iWorld
Criteo unveils commerce Max DSP and next-gen retailer monetization suite
Mumbai: Criteo (Nasdaq: CRTO), the commerce media company, today announced the general availability of its self-service demand-side platform (DSP), Commerce Max, giving brands and agencies a single point of entry to retail media inventory onsite and across premium publishers offsite. Complementing Commerce Max, Criteo is also expanding its retailer monetization solution suite, offering retailers the means to tap previously unattainable demand by paving the way for the integration of marketplace and in-store monetization technologies.
Retail media has proven extremely successful for retailers looking to grow additional revenue streams and brands and agencies looking to engage consumers actively in a buying mindset. Until now, however, fragmentation across the industry has held retailers, brands and agencies back from reaching their full potential with retail media.
“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,” said Criteo CEO Megan Clarken. “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.”
Driving Commerce at Scale
Commerce Max entered market testing in 2022 with leading consumer electronics retailer, Best Buy, and the world’s foremost media investment company, GroupM, as exclusive Alpha partner. Over this period, Commerce Max enrolled 10 retailers including Best Buy, Macy’s and Shipt. Retailers who have completed campaigns have more than doubled conversion rates on average when running both onsite and offsite advertising through the platform.
Industry Praise for Commerce Max
“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,” said Unilever club team shopper marketing lead Billy Dyer following another successful test with GroupM and Unilever in which the brand’s conversion rate rose by over 400 per cent.
“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.”
“Shipt is known for having a unique member community that is loyal to our platform, and when coupled with Criteo’s onsite and offsite products and enhanced personalization features in our full-funnel offering, advertisers have found it to drive an ever greater return for their ad spend,” said Shipt VP, CPG partnerships David Young.
“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,” said Mark Heitke, Director of Ad Products and Audience Strategy at Best Buy Ads. “The platform offers a variety of onsite and offsite capabilities, giving our brand partners even more options to reach our audiences in meaningful ways.”
Now in general availability, brands and agencies across the globe can use Commerce Max to access data and inventory across multiple retailers and marketplaces, finding valuable audiences on these sites and extending these audiences offsite. This is underpinned by closed-loop measurement, enabling advertisers to quickly and efficiently determine the effectiveness of campaigns and optimize accordingly.
Criteo is a leader and one of the first to bring digital measurement standards to retail media with Commerce Max. Criteo’s partnership with Integral Ad Science allows brands and agencies to measure viewability and invalid traffic on a retailer’s site across all ad formats, including native and sponsored products by 2024.
A Unified Approach for Retailers
The second component of today’s launch is the unveiling of Criteo’s retailer monetization solution suite. This suite marks the next phase in the development of Criteo’s core monetization technology, Commerce Yield, which will not only provide retailers and marketplaces with a complete media toolset but also serve commerce companies such as automakers, movie theatres, transportation services, airlines and more.
Commerce Yield combines Criteo’s former Retail Media Platform with several solutions derived from recent strategic acquisitions, including
Commerce Yield Marketplace: Through Criteo’s strategic acquisition of Mabaya, Commerce Yield Marketplace will help monetization officers integrate marketplace tactics and formats.
Commerce Yield In-Store: The powerful union of Brandcrush and Criteo’s in-store monetization technology, providing advertisers access to a wider range of offline inventory.
Commerce Yield Insights: Previously called Gradient, a cutting-edge suite of insight and data tools which provides digital-shelf insights to support enterprise-level retail media buys.
Criteo’s leadership team will unveil more details during a hosted event today, 12 September at 12p.m. Eastern Time. To watch the broadcast, click here.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
