Disclosure: Longtime journalist Steven Brill is the founder or cofounder of a number of publications and companies, including NewsGuard, where he is the co-CEO and coeditor in chief. Among other services, NewsGuard offers advertisers brand-safety services aimed at countering the pitfalls of unvetted programmatic advertising. This story is excerpted from his new book, The Death of Truth.
The Trade Desk’s 2019 annual report explained what all that technology is doing behind the scenes as Trevor pushes the buttons on his console: On average, our real-time bidding technology evaluates more than 790 billion ad opportunities per day, reaching over 819 million devices per day on a global basis … We use the massive data captured by our platform to build predictive models around user characteristics, such as demographic, purchase intent or interest data.