MIAMI – Demand-side platform The Trade Desk believes it’s time for the advertising and media industries to hit rewind on the complicated subject of programmatic buying, so it’s launched an e-learning and certification program with an initial 15 hours of content.
According to Meredith Hall, GM Learning and Development at The Trade Desk, it’s critical for modern markers to evolve from being siloed specialists to becoming generalists so they can understand the full strategy of a media plan. Having all players share common definitions of programmatic parlance is key to this broadening.
“I think it’s really important to kind of hit rewind and make sure that everyone actually understands what programmatic is,” Hall says in an interview at the annual Transformation conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. “We’ve been working in this business for the past seven years and I still find myself being asked by people ‘What is programmatic?’
The Trade Desk’s online curriculum is branded The Trading Academy, a module-based offering whose ultimate output is certification for the company’s agency clients and others. The 100 series walks participants through the process of “understanding the landscape, dissecting the Lumascape and understanding what happens in 100 milliseconds,” Hall explains. The 200 series gets into such subjects as data collection and pixel placement and leads to a mid-term exam, followed by the 300 series covering the forward market and other advanced topics.
The Trade Desk suggests that participants complete the 15 hours of course content within 90 days.
“It’s being rolled out globally so all of our global regions will have access to the content in their local languages,” Hall says. “We just filmed in Korean, Japanese as well as Mandarian for some of our Asian countries and we’ll be looking to do the same thing across Europe as we expand into new territories.”
This video was recorded at the 4A’s Transformation conference in Miami. For additional interviews, please visit this page. Beet.TV’s coverage of the 4A’s was sponsored by The Trade Desk.
