TMTB: MS TMT Day 3 Conf Summaries part 2: TTD ROKU CFLT Z

TTD: Jeff Green, CEO

Competition with Amazon

• "I would pick Amazon to be my competitor because they are absolutely the most conflicted company in the world as it relates to asking the biggest brands in the world to trust them with their data… They’re making traction in… being the second-largest search engine in the world… Prime Video has been adding a whole bunch of ads… The only place you can buy that right now is through Amazon… People have assumed that Amazon’s DSP is doing very well because they’re buying their own inventory, but that is not what we do… It will be hard for them to get the biggest brands in the world to trust them with their data… because they compete with the Nikes… in retail or the FedEx’s… in delivery or the cloud with the biggest tech companies."

• “Sometimes, when you're in a competition, you look at your competitor and say, I have to exploit their weaknesses because that's the only way I can win. I have to focus on their weaknesses. If you're the better team, you're usually saying, as long as I play my game and don't turn over the ball, we're going to win. We're in the latter position and we are focused on our fundamentals and playing our game. If we do that, we think we get the lion's share of market share at the end of all of this because of all the things we've been talking about. We are scaled, we are focused, and we're objective. We can win the trust of the most sophisticated advertisers in the world.”

• “I worry more about there being too few competitors than too many. So I welcome competition. And so if you look at it from that perspective that we need to have competition in order for an auction and market-driven pricing to be a theme, which is where we thrive where buyers that are looking at all the options and want to buy on behalf of the most sophisticated buyers in the world, we want there to be competition.”

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Competition with Google and Others

• "We’ve been competing with Google since inception… We compete with what was once the 27th highest priority at Google, which is their DSP, and is now their 47th highest priority… I believe that they will eventually get out of the business… We go to the biggest brands in the world and say we’d like to objectively help you buy the whole Internet… When [Google] go to advertisers and say, trust us with your money… they come back afterwards and say, great news, all your money went to YouTube… I believe Amazon has an even bigger problem as it relates to objectivity… We can win the trust of the most sophisticated advertisers in the world… We’ve done that for the last eight years and even before that."

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Kokai Platform Upgrade

• "Kokai is the best product we have ever produced… The vast majority of our spend is now on the new platform… We’ve been upgrading the platform… over the last year and a half… It’s the very best buy-side product ever pointed at the open Internet… We made deliberate decisions to make it take a little bit longer in order to make our product a lot better… We did create some delays and add some risk to our Q4… We’ve done more in the last 18 months than we did in the 14 years before that, put together in terms of innovation… Performance, reach, cost, effectiveness, Kokai is the best platform that we’ve ever had."

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Company Positioning and Market Opportunity

• "Digital advertising… is about a trillion-dollar industry when you add up all of its components… We represent the majority of the Fortune 500 brands that buy all over the Internet, all over the world… We’ve managed to get to a scale that nobody in our space has done… Over 98% of the TAM remains for us to improve upon… We’re in an amazing position representing the buy-side of advertising… There’s just so much opportunity for what we’re doing… The size of that opportunity, the value of our objectivity… there’s just more opportunity than most see."

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Q4 Performance and Reorganization

• "We have been public for over eight years… We beat them every quarter until Q4… We just turned over the ball a few too many times in Q4… Macro wasn’t optimal… We’ve been in suboptimal environments before and won… This is going to be the largest reorganization in the Company’s history… We do a reorg every single year at the end of the year… This year was bigger than past years, in part because of all the changes that are happening in the ecosystem… As we’ve been upgrading the platform, we’ve also had to reorganize… to inject AI in the platform from end to end… It was not a byproduct of us turning over the ball a few too many times."

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AI Innovation and Forecasting

• "We were looking at every single opportunity we possibly could to inject AI in every single job that we do… Reporting… identifying users… forecasting what will happen to this ad campaign… We can forecast how a campaign is going to perform before we spend a single penny… We found opportunities to make that better than what we initially thought it could be, but that required some delay… That product will not end when we ship it this quarter… There is endless development that can happen on hypothesizing what the future looks like… That is what we built in this forecasting AI product."

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Strategic Partnerships and Premium Inventory

• "We’ve expanded some new partnerships with Netflix, with Spotify, with Roku, getting access to even more inventory… Two of the most exciting are Netflix and Spotify… Both of them have created… the two best media subscription programs in the history of digital… It’s very much a crawl, walk, run… Every time one of these come online, there is incremental supply… The incremental supply is premium… Arguably the most premium… We’re happy in a world where we are monetizing the most premium parts of the Internet… I don’t believe any company in the world benefits more from that secular pressure or tailwind than us."

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Market Dynamics and Growth Strategy

• "When there’s pressure on the markets, that is our opportunity to grab land… When things are good, we expect to accelerate and grow faster than everybody else… In all conditions… we are winning… We are very focused on grabbing land… We are very focused on growing… We think we get the lion’s share of market share at the end of all of this… We are scaled, we are focused, and we’re objective… We’ve also managed to win and maintain the trust of Wall Street by doing what we say… There’s nothing fundamentally that’s changed about our business."

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ROKU: Anthony Wood, CEO