How Criteo Is Bringing Commerce Media to OpenAI with Michael Komasinski

**Jeremy Bloom** (0:00)
Oh, hello, I'm Jeremy Bloom, co-founder and CEO of Marketecture Media. And boy, do I have news for you. Marketecture Live is back. And if you've been watching from a distance, thinking, that looks phenomenal, but a trip to New York is just a bridge, or several, too far, we've got great news for you. We're bringing Marketecture Live to the beating heart of AdLand. That's right. On September 23rd, 2026, Marketecture Live is coming to Chicago. We're going to be bringing the same sold out energy, sharp insights, and industry defining conversations to the center of advertising's biggest transformations, from media and commerce, to AI, tech and modern marketing. This is where the people shaping what's next for the ad industry will be, want to be, and need to be. Early registration is live now. So lock in your ticket at chicago.marketecturelive.com.
Again, lock in your ticket at chicago.marketecturelive.com.
Disclaimer, I live in Chicago. It's not Chicago, it's Chicago.

**Ari Paparo** (1:26)
Welcome, everyone.

**Michael Komasinski** (1:27)
Hey, Ari.

**Ari Paparo** (1:28)
Hey, how are you doing? I'm very well. So thank you all for coming to the beautiful Criteo Yacht. We're in the shade, which hopefully is good enough for everybody. We have the fans, we've got everything like that. So we're excited. You know, I was talking to someone earlier about, there's like a thousand panels a day, but most panels only have like two people at them too, right?
So I'm pretty excited about this turnout. Yeah, no, they must be interested in what you have to say.

**Michael Komasinski** (1:57)
They must be subscribers to Marketecture.

**Ari Paparo** (2:00)
I don't think we have this many. So, you've been on the job for how long? A year? A year and a half?

**Michael Komasinski** (2:10)
Sixteen months.

**Ari Paparo** (2:10)
Sixteen months. You're not counting or anything?

**Michael Komasinski** (2:12)
I'm not counting.

**Ari Paparo** (2:13)
How is it?

**Michael Komasinski** (2:14)
It's great. Look, you know, it's a super interesting company. It's got great capabilities and we sit at the intersection of some of the fastest moving vectors in the ecosystem, whether that's commerce media or advertising in AI, just performance and how that sort of form of marketing continues to evolve. So, I mean, those were the things that really got me interested in it and they've all turned out to be true. And then, like, along the way, some interesting things have happened. And this will take you way back and show you how long those 16 months have been.
I mean, Privacy Sandbox went away in my third month on the job.

**Ari Paparo** (2:53)
Or went out for Privacy Sandbox.

**Michael Komasinski** (2:55)
Right. You know, Agentic became a big thing. I think we all knew that was going to be big, but we didn't know exactly what the details and shape of it would be. And so that's become a huge part of the business.

**Ari Paparo** (3:06)
I've noticed you're like almost weekly press releases on the subject.

**Michael Komasinski** (3:08)
Yeah, I do. I do talk about it a bit.

**Ari Paparo** (3:10)
It's good. I'll keep hyping it up.

**Michael Komasinski** (3:12)
Yeah, well, you know, and look, the OpenAI partnership, probably one of our sort of flagship partnerships today. So there's been a lot that's happened. But again, the Privacy Sandbox one takes me way back. Right, that was kind of hanging over this industry in a big way. And then suddenly, poof, it was just gone.

**Ari Paparo** (3:29)
So yeah, I mean, we all dedicated years of our lives to it. And now it's just a fading memory. Like last season was a dream. Don't worry about it. Right. Okay, let's never talk about it again.

**Michael Komasinski** (3:40)
Okay, I'd like that.

**Ari Paparo** (3:44)
So, I think Criteo is a little bit, Criteo, I always go back and forth, I apologize. But it's a little bit of an interesting situation because it's almost like two different businesses right now. It's, I don't know how you refer to it, but retargeting, marketing side of the business, and then the commerce side of the business. Do you think about it internally? Is two sides of the same business?

**Michael Komasinski** (4:04)
We kind of live in two different modes.
So we do organize and report the business to the street in the two segments. We report performance media and retail media. So those are P&Ls. But the positioning of the company overall is a commerce intelligence platform. Okay. And that allows us to have sort of a common theme to investors so that they kind of know what space we're getting into. And I think that is more representative of the addressable market that we think of. And then when you get down kind of into the tech stack, there are a lot of shared components between those businesses. So we might report them separately, but there are relevancy models that span both businesses. There are audience capabilities that span both. There are measurement frameworks that span both. So they operate sort of front-end products pretty differently. But some of the componentry that's the most important part actually is shared across, not to mention the infrastructure that it all sits on.