"The state of Criteo"

AdExchanger did a nice interview with Greg, discussing the current "state of Criteo". I particularly liked Greg's final comment, which really summarizes what we are trying to do "We make display ads perform like Search today, and we will make display ads perform better than Search tomorrow"
Adexchanger - the State of Criteo

The rise of private exchanges

One of the biggest trends over the last year has been the rise of private exchanges, giving publishers the benefits of accessing performance display from selected partners without having to commoditize their inventory.
Admeld has seen great success by being an early adopter of this solution, and the other exchanges have followed. Google has just launched  Direct Deals, which is their first version of a private exchange allowing fixed price connections for certain advertisers. We have been working with Google to test this new feature, which Google just announced :
http://doubleclickpublishers.blogspot.com/2011/09/introducing-ad-exchange-direct-deals.html 

Premium publishers, such as The Washington Post and About.com, have been early testers of this feature working with leading exchange buyers such as Criteo, who specializes in expanding search budgets into display. For Criteo, this feature has meant new opportunities to connect with publishers. “Working directly with publishers has always been critical for Criteo, as a way to access the best inventory and deliver the highest CPMs to publishers. We are delighted to be using Direct Deals as a new way to achieve this, with all the advantages of a real-time mechanism,” said Jonathan Wolf, Chief Buying Officer at Criteo.

Criteo is part of Gigaom's "Euro 20"

I don't take these things very seriously - happy customers are much more important. However, I'd lie if I didn't admit it's always nice to be appreciated :-).

Gigaom puts us in their top 20 European start-up businesses, and says we are "almost famous" apparently:

http://gigaom.com/2011/08/08/gigaom-euro-20-almost-famous/

A study by The Guardian, Sky, Channel 4 and Criteo shows premium publishers deliver a unique audience and increased performance for advertisers

Econsultancy and NMA just published a study we completed with three of our UK publisher partners, The Guardian, Sky and Channel 4.

Econsultancy: Premium Publishers Drive Greater Ad Performance

NMA: Premium publishers most effective for performance campaigns

We're pleased to say that the results demonstrated what we have been saying for a long time, which is we see the best results from premium publishers.

Criteo hits $200M

We recently announced we are now doing $200M revenue a year:

Google AdEx announces Criteo is "one of our top global partners"

Google has just released a very generous case study about us:

http://doubleclickadvertisers.blogspot.com/2011/06/criteo-gets-great-results-retargeting.html

We really appreciate Google's global reach, and I'm delighted to see Google recognise the strength of our technology, the scale of our buying, as well as Chip's comment: “Criteo’s technological focus and entrepreneurial spirit has made them a great partner for DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Their sophistication in buying via real-time bidding on a global scale is impressive and has made them one of our top global partners.”

Can display stop being search's ugly sister?

I've been talking a lot about this one-on-one with publishers, so thought it was time to try and explain what I think is starting to happen in the display world, and why personalization is so exciting for publishers.

Emedia vitals article :
Personalization: the revival of display advertising