publishers was none other than Sincera.

Now Sincera crawler approach is not the only vendor in the space that attempts to do it, particularly when it comes to picking up information around identity provider penetration or even inventory / publisher details. Think back to when ads.txt launched, this very subject generated the crawler approach for more sophisticated vendors to build technology around. But where Sincera can power up TTD is with the activation layer, of which SP500 sounds like the start. From an optimisation perspective, the meta data both accessible on the publisher side but also in the bidstream can lead to much stronger algorithmic buying. Align this with the UID 2.0 from an identity solution as well as where OpenPath may end up on the supply side, TTD have the ability to paint the narrative of open ecosystem buying with quality at its heart. And this is likely why IAS partnered with Sincera in 2024 to take on DoubleVerify’s Scibids approach. The walled gardens may believe their algorithms are superior, or their custom bidding approaches as seen from both Google DV360 & Amazon more recently, but they can suffer from flaws that an independent solution may prosper in.

That brings the next question, should the ad verification partners be scared? Increasing yes, but both IAS & DoubleVerify are already a long way to pivoting away from being ad verification vendors where the dangers continue to plague them, to a more outcome / actions business. That be said, verification is still critical for ad spend, which Sincera was never aimed at doing but the legacy ad verification approach is somewhat questionable in its current state.

The buzzword of curation certainly applies to this specific acquisition, but clearly as hopefully most people know, open ecosystem programmatic continues to suffer from inefficiency, ad fraud & in some cases, poor performance vs other mediums. Programmatic may have meant go wide & spam the internet with ads in the past, but nowadays curation whether it is on the DSP, SSP, Publisher or Advertiser side, is imperative to avoid wasting money on downright fraud.