Criteo’s second-quarter results show what happens when a company’s legacy business shrinks faster than its new one can replace it. Revenue fell 11% year over year to $428 million and Contribution ex-TAC dropped 13% to $255 million, driven largely by enterprise clients pulling back spend and scope changes at two retail media accounts. Net income fell to $12 million. CEO Michael Komasinski told investors: “While our second quarter top line performance was disappointing, our long-term strategy remains unchanged.” CFO Sarah Glickman, who is departing after six years with Connor McGogney succeeding her effective August 10, added: “Our updated outlook reflects a more conservative view of our business trends for the remainder of the year.”
Why it matters: Criteo built its business on cookie-based retargeting, and its response to that model eroding has been to attach itself to the newest layer of ad distribution rather than replace the old one outright. The company became OpenAI’s first advertising technology partner in March, and now has more than 2,000 brands running ads on ChatGPT across seven countries. It also kept expanding retail media relationships, adding Loblaw Advance, Monoprix, Druni, Olive Young and Golf Digest Online this quarter even as retail media revenue overall declined 21% on the client scope changes, with the underlying client base still growing 20%.
The original insight: Criteo’s numbers are a cleaner read on AI-native ad distribution than almost anything a bigger platform will disclose, because Criteo has no consumer platform of its own to hide the transition inside. When one of the internet’s largest retargeting vendors is telling investors its growth story now runs through a chatbot rather than a cookie, it is a signal that the AI-agent surface, not just search and social, is where independent ad tech vendors expect the next decade of budget to move. Related: the IAB Tech Lab’s new agentic advertising standard and Amazon’s own Q2 evidence that agentic shopping is already moving ad dollars both point the same direction Criteo is now betting on.
Source: Criteo via PR Newswire
