Meet the digital David taking on the Google Goliath

JEFF GREENTTD learned about marketing the hard way. In his late teens he was sent to Ventura, on the Californian coast, as a Mormon missionary. He spent 12 hours a day knocking on people’s doors, mostly to have them slammed in his face. His sales pitch was hardly compelling on the bikini-loving west coast, but as he tells Schumpeter: “If you can convince people to give up premarital sex, 10% of their income, no more alcohol, no more smoking or coffee or tea, and then go to church three hours on Sunday, then arguably you can sell anything.” Today he is head of a digital-advertising platform, The Trade Desk (), which he co-founded and based in Ventura, his old stamping-ground. Its market value of $42bn is only slightly less than the combined worth of two of the most valuable ad agencies, Publicis and Omnicom. In digital advertising, the only firms bigger—albeit much, much bigger—are the Goliaths of big tech.Mr Green is no longer a Mormon. In 2021 the billionaire publicly parted ways with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, rebuking it for its accumulated wealth and intolerant stance on issues such as gay rights. But he remains a crusader. His latest fight is against Google. Following the lead taken three years ago by Apple, maker of the iPhone, this year Google aims to phase out cookies, bits of software code that enable marketers to track consumers digitally across third-party websites and target them with ads. Google’s justification for ending the practice is data privacy. But Mr Green says that is a figleaf, and that Google’s cookie removal benefits its own full-throttled advertising platform at the expense of others. “They kept their Ferrari…and said everyone else should ride bicycles,” he says. He is on a mission to ensure the digital-ad machinery remains on four wheels.