In this edition of Supply-Side Spotlight, we're once again chatting Erika Longoria, VP, Demand Partnerships & Strategic Accounts at Outbrain. We'll touch on the recent acquisition of Teads, the team's expansion into CTV, the future of full-funnel advertising on the open web, and more.
1. Hi Erika and thanks for taking part in this Q&A. The best place to start is probably with a quick history of Outbrain. Can you talk about the acquisition of Teads and your role in the digital advertising ecosystem?
Outbrain invented content recommendation 17 years ago. At the time, it was a nascent category that sparked recognition of the opportunity to drive engagement and outcomes at undervalued moments of consumer attention.
We’ve greatly evolved that business model, using the incredible wealth of data and prediction expertise that we honed through that business to create a leading performance advertising solution.
Our prediction technology is expert at delivering outcomes and performance—and it has a wide range of applications. We showed our core tech’s ability to optimize attention in new premium environments with Onyx by Outbrain.
Now, we’re excited to bring that expertise to Teads and the incredible branding business they’ve built. Together, we believe we’ll be turning a new page in open internet advertising, opening up an opportunity to reframe the results advertisers can drive beyond walled gardens.
2. One of the key messages from the merger with Teads is a desire to create an “end-to-end, full-funnel platform for the open internet.” What is your shared vision for the future?
This merger combines the strength of Outbrain’s deep performance and prediction expertise with Teads’s best-in-class omnichannel video and branding solutions. Together, we’re creating a single platform to reach consumers at each step of the marketing funnel, while optimizing those consumer experiences to drive real outcomes. The deal reflects the opportunity to revolutionize the advertising landscape by offering an end-to-end platform that can nurture audiences and optimize marketing results from discovery to purchase.
In essence, this combination will address the self-limiting choice between branding and performance that brands currently face when advertising on the open internet. Once completed, the merger would represent a break from established platform players that base their value primarily on views and impressions. This merger creates a platform that can service advertiser needs at each step of the marketing funnel, providing a true alternative and complement to walled garden advertising.
3. A significant upside of the merger is the access that Teads provides to TV and Video publishers. How do you see this enhancing the types of formats that Outbrain supports?
With the launch of Onyx by Outbrain, we created quality environments of attention for brands to drive real outcomes. With Teads, we’re taking a giant leap forward in our strategy to deliver premium experiences that will build the future of a thriving open internet. Teads has deeply entrenched Joint Business Partner programs with more than 50 top enterprise brands such as Apple, KraftHeinz, Nissan and more—spanning numerous verticals and industries. These strong foundations will enable us to take a leap forward in how we service brands, bringing the value of our performance technology to them in premium media environments.
Teads also allows us to achieve our goal of broadening the media platforms we work with and expand to CTV. Teads has a fast-growing CTV business, which leverages its ability to cross sell video campaigns online and on CTV. Today, Teads partners with the top 4 CTV OEMs globally, including an exclusive partnership with VIDAA powered Hisense in 50+ markets.
4. There’s no question that CTV advertising is on the rise, but questions remain around fragmentation, standardization, and transparency. How is Outbrain helping its clients navigate this ever-changing—and often challenging—landscape?
The open internet provides immense value and opportunity in terms of capturing consumer attention. But the channels of the open internet are vast and fragmented, with most open internet advertising platforms focused on delivering reach and views, or point solutions for specific goals. To realize the full potential of the open internet, brands need a partner who can reach consumers at each stage of their journey, and drive real outcomes from them. The industry needs a platform that can enable brands to view the open internet as a safe, premium environment to drive ROAS and outcomes across the marketing funnel.
A growing focus on business outcomes breaks with the industry’s historic focus on reach and impressions. Advertisers increasingly prioritize business outcomes like sales or store visits as key performance indicators (KPIs), even for video campaigns, according to the second part of an Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) report assessing channel trends. Outbrain and Teads will deliver an advertising platform that grows businesses by achieving true outcomes at every stage of the sales funnel through genuine moments of engagement and attention across the open internet.
5. With your new powerful suite of data capabilities gathered from contextual, publisher environment, and advertiser performance signals, what advancements in targeting and reporting can clients expect?
Privacy and respecting the consumer is still the future of our industry, and we believe deep contextual signals and AI are the best way to drive results with it in mind. Relying on mechanisms of the past to invasively target and track is not a stable strategy, nor one we plan to rely on. Outbrain and Teads are well-positioned to deliver future-proof data solutions, as our industry continues to focus on user privacy. This is thanks to a combined data catalog of billions of advanced data signals processed through our complementary predictive AI and generative AI. Our targeting solutions allow advertisers to reach users at valuable moments with contextual signals.
Most importantly, our direct relationships with both publishers and advertisers give us first-party insight into conversion moments and the behaviors that lead up to them. Our platform focuses on delivering outcomes, and our roadmap is focused on continuing to drive those concrete outcomes.
We’re also continuing to partner with leading industry measurement providers, to ensure we can support our partners’ preferred measurement solutions. We are developing support for additional user identifiers, such as universal IDs and publisher-provided IDs. This enables the creation of a user graph based on multiple identifiers, combined with our unique contextual data.
6. We touched on data earlier, but we'd be remiss to ignore Google Chrome’s recent announcement about the new path forward for the Privacy Sandbox. With your expansion into CTV and more upper-funnel advertising, how does this insulate you from any upcoming changes?
As I mentioned before, Outbrain’s and Teads are well-positioned to deliver future-proof data solutions, as our industry continues to focus on user privacy. This is thanks to a combined data catalog of billions of advanced data signals processed through our complementary predictive AI and generative AI. Our targeting solutions allow advertisers to reach users at valuable moments with contextual signals. An expansion into CTV and more upper-funnel advertising is complementary to our existing approach and positions us well for the future.
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