The Trade Desk’s Mike O’Sullivan on unlocking Sincera data for the open internet

Since The Trade Desk acquired Sincera earlier this year, co-founder Mike O’Sullivan has been focused on one mission: scaling Sincera to benefit the entire open internet.

In an exclusive sit-down conversation with The Current Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Paterik, O’Sullivan shares how The Trade Desk is working to make Sincera’s data available to all, including buyers, agencies, publishers, SSPs and DSPs on the open internet — helping improve campaign performance and fuel the next generation of advertising products.

He also reflects on what it means to innovate in the era of Big Tech, cautioning that complexity doesn’t always equal value. (This interview has been edited for length.)

How is data fueling premium publishing?

There’s an enormous amount of engineering and effort around weeding out low-quality supply, very bad environments that obviously marketers don’t want to be around.

There’s not really anything done to say, “What’s the best of the best and why?”

But there’s a few lighthouse metrics that apply to web and CTV that are compounded together from different sources and elements to make something self-evident around quality. And one of those is around ad experiences and what we call ads-to-content ratio.

What does a great publisher’s ad experience look like? What’s their ads-to-content ratio? How many ads are typically in view? And focusing on some metrics that don’t eliminate bad and highlight good has been really successful in elevating the focus on quality.

Let’s talk about Sincera’s transition into The Trade Desk, what have the early days been like, and what have you been focused on since then?

It’s been great because we’ve been able to focus on two main initiatives.

The first is: How do we take Trade Desk products and supercharge these with more Sincera data? How do we make new Trade Desk products for publishers and others and supercharge those with Sincera data and Sincera signals? What does it look like when we comingle Sincera data and the billions of transaction data that The Trade Desk sees in the bidstream today?

So Sincera is not going away, it’s scaling?

Exactly right. There’s Sincera data in The Trade Desk, but another piece is what we’re calling OpenSincera. We’re taking Sincera and making it available to everyone. We’re going to have key Sincera metrics open to anyone in the industry. And not just the ability to browse and look up a publisher, but also the ability to use an API, get data about different publishers and allow people to build new products or enrich their own products — empowering an ecosystem to be more data-driven, more contextually aware, more aware of the ad environment that they’re transacting on. So we’re really excited to scale that out.

Why did you make the decision to open up Sincera data, and how do you hope people benefit?

Being able to directly connect to all of the amazing advertisers that use The Trade Desk and all of the amazing publishers that are connected through OpenPath — and provide them new metrics that allow them to understand quality and drive much better campaign and marketing performance — was really attractive to us.

But as part of that goal of scale, we also recognize that for the open internet to be successful, companies other than The Trade Desk have to be successful. It’s important that we share some of these signals and data with everyone and allow folks to create new and exciting products and experiences that benefit the open internet that we haven’t even thought of.

As a founder, how hard or easy is it to innovate in an age of Big Tech?

There is a huge amount of opportunity for innovation, but you have to have the conviction in the idea or problem you’re pursuing.

It’s trite to say, but there are so many people who went to us at the beginning of Sincera and said, “What is this? This is just a crawler.” But Google Search is just a crawler. OpenAI? Just a crawler.

You can be overly reductive, and there’s a tendency for so many people in technology, whether it’s ad technology or otherwise, to correlate newness and complexity of the technology you’re using with the level of value your start-up will provide.

But what problem are you solving? I think there's no better time to be thinking about a startup or innovating in ad tech. To me, using boring technology is exciting because it’s reliable.

Pick an innovative problem to solve, not necessarily a brand-new technology stack.

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.