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.

 

The temporary problem with second-price auctions

I am increasingly going to post on the Criteo "boom" blog.
Dynamic pricing remains a hot topic in the industry:

http://bit.ly/KAZKC7

Building out the RTB team at Criteo

We just went public about two great new senior hires into our real time bidding team, one in US, one in Europe, from two of the largest ad exchange platforms (Appnexus and Rubicon).

It's very exciting that people with such good visibility into who we are, how we buy (and how much we spend!) and how we compare with our competition decided to make this jump. They are also both very nice!

Meredith Goldman and Fabien Magalon Join Criteo to Further Strengthen US and European Real Time Bidding Publisher Teams

Will We Really Grow Display By Incentivizing Low Bidding?

I just wrote something on adexchanger, about the self-destructiveness of publishers thinking about adopting dynamic floor prices, and other mechanisms that incentivise buyers to significantly reduce the prices at which we bid for inventory.

http://bit.ly/J16uVz

What if Online doesn't work for branding?

I enjoyed this article very much over on Adexchanger, which got me thinking:

What If Online Doesn’t Work For Branding?

For those of us who have been in the online advertising industry for a long time, I think this is a great question. 

Firstly we should be clear what we mean by “brand advertising”. Often we use it in the online industry to mean “something bought at a high CPM price”. However, this is clearly not what P&G means. I would suggest something like this: brand advertising is what causes us to buy a particular soap powder instead of another one that appears to have the same characteristics but costs less. Brand is therefore Warren Buffet's famous "moat" that protects companies from competition. Coca Cola is a famous example, but almost everything Unilever makes fits into this category.

Historically, TV has been pre-eminent at building the characteristics of trust, quality, recognition, etc that build up a brand.

Does "brand advertising" work on the web? And if so, given how smart the people at P&G are, why do they spend so little money online? Perhaps the dirty secret is that forcing people to watch a 30 second ad for soap powder between their favourite shows is just a lot more powerful than any number of random ads for a product you have no interest in. This would explain why the brand advertising end of display is so small.

On the other hand, direct response works dramatically better online than offline. Google’s more than $40Bn of revenue demonstrates this.

So I see two possibilities:

1.     Brand advertising through traditional display ads doesn’t work. If so,the best opportunities online must be video (which is TV after all), and more excitingly social recommendations. If Facebook can ever get the power of personal recommendation to combine with an ad unit large and flexible enough to allow creative agencies to tell a story I think something really exciting could happen there (I guess that explains the mooted $100B valuation).

2.     Brand advertising can work based upon the same principles we see in direct response: create the right tailored ad for the right individual, instead of generic ads targeted at every man woman and child who visit a website. Get this right, and I believe the “upper funnel” could start to work online to build brand engagement and not just fulfil an intention. More on this in the future...

Building ad verification in as standard

We just announced today a partnership with Doubleverify to use their technology as an additional layer of protection at Criteo. We are pretty excited as we believe this is the first time globally that anyone has implemented ad verification as an always-on solution for all their advertisers, and in such a way as to act in real-time before an impression is bought:

http://eon.businesswire.com/news/eon/20120403006268/en

RTB Transparency

This is about to be a very big issue in the industry. Mike Baker at DataXu and I have been discussing this, and he has written a very thoughtful piece on the topic today:
"A Call for transparency"

I'm planning to write some more about this topic in the coming weeks. there is a big revolution going on in display, where finally the use of technology can transform display in the way that it did with search 10 years ago - with the result that spend on display will grow dramatically. Getting transparency about how a price is determined, and providing the right incentives for buyers to bid the full value of an impression (ie a second price auction, which can include a fixed floor) is critical if publishers want to benefit from the uplift in revenues that I believe someone like Criteo can provide.

More to come...

In the news

For once, a couple of articles this week interested me so much that I wanted to share them:

I thought that Walrath on Yahoo's options with Rightmedia is very interesting for anyone in the digital advertising space: you may disagree with all his conclusions, but the analysis about the complexity of delivering a complete adserver to compete with doubleclick for publishers + the adexchange is spot on. As an advertiser, we aren't in this game, but it is fascinating to watch, and the quality of the technology that a large publisher has is very important for how much we can spend with them.

The other article I loved is from CMO magazine and is talking about retargeting. Partly I love it because I believe Criteo invented the word retargeting instead of remarketing, and so it's great to see it being adopted. But more because if you buy into what they say, you really have to start working with us :-).