Hightouch partners with The Trade Desk

Hightouch, a leading Customer Data Platform (CDP) and data activation company, has partnered with The Trade Desk, one of the world's largest independent demand-side platforms (DSPs), to enable exposure log matching. This integration allows brands and advertisers to match The Trade Desk's impression-level exposure logs directly against their first-party customer data housed in their data warehouses via Hightouch. The result is a closed-loop measurement capability that lets marketers understand which of their known customers were actually exposed to their programmatic advertising campaigns run through The Trade Desk. The core technical mechanism involves Hightouch facilitating the ingestion and matching of The Trade Desk's raw log-level data — which contains device identifiers, timestamps, and impression metadata — against a brand's own customer records. This enables advertisers to move beyond aggregate reporting and instead perform person-level or household-level attribution, frequency analysis, and audience suppression based on actual ad exposure. The integration leverages the data warehouse as the central hub, consistent with Hightouch's broader 'data warehouse-native' philosophy. This partnership is significant because it addresses one of the most persistent challenges in digital advertising: connecting media exposure data from walled or semi-walled platforms back to a brand's own customer identity graph. By enabling this matching natively through Hightouch's platform, advertisers gain richer measurement, can suppress already-exposed customers from retargeting, and can build more sophisticated incrementality and attribution models — all without requiring a traditional third-party data clean room intermediary.

This partnership reinforces the growing trend of data warehouse-centric AdTech infrastructure, where the modern data stack (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks) becomes the connective tissue between media platforms and first-party customer data. It positions Hightouch as a critical middleware layer between CDPs/data warehouses and major DSPs, potentially displacing or complementing traditional clean room solutions like LiveRamp's Clean Room or InfoSum for certain use cases. For The Trade Desk, the integration adds value to its existing UID2 and OpenPath initiatives by making its log-level data more actionable for sophisticated advertisers. Competitively, this puts pressure on legacy CDPs and measurement vendors who have not yet built native data warehouse integrations. The partnership also reflects the broader industry shift toward first-party data activation and cookieless measurement strategies, as brands seek durable alternatives to third-party cookie-based attribution. Retail media networks and large direct-to-consumer brands stand to benefit most, as they typically have rich first-party datasets and high programmatic spend on The Trade Desk's platform.