All right. great. We're gonna go ahead and get started. Doug Anmuth, J.P. Morgan's internet analyst. we're pleased to have with us today, Criteo's CEO, Megan Clarken. Criteo operates at the intersection of e-commerce, digital marketing, and media monetization, enabling brands and retailers' growth. its vision is to build the world's leading e-commerce media platform by leveraging its network of more than 5,000 premium publishers, approximately 19,000 commerce clients, and more than 750,000,000 DAUs globally across around $4,000,000,000 in annual activated media spend. Criteo and Megan have really been embarking on this multiyear journey to transition the business from core retargeting to retail media. the platform now derives about 45% of its revenue from non, from new businesses, non-retargeting services. Prior to joining the company, Megan spent 15 years in various positions at Nielsen, most recently as Chief Commercial Officer of Nielsen Global Media. Welcome, Megan. Thank you. It's good to be here. All right. I think it's been about three years, right? A little over three years. Yeah. Maybe just for those a bit less familiar with the story, perhaps you could just walk through some of the company's evolution during that timeframe, and discuss current strategic priorities. Sure. Well, I started, as you said, 3 and a half years ago. When I started at Nielsen. You threw me. When I started at Criteo was a company just focused 100% on retargeting. In other words, sending you an ad and then sending it to you again and again and again until you did something. There was a cap that said, "We've given up on you. We won't send you an ad again." That's what retargeting is. What was happening just as I was coming in the door was that the technology that's used to be able to do that is cookies, as most of you will know, was under threat of being of being deprecated. That business itself was under threat. When I came in the door, it was about how do we turn this company around? How do we send it in a different direction? The first thing you do is you look for the assets that the company has, and Criteo had three major assets. Four major assets. One was a retargeting or targeting platform, the ability to be able to find the right person in the right place at the right time on the right device, so that sort of tech. It had acquired a company called HookLogic, and therefore had some sort of capability around an early adopter of Retail Media. It had amazing people, absolutely incredibly smart people, and it also had amazing clients. Our distribution on both the sell side and the buy side was in the thousands of clients. There are all the right things, ingredients to put together a new strategy. We saw the Commerce Media strategy as being the right one to go after, and starting with Retail Media to focus on that. The reason why is because the total addressable market globally, excluding China, for Retail Media is about $110,000,000,000. The total addressable market for Commerce Media, which is all commerce players, so in other words, retailer might be Target, but a commerce player might be Uber. All commerce players as being about $290,000,000,000, excluding China. A massive pot of dollars flowing in that direction, and very few players, if any, really chasing it down. We had all of those assets that I called out earlier as being our ability to chase that down. We pivoted the organization towards that while maintaining our retargeting capability and making it more of a tactic inside of the Commerce Media play. We said to the market, we would turn this business into a Commerce Media platform. What you would see is that these new solutions would start to overtake the size of the retargeting business as that becomes sort of more stable and contained, and the rest of the business grows. Right now we're 3 years in, so we're halfway through our transformation, and we're at 50%. Half of our business is now those new solutions, and we expect that by 2025, those new solutions will make up 75% of our business and retargeting will be at 25%. We're moving, and we're moving very fast in this direction. Okay, great. Maybe you can just, you started to put some numbers around it. Maybe if you could talk about that a little bit more just in terms of targets, assumptions. You laid some things out at your investor day last year, but just how you think about that path to 2025, and what kind of underlies some of those forecasts. Yeah. We said that our business would be at $1,400,000,000 by 2025, and that Sorry, we would grow our Retail Media business 3 times by 2025, and we're set to do that. We stand behind what we said back then, and we're set to do that. The drivers really are that total addressable market that I called out before has not changed. There's nothing in the current sort of environment that says that that market is decreasing. It is a huge pot of gold. It's still there. It's $110,000,000,000 and $290,000,000,000 for Commerce Media. Nothing in the external factors tell us that anything has changed there. We chase that down. We're building out the capabilities, to fulfill the entire Commerce Media platform, with the last piece of the pie really being around Commerce Max, which is, our DSP, which brings demand into the retailers and to the commerce players, which will be launched in September of this year. That closes out the Commerce Media components that all of that's coming along. We're now at 200 clients for Retail Media. Our strategy has been to secure the retailers, and we've been chasing that down. We continue to sign new logos every single quarter. There's a drumbeat behind that. We see that those retailers that are coming on board, are coming on in all different flavors. They come in knowing that there's an opportunity for them, and they slowly, over time, build that opportunity out. They start from small, and then they grow big over time. We've seen that unfold as we've seen our clients evolve over the last few years. We feel good about those numbers. Okay, great. We'll come back to a lot of that. I wanna talk about AI. Sure. A little bit. Obviously, a big topic in general, but it, you know, at this week, at this conference all week, certainly. Maybe you could just talk about some of the ways that the company leverages AI and machine learning, just in terms of its existing ad solutions, and then kind of how you see that evolving going forward. We've been doing AI for 17 years. It's, you know, predicting what's going to happen. It's just part of the work that we do. It's in our DNA. We have an AI lab that we call CAIL, Criteo AI Lab, and it's about 150 engineers strong. There are more PhDs in that lab than I can possibly count, so it's just full of very bright people that are functioning around AI every single day. While it's not a step change for us, it's just the evolution of more models that we can utilize in the AI that we currently use. We use it for things like, you know, predictive work that we do, for behavioral analysis. For understanding who's gonna click on an ad versus who's not gonna click on an ad. Just ways to, at speed, be able to know whether to surface an ad or not surface the ad, because we can generate some sort of view on what's gonna happen to the ad. That's just what retargeting is all about. This capability has always been there for retargeting. For us, taking that to the next level and introducing it to our Retail Media and Commerce Media play is an obvious place for us to go to next. All of the functions and features that we have have got to be built with AI in mind and GenAI in mind, given what's been going on the last couple of months. Know that internally, there's a big opportunity for us to also apply it through our internal systems and the way that our internal teams go about their everyday work. For instance, if we see an ad is not working, and we have access to the creative, instead of it taking time and people to change that ad out, it just happens automatically through the AI technology that we have. We also see that AI is only as good as the data that it sits on, and given that we process so much data every single second or every millisecond inside of our shop, 2,000,000,000 transactions a day, this is where we see ourselves at our best. Utilizing that technology to just do an even better job of processing faster and with more optimization is there. For our clients, what we expect to see is that creative, they'll probably start by doing sort of better things with creative, producing creative faster. Text to rich media, text to video, voice to rich media, voice to video. Being able to create creative on the fly is the sort of thing that we expect will come at us first, when we're looking at servicing the industry. Lots of opportunities there, but a great tailwind for us in the fact that we are so strong in this field already. Maybe just curious, on the topic, I mean, you've obviously a lot of experience, many years just across the broader advertising industry. Are there any other things that any impacts that you think about around generative AI, just across the industry in general over the next several years? Well, I, everything becomes faster. Okay. Theoretically less people. However, we saw, you know, the internet come about or at least I did. We saw, you know, the calculator be introduced to people's homes or at least I did, and nothing fell off the earth. It was that you could do more, you could do it faster, and you could process much more data, you could optimize. We'll probably see the shape of, you know, organizations change a little bit with new jobs appearing that weren't there yesterday. Mm-hmm. One of the areas to watch out for, I think, is in measurement. Because measurement today, certainly for CMOs is somewhat substandard in the digital landscape. Through commerce media and the ability to use AI techniques to bring data together with high fidelity across the entire supply-demand chain. In real time for CMOs is something that certainly we're leading in on. Okay, great. Let's dig into retail media more. If you can just talk in some more detail about some of the key product capabilities and really differentiators. Yeah. I think you mentioned 200 clients or logos. What is really, you know, causing them to choose Criteo over other providers in this space? Well, there's a number of things. Firstly, independence is key for a retailer to know that they're not working with another agency, or they're not working with a player who's going to, you know, maybe be questioned in terms of their independence and ability to do the job for them and for them first and foremost. Independence has always been a strong sort of way in the door for Criteo. We're an AdTech player. We focus on Commerce Media. That's all we do. We don't do anything else. The other thing is performance. At the end of the day, retailers and brands just wanna make money. What they wanna know is that their ad performs and that their ad drives an ROI. As I said before, we've got 17 years of performance under our belts, and we bring that capability to retailers and to brands every day. The third thing would be the fact that we do on-site and off-site retail media, meaning that some players just do on-site, so they just create or surface the ads on a retailer's site, but they don't do the off-site. Some players do the off-site. They just send ads out across the open internet for the retailer, but they don't do the on-site. For Criteo, we do both. We surface ads on the retailer or the commerce player's site, and we also work with the retailer and their brand to say, "Let's take this opportunity to also send those ads out across the open internet using the same set of data, the first-party data, to do both." That is a huge differentiator for our clients. The next thing which comes up all the time is around network effects, meaning that our clients benefit from the fact that other retailers use the platform because we're developing all the time and we're putting new features and functions all the time. That if they were just on their own or using a smaller platform, they wouldn't benefit from the fact that there is ongoing improvements or ongoing capabilities being surfaced all the time. Network effects is a big one. Another one would be, probably one of the biggest, would be demand. If you're a retailer, and you're certainly, if you're a retailer that's not used to the advertising space, again, what you wanna do is you wanna make money. You've gotta try to get brands to advertise on your site. What Criteo has is we have 200 retailers, but we have, I've written it on my hand, 2,300 brands out there that we can attract to a retailer's site. We also have relationships with all the big holdcos. All of a sudden, there's this mountain of demand that can come through Criteo's pipes to fill out the supply on the retailers' sites, and they like that, 'cause if they don't have that, they've gotta go after that themselves, and they don't know where to start. That's a very big one. Another one is our integration capabilities. What a lot of people don't realize is that when you're doing Retail Media or Commerce Media on-site, you're actually integrated deeply into the datasets of the retailer. Let me explain this a little bit. When you see an ad on a retailer's site, particularly a sponsored ad, and let me pick on Uber for a second, is that Uber is a new client of ours. We signed them last quarter. If you go to Uber Eats, on your app and you search for, you know, something, a grocery product or. You'll see the first ad that's displayed is a sponsored ad. It's very similar to what you might see on Amazon. It's very similar to what you might see on Google search. That's not there just by accident. That's there because Criteo has access to all of Uber's datasets, which makes sure that we surface the right ad to the right person and that it is a sponsored ad. That it's a premium ad that's been paid for by that brand. Note that brands are now competing against each other to be that first one to appear, which is driving this sort of activity and ultimately the revenue for Uber and for us. This whole thing is just key to being a retail media partner for our retailers, and these are the sorts of things that we do that completely differentiate us from anybody else. Okay, that's great. Very helpful. You mentioned Uber, so we get a sense for some of the capabilities there, I guess. Any way to kinda size the potential, you know, perhaps in that relationship? Then just more broadly, how do we think about deal pipeline in the Retail Media space? Yeah ... perhaps over the course of this year? Uber's really interesting for us because with we feel like we're market makers to some extent. We coined the phrase retail media early on. We coined the phrase commerce media. It was very difficult for us to explain the difference between the two. Uber absolutely explains it. They're not a retailer, they're a commerce player. We start off with the retailers that sit in the center. We, we've been really focused on them. Uber comes along, they're part of this entire new TAM opportunity in commerce media. It means for us that other Uber-type players could come along and do exactly the same thing. Again, I'd encourage you to look at the Uber site because you can sort of picture what I'm talking about if you take a look at it. It is laid out in a very similar way to Amazon. If you think that Uber's aspirations here is perhaps, I'm gonna make this up, they haven't said this to me, but be the Amazon for grocery. Like, if that's as big as they're thinking to be, what we're doing for them is what is happening on Amazon. The proposition here is really exciting in terms of the opportunities, and there's others like Uber out there. We love that. This is for Uber Eats. It is a three-year deal. It's exclusive for Uber Eats, and it focuses on just the sponsored ads. For us, we have the ability to extend that out beyond Uber Eats, into the other Uber categories and also globally. This in itself has the ability to be, you know, to be as big as Uber can make it, and they're very serious, clearly about this business. The other side of it, of course, is that it, as I said, it just attracts others. Momentum drives momentum, and one gets going, and then the others start coming in. We saw that with pure retail media. One player came along, and then others started to come along. This is what we're seeing actually around retail media and commerce media, is this sort of swarm towards this area. It's been interesting coming into 2023 because I've spoken to a number of CEOs who now actually have a retail media number in their P&Ls. Mm-hmm ...in their plans for 2023. Never seen that before. We would expect that that is only gonna become more common, and Criteo sitting in this pole position is in a really good shape to not take advantage of, but help them to take advantage of us to reach that number. Maybe just to wrap there on Retail Media, you are targeting 30% growth in Retail Media this year. How do we think about that mix of growth between existing partners ramping up that spend versus new partners to the platform? Well, we saw same client increases of 130% in 2022, so we expect that sort of trend to continue. Meaning that existing clients will continue to grow on top of the platform. That's the first place. Bringing the network effect, as I said, the features and functions to them will help them to become bigger, to grow. They're all Clearly, they want to grow in this area, so we've got a willing and capable audience. The second is new. We went into this year with part of our one of our pillars was to secure the retailers or secure retailers. We've done that. We've gone out, and used 2023 as a year to go after as many retailers as we possibly can, and we've got some great logos that have come on board, and we'll continue to roll them out, announce them as we can. This is to get scale across the platform and see the benefits of that with those clients. The third area is in geo. I think I mentioned this briefly in our last earnings, but we saw about 5 new retail media clients in Japan. Just as an example of the power of geo, we have a strong business in Europe, we have a strong business in the U.S., but Japan is, you know, is around a $30,000,000,000 advertising, digital advertising marketplace. It's big. Because we have a presence in Japan, an actual team there, and it's not a small team, Japanese retailers are loving the fact that there's a local flavor to doing forming a partnership with Criteo. That's given us a really strong first-mover advantage in a marketplace that's heavy in digital retail and digital commerce. Mm-hmm. We see that momentum as being really positive, and it's just one example of some of the endeavors that we're making in international markets. We acquired a business called Brandcrush last quarter, and Brandcrush has presence throughout Asia Pac, and it's just giving us this extra opportunity to lean into, you know, their network and fill out the suite for their clients beyond the omnichannel piece. Between new clients, existing clients, and geo, we've got a, I mean, a pretty good line of sight into further growth. Yeah. Okay, great. Let's shift gears a little bit, talk about Commerce Max. You mentioned September, pretty highly anticipated launch. Maybe if you could give a little deeper overview of the product and then talk about what some of your early learnings have been in the testing that you've done thus far. Commerce Max is exciting. It's sort of I like to see it as a way to stitch everything together, if you like. We've been building an end-to-end commerce media capability, you know, starting from the acquisitions that we had of HookLogic in the on-site capability. That's the ability for us to manage the display and the sponsored ads on the retailer site. That piece with the extension of that into off-site, using our performance marketing capabilities and retargeting and targeting. The Brandcrush acquisition helps us take, helps us manage the retailers' digital inventory in store. Now we've got this sort of line of platform that supports the retailers' advertising from in-store to on-site to off-site. Sitting across the top of that is the demand engine, which is Commerce Max. Commerce Max surfaces for the agencies and the brands, the ability to buy the inventory. Buy the retailer's inventory and also buy inventory on the open internet. Now you see us sitting alongside, you know, the big inventory players like the Amazon, like the Google, like the Meta, and then Criteo. Criteo lights up a Retail Media network. This has been really important for agencies and brands because today it's difficult for them to buy across a suite of retailers or commerce players. They have to go and do it bespoke. Even through us, they have to do it bespoke. This lights up the ability for them to say, "I wanna put this budget across into retailers or into commerce players, and I'm gonna do it through my Criteo spend." It goes through one single platform that's sitting on the desktop of the buyers and sellers. That's the first part of it. It stitches, makes everything available that's underneath. The second part of it, which is really key, is that it then lights up the capability to measure, and I talked about this earlier around AI, is to take the flow of advertising from off-site to on-site. Sorry, from in-store, in-home, on-site, off-site, and stitch together how a campaign has performed. Regardless of the tactic, how it's performed using data at the source, meaning using the retailer's data all the way through, or Criteo data when it comes to off-site, and stitch those pieces together all the way through and create true closed-loop measurement across that entire activation. The reason why this is important, now I've sort of put on my Nielsen hat, is that for years at Nielsen, I would sit in front of CMOs, and they would tell me how they cannot... The worst thing about them advertising on digital was measurement. The single worst thing, the thing that needed to be fixed was measurement. It was elusive because it was third party, because they would get their viewability and their brand safety from somebody or from one player. They'd get their digital exposure or their consumer exposure from somebody else, from Nielsen, they'd be lucky if they got demographics past age and gender. They'd have another player that would use cobbled together credit card data to pull together sort of attribution or ROI. They'd use their mixed models to be able to tell whether or not a suite of campaigns over a period of time. It was just like, was a nightmare. With this, with Commerce Max and our end-to-end closed loop capability of data, which is truly at the source, which is happening in real-time, which is answering all of those questions at the same time, with high fidelity, that is sort of the holy grail of measurement in a digital environment. That's the promise that commerce media brings over and above any other media, unless you're in a closed-loop environment. This one is just a game changer, and as you can see, we're excited about this one, coming through when we launch Commerce Max in September. Okay, great. Let's see. We've got about six minutes. Few things I wanna get through. Yeah. Google Privacy Sandbox, major industry-wide initiative. Maybe you can just talk about how closely you've been working with Google here, and then provide an update on results to date, what we should think about next, and impact on the industry. Google last week announced that they would continue to stand by their dates, which are the second half of 2024. We've been working towards those dates for a long time now. We stand by what Google is saying, and we believe that that's the date. They also opened up some more testing capability just to start to open the aperture a bit more as they get closer to those dates. We've been working with Google now since 2020, early 2020 in the Sandbox, and we've been helping them to get ready for the CMA's ask that they don't deprecate cookies until they have something that is workable by the AdTech community. We've authored a lot of that. We've had input into their APIs. We've been testing their APIs. There's a lot of Criteo stuff behind the scenes with Google to help make sure that, they're doing the right thing for the industry. It's an industry-wide initiative, clearly to make sure that we're ready as well. We're ready. We're ready to go when they go. We're absolutely ready. It's, it's a collaboration with them to get us to this point, I think that, well, as I said, we're ready. Okay, great. Clearly, just thinking about guide for 2Q, markets overall, I mean, macro, you know, certainly remains challenged. Maybe you could just give us some flavor and context for what your conversations are like with marketers in the current environment. Yeah. On the Retail Media side, there's, you know, a lot of enthusiasm around what's going on there. This is new money for a lot of retailers. It's also a big opportunity for them to, you know, utilize or use that opportunity to make up for any shortfalls that they have in other places. There's a lot of enthusiasm going on in the Retail Media front. On the more on the retargeting front, there is, we continue to have caution around the rest of the year, as we've said coming into the year. We see sort of some changes in the data that we see ourselves around different industry sectors. For instance, department stores, fashion has not performed as well as what we would have expected. For us, we have, we have sectors in other areas, so we're always, you know, hedged by the fact that we've got clients across all different sectors. Basically, there are some that are pulling back a bit. What we're mostly seeing is that marketers are just holding back or reevaluating their spend on a more regular basis. As opposed to them releasing spend at the beginning of the year for the whole year, we've seen them come back to month by month reassessing what budgets they'll release and just being a little bit more prudent around where they're spending. Marketers are still advertising. They want bang for buck, so they're going to the things that they know. Search and social are doing well. Retail Media is doing well. as I said, CTV is doing well while it continues to shift from linear. We'll, you know, we feel good about it, but we're cautious about the rest of the year. Just on the rest of the year, so the 2 Q guide does suggest modest improvement in organic. Mm-hmm ... performance, the back half implies an acceleration. What gives you confidence in 2Q and back half at least improving somewhat? We had some comps into the first quarter. If you go back to first quarter last year, March, we lost our Russian business. Yeah ... some comps that were making some changes. We've got development happening that that make us feel confident about the second half of the year. Development, Commerce Max, for example, is development plus other features and functions that we're rolling out, which gives us confidence around the second half of the year. Q4 is usually our biggest, strongest quarter, so we get into more of a, you know, we lose some of the comps from previous year. This year, beginning of this year, upfront, we had loaded some headwinds from from signals. All of that's behind us, and we expect that the second half of the year will have that sort of uptick. Okay, great. Last question, just on profitability. How do you think about, how do you think about margins, you know, over the medium to long term? I know you've got some stuff, you know, IPONWEB, kind of a little bit dilutive, but obviously, Retail Media, contributing more here. Yeah. How do you think about margins? Well, we're like everybody, I guess, in cost control mode and making sure that we can take away any internal costs that we don't need to have. We put a target on that for this year, of which we're halfway through. We're on plan to be achieving the cost savings number in totality by the end of the year. That's really been about taking some headcount out, but also reducing some of the discretionary spend that we have in travel and different things that we've got some control over. We'll continue to do that through the rest of the year. We feel on track in terms of the productivity numbers that we've put in the plan. I think the thing that's, you know, most interesting is that as we evolve, as this company is evolving towards a Commerce Media platform, it has the ability now for us to reshape the organization to be a leaner, meaner machine going forward. There's work going on right now, which is targeting putting some parameters around that, reshaping some teams, working out ways in which to do a job better, faster, and to come out of it with something that, you know, over this transformation that we're going through is just a much different, much leaner, faster looking Criteo. That's what's gonna, you know. I think, I always think that instead of cost-cutting, is just to redesign the entire engine so that it's much more built for speed than trying to, you know, do some activity every year. That's exactly what we're doing. Got it. Yeah. All right. Great. Thank you, Megan. Perfect. Okay. Thank you. Great.