Careers at Criteo

Mission

Criteo is a publicly-listed performance marketing company. It provides personalised online display advertising solutions, targeting consumers that have previously visited the website of one of its advertisers.

History

Criteo was founded in 2005 by entrepreneur Jean-Baptiste Rudelle (“Rudelle”) alongside former Microsoft software engineers Romain Niccoli (“Niccoli”) and Franck Le Quay. The Company began attracting funding in 2006, raising $6.6 million from Elaia Partners and Idinvest Partners in its Series A round. The Company worked for several years on the development of effective tracking algorithms and raised a further $10.4 million in its Series B round before the launch of its first product in 2008. By 2012 Criteo had raised a total of just over $63 million in funding from investors including SoftBank Capital and Index ventures.

Criteo went public in 2013, listing on the NASDAQ in a $250 million initial public offering that valued the Company at over $1 billion. Criteo has a current market capitalisation of $2.77 billion. Since its establishment the Company has expanded to have offices in 31 offices worldwide, including headquarters in Paris and an office in Silicon Valley.

Logo © by CriteoSYS (Wikimedia Commons) under CC BY-SA 4.0

Benefits at Criteo

Business model of Criteo

Customer Segments

Criteo serves two principal customer segments: its advertisers and its publishers. Criteo provides performance marketing and digital advertising services to 11,000 advertisers and brand marketers across a range of sectors and from more than 88 countries, with its principal markets being the US and Europe. These customers primarily comprise companies with an online sales presence, enabling advertisements to lead directly to online sales. Criteo includes a number of high-profile companies among its advertising customers such as Ebay, Sony, Dell, Expedia, Zappos, Air France and Lenovo.

Criteo also serves 16,000 online publishers worldwide, comprising media and news portals, online retailers, blogs and tech companies. The Company’s products and services allow publishers – including Airbnb, Batman News, Faith Hub and ADN – to monetise their inventory.

Value Propositions

Criteo’s principal value for advertisers is that it provides personalised advertisements targeted at specific consumers using proprietary algorithms and user browsing habits. This method is purported to lead to a greater generation of sales revenue for its customers.

The Company also offers a flexible pricing model to its advertising customers, with fees charged on a pay-per-click basis. Customers are also able to decide on how much they pay per click, altering the pricing depending the rate of return on their investment.

For publishers, Criteo provides an opportunity to generate revenue through its content, offering free, self-service access to its partner program.

Channels

Criteo’s products and services can be viewed through its website at www.criteo.com, with sales made via the Company’s sales and marketing team. Criteo delivers advertisements for its customers across multiple channels, viewable on multiple devices, including desktop browsers, mobile and tablet browsers, and mobile applications.

Customer Relationships

While Criteo’s advertising and marketing products can be viewed freely on its website, purchases must be made through the Company’s sales and marketing team, which can be contacted via an online form or over the phone. Account information can be accessed and altered through the Criteo homepage, including changes to pricing, which can be made on a self-service basis. Publishers are able to register on a self-service basis.

Criteo provides a range of resources to its customers, including reports, ebooks, webinars and infographics. The Company also publishes a list of events at which it will be present, so that customers are able to interact with Criteo representatives in person, and keeps customers informed of its activities through its blog, press releases and news coverage. Customers can also interact directly with Criteo through the Company’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts.

Key Activities

Criteo is a global technology company that specialises in the provision of digital performance marketing solutions. The Company's flagship products – Criteo Dynamic Retargeting and Criteo Dynamic Email – use various machine learning algorithms and data pertaining to user browsing habits to provide targeted, personalised advertisements with a view to increasing after-click sales for its advertising clients.

Criteo delivers advertisements across multiple devices and channels in formats including display advertising, native advertising and marketing communications delivered to opt-in email addresses. The Company also partners with a number of mobile and in-app analytics providers to provide insights into app performance data.

Key Partners

Criteo operates an App Measurement Partner Program, which it launched in 2015 following the discontinuation of its own Ad-X Tracking product, through which it partners with a number of mobile measurement and analytics providers to help assess track in-app performance across its products. These partners include two of the market’s largest in-app tracking companies, Tune and Adjust, as well as smaller mobile analytics players AppsFlyer, Apsalar, and Kenshoo.

Criteo additionally partners with advertising technology companies and service providers in order to offer its clients the most reliable service possible. This includes a partnership with Integral Ad Science, which analyses the value of digital advertising placements and provided brand security and ad verification services. The Company is also listed among Facebook's marketing partners.

Key Resources

Criteo’s key resources are its technology, its IT infrastructure and its personnel, notably its large sales and development teams. Criteo has four patent applications registered in its name with France’s National Institute of Property, including applications titled ‘Fourniture de créations publicitaires à des dispositifs informatiques’ and ‘Paramétrage de cookies propriétaires par redirection’. The Company is also named as an assignee in a foreign patent application for ‘Data processing apparatus for propagative correlation’ filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Cost Structure

Criteo’s principal costs relate to the development of its technology, the maintenance of its IT infrastructure and the retention of its personnel. The Company employs a workforce of more than 1,600 worldwide, incurring costs relating to salaries and benefits.

It also operates a network of more than 25 offices across the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific and the Middle East, accruing fixed costs in the form of rent and utilities.

Revenue Streams

Criteo generates revenue through its performance marketing and advertising products. These products are priced on a pay-per-click basis, whereby customers are charged only when an advertisement generated Criteo leads to the completion of a specific marketing action: a sale, a lead or a click.

The Company does not have a fixed pricing system, instead allowing customers to alter the price per click at any time depending on how much they are willing to pay, decreasing and increasing the price depending on their return on investment.

In the fiscal year 2015 Criteo generated €1.19 billion in annual revenue. The Company is showing an increase in revenue generated by its mobile ads, with approximately 47% of its revenue in December 2015 alone coming via this channel.

Our team

Jean-Baptiste Rudelle,
Co-Founder and Executive Chairman

info: Jean has been Criteo’s Executive Chairman since 2005, and also served as the Company’s Chief Executive Officer until 2015. He has worked within the technology and telecommunications sectors since the 19990s, beginning his career in 1993 as an export engineer career at telecoms equipment company Lucent. He moved to management consultancy Roland Berger and Partners in 1996, where he served as a senior consultant until 1999, when he founded telecoms company K-Mobile Kiwee. Rudelle served as K-Mobile Kiwee’s Chief Executive Officer until it was acquired by American Greetings Interactive in 2004. Rudelle sat on the board at American Greeting Interactive for just under two years before co-founding Criteo.

Romain Niccoli,
Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer

info: Romain has served as Criteo’s Chief Technology Officer since co-founding the Company in 2005. Niccoli is an engineer by trade. He began his career in 1999 as a software development engineer at Schlumberger, a provider of reservoir characterisation, drilling, production, and processing technology within the oil and gas industry. He continued his work as a software development engineer at language translation software company SYSTRAN from 1999 until 2000, when he joined tech giant Microsoft as a software engineering manager. Niccoli stayed at Microsoft almost five years before leaving to co-found Criteo.

Eric Eichman,
Chief Executive Officer

info: Eric was appointed Criteo’s Chief Executive Officer in 2015, having previously served as the Company’s Chief Operating Officer from 2013. Eichman has held a number of executive roles within the technology sector since the late 1990s. He, however, began his career at supply chain and logistics company Panalpina, where he served as an MIS Manager for Latin America from 1990 to 1992. From 1994 he worked as a senior engagement manager at global management consulting firm McKinsey and Company, moving into the tech sector in 1999 as SVP Advertising Operations and Systems at AOL. Eichman was appointed to his first senior executive role in 2008, serving as Chief Operating Officer at language education company Rosetta Stone until 2010. He went on to serve as Chief Operating Officer at social media marketing company LivingSocial until joining Criteo in 2013.

Jonathan Wolf,
Chief Product Officer

info: Jonathan has served as Criteo’s Chief Product officer since 2012, having first joined the Company in 2009 as its Chief Buying Officer. Wolf began his career in 1998 as an associate at the Boston Consulting Group. He went on to serve briefly as an associate at Internet Capital Group, before being appointed as a principal at venture capital firm Atlas Venture in 2001. Prior to joining Criteo, Wolf served for three years as a senior director at Yahoo.