Taboola introduces a ‘reimagined approach’ to driving full-funnel performance

In a bid to become an ‘industry-first’ platform that specialises only in performance outcomes at scale beyond search and social, Taboola has launched Realize. 

Realize taps into Taboola’s unique data, performance AI, and an increasingly diverse range of inventory and creative formats to achieve performance objectives. 

Built to fulfil advertisers’ desires to have specialised solutions across the entire marketing funnel, PMW speaks with Taboola’s CEO, Adam Singolda, about why Realize will be the key to driving performance outside of walled gardens. 

What is the change to Taboola’s strategy?

When I started at Taboola more than a decade ago, we had one obsession, one conviction. We wanted to make the open web a thriving ecosystem, a place where journalism, publishers, and OEMs could flourish. A place where advertisers could succeed outside of the walled gardens, search, and social. I used to affectionately declare Taboola the ‘Robin Hood of the open web’. 

We went after something called native advertising, mostly known as bottom of article feed. Not only were we able to generate more revenue from those ad placements than anything else, we also provided our publishers more than just a monetisation—we wanted to help them drive audience and engagement as they battled the fight for users' attention with the walled gardens. But advertisers and publishers wanted more from us. Native wasn’t enough. 

We’re expanding beyond the native advertising market we grew up in and helped create, venturing into the entire performance landscape beyond search and social—with Realize.

Why shift beyond native ads towards search, social, AI, premium inventory and unique data now? And why more towards advertisers rather than publishers?

Advertisers spend $25 billion annually on publishers and apps, trying to grow their businesses, but face significant challenges in today's digital advertising landscape. DSPs are shifting focus to connected TV (CTV), not performance advertising. 

Many demand-side platforms (DSPs) have transitioned into primarily CTV companies, focusing on branding through video ads on large screens rather than delivering ‘Meta-like’ performance advertising results. 

There is also a complicated adtech landscape—hundreds of adtech companies exist globally, making it difficult for advertisers to understand and effectively utilise the best solutions for their needs. 

In addition, most advertisers are experiencing diminishing returns, even with established channels like social media. This is attributed mainly to audience fatigue, leading to rising costs and decreased effectiveness over time.

What benefits will Realize offer advertisers that competitors can’t?

Realize isn't just an update, it's a reimagined approach that solves performance marketers’ most critical challenge: finding and converting users at scale. By focusing exclusively on the performance funnel (consideration and action) versus the full funnel, it provides advertisers with a set of tools which simply don’t exist outside of social networks. These tools enable them to prospect for high intent users, to actively drive these prospects down the funnel and turn them into customers. 

That includes creative options beyond native on new high visibility placements. Our new display and vertical creative will allow advertisers to drive engagement and interaction in a whole new range of high impact placements on premium sites. We’ll also make it easy for advertisers to use their existing display and social assets with our creative importer tool.

What does this company milestone mean for Taboola’s fight against Amazon, Meta and Google's advertising walled gardens?

Advertisers and publishers need a friend and partner. They need Taboola because search and social aren’t enough. The landscape outside of these platforms is fragmented, and there’s a pressing need for a single performance company that does it all.

Realize is here to empower businesses to grow through performance advertising technology that delivers measurable outcomes. It’s the only independent performance platform that goes beyond search and social, delivering outcomes at scale using our unique supply (no more just native/bottom-of-article), unique first-party data, with the use of any creative they already have (display, vertical video, social creative), and the best AI in the industry.

Has this pivot towards AI and data been at all informed by Google’s rollback of cookie deprecation? What did this news mean for Taboola?

This is not connected to cookie deprecation. We still have two realities: consumers want and deserve privacy controls for their data, and we’re still headed to a future without cookies. The cookieless future is inevitable, whether Google is making its own changes, or allowing consumers to opt out. 

The current climate in search and social is messy—X’s turbulent relationship with advertisers, TikTok’s potential ban in the US, Meta removing fact checkers across its platforms—with this in mind, how is the future of native versus social versus search advertising going to shape up?

One fact remains regardless of the ad industry environment: advertisers need outcomes that drive their business forward. In spending so much time winning in the ‘native’ world, we gave this to advertisers. A differentiator will always be advertisers’ ability to reach customers in relevant, high impact ways. 

Unlike social platforms where people often present curated versions of themselves, a sort of ‘who they wish they were’, what people read reveals genuine interests, a real curiosity of humanity based on what actions they take when they care about a topic. This authenticity will always give advertisers an unmatched advantage.