Challenge
Simplifying campaign activation with agentic AI
Dentsu is an integrated growth and transformation partner that helps brands drive growth through media, customer experience, creative, data, and technology. In France, the group brings these capabilities together to create integrated communications ecosystems designed to support brand growth.
Like many agency trading desks, Dentsu France faced a campaign workflow fragmented across platforms and manual processes. The team saw an opportunity to explore how agentic AI could simplify these workflows while bringing greater speed and efficiency to campaign execution.
Working with a leading French leisure brand, Dentsu France set out to prove that a live, real-budget branding campaign could be planned and activated end to end by an AI agent.
Solution
Moving from manual workflows to agent-led activation
Criteo enabled Dentsu France to access Commerce Growth through Criteo Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing the agency’s dentsu.Connect agent to configure and launch the campaign using natural language.
Through Criteo MCP, the agent authenticated with Criteo, connected to the platform, and automatically activated the campaign into Criteo’s DSP for execution. This streamlined the activation process by moving campaign setup from manual workflows to agent-led execution within the platform.
The activation focused on an upper-funnel online video campaign optimized toward completed views. Using 12- and 20-second pre-roll creatives, the campaign ran across socio-demographic, behavioral, family, and contextual audience sets.
“The user authenticates with the Criteo platform, connects via MCP, then configures the campaign in natural language from our Dentsu Connect platform. The whole thing is then automatically injected into and executed within the DSP.”
Results
Accelerating activation while delivering branding performance at scale
By leveraging its dentsu.Connect agent through Criteo MCP, Dentsu moved from manual workflows to streamlined, agent-led execution. This approach accelerated campaign activation and simplified operations while delivering strong upper-funnel results at scale.
The campaign reached 723,000 users and generated 1.71 million impressions and 29,300 clicks, with 71.1% viewability and a 67.8% video completion rate.
Creative performance also showed strong engagement efficiency. Just 27% of campaign spend on the 20-second creative generated 62.5% of total clicks, highlighting the value of the longer video format within the activation.
Together, the results demonstrated how AI agents and Criteo MCP can simplify activation, turning natural-language instructions into live campaign execution at scale.
