Criteo S.A. (NASDAQ:CRTO) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Richard Kramer: Okay, great, thanks. Very clear.

Operator: Our next question comes from Mark Zgutowicz with Benchmark Company. Please go ahead.

Mark Zgutowicz: Thank you. Good morning, Megan, Sarah and Todd. Three, I think, rather quick ones for me. First one, just on the social user addressability. I’m just curious if you have a sense yet of what that may contribute to your ongoing growth, maybe more near term in ’24 and perhaps looking at this indirectly, of course, from the buy side of the equation. And the second question, Sarah, I was just curious what your sort of assumptions were for the 20% Retail Media growth expectation. Just trying to get a sense of the conservatism in that number? And then lastly, just on Retail Media take rate dynamics, I’m curious as you think about the next 12 months, sort of what the – I guess, the dynamics are there and specifically around off-site sort of how off-site is impacting perhaps take rate that would be helpful. Thanks.

Megan Clarken: Yeah. Hi. Mark, I’ll start with the question about the social environment and its relationship to addressability. What we have there is just access, I guess, billions of Ids to be able to match too. So if you think about match rates for the open Internet, one of the issues that publishers have today as they get themselves ready for a cookie deprecation is to have logged in environment or environments where they can pass an ID to you, whether that be a HEM, a hashed email address or an actual ID just to be able to make that match. So that innocently you’re just getting to the right person at the right place at the right time on the right device. And what we like about social environment is that they have – they are a logged in environment and only can you make a more precise match, but you can follow that up with really solid measurement for the brand, the advertiser who’s spending their money with you.

For us, it has an added benefit that the billions of IDs that come with that relationship, just gives us another massive sales set of addressability capability to include in our 3- pronged approach. So as we get to a point where signals, in particular, just third-party cookie signals on Chrome that that’s what we’re looking at, taking away then the ability to fill in that gap by using other signals that we had access to, and again, this adds billions, just makes our ability to provide continuity to our clients possible, and that’s what that brings to us. That was that piece.

Sarah Glickman: I can do the retail growth rate. So we’re assuming 20% growth rate and as we communicated in Q3, that does include the expectation of a change to our largest client contract, which we did renew on a multiyear basis. And for competitive reasons, we’re not going to comment on individual customers. However, what I would say is our expectation is gross media spend will grow around 30%, and we’re taking share within that, so our expectation is 30% versus kind of a 12% expectation from the market. That does assume that all of our clients are continuing to grow and expand quite considerably. So I would say it is not a conservative expectation. We are expecting strong growth across the board. Those would be the two key parts.

And then just in terms of the quarter-on-quarter, our expectation is that the changes in contracts will impact the kind of Q2 onwards. And then in terms of take rate, this year, the average is around 16.5%, and our expectation in 2024 is that will decline. And again as community – communicated previously to around about mid-teens in 2024 and beyond.

Operator: Our next question comes from Mark Kelley with Stifel. Please go ahead.

Mark Kelley: Great. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Just to go back to the Retail Media commentary from the last response. So the contract change kicks in, in Q2, if I heard you correctly. I guess given that the exit run rate for ’23 for Retail Media, 30% on a reported basis, that’s kind of what you think activated media spend grows for 2024. I guess how do we think about the start to the year for Retail Media? The counts are a little bit easier, the contract with your largest retailer, it sounds like it’s unchanged and kicks in Q2. I guess how do we think about the trajectory of the year for Retail Media? That’s my first question. And then the second one, hearing you, Megan, talk about just how publishers are adopting some of these newer cookie workaround.

I think there’s a sentiment across the advertising community and definitely AdTech and maybe like the CSPs, especially the smaller subscale folks, certainly not you guys are way behind in terms of testing the Privacy Sandbox tools or any of the other cookie workaround. Is that an opportunity for you to take meaningful share, particularly on the DSP side? And I guess, does that kind of facilitate consolidation in Retail Media, and I guess, AdTech is more broadly? Thank you.

Megan Clarken: Sorry, just quickly on Q1. So we did we didn’t give – we don’t give guidance on Retail Media [ph] Q1. But yes, we would anticipate stronger Q1 growth, and we are seeing that coming into the year. And that is before the new contract kind of kicks in, which will be, for the most part, coming through Q2. So Mark, it’s a great question, the crystal ball question. I think – well, firstly, to start with publishers. I’ve talked to many. And as I said before, they are in different stages of understanding, working on being ready or being ready. And as you move out from the globe, I must say that if you’re sitting in the U.S. and in Europe, you’re kind of closer this naturally, than I was in Australia the other week.