I still remember the heat of the conference room at [x+1], one of the world’s first marketing technology companies.
A chandelier of 200 incandescent bulbs hung at uneven lengths from the ceiling—beautiful, chaotic, and unrelentingly hot. That was programmatic in 2008.
I’d just swapped a safe consulting gig for the wild idea that media could be bought in real time rather than over fancy lunches, phone calls, faxes, and handshakes.
The new advertising ecosystem we were building barely had a name. We wired together exchanges, DSPs, and a handful of forward-thinking (or brave) publishers, hoping the pipes would hold. It was messy, unpredictable, and—perhaps most importantly—entirely transformative for anyone willing to roll up their sleeves.
As fate would have it, I was one of those people.
From scrappy start‑ups to a trillion-dollar industry
Skip forward a couple of decades, and the world of digital advertising is a very different place.
When header bidding took off in the mid-2010s, every SSP suddenly had technical parity. That meant questions like “Who’s got which publishers?” very quickly became “Why juggle fifteen platforms when three will do the job?” Basic access to supply became table stakes, margins began to thin out, and competing on price alone wasn’t enough anymore.
It became clear that, when everything looks the same, the only way to stand out is to add real value—and not just another hop in the supply chain.
As the barriers to entry lowered, fragmentation increased, leading to rapid intermediation of programmatic players. By the around 2018, advertisers and publishers were further apart than they’d ever been, with countless middlemen taking a cut of a bloated bidstream. It was clear that, at least for SSPs, the future lay in one of two directions: differentiation or consolidation.
It’s in the context of this maelstrom that Criteo acquired one of those scrappy start-ups: A small-but-mighty tech company called IPONWEB.
And from there, the path to differentiation for Criteo’s SSP became a whole lot clearer.
Why the market needs a commerce SSP
We describe Commerce Grid as the world’s first SSP built for commerce, so let me take a moment to explain just what that means.
A conventional SSP clears impressions. Commerce Grid does that, too, but it also clears the commerce intelligence that sits behind them.
We bring together four different interconnected elements—supply, audiences, experiences, and planning—into a single supply path, so a brand’s purchase intent data and a publisher’s impression never lose sight of each other. Agencies and brands no longer have to choose between their preferred DSP and Criteo’s commerce data. Instead, they layer our audiences onto any campaign via a single deal ID and watch upper-funnel media translate into real-world commerce events.
And the proof is in the pudding here.
We’ve seen that global retail brands who are already running performance and retail media with Criteo also have budgets that don’t fit well into either bucket. Working with Commerce Grid has helped them leverage commerce data in some of their mid- and upper-funnel campaigns to drive outcomes that extend beyond immediate product sales.
That’s the commerce difference in action.
Curation puts agencies back in the driving seat
Remember when agencies treated SSPs like plumbing they didn’t need to see?
That paradigm came crashing down when invoice audits exposed hidden fees and spoofed domains. Agencies realized they needed to be closer to the publisher to safeguard both quality and control. It’s here that curation became almost inevitable.
Curation sometimes gets tagged as being an excuse to implement mid-stream mark-ups, but that myth only sticks when agencies stay passive. Hand them the keyboard and curation suddenly becomes a transparency engine: Agencies hand-pick supply, overlay data, and watch every penny, right down to what lands in which publisher’s pocket—critical for managing to commitments.
If a data partner isn’t earning its keep, they have the logs they need to either renegotiate or switch it off. That’s a powerful tool in an industry which has historically been seen as a black box.
And talking of data, that’s the other big plus for an SSP powered by commerce.
Commerce data: The unfair advantage
Retailers happily share their own first‑party segments, but the challenge of scale is never too far away.
A single grocery store’s soft‑drink buyers only stretch so far. Commerce Grid stitches those seeds to Criteo’s broader shopper graph and expands them nationwide without diluting precision. Need lookalikes for runners shopping premium footwear? They’re a query away. Want travelers who booked Florida within six months and are now browsing luggage? Same drill.
And because the data rides inside the deal, every impression is filtered before the DSP auction fires, sparing budgets from needless waste.
What publishers get out of the deal
It’s not just brands, agencies, and retailers who see an upside with a commerce SSP.
Publishers have been struggling with the very same lack of transparency across the supply chain for years.
With Commerce Grid, they can see which agencies sit behind the most profitable open-exchange bids—and which deals are worth pursuing. Our Commerce Index highlights how each of a publisher’s pages over- or under-indexes for categories like luxury skincare of cordless-tool shoppers, so sellers can start to build supply packages that match real intent—not just broad demographics.
The road ahead
I can sum up what excites me most about this year with a single work: Convergence.
Retail media pipes (including those flowing from commerce marketplaces) and open web pipes are finally stitching into a single, commerce‑aware supply path. Consumers have never lived in channel silos, and ad tech doesn’t have to, either.
When discovery, consideration, and purchase share the same intent signals, media stops feeling like plumbing and starts feeling like progress—for brands, for publishers, and for shoppers who just want a simpler way to find what matters.
I’ve watched this industry evolve from handcrafted insertion orders to automated auctions, seen it flow from data drought to data deluge. Throughout all of that, one constant remains: Those who keep actionable data closest to the transaction tend to win.
Commerce Grid is built for that reality, turning ordinary supply into differentiated, outcome‑driven media.
And in a market where sameness spells trouble, differentiation—thy name is commerce.
