Scale and Usability to Fuel Retail Media’s Growth: Criteo’s Gleason

Retail media is on a roll. I think the predictions are one out of every four dollars will be spent of all media in retail media, which is just amazing. If you think about AI, it's at the center of retail media in many ways, because retail media or commerce media is really about discovery. How am I finding new products? How do I know that I'm out of something and where do I go to replace it, where do I buy it from? And to do those things, you have to have a personalized experience the same way that you would if you walked in a store. So if someone came up to me and said, hey, Brian, I know you were looking for this, the same is true if we're in a digital environment. So whether I'm shopping in social, whether on a retailer site or on the open web, AI plays a critical role in using all of the data signals that we have, whether it's contextual data, whether it's transactional data, to be able to make a prediction in that moment to the appropriate consumer with appropriate product. So I think it's massive. It also plays a significant role in measurement. When you think about AI, not all measurement is clean, meaning how do I compare one measurement model to another or one retailer to another? So the ability to use AI or ML to model for measurement is incredibly valuable too. Creative assets in terms of putting the right creative in the right environment, so much of that matters. When you're thinking about this incredibly personal experience of buying something, does it resonate or cause an emotion? And when you buy something, we all have that thing. When you find that one thing that you're looking for, it's that moment of joy. AI plays a critical role in bringing more and more of those moments to life. I think it will continue to evolve. Is there room, though still for surprise and delight? 100%. Again, when you think about shopping, think about going through a store and before you're about to leave and you have sometimes they have those new products lined up and you grab something that you didn't know that you were going to buy. It's an impulse buy. That's impulse those are fun. So you certainly have these delighted moments and what I call inspirational moments where if someone's introducing a new product or a new solution, the whole idea is making it relevant to me. Where you have that reflection, you go, yeah, I wanted that, or I didn't even know I needed that. And now it's there in front of me. That's pretty cool. And AI is at the center of that. There's so much out there right now, in terms of retail media networks, how do you deal with creating a seamless, unified buying experience? Such a good question. It's our number one ambition. So for Criteo, we represent 225 of the largest retailers around the world. In the US alone, we have 65% of the largest retailers. And what we're trying to do is make it easy for brands and agencies to access these amazing environments, whether it's sponsored ads, whether it's a display ad unit, whether it's bringing something offsite back on site. So it's the platform that has the scale and the usability that brings a tremendous amount of volume through our pipes. I think this year we'll do over a billion and a half dollars in retail media. And that's continuing to scale very, very quickly. At the same time, we have to make it easy for the retailers. You know, media isn't their primary business and every retailer is a little bit different. Some are becoming to look more and more like media companies. Look at Walmart buying a Vizio or Amazon, some. So you have to bring them on this journey and have a modular approach because every retailer isn't the same. But you then have to provide a standardized way or format. In many ways, it's almost like building an interstate highway where you want as many lanes of traffic with rules, standards, where everybody knows how to drive, what the speed limit is, what the rules of engagement are, and that's everything we're building at. Criteo is the largest retail media platform in the world to be able to enable this massive growth ahead of us.

I've been at Criteo for three years and I've never been more excited than heading into 2025. We just came off a massive year last year, so it was fantastic to see the growth both on our performance business and our retail media business. But when I look to 2025, I'm thinking about three things. The first of which is connecting all different experiences on the retailer's website. So today you could buy sponsored ads in one platform and display ads in another. Well, that shouldn't be. You should have one experience. So we're doing a lot to make sure that we've got the best in the world capabilities for both sponsored ads and display ads. The other thing we're working a great deal on is relevancy. So using AI/ML to make sure that it's the most relevant experience for that consumer when they show up in those environments. And that's something that will never stop because that drives us forward. I think the other thing that we look to continue to build around is standardization of measurement. So how do we make it easy for the platform to enable the brands to see what they want in the appropriate way? Whether that's key metrics like new to basket, new to cart, new to brand incrementality, all of those things building into the ad stack and as it matures, you eliminate the fragmentation and you provide a scaled platform that has a tremendous amount of value, both to the retailer and to the brands.