Criteo (NASDAQ:CRTO) reported first-quarter financial results on Wednesday. The transcript from the company’s first-quarter earnings call has been provided below.
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Summary
Criteo SA reported first-quarter media spend exceeding $1 billion for the first time, with revenue at $425 million and contribution ex-TAC at $250 million, down 9% at constant currency due to client scope reductions.
The company is focusing on strategic initiatives like AI-driven commerce, with significant partnerships such as with OpenAI, and the launch of Criteo Go, an AI-powered self-service platform.
Guidance for 2026 was adjusted to reflect a low single-digit decline in contribution ex-TAC at constant currency, attributing this to macroeconomic headwinds and reduced budgets from major U.S. clients.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Good morning and welcome to the Criteo SA first quarter 2026 earnings call. All participants will be in listen only mode. Should you need assistance, please press the star key followed by zero. After you the prepared remarks, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, please press star then the number one to withdraw your question, please press star then the number two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Melanie Dambray, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Communications. Please go ahead.
Melanie Dambray (Senior Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Communications)
Good morning everyone and welcome to Criteo SA’s first quarter 2026 earnings call. Joining us on the call today, Chief Executive Officer Michael Komaszinski and Chief Financial Officer Sarah Glickman are going to share some prepared remarks. Joining us for the Q and A session is Todd Persons in his role as Chief Product Officer. As usual, you will find our investor presentation on our IR website now, as well as our prepared remarks and transcripts after the call. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that our remarks will include forward looking statements which reflect Criteo SA’s judgments, assumptions and analysis only. As of today, our actual results may differ materially from current expectations based on a number of factors affecting Criteo SA’s business. Except as required by law, we do not undertake any obligation to update any forward looking statements discussed today. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our earnings release as well as our Most recent forms, 10K and 10Q filed with the SEC. We will also discuss non GAAP measures of our performance definitions and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP metrics are included in our earnings release published today. Finally, unless otherwise stated, all growth comparisons made during this quarter are against the same period in the prior year. With that, let me now hand it over to Michael.
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
Thanks Melanie and good morning everyone. One year into my role as CEO, we’ve made significant progress in sharpening our strategy, strengthening execution and focusing the company on what we expect will drive sustainable value creation. Our focus is clear. Building Criteo into the leading commerce intelligence and AI decisioning platform for an increasingly complex and fragmented ecosystem. Our conviction is that the next phase of commerce will be defined by how decisions are made, not just where ads appear. As AI changes how people discover products and makes the ecosystem more fragmented. The real value will come from turning intent into measurable outcomes at scale. That is exactly where we are focused and where we are building our advantage. While this is not yet reflected in our results, we are making meaningful progress as we continue to transform our business. As we navigate this transition year we executed with discipline in the first quarter, including media spend growth for the third consecutive quarter and meaningful progress across all our strategic priorities. What matters most is the pace of execution and we are moving quickly. In the first quarter, we have advanced our agentic AI roadmap, including our exciting partnership with OpenAI and increasing adoption of MCP with agencies. We also launched Criteo Go as our AI powered self service offering and introduced new capabilities like page Intelligence to help retailers improve product discovery while maximizing monetization. Together, these milestones demonstrate strong progress against our strategy and reinforce the foundations for mid and long term growth. More broadly, AI is shaping how consumers discover, evaluate and buy, which raises the bar for relevance, trust and high quality data. As commerce becomes more complex, the need for a decisioning and orchestration layer across multiple touch points becomes critical and that is exactly where we believe we have a clear competitive advantage. This is powered by our unique Commerce Data foundation with visibility into over $1 trillion in e commerce transactions annually and reach across billions of daily active users, products and interactions, allowing us to operate at scale. We believe this combination of data, AI and scale positions us to play a central role in the ecosystem and to capture increasing value over time. At the same time, AI platforms are emerging as a powerful new discovery channel, unlocking incremental budgets and expanding our addressable market. And for retailers, this is opening new monetization opportunities as they integrate conversational AI into their digital storefronts and create new surfaces for sponsored discovery. These dynamics are increasing demand, expanding our opportunity set and reinforcing the central role we play across the commerce ecosystem. We entered 2026 with the ambition to lead in agentic AI and we are already delivering on this ambition with discipline and focus. We became OpenAI’s first ad tech partner, integrating our demand into ChatGPT’s advertising offering with a focus on experiences that are relevant, additive and built on user trust. This positions us at the forefront of
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
a new, high-intent discovery channel for our advertiser clients. Momentum is building. We now have over 1000 brands live with incremental budgets from both existing and new clients, strong agency traction and early expansion across international markets. We are also extending access through Criteo Go, integrating ChatGPT into our self service cross channel platform to enable advertisers to
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
easily test and scale AI native media. This traction reflects the value advertisers are seeing. Traffic from AI platforms like ChatGPT converts at approximately one and a half times the rate of other referral channels, driving incremental high quality demand to retailer and brand destinations more broadly. As AI driven commerce emerges, our agentic recommendation service is enabling us to demonstrate our capabilities. It has been instrumental in advancing several partnership opportunities, including driving new engagement with a broader set of partners, and is now evolving into a foundational layer of our platform embedded across multiple use
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
cases. An example is conversational ads, an innovative format. We are actively developing. These enable interactive shopping experiences where users
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
can describe what they are looking for and receive tailored product or service recommendations directly within the ad unit. In addition to being engaging, they generate richer intent signals that continuously enhance our models. We’re seeing strong early interest, particularly in our travel vertical. We are also advancing sponsored recommendations within retailer AI assistance built on the same capability.
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
This allows sponsored and organic products to appear seamlessly within conversational experiences, opening new retail media inventory across these emerging surfaces we look forward to sharing More importantly, agentic AI is making our platform more scalable and easier to use. We are moving toward an API first future with agentic workflows embedded directly into our solutions, reducing friction and accelerating execution for our clients.
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
Thanks to our MCP server, Dentsu has activated campaigns with critio from their agent using only a plain text brief. This is a concrete example of how agentic AI raises the bar for efficiency and and interoperability and we expect others to follow. At the same time, we are scaling agents across the platform, helping clients move faster across onboarding, audience creation, analytics and activation. Turning to performance media, our focus is clear re accelerating growth by scaling self service, expanding cross channel activation and extending further up the funnel. As consumer journeys become more dynamic, advertisers are increasingly looking for unified outcome driven solutions across the full path to purchase.
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
This plays to our strengths and reinforces our confidence that performance media will be a durable and growing contributor to our business over time. Against this backdrop, near term trends reflect softer demand in specific verticals, particularly travel in Europe and reduced budgets from certain large US clients primarily driven by client specific decisions. Sarah will provide more detail shortly.
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
We are proactively responding by focusing on delivering strong outcomes to secure client budgets while executing against our growth priorities. While the near term environment is challenging, it does not distract us from delivering on the strategy we believe will drive sustained growth and value. We are taking decisive actions to improve execution. Since joining as Chief Customer Officer in January, Ed Dynashere has elevated our commercial team and operating discipline, including bringing in new leadership for performance media in the Americas. With deep experience in enterprise sales and scaling revenue, we are also deepening and
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
accelerating our engagement with agencies to capture greater share of spend while reinforcing commercial discipline through clearer performance metrics, stronger accountability and more rigorous pipeline management, we are already seeing early signs of progress with new enterprise client WINS in the U.S. our mid market remains resilient and our GO self-service offering is increasingly effective
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
in addressing the needs of smaller clients.
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
Starting with self service, GO launched as planned at the end of Q1. With more than two thirds of campaigns from small clients now running through GO in the US we are building on the successful transition of existing clients as we roll out self service to new ones. Supported by a comprehensive go-to-market plan, including targeted marketing campaigns with focused commercial support to drive awareness and adoption, GO simplifies activation and optimizes performance across channels, bringing together display, video, native and social into a single campaign environment.
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
AI dynamically allocates budgets to drive outcomes while built in generative tools ensure consistent high performing creative across formats. We are also embedding agentic onboarding capabilities into Google, further reducing friction and accelerating
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
time to value for our clients.
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
Importantly, GO expands our addressable market, particularly among small and medium sized businesses. This is supported by strong industry tailwinds with AI powered ad buying expected to grow from approximately $35 billion in 2025 to over $140 billion by 2030. According to Madison and Wall, we are already seeing strong interest and expect GO to be a multi-year growth driver. Clients running fully cross channel campaigns are spending up to three times more, reinforcing the value of an integrated approach.
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
For example, Wine country gift baskets increased return on ad spend by 28% and average order value by 10%, driving higher spend. We are also extending performance further up the funnel as brand performance becomes increasingly important. Discovery is how we help brands reach new audiences across channels and as we build toward a more complete full funnel offering, we are introducing discovery audiences in GO this quarter. Discovery typically represents at least a third of media budgets, creating a meaningful opportunity to expand our addressable market.
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
We are well positioned to capture that spend by connecting upper funnel engagement directly to lower funnel performance. Our cross channel foundation is what makes this possible. It allows us to execute this full funnel strategy seamlessly engaging consumers wherever they are and optimizing outcomes across channels rather than in silos. In practice, this means activating discovery across the environments where it is happening today, including Social, CTV and emerging surfaces.
Michael Komaszinski (Chief Executive Officer)
Like AI platforms, all supported by AI driven creative and optimization, Social continues to be a strong driver for our business, providing broad incremental reach and scalable performance. We are expanding into high impact formats like short form video on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok where we are seeing encouraging traction. CTV is another important growth channel. Through our recently announced partnership with Roku, we are combining premium inventory with our commerce audiences to drive better performance and simplify activation and we expect to bring CTV into GO by the end of the year. Taken together, this positions us to capture a greater share of upper funnel budgets while reinforcing our leadership and performance and we expect these initiatives to build momentum as we move through the year. Turning to Retail media, we continue to build on our position as a global leader in the fastest growing segment of digital advertising. Today we partner with 235 leading retailers worldwide and our focus is clear unlock greater demand scale high performing formats and bring more intelligent conversational experiences to retail environments. Underlying performance remains strong with contribution ex Tac up 24% in the first quarter excluding the impact of the two previously communicated scope reductions. On the demand side, we are expanding budgets and deepening engagement with brands and agencies. We drove additional share gains in the quarter supported by Our network of 15 third party demand API partners and marketplace integrations that continue to unlock additional demand, particularly from long tail advertisers. We are also seeing new capabilities like conquesting drive incremental spend across multiple retailers. By increasing competition on the digital shelf, it helps brands acquire new customers and defend market share. On the supply side, we expanded our partnership with Doordash in Canada and added Hyundai Department Store in Asia Pacific. We also secured many multi year renewals including ASUS in the uk reflecting the strength and durability of our retailer relationships. Innovation across formats continues to be a major growth driver and a source of share gains with existing and new retailers. Auction based display remains our fastest growing format. Now live with more than 60 retailers up from 49 last quarter, this is improving monetization efficiency and driving higher yields for retailers. Shoppable video is also scaling quickly as retailers adopt more full funnel on site strategies that combine discovery and conversion. AI is an important enabler of how we drive performance and monetization. With page intelligence, we are introducing an AI optimization layer that helps retailers balance organic and sponsored content while improving the shopper experience and also to unlock additional revenue opportunities while maintaining full control over product selection and rankings. This positions retailers for a more AI driven commerce future and reinforces our role as a long term strategic partner. Collectively, these drivers are strengthening both demand and monetization across our networks. We are executing with focus and remain on track for retail media revenue to return to growth in the fourth quarter. As we move past previously communicated near term headwinds from two client scope changes, we also continue to expect underlying retail media growth to accelerate in 2026 compared to 2025 to close. We are executing with focus in a transition year. Our fundamentals remain strong with solid margins and cash generation. While we invest in the capabilities that will drive our next phase of growth, we remain highly confident in the trajectory of our business, including our expectation of a return to growth in the …
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