Retargeting specialist Criteo has an agreement to exclusively provide “personalized” display advertising across Yahoo Japan’s inventory. This the first time a third party entity has been given access to Yahoo Japan’s ad system.
Last week, the 16-year-old Yahoo Japan, which was created as a joint venture between Yahoo and Japanese investment firm Softbank, posted a 12 percent rise in display ad spending. E-Commerce, an area the portal has been trying to build up, was essentially flat a 0.7 percent gain compared to the same quarter a year ago. By teaming with Criteo, which already has an established presence in Japan, the company can focus its resources on its display and e-commerce.
“Our team in Japan had been in discussions with Yahoo Japan for months,” said Criteo President Greg Coleman in an interview with AdExchanger. Coleman, the former head of the main Yahoo’s global ad sales, also knew the Japanese entity well, something that helped solidify the deal.
“Yahoo Japan had three decisions they could make when it came to their performance-based advertising strategy: they could buy, build or partner to get the performance expertise needed to take advantage of the opportunities in the market,” Coleman continued. “Building what Criteo has to offer would have been the equivalent of creating a search optimization engine from scratch. Acquiring and integrating an outside company into the larger whole is costly and difficult. The smartest way to get to the hundreds of millions of dollars in the market would have been to partner.”
The main Yahoo had shut off retargeters – including Criteo and others — from its properties back in November of last year. Criteo has since been allowed back in, Coleman noted, and the addition of Yahoo Japan is part of that rekindled relationship.
“We have over 5,000 publishers at Criteo, and our diversification of inventory sources is wide and far,” Coleman said, adding that the company currently operates in 32 counties, including Japan.
The one missing country is China and the high-profile relationship with Yahoo Japan is seen as an important building block in Criteo’s international rollout.
“Nothing to announce yet, but the next move is China,” Coleman said. “What sort of work can we do in China? It’s early on in our discussions about it, but China is definitely on our radar. It is the only large country that we don’t have a presence in.”
