Vincent Karachira, Owner of Next Performance, talks about its recent sixteen million euro fund raise, expansion across Europe, and its local remarketing and upper funnel targeting solutions.

You’ve just raised 16 million euro in new founding. What are you planning to do with the new investment? Expansion into new markets? Will Next Performance be building new tech?

International Expansion will be the main focus. Germany, UK, Italy, Spain, Netherlands are our priorities. We are now look for an executive international VP to help us to deploy quickly in Europe.

Of course, as we've done since the founding of the company, we will continue to invest in R&D - and we are now working on more innovative solutions.

We were the first mover into the dynamic targeting area. We also recently launched a local dynamic retargeting product for large clients specifically for those who have off-line point of sales.

2011 will see the roll out of new innovative product. Our new platform will include additional features - such as self-service and RTB bidder - to our existing platform. Our advertisers will have full self-service access and capabilities

The re-targeting space is very competitive. How is Next Performance differentiating itself in this space form other big players like Criteo?

Our company is focused on the client - and service is a priority. We place the client in the center of our organization. We really care about the quality and the flexibility of our product. This is surprising as we are still a mid-size company. To ensure high value service we decided to hire a “quality assurance & delivery manager”. This manager key responsibility is to improve all the client services we deliver.

I personally come from a software and consulting background, and I know that if you can stay on the long-term view, you have to care about clients and be focused on “operational excellence”.

Campaign customization is also one of the key differentiations we have. All our clients can choose to customize their retargeting campaigns (type of users, frequency capping, bidding, ads…)

Can you give some overview of your “local targeting” solution – and does this benefit advertisers?

The local dynamic retargeting product for large clients enables those who have off-line point of sales, to drive traffic from on-line to offline. We use our dynamic capabilities to deliver localized retargeting ads.

Did you know that 80% of the users visiting a website finally buy at the point-of-sales.

What is Next Performance’s pricing model? Do you work on a CPC, CPA or CPM pricing structure?

We are agnostic. We believe that the business model really depends on the objectives of the client. There is no unique model in the media area, and saying that retargeting is a CPC or a CPA business does not mean anything to advertisers and marketers. The truth is that we are focused on the preferred KPIs of our clients.

So we sell CPM, CPC and CPA - depending on the needs and wants clients

Do you think re-targeters will have to go beyond remarketing visitors to a client’s site, and win new customers? How is NextPerformance doing this?

We have had this approach since we launched Next Performance. We have built our technology to be flexible enough to deliver multiple types of campaigns - new clients, existing clients and former clients….

Our dynamic targeting, dynamic retargeting and local retargeting offers should address our ability to move up the purchase. This allows us to bring new clients, optimize the conversion of existing clients and ultimately bring online visitors to off-line point-of sales.

Do you buy across exchanges? Are you partnered with a third party vendor? Or has NextPerformance built its own tech?

We have a seat on all the main exchanges. We were one of the first European companies to be certified by Google, Yahoo & Microsoft.

As we did in all of our technical components, we built our own bidder, which stick to our needs, it enables us to work across multiple inventory sources like exchanges, SSPs and publishers.

You are planning to launch a self-service platform. Will the platform allow full price and inventory transparency?

We have launched our new platform in beta version. This platform provides many features for clients. One of them is related to the inventory. We do not feel that clients are really not looking for complete inventory transparency. We are not a branding platform; we deliver performance (sales, visibility, large number of unique visitors).

As we want to guarantee our clients that our network is “premium” and controlled, we have signed an exclusivity in the retargeting area with Adloox. Adloox monitors and alerts any brand safe issues we might encounter across publisher inventory. We could have developed this tool, but we really think that using a third-party vendor would give our clients piece of mind and confidence in our solution.

Will the new privacy directive have an impact on your business? How are you ensuing user privacy when delivering targeted ads based on user behaviour?

No. It's not likely to have big impact on our business. There are many issues in the user privacy area (user data, frequency capping, opt-out…). First of all, we do not collect and store any personal information data - we work on anonymous data.

We were the first provider to limit the number of ads displayed by day for a user in the dynamic retargeting area.

On the opt-out side, we did not wait for the law to add this option in our ads for users. This has been in our banners for over a year now, and we let the user choose to unsubscribe for all of Nextperformance's advertisers. We believe that when a user chooses to opt-out, he/she should not see any retargeting ads - whatever the advertisers.

On the privacy side, behavioral targeting or retargeting has existed for a long time. This is not new. What is new is the poor use of frequency capping. The fact that some players over-deliver the same message (some banners can be displayed 100 times during a day, even when you finally buy the product) is causing a lot of concern and has increased suspicion around re-targeting!

We really believe that the market needs to organize itself, and be able to respect all the privacy issues. We have signed the European IAB OAB, and are happy and willing to work with all the major players in order to find compromise and solutions that meet the directive's requirements.