Publishers

Our objective is to generate the maximum amount of profitable sales for our advertisers, while ensuring a safe environment for every ad we display. Achieving this requires direct relationships with over 5,000 publishers, and an ability to give our publishers great prices and large monthly spend.

Criteo has over 3,000 advertisers. 70% of these advertisers have open CPC budgets with us, which means their spend is only limited by the volume of leads we can send them. We convert our advertisers’ CPC search budgets into display spend.

To achieve our advertisers’ objectives, our publisher ecosystem is focused on quality, scale, performance, and safety:

Quality
Scale
Performance
Safety

Quality

“Our relationship with Criteo has clearly demonstrated that performance advertising works best in premium publishing environments.” Tim Gentry, head of optimization and effectiveness, Guardian Online.

Criteo works with many of the highest quality sites on the Internet. In our experience, the best sites usually deliver higher performance that allows us to pay higher prices. This is one of the reasons we are so focused on direct relationships to access the best inventory, since this is usually not otherwise available for performance advertising.

“Criteo proves that personalized advertising in premium environments is appealing for our users as well as attractive for advertisers and publishers. We are very satisfied with our current collaboration and will further expand it within our agreed partnership.” Marco Barei, General Manager Digital Sales, Axel Springer Media Impact.

Value to Advertisers Requires Value to Publishers

Criteo is not only dedicated to delivering the best service possible to our clients, but also to establishing profitable business relationships for our publishers. Direct and long-term relationships are the most efficient kind of collaboration with publishers, delivering them maximum benefits:

We consistently buy large volumes from publishers
We consistently pay high CPMs for publishers’ inventory
We generate ever growing revenues for our publishers

Criteo’s proposition to publishers is simple. Since our clients are spending search budgets with us, Criteo brings large incremental display spend that is not cannibalizing the publisher’s direct sales-force. At the same time, Criteo only displays high quality ads from quality advertisers.

Scale

Criteo employs a full team dedicated full-time to developing publisher relationships, while almost 40% of our employees are engineers. We have dedicated publisher development teams on the ground in over a dozen countries including Brazil, Korea and Japan to ensure the maximum scale for our global advertisers.

As a result our scale is unmatched. Nielsen verifies that our reach is well over 90% in most major markets. Critically, most of our spend, impressions and clicks comes from direct relationships, where our publisher development team is working directly with the sales and operations team at a publisher. This direct relationship allows us to maximize the performance for our advertisers, and therefore the CPM and spend for the publisher. As of March 2012, Criteo had more than 5,000 direct publisher relationships – twice the number from a year before.

Performance

As a technology company, selling a performance product, everything we do on the buyside is focused on delivering the best possible performance. This comes significantly from the optimization of placements and priority with our publisher partners, but as importantly from our underlying buying technology.

All our buying is real-time, based on the same Criteo Engine able to make real-time decisions based on hundreds of variables. We then connect to our publishers through a variety of technologies, including Cookie Targeting, Real Time Audience, Publisher Marketplace and Real Time Bidding.

Less than half our inventory is bought via Real Time Bidding today, but we have been a leader in this technology since the beginning.

Criteo was the first buyer to go live with RTB on the Google ADX in Europe in 2009. Today we are the largest buyer of RTB globally on many platforms, and respond to more than four billion requests every day. Every aspect of our real time bidding is built in-house, to ensure maximum speed and performance. This includes our own dedicated fiber network that transverses the globe, and Criteo data centers in the Americas, Europe and Asia. As a result, our response-rates and win-rates are dramatically higher than the average bidder, according to our Exchange partners.

“Criteo's sophistication in buying via real-time bidding on a global scale is impressive and has made them one of our top global partners.”

Chip Hall

Google’s Head of Buyer Development for ADX, Doubleclick

Safety

Our objective is to have an “always on” relationship with our advertisers and publishers. As a result, our philosophy is never to do something in the short-term that will damage our long-term relationships. This helps to explain our 97% annual advertiser retention rate. It also explains our focus on ensuring that we run our advertising only on “brand safe” inventory.

We have always had industry leading processes and technologies to ensure our advertising only runs on “brand safe” inventory. In March 2012, we announced a strategic partnership with DoubleVerify (www.doubleverify.com), the worldwide leader in online media verification and decisioning. This global deal enables us to take our stringent “brand safety” requirements to the next level. By implementing DoubleVerify’s proprietary technology within our real-time buying environment, we ensure that our ads will not appear on inappropriate or fraudulent sites.

DoubleVerify’s proprietary technology acquires data from each impression in real-time and interprets whether or not the site on which the ad is being served is safe. Uniquely, Criteo will use DoubleVerify’s data for every single one of its advertisers’ campaigns, and will use the data in real-time to prevent an ad being displayed in an unsafe location, rather than reporting this problem after the fact.

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. This added layer of protection from DoubleVerify is live in the US, and rolling out globally in 2012.