Adtech
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Introducing CLEPR, our model for semantic understanding
At Criteo, retail media is about helping brands reach shoppers directly on retailers’ property, right at the digital shelf where purchase decisions are made. Through CMAX, our unified retail media platform, we connect advertisers to retailers’ audiences with Sponsored Products that appear alongside native results in onsite search and browsing experiences. In this context, the…
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AdTech, culture, diversity, and AI: Notes from our latest Women In Tech Meetup
On a weeknight in Bucharest, Criteo opened the doors of its new tech hub for a Women in Tech meetup under a simple but clear theme: Driving Change in Tech. The agenda moved from a deep‑dive keynote on ad tech at scale to a panel about culture, diversity, and AI, and finally, networking. The result…
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Leveraging Commerce Data for Outcome-Based Relevancy in Agentic Recommendation Systems
TL;DR Most agentic commerce recommendation services today rely on content embeddings or mainstream LLMs (e.g., Claude, Llama, GPT). While effective for semantic understanding, these models are not grounded in real shopping behavior and are not optimized for commercial objectives such as clicks or conversions. In this article, we show that leveraging commerce data at both…
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Video Ads: Introducing video interactivity in production
At the end of 2024, Criteo’s Video R&D team started working on a new goal: adding recommended products on top of videos, so that each display delivered to someone on the Open Web would become the most relevant possible. Over the last two decades, Criteo has continuously advanced its recommendation engine. Good news: From now…
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Off-Policy Learning in Large Action Spaces
Optimization Matters More Than Estimation This Research Card shows that in large-scale recommendation systems, like those used at Criteo, focusing on how we optimize algorithms is more impactful than trying to perfectly estimate outcomes. By using simpler, more stable training objectives, we can achieve better click-through rates, faster experimentation, and more scalable performance across millions…
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Criteo Boosts Ad Performance with Latest AI Advancements
Abstract. Everyone talks about AI today, and it seems AI has become an off-the-shelf tool providing plug-and-play capabilities. However, when addressing the hardest problems, such as those arising in the Commerce Media and AdTech industry, things are far more complex and require advanced AI (more specifically, machine learning) expertise. In this post, we share the…
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How RecSys & LLMs Will Converge: Architecture of Hybrid RecoAgents
Recommender systems have become critical infrastructure in commerce. Their role is not only to surface relevant items but also to shape how users explore, compare, and decide. Improvements in recommendation translate directly into superior business outcomes: higher engagement, more conversions, stronger loyalty, and more efficient allocation of marketing budgets. Over the last couple of years,…
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Agents, APIs, and Advertising: Lessons From Engineering Our MCP Server
MCP, Model Context Protocol, has made quite some noise in the past year as it promises a simpler, user-driven, integration of tools into Large Language Models (LLMs). At Criteo, we believe that MCP will be key to empowering our clients and giving them the control to create and manage advertising campaigns in a new way:…
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Pareto-Optimality, Smoothness, and Stochasticity in Learning-Augmented One-Max-Search
A rule for choosing when to sell/buy an asset when facing a sequence of prices This Research Card explains a rule for choosing when to sell/buy an asset when facing a sequence of prices. The key feature is that the algorithm has access to “predictions” on the optimal price. The objectives are to take “safe” decisions,…
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Improving Consistency Models with Generator-Augmented Flows
Delivering more personalized ads in real-time — boosting engagement and cutting infrastructure costs. This Research Card presents Generator-Augmented Flows (GC), a technique improving consistency models, which are state-of-the-art models for fast image and video generation. For Criteo, this could mean delivering more personalized ads in real time — boosting engagement and cutting infrastructure costs. Title: Improving Consistency Models with…