Michael Komasinski, Criteo’s new CEO, knows what it’s like to sit on the other side of the table.
Before taking the top job at Criteo earlier this year, he spent roughly a decade in executive roles at agencies, including as CEO of the Americas at Dentsu leading all data projects globally. He was also global CEO of Dentsu-owned performance and CRM agency Merkle.
So he knows how to frame Criteo’s value proposition to the buy side. But he doesn’t necessarily think of himself as “an agency person.”
“I’d say I’m more of a digital ecosystem person,” said Komasinski, who took the reins from former CEO Megan Clarken on February 15.
“I just love this space,” he said. “The complexity of it, the technology elements, how fast it moves and how you always need to be studying what your competitors are doing.”
And there are plenty of competitors to study – including his former employer Dentsu. In fact, all of the agency holding companies are building their own retail media capabilities, and some are making big acquisitions, too.
Publicis bought CitrusAd in 2021 and recently spent a reported $600 million to acquire Mars United Commerce. Omnicom, meanwhile, has Flywheel Digital, and its planned merger with IPG will only strengthen their combined reach.
The holdcos are Criteo’s direct competitors, but they’re also potential customers, and Criteo is actively courting them. Ad tech is full of frenemies.
“There’s always a place to partner with people, even if you might compete on certain elements,” Komasinski said, noting that Criteo partners with CitrusAd on some clients and that Omnicom is one of Criteo’s best partners via FlyWheel.
“We even partner with them actively on how to shape our road map,” he said. “We love working with those guys.”
AdExchanger caught up with Komasinski 100 days into his new job.
AdExchanger: What’s your vision for Criteo? Be specific!
MICHAEL KOMASINSKI: We want to be the world’s leader in commerce media. It’s a growing space, and we’ve got the right pieces so that we can own that.
To make sure the space continues to grow, though, we need to drive the standardization of measurement, we need to make the buying experience less fragmented and we need to make supply easier to buy. That’s a growth road map for the whole industry, not just Criteo.
And then, over on the performance side, we recently got some good news with Google’s decision about cookies. We were ready for whatever happened and whether cookies stayed or went away; it didn’t really matter to us. But clarity is good for everyone, and now that we have it, we can focus on extending our performance offering to be more full funnel and then take that cross channel, including expanding our product focus into CTV.
You brought up cookies, so I have to ask: Are you secretly happy that Google isn’t deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome?
We’d invested heavily in leading the Privacy Sandbox effort and we were ready for a cookieless future. What we’re happy about is having clarity.
I know this predates your time at Criteo, but please be honest with me: Was all of the time, money, effort and engineering hours spent on testing the Chrome Privacy Sandbox really worth it?
I appreciate the question because, honestly, yes. We always talk about Chrome like it’s the only browser out there, but there are still big chunks of the ecosystem, like Safari, that don’t have cookies. The addressability landscape is evolving, and the investment we made to interact with PSB means we’re so much better prepared for that now.
I spend a lot of my day listening to people use acronyms, but PSB as an abbreviation for “Privacy Sandbox” is a new one for me! How much of Criteo’s business still depends on cookies?
We don’t really disclose that.
Fair enough. Going back to your point about growing supply and making retail media easier to buy, how are you doing that?
We’re looking to open up new social partnerships, like the one we announced with Meta, and we’re also moving into CTV, which I think can be a performance category.
We’ll also continue working with our API partners and evolving our Commerce Max product to make the buying process for retail media easier and more scaled. We’re looking at a couple of different options, like maybe a programmatic-style solution or something that’s more like a network.
But what about AI? Criteo is in the midst of an AI-fueled transformation. Who isn’t, though, right?
We see the potential future of agentic shopping as a big opportunity for Criteo. That could mean feeding answer engine optimization with signal that allows our retailers to have their products show up in the right places or it could even mean developing bespoke chatbots or shopping agents of our own for our customers.
But no matter how we show up, whether it’s to strike partnerships or to support our own product development, we come with a lot of raw material, which is what you need to be relevant in the AI conversation.
We have four and a half billion SKUs in our product catalog, we see 720 million transactions, and our shopper graph is unrivaled.
The other thing we’re really focused on from an engineering perspective is the model context protocol (MCP), which is the layer where these sorts of feeds can come together and interact with an agent. What Criteo was to PSB, I think we can also be to the MCP by making sure our retailers and brands show up in answers and prompts.
Commerce is obviously the main focus of Criteo’s business today, but what about poor old retargeting, which is where it all began for Criteo?
Our performance algorithm is one of the foundational elements of Criteo. Retargeting is where we were founded, and it still works. But it’s just one tactic of several.
In the mid-funnel, for example, we’ve been able to identify certain kinds of high-value behaviors that we cross with our shopper graph to target people who might be in the market for something. That’s one of the fastest-growing products we’ve had in the past two years – which brings me back to our full funnel, cross-channel ambition.
Retargeting is still a really solid base, but we’re building off of that for the future.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
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