How The Trade Desk (TTD) can Help Drive Culture Change Among Advertisers

PURPOSE
Your document shows your professional market research and problem-scoping capabilities. Once completed, you should be proud to share it with senior executives, including me as your professor of practice. So ensure you get excited to fall in love with one of the challenges you decide to investigate during this course. As you conduct your research, think of the underlying opportunities for data collection and how to harness these for business purposes. The assignment also familiarizes everyone with the initial steps of design thinking and lean pedagogy as a shared process for learning in the course.
During the course, you will design a solution for the chosen problem which is seen as intriguing to stakeholders and resonates with this assignment and the original challenge scoping.
Choose one of the problems "theTradeDesk" company is facing and help solve it.
PROBLEMS
"Trust and Trasparency"
Attitudes toward privacy, among both regulators and consumers, are evolving rapidly. There is pressure on the advertising industry to ensure that consumer privacy is protected and not compromised. At the
same time, premium content has always relied on advertising for monetization. And the more relevant the advertising, the valuable it becomes, the more great content can be produced. This is as true today for the internet as it was when soap companies started sponsoring daytime TV dramas in hope of reaching stay-at-home moms in the 1950s. Technology companies are under pressure to rethink identity technology (such as cookies and other trackers). How should TTD engage the industry in a new approach that preserves the value exchange of relevant advertising but which provides consumers with more control over identity and privacy.
“Cultural change”
One of the fastest growing areas of digital advertising, and TTD's business, is streaming (or Connected) TV. More major platforms, such as Netflix, Disney and HBO, have recently committed to offering consumers an ad-supported option, where they will get to see content at a lower cost, or free, in exchange of watching ads. This has the potential to revolutionize the way advertisers think about TV
advertising. Instead of a traditional "upfront" model where advertisers commit billions of dollars in advance with no real sense of who will see their ads, now there is the promise of highly
decisioned, data-driven ad impressions for TV, often their largest campaign segment. How should TTD work with major TV platforms and providers to help drive this culture change among advertisers?
GUIDANCE
After initial research, decide on one problem area and proceed with more in-depth market research and problem scoping to learn as much as possible about this particular problem, need, or challenge.
Avoid replicating what is already being done in business; instead, come up with new issues that still need to be addressed associated with the challenge you choose. In terms of context, be creative and look for the unexplored.
Evidence of why this problem is worth solving and why doing so may offer high-value opportunities.
Ensure you provide enough context with rigorous references (both academic and professional) to the course materials and other sources, including input from experts in the field.
A compelling problem can be solved as an instance or activity where a problem is solved for the target audience in a new and novel fashion while giving the client company an ethical, reliable, unused, and valuable way of conducting business.
DELIVERABLES
Cover with heading and name, brief max 4-pages of text and bullets, with page numbering and subheadings as requested: professional document with APA references, unlimited number of complete appendices including relevant and readable tables, graphs, images, etc. Font 12, 1.0 spacing, and standard margins.
Note: executives are busy people who crave evidence to make sound decisions, so ensure you stick to the core, reference, and if you need more pages, refer to relevant appendices in the main text.
Before starting this assignment, check the rubric for what determines a quality contribution.
You are expected to submit a detailed description of your problem set and data collection opportunity by referring actively to relevant sources to strengthen your problem argument and then responding to the following critical areas of importance (use these headings):
Introduction and Problem Statement: Introduce the paper by leading the reading to the theme, the problem, and critical findings, along with a brief document flow overview.
Market Research: Identify and define the problem area based on your research findings regarding currency, relevancy, and societal and business significance (actively referenced, both academically and professionally).
Description of Problem and Significance of data collection opportunity: Provide clarity to the underlying issues, the people and organizations dealing with them, and define data collection opportunities when addressing the problem. Make appropriate references to your market research discoveries.
Opportunity and Risk Assessment: Describe competing and existing initiatives, regulatory trends, and other factors influencing the opportunity to solve the problem and collect data. What resources are needed to collect data to address the issue, and what risks and potential barriers like technology or regulation have you identified? What impact could a working solution have on people, businesses, industry, and the environment, both positive and negative? The answer could build on digitalization and leveraging data-driven transformation, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), hybrid, cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, Robotic Process Automation, and other similar exponential technologies.
Concluding Discussion: Conclude by arguing, based on your newly gathered research and analyzed intelligence, why solving this problem is worthwhile, especially from a business and data collection perspective. Why is it novel and fresh, despite potential competition / alternative solutions? Finally, list concrete actions for your client to proceed and succeed in building a state-of-the-art solution.
Personal Reflection: Discuss critical findings from this assignment for yourself; what was most valuable learning? Discuss how you will continue enhancing your knowledge with potential external people from your network throughout the course.