Criteo wants retailers and brands to pool their data to stand a better chance of pulling customers out of the Amazon ecosystem

Criteo is encouraging retailers, publishers and brands to pool their data together to stand a better chance of getting new and existing customers to purchase their products outside the Amazon ecosystem. The idea is that with more accurate data covering consumers’ offline and online shopping habits, retailers and brands can better target ads at people who are most likely to make purchases.

The Criteo Commerce Marketing Ecosystem, as it will be called, will give its clients the option to share anonymized, or “hashed,” aggregated data sets of customer email addresses or other customer relationship management (CRM) data, plus purchase and other “event” information from their physical stores, websites and apps.  Criteo says it doesn’t store any personal data that allows for individuals to be identified.

Those clients will then have the ability to join a data pool with Criteo’s other opted-in customers to receive data back that could soon expand their ad targeting options, beyond the people who have previously visited their websites. Criteo is looking to build a product similar to Facebook’s “Lookalike Audiences,” for example, to be able to segment groups of potential customers who have shown interest in similar products and product categories as their existing customer base.

Criteo says, in the more immediate term, the new platform will also help a handbag brand, for example, better understand if an ad it served to a consumer online for a certain product contributed to that person purchasing that item on a department store’s website, app or in a brick-and-mortar location—cross-device, anonymized data they may not have had access to before on their own.

The Commerce Marketing Ecosystem is currently in development.  Criteo’s executives said they expect to share more details about the platform, plus the company’s ambitions to be more than just a retargeting firm during its next quarterly earnings call, which is planned for Aug. 2.

Criteo is one of the two standout performers in the public ad tech market, alongside The Trade Desk, a demand-side platform that made its debut on the stock market last September.

Criteo reported revenue of $517 million in the quarter ended March 31, a 30% increase from a year earlier.

Source: Wall Street Journal