Criteo is probably the most successful European ad tech story over the last couple of years. It owns the re-targeting market here in Europe. Criteo's tags are everywhere, including most of the top ecommerce sites in the market. It is now rumoured to making several hundred million euro per year in revenue - and has a fat profit margin that even Zynga wouldn't baulk at. In an attempt to scale its managed and self-service solutions for direct advertisers and agencies, Crtieo has announced that it is looking to hire over a hundred engineers and analysts in Paris. The engineering piece is often overlooked – as there seems to be a massive disconnect in our industry between media sales and the technology that powers it. With this in mind, it’ll be interesting to see if this new move will allow Criteo to improve scale in its retargeting offering. ExchangeWire recently spoke to Romain Niccoli, Chief Technical Officer and Co Founder, about the announcement and what this means for product development at the company.

How difficult will it be to build out such an ambitious project?

The challenge is really two-fold. First, we need to find the right people. As we set the bar very high in terms of technical and analytical skills, only a small number of candidates make it through our hiring process. It can be quite time-consuming, but we know it’s a worthwhile investment.

Second, although the team is growing fast, it’s crucial not to lose our focus and speed of execution. Obviously, we need more structure than before, but not at the expense of efficiency. We’re strong believers in Agile methodologies, such as Scrum, which are really a perfect fit for our business as they help us deliver working code in production every week. This is the best way to launch new projects or try new ideas quickly and efficiently.

What key areas will this new tech resources be focusing on?

Each team has their own projects, but as a whole, our top priority is scalability. The amount of traffic handled by our platforms is growing exponentially. As a consequence, we continuously adapt our applications and our infrastructure to cope with the ever-increasing workload, be it network traffic or data processing. No one at Criteo will accept any compromise on performance and since there are virtually no off-the-shelf solutions that fit our business, we have to be highly innovative and creative every day.

How do you see technology in the display area evolving over the next year?

We are only at the very beginning of the technology era in the display market. As technology gets better, ads will be more targeted and hence more relevant, which is good news for end users and also means more revenues for advertisers and publishers. We already see significant improvements in conversion rates from our personalised ads and this is only likely to get better. The ability to measure performance very precisely and refine your advertising strategy accordingly will also continue to give internet advertising the edge over other channels such as press and TV.

What are we likely to see from Crtieo in terms of product development?

We are working on several new launches which we can’t mention just yet. You can however expect Criteo ads to be even more efficient and diverse as we roll out exciting new features to optimise the graphical design and animation within our ads including APIs for agencies and clients to build their own creative.

We are also working on our performance optimisation platform to give advertisers even more control over their own campaigns. And as mentioned earlier, scalability is of primary importance; Criteo processes several terabytes of data every day to feed its advanced algorithms.