The Trade Desk Launches Audience Unlimited

The Trade Desk is launching Audience Unlimited, a major upgrade to the marketplace for third-party data within digital advertising.

Audience Unlimited leverages artificial intelligence to score data segments by relevance to advertiser campaigns, across thousands of curated segments from hundreds of trusted, privacy-conscious third-party data providers. Advertisers can add all the relevant data sources to their campaigns and activate precision targeting at scale with third-party data.

"Audience Unlimited is going to transform the way marketers think about the value and cost of third-party data. Brands that leverage third-party data to optimize their campaigns consistently see significantly improved performance. However, the complexity of the data marketplace to date has made the deployment of data somewhat anemic," said Samantha Jacobson, chief strategy officer of The Trade Desk, in a statement. "By securing bulk pricing for data, The Trade Desk can pass on savings to advertisers, and our advanced AI will help advertisers understand the relevance of all data sources to their campaigns and layer in as much as they need to optimize performance."

To help advertisers take full advantage of Audience Unlimited, The Trade Desk will introduce Koa Adaptive Trading Modes, giving advertisers flexibility to adapt Kokai based on campaign strategy and requirements. The two distinct modes, both powered by advanced agentic AI, are the following:

• Performance Mode, in which Koa acts as a full co-pilot, dynamically optimizing bids and allocation. Advertisers set the overall strategy and guardrails, and agentic AI continuously finds the most value within them. All optimizations remain fully transparent, with visibility into the changes Koa makes and the ability to override bid factors at any time. Performance Mode also brings together The Trade Desk's Audience Unlimited, Predictive Clearing, Identity Alliance, Prism, and free measurement.
• Control Mode, in which traders manually manage bids, allocation, and optimizations, with full flexibility to structure campaigns. Agentic AI still surfaces recommendations and opportunities, but traders decide when and how to activate them across individual tiles (e.g., Geography, Device Type, Ad Format, and more). Performance features are available and priced a la carte in this mode.