Criteo charts new course with AI, retail media and CTV

When Todd Parsons joined Criteo in 2020 as chief product officer and president of performance media, the Paris-based company was already navigating a shifting adtech landscape. Founded in 2005 by Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, Franck Le Ouay, and Romain Niccoli, the company had spent its first four years in R&D before launching its first product in 2008. By the time the GDPR took effect in 2018, privacy principles were already embedded into its solutions.

For Parsons, who previously held senior product roles at OpenX, SocialCode, and Acxiom/Liveramp, the challenge was clear: adapt Criteo’s roadmap to a world where privacy, addressability, and artificial intelligence collide. He had also founded two venture-backed startups—Aditive, acquired by Acxiom in 2014, and BuzzLogic, one of the earliest SaaS players for social media measurement—giving him a front-row seat to the evolution of digital marketing.

“Later this year, one will hear how Criteo is promoting responsible use of AI benchmarking and privacy,” Parsons told Campaign. “We use a lot of AI for inference, it doesn’t bring sensitive data sets into AI to do it. however, we don’t get credit for that, or for anonymisation under GDPR from the very beginning.”

Going local

Criteo’s India strategy has been gathering pace, most recently through a deepened strategic partnership with Zepto, one of the country’s fastest-growing quick commerce platform. The collaboration, which began last year, extends Zepto’s retail media capabilities beyond its app and website by leveraging Criteo’s Retail Media Offsite platform.

The goal is a connected commerce strategy that follows the shopper journey across the open internet. By mapping these touchpoints, brands can re-engage users with personalised ads, encourage return visits, and ultimately drive conversions. Zepto benefits from tapping into its expanding user base while delivering measurable results for partner brands.

“As quick commerce continues to revolutionise how Indian consumers shop online, our partnership with Criteo represents a pivotal step in maximising value for both our users and sellers,” said Devendra Meel, chief business officer at Zepto. “The success driven by leveraging Criteo’s retail media solutions only cements the powerful ecosystem that we are creating.”

Medhavi Singh, country head of Criteo India, added, “Zepto’s disruptive model, combined with Criteo’s offsite retail media capabilities, enables brands to reach high-intent consumers across the entire shopper journey — from discovery to conversion.”

Medhavi Singh, country head of Criteo India

The partnership comes as India’s quick commerce market is projected to grow 75–100% year-on-year, far outpacing traditional retail. At the same time, India is leading the world in generative AI adoption. Data from Appfigures shows ChatGPT has recorded 111 million downloads in India, compared to 80 million in the United States.

“We see tremendous potential in leveraging the vector space of the shopper journey to deliver meaningful outcomes for our clients," Parsons observed. "Whether it’s powering a bot on their own website or integrating within platforms like Bharat GPT, our MCP solution enables product recommendations as a key use case we’re bringing to market right now.”  

The CTV opportunity

Parsons views connected TV (CTV) as another growth channel, particularly for upper-funnel discovery advertising. While calling this channel a relatively new one, Parsons explained that it was because the company didn’t have this set up to do discovery advertising, which is CTV-friendly.

“This means new to the brand or product. For instance, when Dyson is introducing a hair dryer, we want to ensure that it’s in the Instagram feed, in the retail and the buyer’s box. CTV is quite friendly for discovery advertising and upper funnel, but that’s quite new for us,” he added.

Criteo has historically focused on middle and bottom funnel activity. The push into CTV requires new relationships with platforms and a more localised approach to market strategy. When visiting Japan two months ago, Parsons realised Instagram and TikTok are big in the land of the rising sun.

He added, “But we don’t have anything with Mixi,” a Japanese social media platform. This reinforces this opinion that if one gets caught in the trap of trying to think of a global phenomenon, one is apt to miss the point of trying to build a locally-friendly product. As Criteo moves further into cross-channel campaigns, he expects partnerships to reflect local needs rather than a one-size-fits-all global template.

Competing in retail media

Retail media has been widely labelled advertising’s ‘next big growth engine’. Yet the space is crowded, dominated by Amazon, Walmart, Flipkart, and emerging players like Reliance JioMart. Criteo positions itself as a neutral partner connecting brands, retailers, and publishers.

Criteo often gets asked whether it is a friend or foe, to which Parsons replies that it is great partners to companies like Amazon and Flipkart. He recalled that when it started partnering with Flipkart three years ago, it was a lot of experimentation. “Flipkart has specific needs for us—in monetising their properties, and some of it offsite in an increasingly fragmented landscape,” he remembered.

Motorola moto g35 5G was sold on Flipkart's site last December.

This is where Criteo leaned into its ability to map shopper journeys across multiple touchpoints. “Our superpower is being able to take the primitive of commerce data and mapping it to those meaningful touchpoints to reach people in their daily routine. Nobody else is doing it. No neutral platform stewards data on behalf of each party you mentioned and maps it,” Parsons argued, adding that it differentiates Criteo from both walled gardens and retail-owned platforms.

AI in Action

AI is not simply a buzzword at Criteo, but a practical engine for product innovation. Parsons is often asked how it safeguards data within borderless AI, because the company works with private and responsible data sets to ensure there is no abuse in how AI is applied.

One example of how AI is coming to life for the company is mapping the shopper journey in a privacy-protected way and making inferences—be it intent or the likelihood of interest in being exposed to a product for the first time.

Criteo’s AI applications range from inference modelling and creative optimisation to automated content generation. “We can point our AI at a SKU product feed’s URL and instantly create a video—something now in market,” Parsons said. “We recently stood up a company’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) server—the next version of API, enabling AI agents to avoid dual API builds. In this case, a client could talk to Claude and pull a custom report without navigating UIs.”

Other use cases include product recommendations, querying backends for audiences, and enabling agencies to activate full-funnel campaigns within their own systems. “I spend much of my time driving this AI development agenda, supported by product teams working on it daily,” Parsons added.

Measurement and incrementality

With advertisers demanding proof of incremental sales lift, Parsons acknowledged the complexity of measurement, which is a tricky problem. “Looking at the lessons from large platforms like Meta before us, the pattern is very clear,” he recalled. “I remember when Meta struggled with this exact topic and they were running brand lift studies with a third-party measurement company.”

Criteo is partnering with measurement providers to give clients more transparency. One thing it is doing more currently is figuring out privacy safe setups. An example is Snowflake, so it can drop data off to a client who might want to do their independent study.

Parsons added that Criteo’s approach is designed to align with client-preferred systems, whether GA4 or independent measurement partners. “You can’t do that by pushing a view of the world that someone else doesn’t subscribe to,” he explained.

Criteo’s relative independence in an industry dominated by tech giants is a recurring theme for Parsons. While aware that it operates in an environment where a large platform can roll over and crush it, Parsons conceded, “We’re still a relatively small company, but our independence is incredibly important to our truth and trust ethos.”

This independence allows Criteo to manage conflicting demands between retailers, brands, and platforms. Across retail media networks, a global brand might want to up their spend, which could be at the cost of upsetting a retailer. “Similarly, platforms like Meta can get an 20% additional reach for our clients. But you don’t get the reporting transparency,” he noted. “This independence and how we work with each party is vitally important in cleaning up the landscape.”

WPP and cross-channel commerce

Criteo’s partnerships with WPP Media and CTV players signal a push towards broader commerce intelligence. Parsons rejected the idea that this was a defensive move. “It’s more the latter,” he said. “We are setting ourselves up to run commerce worldwide of open auction and API auction hosted auction to make commerce normal.”

Talking about this collaboration last July, Sandy Welsch, Executive Director Global Commerce Partnerships & Tech Enablement at WPP Media said, “There is a confluence occurring where traditional brand ambitions of reach and frequency are being met with the fast-emerging metrics of performant commerce media. By combining the strength of Criteo’s commerce signals with Open Intelligence, we’re accelerating the assimilation of the two—unlocking full-funnel, performance-driven strategies in CTV.”

With 220 retailers and 1200 publishers integrated into its ecosystem, Criteo sees itself as an intermediary enabling agencies to activate campaigns across channels with commerce data at the core. “That’s really an opportunistic, not a defensive, move, which is full funnel and cross channel across WPP’s landscape,” Parsons said.

Scaling walled gardens

The looming deprecation of cookies and Google’s shifting stance on privacy also remain industry-wide concerns. A couple of years ago, Criteo partnered with Google to ensure that its pipelines for accessing its inventory, gated by the global tech major, were adapted to their setups. Parsons recalled that despite a privacy sandbox, this that was never rolled out.

Criteo has already adapted to proposed setups and maintains active discussions with Google on privacy and inventory access. “In the meantime, we continue to go deeper with Google to see whether we could get them to open up YouTube,” he said.

While publishers fear the shrinking open web, Criteo claims to be prepared. “If content is created in a place that can be crawled and interrogated by us, or an AI partner, then credit and monetisation can go back to the creator,” Parsons said. “Much of our focus is now on preventing publishers and creators from losing credit and money for their work, through the data and stewardship we maintain.”

Todd Parsons at the Criteo Commerce Forum India last month.

The advertising industry is in the midst of profound change, driven by privacy regulation, AI adoption, and shifting consumer habits. For Criteo, which once defined an era of online retargeting, the challenge now lies in remaining relevant as retail media, CTV, and generative AI reshape the market.

Parsons, who has seen multiple waves of transformation in adtech, summed it up: “You’re never going to keep everyone happy. And if you’re able to say truth and be confident, the trade-off is that you will make, which also comes from independence.”

For agencies and marketers navigating an increasingly complex ecosystem, the question is whether neutrality, privacy, and cross-channel intelligence will be enough to secure Criteo’s place in the next phase of commerce media.