At Criteo, we have a global team of over 80 designers who serve as the trusted creative advisors to your campaigns and, together with our advanced DCO+ technology, produce ad creative that millions of shoppers engage with every day.
We believe that while machines and algorithms are vital to driving scale and performance for such campaigns, it is also essential to have specialists in place to ensure all needs are met by the ability to collaborate with a creative expert.
We are more than designers; we are Creative Consultants who act as advisors, strategists, and brand advocates for the accounts we work with. In the Americas, when working with our biggest advertisers, our design team delegates individual design experts to manage all creative operations and optimizations for each account.
Our creative offer is ever evolving and so is the day in the life of a designer in the Americas for our large customers – we think about how to use DCO+ in a holistic way to deliver beautiful results for every type of campaign.
Criteo has been at the forefront of developing and utilizing Dynamic Creative Optimization to provide scale and performance and our own Real-Time Creative Optimization (RTCO) technology takes DCO to the next level by assembling ad creative on-the-fly for every individual shopper and impression, at every step of the shopper journey.
We also believe that to support successful client partnerships, a human design team is essential in that success and how we approach design solutions to deliver the best results.
Whether that solution takes the form of a preset design framework developed based on data and our designers’ creative expertise or the result of creative brainstorming with a client, a Criteo designer has always had an input. This is certainly what makes us unique as a marketing partner in addition to the diversity of skills of each Criteo designer possesses. We have the ability to offer expertise, design operations, and insights through the individual and by working together in teams.
At Criteo, we approach our designs by thinking about functionality, performance, and of course a fantastic user experience. If you’re ready to learn more about what it’s like to be a trusted client advisor within the America’s Creative Services for our top client segments – read on!
The Kick Off
When we receive an invite for a ‘Kick Off’ to start work on a new integration it is an exciting time for the creative designer. Typically, we’ll sit down with members of the account and sales management teams, technical engineer, and data scientist to learn more about our new client and what their goals for working with Criteo are.
Whether our client is looking to leverage our Display Retargeting product or attract new customers with our Acquisition product, we help develop ideas and which execution of our DCO+ offer would work best in tandem with the account and technical teams.
Design
Next, it’s time to bring our ideas to life with a demo for our client to review. Our client will provide us with brand assets that they’d be happy to have incorporated into an ad design. With Composer, a feature of our DCO+ technology, we’ll use those assets to build the client’s unique design framework, which contains all the elements necessary for DCO+ to build completely personalized ads on demand for every impression.
The Creative Consultants work closely with each client to meet their campaign objectives. In one instance, we may be working on an awareness driven campaign in which case we would highlight more branding oriented elements within the framework.
Alternatively, the client may also want to go live with a conversion driven campaign where we will adjust the creative, as well as to focus even more on the product recommendations and optimizing the diversity of the creative. While typically there is a dedicated designer for each account, we also work together as a team to brainstorm concepts and finally, review demos to ensure no optimizations have been missed and quality is top-notch.
For the Americas team, most designers have approximately 30 accounts to lead with the guidance of a team lead or manager.
Creative Review
Ideally, once we have creative ready to preview we like to spend some time either by phone or video call to walk through the demo with the client. This is where we have the opportunity to explain how our creative offer works and in what ways we can customize the design to meet brand standards, and to answer any questions. These conversations are also a great time to brainstorm new ideas or solutions for future activations with our client or ways to innovate our product to even better solve their marketing challenges.
Campaign Management & Beyond
As a design team working for the most high profile and savvy e-marketers, our day-to-day must go beyond on our client integrations and maintenance.
We are constantly thinking of ways to improve our knowledge and skills both as individuals and as a team. For example, a large focus within our daily tasks is to collaborate across other functional teams within our business to push the limits and improve our products.
Some projects may include ways to better provide insights into our performance from a creative standpoint by liaising with the centralized teams at our Paris headquarters that collaborate regularly to Criteo R&D teams while also enlisting the help of our data analytics teams. Pairing designers with analysts can yield some interesting and impactful ideas! We also form workgroups to do deep dives on relevant aspects of digital design such as User Experience and Interface, branding, coding, and more.
There is also a strong desire to represent ourselves in the design community whenever the opportunity presents itself and members of the team can often be found connecting with other designers at special events. As part of the Criteo culture, we’re also relied upon to be self-motivated and driven – and can find inspiration just about anywhere.
By now, it shouldn’t be hard to see that our role extends beyond straightforward operations and that the day for a designer in the Americas is filled with specialized solutions for each of our clients. We perform necessary tasks but we are also problem solvers, and see performance and design to not be mutually exclusive.
Through training, guidance, and experience we understand design problems by figuring out the right questions to extract from our clients and the commercial teams we work with. We don’t just upload your logo into our tools and leave it at that; we absorb the aesthetics of your website and style guide to determine which is the best representation of the client’s brand, across the trillions of potential ad combinations our DCO+ technology can build.
We also listen and take the time to understand what is happening within your business and find ways we can best support your marketing strategy. We’re also there to be your representative within the Criteo ecosystem and keep you updated on what innovation is happening next.
There is a significant sense of pride for a Criteo designer to see how their work with your brand translates to all of our products and how we’ve helped contribute to growing your business. A day in the life of a creative consultant here can be many things, but certainly never dull.
Want to learn more about Criteo? Visit the Criteo Culture section!
