• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, 10 hours ago

Big media-selling companies including Amazon and Google are ramping up new competitive efforts -- with The Trade Desk (TTD) in their sight. This is occurring as TTD’s revenue gains continue to fall in the recent periods.

But Dan Salmon, media analyst for NewStreet Research, says not to look at obvious areas of that competition -- like Amazon DSP.

Amazon DSP may not even be around in five years, he suggests. This comes also from analysis by Jeff Green, CEO of TTD. The belief is that Amazon DSP will be integrated into other company areas -- like its Campaign Manager, which is underway.

Ongoing hesitation by Amazon and perhaps others to jump into the TTD "open exchange" marketplace space comes from a key specific factor -- typically the business can be one of low gross margins.

But bundling this with all other digital media pieces of a campaign puzzle may work as a lure for those open exchange-focused marketers.

“We believe Amazon has an incentive to transition low gross-margin revenue from DSP [demand-side platform] and other ad tech services within Amazon Ads to AWS [Amazon Web Services], where it can be packaged with a broad AWS engagement and drive higher operating margins,” according to Salmon.

This is important, especially from a connected TV (CTV) point of view, a TTD major growth area in recent periods: Recently AWS made a deal with Warner Bros. Discovery to expand their partnership for agentic AI-based ad technology.

Nage Sethu, senior vice president of technology, converged advertising and linear systems, for WBD, has said:

"Building with AWS has been critical to streamlining the buyer’s experience across linear and digital powering critical layers of our data, forecasting, and next-generation agentic advertising stack.”

While AWS has been making deals with for narrowly ad-specific solutions, the one with WBD “is different -- it creates an entirely new architecture on core AWS solutions,” says Salmon.

In addition, Google is pushing its "Buyer Direct" operation. Salmon says this is a “new near-term risk for TTD,” which can bypass DSP buying entirely.

Are you seeing the big picture? Look to the big media digital media players for some answers.