Individual customised advertising is online current trend – Criteo CEO

Dirk Henke, managing director of emerging markets for Criteo was in Nigeria last week to expand the company’s footprint in the Africa’s largest economy. Established in 2005 with headquarters in Paris, France, Criteo is global technology company that specializes in marketing performance advertising. It enables companies to engage and convert their customers online. To him, the biggest problem e-commerce operators have is not necessarily the amount of users visiting their platform searching for products but the problem is the big number of people leaving the site without purchase. Dirk who believes in Nigerian economy and its growth potential told BusinessDay in this interview that the trend now is individual related advertising and delivering highly classified messages to target individuals for impact. Excerpts.

Could you enlighten us more about Criteo and your mission to Nigeria?

I started with Criteo about 6 years ago when we were a small company with about 6 people. Now we are expanding to other new markets. We operate in Russia, Middle East, Africa, and Europe.  Criteo is attracted to interesting markets for growth opportunities. We have operated in Nigeria for about three years and we have clients here. The way we started here is similar to how we started in Europe. Today, we are a small company with about 2,000 employees; it is still small when you compare it to Microsoft or Google. We operated from our head office in Paris, France for the German market. Once business reaches a certain size, we go local. We expect to keep growing and learn more about the market and we will need to see what the next steps are. We work on one hand with advertisers which are mainly e-commerce players and everyone who is selling a lot online. It could be pure e-commerce players who are operating online or a lot of brick and mortar retailers who are starting now to sell more online.  Also we work with publishers where we buy the media and impressions in order to place the Ads.

Could you explain your technology solution?

Special about Criteo is the technology in between. Every single Ad we display is customized to the user. We don’t pre-produce the Ad. We work with publishers like news sites and what we do is when a consumer goes online, for purchases or window shopping searching for perhaps shoes, if the consumer leaves the site to another site, we will recognize him/her again. We will know that it is the same consumer who has visited our client site earlier looking for shoes or any other product. We will follow and show him/her Ads related to what the consumer has been looking for. If the consumer has bought certain products, we will show him/her complementary products that could be relevant to the consumer. When you compare this with years back, you will find a clear shift in advertising. The specific adverts are helping our clients.

What you are saying is that with Criteo technology, it makes it easy for a client to target and follow consumers

Yes. It is not about target groups as advertising used to be in the past. Take for instance; you are selling male shoes. Ordinarily, the target group should be men. But it could be also that your wife would like to give you a present. She is not technically in the target group but she is still a potential customer buying the shoe. We know that tracking the online shopping behavior helps us to determine what someone is interested in and based on that we will show the banners.

Could you share the trend in the Nigerian market and challenges of this target advertising?

It is not a secret that Nigeria is really an interesting market because of its mixture of size and maturity within Africa. This year, Nigeria has large internet audience and with online shops already here, Nigerian market is very interesting. For us, Nigeria offers new opportunity in advertising. In terms of challenges, for us technically, there is no new challenge we did not have elsewhere. For our clients, challenges here may be unique. For e-commerce player who need to deal with logistics, payment and others, these are challenges that are not as big as they are in Europe and US. But here, I see those challenges as opportunities. Also in as much as many people are online, many also are offline. When I started with Criteo, most purchases were happening on desktop computers and many people were not buying through mobile phones for several reasons because the phones were smaller and the displays were tiny, making it difficult for consumers to look at the products through their mobile phones. Today and globally, about 39 percent of all the purchases in all 10,000 Criteo clients are coming through mobile phone. This is really big number and it is growing massively. For us, in Africa especially Egypt, Nigeria and S/Africa about 32 percent of transactions of our clients are coming through mobile phones. There are still a lot of people who are not buying online but with the mobile phones it makes it easy to buy online and this will help the growth of E-commerce in Nigeria.

Do you think your company has the technology to satisfy clients in Nigeria’s growing e-commerce market?

You can see us as extended sales arm of e-commerce players because the biggest problems our clients have is that they have a lot of users visiting their sites but don’t buy.  Globally about 90 percent of users go to online shops without buying. This is because online is easier to go, leave to somewhere else and compare the values and prices. So, we help our clients, once a user visits, we will recognize the user. Therefore, whatever the user does online, we will recognize him/her and show the customer a tailored Ad and lure the customer  back to the online shop. We help our clients who are start ups to grow their businesses.

Does your technology solution fit all sizes of business?

Globally, we have solution for medium and small e-commerce businesses. Again the biggest problem e-commerce operators have is not necessarily the amount of users visiting their platform searching for products but the problem is the big number of people leaving the site without purchase. As startups,  they need to focus on branding to make visitors come to their site and we can start helping them with the increasing number of people coming to the shops and bringing them back to buying something. We are rolling out those technologies across globe including Nigerian market.

There are other competitors in the market offering the same solution, what are your differentiating factors from competition

I am really proud that we are pure technology company. In advertising, technology is becoming very important. Largest part of our workforce is our engineers working and optimizing systems from time to time. Secondly, we have partners who we buy media for. Again as online shop, you need data of people going to your site.

Nigeria is a big market, what are your expectations going forward?

Mobile trend has completely changed the industry. Facebook used to be a pure desktop company; it is now a mobile company. My expectation generally is that there is a trend from offline to online. Many brick and mortar shops are moving online and for Nigeria it is an interesting market. I see big growth in this market and mobile will drive it. There are interesting startups in the e-commerce and they will grow eventually and they will be our future clients. Nigeria is the first country in Africa we have a dedicated staff on the ground.

The future is about big data and e-commerce will ride on it, how is your solution supporting big data?

We are globally advertising company using big data as part of our daily life. Our business is based on data. Every single Ad we display is unique and it is produced for specific individual at that moment and in real time and to do this we have to rely on data. If we see you on Jumia platform, for instance, we will know that you have been on different sites looking for particular products and we will target you with specific product adverts. Criteo is a performance advertising firm using big data.

Can two e-commerce firms buy in to your solution?

Yes but we separate the information. We use only the information we receive from customers of an e-commerce firm to set Ads for them. We have done this for many years for biggest e-commerce players. This is because a lot of our clients are competitors and we have built trust for ourselves with our clients globally.

How confident are you on the Nigerian market?

I am confident about the Nigerian market and I believe in Nigeria when it comes to e-commerce. I am happy working for interesting markets and not for boring mature ones. For me, European markets are boring but in Africa, there are new trends to tap into.