Criteo Gets €30 Million For Retargeting; Atlantic Bans Banners

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Criteo’s Windfall

Retargeting specialist Criteo has been working on its expansion plans lately and has its eye on building up its presence. The company has raised a whopping $38 million (30 million euros) fourth round funding from its recent partner Yahoo Japan. The large size of the round is likely to spur speculation about Criteo’s plans: was this done to pay off investors? Is it a bridge loan? A Criteo rep told us it’s neither and that it’s strictly to build up its tech offerings and scaling the global expansion. “We’ve been profitable for three years, so a loan is not needed,” the rep said. Read more on AllThingsD.

FBX Ads: Your Way, Right Away

A new stat from Facebook Exchange partner Triggit suggests FBX may be great for short consideration purchases. Steve Palombo writes in a Triggit blog post, “A majority (60%) of the visitors who we found on FBX showed up for auction on Facebook’s exchange within 60 minutes of visiting a partner’s site.” Read it. Triggit has lately pivoted to be the “Facebook DSP,” and in an interview with Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson, CEO Zach Coelius gets bullish. “When Coelius says that 18 months from now, most of Facebook’s ad inventory will be sold through retargeting, and that rates will have gone up by a couple multiples, we find him to be credible enough.” More.

The Atlantic’s Banner Ban

Jay Lauf, The Atlantic’s publisher, isn’t exactly declaring war on banner ads, but he is trying his best to de-emphasize the format in favor of the news and culture magazine site’s “native ads.” He tells Digiday’s Josh Sternberg, “I would love to eliminate banners because I think most of them don’t work. There’s a need for scalable solution for certain advertisers. What I’m advocating is more relevant, engaging content.” Read the rest.

When To Spend $20 Million

In an interview with Boston Business Journal, HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan (AdExchanger Q&A in June) divulges the $20 million acquisition price for landing page optimizer Performable last year. Halligan goes on to say that even though it was an expensive deal, it was necessary: “If I had to criticize HubSpot, in the early days of HubSpot, we were very good at sales and marketing but our product lagged behind. (…) Acquiring Performable enabled us to really become more of a product company – more of a West Coast-style, product-centric company.” Read more.

Baking the Mobile Cookie

BlueKai is taking the wraps off a mobile extension of its core data management product. “Marketers and publishers will now be able to tap into first or third party mobile data to identify, analyze and re-target valuable mobile site visitors as well as prospecting new audiences who are on-the-go.” Additionally a new Mobile Privacy Guard technology aims to calm privacy fears. Press release.

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The Addressable CMO

Forbes’ Shel Israel covers last week’s Salesforce Dreamforce event and says – similar to IBM and Oracle – the company is positioning to address the CMO directly with the Marketing Cloud that has Buddy Media and Radian6 at or near its center. Israel writes, “The event revealed more about Salesforce corporate strategy than Marketing Cloud product strategy, and more important, it revealed the company’s perception of the state of social media in the enterprise and the evolutionary importance of marketing departments over IT in terms of technology sales.” Read more.

Mo’ Tags

ValueClick ad serving subsidiary MediaPlex formally announced its entry into tag management. The product, Master TMS, claims to offer “a minimized code footprint, optimized tag loading on mobile devices, improved implementation workflow and instant tag activity and health reporting.” Read the release.

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