"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

Greg Coleman joins the team!

I am really excited that Greg Coleman has joined Criteo today as our President. Greg ran all of sales (search +display) worldwide for Yahoo, and has been a great member of our advisory board for the last year, while also being responsible for the Huffington Post's dramatic revenue growth prior to its acquisition by AOL. As you can imagine, he had a lot of exciting opportunities in front of him, so we all see this as a huge vote of confidence in Criteo's future:

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110407/former-yahoo-aol-huffpo-sales-dude-greg-coleman-lands-again/

Luckily we are almost ready to move into our new office in New York, to make room for all the new faces!

Microsoft chooses Criteo as its preferred partner in Europe

Microsoft has been a great partner for Criteo for three years now, since the very early days. I'm therefore really delighted that we've announced our formal partnership in Europe. You can read the details on Microsoft's blog
The full press release is here

Microsoft is the largest publisher in Europe, with strong reach in every market, so I'm particularly pleased that as a result we will be able to further increase the scale of the business we do with them. End result will be that we can send a lot more (converting) users to our advertisers.

Real Time Bidding: 4 points to consider

I wrote this today for the Association of Online Publishers, on the issues publishers need to consider when deciding how to adopt RTB:

Real-time bidding - 4 points publishers need to consider

One of Europe's biggest startups!

Business Insider just listed Criteo as one of the 10 Biggest European Startups.



I particularly like the "Here in Paris, people mention Criteo in hushed, awed tones, talking about the technical caliber of its engineers." I hope they also mention all the money we make for our advertisers and publishers :-).