Criteo S.A. (Criteo) operates as a global commerce media company that enables marketers and media owners to drive better commerce outcomes.
The company leverages commerce data and artificial intelligence (‘AI’) to connect ecommerce, digital marketing and media monetization to reach consumers throughout their shopping journey.
The company enables brands', retailers' and media owners’ growth by providing best-in-class marketing and monetization services and infrastructure on the open Internet, d...
Criteo S.A. (Criteo) operates as a global commerce media company that enables marketers and media owners to drive better commerce outcomes.
The company leverages commerce data and artificial intelligence (‘AI’) to connect ecommerce, digital marketing and media monetization to reach consumers throughout their shopping journey.
The company enables brands', retailers' and media owners’ growth by providing best-in-class marketing and monetization services and infrastructure on the open Internet, driving approximately $31 billion of commerce outcomes for its customers – in the form of product sales for retailers, brands and marketers and advertising revenues for media owners. The company differentiates by delivering the best performing commerce audiences at scale and through the activation of commerce data in a privacy-by-design way through proprietary AI technology to reach and engage consumers in real time with highly relevant digital advertisements (‘ads’) based on shared characteristics across all stages of the consumer journey. The company’s data offers deep insights into consumer intent and purchasing habits.
The company’s business is grounded on commerce media. As of December 31, 2024, the company served approximately 17,000 clients including many of the largest and most sophisticated consumer brands, retailers, commerce companies and media owners in the world. The company partners with them to capture user activity on their websites and mobile applications (‘apps’), which it defines as digital properties, and leverage that data to deliver superior ad performance to help marketers, brands and agencies reach their campaign objectives from top to bottom of the marketing funnel. This includes powering the retail media ecosystem as the company enables brands to reach shoppers with relevant ads near the digital point of sale on retailer and marketplace websites while enabling retailers to monetize their ad inventory and add a new, high margin revenue stream.
The company has established its leading market position in commerce media by focusing on three key assets that differentiate it: actionable commerce data, extensive media access, and world-class predictive AI technology. The company’s large dataset is uniquely focused on commerce and shoppers, and its media access across a broad direct network of media owner partners provides large consumer reach, as it sees approximately 720 million daily active users. The company's purpose-built AI technology activates this data and media to drive multiple commerce outcomes for its customers.
The company is presented with billions of opportunities to connect consumers with relevant advertising messages from its commerce and consumer brand clients in compliance with the highest privacy standards, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). For each of these opportunities, the company's algorithms analyze massive volumes of shopping data to predict consumer preferences and intent, delivering specific messaging for products or services that are likely to engage that consumer. The accuracy of the company's algorithms improves with every ad it delivers, as they incorporate new data while continuing to learn from prior interactions.
Solutions
On the supply side, the company enables media owners to earn more revenue by enriching and activating their first-party data and advertising inventory:
Commerce Yield is a suite of monetization solutions giving retailers and marketplaces full control to achieve maximum monetization of their digital assets through inventory and data management, packaging, and in-depth insights.
Commerce Grid is a Commerce Supply Side Platform (‘SSP’) for media owner data and inventory monetization which powers Commerce Growth and provides commerce media access to the world's leading agencies through the DSP of their choice.
Segments
Criteo operates as a unified Commerce Media Platform that directly connects advertisers with retailers and publishers on the open internet. The company operates through Retail Media and Performance Media.
Retail Media assists retailers in generating high-margin advertising revenues from brands and agencies looking to address multiple marketing goals with strong return on ad spend (ROAS), and to drive sales for themselves, by monetizing their audiences through personalized ads, either on their own digital store (also called ‘onsite’) or on media owner properties on the open Internet (also called ‘offsite’)
Examples of expected business outcomes driven by Retail Media include:
Generating advertising revenue for retailers on their online store, by providing retailers with self-service access to the company’s technology platform for them to monetize their ad inventory, commerce data, traffic and audiences directly with consumer brands across various marketing goals;
Driving sales for consumer brand clients on the site of retailer partners, by connecting consumer brands and retailers and engaging consumers on the retailer's digital property with personalized ads offering specific brand products available on the retailer's digital store and for which consumers has expressed interest; and
Driving sales for consumer brand clients on the site of retailer partners, by connecting consumer brands and retailers and engaging consumers outside of the retailer property on the open Internet with personalized ads offering specific brand products available on the retailer's digital store and for which consumers has expressed interest.
The company’s retailer and brand customers respectively manage their Retail Media revenues and budgets using a self-service interface. The company charges retailers a negotiated supply-side platform fee and sometimes a technology fee, while brands pay it a negotiated demand-side platform fee.
On the supply side of Retail media, Criteo's retailer monetization solution suite, Commerce Yield, provides retailers, marketplaces and commerce companies with a complete media tool set. Commerce Yield combines Criteo's former Retail Media Platform with several solutions derived from recent strategic acquisitions, such as marketplace tactics and formats, and digital-shelf insights to support enterprise-level retail media buys.
On the demand side of Retail Media, Criteo’s self-service demand-side platform (DSP), Commerce Max, gives brands and agencies a single point of entry to Retail Media inventory onsite and across premium publishers offsite.
Brands and agencies across the globe can use Commerce Max to access data and inventory across multiple retailers and marketplaces, finding valuable audiences on these sites and extending these audiences offsite.
This is underpinned by closed-loop measurement, enabling brands and agencies to quickly and efficiently determine the effectiveness of campaigns and optimize accordingly.
Criteo’s supply-side platform (SSP), Commerce Grid, brings additional monetization opportunities. It allows retailers to curate their first party audiences and make them available for access through all DSPs.
Performance Media encompasses commerce activation, monetization, and services. Performance Media is available through Commerce Growth to help advertisers achieve their customer acquisition and retention goals. It also includes Criteo real-time advertising technology and trading infrastructure which delivers advanced media buying, selling, and packaged capabilities for media owners, agencies, performance advertisers, and third-party AdTech platforms.
Examples of potential business outcomes driven by Performance Media address the full funnel of commerce, including:
Discovery: creating and building brand awareness for a client's existing or new product or service, by targeting relevant high-quality consumer audiences showing intent for that particular product or service and reaching these audiences, for example, through online video ads and through Connected TV channels;
Choice: driving qualified visits from new prospects to the company’s clients points of purchase, by engaging such commerce audiences online (either on the web, in apps or on connected TV), with personalized ads offering products or services tailored to their predicted interest;
Purchase: driving sales for commerce clients by engaging consumers online, with personalized ads offering products or services for which they have already expressed shopping intent; or driving more sales from existing customers of the company’s commerce clients, by accurately targeting and re-engaging these existing customers online with personalized ads offering new products or services that they have not yet purchased nor been exposed to.
The company’s clients have access to an integrated self-service client interface that reduces unnecessary complexity and cost associated with manual processes of having to use multiple DSPs and sources of inventory supply.
The company also offers a managed-service approach to its larger clients, providing deep business intelligence and analytics services.
In Performance Media, the company’s Commerce Audiences solutions are focused on attracting more customers for its marketer clients and growing their existing customer relationships, leveraging the company’s AI engine to engage commerce audiences with the right ad for each opportunity, such as increase awareness and interest in a brand, product, or services; attract new consumers to an online and/or offline store; generate leads from consumers who are in market for a brand, product or services; get more shoppers and grow sales on an online and/or offline store; and encourage consumers who purchased in the past to make additional purchases.
For Performance Media, the company typically purchases inventory programmatically on a CPM basis from its direct publisher partners and Real-Time Bidding (RTB) platforms, through standard terms and conditions for the purchase of advertising inventory. This means that inventory purchased for Performance Media solutions is paid to the publisher irrespective of whether the user engages, in whatever form, with the advertisement delivered on that publisher's digital property. Pursuant to such arrangements, the company purchases impressions for users that Criteo recognizes on these publishers' digital properties.
Criteo First-Party Media Network
The company’s First-Party Media Network is a key pillar of its hybrid addressability strategy and represents the combination of the company’s unique data and media assets. It is the powerful output of the company’s network of direct relationships with media owners, including retailers, together with its dataset focused on commerce and shoppers that powers Criteo's First-Party Media Network.
The company’s First-Party Media Network enables consented data to interoperate across marketers and, media owners to engage addressable consumers on a one-to-one basis. It also helps to predict how commerce audiences behave and how ads will perform and convert in the same way.
The company prioritizes openness by facilitating a reciprocal data exchange with its marketer and media owner clients. All contributing parties benefit from the shared dataset through its Commerce Media Platform, gaining access to cross-device user IDs and relevant Key Performance Indicators, which enhance their advertising optimization. Transparency is upheld through clear and permission-based data sharing within the company's data pools, ensuring mutual benefits for all participants. The company maintains high levels of data security and user privacy standards for the data it handles.
The company's data collectives are designed to ensure fairness, ensuring that the value gained by each participant surpasses their individual contribution, irrespective of size.
Consistent with its data minimization principles, the company’s technologies only rely on categories of data that are strictly necessary for the purpose of its services. This means that the user information it collects relates primarily to purchase intent. In addition, the company provides consumers with easy-to-use and easy-to-access mechanisms to control their advertising experience and opt out of receiving targeted ads it delivers. This transparent, consumer-centric, and controllable approach to privacy empowers consumers to make better-informed decisions about the company's use of their data.
The company also actively encourages its clients and media owner partners to provide transparent and clear information to consumers about its collection and use of data relating to the ads it delivers and monitors.
Media assets: the company’s first-party media integrations and media buying scale
The company provides its marketer clients with extensive real-time access to advertising inventory through direct relationships with thousands of media owner partners, as well as selective supply side partnerships. The company defines inventory as the combination of desktop web, mobile web, mobile in-app display, including social and native, online video displays, connected TV, and ad inventory on major retail ecommerce properties, including standard banners, native and sponsored product formats.
The company’s publisher relationships can gives it privileged access to first-party publisher data which allows the company to bid on impressions without using third-party cookies or other third-party identifiers.
Many of the company's direct publisher partners has granted it preferred access to portions of their inventory because of its ability to effectively monetize that inventory. For example, within Retail Media, the company accesses inventory and first-party data from eCommerce sites that are generally not available to traditional advertising demand.
The company takes a variety of brand safety measures to ensure that the brand equity of its clients is preserved at all possible times. These measures include determining that each publisher's inventory meets the company’s content requirements and those of its clients to ensure that their ads are not shown in inappropriate content categories, such as, for example, adult, violence, harassment or hate speech.
In addition, the company is an active member of the Coalition for Better Ads, supported by Google, and are compliant with their recommendations for user-friendly advertising formats. Criteo's AI powered contextual analysis engine is also integrated with DoubleVerify IQ Advanced Solutions, a solution providing page-level pre-bid classification to clients across 26 standard brand safety categories. In recognition of its efforts to combat fraud and ensure a brand safe digital ecosystem for the company’s advertisers, Criteo has been independently certified by the Trustworthy Accountability Group for the Certification Against Fraud and the Brand Safety Certification.
AI at Scale
AI is core to continuously optimizing the performance of the company’s solutions in ways that deliver effective advertising and highly personalized experiences to consumers and thereby to enable superior outcomes for its clients and partners. AI is also key to driving operational efficiency across the company’s business.
The Criteo AI Lab
The Criteo AI Lab is pioneering AI innovation with 140 engineers, researchers and data scientists who closely collaborate to deploy AI at scale through the Criteo AI Engine, and advance new AI technologies. The Criteo AI Lab is recognized as a center of scientific excellence for its research on Deep Learning, Generative AI, Game theory AI, Information Retrieval and Privacy Preserving Machine Learning.
The Criteo AI Engine
The Criteo AI Engine is the company’s proprietary software and hardware highly scalable AI infrastructure. It leverages Criteo's data, with the goal of maximizing consumer engagement to drive impactful business outcomes for clients through the delivery of highly relevant and personalized ads in real time. A combination of deep machine learning and Generative AI models power the Criteo AI Engine to optimize each and every touch point on the advertising journey, all the way from media planning to shopper conversion.
Lookalikes finder models create and activate audiences built out of shopping insights derived from Criteo unique shopper data. These models enable interference and predictions across user, contextual and product data and support Commerce Audience campaigns to drive new prospects to consider brands, products or services with which they have not yet engaged in the past.
Recommendation models build on top of the company’s award winning Deep KNN (Deep K-Nearest Neighbour) technology, to determine the specific products or services to include in the ad, based on shopper or shopper lookalikes past interactions and media content. Deep KNN is Criteo's proprietary Vector Database technology that processes billions of products from the company’s client product feeds.
Dynamic Creative Optimization+ (DCO+) models optimize banner layouts in real time, on a per impression, per user basis. The company's patented Dynamic Creative Optimization+ technology offers unlimited personalization, generating and scoring trillions of different ad variations without the need to define ad sizes or layouts upfront, while always maintaining the consistency of its clients' brand image. The company works to build the next generation of DCO by blending its proprietary models with Generative AI models to create exceptional advertising experiences for its clients’ consumers.
Sponsored Product placement models combine recommendation and predictive bidding algorithms to determine which sponsored products to show on the company’s Retail Media client search result pages, in response to a user’s search queries.
The company’s robust software infrastructure allows it to operate seamlessly at a large scale through its network of approximately 36,500 servers as of the end of 2024. The architecture and processing capabilities of this technology has been designed to match the massive computational needs and complexity of its algorithms in real time. This technology enables data synchronization, storage, and analysis across a large-scale distributed computing infrastructure in multiple geographies, as well as fast data collection and retrieval using a multi-layered caching infrastructure.
The company continues to modernize and transform its data center infrastructure and architecture, ensuring that it remains at the forefront of evolving AI models, including generational AI. The company expects to add additional capabilities, including high-density GPU servers, to work alongside its existing CPU servers in the coming years. The company also expects to invest in liquid cooling technologies in its data centers.
The company’s Experimentation platform enables its Research & Development team to continuously tune its Criteo AI Engine via experimentation and A/B tests. For example, in 2024, the company performed about 1,370 online A/B tests and over 100,000 offline experiments and tests. It uses an online/offline testing platform to improve the capabilities and effectiveness of its prediction models by measuring the correlation of specific parameters with user engagement, usually measured by consumer visits, clicks, and conversions, typically in the form of sales.
Privacy-by-design approach
The company has long established and adopted Privacy-by-design as a central element of its technology and product design and development cycles, with a strong commitment to ensuring best practices in privacy, security, and safety for consumers and its marketer and media owner customers. Since 2013, the company had a designated Data Privacy Officer along with a team of privacy experts. These experts are part of the company's R&D and Product organizations and consider all facets of user privacy in the design of any new technology, solution, or feature of the Commerce Media Platform. They also perform ongoing Privacy Impact Assessments to monitor potential risks during the product lifecycle and proactively mitigate those risks.
The Data Privacy team delivers company-wide privacy training, enforces the company’s privacy policies, and is integral to ensuring that it builds the best solutions and services. The company regularly reviews and documents its internal privacy policies, amends existing policies as necessary, and enforces these policies with its clients, media owner partners, and vendors.
Retail Media
The company’s Retail Media value proposition is unique in the market today. Its offering empowers brands and agencies to find valuable audiences on retailer sites using on-site sponsored and display ads, but also extends these audiences off-site, across open internet inventory with unified reporting and closed-loop measurement, including product-level sales attribution. The company enables brands, agencies, and multiple retailers to buy and sell retail media using a common platform, thus benefiting from meaningful network effects due to its unique position as the technology supporting a multi-retailer ecosystem, whereas most competitors in the retail media space focus on supporting siloed retailer walled gardens.
Brands and their agencies use the company’s platform to access unique inventory at meaningful scale, while retailers gain access to brand marketing budgets at a scale, they would not be able to access on their own. This creates a network effect where the value for clients only increases as more brand and retailer participants join the ecosystem. In addition, the company’s deep technical integrations with retailers make it instrumental to their digital success and enable it to offer preferred or exclusive inventory to brands and agencies, as well as a superior shopper experience to consumers. The company requires multi-year commitments and product ad exclusivity as part of its standard retailer services agreements.
Both the company’s unique inventory access and increasingly deep technical integrations with other advertising technology and reporting platforms provide defensible relationships with brands and agencies. For example, its API partner program embeds its technology into ad platforms that brands and agencies already use to buy search, social, and other large platforms' ad inventory.
Superior Insights and Measurement
The company has superior capabilities for Commerce Insights and measurement. The company’s technology provides clients with the unique ability to measure against product sales at the product SKU level. For example, the company's commerce insights can bring together organic shopping data with paid media metrics for brands. In 2024, the company achieved its first MRC accreditation for Retail Media measurement, marking a significant milestone in unifying the ecosystem.
Scaled Global Presence
The company operates in 108 countries and has a direct operating presence through 23 offices in 16 countries. The company has achieved this global presence by replicating and scaling its effective business model across all geographic markets. Large businesses are increasingly seeking global advertising partners capable of providing comprehensive offerings that are effective across multiple geographies. The company can meet this demand by leveraging its scalable AI technology and global network of relationships, and it is well positioned to serve its clients in virtually every market in which they seek to drive trusted, impactful, and measurable business results and commerce outcomes.
Business & Growth Opportunities
The company has successfully implemented its Commerce Media Platform vision, positioning the company at the forefront of industry transformation and enabling it to capitalize on emerging trends in digital advertising.
The company continues to invest in building the world’s leading Commerce Media Ecosystem with notable wins and valuable expansions across its partner network. The company’s ecosystem is a critical part of Criteo’s moat and the unique value it provides to clients.
Strategics
In 2024, the company’s partnership with Google continued to expand with Google's DV360 leveraging Criteo’s Commerce Audiences to power advertiser campaigns. Furthermore, the company’s strategic collaboration with Microsoft as their 'preferred onsite partner' for Retail Media and the design of its demand integration with Microsoft Advertising underscores Criteo's leadership, innovation and scale in this rapidly evolving space.
Retail Media
The company continues to operate the world's largest independent Retail Media API program, connecting with 13 buying partners and integrating with leading order management systems, including Salesforce.
Retailer Data
A key focus has been to enable interoperability of retailer data across the company’s platform. The company recently announced an example of this with Boots, a UK retailer, demonstrating over a 20% uplift for their advertiser using this new data service.
Performance Media
The company is exploring the impact of Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) features in its ads to boost consumer engagement and conversion rates, showcasing the company’s commitment to innovating at the intersection of fintech and advertising to deliver value for advertisers and consumers.
Resellers
The company is always seeking efficiencies and expanded its reseller program to include Turkey and Latin American markets (excluding Brazil) in addition to Africa and targeted countries in Eastern Europe and APAC.
Addressability
Criteo continues to develop its partnership base with ID partners that allows the company to target incremental inventory using privacy compliant and consent-based solutions in the U.S. and Japan.
1P Data
The company has nearly 40 data platform and customer engagement platform partnerships enabling the activation of first-party audiences across Performance Media and Retail Media.
The company continues to have an active M&A pipeline, with a critical assessment on technologies and businesses that have the potential to accelerate its Commerce Media Platform strategy by enhancing, complementing or expanding the company’s strategic capabilities, primarily through technology and broadening its Commerce Media capabilities across all channels. Key criteria for acquisitions include demonstrated revenue growth, ability to create synergies with the company’s existing platform or customers, and ease of integration. The company’s entrepreneurial culture, growth opportunities, global scale, financial profile, strong brand and market position enables it to be an attractive acquirer.
Infrastructure
The company’s ability to execute depends on its highly sophisticated global technology software and hardware infrastructure. As of December 31, 2024, the company manages its global infrastructure of servers through a global network of data centers. The company’s global infrastructure is divided into three geographic areas: Americas, Asia-Pacific, and EMEA, and its services are delivered through one or more data centers that support each area. Within large areas, the data centers are strategically placed to be close to the company's clients, publishers, and users.
The company also generally seeks to distribute workload across multiple locations to avoid overloads in its systems and increase reliability through redundancy. In addition, the company considers sustainability factors as it evaluates its infrastructure footprint, including prioritizing resource efficiency and clean energy to operate sustainable data centers.
As part of its growth strategy, some of the company’s products rely on major public cloud providers.
The company uses multiple-layered security controls to protect its Criteo AI Engine and data assets, including hardware- and software-based access controls for its source code and production systems, segregated networks for different components of its production systems, and centralized production systems management.
Clients
On the demand side for commerce media activation, the company’s diversified client base consists of more than 3,500 established brands and agencies, and more than 13,500 performance marketers, primarily in the retail, travel and classifieds verticals, and including some of the largest and most sophisticated commerce companies in the world.
On the supply side for commerce media monetization, the company powers the Retail Media Networks of approximately 225 retailers, as media owners. The company also partners with approximately 75% of the top 100 ComScore publishers in its largest markets.
As of December 31, 2024, the company had a total of approximately 17,000 clients. In 2024, approximately 40% of the company’s client relationships were held directly with the client and the remaining 60% with advertising agencies or other third-parties on the Performance Media side of the business, whereas 30% of its Retail Media revenue comes from agencies.
In 2024, the company’s largest client represented 4.6% of its revenue, and in 2024 its largest 10 clients represented 17.1% of the company’s revenue in the aggregate.
The company’s clients are serviced through a combination of direct and indirect approaches, including through brand agencies for large clients, and performance agencies and resellers for midmarket clients.
Research and Development
For the year ended December 31, 2024, the company’s research and development expenses totaled $279.3 million.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2024, the company held 33 patents issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and various foreign counterparts and had filed three non-provisional patent applications in the U.S. and Europe.
Competition
The company competes with large, well-established companies, such as Amazon, Meta Platforms, Google, and Microsoft, pure play Demand-Side Platforms (‘DSPs’), such as The Trade Desk, pure play Supply-Side Platforms (‘SSPs’) such as Magnite or PubMatic, and pure play retail SSPs such as Publicis' CitrusAd, that focus on monetizing retailers' media, as well as smaller, privately held companies. Potential competition could emerge from large enterprise marketing platforms, like Adobe Systems Inc. (‘Adobe’), Oracle Corporation (‘Oracle’) and Salesforce.com, Inc. (‘Salesforce’), or public and private companies specialized in the Marketing Technology (‘MarTech’) space. In addition, web browsers, and desktop and mobile operating systems developed by large software companies like Google and Apple Inc. (‘Apple’) can have a significant influence and impact on the way the company operates.
Seasonality
The company’s client base consists primarily of companies in the Retail, Travel and Classifieds industries. In the digital Retail industry and the consumer brand verticals in particular, many businesses devote the largest portion of their advertising spend to the fourth quarter of the calendar year (year ended December 31, 2024), to coincide with increased holiday spending by consumers. The company’s Retail clients typically conduct fewer advertising campaigns in the first and second quarters than they do in other quarters, while its Travel clients typically increase their travel campaigns in the first and third quarters and conduct fewer advertising campaigns in the second quarter. As a result, the company’s revenue tends to be seasonal in nature.
Trademarks
‘Criteo,’ the Criteo logo and other trademarks or service marks are the property of Criteo.
History
Criteo S.A. was founded in 2005. The company was incorporated as a societe par actions simplifiee (S.A.S) under the laws of the French Republic in 2005 and converted to a societe anonyome (S.A).
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