Adhese

Company Details

Category

MarTech

Headquarters

Ghent, Belgium

Data Hosting

EU Selectable

Open Source

No

Pricing

paid

Website

https://adhese.eu

About Adhese

Retailers, publishers, and consumer-facing organisations sit on enormously valuable assets — first-party data, owned digital touchpoints, and direct customer relationships — yet most struggle to monetise them effectively. The ad tech landscape forces media owners to stitch together fragmented vendor stacks, ceding control of their data and customer relationships to big-tech platforms in the process. Tightening GDPR enforcement and the deprecation of third-party cookies make this dependency increasingly untenable. Adhese solves this by providing a single, unified platform to build and operate a credible, profitable media business — without giving up control. Mid-to-large retailers, publishers, and consumer-facing organisations (logistics, travel, telecoms, loyalty programmes) seeking to monetise their own data and digital inventory without dependency on big-tech intermediaries. Clients include Ahold Delhaize, Salling Group (Denmark's largest retailer), PostNL and Colruyt Group. One platform covers onsite, in-app, in-store DOOH, and offsite advertising — no multi-vendor stitching required. Unlike big-tech alternatives, Adhese never acts as a marketplace or sells client data; first-party data, inventory decisions, and advertiser relationships stay entirely with the media owner. The platform supports cookieless targeting natively — contextual, audience-group, and data clean room — including consentless advertising for users who withhold consent, with no reliance on cookies or unique user identifiers. A white-labeled self-service portal lets advertisers book and manage campaigns independently. The open architecture integrates with existing CRM, CDP/DMP, DOOH CMS, Prebid, OpenRTB, and direct DSP/SSP connections via SDKs, APIs, and ad tags — no vendor lock-in, adoptable incrementally. Deployment and data residency Adhese is headquartered in Gentbrugge, Belgium, with offices in Belgium and Poland, and has over 20 years of experience in (retail) media. The platform is built for European privacy standards and deployable worldwide. Each client runs as an independent platform instance with its own database and domains — data cannot flow between instances. Adhese does not log personally identifiable information (PII) even when consent is given. Direct channels never leave the client's environment; programmatic channels connect only through private deals or OpenRTB-enabled partners chosen by the retailer. Ahold Delhaize holds a minority stake, providing retail media expertise and growth capital while contractual Chinese walls ensure full data separation and operational independence for all clients. How Adhese compares to non-European alternatives The core problem with US-origin platforms in European contexts is structural: they were built for a regulatory environment where personal data flows freely, consent is assumed, and identity-based targeting is the default. None of those conditions hold in Europe. Platforms such as Zitcha and Kevel offer flexible ad infrastructure, but their architecture assumes data portability models that sit in tension with GDPR — meaning European retailers must build compliance guardrails on top of a stack not designed for them, and route data through infrastructure governed by non-European legal frameworks. Criteo, while present in Europe, is a Nasdaq-listed US entity whose revenue-share model requires sharing inventory and audience data with the platform — directly at odds with the data sovereignty principle that European retailers and regulators increasingly demand. Adhese is governed by European law, built privacy-first from the ground up, and gives clients complete ownership of their data. This is not a compliance add-on — it is the architecture. European retail media ad spend is projected to reach €31BN by 2028 (IAB Europe, Retail Media Hub) — Adhese is the independent European alternative purpose-built to capture it.