OS Data Solutions today launched OSDX, a data management platform that pulls the Ströer subsidiary's entire targeting offering onto infrastructure it controls directly, ending its reliance on the Virtual Minds DMP that had carried its Multi-ID Audiences until now. The Trade Desk is connected as the first external partner, with German audience, contextual and geo data available inside Kokai immediately. The platform also ships an MCP server.

The announcement, published on the company website on September 2, 2026, is framed around a word the German advertising trade has been circling for most of the year. OS Data Solutions calls OSDX data infrastructure for the agentic era, and the release names The Trade Desk's Koa Agents as one of the specific developments that changed what a data supplier has to provide.

That framing is doing real work rather than decorating a routine product update. Two distinct things happened at once: a vendor was removed from the supply path, and a machine-readable interface was added on top of what replaced it.

What OSDX replaces

The concrete change sits in one sentence of the release. Until now, according to OS Data Solutions, the company's Multi-ID Audiences were delivered through The Adex, the data management platform operated by Virtual Minds. With OSDX, the company transfers them into its own infrastructure and manages them there alongside the contextual and geo data that was already directly available.

The distinction matters because it separates two categories of data that had been sitting in different places. Contextual and geo signals were under the company's own control. Audience segments, the part built on identifiers, were not. OSDX puts both on the same stack.

According to the company, the result is a fully integrated data offering from a single source, with higher data currency, shorter activation times and more flexibility for campaigns that start at short notice. Those are latency and freshness claims. No figures are attached to any of them, and the release offers no before-and-after measurement.

The Adex is not an obscure product. Forrester classified it as a contender in a seven-vendor data management platform evaluation alongside Lotame, in a field led by Salesforce and Adobe. Virtual Minds also remains embedded elsewhere in the Ströer group's programmatic operations: in February 2026, Ströer, Virtual Minds through its Yieldlab platform, and YOC integrated The Trade Desk's Price Discovery and Provisioning API to automate deal management in Germany. The release addresses only the DMP layer. What happens to the wider relationship is not discussed.

What the platform carries

OS Data Solutions describes OSDX as combining Ströer's digital reach and first-party data with data from partner sources. Three components are named.

The first is Multi-ID Audiences, the segments now migrated off The Adex. The second is the OSDS Contextual Classifier, which the company states follows the joint independent classification standard maintained by the OVK unit for AdTech and Programmatic, the German industry body's technical arm. Adherence to a shared classification standard is a competitive claim in a market where contextual vendors typically run proprietary taxonomies that buyers cannot compare across suppliers. The third is what the release calls a comprehensive offering of geo data for precise location-based audience targeting.

The company's boilerplate adds that OS Data Solutions was founded in June 2019 and draws on partner data including the PAYBACK Panel. Worth noting for anyone tracking the corporate history: the business began as a joint venture between Ströer and Otto Group Media, and according to the company's own about page it subsequently became a wholly owned Ströer subsidiary. The release describes it only as a Ströer subsidiary, with no reference to the original structure.

Tobias Emmer, Managing Director at OS Data Solutions, framed the consolidation in the release. Translated from the German, he stated that OSDX creates the technological foundation to bring the company's data solutions to market more directly, more current and more flexibly, and that for customers this means all data from one platform, considerably higher speed in executing data-driven campaigns, and the certainty that activations rest on data meeting the highest German quality and data protection standards.

The Kokai integration

The data is available to advertisers and agencies immediately inside The Trade Desk's Kokai platform, according to the release, covering programmatic campaigns across connected television, mobile, desktop, audio and digital out-of-home. That channel list is wider than most audience data integrations claim, and it matters in Germany specifically, where programmatic outdoor buying has scaled quickly. Ströer's own programmatic digital out-of-home revenue grew 45.0 percent in the second quarter of 2026.

The release ties the integration to The Trade Desk's data commercial layer. It states that the direct connection benefits the reworked Data Marketplace, and names Audience Unlimited and the Koa Adaptive Trading Modes as the mechanisms through which advertisers can deploy segments more flexibly and efficiently, provided the underlying data is current, structured and directly available.

Audience Unlimited is the third-party data restructuring The Trade Desk announced on September 29, 2025, charging 3.3 percent and 4.4 percent of impression cost in Control Mode and bundling data access at no incremental cost in Performance Mode. According to the company at the time, advertisers who used third-party data before the change typically spent close to 20 percent of media costs on it. The OSDX release names Audience Unlimited but does not state whether OSDX segments are priced through it or through a separate arrangement.

Chris Walter, Senior Director Data Partnerships EMEA at The Trade Desk, is quoted in the release. Translated from the German, he stated that high-quality, directly activatable data is not an option for successful omnichannel campaigns but a precondition, and that the direct integration of OSDX into Kokai expands the data offering available to clients where they steer their campaigns, supporting transparent, data-based media buying on the open internet.

One editorial note on the source document: the release contains two consecutive paragraphs making substantially the same point about what the integration means for The Trade Desk, differing mainly in that the second adds the Audience Unlimited and Koa Adaptive Trading Modes reference. The duplication appears to be an editing artefact rather than two distinct claims.

The MCP server and the agentic argument

The part of the release with the least precedent among German data suppliers is the last section. Within OSDX, according to OS Data Solutions, the company provides a Model Context Protocol server through which AI applications and autonomous agents can interact with data sources and platform functions in a structured way.

The release is specific about what that permits. AI systems can automatically check data availability, develop segment ideas and prepare activation processes, operating through controlled interfaces and defined data access. Those three verbs describe a read-and-plan surface rather than an execution surface. Nothing in the release says an agent can buy anything, and the phrase defined data access implies the permission model is scoped rather than open.

Model Context Protocol is the open standard Anthropic published in November 2024 and later donated to a Linux Foundation fund, which governs how a language model discovers and calls tools it does not own. Advertising adopted it early and heavily, as PPC Land's coverage of agentic AI infrastructure documents: Amazon Ads opened an MCP server beta in November 2025 and moved it to open beta in February 2026, Google released an open-source MCP server for the Google Ads API in October 2025, and Snap opened its ads platform to third-party agents through an MCP server in July 2026.

What OS Data Solutions is doing differs from those in one respect. The Amazon, Google and Snap servers expose an advertising platform. This one exposes a data supplier. That is a smaller category, and it addresses a specific bottleneck: an agent building a campaign has to discover what segments exist and whether they are available before it can plan anything, and until now that discovery step has generally meant a human reading a rate card.

Emmer connected the server directly to the partnership. Translated from the German, he stated that the expanded direct partnership with The Trade Desk is an important step in making the company's high-quality local audience data available where advertisers execute omnichannel strategies, and that the MCP server simultaneously builds the bridge into the agentic era, with the data infrastructure ready for AI-supported marketing processes today and in future.

The alignment claim points at a real product. The Trade Desk shipped Koa Agents on April 22, 2026, its first in-platform AI agent, with Stagwell as pilot partner, publishing the Open Agentic Kit as a proposed interoperability standard the same day. On August 27, 2026, the company shipped Zuma, its third-quarter Kokai release, adding a Koa AI assistant that sits above a set of specialised agents covering campaign creation, audience building, troubleshooting and performance analysis, and reporting a 32 percent reduction in cost per acquisition across 62 campaigns. An audience-building agent needs an audience catalogue it can query. OSDX is positioned as one.

What the release does not say

Several gaps bear on whether a buyer can plan against this.

No pricing appears anywhere. The release names Audience Unlimited but does not place OSDX inside its Control Mode or Performance Mode structure, so the cost of activating a German segment through Kokai is not established.

No segment counts appear. The OS Data Solutions website, which has not been updated to reflect OSDX, describes more than 1,500 standard segments built on more than 50 million unique users across the Ströer portfolio. Whether that inventory carries across to OSDX intact is unstated, and the release offers no reach or match rate figures.

The MCP server is described without technical specification. The release does not name the protocol revision it implements, which is not a trivial omission: the 2026-07-28 revision removed protocol-level sessions entirely, requiring every server call to carry its own complete context and forcing implementers to rework remote server architecture. Nor does the release state who can authenticate against the server, whether access is gated to existing clients, or whether it is generally available or in beta.

No second integration partner is named. First external partner implies others, but no timetable is given. OS Data Solutions has historically positioned itself as platform-neutral, distributing audiences across all relevant demand-side and supply-side platforms, which makes an exclusive reading unlikely without confirming it.

Two companies, two kinds of pressure

The timing sits against sharply different financial pictures.

Ströer published half-year 2026 figures on August 13, reporting group revenue of 1,037.4 million euros for the six months to June 30. Digital out-of-home grew 24.3 percent in the second quarter and 18.5 percent across the half, with programmatic digital out-of-home up 45.0 percent and 29.3 percent respectively, while classic out-of-home fell 1.3 percent. The digital screen business is carrying the group. The direction was set earlier: on March 5, alongside record 2025 revenue of 2.08 billion euros and negative organic growth, Ströer set out a plan to convert itself from a marketer of advertising space into an AI-driven platform business. OSDX fits that programme, though the release does not name it as part of it.

The Trade Desk's position is harder. The company reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of 715 million dollars on August 6, up 3 percent year over year, with adjusted EBITDA of 241 million dollars at a 34 percent margin and third-quarter guidance of at least 650 million dollars, implying a year-on-year contraction. Shares fell 24.22 percent after hours to 13.39 dollars.

Data supply has become one of the levers management names publicly. The German build-out through 2026 has been dense: BCN and Kleinanzeigen adopted European Unified ID and OpenPath in February, AudienceProject added socio-demographic segments in the United Kingdom and Germany later that month, Utiq telco identity signals including netIDarrived on June 1, and Acxiom geo-based audiences went live in the same two markets on June 10. OSDX is the third German geo-inflected addition inside a single year, after Acxiom and the Adsquare location segments folded into Audience Unlimited on June 17.

What differentiates OSDX from those is ownership of the underlying reach. Acxiom and Adsquare are data specialists. OS Data Solutions sits inside a company that operates the German screens and the German portal, which is a different supply position for a demand-side platform arguing that the open internet needs signal from outside closed platforms.

Why this matters for media buyers

For agencies running German budgets, the practical change is narrow and testable. A data source that previously reached Kokai through a third-party DMP now reaches it directly, and the company attributes lower latency and faster campaign starts to that shortening. Those claims can be checked inside a campaign cycle.

The strategic change is larger and slower. German industry work has been formalising this territory: the BVDW published a whitepaper in March 2026 defining programmatic curation as the selection, combination and enrichment of media inventories and data signals into packages, explicitly covering geography, time, device type and weather as data layers. OSDX sits on the data side of that definition rather than the sell side, feeding a buying platform rather than packaging deals into curated inventory. The distinction determines who controls the segment and who books the margin.

The MCP server is where the longer bet sits. If campaign workflows move toward agents, the suppliers that expose machine-readable catalogues get discovered by those agents and the ones that do not are reachable only by humans reading documentation. That is a positioning argument rather than a demonstrated outcome, and the release supplies no evidence that any agent has yet queried the server. Whether a second and third integration partner arrive quickly will indicate whether OSDX functions as neutral infrastructure or as a narrower arrangement built around one buyer.

Timeline

Summary

Who: OS Data Solutions GmbH, the Hamburg-based data subsidiary of Ströer, represented by Managing Director Tobias Emmer, and The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTD), represented by Chris Walter, Senior Director Data Partnerships EMEA.

What: The launch of OSDX, a data management platform consolidating the company's Multi-ID Audiences, OVK-standard Contextual Classifier and geo data onto directly controlled infrastructure, migrating the audience layer off The Adex, the Virtual Minds DMP that previously delivered it. The Trade Desk is the first external integration partner, with data available inside Kokai for connected television, mobile, desktop, audio and digital out-of-home campaigns. OSDX also provides a Model Context Protocol server allowing AI applications and autonomous agents to check data availability, develop segment ideas and prepare activation processes.

When: Announced September 2, 2026, with the Kokai data availability described as effective immediately. No date is given for the MCP server's general availability or for a second integration partner.

Where: Germany. OS Data Solutions is registered at Alter Wandrahm 15 in Hamburg; Ströer is headquartered in Cologne and listed in the MDAX segment of Deutsche Börse; The Trade Desk is headquartered in Ventura, California.

Why: The company frames the German market as undergoing structural change on three fronts: identity solutions replacing third-party cookies, audience targeting requiring high-quality first-party data, and AI-supported campaign automation such as Koa Agents placing new demands on data infrastructure. Owning the infrastructure removes a vendor dependency from the audience path and permits a machine-readable interface on top. Neither the pricing of OSDX data, its relationship to Audience Unlimited's rate structure, its segment counts, nor the MCP server's specification version were disclosed.