Criteo wasn’t supposed to survive. By 2019, the French retargeting wunderkind looked like a one-trick pony that had forgotten its one damn trick. Apple had already kneecapped cookies, Chrome was waiting with a sledgehammer, and Wall Street had the obituary drafted.

Enter Megan Clarken — former track-and-field prodigy from Auckland, Nielsen heavyweight, four-time HERoes Role Model Executive, and eventually the CEO who tried to turn adtech’s wheezing dinosaur into a commerce-media predator with teeth.

It wasn’t the safe move. It wasn’t even the obvious move. But then again, Megan has never been the “safe and obvious” type.

Megan Clarken wasn’t supposed to be in adtech at all. She was supposed to be in the Olympics.

“I was most interested in training and becoming a gold medalist… school was just, you know, you had to go there,” she said. Then came the knee. “A serious accident to my left knee… my career finished at around 20.”

Most people would have folded. For Megan, it was the opening chapter. “I had to find a career without that college education,” she admitted. So she started working at 16: first as a computer operator, then MSN in the late ’90s, and eventually Nielsen.

At Nielsen she didn’t coast, she rewrote the map. She built digital measurement, expanded into global media, and stayed for 15 years — finishing as President of Nielsen Global Media and Chief Commercial Officer.

And through it all, the athlete never left. “The discipline to prepare for a date in the future, to take the highs and lows, to utilize a team — that’s what I bring to my job today.”

By the time she arrived in late 2019, Criteo looked like a company on life support. Retargeting was collapsing, revenue was flat, and the stock had been hammered. Why walk into that mess?

Her answer is still one of the most Megan things ever said: “I love a bit of punishment.”

Then she broke it down. “They were the best retargeting company on the planet… and they hit the ITP challenge in 2017… there was no strategy and no plan to get past this. Even worse, the cliff was coming with Chrome.”

But she also saw what everyone else ignored: “22,000 clients, 600–700 million daily active users, a trillion dollars of e-commerce activity running through their pipes… and a retail media foothold with HookLogic.”

That’s not blind optimism. That’s an athlete scanning the field, spotting the gaps, and adjusting the stride.

The industry calls it a pivot. Megan calls it common sense.

“It’s not about identity — it’s about the signals you can get, the first-party data, the URLs… to pull together a story around audiences and take the place of what was there before.”

Translation: stop whining about cookies and start building something better.

That “better” was commerce media — a term she hammered until it stuck.

“Retail media is the first part,” she explained, “but commerce media is the bigger prize. Being immersed in commerce for every media you see. There’s some commerce element to it, in context.”

Before Megan, Criteo treated agencies like an afterthought. She couldn’t believe it.

“Agencies are so fundamental… I don’t know why we weren’t playing nicely with them in the past.”

So she changed it. She brought in GroupM heavyweight Brian Gleason as CRO, gave agencies a single, clean platform instead of twelve tabs of misery, and positioned Criteo as the connective tissue for budgets outside the walled gardens.

Her pitch was blunt: “Make it seamless, effortless, cheap… as opposed to the 10 or 12 platforms they play with today.”

That’s how you get agencies to stop rolling their eyes and start writing insertion orders.

This is where Megan’s story stops sounding like PR and starts sounding like survival.

“As a female, as LGBT, as someone who didn’t finish high school — I’ve seen discrimination. Boy, have I seen it. My bow here is to make sure it doesn’t happen to others.”

She had no patience for window-dressing. “Pay parity? Just do that one first. Women paid the same as men — that’s a massive move. It costs money, but you have to commit to it.”

And at Criteo, she did commit.

Her explanation of Open Path cut through the jargon: “It’s a 12-month training program… candidates get access to mentorship, training, upskilling. We want to make sure underprivileged students can enter the workforce. Think global, act local.”

That’s not a slide. That’s infrastructure.

Ask her how she led through cookie chaos, a pandemic, and shareholder whiplash, and she doesn’t bother with buzzwords.

“Momentum drives momentum. We take the noise away, get people focused, execute. I manage the shareholders and the board, take all that noise away, and just get people to execute.”

It’s not a McKinsey deck. It’s the anti-jargon operating system.

Even as the former CEO of Criteo, her fingerprints are everywhere. The commerce media narrative? Hers. The pivot away from cookie panic? Hers. The insistence on DEI with teeth, not slogans? Also hers.

And she’s still dropping the kind of lines that should be engraved on the glass walls of every adtech office:

In a world drowning in PowerPoints and half-baked mantras, Megan Clarken is proof that leadership can be blunt, fearless, and brutally effective.