Criteo's Coleman Studies Ad Performance

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Former Huffington Post President and Chief Revenue Officer Greg Coleman took the helm as president at Criteo Thursday to carry the company's vision across the world. Coleman didn't know he would become a "free agent" last month when he agreed in 2010 to sit on the advisory board of the display retargeting company.

Coleman, who also ran search and display at Yahoo advertising sales teams, told Online Media Daily that ad performance has become more difficult as the glut of inventory continues to rise, but it provides opportunities for smart technology companies to fix the problem. "Performance display advertising is something we tried hard to follow," he said. "We didn't have the chance to put teams together to really tackle the job. The Holy Grail is just about trying to understand the combination of serving up the right ad at the right time to the right person. We've all heard that a million times."

Creating an ad that gets consumers to respond has become a science as noise across the Web continues to rise, Coleman said. Making that work isn't easy. The company is exploring different options to work with social networks, such as pulling the data back into the ad and integrating social signals such as a click on a "Like" button in the retargeting process.

The amount of data required to retarget ads might seem overwhelming to those not familiar with the process. Criteo works with the data collected from an advertiser's site, such as browsing and tagging. The tags go on the product pages, so Criteo can pull the information from the catalog feed. Data storage will become a concern for many companies in the ad space as the industry matures.

Facebook on Thursday unveiled a new green data center in Prineville, Ore. that costs 24% less to run and uses 38% less energy to do the same work as its existing facilities. Custom servers, power supplies, server racks and battery backup systems support the facility to reach lower power consumption, and in the winter the data center will reuse hot aisle air to heat offices. It took 18 months to build.

 

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