Criteo Plans to Acquire IPONWEB In a Striking $380M Deal!

Criteo announced its intentions to acquire IPONWEB for $380 million yesterday, a move that might be essential to the company’s planned shift away from ad retargeting and into retail media.

The deal is expected to close by the end of the first quarter of 2022, subject to regulatory clearances, and will likely consist of $305 million in cash and the rest in Criteo shares.

Criteo’s CEO Megan Clarken called the agreement a pivotal moment in Criteo’s transition as the company wants to drive sustainable development and, more crucially, “revenue diversification” with the acquisition, which comes soon after the company’s purchase of Mabaya in May. In the press release, Clarken said – 

Criteo’s customers would benefit from enhanced full-funnel capabilities with even more flexible self-service tools while continuing to leverage Criteo’s unique commerce data for targeting, measurement, and superior outcomes.

Criteo is one of the most well-known names in digital advertising as a publicly listed firm with a market valuation easily above $2 billion. Criteo’s need to migrate away from a past dependence on third-party cookies to power its main ad retargeting business is a familiar one, with the company’s stock price plummeting anytime Apple or Google impose new ad targeting limits on their platforms.

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Criteo and IPONWEB: What’s The Deal? 

By integrating IPONWEB’s well-established DSP and SSP technology, Criteo advances its Commerce Media Platform ambition and delivers better control to its enterprise marketers – and their agency partners.

The agreement also extends revenue potential for media owners and provides important first-party data management services throughout the network. Criteo, in collaboration with IPONWEB, will establish itself as the open internet’s preferred commerce media partner in the post-third-party cookie and identifier era.

IPONWEB’s open technology and ethos are ideally matched with Criteo’s mission to promote a fair and open internet where technology empowers consumers, advertisers, and media owners to discover, innovate, and choose. 

Both firms have a deep technical culture that allows them to develop and tackle hard challenges at scale. They are also global with European origins, with privacy-conscious, sophisticated datasets and AI at their core.

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Furthermore, Criteo will soon have access to the whole suite of IPONWEB services, including BidSwitch, BidCore, and The MediaGrid, all of which are expected to generate additional revenue.

Criteo will have a product in BidSwitch, a marketplace that facilitates trades between more than 100 demand-side and sell-side ad tech providers, that will assist expand the addressable market for its first-party data offering. This will make “first-party data activation, interoperability, and measurement more seamless in the post-third-party cookie world,” according to the business.

In summary, the IPONWEB ad stack will provide Criteo with a full array of ad tech capabilities, allowing it to curate deals in a way that is less dependent on the soon-to-be-extinct third-party cookie.

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