Courting agencies is a key element of Criteo’s retail media ambitions.
Which is one reason Criteo hired ad agency vet Brian Gleason as CRO in February.
Getting cozy with agencies wasn’t always a priority, though. Criteo has direct relationships with more than 20,000 clients.
But now that Criteo has commerce and retail media aspirations, it needs to strike agency partnerships, and Gleason’s intimate understanding of how holding companies operate is an asset.
Gleason joined Criteo after more than five years in executive roles at GroupM, including most recently as its global chief commercial officer. He also previously served as global CEO of Xaxis.
Since Gleason came aboard, Criteo has realigned its sales team to focus more on what he calls “client solutions.”
“We changed from a commercial org to a client solutions org,” he said, “And we now have an enterprise group and a growth group.”
Gleason spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: One of Criteo’s main competitors, CitrusAd, was acquired by Publicis last year. Has that worked to Criteo’s benefit?
BRIAN GLEASON: Data is the most sacred thing to any agency. CitrusAd, Profitero and Epsilon have built a powerful tool for Publicis. But all the other holdcos are probably looking at Publicis and thinking they need their own solution or partners.
Does Criteo consider agencies and holdcos to be competitors?
Absolutely not. Our number one focus is to enable agencies for commerce media.
How are you doing that?
It’s a three-step process. The first is education. We launched what we call “Retail Media University” earlier this year, and we’ve already given over 6,000 certifications. Second is enhancing our offering. For example, we have a digital shelf tool called Gradient that analyzes share of voice for different retailers. And third is utility. Everything we’re designing prioritizes ease of use for agencies so they can match their data into our environment.
How does focus on client solutions play into Criteo’s retail media ambitions?
Within many retailers, the roles of overseeing monetization and activation are coming together. A perfect example of that is Anna Kruse, Best Buy’s VP of ads and media strategy. She oversees both sides. Building an organization that can speak to those individuals also puts Criteo in a better position.
We’re also building our vertical expertise by bringing on people who have worked on the client side. For example, we hired Alex Crowe from Asda in July as our global VP of omnichannel strategy. He knows the retail world inside out.
We also brought our go-to-market team into our client solutions team, because communication has to be bidirectional. In the past, we had a retail media team and a marketing solutions team, and that [separation] was confusing our messaging.
How does Criteo’s acquisition of IPONWEB support your retail media strategy?
Nobody understands DSP architecture better than Boris Mouzykantskii and the team at IPONWEB.
We can combine that expertise with our retail media experience and link it to our shopper graph, where we see a trillion dollars of transactional data. This gives us a fully functional front end for agencies to be able to access on-site sponsor, on-site display and off-site audiences with closed-loop measurement in real time. That’s our biggest differentiator.
About a year ago, agencies were dealing with an average of four retail media networks, and now it’s eight. They need a way to deal with those in a uniform manner.
Is Criteo seeing more ad spend coming from brands or agencies right now?
Our growth clients are traditionally anybody with a direct-to-consumer offering, which could mean a startup or the largest retailers in the world. That part of the business is focused on two things only: customer acquisition and retention. It lives and dies by performance. Right now, that business is the larger one overall.
However, we’re looking to do over a billion dollars this year from retail media, which is predominantly coming from agencies and brands. That business is scaling at 45%-plus growth year over year.
Is it “better” for you to have more ad spend coming from brands directly versus agencies or vice versa?
We want to grow them both. Scale will continue to come from agencies and brands, because it’s a whole new revenue line for us. In the US alone, the overall retail media opportunity is $40 billion.
How will signal loss impact Criteo?
The number-one advantage of retail media is that it’s not cookie reliant, and from a measurement standpoint, having first-party data linkage is key.
We’ve seen a significant uptick in customer acquisition among performance-oriented brands, because acquisition isn’t as reliant on a cookie as retention or retargeting are. Years ago, we might have had 100% of spend coming from customer targeting. Now, for new campaigns, 40% of spend goes toward customer acquisition through contextual targeting and 60% is spent on retargeting.
How are recession fears impacting retail media?
Customer acquisition and retention become even more important in a downturn, because you want to capture as much volume as you can from your current customers, and you want to acquire new ones. Branding dollars become less of a focus.
If sales diminish, you need to focus on incremental revenue streams. During a recession, brands want to get as close to the point of purchase as they possibly can – and there’s nothing closer than being on a retailer’s page.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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