There’s one Koddi value that has always particularly resonated with me as part of the product team: ‘Get the experience right, together.’ The ‘together’ part doesn’t just refer to a collaborative internal culture– it speaks to the way we build alongside our customers. Rather than hewing to a pre-determined, Koddi-led vision for our products, our roadmap is a living document that we co-create with our customers and partners.
As we build a new vision for all commerce media in 2025, there’s one thing we know for sure: no network can follow a “one size fits all” approach. We have to consider various market trends, individual customer needs, and our own inspiration for what commerce media can become.
Last year, Koddi navigated that tension by building for the future, with AI quality scoring improvements, and for our partners’ needs right now, with new reporting views that help them better understand and innovate within their programs. I’ll cover a few more releases I’m especially proud of in this article.
But we’re accelerating even further as we head into 2025. We aren’t just getting the experience right for our customers today, but for the future of commerce media as a whole. Let’s dive in.
2024: The year of balance
Looking back at 2024, there are quite a few things to highlight – particularly in terms of how we struck a balance between addressing direct customer needs and building for the future.
- Developed new AI/ML advancements: We upgraded our AI/ML capabilities across our products in a number of areas, launching ads quality scoring, automated bidding, budget recommendations, and more. A highlight: we rolled out a set of new real-time ads quality prediction techniques across our partners and saw significant increases in CTR and revenue. One network saw their home page CTR increase by 20%!
- Offered new reporting insights: We rolled out a set of tools for our Koddi Ads customers to better understand what’s happening with their ads businesses. Specifically, we launched three new views:
- Network insights, a view that lets commerce media programs understand macro trends across their program for key metrics like total impressions, budget utilization, and ROAS.
- Pacing reports, a view that helps commerce companies identify campaigns at risk of under-delivering, and suggests actions they can take to get them back on track.
- Inventory insights, a view that allows commerce companies identify pockets of under-monetized ads supply and top advertisers they should pitch to grow.
- Expanded inventory and advertiser demand: We helped our customers get connected to more sources of supply and demand than ever. In total, we launched 11 new media integrations in 2024 for Koddi Demand and Koddi Ads, including a handful of APAC online travel agencies (OTAs) to drive growth for our travel advertisers, as well as initial off-site integrations with Google DV360, TTD, and more to give our commerce media customers access to simple self-serve off-site experiences.
- Enhanced platform flexibility: We opened Koddi Demand beyond travel, giving brands and their franchisees across verticals access to simple yet powerful media management tools, and the ability to buy across 10+ channels from a single interface. Our first vertical outside of travel was home services, where we helped a major home services brand stand up a self-serve media management platform for their franchisees.
- Deployed again, and again, and again: We upgraded our front-end development stacks across the company and standardized on a new, clean React stack. As part of this, we also separated our front-end and back-end release cycles. Our front-ends teams now release, on average, eight times per week.
2025: Where we’re headed
In 2025, “getting the experience right, together” means we’re investing in building a commerce media platform that allows every retailer, auto dealer, delivery service, travel company, financial platform, and beyond to build the best-performing media network possible. We believe that means focusing on the following themes:
- Taking our AI/ML capabilities even further. In 2025, we’ll continue to push the boundaries of AI/ML to empower commerce media networks & advertisers with smarter, more impactful tools. We’ll upgrade our ads quality and automated bidding systems to drive better results for advertisers, more relevance for consumers, and more revenue for commerce media networks. We’ll also give advertisers unparalleled visibility into the impact of their decisions: how many more clicks will a 10% bid increase drive? How many more orders can a restaurant expect if they increase their budget by 25%? These investments turn complex campaign optimization into intuitive, data-driven action.
- Delivering as much ads demand to commerce media networks as possible. Much of the risk and effort involved in running a successful commerce media program comes from securing and maintaining ads budgets. A huge part of 2025 is focused on making it as easy to attract ads demand. The Koddi Ads UI offers a powerful white-label platform to drive direct demand, and 2025 will bring upgrades across the board designed to tailor the UI to each unique advertiser base: how can we provide the ideal experience for both a small restaurant and a sophisticated CPG ads agency? Additionally, our Koddi SSP connects custom commerce media inventory to scaled demand through programmatic partners. With new integrations on the horizon, we’re helping commerce media networks unlock greater ad revenue with less effort.
- Enabling seamless off-site activation. Off-site activation is critical for advertisers to extend their reach, but the current process is anything but simple. In 2025, we’re focused on eliminating friction by refining integrations with key platforms like Meta, Google Shopping, DV360 and The Trade Desk. Our goal is to make off-site campaign creation as smooth and intuitive as on-site, with a particular focus on audience synchronization—a part of the campaign creation flow that is still hugely manual. By streamlining workflows and reducing back-and-forth, we’ll deliver a truly self-serve solution that enables advertisers to activate off-site campaigns seamlessly, driving better results with less effort.
- Maximizing commerce media network revenue and yield. It is our firm belief that most commerce media programs still have significant gas in their on-site ‘tanks’, not to mention the incremental opportunity off-site presents. In 2025, we’ll continue to equip commerce media networks with the tools to accelerate. Our focus is on delivering powerful, intuitive solutions that make managing and optimizing ad programs straightforward. A Koddi customer in Q4 of 2025 could use our tools to identify a slice of traffic where they’d like to adjust the floor price and use our UI to launch that change as an experiment. Our bid capabilities (see #1 above) will help estimate the impact of that change before it’s made, and our measurement suite will give real-time readouts on experiment performance, including indicating when results are statistically significant.
- Helping our customers unlock the full potential of commerce media measurement. Measurement is a huge part of what makes commerce media appealing to advertisers, but it also remains a large source of frustration. In 2024, we introduced managed-service incrementality testing and reporting for all our customers. In 2025, we’re making that testing self-serve, complete with real-time experiment reporting and statistical significance insights to guide decision-making. Beyond incrementality, we’ll explore advanced modeling techniques and expand our measurement capabilities to integrate directly with advertisers’ media mix modeling. These enhancements will give commerce media networks the tools to quantify impact, optimize performance, and elevate commerce media’s role in their advertisers’ broader marketing strategies.
By the way: we’ll be growing our teams significantly in the first half of this year to help us accelerate. If building the best commerce media software possible sounds like fun, we’re hiring!
What’s next
There’s a lot in store for 2025, both for Koddi and our customers, as well as the commerce media landscape at large. Commerce media is growing rapidly for a reason– it’s an effective channel with loads of potential. I’ve outlined just a few big bets our team is making that will benefit our customers today and the market at large, but the opportunities are endless.
To learn more about our vision, and take a peak at our full detailed roadmap, feel free to contact us here.
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