Criteo vs Scibids Comparison: Everything You Need to Know Before Choosing

Scibids develops customisable artificial intelligence that improves return on investment across addressable paid media bought programmatically through demand-side platforms. It occupies a specific and technical niche in the advertising technology stack: rather than being a buying platform itself, it sits on top of the DSPs an advertiser already uses — the systems through which programmatic display, video, audio and connected television inventory is purchased — and takes over the bidding decisions those platforms make. The rationale is that native DSP optimisation is built to serve a broad market and optimises toward generic proxies such as clicks or viewable impressions, whereas an individual advertiser cares about a specific business outcome and has data the DSP cannot see. The platform ingests an advertiser's own performance data, including conversions, revenue, offline outcomes and custom key performance indicators, and builds bespoke algorithmic models per campaign rather than applying a single generalised model. Those models then set bids at a granular level across the many thousands of combinations of inventory, audience, placement, time and device that a campaign encounters, adjusting continuously as results accumulate. Because decisions are executed through the DSP's own APIs, the advertiser retains its existing buying relationships, contracts and inventory access rather than migrating to a new platform. Customisation extends to the objective function itself, so a campaign can be optimised toward profit margin, lifetime value, incremental reach or a blended goal rather than a simple cost-per-action target. Transparency is emphasised, with reporting that explains how spend was allocated and what the algorithm did, addressing the black-box objection that impedes adoption of automated bidding. Scibids is used by large advertisers, media agencies and trading desks running substantial programmatic budgets, where even modest efficiency gains represent significant sums. Pricing is quote-based and typically structured as a share of managed media spend, with a free trial available and no free version.