EuroBusiness Media (EBM): Criteo, the performance marketing technology company, reports results for the second quarter. Eric Eichmann hello, you are the President and Chief Operating Officer of Criteo. You just closed another strong quarter of growth in Q2. What where some of the main drivers of this performance?
Eric Eichmann: Great quarter indeed. We exceeded now, for the 7th time in a row, expectations and we continued to execute against our growth plan. Three main drivers. One, first driver, is the rollout of our technology improvements. One of the things we are really excited about this quarter is we started rolling out our new creative platform, which is optimising around all elements of the banner. The second part of that technology improvement is our multi-screen solution, which we now have with 85% of our clients and now all of those things have resulted in a 25% increase in revenue ex-TAC for existing clients. The second big driver for us has been the addition of new clients who are now at an all-time high in terms of additions in the quarter. We added 730 new clients and we did this while maintaining a 90% retention rate. And one of the big drivers of that momentum obviously is our mid-market where we continue to invest quite heavily. And the third big driver is the expansion of our publisher relationships. Big, important relationship there obviously is Facebook: we continue to expand our relationship with them in dynamic product ads. We’ve arrived also at 11,000 publisher relationships this quarter.
EBM: How would you characterise your performance by geography in the second quarter?
Eric Eichmann: So, we grew out across all geographies. The Americas lead the pack with 81% growth, driven by more clients and also superior technology and more buying power for the existing clients. Europe grew across all markets, 37% overall. And then finally Asia grew at 53%, driven by Japan doing quite well but also new geographies like South East Asia and Taiwan growing very fast.
EBM: You held your first investor day back in June, what were some of the main takeaways?
Eric Eichmann: So, very successful event. We talked about three big trends. The first one is that the consumer journey is becoming more and more measurable in real-time and this is due in part to the fact that we all carry devices with us 24 hours a day. The second thing we talked about is mobile commerce booming, in for example in the US, just recently we saw that more than 30% of the transactions were driven by mobile devices, e-commerce transactions. And finally, the next big trend is also cross-device and we’re seeing now for example in the US that of all transactions that are happening, more than 40% are happening across devices.
EBM: And lastly, looking forward, what would be your focus for the rest of 2015?
Eric Eichmann: So, three key priorities that take advantage of the trends that I just discussed. The first one is to continue to build and deploy our multi-channel solutions. So for that, this year we’ll continue to focus on strengthening our in-app native and social presence; and the second thing, continue to roll out our cross-device solution. The second big priority for us is to continue to improve our core technology. There, obviously, it’s always about improving our core engine. Which, in this particular case this is going to be product recommendations and prediction improvement. And then obviously we talked about this earlier, continue to roll out our new creative platform which we’re quite excited about. So the third priority obviously is to continue to expand our geographic presence. Two parts to that: going after major and early-stage markets: major markets like the US, early stage like South East Asia. And then continuing to invest in our mid-market segment.
EBM: Eric Eichmann, President and Chief Operating Officer of Criteo, thank-you very much.
Eric Eichmann: Thank-you.
