AudienceProject and The Trade Desk today announced a formal partnership designed to connect independent audience measurement with programmatic campaign targeting across the open internet, including connected television environments. The collaboration, announced on 25 February 2026 from London, comprises two distinct components: a direct technical integration enabling campaign measurement within AudienceProject's SaaS platform, and the availability of AudienceProject's socio-demographic audience segments in The Trade Desk's Data Marketplace.
The announcement formalises a relationship that had been in development for some time. AudienceProject first outlined plans for a Trade Desk integration as part of its Q4 2025 roadmap in October 2025, describing the partnership as one of its most significant platform integrations. By January 2026, the company confirmed the integration would enter its technical development phase during Q1 2026, with full functionality expected later in the year. Today's press release marks the formal public launch of that collaboration.
The measurement component enables advertisers running campaigns through The Trade Desk to measure those campaigns directly inside AudienceProject's AudienceReport platform. Results are delivered either through a dedicated access point created for this purpose or, for existing AudienceProject customers, within the platform interface they already use. The system provides reach and frequency measurement, including on-target percentage calculations, and - notably - allows advertisers to access results while campaigns are still live. That in-flight access supports what the companies describe as real-time optimisation decisions.
The second component, separate but complementary, makes AudienceProject a data provider in The Trade Desk's Data Marketplace. Advertisers buying through The Trade Desk can activate AudienceProject's socio-demographic audience segments to sharpen targeting accuracy and improve audience alignment against campaign objectives. The two functions - measuring who was reached and targeting who should be reached - are positioned as working in tandem.
According to Ben Samuel, VP of Partnerships at AudienceProject, "This partnership with The Trade Desk brings together two critical parts of modern advertising: high-quality audience activation and independent, cross-media measurement. By combining direct measurement integration with audience targeting in The Trade Desk's Data Marketplace, we're making it easier for advertisers to both reach the audiences they intend to reach and prove that they actually did."
Paula Bacariza Perez, GM of Data Partnerships EMEA at The Trade Desk, added: "The open internet works best when it's built on interoperability, transparency and choice. This partnership with AudienceProject gives brands a clearer, more consistent way to understand and activate audiences across the fragmented channels of the open internet. By uniting audience activation with in-platform measurement, we're helping advertisers improve performance and make more confident optimisation decisions in real time."
The measurement integration launches initially in eight markets: the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland. The audience targeting segments in the Data Marketplace start in a narrower set - the UK and Germany - with additional countries to follow in both cases. Neither the press release nor the companies specified a timeline for further geographic expansion.
The initial market selection reflects where AudienceProject has established operational infrastructure. Germany is Europe's largest advertising market by total investment. The UK, meanwhile, represents a mature programmatic environment where demand-side platform adoption among major agencies is high. The Nordic markets - Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland - are historically among the strongest per-capita digital advertising spenders in Europe and have been part of AudienceProject's core operational footprint since the company's founding in Copenhagen.
The announcement places particular emphasis on connected television. The press release explicitly cites CTV as a "fast-growing channel" and notes that the shift of media investments toward connected TV is driving advertisers to scrutinise who their campaigns are reaching and how they are delivering against objectives.
That emphasis reflects a broader structural shift documented across the industry. CTV's share of media budgets has doubled from 14% in 2023 to 28% in 2025, with 72% of marketers planning to increase programmatic advertising investment. Yet despite that growth, measurement accountability has lagged. DoubleVerify called out the gap in December 2025, noting that streaming television advertising spending reached $33.35 billion in 2025 while measurement adoption remained significantly lower in CTV than in other digital channels. IAB Tech Lab identified six distinct technical challenges specific to CTV advertising infrastructure at a workshop in August 2025, ranging from creative ID frameworks to inventory ownership complexities.
The AudienceProject-Trade Desk integration addresses the measurement side of that problem. By embedding independent third-party measurement directly into The Trade Desk's campaign workflow, advertisers no longer need to manually extract and reconcile campaign data across separate systems.
The Trade Desk's expanding data ecosystem
For The Trade Desk, the AudienceProject partnership adds to a Data Marketplace that has seen significant development in recent months. In September 2025, the company unveiled Audience Unlimited, an AI-powered overhaul of how third-party data is priced and deployed, with new pricing structures at 3.3% and 4.4% rates and plans for broader rollout in early 2026. In November 2025, Intuit brought SMB MediaLabs audiences into the platform, giving advertisers access to first-party small and mid-market business data derived from QuickBooks, Mailchimp, and other Intuit products. In January 2026, Comscore launched AI-powered audio contextual targeting on The Trade Desk, extending cross-platform measurement capabilities to streaming audio and podcasts.
AudienceProject's addition brings a socio-demographic targeting layer focused on European markets. The company's segments are built on its own panel and measurement infrastructure, positioning them as independent of the platform data that already flows through the marketplace. That independence is a recurring theme in how AudienceProject describes its value proposition.
The Trade Desk reported $739 million in Q3 2025 revenue, up from the same period in 2024, and processed $12 billion in platform spend across fiscal year 2024. The company joined the S&P 500 index in July 2025, becoming the first independent advertising technology company to do so in approximately 20 years.
Today's announcement is the latest step in an accelerating sequence of platform integrations for AudienceProject. The company launched a direct Netflix integration in October 2025, enabling independent measurement of Netflix advertising campaigns across the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. In January 2026, AudienceProject activated a direct Disney+ integration covering the same five European markets. Both integrations follow a similar structure: campaign data flows automatically into AudienceReport, removing manual transfer steps and providing cross-device measurement including co-viewing on connected television screens.
The company has also expanded geographically. AudienceReport launched in Mexico in September 2025, marking the company's entry into Latin America, and entered Canada through a partnership with NLogic announced in July 2025. Médiamétrie partnered with AudienceProject in September 2025 to develop a Cross-Media Video advertising measurement solution targeting the French market.
The appointment of Bruno Furnari as Chief Product and Technology Officer in October 2025 - who previously held positions at Nielsen and Amazon Ads - brought additional measurement expertise to the company at a period of rapid expansion. Furnari has described AudienceProject's independence from legacy approaches as a competitive differentiator, emphasising precision and validity as the core attributes of its measurement methodology.
The Trade Desk partnership, meanwhile, represents a different type of integration from the streaming-specific deals with Netflix and Disney+. Rather than measuring content consumption on a single platform, it covers programmatic campaigns across the open internet broadly - the full range of inventory a buyer might access through The Trade Desk's demand-side platform. That scope makes the technical requirements more complex and the potential coverage broader.
AudienceProject describes itself as providing independent measurement, which in this context means the verification of campaign reach and audience composition is conducted by a party separate from both the advertiser and the platform where the campaign ran. The Trade Desk itself is not providing the measurement data; neither is the publisher or inventory owner. That structural separation matters to advertisers who want assurance that reach numbers are not self-reported by the platforms they are buying.
Media fragmentation has made that independence more difficult to achieve and more valuable when it exists. Audiences are distributed across a larger number of platforms than at any previous point. Deduplicated reach measurement - understanding how many unique individuals a campaign has actually reached across multiple channels, not the sum of reach on each channel separately - requires access to and reconciliation of data from each platform. AudienceProject's direct integrations with streaming platforms and programmatic infrastructure are designed to make that reconciliation automatic rather than manual.
The integration with The Trade Desk adds one of the most significant demand-side platforms in global programmatic advertising to that measurement infrastructure. For advertisers running substantial portions of their open internet spend through The Trade Desk, this means AudienceReport can now incorporate that activity directly alongside measurement from Netflix, Disney+, YouTube, Amazon, and other platforms where AudienceProject has established connections.
Who: AudienceProject, a Copenhagen-based SaaS company providing independent cross-media audience measurement, and The Trade Desk, a US-headquartered demand-side platform that reported $2.4 billion in 2024 revenue and $12 billion in platform spend.
What: A two-part partnership comprising a direct technical integration enabling AudienceProject to measure The Trade Desk campaigns within its AudienceReport platform, and the availability of AudienceProject's socio-demographic audience segments in The Trade Desk's Data Marketplace for advertiser targeting.
When: Announced today, 25 February 2026, from London. Measurement capabilities launch initially across eight European markets; audience targeting segments launch in the UK and Germany, with further countries to follow.
Where: The measurement integration is initially available in the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland. The Data Marketplace audience segments launch in the UK and Germany. The partnership covers open internet inventory including connected television environments.
Why: Advertisers face growing pressure to measure campaign performance accurately across fragmented media environments - particularly connected television, where budget share has doubled in two years but independent measurement has historically lagged. The integration allows advertisers to access in-flight reach and frequency data for Trade Desk campaigns through an independent third party, while also enabling more precise socio-demographic targeting through AudienceProject's panel-based audience data.
