More Tech IPOs: Criteo Files, and Rocket Fuel Is Ready to Start Trading Friday

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported that video ad startup YuMe was trading below its $9 IPO price; YUME shares climbed back above $9 last week and closed today at $11.

Here's another tech company headed for the public markets: French advertising startup Criteo has filed its public IPO documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which means the company could be trading in less than a month.

Criteo's latest funding round, completed a year ago, valued the company at $800 million.

Like Twitter - and just about every other company that has gone public this year - Criteo filed its initial documents with the SEC in private earlier this year, using cover provided by the 2012 Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act.

But, unlike Twitter, the timing of Criteo's filing isn't surprising at all, since the ad-tech world has been gabbing about it for months.

Criteo is a retargeting company, which means it helps e-commerce companies track prospects online and show them display ads. Last year, it made a profit of $1 million on sales of $354 million; in the first six months of this year, it lost $6.4 million on sales of $252.7 million.

More than half of Criteo's top-line dollars go back out the door via traffic-acquisition costs. It spent $205 million on TAC last year, and another $152 million in the first half of 2013.

Criteo, which is based in Paris, wants to list its American Depositary Shares on the Nasdaq under the "CRTO" ticker.

Criteo's filing follows disappointing public debuts for ad-tech startups this year. Marin Software and Tremor Media are trading below their IPO prices, and the general climate for ad-tech stocks has been lousy enough that Adap.TV chose to sell to AOL instead of following through on its IPO plans.

But now the conventional wisdom is that investors are once again willing to look at companies that combine technology and advertising, at least in some cases - see Facebook's triumphant return.

We should get a better sense of investors' appetite for ad tech at the end of this week, when Rocket Fuel, which helps advertisers buy "programmatic" inventory, is supposed to go public. People familiar with the company's plans said it expects to price its shares on Thursday, and head to the Nasdaq Friday morning.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Everett Collection)

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported that video ad startup YuMe was trading below its $9 IPO price; YUME shares climbed back above $9 last week and closed today at $11.

Cross-Device Ad Startup Drawbridge Adds Mobile App-To-Web Retargeting (And Vice Versa)

Drawbridge, an ad targeting startup backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, is expanding its offerings today with a new feature allowing mobile advertisers to reach consumers with retargeted ads, regardless of whether they're using an app or on the mobile web.

Founder and CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan said that while ad retargeting (i.e., ads targeted based on your past visits and activity) is possible within apps, things get trickier when you try to cross the boundary between apps and websites: "It's literally two devices on the same device, separated by an iron wire." (I question her question use of "literally", but I think you get the point.) App developers can also try to reengage their users through alerts and notifications, but users can always turn those off.

In order to solve that problem, Drawbridge is "piggybacking" on its core technology. That technology examines user activity to help advertisers identify when multiple devices are likely being used by the same person. That allows advertisers to use data collected on the desktop to target ads on mobile. The company's two products launched last fall include PC-to-mobile retargeting and mobile app marketing. The mobile-to-mobile retargeting is intended to fill out the mobile marketing product, Sivaramakrishnan said.

Drawbridge has already run test campaigns with e-commerce companies, who were either trying to bring old customers back to the site or to convince current customers to buy more. Sivaramakrishnan said that in a campaign targeting lapsed users, the client reached 100 percent return on ad spend within three weeks. Another campaign targeted active users and reached 100 percent ROAS within a single day.

Advertisers will have a chance to test this out for themselves, Sivaramakrishnan said, because the new capabilities include an A/B testing framework. So advertisers can run part of their campaign with Drawbridge's retargeting and part of their campaign without it and see which ads perform better.

Earlier this year, Drawbridge announced that it was partnering with TRUSTe to allow mobile consumers to opt out of its targeting. Since then, Sivaramakrishnan said that some users have indeed opt out, but that the rates haven't been "heavy".