COLOGNE – As it extends beyond its roots of helping retailers with consumer ad retargeting, Criteo is building a new tech stack around platforms to help online retailers monetize their inventory. “They know we are sitting on a pile of data and data is gold, and they want to know how to use it,” says Criteo’s Gregory Gazagne.
“We believe we have an edge here because we have access to amazing shopper data. We cover more than 74 percent of shoppers worldwide,” Gazagne, who is EVP, Global Revenue & Operations, adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference.
Three pillars support the new tech offering: helping clients acquire new website visitors, converting those people in clients and re-engaging with them “once they are part of your CRM.”
Gazagne potentially sees “every retailer” benefitting.
“We are first focusing on, of course, the biggest retailers with the manpower to operate these kind of platforms. But as we build it, it will be more scalable in time and so even small retailers will be able to use it.”
In creating the acquisition, conversion and re-engagement platform, Criteo is going “beyond the digital world because we have CRM data and being connected with the offline world through loyalty cards we are able to understand not only online behavior but offline behavior.”
Asked about the impact on the European Union’s new GDPR rules, Gazagne says “clearly, customers and users want to be in control of what they see, what they are being recommended. Clients also want to be more in control and have more transparency in what is being done, with their ads and where they are being played, so we are now proposing all this.”
For publishers, the whole idea has been having access to direct demand from retailers at scale. “Retail demand has always been something really quite tough to capture from normal publishers,” says Gazagne.
Currently operating in 30 countries, Criteo added another non-retargeting product with the recent acquisition of Storetail, a French ecommerce ad tech startup focused on bringing retail trade marketing dollars online. That helped to augment its creation of Criteo Customer Acquisition, Criteo Audience Match and Criteo Sponsored Products.
Asked about the DMEXCO confab, Gazagne says, “I love this show. I can meet all my German clients at once. As well as meeting with all the publishers worldwide. It’s the only show I never miss.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.
