RTB House

RTB House is a Polish advertising-technology company that specializes in targeted advertising including retargeting and real-time bidding (RTB) strategies. Founded in 2013, it's headquartered in Warsaw, Poland, it has more than 1,000 employees in over 30 offices worldwide.

RTB House develops a demand-side platform (DSP) for autonomous personalized-marketing services that utilize proprietary deep learning algorithms based on neural networks. Since 2021, the company has contributed to the Privacy Sandbox initiative of building advertising solutions without the involvement of tracking cookies.

Since 2018, the company has been featured in seven consecutive editions of the “FT1000”, Financial Times and Statista's list of the fastest growing companies in Europe.

Founding
In 2012, an online marketing agency AdPilot established by entrepreneur Paweł Chodaczek was joined by capital market developer Robert Dyczkowski, advertising solutions developer Bartłomiej Romański, and social networks entrepreneur Daniel Surmacz.

Dyczkowski and Romański created a software for selling ads in the RTB model, where each pageview is auctioned and the winner's ad is immediately displayed on the publisher's website, on the provided advertising space. The proprietary solution included a DSP and algorithms enabling participation in auctions of advertising space in real time, as well as tools for optimization, recommendations, and dynamic production of banner ad design.

In May 2013, Chodaczek (leading investor), together with Dyczkowski (executive president), Romański (technical director), and Surmacz (operation director) founded a technology agency dubbed RTB House. For the initial capital, the founders provided their own capital of PLN 1.5 million (€0.35 million).

Betting on real-time bidding
When the RTB model became a breakthrough alternative to ineffective display ads, with displays bought in bulk, the tools developed by RTB House gave advertisers and publishers easily quantifiable benefits.

The proprietary DSP built by Romański to purchase and optimize online advertising in the real-time bidding model, was one of the first tools in the world to utilize the auction system for buying impressions of banners on websites and web portals, where ad exchange transactions happen in milliseconds. Banner ads emitted in the tool, through personalized retargeting are displayed in local and global advertising networks including the Google Display Network.

The company bases the appropriate display of advertising space on the retargeting model (through programmatic advertising), by selecting ads according to user behavior patterns. A user’s lack of purchase decision on the store's website is used in subsequently visited websites to attract the user back to the store. The mechanism is controlled by a learning and developing artificial intelligence (AI).

From 2013, RTB House has expanded its activities internationally. Within its first year, the company began sales in 33 European markets, including the UK and Ireland. In 2014, it achieved a turnover of €5 million. The company reached PLN 23 million in revenue and over PLN 1 million in profit. By the end of 2016, RTB House opened branches in Asia,   Africa, and Latin America. The number of employees increased to 160.

Leaning toward deep learning
In 2017, RTB House's retargeting solution was fully based on deep-learning algorithms in all of its products. Into the product recommendation engine, the company implemented deep learning components, with various scenarios for implementing business strategies: increasing sales, increasing traffic in e-shop applications, and supporting cross-sellings.

At the time, the company released a paper explaining how a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network could be used to describe a user of a particular website without human intervention, building an understanding of a user without requiring them to click on an advert.

Throughout 2018, RTB House expanded in Europe, Australia, and Asia,  followed by subsequent offices in the US. The company's revenue was €99.89 million. It had over 300 employees.

In 2019, the company changed its business model, by increasing its role as a development supporter and technology supplier for subsidiaries. A private equity fund Cinven bought a package of shares of RTB House from its founders, to further internationalize the company, given Cinven’s presence in the United States, and to continue investing in the RTB House’s technology. The number of employees grew to 575.

Cookie-less advertising
In 2020, 90 percent of RTB House's revenues came from outside Poland, the company ran 2,000 advertising campaigns in over 70 markets. At that time, Forbes listed it as the 10th largest Polish private investor abroad.

In late 2021, RTB House released a cookie-less contextual targeting solution Context AI. It scans 1.5 million articles an hour, allowing for the creation of contextual audiences of users interested in a given topic.

In 2022, RTB House consisted of over 1,000 specialists in over 30 locations around the world. RTB House supported over 3,000 campaigns for clients in EMEA, APAC, and the Americas. It suspended all operations in Russia. The value of the company's assets outside Poland amounted to PLN 2,021 million.

In late 2023, the company launched content-targeting generative AI tool based on generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) algorithms. During that time, a subsidiary search engine marketing agency SEM House was launched.

Mergers and acquisitions
In 2021, RTB House acquired a Polish content-marketing platform WhitePress, from its founders, a technology-focused investment fund Dirlango, and a CEE private-equity fund Innova Capital. Following the acquisition, WhitePress' revenues increased by 68 percent, to PLN 48.71 million. In late 2021, RTB House also invested in a Polish SaaS social-media management platform NapoleonCat.

In 2022, WhitePress was merged with a Polish startup Senuto specialized in SEO, big-data, and web analytics, with a venture fund investment of over PLN 8 million, and combined it with the previously purchased WhitePress. Senuto made its platform available in five European markets.

Also in 2022, RTB House launched a media buying startup Adlook that focuses on advertising for CPG brands.

Technology
RTB House’s technological facilities along with the R&D department are located in Poland. The created retargeting tool in a new analytical model was based on proprietary deep learning algorithms that predict users’ behavior and interests, and therefore are able to precisely segment customers’ profiles.

The technology is based on mathematical structures inspired by the biological activity of neurons in the human brain. Conversion rate algorithms collect and interpret not only data on the click-through rate (CTR) of individual ads but also take into account information on how offers are viewed, categories displayed, transaction finalization method, as well as preferred product search tactics. All variables are analyzed automatically, without human intervention.

In 2017, the company implemented deep learning algorithms in all its mechanisms, which made advertising campaigns more effective than traditional machine-learning methodologies by 41–50 percent. The personalized retargeting mechanism combines self-learning algorithms based on AI, with the image recognition function. They allow for a very accurate estimation of the CTR indicator. This translates into the ability to more accurately predict whether a user will click on an ad, resulting in a higher return on investment (ROI) for customers.

The company’s ad platform can identify the exact position of each user within the purchase funnel – deciding if they are closer to the awareness, consideration, or conversion stage – and recommend a specific and personalized approach for each type of user.

Research and development
In 2018, RTB House opened a research division AI Marketing Lab, for a yearly budget of $5 million, to research and develop mar-tech solutions for publishers and advertisers – an internal unit that will conduct research and development across a broad marketing area. Separate from the main R&D department, the new division focused on creating an environment for inventing and developing new martech solutions.

The Lab introduced Social Banners (improved recommendation mechanisms in personalized offers with gamification), Snippet Ads, with higher CTR of ads than static banners, and new product recommendations for individual shoppers based on their behaviors and preferences.

In 2019, RTB House launched the Creatives Lab, a team focused on improving the effectiveness of graphic designs that includes human input into generated campaign visuals.

Since 2021, RTB House has collaborated with ad-measurement and marketing suite Oracle Moat Measurement to provide transparency and insights into campaign performance. Oracle Moat’s advertisement analysis tools integrated into RTB House's deep learning-based advertising platform, and opened the opportunity for more precise non-cookie metrics.

Participation in the Privacy Sandbox
Since January 2020, RTB House has worked on making its platform compatible with assumptions of the Privacy Sandbox initiative, led by Google, dedicated to establishing conditions of the online advertising market without the use of cookies. In early 2021, the company was the first demand-side platform to successfully test and use the simulation of the proposal codenamed FLEDGE (First Locally-Executed Decision over Groups Experiment), developed in place of third-party cookies. It was executed through on-device ad auctions in a tool that served remarketing ads to custom audiences without the need for cross-site tracking of individuals.

Since late 2022, RTB House has been experimenting with the anonymous targeting solution through the FLEDGE API. It enables on-device auctions by the browser, to choose relevant ads from websites the user has previously visited.

The company published a white paper detailing the results of its early experiments with FLEDGE. The publication highlighted that low industry participation remained a roadblock for the Privacy Sandbox and that certain technical steps would need to be taken before it could be adopted as an industry standard. In April 2023, Google renamed FLEDGE to Protected Audience API. In June 2023, RTB House launched the first advertising network that uses the Protected Audience API.

Awards and accolades
Between 2018 and 2024, RTB House was featured by the Financial Times and Statista in the list “FT1000,” as one of the fastest growing companies in Europe, seven times in a row. In 2018, it was ranked 8th among “the fastest growing technology companies in Europe.”

In 2018, in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Central Europe ranking, RTB House was in the main category “The Fast 50,” it was ranked 32nd fastest developing tech company in the region. In 2019, RTB House ranked 37th in the ranking, while reaching revenue growth of 523% percent from 2015 to 2018.

At the International Business Awards competition, RTB House won several Stevie Awards,  including gold for the "Innovation of the Year – Business Products Industries." (2019), and gold for the "Marketing/Public Relations Solution" (2020).

In 2018, RTB House won the Big Innovation Award for the implementation of deep learning that improved the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, from the international group of experts of the Business Intelligence Group. The company won the AIconics Award from the international AI Community, for the Best Application of Artificial Intelligence for Sales & Marketing.

In 2020, the intelligence organization MarTech Breakthrough recognized RTB House with the AdTech Innovation Award. The company was featured on the list of Best Places to Work and Best Paying Companies in 2020 by Built In NYC. In 2021, the Business Intelligence Group named RTB House the winner of the Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards for its Full Funnel Marketing Solution.