Apollovin and The Trade Desk announced twin news items today. Mobile gaming and advertising giant Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) has launched an integration with the product and The Trade Desk will for the first time start buying directly from AppLovin.
Trade Desk previously bought AppLovin Inventory, but through the MoPub Exchange. Trade Desk did not have a direct contract with Apollovin, in part because it was a hybrid walled garden type company. For example, Trade Desk does not purchase ads on Snapchat or Facebook.
But The Trade Desk needs an alternative: the MoPub mobile ad exchange and the SDK, which AppLovin acquired last year, both shut down in late March. The technology has now been folded into the AppLovin SDK and Exchange and customers have moved to new platforms (or no longer subscribers).
Trade Desk has historically been a major demand partner for MoPub, says Meagan Martino, EMEA and AppLovin, the US demand leader who came to AppLovin with the acquisition.
“Migrating the trade desk and moving to Apollovin was one of the top priorities for my team,” he said.
More than 120 DSPs plugged into Apollovin, Martino said. But they are primarily mobile-centric performance marketers who aim to install apps or rejoin the app’s Applovin portfolio. Trade Desk brings advertisers into a different category. Martino said the Omnichannel DSP “brings the net new budget to mobile,” and advertisers who optimize for different KPIs.
AppLovin owns its own game suite, which makes the partnership another direct-to-supply deal for The Trade Desk. The DSP works with broadcasters to provide live CTV, for example, without a third party SSP. And in February the trade desk launched a supply-path optimization (SPO) product, OpenPath, which cuts publisher deals directly and separates SSPs and exchanges.
“Apollovin has an important place in the world of SPOs and directives, which is now important for how the trade desk thinks about partnership and supply priorities,” Martino said.
It is also important to include UID2 for Apollovin to be “part of the identity conversation”. Advertisers who are testing first-party data platforms and ad ID solutions that work without cookie-based data or mobile ad IDs often do so with Trade Desk and UID2, he said, so it is important for AppLovin to be part of that test. .
He had previously spoken to LiveRamp about MoPub’s ad ID service, he said. But among the MoPub and now AppLovin open web advertising ID products only UID2 has been integrated.
Integration with UID2 is not related to the direct supply agreement between The Trade Desk and Apollovin – Trade Desk can purchase inventory without an ID. But AppLovin gets a strategic new demand partner and gets a sweet feather in the cap of UID2 – the first mobile-native in-app exchange to sign AppLovin.