Criteo is a global technology company that helps marketers and media owners reach their goals through its Commerce Media Platform. Headquartered in Paris, France, the company has offices in New York City and other locations throughout the U.S. and around the world.
According to Lucile Roose, global product strategy director for retail media, Criteo acquired its first company in the U.S. a few years ago.
“While we do on-site advertising, it’s really the opportunity for brands and agencies to have their products or SKUs promoted on the retailer sites and apps,” she said.
Criteo went on to acquire a company in Europe doing the same thing but more on the display side, and it combined the companies. From that action, it created its retail media platform that “is basically powering the largest retailers across the world with advertising capabilities that brands and agencies can buy through a self-service platform,” Roose said.
Criteo now works with more than 160 of the largest retailers in the world, including grocers. Roose said the company’s success in the grocery ecosystem is that it integrates capabilities that are important for grocers, such as out-of-stock management. “You obviously don’t want to advertise a product that is out of stock.”
While e-commerce expanded during the COVID pandemic, shoppers are coming back into stores. Instead of having just in-store or online only, shoppers now have an omnichannel experience, Roose said. “We never really know where they’re going to finalize their buying.”
Taking into account both online and offline data and applying that to sales measurements allows Criteo to target shoppers that visited a particular store online and in-store.
“I think that’s actually the perfect transition, because…this is a really competitive environment. As a retailer, I really want my data to be used only for my buy and my purpose. We work with all these retailers, all these brands, in a fully transparent manner…I think that’s also the beauty of the ecosystem is how do we create a fully open ecosystem by keeping the retailer specificities and making sure that the data is not shared between each other,” Roose said.
She noted that Criteo works with Midwest grocery retailer Meijer, which has a loyal database. Advertising with those shoppers on Meijer’s website or retargeting them on the internet is valuable. “You want to diversify your advertising, you want to make sure that you put the right SKUs in front of them, that you’re super relevant with the offering. And I think that’s how it gets really interesting for advertisers.”
While four years ago some people were saying Criteo would not last, now they are saying the company is “actually the best player in the retail media ecosystem.”
“It’s exciting…because that means that we handled the transition,” Roose said. “We created the tools that customers actually need. We are customer-centric. Everything that we build is coming from feedback that we get from our retailers, from our brands, from agencies. I think that’s why it’s getting better and better, and that’s why they love working with us.”
Roose said she believes the future of retail media will move from just on-site to on-site plus programmatic, adding email, CTV, video, social, digital out of home. “If the industry goes toward that with one partner in the middle that can have one central interface, all connected and available to all, to activate, I think that’s just going to change everything.”
Criteo unveiled its newest solution at Groceryshop 2022. Roose said it unifies “the retail media onsite worlds and the off-site programmatic one in one single interface.” She said being able to measure sales in real time is the future.
“You cannot ask marketers to invest in advertising anymore if they don’t get sales and if they don’t have the ability to actually measure results…I want to make sure that my advertising is actually generating the most dollars and I want to track it. That’s really where the closing measurement is so important.”
