Online Advertising Specialists Criteo Nabs 17,000 sq. ft in Soho
By Daniel Geiger May 11, 2012 12:50 pm
reprintsCriteo, an online advertising company, is expanding its offices in a move to 100 Avenue of the Americas.
The company just reached a deal to sublease about 17,000 square feet where it will relocate its New York headquarters by August.
The Paris-based firm develops sophisticated software and algorythms that determine web users’ shopping and product preferences, then populates the websites they visit with tailored ads.
“Right now we have about 70 people in a space that is big enough to comfortably house about 50 employees,” Tom Burg, the company’s U.S. head of marketing and communications told The Commercial Observer. “We really have been growing.”
Mr. Burg said that the company expects to have about 100 employees in New York by the end of the year and about 800 staff members globally (currently it has about 540 employees around the world).
“It’s not just any one particular area,” he said. “We’re adding people in sales and marketing, operations, account management, human resources, business development.”
Mr. Burg noted that Criteo has recently expanded is European offices as well, doubling in size in London and moving into a roughly 90,000-square-foot headquarters space in Paris.
Jason Greenstein, an executive with the real estate services company Newmark (NMRK) Grubb Knight Frank, represented Criteo in the deal at 100 Avenue of the Americas and helped the firm find the room to grow successively in the city.
“They started by taking an incubator space on Morton Street when they were just seven or eight people,” Mr. Greenstein, who has been involved in a number of transactions in the Midtown South neighborhood, said.
Criteo will be moving out of 50 West 17th Street. The space at 100 Avenue of the Americas, a nearly 400,000 square foot building owned by Trinity Real Estate, will be subleased from the company DST Systems in a deal that spans five years. The company is taking a portion of the 17-story building’s fifth floor.
Criteo has forged a properous partnership with Microsoft, Mr. Burg said, which allows it a pipeline of websites to place advertisements. Among the companies that it advertises for are the popular retailers Overstock.com and Anne Taylor.
The company’s deal is emblematic of the dramatic growth that is possible in the city’s tech sector and how it has become one of the city’s most talked about space taking industries.
“In our business it’s all about attracting talent,” Mr. Burg said, explaining that the space at 100 Avenue of the Americas is outfitted with an office installation ready for occupancy. “We feel the new location will really add to recruiting.”
