The Trade Desk and Dstillery Link AI Agents for Mid-Campaign Audiences

Building a Dstillery custom audience through The Trade Desk typically took four days; the companies say their new AI-agent link can complete that work in minutes.

The link joins Ask Koa, The Trade Desk’s conversational agentic platform, and DS-1, Dstillery’s agentic platform. The companies describe three parts to the workflow:

• Ask Koa and DS-1 communicate while campaigns are live.
• Performance insights and an advertiser’s targeting goals guide the identification and build of new audiences.
• Advertisers can activate the new audiences through The Trade Desk.

“Building them required manual coordination and typically took four days,” said Taejin “TJ” In, Dstillery’s chief product officer.

In’s account describes a capability advertisers already had: they could buy Dstillery’s custom audiences through The Trade Desk, but the audience build depended on manual coordination. The new connection targets that delay rather than the buying route.

What does this change for campaign teams?

The practical change is the interval between a campaign signal and a usable audience. According to The Trade Desk and Dstillery, buyers can build new audiences mid-flight from live performance insights and targeting goals, then activate them through The Trade Desk.

The mechanism is an exchange between two agent platforms. Ask Koa and DS-1 can communicate while a campaign runs, and performance insights and targeting goals inform the audiences they identify and build.

For campaign teams, that places audience revision inside the live buying process. It replaces a waiting period with an agent-to-agent step the companies say takes minutes.

The source provides no service-level commitment. It names no minimum build time, test volume or success rate for the agent exchange. That leaves buyers with a clear workflow change and an incomplete performance record.

The commercial question remains open. The ADWEEK report’s key takeaways say ad buyers are questioning whether the integration will actually drive higher spend. The source gives no budget figure, campaign result or named buyer example. Marketers cannot equate faster audience construction with greater advertising investment on that evidence alone.

For practitioners, the distinction matters. The companies have stated a build-time benefit. Buyer spending remains an open outcome. Campaign results, rather than platform speed alone, must establish whether the integration earns more budget.

A simple test follows from the source. Buyers can measure the time from an insight to an active audience, record the targeting goal behind each revision and track the budget assigned to the result. The source supports the time-saving claim and leaves the spending effect unresolved.

The ADWEEK report that introduced the integration carries an AI-generation label and records newsroom review. That label describes how the report was produced, not how the platforms performed.