The news: The Trade Desk (TTD) unveiled Deal Desk, a new tool built to fix one of programmatic advertising’s most persistent problems: broken deal IDs.

• Deal Desk, part of the Kokai platform, lets sell-side partners build and manage deals via API—eliminating the manual back-and-forth that currently eats up to 40% of advertisers’ time, TTD said.
• As Will Doherty, TTD’s SVP of inventory partnerships, explained at the IAB Tech Lab Summit, roughly 90% of private marketplace (PMP) campaigns using structured deal IDs fail to scale, often spending under $10 a day.
• The platform will also standardize taxonomy and surface relevant metadata like contextual fit, win rates, and availability. TTD plans to roll out Deal Desk this summer, ahead of its full Kokai UI transition for all clients by the end of 2025.

Deal dilemma: Despite accounting for the lion’s share of programmatic display spending, deal IDs—the mechanisms used to execute most PMP buys—are notoriously unreliable.

Only 10% of them drive most of the spend, Doherty says. With manual setup errors, mismatched targeting, and metadata inconsistencies plaguing execution, Deal Desk’s centralized approach offers a chance to unlock much of the value that’s currently being left on the table.