Economist meets game of Thrones

My favourite graphic on the Internet  ever :-)

Probably only for those who like Tolkien-esque fantasy and also internet advertising. This is a larger cross-over group than you might imagine...

http://www.economist.com/news/21567361-google-apple-facebook-and-amazon-are-each-others-throats-all-sorts-ways-another-game

Demand Generation: The next frontier for display

Digiday just printed my piece on how demand generation is finally going to be possible online http://bit.ly/QZt3P5
This is something I've been thinking a lot about, as have others, and I will likely return to the topic.

Criteo raises a D round

Looks like we will be able to cover all that capex for the forseeable future...

Kara Swisher just covered this:

http://allthingsd.com/20120925/criteo-nabs-40-million-in-funding-at-800-million-valuation/

Facebook Exchange Live

We can finally talk about it :-)

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/buyers-bullish-facebook-exchange-143658

Expect much more in the coming weeks.

"Criteo to exclusively enable personalized display advertising across Yahoo! JAPAN’s inventory"

We are really pleased about this one. It also demonstrates just how global the Internet is. We are deploying the same global platform in Japan as we do in Brazil, France or the US. And it creates value for publishers and advertisers in just the same way in all those markets.

Nice piece from greg talking about this in adexchanger today: 

And the formal release is here

Great piece from Casale on broken auctions

Andrew Casale runs Casale Media, which amongst other things provides a premium ad exchange  - and incidentally is a great guy.
This year has seen various SSPs arguing for hidden fees and so-called "dynamic prices" which basically consist of charging you extra anytime you increase your bid above the floor price. I have written about this before, and no doubt will continue to do so.

It is therefore delightful to see Andrew, who runs a premium ad exchange with very well performing inventory, make clear that he believes this is a really bad thing for the industry - and not just for advertisers, but bad for businesses like his that represent inventory.

Andew's piece is here:

http://the-makegood.com/2012/08/09/are-you-bidding-against-another-buyer-or-yourself/

I am hopeful that when even the SSPs are starting to publicly push back against these "dynamic prices" that we are starting to see the tide turn. It does seem extraordinary that anyone thinks these mechanisms will do anything other than drive bidded prices lower.

Finally proving it: clicks really matter in display

We've been working for the last few months on some really exciting research from Criteo's BI group. Yesterday we released a research study "Measuring the Value of Users Who Click on Online Display Ads." The study, which took place in early March 2012, analyzed over $11B of e-Commerce transactions and 142 million users to whom a Criteo ad was shown. 

To sum up, it shows that clickers buy much more than non-clickers, and that the more a user clicks, the more they buy. Next time someone tells you clicks don't matter, ask them to read this.

UPDATE: Patrick has a great blogpost on this here: http://digitalboom.tumblr.com/post/25930999024/valueofclickers 

The press release is here and provides some more context on why this matters,

The report is here.