Calls
Source: S&P Capital IQ transcripts via Xpressfeed · latest indexed call 2026-05-07 · generated 2026-07-30.
Latest call digest
The Trade Desk, Inc., Q1 2026 Earnings Call, May 07, 2026 · 2026-05-07T21:00:00
Q1 2026 earnings call — May 07, 2026. Prepared remarks and Q&A pointed in opposite directions. Jeff Green spent the bulk of his script on the size and shape of the opportunity — a $1 trillion TAM, a record supply-demand imbalance he calls "the biggest buyers' market in the history of advertising," the case that measurement is broken and that fixing it favors the open internet, and a run through partners (Disney, Spotify, NBCU, Netflix) and products (Audience Unlimited, retail data, agentic AI with Stagwell, Lyft Ads, Dollar General). Commercial proof points were real: 45 JBPs signed in March, total JBP count up 55% year-over-year, new JBP deal spend up 40% excluding renewals, and a pharma account won back from Amazon with a 2026 JBP that lifts spend 114% year-over-year.
Interim CFO Tahnil Davis reported revenue of $689 million, up 12% year-over-year, with $206 million of adjusted EBITDA (30% margin). Video including CTV was a low-50s percent of the business; audio was around 6% and grew faster than any other channel; the U.S. was approximately 82% of revenue. Guidance given: Q2 revenue of at least $750 million, Q2 adjusted EBITDA of approximately $260 million, full-year 2026 adjusted EBITDA margin of at least 40% and approximately in line with 2025, and headcount growth below revenue growth.
The Q&A reality. Neither of the two topics that opened Q&A appeared anywhere in the prepared remarks: the Publicis negotiation and the departure of Chief Strategy Officer Samantha Jacobson to OpenAI, which the trade press had reported hours before the print. Four of the nine analyst questions pressed on the Q2 outlook, its causes, or the path back to faster growth, and three of those used the word deceleration. Green attributed the deceleration to macro pressure on Fortune 500 brands — geopolitical instability, tariffs, consumer pressure — and said the near-term answer is execution rather than reinvention. On Publicis he said negotiations are ongoing and that it is "probably not prudent" to say more. On the record March JBP signings he declined to say whether they relate to the agency dispute. He drew a firm line against ever moving to the sell side, and framed LLM and AI-search advertising as a real TAM unlock still in "the first inning." The most notable omission relative to prior calls: Kokai, UID2, and Deal Desk went essentially unmentioned.
Participant coverage from the latest call.
| Group | Participants | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Management | Operator; Chris Toth — Vice President of Investor Relations, The Trade Desk, Inc.; Jeffrey Green — Co-Founder, CEO, President & Chairman, The Trade Desk, Inc.; Tahnil Davis — Chief Accounting Officer & Executive VP, The Trade Desk, Inc. | 4 |
| Analysts | Shyam Patil — Senior Analyst, Susquehanna Financial Group, LLLP, Research Division; Vasily Karasyov — Founder, Cannonball Research, LLC; Matthew Swanson — Analyst, RBC Capital Markets, Research Division; Justin Patterson — MD & Equity Research Analyst, KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc., Research Division; Mark Zgutowicz — Senior Equity Analyst, The Benchmark Company, LLC, Research Division; Youssef Squali — Head of Internet, Truist Securities, Inc., Research Division; Timothy Nollen — Research Analyst, SSR LLC; Jessica Reif Cohen — Managing Director in Equity Research, BofA Securities, Research Division; Jason Helfstein — MD & Senior Internet Analyst, Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division | 9 |
Curated latest-call exchanges; one row per analyst topic.
| Analyst | Firm | Topic | What changed in Q&A |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shyam Patil | Susquehanna | Publicis negotiation and the Q2 deceleration | Green said the conflict has been framed in the most conflict-rich language the press can provide and called it overdramatized; confirmed negotiations are ongoing and declined further detail. On Q2 he pointed to macro pressure on Fortune 500 brands rather than anything company-specific, and said several fast-growing verticals would grow faster absent tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty. |
| Vasily Karasyov | Cannonball Research | Chief Strategy Officer's departure to OpenAI | Karasyov noted the trade-press story landed the same day, before the print. Green confirmed the move, said Jacobson stays on the Board of Directors, and pivoted to senior hires he says have been assembled quietly. No successor or scope change was described. |
| Matthew Swanson | RBC Capital Markets | Cyclical versus structural drivers of re-acceleration | Green separated the two, said structural drivers are extremely strong and that re-acceleration is about executing against an expanding opportunity, not reinventing the company. He conceded the industry pressures do not show up in results today and that stabilizing macro would be a tailwind that is not present now. No timing was offered. |
| Justin Patterson | KeyBanc | Levers to the full-year EBITDA margin target after a softer first half | Patterson noted both revenue and margins started the year soft against the at-least-40% target. Davis reiterated headcount growth below revenue growth, investment concentrated in platform innovation, AI, retail media and measurement, and flexibility in pacing spend. Green added that 2026 is a year of disciplined reinvestment. No quantified bridge to the target was given. |
| Mark Zgutowicz | Benchmark | Whether agency weakness or one-time items explain the Q2 guide | The hardest exchange on the guide. Zgutowicz asked directly whether one-time or one-to-two-quarter items sit inside a guide he characterized as below industry growth expectations. Green said there is nothing incremental to add on the agency front and did not address the one-time-items question; he then agreed CPG and auto comps get easier and argued the discipline those categories have adopted matters more than the comps. |
| Youssef Squali | Truist Securities | LLM and AI-search advertising opportunity and gating factors | Green declined to discuss talks with the key players. He compared the chatbots to Netflix five to ten years ago, argued expensive content forces ad monetization, and said detailed prompts support formats beyond keywords, potentially including video. He placed the opportunity in the first inning, "a couple of pitches in, max." No P&L timing. |
| Timothy Nollen | SSR | Whether The Trade Desk should add sell-side services; OpenTTD | Green identified OpenTTD as the hub he referenced in prepared remarks, then ruled out yield management outright, saying serving two masters is the flaw of the ad-network model and that they will never do it. He said OpenPath exists to plug into publishers running their own yield tech, and tied supply-chain inefficiency to why 2026 is a reinvestment year. |
| Jessica Reif Cohen | BofA Securities | When agentic trading becomes the dominant model | Green rejected the framing of being impacted by AI and said The Trade Desk will lead the agentic shift. He criticized rivals for connecting single advertisers to single publishers, which he argues recreates ad networks and forfeits holistic decisioning. The Stagwell work starts with creating and editing campaigns and is expected to move to optimization. No adoption timeline. |
| Jason Helfstein | Oppenheimer | Agentic path — technology versus commercial terms; whether record JBPs relate to the agency dispute | Green said the optimization variables are more the problem being solved than commercial terms, with frameworks set in advance and repeated by agents at scale. On the yes-or-no JBP question he said he cannot comment on whether the March signings are relevant to the agency discussions. |
Theme tracker
Themes are curator-classified across supplied calls.
| Theme | Status | Quarters mentioned | Read-through |
|---|---|---|---|
| CTV as the largest and fastest-growing channel | persisted | Q2 2023, Q3 2023, Q4 2023, Q1 2024, Q2 2024, Q3 2024, Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026 | Present on every call in the window, but the framing has thinned. Through 2024 CTV carried multi-paragraph treatment and explicit growth claims; by Q1 2026 it appears mainly as a bullet in a list of investment areas, with the channel disclosure given as video in a low-50s percent share. Q4 2025 was the last call to state plainly that CTV grew faster than the overall business. |
| Buyer's market and the supply-demand imbalance | persisted | Q4 2023, Q1 2024, Q2 2024, Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026 | Management's central strategic argument, and it has strengthened rather than faded. Q1 2026 escalated it to the biggest buyers' market in the history of advertising. Worth noting the argument cuts both ways: an oversupplied market is also a market where inventory prices fall, and revenue growth has decelerated across the same stretch in which the imbalance widened. |
| Objectivity and not owning inventory as the core differentiator | persisted | Q2 2023, Q3 2023, Q4 2023, Q1 2024, Q2 2024, Q3 2024, Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026 | The most stable message in the entire history. It is unchanged from the 2023 calls, which makes it a poor source of new information but a reasonable read on management's strategic conviction. The Q1 2026 twist is that objectivity is now framed as the enabler of AI decisioning rather than only as a trust argument. |
| Amazon and DSP competitive intensity as a Q&A topic | persisted | Q4 2023, Q1 2024, Q2 2024, Q3 2024, Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025 | Analysts raised Amazon, its DSP, DV360 or Prime Video in at least one question on nine consecutive calls from Q4 2023 through Q4 2025, and Green's answer barely varied: Amazon's DSP is a distant priority behind sponsored listings and Prime Video, so the two are not really competing. Q1 2026 is the first call in that run with no analyst question on it, with attention shifting to agencies and the guide instead. |
| Agentic AI | emerged | Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026 | First surfaced as a passing aside in Q2 2025, formalized as a Kokai trading-modes copilot in Q3 2025, and by Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 it is the dominant narrative — the Stagwell partnership, an agentic framework for partners, and a rebuttal to the view that AI disintermediates platforms. It is the clearest case of a new theme displacing older product stories. |
| CPG and automotive vertical weakness | emerged | Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026 | Introduced obliquely in Q2 2025 as tariff-driven volatility in auto and CPG, named as a tale of two cities in Q3 2025, and elevated in Q4 2025 to a headline explanation with the disclosure that the two categories are roughly a quarter of the business and that growth would have been at least 5% higher without them. Still present in Q1 2026 as pressure in Home & Garden and Food & Drink. |
| Organizational upgrade and senior leadership turnover | emerged | Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026 | Began with the Q4 2024 miss and the largest reorganization in company history, and has been a standing agenda item since — a new COO, CFO and CRO in 2025, a second CFO change by Q4 2025 with an interim in the seat, and a Chief Strategy Officer departure in Q1 2026. Six consecutive calls of leadership change is itself the signal; the JBP and go-to-market metrics are management's evidence that it is working. |
| UID2 and the identity framework | dropped | Q2 2023, Q3 2023, Q4 2023, Q1 2024, Q2 2024, Q3 2024, Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025 | A dominant theme through 2023 and 2024, when it anchored whole sections of prepared remarks and the cookie-deprecation debate, appearing in nine separate components on the Q2 2023 and Q4 2023 calls. It thinned steadily through 2025, down to a single passing reference in Q4 2025, and is absent from Q1 2026 entirely. Management's account is that UID2 became ubiquitous and stopped needing airtime; either way, a former headline differentiator has left the narrative. The absence itself is only one call deep, so treat it as a fade rather than a reversal. |
| Kokai platform migration | dropped | Q2 2023, Q3 2023, Q4 2023, Q1 2024, Q2 2024, Q3 2024, Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025 | Discussed on eleven straight calls, peaking in Q1 and Q2 2025 when adoption percentages and performance deltas were the core of the growth case, and not mentioned at all in Q1 2026. The migration completing is the benign reading. The less benign one is that the performance case built on Kokai case studies has not translated into the revenue re-acceleration it was expected to fund. As with UID2, the absence is one call deep. |
| Google antitrust and Google exiting the open internet | dropped | Q2 2023, Q1 2024, Q2 2024, Q3 2024, Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025 | A recurring bull argument that peaked in Q1 2025, when Green called two guilty verdicts a major victory for the open internet and said no company would benefit more. It was still live in Q3 2025 ahead of closing arguments, then vanished from both Q4 2025 and Q1 2026. A predicted tailwind that stopped being discussed rather than one that was declared realized, and the only theme here with two consecutive calls of absence. |
| Supply-chain efficiency through OpenPath and adjacent tools | persisted | Q2 2023, Q3 2023, Q4 2023, Q1 2024, Q2 2024, Q3 2024, Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026 | Continuous across all twelve calls but with a changed tone. Through Q1 2025 the treatment was expansionary, with publisher fill-rate and revenue case studies and a prediction that 2025 would be OpenPath's steep S-curve year. By Q4 2025 Green was defending it against trade-press criticism, and in Q1 2026 it appears only as the reason the company will not move to the sell side. |
Guidance ledger
Quotes, calls, and speakers are source-verified; outcomes are curator-classified.
| Verbatim guidance | Call | Speaker | Curator outcome | Outcome note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| “We estimate Q3 revenue to be at least $618 million, which would represent growth of 25% on a year-over-year basis.” | The Trade Desk, Inc., Q2 2024 Earnings Call, Aug 08, 2024 · 2024-08-08T21:00:00 | Laura Schenkein | kept | The Q3 2024 call reported revenue of $628 million and growth of 27% year-over-year. |
| “We estimate Q4 revenue to be at least $756 million, which would represent growth of about 25% on a year-over-year basis.” | The Trade Desk, Inc., Q3 2024 Earnings Call, Nov 07, 2024 · 2024-11-07T22:00:00 | Laura Schenkein | missed | Q4 2024 revenue came in at $741 million, up 22%. Management called it the first shortfall against its own expectations in 33 quarters as a public company and attributed it to execution missteps rather than market conditions. |
| “We estimate adjusted EBITDA to be approximately $363 million in Q4.” | The Trade Desk, Inc., Q3 2024 Earnings Call, Nov 07, 2024 · 2024-11-07T22:00:00 | Laura Schenkein | missed | Q4 2024 adjusted EBITDA was reported at $350 million, a 47% margin, below the guided figure alongside the revenue shortfall. |
| “We expect revenue to be at least $575 million, reflecting 17% year-over-year growth.” | The Trade Desk, Inc., Q4 2024 Earnings Call, Feb 12, 2025 · 2025-02-12T22:00:00 | Laura Schenkein | kept | Q1 2025 revenue was $616 million, up 25%, which management described as far surpassing its own expectations. |
| “I expect that all of our clients will be using Kokai exclusively.” | The Trade Desk, Inc., Q4 2024 Earnings Call, Feb 12, 2025 · 2025-02-12T22:00:00 | Jeffrey Green | unknown | Green set this for well before the end of 2025. Q3 2025 reported nearly 85% using Kokai as their default experience and Q4 2025 said almost 100% of clients are running through Kokai, so the calls do not establish whether full exclusivity was reached. |
| “in Q2, we expect revenue to be at least $682 million, reflecting 17% year-over-year growth” | The Trade Desk, Inc., Q1 2025 Earnings Call, May 08, 2025 · 2025-05-08T21:00:00 | Laura Schenkein | kept | Q2 2025 revenue was $694 million, up 19% year-over-year. |
| “we expect Q3 revenue to be at least $717 million, reflecting 14% year-over-year growth” | The Trade Desk, Inc., Q2 2025 Earnings Call, Aug 07, 2025 · 2025-08-07T21:00:00 | Laura Schenkein | kept | Q3 2025 revenue was $739 million, up 18% year-over-year, or approximately 22% excluding prior-year political spend. |
| “For Q4, we expect revenue to be at least $840 million.” | The Trade Desk, Inc., Q3 2025 Earnings Call, Nov 06, 2025 · 2025-11-06T22:00:00 | Alex Kayyal | kept | Q4 2025 revenue was $847 million, up 14%, or approximately 19% excluding prior-year political spend. |
| “For the first quarter, we expect revenue to be at least $678 million, representing 10% year-over-year growth.” | The Trade Desk, Inc., Q4 2025 Earnings Call, Feb 25, 2026 · 2026-02-25T22:00:00 | Tahnil Davis | kept | Q1 2026 revenue was $689 million, up 12% year-over-year. |
| “We estimate adjusted EBITDA for Q1 to be approximately $195 million.” | The Trade Desk, Inc., Q4 2025 Earnings Call, Feb 25, 2026 · 2026-02-25T22:00:00 | Tahnil Davis | kept | Q1 2026 adjusted EBITDA was $206 million, a 30% margin. |
| “For Q2, we expect revenue to be at least $750 million.” | The Trade Desk, Inc., Q1 2026 Earnings Call, May 07, 2026 · 2026-05-07T21:00:00 | Tahnil Davis | pending | Guided on the most recent call; no subsequent call in the supplied history. Three analysts characterized the implied growth rate as a deceleration. |
| “we continue to expect our full year 2026 adjusted EBITDA margin percentage to be at least 40%, approximately in line with 2025” | The Trade Desk, Inc., Q1 2026 Earnings Call, May 07, 2026 · 2026-05-07T21:00:00 | Tahnil Davis | pending | Reaffirms the Q4 2025 framing and adds the at-least-40% figure. Q1 2026 came in at a 30% margin, so the target implies materially higher margins across the remaining quarters. |
Q&A pressure map
Question counts and firms are curator tallies; analyst coverage shown above.
| Topic | Questions | Firms | Pressure / response |
|---|---|---|---|
| Growth deceleration and the credibility of the guide | 9 | Susquehanna, Cannonball Research, KeyBanc, Oppenheimer, RBC Capital Markets | The most persistent line of pressure, running from the Q4 2024 miss through Q1 2026. It began as forensic questions about what went wrong, became questions about whether a 20%-plus growth rate is sustainable, and by Q1 2026 had turned into three separate questions about the Q2 guide and the path back to faster growth. Management's answers have been consistent in substance and consistently free of timing. |
| Amazon and competitive intensity across the DSP landscape | 13 | Truist Securities, Cannonball Research, Macquarie, Wolfe Research, Oppenheimer, RBC Capital Markets, Stifel, Susquehanna, BofA Securities, KeyBanc | Counting analyst question turns across the last eight calls that raise Amazon, its DSP, DV360, Prime Video or the DSP competitive landscape. Asked on every call from Q2 2024 through Q4 2025, and by Q3 2025 Green said outright he had been hoping for the question. His framing has been stable: Amazon's advertising is overwhelmingly sponsored listings and Prime Video, its DSP is a distant priority, and objectivity conflicts prevent it from competing on decisioned open-internet buying. Analysts kept asking, which suggests the answer has not fully settled the issue. |
| AI and agentic disruption risk | 7 | KeyBanc, Oppenheimer, Truist Securities, BofA Securities | Evolved from questions about Kokai's AI returns in Q2 2025 to explicitly adversarial framings by Q4 2025, when Oppenheimer put the super-bear view that an agentic future makes brands irrelevant and asked whether The Trade Desk can scale AI against Amazon and DV360. Green engaged the brands argument directly and answered the scale question with trust and data access rather than compute. |
| Supply-chain positioning and OpenPath | 6 | BofA Securities, Wells Fargo Securities, SSR | Early questions were opportunity-framed, asking when OpenPath would scale. The tone changed in Q4 2025 when Wells Fargo cited press reports of discomfort over transparency and perceived conflicts of interest, and again in Q1 2026 when SSR asked whether independence still makes sense and whether sell-side services are coming. Green called some of the assertions ridiculous and drew a hard line against yield management. |
| Organizational change and leadership turnover | 5 | Susquehanna, KeyBanc, Cannonball Research, Evercore ISI | Recurring since the Q4 2024 reorganization, with analysts repeatedly asking what has actually changed and where the results are. Cannonball's Q4 2025 question explicitly held management to the prior year's reorganization claims. Answers have relied on JBP pipeline and count as the evidence of progress. |
| CPG and automotive softness | 4 | Cannonball Research, Susquehanna, Oppenheimer, Benchmark | Concentrated in the last four calls. Analysts have pushed past the category description toward the harder question — what happens to growth if the weakness persists. Green has answered mainly by arguing the pressure makes those brands more disciplined and therefore better customers, which does not directly address the modelling question being asked. |
| Agency relationships and the Publicis dispute | 3 | Susquehanna, Benchmark, Oppenheimer | New in Q1 2026 and the sharpest exchange of the call, with three analysts approaching it from different angles. All three were substantially deflected: negotiations described as ongoing with no further detail, nothing incremental offered on whether agency weakness sits in the Q2 guide, and no comment on whether the record March JBP signings connect to the dispute. Green said he hoped the call would end the public discussion, which is a statement of intent rather than an answer. |
Language shifts
Only language evidence verified against the referenced component is shown.
| Observation | Verbatim evidence | Call ID | Component |
|---|---|---|---|
| The opening characterization of the quarter has softened from strong to solid. Q3 2025 and Q2 2025 both opened with having again posted strong growth; Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 both open with a solid quarter. | “As you've seen from our press release, we delivered a solid quarter once again.” | 1996530678 | 2 |
| Tahnil Davis's closing sentence is nearly a verbatim repeat of the Q1 2025 version with one phrase removed. In Q1 2025 Laura Schenkein said the company was confident in its ability to outpace the market and capitalize on the opportunities ahead; in Q1 2026 the outpace-the-market clause is gone and only capitalizing on the opportunity remains. Market-share outperformance was the single most repeated claim of the 2024 calls. | “we remain confident in our ability to capitalize on the significant opportunities ahead of us” | 1996530678 | 3 |
| Disciplined reinvestment is new vocabulary that entered in Q4 2025 and was repeated three times in Q1 2026, by both the CEO and the interim CFO. It functions as advance framing for margin pressure in a year guided to a margin only approximately in line with the prior year. | “Looking ahead, it's important to think about 2026 as a year of disciplined reinvestment.” | 1980876042 | 7 |
| Visibility language appeared for the first time in Q4 2025, replacing the earlier construction in which guidance was conditioned on the macro remaining stable. The caution is now located inside the company's own forecasting confidence rather than in an external assumption. | “Our Q1 guidance reflects a prudent approach in an environment, where visibility remains somewhat lower, particularly in CPG and to a lesser extent, auto verticals.” | 1980876042 | 3 |
| Q1 2026 introduced explicit near-term headwind and cloudier-macro phrasing in the same breath as the long-term case. Earlier calls tended to reframe macro pressure as an opportunity to grab land or gain share; this construction concedes the near term before pivoting. | “And so while there are clearly near-term headwinds and a cloudier macro environment, we continue to believe that the long-term opportunity for our business remains extremely strong.” | 1996530678 | 6 |
| The CEO has begun conceding the quality of results directly rather than only in the context of a specific miss. This is a marked change from the 2023 and 2024 calls, where results commentary was uniformly superlative. | “Despite the fact that I don't think that this is our best earnings report ever, I hope you can hear it that I am as optimistic as ever” | 1980876042 | 10 |
Twelve calls show a strategic story that has barely changed and a growth rate that has come down a long way inside it. That combination is the crux of the debate: management's explanation is macro and cyclical, centred on CPG and auto, and the record JBP signings support the view that demand is intact. The harder reading is that the product cycle that was supposed to fund re-acceleration has gone quiet in the prepared remarks, the market-share-outperformance claim has been dropped from the CFO's closing language, and the newest pressure — the agency relationship — is the one management is least willing to discuss.