Eurobusinessmedia (EBM): Criteo, the advertising platform for the open Internet, has just announced its second quarter results for 2019. I’m joined today by Criteo’s founder and CEO, JB Rudelle. JB, thank you so much for joining us.
JB Rudelle: Thank you.
EBM: So JB, this quarter Criteo has seen several positive developments. Tell us about them.
JB Rudelle: Indeed, we made some nice progress this quarter. Actually, we hit our numbers, both on RexT and on profitability. And there are a few interesting highlights. One of them is that we reached the highest level of net client additions since Q2 last year, and this is mainly thanks to a very focused execution of our midmarket teams.
Another interesting thing is our new solutions grew 60% on a Revenue ex-TAC basis, up to 10% of the total. This was only 6% a year ago.
On top of that, our app business grew by over 20%, and we are now seeing a new version of our app install being tested in the market. This is very exciting for the coming quarters.
EBM: What else can you tell us about your new solutions?
JB Rudelle: Specifically on Retail Media, our new solution to address retailers, to monetarize their audience for brands. There, we’re on very good progress, by accelerating our momentum, which is now beyond 20% on a year on year basis. So very nice growth over there.
In particular, we are very pleased that our transactional-SaaS product is seeing very good momentum, accelerating there. And this is part of a big transition we are seeing in this market, with our clients using our solution more and more as a technology platform.
EBM: So JB , what about Criteo’s core retargeting business?
JB Rudelle: Regarding the core retargeting, as we were expecting, this very large business has been slightly declining. I would say low single-digit. And this slight erosion is, mostly, due to the fact that the web is a very mature market, where the usage of web browsing is slightly eroding across the board in all market.
Now, this said, we are confident that we can stabilise very well this business. There are two major initiatives there. One is obviously to keep investing very strongly in the app world, which is still enjoying a lot of growth in terms of usage. So, we are growing our app retargeting business, which is compensating, in some way, our web retargeting erosion.
The second thing is about addressing the lower torso of the market, which we haven’t been serving so far. Now that we are pushing very hard a self-service platform, we’re going to be able to serve this new market. And this is very exciting, it is a very big untapped opportunity, and by leveraging both the app and this self-service platform, we hope to mitigate most of this erosion and turn back this business.
EBM: Now these are indeed positive developments. What can you tell us about your strategic initiatives to manage your business?
JB Rudelle: We have a number of very important initiatives right now, with two that were very big milestones in Q2.
The first one is about self-service. We announced that this was a big priority for the company, and we are very pleased that recently we just shipped our self-service registration, which will allow our clients to start all the way on their own on the internet, register, start their own campaign, all in self-service mode.
So this is very exciting, and we believe it’s going to be a strong growth engine for the future.
The second area is in terms of organisation. I’m very excited because, in the last 12 months, I’ve done major changes in my executive team. Now, I have a very nice and talented team, composed of a good mix of, obviously, my CFO Benoît, who’s been around a very long time and is a very experienced CFO, but also a lot of new faces. Some coming from the outside, and some being talents emerging from inside the company.
And this new team is having a lot of energy, a lot of momentum, and I see this as a strong lever for the future growth of our company.
EBM: And last but not least, what are your priorities going forward?
JB Rudelle: For the next 18 months, we remain focused on executing on our key priorities:
The first one is to grow adoption of self-registration at scale to add new small and midmarket clients.
The second one is to grow our upper funnel solutions, whatever it’s app install on one side or Consideration for web.
The third one is to continue to invest in Retail Media and accelerate our transition towards transactional-SaaS.
The fourth one is to reinforce our identity solutions, something absolutely key, and also reinforce our data management assets.
And, last but not least, we want to make sure we keep managing effectively our cost base so we pave the way for a very healthy growth and a healthy next year prospect.
Lastly, I am pleased to announce that we are launching a new $80 million share buy-back program. Hopefully, this is a strong sign that we feel really good about the future of the company.
In closing, I would say we feel really good about our strategic direction and are 100% focused on execution.
EBM: JB Rudelle, Criteo’s CEO, thank you so much for joining us today.
JB Rudelle: Thank you!
