The Commerce Desk earned $1.2 billion in 2021, a 43% bounce from 2020 and the primary time the corporate cleared one billion {dollars} in income in a calendar yr.
That $1.2 billion was earned on $6.2 billion in whole platform spend – inserting The Commerce Desk’s take fee a tad shy of 20%.
The Commerce Desk began flexing its scale muscle tissues round two years in the past, leaving different impartial DSPs behind when it comes to what it invests in QPS knowledge (queries per second, which grow to be a serious price issue when an organization bids on billions of impressions) and pushing again on IAB options that gave preferential remedy to Google merchandise.
Now a billion-dollar annual enterprise, The Commerce Desk has grow to be an much more assertive participant within the media panorama.
One instance of The Commerce Desk’s newfound boldness got here earlier this week, with the launch of OpenPath, a direct-to-publisher bidding resolution, and the announcement that the corporate would now not buy by Google’s Open Bidding product.
The Commerce Desk isn’t coming into the SSP market, CEO Jeff Inexperienced instructed buyers on Wednesday. It received’t construct yield administration and supply-chain optimization merchandise for the availability facet.
Inexperienced gave some colour on the catalyst for OpenPath.
“The arrival of header bidding was maybe the most effective factor that ever occurred to us as an organization and to the open web,” he mentioned on the earnings name.
Open Bidding was Google’s response to header bidding, a part of the corporate’s effort to quash the brand new know-how, together with the key Jedi Blue deal between Google and Fb that was outlined in allegations unsealed final month within the antitrust case towards Google. It actually is sensible that revelations of Google’s makes an attempt to covertly stamp out the open market dynamics of header bidding, with Google Open Bidding on the coronary heart of that effort, would spur The Commerce Desk to ditch an necessary provide supply.
Solimar, not a seaside resort
The Commerce Desk launched Solimar, its new DSP dashboard and knowledge market product, in July 2020. Solimar too is an indication of self-empowerment for The Commerce Desk. For one, it’s an evolution of the info market, with The Commerce Desk’s AI utilizing extra knowledge at its personal discretion.
Relatively than an advertiser setting upfront that it makes use of X contextual knowledge supplier and Y knowledge for attribution, The Commerce Desk purchases knowledge from throughout a broad vary of information sellers, primarily white-labeling the info beneath The Commerce Desk AI.
The Commerce Desk additionally fees a p.c of CPM by this knowledge market mannequin, so it may well apply comparatively costly knowledge to comparatively low-cost media (which usually an advertiser can’t do as a result of it may imply presenting their purchasers with media plans the place the vast majority of spend went to knowledge).
“For advertisers which have adopted Solimar, the common variety of knowledge parts utilized to every impression has doubled,” Inexperienced mentioned.
Koa, The Commerce Desk’s AI optimization product, is one other main flex. It makes use of a tactic referred to as bid shading, which helps the DSP keep away from over-bidding on first-price auctions, like when the second-highest bid is considerably decrease. Different DSPs use bid shading, however with Koa The Commerce Desk pockets a proportion of what it claims it saved the advertiser by not over-bidding.
If companies and advertisers see the outcomes, they’ll fork over one other level or two to The Commerce Desk, even when it’s a case of the DSP not spending their cash. And Koa adoption on Solimar is 90%, Inexperienced mentioned, almost double that of the legacy platform.
Oh, and The Commerce Desk will deprecate the legacy platform totally by the top of the yr, he added.
Inexperienced fields
The Commerce Desk is pushing in two classes that it hopes will outline its enterprise quickly sufficient.
One, in fact, is CTV. The class spent its third straight yr because the DSP’s greatest progress driver, Inexperienced mentioned. The variety of advertisers spending $100 million or extra on CTV advertisements in 2021 doubled from the yr earlier than.
The opposite “inexperienced subject open to us” is retail media, he mentioned.
In This fall, The Commerce Desk launched a DSP partnership with Walmart. Inside a separate cloud-based perform of The Commerce Desk’s platform, manufacturers may tie Walmart buy knowledge to programmatic IDs to create a closed-loop attribution system akin to the Amazon DSP. The Walmart DSP partnership began with about 20 manufacturers, he mentioned, and remains to be in a testing section.
The Commerce Desk additionally introduced a partnership this week with Walgreens. The retailer constructed a clear room on The Commerce Desk’s platform which connects advert impressions to gross sales in its pharmacy chain.
The Commerce Desk additionally deepened its relationships with the world’s largest manufacturers in 2021. The highest 25 model spenders on the platform collectively elevated their budgets by greater than 50% final yr – outpacing the 43% total progress. And that doesn’t rely the surge in dedicated advert {dollars} by huge manufacturers which have set contracts to spend in retail media.
