Building Criteo's European Agency Sales team for a new era of retail media

The business context

Criteo had long been known for performance advertising and retargeting, but by 2021 the wider market was changing quickly. Retailers were starting to recognise the value of their first-party data and digital inventory, and brands were looking for new ways to reach customers closer to the point of purchase. As commerce and retail media became a much bigger part of the conversation, Criteo saw the opportunity to take a broader proposition to agencies and advertisers. That opportunity came with a recruitment challenge attached.

The challenge: selling a category that was still being defined

Criteo needed an Agency Sales team capable of taking an evolving proposition to market. The people joining had to understand agencies, communicate a relatively new commercial proposition and build credibility with clients who were still working out how retail and commerce media fitted into their own plans. Experience in Adtech sales was only part of what the role required.

The team also had to be built across London and Barcelona, and quickly. Criteo needed a whole group of commercial people joining within the same period, which ruled out hiring one person at a time and waiting to see how each performed.

How the project was run

Ultimate Asset was appointed on an exclusive basis to run the search, covering 12 Agency Sales hires across two European hubs with multiple searches running at once. We owned the search activity end to end and held weekly discussions with Criteo's Talent team and senior commercial leadership on pipeline, feedback and what we were seeing in the market. The aim throughout was to build the team quickly while keeping quality steady as the numbers grew.

Before approaching anyone, we needed to understand exactly what candidates would be joining to sell. Criteo's proposition was moving towards commerce and retail media, and candidates had to see why that market was developing and what it could mean for their careers. That understanding shaped both the search strategy and how the opportunity was presented to the market.

Two cities, one project

London and Barcelona had different talent pools, compensation expectations and levels of relevant experience, so we mapped each market independently while keeping one overall project structure. That showed us where direct experience existed, where adjacent backgrounds could transfer and where the brief needed to stay flexible.

With several candidates moving through interviews at the same time, coordination became as important as sourcing. Feedback had to move quickly, candidate expectations had to be managed, and Criteo needed one clear view of the overall hiring pipeline. Running the project exclusively made that possible, and the weekly contact with Criteo meant issues were dealt with quickly and the search could adjust as the team began to take shape.

Hiring for transferable commercial capability

Because commerce media was still developing as a category, insisting that every candidate already had direct retail media experience would have shrunk the market unnecessarily. The search focused on transferable commercial capability instead. Strong candidates could come from Adtech, programmatic, agency sales or adjacent digital advertising, provided they understood agency relationships and could sell a developing proposition. That widened the talent pool while keeping the commercial standard high, and it mattered because each of the 12 still had to represent a changing proposition credibly in front of agencies.

12 Agency Sales hires in three months

Ultimate Asset delivered 12 Agency Sales appointments across London and Barcelona within three months, giving Criteo the commercial capacity it needed at an important stage in the evolution of its proposition. What made the project demanding was the combination of speed, multiple concurrent searches and recruiting people into a proposition that was still relatively new to much of the market.

What this project taught us

New products create unusual recruitment problems. Businesses naturally want people with direct experience, but when a category is developing quickly those people may barely exist, and the more useful question becomes which experience actually matters and which parts can be learned. For Criteo in 2021, strong agency relationships, Adtech knowledge and commercial credibility counted for more than having exactly the right terminology on a CV, and recognising that early opened up the market enough to build the team at the pace the business needed.