Strategies for mutual growth based on solid partnerships
In 2019, PlayD showed 90% growth in terms of billing amount compared to the previous year, and was awarded the highest honor, Agency of the Year at the Criteo Annual Awards in Korea. Even in 2020, when uncertainty increased, it grew 15% year-over-year in the fourth quarter as a strategic response to external environmental changes.
It was selected as an Innovator of The Year with excellent sales and growth with Criteo’s new products. The key factor that enabled PlayD and Criteo to successfully collaborate while simultaneously promoting both quantitative and qualitative growth is a step-by-step approach strategy based on accurate situation analysis.
In 2017, when Criteo and PlayD began to collaborate in earnest, they focused on basic training and sales consulting for Criteo marketing solutions. As a result, many advertisers who were unable to achieve their ROAS goals with the existing media mix were able to improve performance through the Criteo Dynamic Retargeting.
Since then, PlayD and Criteo have held regular meetings for advertisers to continuously achieve the various goals, and to propose new products, optimize campaigns, and form long-term partnerships.
New verticals and opportunities across the marketing funnel
Given that Criteo expanded their portfolio beyond lower-funnel conversion campaigns, they were able to offer upper-funnel marketing campaigns to drive brand awareness and web traffic. These capabilities, combined with PlayD’s in-depth understanding of full-funnel marketing yield much success, as 69% of advertisers who use Criteo solutions through PlayD are adopting these full-funnel solutions.
In addition, PlayD has expanded their use cases to new various advertising verticals. Since Criteo Mid-Marketing Sales team was formed in 2017 and started to collaborate with PlayD, 35 new verticals including games, B2B, webtoon, and delivery have been added. This is the result of collaboration between PlayD and Criteo so that a wider variety of advertisers can find the right users and display ads with the right message at the right moment.
Seokjae Yoon, Director at PlayD explains, “In these days when integration and optimization centered on the customer journey is emphasized, it is rare for a platform to perform full-funnel from the awareness stage. For us, Criteo is such a partner.”
These upper-funnel campaigns focus on customer acquisition, inviting new visitors to PlayD’s client websites by displaying the right advertisements to the right audiences and then re-engaging them throughout their purchase journey — transforming them into loyal customers.
Yuncheol Lee, Team Leader at PlayD elaborates “Criteo… has shown excellent performance and efficiency, not only in retargeting, which has already shown outstanding effects, but also in securing new customers belonging to the upper-funnel and converting secured new customers into loyal customers.”
Adapting quickly to external changes
To help their clients navigate uncertain external changes, such as those caused by COVID-19, Criteo and PlayD focus on in-depth analytics. They use these metrics to help advertisers respond quickly to changes that may affect their businesses, analyzing risk factors, and providing the most appropriate recommendations.
For these insights, they leverage the Criteo Shopper Graph, Criteo’s massive consumer dataset to help understand shopper behaviors and make predictions using consumer intent data. Using this, as well as PlayD’s TechHUB solution, helps both teams implement winning strategies for their clients.
Also, to adapt to COVID-19, Criteo and PlayD worked together to enhance strategies of clients with more sought-after products during the pandemic, such as distribution, food, and webtoons, to increase their sales and engage people across the consumer journey. They also helped at-risk businesses, such as travel, optimize their strategies by focusing on domestic campaigns that operated within given regulations.
Yujin Hwang, Manager at PlayD says, “Criteo is actively supporting not only technical aspects, but also operational aspects such as banner creative work and analytics reports, campaign expansion, and additional functional suggestions.”
And the growing partnership between PlayD and Criteo will continue. Yuncheol Lee elaborates, saying that Criteo “is a highly reliable advertising platform that proves advertising performance in numbers and helps you experience proven performance. Criteo is actively recommending execution to account executives and advertisers.”
