Commerce Media Ready To Explode: GroupM's Gleason Joins Criteo

Last week was big news, at least for me, after spending a decade in Group working with teams and building a lot of our brands, and most recently as the global chief commercial officer. I'm moving over to Criteo as of April 1 and will be joining as the global chief revenue officer. So, incredibly excited to join Megan and the team. I'm ready to get to work.

It's interesting and I'm fortunate in the respect that I was able to see and deal with so many emerging areas over the last 10 years, whether we connected television and programmatic when we first kicked it off, influencer. But looking on the horizon, there's no bigger opportunity for the entire ecosystem, whether it's brands, retailers, suppliers, agencies, everyone is looking and understands the growth potential of commerce media. And I've had the opportunity to work closely with Criteo, or at least know them for at least 5 to 6 years, and I think they pioneered shopper engagement dating back nearly 15, 16 years ago. And they've been the leader at it, and over the last two years since Megan's joined, they've done a phenomenal job of transitioning and I think when I had the opportunity to get closer to the organization, the thing that intrigued me was three main areas of massive potential. The first is shopper engagement, and that was the bread and butter for Criteo and still is today. They understand intent and they understand shopper behavior and they understand the ecosystem and they have 22,000 clients that are relying on that today and that number continues to grow. The second is the most recent announcement that they're acquiring IponWeb, and that really got my attention because that provides connectivity. IponWeb has been really the plumbing for much of our ecosystem and bringing that on board allows access to that shopper data, the shopper engagement, intent that we see. And the last one is just growth. If I think about growth, whether it be the retail media side, whether it be growth for brands, whether it be growth for the monetization opportunity for retailers, if you put those three things together, that's top of mind of everyone. And spending time at the agency over the last again 10 years, we're all looking to tap into it, but there hasn't been an easy way. And I still think there's some work ahead but Criteo in the commerce platform is certainly well positioned to open up that opportunity and do for the open web much what Amazon has done within their environment.

It's a great question Andy, and I think when I look to it is if you think about shopper media, right, the idea is digitalization allowed us to bring our storefront online and that's for us, we've seen as the pandemic hit over the last two years, such a tailwind to be able to push retailers to do that. And so when you open up your storefront online, that doesn't mean that people are gonna come into your store. So the first thing is to understand, okay great, how do I bring people in, that's the engagement aspect of it. And that's what Criteo has done since I think 2006, 2005. The second part to that though is how do brands tap into that data, because for brands it's understanding the intent of the consumers, how do they bring their brands into the store and how they place them in front of the attention at the appropriate time. And I think that's the interesting thing that Todd Parsons and the team has done around the data aspect of Criteo. The third is unique, Criteo has been predominantly focused on brand direct and while they focused on agency, it hasn't been the center of gravity, I think IponWeb allows that which is the connectivity. So regardless of your DSP that you use, IponWeb allows open access. So suddenly I have this treasure trove of shopper engagement data, I've got connectivity to virtually any DSP. And the next thing that I think that you alluded to is now, how do I engage with those consumers? And that's where we get into shoppable ads, right? But shoppable ads don't work without the others. The shoppable ad if it's not in the right place and it's not presented in the right time or the right format can do the complete opposite which is turn consumer sentiment against. But in the appropriate time at the appropriate audience, it's a gold mine for both the consumer and in the discovery phase, but also for the brand because they're engaging and they're finding consumers to bring into their store.

So, retail media has been again, top of mind for everyone and I think we saw it first with Amazon, with Walmart, Target, CVS, Kroger, and the list goes on and this for two reasons. One is, retail media opens up a phenomenal opportunity for most retailers to create a new revenue stream, allows them to monetize their assets in a way that they haven't done in the past. But to do that, you have to be incredibly considerate, because if a retailer were to go too far into that and not put the appropriate technology or put a display out in the wrong place, they detract from consumer attention. So I think having the right technology is incredibly important. The second thing is important though, is just because you open up or you have a retail asset or put a search engine or a search product on your page, that doesn't mean it's going to get in front of the agencies, and someone like Andrew Ruger at Group is fortunate to have someone to be able to lead the effort across the entire agencies. Because you can imagine each new retailer that opens up a search specific asset on their side is something new that a trader inside the agency has to deal with. So in the past, maybe they went to Google, maybe they went to Tubi, and maybe they went to Amazon, but now suddenly more and more search opportunities are opening up and they have to make sure they understand first and foremost where to look to find these assets. The second is to understand how to track and what's the attribution mechanisms of each one of them and how to tie them together. So I think Andrew in terms of what he's doing, and that's just the search side. The other side of it is using the search data, the information that we learned from PLAs or product listing ads. And then to be able to take that offline and start to bring the opportunity outside of owned and operated sites but out to the open web. And that's where I really think there's a tremendous amount of opportunity and we're just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of starting to understand how to utilize that, how to understand it. And the final fact is the agencies are doing a great job, but we all know the retention challenges we have in our industry. When you're turning over 35% of your team, there's an enormous need for education in terms of this entire ecosystem, how to measure, how to track, and how to activate it. And that's really where I see an opportunity for Criteo. Criteo is a predominant voice in retail media. They've got a footprint in over 96 countries around the world, and I think there's an opportunity at a point in time right now. That's a phenomenal opportunity to take that to market because clients needed, brands needed, agencies needed, and I think Criteo is well positioned to deliver it.