Criteo wants to be an advertiser’s one-stop shop for, well, shopping.
On Tuesday, Criteo released a supply-side platform out of beta called Commerce Grid specifically for buyers and sellers of commerce media. It’s available in the US, with other markets to come later this year.
Omnicom Media Group is Criteo’s launch partner.
The SSP is housed within Criteo’s broader commerce media suite of products, which includes a monetization platform, a customer acquisition and retention solution and a demand-side platform, Commerce Max, set to fully launch in September.
Criteo was already working on a commerce SSP before buying IPONWEB last year, but that acquisition accelerated the process “in a massive way,” CRO Brian Gleason told AdExchanger.
Although IPONWEB had a supply-side platform of its own, it “wasn’t purpose built for commerce,” Gleason said. And that’s what a growing number of advertisers, agencies and retailers are looking for: technology that makes it easier to transact commerce media.
Because it doesn’t matter how big a new media opportunity is unless brands and their agencies have an efficient way to buy in, he added.
The ‘F’ word: Fragmentation
Advertisers have long been pressing for more standardized measurement and a less disjointed way to make scaled commerce and retail media buys (because we can’t all be enormous like Amazon).
“The fragmentation of capabilities, buying models and transparency all make developing a cohesive, holistic strategy challenging for buyers,” said Megan Pagliuca, chief activation officer at Omnicom Media Group. “Many brands fail to harness the full potential of retail media today.”
It’s a sentiment that echoes across the buy side.
Onstage at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview event in February, Chelsea Monaco, Merkle’s VP of commerce media, pointed out how untenable it is to expect advertisers to log in to who knows how many platforms to access retail media inventory.
“Three years ago, there were probably four logos in the space,” Monaco said. “And now we’re talking about hundreds.”
Some retailers are keen to spearhead the development of measurement standards for the category. (Hey, if competing broadcasters can collaborate on a joint industry committee, there’s no reason why retailers can’t do something similar.) And Omnicom Media Group is also working on a nascent standardization effort of its own, CASA Retail, to deal with the lack of industry standards.
These types of efforts are evidence that going the walled garden route isn’t “the appropriate path forward” because it limits demand, Gleason said.
That’s not a surprising viewpoint considering Criteo positions itself as a commerce media platform for the open web.
“But if you talk to any agency or any brand,” Gleason said, “that is also not a world that they want.”
Shopping for audience data
Advertisers can use the new SSP to target audiences against commerce inventory across retailers and get access to Criteo’s own audience data.
Criteo’s shopper graph includes data from more than 750 million daily shoppers and roughly 4 billion skews.
In the past, this data wasn’t available outside Criteo’s own growth and performance platform. The Commerce Grid allows advertisers to target these audiences through their DSP of choice, whether that’s Criteo’s own Commerce Max DSP or a competitive DSP, like The Trade Desk or Google’s DV360.
Although Criteo would obviously prefer buyers to use its tools, “we’re going to let the market decide what works best for them,” Gleason said. “They’ll have two paths.”
Doing the programmatic thing
Criteo is bullish that retailers will increasingly embrace programmatic and offsite media, although it makes sense that many are starting with onsite sponsored ad placements. They’re taking a page from Amazon’s book, the most long-standing retail media player out there.
The majority of Amazon’s ad revenue comes from sponsored ads in search results on its own site. (Amazon made around $38 billion from advertising last year.)
But unlike Amazon, and with a few exceptions among the biggies like Walmart and Albertsons, when the time comes to expand their retail media offering to offsite inventory, most retailers are not going to build their own ad tech.
“The benefit of our platform long term for a retailer is that they can open up their supply to the largest pool of demand,” Gleason said. “And we give them the pipes to be able to present their data in the way they want, where they want and to who they want.”
One of the main benefits for the buy side is being able to fight the fragmentation, Pagliuca said.
The audience offering in Commerce Grid is in line with Omnicom Media Group’s “larger consolidation strategy,” she said.
“We get access to Criteo’s commerce signals in a way that lends itself to established and existing advertiser strategies,” Pagliuca said, “and without fragmenting buys in detrimental and waste-prone ways.”
