GroupM and Criteo Pilot Omnichannel Commerce Boost in APAC
GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, and Criteo, a commerce media company announced a pilot collaboration in Asia Pacific (APAC). For GroupM clients in the area, the alliance intends to improve omnichannel commerce media capabilities. The first-ever partnership in APAC combines GroupM’s patented media solutions, privacy-safe commerce audiences, and proximity-based insights to enable omnichannel commerce through the integration of in-store and retail media.
Criteo’s omnichannel monetization solution
For better media planning, budgeting, and best-in-class activation, GroupM’s clients will have access to Criteo’s insights technology. New degrees of relevance, optimization, and conversion are made possible. The collaboration will increase GroupM’s clients’ access to Criteo’s comprehensive omnichannel monetization solution. Additionally, it enables merchants to manage their complete media inventory for both physical retail and the Internet. It will make it possible for brands and agencies to easily find and buy omnichannel media from top retailers.
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GroupM media asset activation
360° media asset activation, including in-store activations like point-of-sale displays, out-of-store activations like inbox sampling, and online activations like email and social, are tools that are accessible to GroupM clients. By examining strategic prospects across media-buying capabilities and analytics to support predictive decision-making, Criteo and GroupM also intend to advance their cooperation. As a response to the ongoing acceleration of commerce media, cooperative attempts to create best practices in the field seek to open up a wide range of interesting possibilities.
Here’s what they said
Anita Munro, Chief Investment Officer, GroupM APAC said,
The innovation in commerce that will be made possible through this collaboration with Criteo is a significant and hugely exciting development for advertisers in APAC, and for our industry as a whole. Combining Criteo’s commerce media capabilities with our own not only strengthens our commerce offering in the region, but also allows us to set a new standard for what’s possible in advertising by bringing products, media, clients and consumers closer than ever before.
Taranjeet Singh, Managing Director, Enterprise, APAC at Criteo stated,
Together with GroupM, we are honored to usher in the next era of omnichannel marketing in the region. This partnership represents a union of industry leadership, and we are optimistic that it will drive greater integration across omnichannel campaigns and elevate success for brands and advertisers.
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Criteo’s Commerce Max DSP Unites Retail Media with General Availability
Criteo, the commerce media firm has made its self-service demand-side platform (DSP) Commerce Max, generally available. Brands and agencies will now have a single point of access to retail media inventory both on-site and across premium publishers off-site. Criteo is extending its array of retailer monetization solutions in addition to Commerce Max. Retailers will have the ability to meet previously unmet demand thanks to it. It will also open the door to an amalgamation of online and offline monetization strategies.
The world of retail media
Advertisers wishing to interact with consumers and learn more about their purchasing habits have a lot to gain from the rapidly expanding field of retail media. But with so many shops entering the retail media sector in recent years, the industry has grown unstable. However, it has been incredibly effective for merchants trying to expand their existing revenue streams. It has also benefited companies and organizations trying to actively engage customers in the purchasing process. Retailers, brands, and agencies have not, however, been able to fully utilize retail media due to fragmentation in the market.
Creating scalable commerce
With Commerce Max DSP, Criteo was a pioneer in introducing digital measuring standards to retail media. Additionally, it enables marketers and agencies to track invalid visitors to merchant websites in all ad formats. This is thanks to its connection with Integral Ad Science. By 2024, they will also contain sponsored and native products. In 2022, GroupM and Best Buy, a retailer of consumer electronics, launched a marketing test with the DSP. Over the course of time, Commerce Max signed up 10 shops, including Shipt, Macy’s, and Best Buy.
When running both onsite and offshore advertising through the platform, retailers who have finished campaigns have seen conversion rates increase by an average of more than double. Brands and agencies from all over the world can obtain data and inventory from various retailers and marketplaces using Commerce Max DSP. They can use it to expand these audiences offsite and locate relevant audiences on these sites. Closed loop measurement serves as the foundation for this platform. It enables advertisers to rapidly and effectively assess the success of campaigns and optimize them accordingly.
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Unifying Retailers’ Approaches
The merchant monetization solution suite is the second element that Criteo has released. It is the next stage in the advancement of Commerce Yield, Criteo’s primary monetization technology. Along with giving retailers and marketplaces access to a full suite of media capabilities, it will also benefit businesses like automakers, theaters, transportation providers, airlines, and more. In order to create Commerce Yield, Criteo combined its existing Retail Media Platform with a number of products acquired through recent strategic acquisitions. They consist of
- Commerce Yield Marketplace: It will assist monetization officers in integrating marketplace methods and formats thanks to Criteo’s strategic acquisition of Mabaya.
- Commerce Yield In-Store: By combining their in-store monetization technologies, Brandcrush and Criteo, advertisers now have access to a greater variety of offline inventory.
- Commerce Yield Insights: Previously known as Gradient, the package of insight and analytics solutions offers digital-off-the-shelf data to assist with enterprise-level retail media buys.
Here’s what they said
Megan Clarken, CEO at Criteo, said the company’s emphasis is to enable all commerce-driven firms to buy and sell to audiences engaged in shopping. She further added,
The process has to be frictionless, and it has to solve for fragmentation. With today’s launch, we’re equipping our clients with the right tools to cut through and connect in a more unified retail media ecosystem that ultimately creates more unity across the broader advertising marketplace. Our focus is enabling all commerce-driven companies to buy and sell audiences engaged in shopping. The process has to be frictionless, and it has to solve for fragmentation. With today’s launch, we’re equipping our clients with the right tools to cut through and connect in a more unified retail media ecosystem that ultimately creates more unity across the broader advertising marketplace.
Billy Dyer, Club Team Shopper Marketing Lead at Unilever following another successful test with GroupM and Unilever in which the brand’s conversion rate rose by over 400% praised Criteo saying,
Through Criteo we now have one point of entry to a pivotal retail media network, all within a single platform – Commerce Max – that applies the same KPIs to retail media as those we use for our programmatic buys. Combining onsite and offsite targeting enables us to focus media spend across a broader part of the shopper funnel while finding the most suitable audiences wherever they are.
Mark Heitke, Director of Ad Products and Audience Strategy at Best Buy Ads commented,
We’re excited to be at the forefront of the rollout of the Commerce Max platform, starting with its initial testing phase and now its general availability. The platform offers a variety of onsite and offsite capabilities, giving our brand partners even more options to reach our audiences in meaningful ways.
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Omnicom and Criteo Unveil First-Of-Its-Kind Retail Insights Alliance
The multinational marketing and corporate communications firm Omnicom and the commerce media business Criteo have announced an expansion of their current collaboration. Moreover, both companies are extending their previously announced relationship in commerce data to include insights from Criteo’s extensive retailer network and digital shelf data. Omnicom will be the initial holding company to collaborate with Criteo. The project has been referred to as a first-mover cooperation. The alliance comes after the two businesses announced a data-sharing agreement during the Cannes Lions Festival in June. InfoSum, a data clean room processor would incorporate the data into Omnicom’s in-house, custom Omni platform.
Criteo’s investment in Commerce Insights
Criteo’s decision to invest in Commerce Insights comes from its strategic acquisition of Gradient, an intelligent insights platform. Criteo is recognized as a pioneer in applied machine learning. The National Retail Federation has predicted $41.5 billion in the US for the back-to-school this year. With the start of the holiday shopping season, consumers are looking for the best deals and advertisers are trying to capture their attention. With Commerce Insights, advertisers get visibility into sales rank, attribute sales, and other metrics to allow for data-driven decision-making. These decisions will be the basis for the entirety of the commerce media lifecycle. It will include media planning to campaign execution and optimization.
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Omnicom’s commitment to leveraging commerce insights
Both Omnicom and Criteo ran a trial earlier this year. The Omnicom team implemented the use of the Criteo digital shelf data. They observed a 22 percent rise in the total return on advertising spending (ROAS) goals. With the acquisition of Outpromo and Global Shopper, Omnicom has increased the scope of its connected commerce business. Furthermore, both businesses are the top linked commerce and ritual media firms in Brazil. The holding firm introduced Omni Commerce, the first linked commerce arrangement solution in the market, in June.
Here’s what they said
Frank Kochenash, Global CEO of Omnicom’s connected commerce and e-retail consultancy Transact stated in the announcement,
This collaboration is another example of how Omnicom is co-creating with other marketplace leaders to develop unique utility and competitive advantages for our clients in this rapidly evolving space. Operationalizing Criteo’s suite of insights and tools within our Omni marketing orchestration system, our teams will be able to better optimize our clients’ investments across retailers, improve their brands’ standing in their categories, and help them exceed ROAS goals.
Brian Gleason, Chief Revenue Officer at Criteo said,
With this partnership, our insights technology will empower Omnicom’s clients to better understand the impact of their advertising by gaining unprecedented visibility into their share of shelf, their share of the category, and more product-level insights than ever before. As we head into the busy back-to-school and holiday season, advertisers are looking to prove the value of their investments and media budget, and Criteo is giving them the tools needed to succeed in the ever-complex retail media ecosystem.
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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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