How Criteo's Todd Parsons Is Reinventing Performance Marketing with AI

**Ari Paparo** (0:01)
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**Ari Paparo** (2:01)
Welcome to Marketecture, where you can get smart fast with in-depth interviews of leading tech executives. I'm Ari Paparo. I'm joined today by Todd Parsons, the CPO of Criteo. Is that correct? You're the CPO? Got the title right and the pronunciation correct?

**Todd Parsons** (2:16)
I'm the president of Performance Media and the CPO.

**Ari Paparo** (2:19)
Well, thanks for joining me. So we recently had your boss, the CEO of Criteo on the show. I interviewed him at Cannes on the yacht, and everyone's complaining it was hot.
But now I'm back in New York, and it's much, much hotter.

**Todd Parsons** (2:35)
It is way hotter.

**Ari Paparo** (2:36)
What have we learned?

**Todd Parsons** (2:38)
Yeah. We definitely learned that we're better off on a boat.

**Ari Paparo** (2:44)
Yeah. I would strongly prefer to be on a boat than doing this interview remotely.
So I want to talk about the product stuff that's going on at Criteo, because you've always been leading edge investing in product. So about earlier this year, you introduced GEO, which is your AI-powered performance platform. Take us through what GEO is and how it's going so far.

**Todd Parsons** (3:10)
Yeah.

**Ari Paparo** (3:10)
Okay.

**Todd Parsons** (3:11)
We're excited about GEO.
It's basically centering around the solving the problem that performance marketing was originally built around channel. So you got search over here, you got social over there, display and programmatic somewhere, each with its own tools, workflows, optimization logic and console and so on and so forth. So that model is breaking down. Marketers that we're serving, they just don't need another dashboard to manage the fragmentation. So GEO is really a system that is reducing that complexity. And it's our answer to the shift. It's a lot of AI-assisted performance in a platform that uses our commerce intelligence to make execution simpler and a lot smarter, and we hope people enjoy it.

**Ari Paparo** (4:01)
Enjoy it. That's an interesting choice of verb.
So whether they enjoy it or not. Yeah. Who are the customers? Is it retailers, brands, or everybody?

**Todd Parsons** (4:15)
It's a little bit of everybody. The customer profile that we're most excited about serving are users of Google Performance Max and PMAX, as it's called, and also Meta's Advantage Plus.
So that's a wide variety of folks, but they're basically users that are excited about getting outcome-based performance and are willing to accept a non-transparent model for doing that, for having their budgets reallocated across the channels towards a specific outcome. It does vary, but you're talking about more small to medium-sized businesses at the core.

**Ari Paparo** (4:55)
And is it basically just give us your money, we give you your performance? How do they differentiate versus the other platforms?

**Todd Parsons** (5:02)
I mean, effectively, what's differentiated is that it is cross-channel, so it's the only platform that I know of where you can get to all of the goodness of the open web still, whether it's online video or whether it's app or whether it's just simply display.
And also Meta and TikTok and more recently OpenAI. So that's really the distinguishing proposition. And in terms of that, the outcomes, it's really simple. It's like new to brand and new to product. What we are calling in the industry discovery these days, how am I going to get discovered? How do I get either a lead or a net new customer? And then what remarketing am I going to do with those? It's just that those three different tactics cross channel.