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Topsort, a four-year-old advertising tech startup, announced three new ad products today aimed at simplifying retail media ad buying.
The products include a sponsored listing-focused ad exchange called Toppie, a suite of measurement tools called Top Optimizer, and a tool for digitizing in-store consumer data called In-Store Journey. The tools build on Topsort’s retail media infrastructure, which companies use to sell ads on their ecommerce websites and around the web.
For Regina Ye, Topsort co-founder and chief executive officer, these three tools also aim to answer a broader question that the company’s engineers have been ruminating on—and building a technological solution to—since founding Topsort in 2021 as a competitor to companies like Criteo, Koddi, and Publicis-owned Epsilon.
“With all the tech that’s available these days, does it really unlock a different future?” Ye asked. “What does it really mean, [and] what’s the implication for retail media?”
The company is revealing the products this week at its first Topsort Developer Day, a three-day conference in Palo Alto, Calif., which Ye said it plans to host annually. The event includes a keynote from Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin Roth and panels focused on retail media tech, product and measurement standardization, and AI. Companies including Kevel, Google, Skai, Nvidia, Albertsons, and DoorDash will be represented onstage.
Solving retail media’s tech problem
The Topsort Developer Day tagline, “it’s not a media problem, it’s a tech problem,” tees up Topsort’s AI-powered product launches, promising to “break down Big Tech’s barriers and put product-driven innovation into the hands of the builders.”
Toppie, the new ad exchange and demand-side platform, lets advertisers buy sponsored listing ads for the same SKUs across multiple retail media networks, Ye explained. The logistical challenge of buying across many different retail media networks is one of the major hurdles that Toppie aims to solve. Topsort has been testing the tool with DoorDash.
Brands and agencies have been testing the exchange with positive results, Ye said. In a pilot, electronics brand LG sold out of all its regional inventory after buying ads through Toppie and had to pause the campaign until it could restock.
With Top Optimizer, Topsort is touting its machine learning tech as a solution for commerce media networks looking to improve the performance and reliability of their onsite ads. By layering the AI piece on top of the retailer or ecommerce company’s ad platform, Top Optimizer can handle things like pacing, prediction, and live forecasting, Ye said. It can also set up automated messaging that will alert the relevant parties as metrics change.
“A lot of these different endpoints bring some science to building an ad business,” Ye said. “Because sometimes it’s hard to know if it’s working.”
Mapping in-store movements
Topsort’s In-Store Journey tool digitizes fully anonymized data collected through Bluetooth-connected beacons that many retailers already have installed inside their physical stores. It then runs the data through an AI model and overlays it with other signals, like digital ads or sales data, to get a better understanding of how shoppers are interacting with products in-store.
Capitalizing on that in-store first-party data could give retailers a much-needed leg up against Amazon, too, Ye noted.
“We’re committed to enabling retailers to leverage industry-best technology to challenge big tech’s dominance,” Francisco Larrain, the cofounder and chief technology officer of Topsort, said in a statement. “In-Store Journey is a clear example of this.”
