Commerce Media Pull Brands Closer to Digital Shoppers: Criteo’s Brian Gleason

Well first off, we're incredibly excited about Cannes. We can't wait to see everybody in person just six weeks away. So it'll be nice to see the industry come back together. In terms of commerce media, we can start with a basic definition: commerce is the act of buying and selling and media is mass communication. If you put those together, you're really talking about this idea that we've seen over the last 10 to 15 years of transactions in a digital environment. And it started off predominantly with DTC (direct-to-consumer) brands, who when digital came to the forefront had the opportunity to go out and bring their store to that environment. At Criteo, we have nearly 22,000 clients who fit that bill. And then recently we've seen that expand and that comes on the media side of that. And that came with the evolution of retail media. Retail media is a $100 billion business and continues to scale with massive growth. And if you think about the why and what that is, retailers like Target have this tremendous environment where they invite consumers into their store every day online. And that engagement point between the consumer and the brand- whether it be Unilever, Kimberly-Clark, Johnson & Johnson- suddenly they're able to position themselves at the point of purchase. Which is an amazing opportunity for the brand and for the consumer in the discovery phase. The output of that is this tremendous measurement that we have that we refer to as 'closed loop'. But it gives the brand the ability to see exactly how their ads perform in that environment. They can see what percentage of the digital shelf they have, which is just amazing. And as that evolves, you can see for the retailer, suddenly they had these incurred costs of being able to figure out how to do e-commerce, how to ship. And the media aspect of that gives them an amazing ability to monetize that opportunity and become media owners. And that's a component of what commerce media is, but not the whole. You can add in other subsets to that, whether that be travel, whether that be delivery services and a critical, we're fortunate to work with a lot of brands that fall into each of those portfolios. So if I put it in context, at Criteo, when you're thinking about that concept of the transaction or the act of buying and selling, we see nearly a trillion dollars of actual transactions a year. It's roughly three times the size of Amazon. So there's this massive marketplace that's just beginning to boom and explode, and it's coming at the exact right time. I think it's actually the next wave of growth that we're seeing around digital, and you're starting to see the impact of that. So we're just in the middle of it. We're just starting to see retailers come in like Target, Best Buy, Walgreens and others, and it's amazing to see how each one of these continue to innovate, and the brands take advantage of it.

Sure, well, I put Criteo at the center in a few ways. For us, there's two major ambitions that we have at Criteo. The first is to be the ad stack for retail media, which we're well underway. We have over 100 retailers relying on our platform globally. But if I think about where we play in the connectivity that we provide, there's three main entry points. One is what I call the supply. Those are the retailers, and the retailers now have this monetization opportunity, but that takes a skillset that not many of them have had. It's a brand-new business for them, so to come in and understand how not to disrupt the customer experience, how to identify which of the appropriate ad placements to put on their site? How to figure out how to do everything from traffic delivery, and that doesn't even take into account the ad sales portion of it? But all of a sudden that's a massive new influx of valuable media inventory that comes into the marketplace. The second side of that is the buy side. So there's two components of that. One is the agencies, the agencies are arbiters of brand money, they have to be the best and the brightest at figuring out how to place those dollars and the best way to measure them. Suddenly, they have this new vehicle with retail media to be able to place those dollars. And the great thing for an agency in that space. It started off with search, which is what we call 'product listing ads'. And that was great because that's someone who's right at the discovery phase. They're typing in what they want to buy, and I can place my brand in that environment. The second is then taking that and the ability to go offsite. So, to take those audiences and extend them beyond the retailer sites out into the open web. And that's the first time that really happened to have this massive opportunity outside of the walled gardens. And the third one is the brand. For the brand in this environment. Everything that a brand is looking for is: how do I get into that discovery point? And if you look at the massive disruption we have now in terms of platforms and the amount of money we spend on Google, Meta and Amazon compared to the time spent on the open web, there's a massive disparity. But now I have this vehicle with commerce media that gives me the measurement that I may have gotten or the performance metrics from those platforms. But suddenly now I can do it across the open web, and that's a significant opportunity that we're just seeing continue to explode.

It almost feels like we're back 15, 16 years ago when digital started coming about. When digital started coming to the forefront, it was this amazing opportunity for brands who couldn't participate on television or print because they didn't have the budget to be able to get into that arena. I think then we saw the next wave when we saw programmatic start to come to the forefront, probably in 2008 or 2009. The next evolution was search that really took off. And I think we're at that next wave, if you will, of this digital ecosystem that's really unlocking the power of technology and the ability to connect with people because that's where we spend our time. If you think about the time that we spend every day, it's online and in that environment, I live in a world, and I'm sure you do. And a lot of people watching do as well, I'm in a see-click-buy environment, I want to be able to see it, discover it, click it and buy it all in one ecosystem. And we're seeing that in front of our eyes and I think it's just the beginning of that, how that evolves is gonna be incredibly impressive. And I'm anxious to see the players who participate, the partners that we have, and my hope is certainly that Criteo's in the center of it.

I honestly can't wait to be sitting at JFK terminal to see all of my colleagues line up to get on that flight to head over to Cannes. And to know that we've got a week together to be able to focus on these big issues, just the camaraderie and the talent that we have in our business. I think we've all felt that we haven't had that connection over the last two years. But to be able to get out and actually share those ideas, see partners, see friends. And focus on things like commerce, media, connected, television, what the work that we see around content creation, we've got a lot of innovation taking place in our business right now. And I think Cannes is gonna be a place where we celebrate the great work, and we also focus on what we're gonna be doing moving forward. So, really looking forward to it.