Reinventing Ad Tech, Criteo’s CEO on Retail Media, AI, and the Future of Addressability

Summary

Podcast Summary: Next in Media

Episode: Reinventing Ad Tech—Criteo’s CEO on Retail Media, AI, and the Future of Addressability

Host: Mike Shields
Guest: Michael Komasinski (CEO, Criteo)
Release Date: October 7, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Mike Shields sits down with Michael Komasinski, the recently appointed CEO of Criteo, to dissect the dramatic transformation of the ad tech landscape—especially in retail media. The conversation explores Criteo’s pivot from retargeting to a major player in retail media, the sector’s growth and challenges, the impact of AI and agentic buying, and the company’s evolving role as an independent tech provider. Komasinski also reflects on Criteo’s partnerships, notably with Google, and muses on the future of addressability, measurement, and AI’s practical role in advertising.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Criteo’s Reinvention and Strategic Acquisitions

• Legacy & Transformation:
  • Criteo, once synonymous with retargeting, faced existential threats from cookie deprecation and privacy changes.
  • Under former CEO Megan Clarkin, the company diversified via critical acquisitions:
    • HookLogic (2016): Laid the foundation for retail media business.
    • IponWeb: Brought advanced ad tech tools and the Commerce Grid (SSP).
  • Embraced the addressability challenge, investing in technology to leverage “weak signals” to preserve targeting (02:28).
• Quote:

  "The company did well...really embraced the addressability challenge...developing technology to harvest weak signal as a way to preserve addressability...In many ways, it future-proofed [Criteo] for whatever the ebbs and flows will be in that part of the ecosystem."
  — Michael Komasinski [03:50]

2. Role as an Independent Technology Provider

• Neutral Player in Retail Media:

  • Unlike Amazon or Walmart, Criteo doesn’t operate a marketplace; rather, they provide ad tech infrastructure across the ecosystem—both supply and demand sides.
  • Criteo now supports ~230 retailers with ~$160bn in gross merchandise volume (GMV), enabling especially midsize retailers to access state-of-the-art ad stacks (07:10).

• Quote:

  "We are an independent technology provider which makes us neutral...We support the entire ecosystem of retail media, both sell side and buy side."
  — Michael Komasinski [05:26]

• Why Retailers Don’t Go It Alone:

  • Building and maintaining sophisticated ad tech is costly and complex—most retailers lack the scale or expertise to self-provision.
  • Continuous innovation and demand generation require specialized technology partners.

3. Market Dynamics, Partnerships, and Growth Barriers

• Consolidation, Growth & Incrementality:

  • Amid rapid growth, the sector’s easy money—from digitizing in-store promotional budgets—has already migrated. Future growth depends on winning a share of broader, national media budgets (09:39).
  • Partnerships (e.g., Macy's+Amazon, Walmart+The Trade Desk) are about accessing incremental demand rather than simple consolidation.

• Quote:

  “[Now] the easy money is over.” — attributed to Melanie Zimmerman, Criteo GM of Retail [09:43]

• Unlocking Next-Phase Growth:

  • Reduction of friction in buying across retailers, standardized measurement, and the opening of new, programmatic “pipes” are essential.

4. The Challenge of Unifying Budgets and Teams

• Slow Organizational Change:

  • Brands and agencies are moving towards holistic measurement but still often operate with separate teams for trade/shopper and traditional media (11:08).
  • Overlays and coordination are increasing, but full convergence is incremental.

• Quote:

  “It's changing, but it is slow. I would describe it as somewhere in the middle innings. In terms of convergence...”
  — Michael Komasinski [11:08]

5. Programmatic in Retail—More Than Just Turning on Ads

• Holistic Page Optimization:

  • The “just bring programmatic to retail” mindset fails to account for the need to balance organic and sponsored placements on e-commerce pages.
  • 2–3% of retailers’ GMV typically comes from ads—so optimizing for both ad revenue and user experience is crucial (14:21).
  • Requires sophisticated algorithms (deep tech) that prioritize both shopper experience and revenue.

• Quote:

  “It's a deep technology solve that requires, you know, independent ad tech companies that have large engineering teams. Kind of like ours.”
  — Michael Komasinski [15:31]

6. Impact and Role of AI

• AI’s Current Use:

  • AI aids in signal processing and optimizing campaign logistics, but business intelligence—not “magical” general AI—is more relevant right now.
  • Internal example: Criteo’s product team built an agentic workflow—configuring, launching, and billing a campaign via conversational AI interface (Claude), making workflows more efficient and scalable for clients, especially SMBs (20:28).

• Quote:

  “The whole sort of agentic front end to planning and activation is here now...We're doing that today and then we'll start to expose that to our customers.”
  — Michael Komasinski [20:28]

7. CTV, Shoppable Media, and Google Partnership

• CTV as a Performance Channel:
  • Criteo is integrating commerce audiences and CTV inventory (e.g., Roku-WPP partnership), viewing CTV as a performance-driven channel and opportunity for crossing retail audiences into new media (17:09).
• Google Partnership:
  • The collaboration with Google (SA360) extends Criteo’s access to incremental demand—viewed as an additive, not competitive, relationship (18:42).

8. The Future of Agentic Shopping, Open Web & Rexis

• AI Agents Shopping for Consumers:

  • Komasinski is skeptical of fully autonomous agents taking over all shopping—some high-friction tasks are unlikely to be delegated, and low-friction tasks don’t need automation.
  • “Agentic Shopping” will become an incremental, not replacement, channel (24:06).
  • Digital consumer evolution is additive, not zero-sum—“Nothing ever goes away. We only get more.”

• Quote:

  “It only becomes more complex, more fragmented, more channels, more platforms. It's never winner take all, it's never zero sum game and nothing ever goes away.”
  — Michael Komasinski [24:08]

• The Need for Recommendation Data:

  • For agentic shopping to work well, AI platforms will need Rexis (recommendation engine) data—built on observing billions of user actions, not just language semantics.
  • Criteo’s roots: their platform began as a recommendation engine for DVDs, long before pivoting to advertising (27:11).

• Quote:

  “Critio is incredibly deep in the Rexis space. So the backbone of our platform is built on 20 years of showing different ads to people, understanding what they clicked on or didn't click on what they bought. Didn't buy.”
  — Michael Komasinski [25:53]

• Impact on Open Web:

  • The open web isn’t “dead” but is becoming more efficient as superfluous traffic gets cannibalized by AI and conversational search, leaving more valuable opportunities intact (28:46).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Criteo’s reinvention:

  “It just bolstered the addressability and targeting capabilities of the company in many ways. It future proofed it for whatever the ebbs and flows will be in that part of the ecosystem.” [03:50]

• On retailers’ reluctance to go it alone:

  “If you're a mid sized retailer like you can't build that kind of ad stack let alone then like you said, bring the demand side to it.” [07:10]

• On post-easy-money phase:

  “The easy money is over.” — Melanie Zimmerman, Criteo GM of Retail [09:43]

• On the complexity of bringing programmatic to retail:

  “There's a set of technologies that need to be developed that we call internally holistic page optimization…it's about the trade offs between organic and sponsored.” [13:37]

• On agentic shopping:

  “I think some of it's insane...Nothing ever goes away. We only get more.” [24:08]

• On what’s needed for AI-driven commerce:

  “Platforms will need to develop more advertising or recommendation oriented capabilities...to build a data reinforcement loop that really is the competitive advantage that those platforms will need to be built on.” [24:59]

• On the open web:

  “It’s getting more efficient than it [was before]...the cannibalization is in the part that wasn’t very efficient.” [28:52]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Criteo’s transformational journey: 02:28 – 04:52
• Criteo’s independent tech provider role: 05:26 – 07:10
• Retail media challenges & consolidation: 08:26 – 10:36
• Organizational/budget convergence: 11:08 – 12:36
• Programmatic & page optimization challenges: 13:31 – 15:31
• AI’s current & future impact: 15:40 – 20:28
• CTV’s retail media promise: 17:09 – 18:23
• Google partnership rationale: 18:42 – 19:32
• Agentic shopping future & Rexis importance: 22:52 – 27:15
• Open web’s continued value: 28:06 – 29:03

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Tone & Vibe

Conversational, thoughtful, and honest—mixing big-picture industry analysis with concrete examples, while maintaining skepticism for hype (especially around AI). Both Shields and Komasinski bring candor and subtle humor to demystifying ad tech trends.

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Tuned In

This episode offers a rich, nuanced look at how one of ad tech’s pioneering firms is both shaping and responding to seismic changes in retail media, privacy, and addressability. Komasinski’s insights will resonate for anyone interested in digital transformation, the realities behind AI in advertising, and what it takes to enable growth for retailers beyond the tech giants. The discussion is packed with industry context, historical perspective, and practical analysis of where retail media and ad tech are headed next.

Transcript

[Michael Komasinski]

Predecessor Megan Clarkin. I mean she did a really nice job diversifying the business. The company did well. Was it really embraced the addressability challenge. Developing technology to harvest weak signal as a way to preserve addressability sort of survival in some ways but also a lot of innovation. Was that investment waste of time? Absolutely not like what we developed. It just bolstered targeting capabilities and future proofed it. We are an independent technology provider which makes us we support the entire ecosystem providing great technology to retailers but then also developing the demand side of it. Building the ad technology that supports it is hard to build. Supports almost 230 retailers like $160 billion of GMV. If you're a mid sized retailer like you can't build that kind of ad stack. The easy money is over.

[Mike Shields]

Foreign this week on nexty Media, I spoke with Michael Komasinski who earlier this year was named CEO of Critio. Kaminsinski came on board after Critio had seemingly undertaken a successful long term reinvention. Going from an ad tech firm that was synonymous with retargeting is becoming a major player in retail media. Still, that sector is changing rapidly thanks to a crowding market and agentic buying maybe. So Michael and I talked about where that's going as well as the company's recent, perhaps surprising deal with Google. Let's get started. Hi everybody. Welcome to Nexting Media. I'm Mike Shields. My guest this week is Michael Komazinski. He is the CEO of Criteo. Hey Michael, thanks for being here.

[Michael Komasinski]

Hey Mike. Glad to be here.

[Mike Shields]

Excited to talk to you because you were at a really interesting company at a pretty interesting moment. You've been there since the beginning of the year, correct?

[Michael Komasinski]

Yeah, since February.

[Mike Shields]

I know that some of this is going to predate you, but I want to ask you about like a little Critio history. First of all, am I pronouncing it right? I've always pronounced it that way, but I hear different things.

[Michael Komasinski]

Yeah, as far as I know that's right. I hear that. I hear the Criteo every now and then, but I'm sticking with Critio.

[Mike Shields]

Yeah. I don't want to like come across as, you know, uncouth or something. But this is. I've always said Critio. For the longest time you would think of Critio as like the ultimate retargeting company. I'm going back years ago and you were Critio was supposed to be like the company that was going to be most hit by this cookie change. You can't do that anymore retargeting. And over the last couple years you're really pivoted successfully towards retail media and other businesses. But tell me, like, give us the history of how that came about, how that went and where you are now.

[Michael Komasinski]

Yeah, no, there's. I think there's kind of two tracks within that. So my predecessor, Megan Clarkin, I mean she did a really nice job diversifying the business.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

So the sort of two key decisions in that were one, the purchase of the Hook Logic business back in 2016, which is the foundation for our retail media business, and then the acquisition of Ipon Web, which was a set of ad tech tools, most notably, which gave us our commerce SSP commerce grid as it's known today. Right. So the point there is that like Megan did a nice job diversifying the business, but the other thing that the company did well was it really embraced the addressability challenge that really started with Apple's decision around ITP and just went hard at developing technology to harvest weak signal or diverse signals as a way to preserve addressability across a variety of platforms. And so it's why Critia was so leaned into the privacy sandbox initiative when that was underway with Google, was that this company was going to figure out a way to preserve some kind of addressability signal to maintain your business. Yeah, exactly.

[Mike Shields]

You had to have sort of survival.

[Michael Komasinski]

In some ways, but also a lot of innovation. And the question I then got this spring when, when obviously cookies, you know, when Chrome decided to maintain that ongoing, was that investment of the company, was that a waste of time? And I said absolutely not. Like what we developed. I'm sure somebody, some before I joined.

[Mike Shields]

Some of those conference calls with Privacy sandbox maybe feel like a waste of time for some people.

[Michael Komasinski]

There may have been a bit of effort here and there, but what it did is it just bolstered the addressability and targeting capabilities of the company in many ways. It future proofed it for whatever the ebbs and flows will be in that part of the ecosystem. And that is really important. So it allows us to plan our roadmap further out, be more growth oriented in the way that we think about it. So that's just as important as the diversification that Megan oversaw. So we're in a much better place than the company was maybe a few years ago in that way.

[Mike Shields]

It's funny you mentioned those key acquisitions are happening well before we were talking about retail media or even maybe you could have, definitely, certainly you could have seen Amazon on coming, but I don't know if you Would have seen Dick's Gordon Goods coming. But how do you explain to people, okay, I understand why retail media works really well. You've got the transaction and the ad exposure happening in the same place. That's why it's so powerful. But how do you guys do what you do well without. Actually you don't, you don't sell anything yourselves. You don't have your own e commerce website. How do you succeed in retail media without being in retail?

[Michael Komasinski]

I guess, yeah, sure. I mean it's sort of inherent in the premise of the question, right? We are an independent technology provider which makes us neutral. And then I think the key proposition that Critio brought to that early on and maintains today is we support the entire ecosystem of retail media, both sell side and buy side.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

We've been more focused on like building the business. So that is providing great technology to retailers that allow them to monetize their site traffic and improve their customer experience, but then also develop in the demand side of the business to make sure that there's revenue coming in. Because these are, these are business units that retailers are standing up.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

You're not just trying to, you know, check a box on some sort of cost item for a technology capability.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

You're really trying to deliver a sort of full P and L business solution. And that's what really made Criteo the independent industry leader outside of Amazon and Walmart. And it continues to be our core value proposition today.

[Mike Shields]

Stupid question on that note. That makes total sense. Like someone needs to channel the demand, you know, facilitated on both sides of the equation. You would think anybody who has this valuable data in real estate all the time. You hear everyone loves retail media because not only it works, but it's like super profitable. Why would any of these retailers want to have an intermediary at all? You know, why would that not all wall garden you out of this business?

[Michael Komasinski]

Sure, sure. Yeah. I think first of all like building the, the ad tech, tech technology that supports it is hard to build.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

It's complicated. You know our ad serving product supports almost 230 retailers like $160 billion of GMV just on the E comm that flows through that. So you know these are, it's a scaled platform and if you're a mid sized retailer like you can't build that kind of ad stack let alone then like you said, the bring the demand side to it.

[Mike Shields]

Cost wise, technology wise, people wise.

[Michael Komasinski]

Yeah, no, it's just, it's just too big a lift. And like it is with any of these platforms, the need to continually innovate, bring new capabilities to market, develop new ad formats. That is uniquely an independent ad tech sort of domain that, that we're really confident about.

[Mike Shields]

Okay, so give me, I keep, I keep referring to a couple like, this category is booming, but it, there is a lot of change going on. Like everyone wants for signs of consolidation. I don't even, it's like all we do is talk about, oh, it's incredible and everyone's going to eventually give in. Right. Which doesn't make sense. What are you seeing? You seeing like, you know, Macy's and Amazon have a partnership. Walmart may or may not stick with the trade desk. Amazon is obviously making deals with everybody. Like what, how do you sum up what is going on right now in the category?

[Michael Komasinski]

Yeah, so everyone's looking for incremental growth.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

Just sort of an obvious statement, but that really is the core. That's what drives it. And so in terms of partnerships, that's the red thread between the examples that you gave there. In those cases, all of those partnerships are predicated on the assumption that the other partner or the counterparty there is bringing some kind of incremental demand that they're not going to be able to achieve in any other way or on their own.

[Mike Shields]

Right, right.

[Michael Komasinski]

And so that just, you know, you become partners and friends with people that you think can bring you incrementality.

[Mike Shields]

Sure.

[Michael Komasinski]

And I think that's then the broader sort of imperative for the entire ecosystem.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

I'll take you back a second. The growth over the last four or five years has largely been migration of traditional trade spend into digital media, which for all the reasons that you said, close to the point of purchase, brand safe, closed loop, all those things, digitizing.

[Mike Shields]

Those in store units and circulars and.

[Michael Komasinski]

Stuff, powerful tailwinds to put that on the media plan and to change those dollars into that format. A lot of that migration has passed.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

And so like our GM of retail, Melanie Zimmerman said, the easy money is over.

[Mike Shields]

Yeah.

[Michael Komasinski]

Is her quote.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

But that doesn't mean that the growth rate of the sector has to slow down. It just means that you need to overcome those growth challenges. And what is that? That's now trying to play for a bigger share of wallet for national media budgets. And the way you do that is by reducing friction in being able to buy across retailers in an easier, more fluid way, getting measurement standards more consistent and generally opening up new pipes that allow that to flow in in a more programmatic fashion. So I think there's a couple of different unlocks and, or adoptions that'll need to happen across the industry in the coming years. But it could be very much the same growth that we saw previously. It'll just be driven by these sort of removals of obstacles or enhancements, basically. There's a lot of upside still, for sure.

[Mike Shields]

Now we talk about this a lot in this, in this category. You mentioned how it was the migration of what we, what were like distinctive budgets and then now it's like, you know, fighting for maybe the more advertising media budget that wasn't traditionally going to these folks. You always hear that every brand was in a different place where they're organizationally and it's hard to maybe not everybody was ready to merge all those worlds together and bring the budget, channel them into one place. Are things coming together? Is it smoother? You still, are you still having tug of wars internally at big companies? Like what, what does that look like right now?

[Michael Komasinski]

Yeah, it's changing, but it is slow. I would describe it as somewhere in the middle innings. In terms of convergence, you definitely still have separate teams, especially inside of big brands. But there's definitely much more focus on trying to holistically measure that spend, even if it might sit with different teams. So now there's some kind of an overlay that it knows what those budgets are, where there's overlap on retailers and how that's laddering up to incrementality. So even where brands have not consolidated the teams or even inside of agencies, there's still a push to measure holistically and there's certainly awareness of those overlaps. I think it's moving in that direction. But there's more to go. And some of that's rooted in the essential nature of trade and shopper marketing teams. I mean, they have quite a fundamental goal.

[Mike Shields]

We wanted to get rid of all that. Okay, why would you have that anymore? Right? Just move it over retail media. That's not, that's not as many sense for many of these companies.

[Michael Komasinski]

No, it doesn't. Those are still powerful ways to drive shopper traffic and loyalty and they intersect closely with the, with the physical space as well. And so, you know, the future of trade and shoppers is, is still quite robust inside of, of of retailers and brands.

[Mike Shields]

Okay. So maybe they're not like rivals or, or operating totally independently. They're, they're trying to coordinate their data and goals.

[Michael Komasinski]

But still more coordinated and more measured holistically, I'd say is where we're headed.

[Mike Shields]

Right now on the media side of things. Like I said we'd love to talk about. It's a great business, it's, it's great margins. Everyone's growing, but for sure they're not. All these companies are going to stick with it, right? They're going to. All brands don't want to deal with 300 networks. They're going to come together in some way. Are there signs of that? Like with was the Macy's thing, Canary in the coal mine, not a big deal. Are you guys seeing that?

[Michael Komasinski]

I mean it goes back to the growth thing, right? So these networks are looking for growth, they've got targets to hit and they're going to either like we said earlier, forge partnerships that they think bring them incremental demand or they're going to turn to providers like Critio and expect us to unlock that with new technology solutions. So let me go a little deep on this one for a second because I think it's super interesting. So the really simple answer to that is oh, we'll just bring Programmatic into retail.

[Mike Shields]

Well, easy. Yeah.

[Michael Komasinski]

Easy. Yeah. Well it's not easy actually. And that's actually not the first step.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

More fundamentally, there's a set of technologies that need to be developed that we call internally holistic page optimization. And what that gets to is the set of algorithms that would govern the trade offs between organic showing organic products like natively versus sponsored.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

And what's the right mix of sort of like showing the right product to someone and essentially driving a better shopping experience, maybe a higher transaction rate and the gross margin that comes with that versus the trade off of showing something that's sponsored and the incremental advertising revenue that comes through.

[Mike Shields]

So basically we like to think of it as just like turn on the ads, show ads every time someone searches.

[Michael Komasinski]

Done. No. And you can, you can also like work backwards. And always remember that for a retailer, the revenue that they're deriving from ads on site is typically in the 2 to 3% of GMV ratio. So it underscores the importance of the value of gross merchandise versus ad sales.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

It's important as an incremental profit driver, but you don't want to mess up your user experience, your shopping experience or the volume of goods that you're moving through your E Comm channel. And so really getting that optimized and hopefully making advertising and organic incredibly complimentary.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

If you can master that, then you can bring in a pipe.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

With the right sort of like safeguards around what ads you want to show, in which situations that are going to fit that Complimentary criteria. Now you've got an additional sort of demand source coming in technologically, but you have to solve the sort of page optimization first between organic and paid.

[Mike Shields]

Right. So that, and that is crucial and not everybody can do that very easily.

[Michael Komasinski]

That is a deep technology solve that requires, you know, independent ad tech companies that have large engineering teams. Kind of, kind of like ours.

[Mike Shields]

Yeah. And so obvious question, does AI, has that made that easier? And then I want to get into the like, are you seeing the agentic thing actually that we talk about change practices yet?

[Michael Komasinski]

So the, the solve for that, I mean AI plays a role, right, I think in like processing those signals faster, certainly helping us write code faster. But I think there's a lot of business intelligence as opposed to maybe kind of the way we think about AI more broadly.

[Mike Shields]

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[Michael Komasinski]

We are playing there in a couple different ways. Definitely see CTV evolving as a performance channel. Definitely think the evolution of ad formats that you allude to there, as well as the development of just long tail channel variety creates a lot of really interesting advertising inventory. And so we look at it as a performance channel, you know, just like we would, you know, the open web or other channels. The opportunity then like it is for critio in so many cases is to cross these things. So CTV also represents an ability for us to take retailers into off site and that's kind of like core to the partnership that we announced over the summer. Between Roku and WPP Media, we're essentially taking critio commerce audiences, crossing those with Roku and the reach that they've got across CTV and then serving those to WPP media clients and very tailored vertical specific audiences. There's a lot to do there as you intersect the reach that you've got there with the commerce signal that we have from our retailers.

[Mike Shields]

Speaking of announcements you've made, you recently in the last couple weeks announced a deal with Google which I thought was eye opening for a couple of reasons. Perhaps you don't think of Google might have been a dominant player in retail media, but they just weren't first or they weren't let in for whatever reasons. I don't know, you might have expected you two to come together, but give us like what's behind that and what's the potential there.

[Michael Komasinski]

Yeah, so again it goes back to the, the whole incrementality play, right? I mean like we're 100% focused on bringing incremental demand to our retailers. And so while we have powerful front end in commerce max and a large user base associated with that, we have 14 other API partners that bring demand into our retail inventory. And so we look at Google as just a natural extension of that. There are brands that want to run campaigns through SA360 and those are going to be incremental to the 14 other partners that we already have or incremental to brands that we work with directly. And that's really, it's as simple as that.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

That partnership's got a lot of potential and even potentially across some of the other products in the Google suite.

[Mike Shields]

What about getting back to. We were talking about AI of course, before Guess. Are some of your clients using agents they've built to do the workflow stuff that they used to be done by planners, buyers and that's getting smoother. And how far away are we from some kind of equivalent to performance max for retail media or those like a media buying tool that just does everything?

[Michael Komasinski]

I think in retail media it might be a little bit further off, but I will tell you like the whole sort of agentic front end to planning and, and, and activation is here now. Like we just announced a, an internal case study. We had kind of a cool challenge with the product and R and D teams over the summer to get $1 of invoice revenue flowing through our MCP servers from a agentically activated campaign.

[Mike Shields]

Okay.

[Michael Komasinski]

And they did it, they did it like at the end of September. And basically what that was was you could come in Through Claude configure a campaign conversationally which then translates through our MCP layer into our commerce growth platform. And campaigns are up and running and live. And so it's a good example kind of on your point about making workflows more efficient. We're doing that today and then we'll start to expose that to our customers and then eventually I think some of that functionality will come to the retail media interface as well. So very focused on that type of capability and how it unlocks and makes our offering more scalable, I think especially with SMB clients.

[Mike Shields]

Yeah, we're assuming that that won't be the last dollar that gets transacted that way.

[Michael Komasinski]

No, no. Hopefully many more than that.

[Mike Shields]

I want to ask you, you probably have a pretty good pulse on consumers and their and retail spending just from your vantage point. Like I think we, we waited half the year for like tariffs are going to do something to the economy. It's been unclear up and down. Are you seeing impacts? Are your clients seeing impacts there? Is it like un. Hard to read?

[Michael Komasinski]

It has been hard to read actually. And there have been ups and downs with different subsectors within retail. But as we sit here kind of now in, you know, October, job market has, has held up pretty well. Consumer spending's held up. There do seem to be some, some warning signs about the job market maybe looking forward. But you know, consumers seems like they're in pretty decent shape right now. So yeah, it's been volatile I think sometimes like brand to brand or within subsectors, but we seem to have weathered the whole tariff thing reasonably well.

[Mike Shields]

Yeah, it's like, like consumers like to grumble or. But then they'll go crazy on prime day. Like it doesn't. There's a, there's a conflicting behavior or what about, you know, there's a lot. There's some. It's funny, it's still very. Feels very early but with the agentic thing there, there are camps that say we are going to use agents and they'll do all our shopping for us every week and never have to worry about it. And there are others. Are like this never going to happen. You're insane. Or is it something you're thinking about? Do you, do you see that? Is it like, is it something that's just very hard to read right now?

[Michael Komasinski]

I don't know if it's hard to read. I'm in the latter camp. I think some of it's insane. I find myself, I find myself gravitating now to authors who publish as much what things will be as much as things will not be.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

So like there's a. You probably follow some of this too, right. I think Eric Soyfert and Andrew Sussman wrote like a really great piece a few weeks back and talked about how sort of the notion of autonomy was a little bit upside down.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

Relative to the need states.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right. That.

[Michael Komasinski]

That things that have relatively low friction are easy to automate. But why would you. Because they're low friction. And things that are highly considered are not things that you would delegate because they're high consideration. And so it's a solution looking for a problem in some ways. I think that's a super interesting point of view. Now that said, I do think that Agentic Shopping will emerge as a powerful new channel. And I think of it as a channel. I think of it as like an incremental channel. It's kind of how we look at the chat GPT this week. It's not all or nothing.

[Mike Shields]

You're still shopping in stores, it's still E commerce.

[Michael Komasinski]

That has been the pattern of digital consumer evolution the last 30 years. Nothing ever goes away. We only get more. It only becomes more complex, more fragmented, more channels, more platforms. It's never winner take all, it's never zero sum game and nothing ever goes away. That's the, that's a deep belief that I have about this space now on Agentic. I do think there's a really interesting topic that I'd love to go deeper with you here that I was hoping you'd ask about is I think the platforms will need to develop more advertising or recommendation oriented capabilities. Not so much just to bring in new revenue, although I do think that'll be important, but also to build a data reinforcement loop that really is the competitive advantage that those platforms will need to be built on.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

And it really gets down to geek out for a second. Sort of the difference between like semantic algorithms that Most of these LLMs are built on today versus what we call recommendation engines or Rexis algorithms that are really built on billions and billions of observations of what someone was shown and what they ultimately did. It's kind of like the difference between like attitudinal research versus behavioral research.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

And behavioral is built on what people actually do.

[Mike Shields]

Right. Which is not always where they say exactly.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

And so it's interesting the convergence of these kind of two different algorithm technologies. Critio is incredibly deep in the Rexis space. So the backbone of our platform is built on 20 years of showing different ads to people, understanding what they clicked on or didn't click on what they bought. Didn't buy.

[Mike Shields]

Okay.

[Michael Komasinski]

And then normalizing all that behavior across different categories, sites, day parts, et cetera, that's a powerful like backbone that needs to find its way into these platforms for them to be able to serve relevant recommendations. Otherwise.

[Mike Shields]

You mean there's platforms like OpenAI and Claude, like should I do. They just don't incorporate that as much. So they're not good at.

[Michael Komasinski]

They'll need to develop. They'll either need to develop offerings or partnerships that bring that type of intelligence into their engines.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

Which is, which is why I think like the move this week with, with Chat, GPT and Etsy was noteworthy because that essentially allows them to start to build transactional data, which is at least a move in that direction.

[Mike Shields]

Yeah.

[Michael Komasinski]

Albeit on a very, very small scale when you compare that to sort of the breadth of the entire open web and the entire retail ecosystem. So I guess my point is it's not necessarily just advertising for the revenue component. It's advertising or recommendation services for the data loop. Compone it. It's actually like more valuable than the, the sort of revenue that the advertising part brings in.

[Mike Shields]

Interesting. This is the first Rexis reference we've had on my show. On that note, you know what it is?

[Michael Komasinski]

It's deep, like because it's, it's funny. You, you'll enjoy this. The history of Critio.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

Like the company started 20 plus years ago as a recommendation engine for DVDs.

[Mike Shields]

Wow.

[Michael Komasinski]

That's actually what the first sort of proposition was. And they built the sort of engine around that weren't satisfied with the economics it was producing and then eventually pivoted towards advertising and that's where it really took off. So it's sort of deep in the DNA of the history of the company, which is sort of fascinating.

[Mike Shields]

I probably knew that at one point, but I had forgotten that. That's fascinating. There has been some buzz recently about. You're starting to see some, like you said, the commerce deals from Chat, GCP and others and some evidence that shopping traffic is coming from those guys. Are you seeing that yet? Like that the conversational search is driving new types of retail transactions or is it still really small?

[Michael Komasinski]

It's really small. So what you see is definitely huge changes in publisher traffic.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

But we think that that's cannibalized a lot of kind of either very simple or in some ways kind of superfluous traffic.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

And E commerce, or at least the bid stream that we see. And that's slightly different than traffic.

[Interviewer/Host Assistant]

Right.

[Michael Komasinski]

We don't have any degradation in our bid stream opportunities to drive performance. And I think it kind of gets to what I was saying about people still land on site, have multiple steps in their journeys to research things thoroughly and we haven't had any degradation in the opportunity to talk about it.

[Mike Shields]

It's almost like we want to say the open web is dead. Or it's more like, well, now maybe certain parts it's more efficient. Yeah.

[Michael Komasinski]

I would say the open web is getting more efficient than it. And so the cannibalization is in the part that wasn't very efficient.

[Mike Shields]

Right. It wasn't that. Where the really valuable parts are probably that much more valuable.

[Michael Komasinski]

That's correct.

[Mike Shields]

All right. I like that note to end on. That's kind of hopeful. Michael, awesome conversation. Great stuff. Let's do this. Gets a dot. Thanks a lot for your time.

[Michael Komasinski]

Yeah, I would like that. Thanks for having me on. Mike. Great to see you.

[Mike Shields]

Thanks again to my guest this week, Criteo CEO Michael Komazinski and my partners at Elemental tv. If you liked this week's episode, please take a moment to rate and leave a review. We have lots more to bring you, so please hit that subscribe button. We'll see you next time for more with nexting Media. Thanks for listening.