Criteo S.A.

All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please press the star key followed by zero. After the prepared remarks, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, please press star, then one. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Melanie Dombre Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to CREDO's fourth quarter and fifth quarter year 2023 earnings call. Joining us on the call today, Chief Executive Officer Megan Clarkin and Chief Financial Officer Sarah Dickman are going to share some prepared remarks. Third person, our Chief Product Officer, will join us for the Q&A session. As usual, you will find our investor presentation on our investor website now, as well as our prepared remarks and transcripts after the call. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that our remarks will include forward-looking statements, which reflect Credo's judgments, assumptions, and enemies as of today. Our actual results may differ materially from current expectations, based on the number of factors affecting Credo's business. Except as required by law, we do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements discussed today. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our earnings release, as well as our most recent forms, 10-K and 10-Q, filed with the SEC. We'll also discuss non-GAAP measures of our performance. Definitions and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP metrics are included in our earnings release published today. Finally, unless otherwise stated all board comparisons made during this course are against the same period in the prior year. With that, let me now hand it over to Megan.

Thanks, Melanie, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. In Q4, we delivered record top line with organic growth acceleration and record adjusted EBITDA. I'm proud of our team's hard work and strong execution during the holiday season. when the entire organization leans in to support our clients throughout this peak time in advertising. Our outperformance reflects the resilience of our business and was driven by the robust strategies we've implemented with large-scale commerce data and breakthrough AI technology to deliver better predictions and outcomes for our clients. Looking back over the years since I started with Criteo and began the transformation of the company, we've made remarkable progress I'm so proud of the work that we've done, what we've achieved, and I've never been more excited about our future. Our better than expected performance in 2023 further affirms our strategic direction while setting the stage for continued growth in 2024. In 2023, we achieved double-digit growth for the second consecutive year with a historic milestone of crossing the $1 billion in contribution XTAC mark for the first time. This is a testament to the tireless efforts our Criteos have poured into executing our company turnaround. We also exceeded our adjusted EBITDA margin target for the year, demonstrating cost discipline while executing our turnaround. Retail media surpassed $200 million in annual revenue, and retargeting now represents less than 50% of our business. Our strategy to offset declines in our retargeting business by offering full funnel targeting, a strategic move that we announced in 2020, has proved successful. With accelerated momentum, our commerce audience's targeting is up 60% in the fourth quarter. As we continue to push forward, carving out our leadership position in commerce media and delivering against the vision that we've laid out, 2023 was a big year for us as we focused on tech delivery and differentiation with the launch of our demand-side platform called Commerce Max and the launch of our supply-side platform called Commerce Grid. We've built differentiated capabilities that position Criteo to offer the end-to-end platform of choice for commerce media, allowing data flows and access across one platform for frictionless data need that our clients are looking for. We bolstered our position as the leading retail media ad tech provider, gaining market share in 2023 with a remarkable 36% year-over-year growth in activated media spend, which surged to $1.2 billion, now flowing through our pipe. We partner with 220 retailers globally, and they are trusting Creo with more ad placements more ad formats and more first party data than ever before among others we expanded the scope of our partnership with walgreens to now include on-site display and we're excited to launch sponsored video with walmart connect mexico and doc morris in addition we expanded our global presence by tripling our retailer footprint in apac over the past 12 months We also broadened our ecosystem to include commerce companies like Uber, which saw media budgets more than double sequentially in Q4. We're pleased to continue to expand our partnership with Uber in markets including Japan, Colombia, and Peru. We continue to gain traction with our self-service commerce max DSP. which gives our 2,600 brands and agencies a single access point to buy premium retail media inventory on retailers' sites and across open internet inventory off-site with closed-loop measurement. All of the major whole co-agencies are now using Commerce Max, and we're seeing increasing adoption of multi-retailer campaigns and full funnel campaigns across on-site and off-site advertising. We ran multiple off-site campaigns in Q4, and we kicked off 2024 with 10 onboarded retailers such as Best Buy, Macy's, Rite Aid, Shipt, Asda, and a growing pipeline. We've seen Commerce Max unlock brand national media budgets. Along with the growth of retail media as a powerful new advertising vehicles, our momentum is building. We're in pole position to capitalize on the largest market opportunity in advertising since search and social, and our team continues to work hard to differentiate, deliver, and drive scale. Turning to marketing solutions, we delivered our second consecutive quarter of growth with a successful holiday cyber six period. This was driven by the fast growth of our commerce audiences solution, which focuses on mid and upper funnel targeting using the latest commerce data set on the open internet and best-in-class AI. We see more advertisers choosing Criteo for precision targeting across the entire marketing funnel, including existing clients expanding the scope of their partnership with us. A recent example is our full funnel activation with TUI that led to successful engagement during the holiday season and resulted in a year-over-year increase of close to 60% in their media spend, which they allocated to Criteo in Q4. Our advertiser clients can move spend between performance, awareness, and broad reach tactics using shopper targets only available with our full funnel targeting capabilities. Our cross-selling efforts are also contributing to the success. About 70% of our media spend comes from clients that use commerce audiences targeting in addition to retargeting. We also benefited from our AI driven performance enhancements, which drove an uplift in contribution extract in the high single digit million range in Q4 a real output of our AI ML practice at work. Furthermore, we're experiencing solid traction in our partnership with Meta, and we see further opportunities to expand into other social environments, which bring access to first party identifiers for billions of users. The work we've done over the past few quarters has started to bear fruit. We ran hundreds of campaigns on Facebook and Instagram during Q4. Our advertiser clients are seeing a 25% boost in sales on average when activating Meta's inventory in combination with the open internet. Among others, Superfarm experienced a double-digit increase in return on ad spend and a 69% sales boost after adding Meta's large-scale inventory to their campaigns in Q4. It's important to call out that social networks are logged in environments which offer precision and scale for first-party data matching in a cookie-less world and represent one of the pillars of our multi-pronged addressability strategy. In other words, activation of first-party data at much greater scale. Turning to 2024, We see further opportunities for Criteo ahead as we continue to focus on delivering against our transformation. In retail media, our top priorities this year are centered on scaling retailers and driving more demand into our platform. We recently expanded our roster of senior leaders to further scale our business with the appointments of industry veterans Melanie Zimmerman and Stephen Howard-Serenc. We're thrilled to have them join us at a time when we continue to gain market share. We recently won new retailers, including Albertsons in the US and PC Components in Europe, which present exciting growth opportunities and reinforce our leadership position in the space. Albertsons chose Criteo for our technical capabilities and our platform's ability to scale and perform along with our roadmap to continuously enhance our capabilities. Now, we're off to a great start with them. With an expanded retailer footprint, we see exciting opportunities to drive more demand or media spend, I should say, into our platform. Our goal is to make retail media easy to buy, bringing more opportunities to our clients and driving further scale. We're proud to have recently signed multi-year global brand deals with two world-leading beauty and CQG brands. We also anticipate sustained momentum with the major whole co-agencies as their retail media has been allocated to Criteo's search in 2023 by 50% in the U.S. and experienced a two-fold increase in Europe and APAC. Overall, our multi-year partnerships with leading agencies and brands represent hundreds of millions of dollars of spend predicted to come through our platform in 2024 and beyond. According to GroupM, RetailMedia is the fastest growing advertising platform worldwide and is predicted to exceed linear TV and connected TV spend combined by 2028. Similarly, a recent study we conducted shows that more than two-thirds of brands and agencies expect retail media to attract more spend in 2024, as 77% of brands and 82% of agencies globally say retail media spend is more effective in terms of sales impact compared to other channels. Our platform unifies supply and demand to unleash the full potential of their retail media activation. as more and more dollars flow from legacy ad channels to retail media, further accelerated as advertisers increasingly value retailers' first-party data in the absence of third-party cookies. Looking at commerce media more broadly, we believe we have great opportunities to scale our offering and drive more innovation. We're excited to expand our commerce grid partnership with Google's Display and Video 360 to surface always-on supply deals powered by Criteo commerce audiences inside their marketplace for activation across their advertiser portfolio. We're already seeing incremental demand from top agencies for our proprietary commerce audience and supply packages that could expand to retailer audiences over time. With Commerce Grid, We intend to bring demand from established third-party DSPs to drive more revenue for retailers. We recently completed our first retail media offsite campaign using retailer first-party data through Commerce Grid, and we look forward to building on that momentum. Importantly, we continue to integrate cutting-edge AI into our platform with a focus on improving performance and user experience for our clients, and optimizing our service delivery process. The use of impactful and engaging creatives is expected to become increasingly important to capture an audience's attention. This is a key component of the innovation we're bringing to market, and we've been developing and testing generative AI-powered tools to optimize creatives and enhance performance. We're also innovating with AI-powered creative formats such as shoppable videos, in-bot sponsored products, and affiliate product listing ads to bring more demand to publishers, retailers, and social platforms. Meanwhile, we've already realized significant efficiencies using co-pilots, for development in our own AI system for identification for business opportunities, and we plan to roll out more AI-driven efficiency tools this year. Lastly, 2024 is expected to be a dynamic year in digital advertising, with the planned deprecation of third-party cookies on Chrome in the second half of the year. Now, we've been preparing for this change for years with a comprehensive multi-pronged addressability strategy to future-proof our clients' advertising and performance. First, as you know, we've worked with Google since the very beginning of the privacy sandbox and met with them weekly on average over the last three years to ensure proposed solutions maintain advertising performance for our clients and partners. We're actively involved in the five-month testing related to cookie deprecation on 1% of Chrome's users that started in early January. And we're working tirelessly to ensure proper setups and evaluate all testing mechanisms. This testing requires a rigorous methodology and statistical significance. We expect to deliver the results for the UK CMA by mid-June. to help them determine whether third-party cookie deprecation can move forward. We'll also provide updates to the broader market along the way. Now, several ad sec players have focused their efforts solely on using a durable ID to replace third-party cookies. For us, this is just one part of our multi-pronged approach to secure continuity. We refer to it as our first-party media network, We leverage hash identifiers, which are universal privacy-safe tools to bridge datasets from marketers and media owners across demand and supply, facilitating successful personalization and measurement. When looking at signals from publishers we have direct integrations with, we connect over 10 times more hashed email than similar alternative industry IDs that lack scale. In addition, we have integrations with about 40 customer data and data collaboration platforms to activate clients' first-party audiences. Next, and as an extension of our first-party data strategy, we're focused on helping our clients reach consumers in more closed and authenticated environments like retailer sites and social platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. These environments facilitate first-party data matching with precision and scale. Using best-in-class AI to marry these diverse solutions with contextual and other cookie-less signals enables us to automatically determine the optimal path for driving personalized advertising that meets our clients' performance expectations. We believe we're prepared for third-party cookie deprecation on Chrome and we already bring performance to our clients in cookie-less environments today. We continue to expand our capabilities to drive the best outcomes for our clients without third-party identifiers. To conclude, we're proud to have been recently acknowledged or recognized as one of the hottest ad tech companies by Insider for the second year in a row. This acknowledgement reflects our commitment to staying at the forefront of our industry with the only unified AI-driven platform that directly connects advertisers with retailers and publishers to drive commerce on retailers' sites and the open internet. One last but important call-out. Sustainability is a key focus at Criteo, and I'm pleased to report that we're the first company in our industry to have our carbon emissions reduction targets approved by the Science Based Targets Initiative, meaning our climate goals are aligned with the Paris Agreement. As we step into 2024, we're laser focused on execution and we look forward to harnessing the opportunities that lay ahead. We're confident in our strategy and our commitment remains steadfast towards sustainable, profitable growth with a disciplined approach to capital allocation to drive shareholder value. And with that, I now want to turn it over to Sarah, who will provide details on our financial results and our outlook. Thank you.