Can The Trade Desk Really Dent Google?

A few weeks ago I asked - given all the swirl over cookies and IDFA, etc. - whether ad targeting was about to get a lot better, or a lot worse.

A reader responded with - well, that all depends upon how the battle between Google and the Trade Desk turns out.

Which. got my attention.

You don’t always hear this framed that way. If anyone’s taking on Google, it’s usually another FANG company, or it’s the Feds. But sweet little Trade Desk, the ad tech company that could?

The one that quietly - if that’s possible - has amassed close to a $40 billion market cap? The one, as Adweek’s Ronan Shields pointed out in a recent episode of the Next in Marketing podcast I host, never misses a chance to take gentle shots at Google?

The Trade Desk is one of 20 some odd companies looking to figure out an alternative the whole digital ad industry can use in a post-cookie, post-IDFA, post-regulation world. The company has perhaps made the most noise and gained the most traction with its Unified ID 2.0 solution.

As I understand it, the hope is that the Trade Desk can rally the vast majority of the ad industry to pool together digital identifiers, such as hashed emails, so that ad targeting can thrive post-cookie and that everyone is on the same page. For its part, Google is also attempting an industry-wide solution, which is - guess what - being overseen by Google.

Putting aside whether The Trade Desk can pull off this exceeding complex coordination, this raises a bunch of questions:

Would this actually hurt Google?

How exactly?

Let’s say everyone starts using Unified ID, and it proves fairly effective for ad targeting purposes and doesn’t roil up regulators (another big if) - what happens next?

Can ad targeting on the open web be anywhere near as good as on Google or Facebook/Instagram?

Could Unified ID make targeted ads easier to track in terms of impact (put another way, can anyone touch the Duopoly’s closed-loop attribution)?

Would brands actually have any reason to pull money from Google search ads, or YouTube? (I’m guessing no).

Would the fact that fewer digital ads would be relying on Google data hurt Google indirectly/gradually, making its rich picture of consumers and buying trends less potent?

Would fewer brands use Google’s ad tech in favor of The Trade Desk’s? On the DSP front, that seems to already have happened, right?

Does that matter? The fewer buys that go through Google’s tools means fewer hooks into brands’ budgets and strategies, right? (Business Insider’s Lauren Johnson has a smart piece on this)

Would Google use Chrome to mess with Unified ID somehow?

Ultimately, would this be a ‘playing-field-leveling, we’re-all-now-in-a-giant-walled-garden’ move for the publishing industry? Or is this just about survival?