The Trade Desk has rolled out its Q2 2026 feature release for Kokai, the company's AI-powered media buying platform, introducing a set of updates spanning AI optimisation controls, connected television pause ads, private marketplace deal management, supply chain quality signals, contextual targeting workflows, live event buying, and omnichannel campaign reporting - all positioned as part of a single quarterly release.

The release lands at a complicated moment for The Trade Desk. The company reported Q1 2026 revenue of $689 million on May 7, beating analyst consensus of $679.5 million but guiding to second-quarter revenue of at least $750 million - a figure implying roughly 8 percent year-over-year growth, well below the pace the company sustained through 2024 and 2025. Against that backdrop, the Q2 product release represents The Trade Desk's most substantive platform update since its September 2025 round of Kokai enhancements, and arrives as the company works to demonstrate that its platform technology can sustain commercial momentum.

Advanced AI controls: three optimisation modes replace the on/off switch

The most technically significant update in the Q2 release is a new set of controls for Koa Optimizations, the AI layer within Kokai that dynamically adjusts bids and inventory prioritisation in real time. Previously, traders could switch Koa Optimizations on or off across campaign dimensions. The updated system replaces that binary approach with three distinct modes.

According to The Trade Desk, three modes are available:

Optimize for performance and delivery

Balances pacing and performance to maximise results while keeping campaigns delivering effectively.

Optimize for efficiency

Prioritises cost-efficiency to help campaigns achieve outcomes at lower effective prices.

Allocate spend by priority

Focuses delivery toward preferred inventory or campaign priorities rather than treating all inventory as equivalent.

A material operational change accompanies these modes: after applying a setting, traders no longer need to manually enable Koa Optimizations across every individual campaign dimension. The system will remain on by default, applying AI-driven bid factors automatically unless the trader overrides them. The platform will display two status icons next to each optimisation dimension - one indicating Koa-optimised dimensions and one indicating dimensions where the trader has applied their own manual inputs. According to The Trade Desk, this design means Koa will "automatically optimise within your defined targeting dimensions while still respecting any manual inputs you apply." This feature was in closed beta as of April 30, 2026.

CTV pause ads: programmatic access to a user-initiated format

The Q2 release formalises programmatic access to connected television pause ads within Kokai. The format - a display advertisement appearing on screen when a viewer pauses video content - has existed in direct-sold form for some time, but activating it required separate direct integrations and custom workflows with individual publishers. According to The Trade Desk, buyers can now activate and manage pause ad inventory using the same campaign infrastructure they use across other channels, without building custom workflows for each publisher.

The technical mechanics are specific: pause ads are transacted through private marketplace deals or programmatic guaranteed arrangements, not through the open auction. Activation, pacing, and management occur within Kokai's standard campaign interface. Creatives are uploaded and approval status is monitored across participating publishers and supply-side platform partners from inside the platform. The format is built to IAB connected television standards, which governs measurement, brand safety, and reporting consistency across publishers.

According to The Trade Desk, pause ads deliver in a full-screen format designed for high visual impact. The company describes the placement as a "high-attention, user-initiated" moment because the viewer has chosen to pause rather than having an ad interrupt playback. The feature entered open beta on May 12, 2026.

Deal Desk upgrades: transparency across private marketplace buying

Deal Desk, which The Trade Desk launched in June 2025, receives a set of upgrades in the Q2 release. The original Deal Desk announcement - covered by PPC Land when the platform launched in June 2025 - introduced a centralised interface for proposing, negotiating, activating, and managing private marketplace deals directly within Kokai.

The Q2 enhancements add customisable lookback windows, improved filters, and more deal metadata. According to The Trade Desk, the upgraded Deal Desk now enters open beta, making it available to all buyers. The company frames the context as follows: private marketplace deals represent over 60 percent of programmatic spend, according to an ANA Benchmark Study published in December 2024. Despite their scale, these deals have historically been difficult to manage at the activation stage due to a lack of shared visibility between buyers and sellers, limited ability to optimise before campaigns run, and workflows that rely heavily on email and phone calls.

Deal Desk addresses those friction points through standardised deal metadata, in-platform workflows that allow buyers to accept or amend deals without off-platform communication, and Deal Quality Scores that let both sides assess deal health before activation. The AI-powered suggestions built into Deal Desk can automatically expand or modify underperforming deals to find additional scale. According to The Trade Desk, Disney is among the initial publishers to adopt Deal Desk for private marketplace transactions. "As more buyers shift toward biddable activation, we're focused on ensuring they have the tools, access, and flexibility they need to drive results," said Jamie Power, SVP of Addressable Sales at Disney. "We continue to put our advertisers first, and our relationship with The Trade Desk reflects our commitment to meeting advertisers where they are and evolving how we transact to deliver greater efficiency and performance."

Publishers who adopt Deal Desk gain access to the same Deal Quality Scores that buyers see, enabling both sides of a deal to benchmark performance against the same data set. The company also says publishers can increase deal revenue by providing richer data signals to the buying side through the Deal Desk framework.

Sincera inventory signals: supply quality data in the buying workflow

The Q2 release integrates Sincera's publisher metadata signals directly into Inventory Controls within Kokai. Sincera, which The Trade Desk acquired in January 2025 for approximately $30 million, provides metadata signals covering more than 400,000 publishers. Those signals include ads-to-content ratio, ads in view, and ad refresh rate - metrics that reflect the quality of the ad environment rather than the audience.

Prior to this integration, accessing Sincera data required going outside Kokai's trader workflow. The Q2 update surfaces those signals directly inside the Inventory Controls tile, where traders can apply bid factors and optimisation strategies based on the Sincera data alongside their existing targeting parameters. Settings that draw on Sincera data are marked with a Sincera icon within the interface. According to The Trade Desk, traders can click into each setting to specify benchmarks, view the impact on total available impressions, and assign bid factors.

The practical implication is that a trader can now set a minimum ads-in-view threshold, assign a bid premium to publishers meeting that threshold, and penalise publishers with high ad refresh rates - all from within the same interface they use to manage audience targeting. This feature is expected to enter open beta as part of the Q2 Kokai releases, with all advertisers able to access it at that point.

Contextual Marketplace: and/or logic and a dedicated library

Announced on March 25, 2026, the updated Contextual Marketplace introduces three structural improvements to how contextual targeting strategies are built and managed in Kokai. The changes are available through the Contextual tile within the platform.

Enhanced bidding logic

Traders can now group segments from multiple contextual data providers using "and/or" logic. Previously, traders were limited to selecting segments from a single provider within a given strategy. A campaign targeting users reading about financial services can now combine segments from two different contextual vendors, requiring either to match or requiring both simultaneously.

Contextual Performance report

A new report provides impression-level and performance data for each individual contextual segment applied to an ad group. New metadata visible directly in the planning interface, including average daily reach figures, helps traders forecast scale before committing budget.

Contextual Library

A centralised repository where saved contextual data groups and strategies can be edited, reused, and applied across multiple ad groups. According to The Trade Desk, Evertune is expanding its AI retargeting capabilities through the platform as part of the contextual update, with that capability expected to be available in early Q2.

Live events: five buying features for sports and tentpole programming

The Trade Desk also formalised a suite of live event buying features within Kokai, targeting the specific operational challenges of buying advertising around sports broadcasts and other large-scale live programming. According to eMarketer data cited by The Trade Desk from July 2025, live sports viewership is projected to reach 133 million viewers by 2028 - a figure that reflects the continued migration of live sports rights to streaming platforms, which fragments what was previously concentrated linear television inventory.

The live events feature set within Kokai includes five components.

Comprehensive catalog

Traders can browse and search for upcoming live events from a single view, replacing the previously fragmented process of identifying available inventory across individual publisher relationships.

Simplified category-level targeting

Traders activate at the sport or league level to access The Trade Desk's full catalog of publishers in that category, without manually curating individual publisher lists.

Automated budgeting across a season

A single campaign flight with automatic daily caps covers an entire sports season without requiring manual budget adjustments as schedules shift.

Smarter pacing system

Designed to react instantly to audience attention spikes during peak moments - such as the final minutes of a close game - and capture more impressions during those windows while staying within the overall campaign budget.

Predictive forecasting

Provides predicted CPMs and a dynamic range that traders can use to estimate reach and impressions before committing budget to a live event flight.

In an internal head-to-head test cited by The Trade Desk, the live event pacing system delivered 49 percent more bids and spent 99 percent of budget, compared to standard campaign pacing. The company cited several advertiser results from campaigns using live sports features. Old Navy reduced cost per unique household by 70 percent using decisioned buying compared to programmatic guaranteed deals during live sports activation. Hyatt increased its booking rate by 335 percent. A brand working with Happy Cog achieved a 366 percent increase in return on ad spend during football season. Best Western Hotels and Resorts reached more than 2.3 million households through live sports activation, achieving 89 percent incremental reach beyond linear TV by using multiple private marketplaces across sports content.

Omnichannel campaign groups: cross-channel performance in one view

A further update announced on May 4, 2026 restructures the campaign group experience within Kokai to provide a single hub for managing and measuring campaigns across channels. The upgraded campaign group interface, accessed through the Channels tile within campaign settings, surfaces key cross-channel metrics - including channel overlap and conversion contribution - directly in the dashboard without requiring a separate report to be generated.

From this hub, traders can enable omnichannel optimisations at the campaign group level, manage group naming and marketing initiatives, add or remove campaigns as strategies change, and view channel distribution data showing how impressions, spend, and performance vary by number of channels in the mix. According to The Trade Desk, the conversion contribution view lets advertisers understand how each channel supports conversions even beyond last-touch attribution, which is a meaningful distinction for campaigns running across CTV, display, audio, and retail simultaneously.

The Trade Desk cites IKEA Canada as a case study: the retailer reduced cost per acquisition by 17 percent with omnichannel optimisation within Kokai. The campaign group update entered availability on May 4, 2026.

Context for the Q2 release

The breadth of the Q2 release is notable. The Trade Desk has faced sustained criticism about Kokai's complexity and adoption friction since the platform launched in June 2023. A round of enhancements in September 2025 addressed navigation and bulk editing, and partial retirement of the platform's signature periodic table interface followed shortly after. The current release does not change the interface architecture further but adds a layer of AI transparency and granularity that was absent in earlier versions.

The Sincera integration is particularly significant in context. The Trade Desk launched OpenSincera in Q2 2025, providing publisher metadata free of charge to the industry including competitors. Bringing those same signals inside Kokai's Inventory Controls workflow closes the loop between the open-data initiative and the platform's commercial tools. Traders can now act on supply quality data at the point of bidding rather than evaluating it separately.

The Deal Desk upgrade builds on a product that was itself designed to address a structural problem. Programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals have historically sat outside the auction infrastructure and therefore outside the reach of AI optimisation. By bringing deal management into Kokai and attaching Deal Quality Scores and automated expansion capabilities, The Trade Desk is attempting to apply AI-driven efficiency to a segment of spend - that 60 percent of programmatic budgets - that its own AI infrastructure previously could not easily touch.

For marketing practitioners operating on The Trade Desk, the Q2 release represents a meaningful expansion of what can be controlled, automated, and measured from inside the platform. Whether that translates into measurable performance outcomes - and whether it helps arrest the commercial pressures The Trade Desk faces heading into the second half of 2026 - remains to be seen.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Trade Desk, an independent demand-side platform for programmatic advertising headquartered in Ventura, California, operating Kokai as its primary media buying platform for advertisers and agencies globally.

What: A Q2 2026 release of Kokai platform features including three advanced Koa AI optimisation modes (closed beta), CTV pause ad management (open beta from May 12), Deal Desk upgrades with customisable lookback windows and open beta access, Sincera inventory quality signals integrated into Inventory Controls (open beta), an updated Contextual Marketplace with multi-provider bidding logic and a Contextual Library, a five-feature live events buying suite, and a restructured omnichannel campaign group dashboard.

When: Features were released across a window from March 25 through May 12, 2026, with the bulk of the open-beta launch occurring on May 12. The Koa Optimisation advanced settings entered closed beta on April 30, 2026. The omnichannel campaign group update was available from May 4, 2026.

Where: Kokai is the platform interface used by The Trade Desk's advertiser and agency clients globally. All updates are delivered within the platform's existing tile-based interface, accessible via the Koa Optimisations (K) tile, Inventory Controls (Inv) tile, Contextual (X) tile, Channels (Ch) tile, and standard deal management workflows.

Why: The Q2 release addresses several persistent challenges in programmatic buying - the opacity of private marketplace deals, the difficulty of optimising live sports inventory in real time, the fragmentation of supply quality data outside the buying workflow, and the limitations of a binary AI on/off switch for campaign optimisation. It arrives as The Trade Desk navigates revenue growth deceleration, agency holding company tensions, and competitive pressure from Amazon DSP and walled-garden platforms.

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