Teads wants to become synonymous with premium open web advertising in the way that Google pretty much owns search and Meta dominates social media.
That’s the bullish message from Teads co-president and chief business officer of North American and international Bertrand Quesada, who says the merger provides advertisers with a “unique” omnichannel offering that spans across the marketing funnel and allows them to potentially reach billions of consumers.
The merger between Teads, a programmatic platform, and content discovery and native advertising platform Outbrain has created a business with $1.7 billion in revenue.
Aside from Google, this makes it the third largest open web adtech player behind The Trade Desk and Criteo on a revenue basis.
In concluding the merger, the combined business is expected to generate up to $75 million in synergies by the second full year post-merger. As part of the combination, around 10 per cent of the combined headcount were made redundant, leaving the new Teads with a global workforce of 2,000 staff.
The new leadership team is a mixture of senior executives from Teadsand Outbrian. It is being led by CEO David Kostman, who was CEO Outbrain.
Quesada and Jeremy Arditi (both co-CEOs of Teads pre-merger) are chief business officers and will be responsible for leading brand and agency relationships.
Asaf Porat, the chief operating officer of Outbrain, is Teads COO and is responsible for integrating Outbrain’s technology into new brand applications.
The businesses are working through a structured integration plan to align teams, tools and processes over time.
Quesada caught up with B&T in Sydney to explain more about the merger, its benefits and the company’s future ambition.
He said that Teads had played in the brand awareness space often providing advertisers and agency partners with premium advertising solutions in digital display and connected TV.
The addition of Outbrain adds a strong performance advertising capability and large SME client book that had not been Teads focus pre-merger.
Outbrain’s predictive technology and AI optimisation is one way the combination can enhance Teads’ advertising solutions.
“We were born in branding but if you want to be a large player in the digital marketing space, at some point, you need to have a performance offering,” he said. “Outbrain is one of the category leaders in performances. They do about a billion dollars in revenue selling mid and lower funnel campaigns to customers.”
Taking on ‘Goliaths’
The two companies are neighbours in New York and have been working together for a number of years. Merger talks aren’t new, but Quesada felt that now the timing was right.
“It’s David against Goliath, and there are a couple of Goliaths in the space. So we thought, it makes a lot of sense to combine our businesses,” he said.
“If we look at what Facebook is for social, and Google is for search, we want Teads to become the platform for premium open internet, where brands are receiving an end-to-end solution with precision targeting and strong results.”
The new Teads has a potential global reach of more than 2.2 billion users across 10,000-plus curated media environments. It serves advertising space from premium publishers including CNN, BBC, Paramount, CBS, Variety, GQ, Rolling Stone and more.
In Australia, Teads has deals with LG and Hisense to sell advertising on their smart TV homepages, and runs thousands of campaigns in this space to 70 per cent of the largest advertisers in the world.
“We are now omnichannel and full funnel, and have a consistent approach across all the screens leveraging data,” Quesada explained. “So in the morning you read the news on your phone, and then at night you watch TV. We want to make sure we have several touch points across the day with customers and can provide consistent messaging on the creative side.
“We also want to measure these campaigns across all of the screens; that’s a big part of the proposition that we are building.”
