Koddi announced a partnership with GIPHY on July 16, 2026, that lets brands run targeted advertising across GIFs, stickers, reactions and search experiences on a platform that reaches more than 1 billion users a day. The arrangement folds in LiveRamp's identity and audience layer, and it marks another step in the migration of commerce media away from retailer websites and into surfaces built for everyday digital conversation.

The Fort Worth, Texas company framed the deal as a way to reach people in what it called moments of digital self-expression, the sending of an animated reaction inside a chat rather than the browsing of a product catalog. According to Koddi, the partnership combines its commerce media technology, LiveRamp's identity and audience capabilities and GIPHY's advertising platform, with the stated aim of engaging consumers as they search and share content. GIPHY, founded in 2013 and acquired by Shutterstock in 2023, serves more than 10 billion pieces of short-form content every day, a volume that defines the scale of the inventory now being opened to commerce media buyers.

The announcement carries no financial terms, no enforcement dimension and no disclosed campaign commitments. What it does signal is a structural bet: that the infrastructure built to monetize grocery apps, travel booking sites and delivery marketplaces can be pointed at a communication platform whose currency is the reaction GIF, not the shopping cart.

What the partnership actually connects

Three distinct layers sit inside the arrangement, and separating them clarifies what is new.

Koddi supplies the commerce media technology. The company runs a platform built on first-party data and what it describes as agentic decisioning, with more than a decade of experience processing billions in media spend. Its role here is the machinery that manages campaigns, serves ads and optimizes performance. According to Koddi, that infrastructure is what allows an organization like GIPHY to run an advertising business at scale rather than assembling the tooling itself.

LiveRamp provides the identity and audience layer. The company operates a data collaboration platform anchored by its RampID pseudonymized identifier system, which matches records across advertisers, publishers and data partners without exposing individual-level data. LiveRamp's network spans more than 900 partners, and its clean room architecture has become a recurring measurement backbone across the commerce media sector. In the GIPHY context, that layer is what would let a brand define an audience and connect exposure to outcomes without either side handing over raw customer files.

GIPHY brings the surface and the reach. The platform's advertising business, GIPHY Ads, sits atop a daily user base exceeding 1 billion and a content delivery volume above 10 billion short-form assets each day. The company positions its format as advertising that people share rather than merely see, a distinction that separates a sponsored GIF passed between friends from a display banner served against a page.

Eric Brackmann, VP of Commerce Media at Koddi, described the logic in terms of consumer behavior. "Consumers don't just interact with brands when they're shopping. They connect with them while they're searching and sharing," he said, adding that the partnership brings commerce media capabilities to those moments while giving GIPHY the foundation to scale and monetize its advertising business.

For GIPHY, the framing centered on infrastructure rather than reach. Kevin Hein, Chief Growth Officer at GIPHY, said the company is focused on delivering more value to advertisers while building a scalable foundation for long-term growth. According to Hein, Koddi's technology helps streamline campaign activation, improve performance and build the infrastructure needed to support the next phase of the advertising business.

Why the format matters

Traditional commerce media lives close to a transaction. A sponsored product appears while a shopper searches a retailer's site; a purchase follows, or it does not, and the sale can be measured against the exposure. The GIPHY surface breaks that adjacency. A person sending a sticker inside a messaging thread is not shopping in any conventional sense, which raises an immediate question the announcement does not resolve: how a reaction shared between two people converts into a measurable advertising outcome.

That gap is precisely where the LiveRamp layer earns its place. Attribution on a conversational surface cannot rely on a click through a product feed the way a retailer's onsite placement can. It requires an identity graph capable of connecting an exposure on one platform to a downstream action somewhere else, inside a privacy-safe environment. Whether that connection holds up on a surface as diffuse as GIF sharing is a matter the partnership will have to demonstrate in practice rather than assert.

The wider migration of commerce media

The GIPHY deal is not an isolated experiment. It fits a pattern that PPC Land has tracked across the past year, in which commerce media has pushed steadily outward from its retail origins toward any organization holding an owned digital audience.

The direction of that expansion has been visible for months. Commerce media maturity still lags across most industries despite a market projected to exceed $1.3 trillion by 2030, according to a Koddi-commissioned benchmark study conducted by Forrester Consulting across 788 senior decision-makers, which found that only 13 percent of organizations qualified as trailblazers while 49 percent remained nascent. Payment networks have entered the same territory: Mastercard launched a commerce media network positioned against a $100 billion market opportunity, and PayPal Ads has staked out cross-merchant visibility spanning 30 percent of global commerce transactions across 30 million merchants and 400 million consumers. Delivery has moved the same way, with DoorDash Ads repositioning as a global commerce media platform reaching 400,000 advertisers on the back of its Wolt and Deliveroo acquisitions.

Against that backdrop, a GIF platform is simply the next surface. The common thread is not the vertical but the asset: a large, engaged, first-party audience whose owner wants to build an advertising business without constructing the technology stack from scratch. Koddi's pitch is that it supplies exactly that stack, and the company has been assembling the pieces methodically. Koddi brought its commerce media network inside Google's Search Ads 360 in June 2026, letting advertisers activate and measure campaigns across its retailer ecosystem inside existing SA360 workflows, an integration confirmed by Nicholas Ward, president and co-founder of Koddi.

A supply-side push already in motion

The GIPHY partnership also extends a supply-side strategy Koddi has been building through direct platform integrations. The Trade Desk connected to Koddi's commerce media platform to enable programmatic buying of onsite retail media inventory in October 2025, with Gopuff as the launch partner. Months later, Wolt Ads opened its in-app inventory to programmatic buyers through the Koddi SSP in Germany, a deal that marked Koddi's first active move into the German commerce media market beyond its travel work. Koddi's own research, cited in that coverage, found that more than 95 percent of media buyers said they were open to purchasing onsite retail media programmatically, a figure the company reads as evidence of latent demand for the kind of access these integrations create.

Whether GIPHY inventory ever flows through a comparable programmatic pipe is not addressed in the announcement. The partnership as described sits closer to campaign activation and measurement than to open programmatic access, and Koddi did not disclose a timeline for any further stage.

LiveRamp's expanding role as connective tissue

The presence of LiveRamp in the deal is unremarkable precisely because the company has become near-ubiquitous as the measurement and identity layer beneath commerce media. Its recent trajectory shows how deeply that role has embedded.

LiveRamp enabled retail media networks to measure Meta campaign performance against first-party sales data through its Clean Room on October 23, 2025, positioning itself as a neutral intermediary that provides measurement without competing for advertising dollars. The company has also been layering artificial intelligence into that infrastructure: LiveRamp introduced agentic AI orchestration and natural-language segmentation tools on October 1, 2025, giving autonomous agents governed access to its identity, segmentation, activation, measurement and clean room capabilities.

Its ownership picture has since shifted in a way that matters to every network relying on it. Publicis agreed to acquire LiveRamp for $2.5 billion in an agentic AI data play, a transaction that has prompted agencies and media owners to re-examine whether to route campaigns through a platform now owned by a holding company competitor. For a partnership like the GIPHY deal, LiveRamp's neutrality is part of the value proposition, and how that neutrality is preserved under new ownership remains an open thread the sector is watching.

The agentic backdrop

The timing also sits against a broader reorientation toward AI-mediated commerce that data from Koddi has helped quantify. In research finding that visibility inside AI-generated shortlists is becoming commerce media's next paid placement battle, the company reported that 84 percent of commerce media leaders said they would invest in opportunities to increase brand visibility inside AI-generated answers and recommendations, while 70 percent already use AI agents to analyze data and automate campaign execution. That study, titled The State of Agentic Commerce, was announced on June 10, 2026, and drew on fieldwork across 750 consumers and 150 senior commerce media professionals in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany.

The GIPHY partnership does not touch AI shortlists directly. But it reflects the same underlying premise animating that research: that commerce media is no longer confined to the retail shelf, and that the surfaces where consumers spend attention, whether an AI assistant's recommendation or a shared reaction GIF, are all being evaluated as monetizable inventory.

What is left unstated

Several details a marketer would want are absent from the announcement, and their absence is worth marking plainly. No pricing model, no ad formats beyond the general categories of GIFs, stickers, reactions and search, no measurement benchmarks, and no launch date for advertiser availability were disclosed. The descriptive account of how the three platforms work together came from the companies rather than from independent testing, and no early campaign results were provided.

The scale figures are real and come from the parties themselves: more than 1 billion daily users and more than 10 billion pieces of short-form content served each day. What those numbers mean for advertising performance on a conversational surface is the question the partnership sets out to answer rather than one it has already resolved. For the marketing community, the significance lies less in this single deal than in what it confirms: the technology stack behind retail media has become portable enough to be pointed at almost any owned audience, and the definition of commerce media inventory keeps widening to match.

Timeline

  • 2013: GIPHY founded as a visual communication platform for GIFs, clips and stickers
  • 2023: Shutterstock acquires GIPHY
  • October 1, 2025: LiveRamp launches agentic AI orchestration and natural-language segmentation tools
  • October 9, 2025: The Trade Desk connects to Koddi's commerce media platform for programmatic onsite retail inventory, with Gopuff as launch partner
  • October 23, 2025: LiveRamp enables retail media networks to measure Meta campaign performance through its Clean Room
  • November 19, 2025: Koddi releases its Forrester-conducted commerce media benchmark study
  • May 2026: Wolt Ads opens in-app inventory to programmatic buyers through the Koddi SSP in Germany
  • June 10, 2026: Koddi announces The State of Agentic Commerce report
  • June 17, 2026: Koddi integrates its commerce media network inside Google's Search Ads 360
  • July 16, 2026: Koddi announces the GIPHY and LiveRamp partnership for targeted advertising across GIFs, stickers, reactions and search

Summary

Who: Koddi, a commerce media technology company headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, in partnership with GIPHY, the GIF and sticker platform founded in 2013 and owned by Shutterstock since 2023, with LiveRamp providing identity and audience capabilities. Named spokespeople were Eric Brackmann, VP of Commerce Media at Koddi, and Kevin Hein, Chief Growth Officer at GIPHY.

What: A partnership enabling brands to run targeted advertising across GIFs, stickers, reactions and search experiences on GIPHY, combining Koddi's campaign infrastructure, LiveRamp's identity layer and GIPHY's advertising platform. No pricing, formats beyond those categories, measurement benchmarks or advertiser launch date were disclosed.

When: Announced July 16, 2026.

Where: GIPHY's platform, which reaches more than 1 billion users daily and serves more than 10 billion pieces of short-form content each day; Koddi is based in Fort Worth, Texas.

Why: The deal extends commerce media beyond its retail origins onto a conversational surface, giving GIPHY a technology stack to scale and monetize GIPHY Ads while giving brands a way to reach consumers in moments of digital self-expression. It fits a broader migration, tracked by PPC Land, in which payment networks, delivery marketplaces and now content platforms adopt commerce media infrastructure built for owned first-party audiences.