The Trade Desk today announced a partnership with Adsquare, the Berlin-based location intelligence platform, to bring real-world behavioral data into Audience Unlimited - the demand-side platform's AI-powered data marketplace that launched in September 2025 to overhaul how advertisers price and deploy third-party audience segments.

The partnership, announced on June 17, 2026, via The Trade Desk's LinkedIn page, makes Adsquare's location-derived audience intelligence available to advertisers buying programmatic campaigns through The Trade Desk's Kokai platform. According to The Trade Desk, the integration is designed to help marketers activate high-quality audiences with greater precision and to connect digital campaign activity to what the company describes as real-world outcomes - store visits, in-store conversions, and measurable business results across the open internet.

What Audience Unlimited is and why this matters

Audience Unlimited is a structural overhaul of how The Trade Desk handles third-party data, announced on September 29, 2025. Before the product launched, advertisers using third-party data through The Trade Desk typically invested close to 20% of their media costs on it, according to the company. The barriers were well-documented: fragmented pricing structures, difficulty determining which data sources drove results, and cost concerns that discouraged experimentation at scale.

Audience Unlimited addressed those barriers in two ways. In Control Mode, data is priced at 3.3% or 4.4% of impression costs, depending on segment type, with Koa - The Trade Desk's AI engine - surfacing recommendations that traders evaluate and act on themselves. In Performance Mode, data access is bundled at no incremental cost, with Koa acting as a continuous co-pilot that optimizes bids and allocation dynamically within advertiser-set guardrails. The AI scoring engine evaluates thousands of curated segments from hundreds of third-party providers, matching data relevance to individual campaign objectives automatically.

Adsquare's entry into that ecosystem adds a specific data type that Audience Unlimited has not previously emphasized: real-world behavioral intelligence derived from physical location visits rather than declared attributes, lookalike modeling, or digital behavioral proxies.

Adsquare's platform and what it contributes

Adsquare, founded in 2012 and headquartered in Berlin, operates across 26 markets with nine offices. The company serves over 2,500 brands, agencies, and platforms - including Coca-Cola, IKEA, H&M, McDonald's, Samsung, Volkswagen, and L'Oreal on the brand side, and agency groups including WPP, Omnicom, Havas, Publicis, Dentsu, Mediabrands, GroupM, and Mindshare. Its DSP integrations cover The Trade Desk, Google Display and Video 360, Amazon DSP, StackAdapt, Adform, Yahoo DSP, Magnite, PubMatic, and Equativ, according to the company's platform documentation.

The core of what Adsquare offers is what it calls "The Outcomes Loop" - a four-phase continuous framework that flows from Planning through Targeting, Optimization, and Validation, with each phase feeding back into the next. The architecture is explicitly designed around offline measurement rather than digital proxies. Planning draws on store-level footfall intelligence and spatial data. Targeting activates what Adsquare calls ID-Precise Audiences and Geo-Contextual Audiences derived from SDK-sourced mobile location signals. Optimization uses near-real-time visit data to reallocate budget toward placements driving physical store traffic. Validation closes the loop by connecting campaign spend directly to store visits and conversion outcomes.

The technical infrastructure underpinning this relies exclusively on SDK-derived location data rather than bid-stream data - a distinction Adsquare has emphasized across previous partnership announcements as being essential for accuracy. Bid-stream location data is notoriously noisy, frequently carrying incorrect coordinates or outdated device positions. SDK-derived signals are pulled directly from applications with explicit user permission at the point of collection, providing higher positional accuracy and a cleaner consent chain.

Privacy by design is a stated architectural principle for Adsquare. The platform only uses data where explicit consent has been collected at the device level through opt-in mechanisms. According to Adsquare, this positions the platform for compliance with GDPR in European markets and equivalent frameworks elsewhere. The company's Privacy Centre documentation frames the approach as foundational - not retrofitted to meet regulation, but built into the product from its 2012 founding.

The specific mechanics of the Adsquare-Audience Unlimited integration

According to The Trade Desk's announcement, Adsquare's insights are now integrated into Audience Unlimited as available data segments. Advertisers using the Kokai platform can activate Adsquare's location-intelligence-derived audience segments through the same interface used to access hundreds of other third-party providers. Because Audience Unlimited's AI scoring evaluates segment relevance against specific campaign objectives, Adsquare's segments will be surfaced when campaign goals align with what location data is best suited to deliver - primarily campaigns where the objective is to drive in-store traffic or attribute offline conversions to digital media spend.

The practical workflow for a trader running a Control Mode campaign would surface Adsquare's segments as AI-recommended options when, for example, a campaign targets retail foot traffic. In Performance Mode, where Koa operates more autonomously, the system would incorporate Adsquare's audiences into its ongoing optimization logic without requiring manual segment selection.

What this integration does not change is Adsquare's independence from media buying. The company has consistently positioned itself as an intelligence layer that sits outside the inventory transaction - Adsquare does not own media, does not operate as a sell-side platform, and does not have a financial interest in which impressions get purchased. That structural separation is relevant: measurement solutions affiliated with media businesses have an inherent conflict of interest in determining whether a campaign drove store visits, because the answer affects the revenue of the entity providing the data. Adsquare's independent position removes that conflict.

Case study evidence behind the data

Adsquare has published several case studies that illustrate the measurable impact of its location intelligence in practice. The most prominent involves IKEA Canada, which ran a multichannel campaign in partnership with Dentsu using Adsquare's platform and Google DV360. According to Adsquare, the campaign drove over 4,000 real-world store visits. GrandVision, the European optical retail chain, ran an audio-driven campaign measured by Adsquare across nine markets in 2024 and reported store visit uplift. Visit Vermont, a tourism destination campaign, achieved a cost-per-visit below $0.50 using Adsquare's measurement infrastructure in a single destination market.

Separately, PPC Land reported in February 2025 that Adsquare had documented a Walmart Mexico campaign achieving a 17% year-over-year uplift in store visits across 12 million ad impressions using its visit matching methodology. That methodology maps audience signals onto two-dimensional polygon representations of store locations, processes daily footfall data from mobile devices, and delivers results directly to advertiser DSPs for side-by-side analysis with campaign performance metrics.

These figures are not independently audited in published form, but their inclusion in The Trade Desk's decision to integrate Adsquare reflects an institutional assessment of the data quality and measurement methodology.

How this fits The Trade Desk's broader data strategy

Audience Unlimited has been a primary vehicle for The Trade Desk's commercial recovery following a difficult stretch. The company reported full-year 2025 revenue of $2.896 billion, with growth decelerating to 18% year-over-year from 26% in 2024. CEO Jeff Green identified third-party data underutilization as a core problem the product addresses: according to PPC Land's coverage of the February 2026 earnings call, Green stated that there has been "a massive underutilization of third-party data and retail data in particular since the advent of programmatic about 20 years ago," attributing this to cost complexity that generally discourages marketers from using it.

Audience Unlimited is the proposed structural fix. Since its September 2025 launch, The Trade Desk has brought in a series of data providers to strengthen the marketplace. AudienceProject entered in February 2026, adding socio-demographic audience segments for European CTV campaigns. Intuit brought SMB MediaLabs audiences derived from QuickBooks and Mailchimp data in November 2025. Acxiom's InfoBase Geo-Based segments went live for UK and Germany buyers in June 2026. Comscore launched AI-powered audio contextual targeting on the platform in January 2026.

Adsquare is distinctive within that list. Most of the recent additions are either B2B data sources, financial behavior proxies, socio-demographic models, or digital behavioral segments. Adsquare is the most direct physical-world intelligence provider to enter the Audience Unlimited ecosystem - it is the only one whose core product is derived from actual consumer movement at real-world locations rather than from digital signals or declared attributes.

The Trade Desk also launched OpenTTD on March 4, 2026 - a structured developer portal giving data providers, publishers, and advertisers API access to the platform's programmatic infrastructure. That portal organized data partner access through a single entry point, reducing the friction of bilateral integration negotiations. The Adsquare partnership likely followed a path through that framework, which The Trade Desk built explicitly to accelerate the kind of data provider integrations Audience Unlimited requires.

Adsquare's trajectory into major platform partnerships

The Trade Desk integration follows a pattern of Adsquare deepening its presence inside major programmatic platforms. In September 2024, StackAdapt and Adsquare launched an integrated Footfall Attribution solution covering EMEA, APAC, NORAM, and LATAM regions - embedding Adsquare's visit data directly into the StackAdapt interface so that advertisers could measure campaign-to-store visit conversion without leaving the buying platform. That partnership built on a long-standing relationship between the two companies.

In September 2025, Azerion expanded its Adsquare partnership across Latin America, the Middle East, the United States, and additional European countries through its Hawk DSP, adding location-based audience targeting and cross-channel measurement across DOOH, mobile, and audio inventory. The expansion integrated Adsquare's full platform directly into the Azerion Data Marketplace.

In June 2025, Adsquare launched its Attribution Dashboard, transforming its existing attribution offering from a static post-campaign report into an on-demand analytics hub with continuous insight access. The system uses Adsquare's proprietary Control Condition methodology - a statistical model that simulates consumer behavior for unexposed audiences, accounting for seasonality, public holidays, and weather conditions to isolate genuine advertising impact without manual control group configuration.

On April 8, 2026, Adsquare and NielsenIQ announced a collaboration making NielsenIQ's GeoPurchase audience segments available within Adsquare's platform. Those segments are built from anonymized, store-level CPG sales data reflecting actual consumer buying behavior, not modeled or inferred signals. The combination - Adsquare's location-based activation layer with NielsenIQ's purchase-derived audience intelligence - extended Adsquare's capabilities directly into the CPG category that has historically been a priority for The Trade Desk's retail data strategy.

In January 2026, Adsquare released four seasonal audience segments for the Super Bowl, Chinese New Year, Valentine's Day, and the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics - events representing combined U.S. consumer spending measured in the tens of billions. Super Bowl-related spending reached $18.6 billion in 2025, according to data cited by Adsquare. Valentine's Day spending hit $27.5 billion in the United States in the same year. Those datasets were activated across The Trade Desk's platform among others, establishing the technical relationship that may have accelerated today's Audience Unlimited integration.

What this means for programmatic advertisers

For media buyers and planners using The Trade Desk, the Adsquare integration changes what is available inside Audience Unlimited specifically for campaigns where the objective is physical retail performance. Prior to this partnership, connecting a programmatic campaign directly to a store visit measurement framework required separate data arrangements outside the buying platform - either through Adsquare's OnePlatform interface or through a DSP that had already embedded footfall attribution natively.

With Adsquare now inside Audience Unlimited, a buyer running a retail or QSR campaign through Kokai can potentially access location-intelligence-derived audience segments and optimization signals through the same interface used for every other targeting decision. That consolidation reduces the number of separate vendor relationships required to run a location-attributed campaign and, in Performance Mode, removes the need for a trader to actively manage segment selection at all.

The pricing implications deserve attention. In Control Mode, data from third-party providers is priced at 3.3% or 4.4% of impression costs. For Adsquare's location data specifically, which has historically commanded premium pricing relative to modeled behavioral segments - because it is derived from direct physical observation rather than probabilistic inference - access through Audience Unlimited's tiered rate card may represent a more economical path for some buyers than direct platform licensing. That comparison depends on campaign scale, geographic scope, and volume, and neither party has published a direct price comparison.

PPC Land has previously reported on Adsquare's curation service, launched in October 2024, which introduced three Private Marketplace options - an ID-Precise PMP for demographic and intent targeting, a Geo-Contextual PMP for proximity-based campaigns, and an Incremental PMP for measuring visit uplift from digital ad exposure. The Audience Unlimited integration represents a structurally different distribution path than the PMP model: where curation packages audience and inventory together in a private deal, Audience Unlimited surfaces Adsquare's data as a targeting layer that buyers activate against open marketplace or direct-sold inventory of their own choosing.

The open internet context

Both Adsquare and The Trade Desk have consistently framed their positioning around the open internet as distinct from walled garden advertising environments. Adsquare is explicitly independent from media - the company has no inventory to sell, no publisher relationships that create conflicts, and no financial incentive to direct campaign budgets toward specific inventory sources. The Trade Desk, as the largest independent DSP, has built its commercial identity on being an alternative to the closed advertising ecosystems operated by Google and Amazon.

The language in The Trade Desk's LinkedIn announcement reflects that shared positioning. The company described the Adsquare partnership as reflecting "a shared commitment to building a more open, addressable, and accountable ecosystem where data works smarter, campaigns perform better, and every impression drives meaningful value." Those three qualities - open, addressable, accountable - are the same terms The Trade Desk has used consistently to describe its competitive differentiation from platforms that control both the buying infrastructure and the audience data.

Whether that philosophical alignment translates into measurable commercial benefit for advertisers will depend on how effectively Adsquare's location intelligence integrates with Koa's optimization logic in live campaign conditions. The technical architecture is compatible - Adsquare already operates directly within The Trade Desk's ecosystem through prior integrations - but Audience Unlimited's AI scoring engine will determine how frequently and prominently Adsquare's segments are surfaced to buyers in practice.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Trade Desk, the largest independent demand-side platform headquartered in Ventura, California, and Adsquare, a Berlin-based location intelligence platform founded in 2012 and operating across 26 markets with over 2,500 brand, agency, and platform clients.

What: The Trade Desk is integrating Adsquare's real-world location intelligence - derived from SDK-sourced, consented mobile behavioral data - into Audience Unlimited, the AI-powered data marketplace The Trade Desk launched in September 2025 to simplify third-party data access and pricing for programmatic advertisers. The integration makes Adsquare's audience segments available through the Kokai buying platform for advertisers seeking to connect digital campaigns to physical store visits and offline business outcomes.

When: The partnership was announced on June 17, 2026, via The Trade Desk's LinkedIn page. Audience Unlimited itself became broadly available in early 2026 following a late 2025 rollout with select agencies. Adsquare has been building its presence in The Trade Desk's ecosystem through prior integrations across seasonal audience products and direct DSP connections dating to at least January 2026.

Where: The integration operates within The Trade Desk's Kokai platform and Audience Unlimited data marketplace, accessible to advertisers running campaigns across the open internet. Adsquare's location data infrastructure covers 26 markets globally across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC regions. The announcement was distributed via The Trade Desk's LinkedIn profile with over 261,000 followers.

Why: The partnership addresses a persistent gap in programmatic advertising: the inability to connect digital impressions to verifiable offline consumer behavior at scale without requiring separate data arrangements outside the buying platform. For The Trade Desk, adding location intelligence to Audience Unlimited strengthens the product's utility for retail, QSR, tourism, and brick-and-mortar advertisers whose primary campaign objective is physical store performance rather than digital conversion. For Adsquare, distribution through Audience Unlimited extends the reach of its data products to the full base of Trade Desk advertisers without requiring individual platform integrations, creating commercial scale at the data layer.