Outbrain launches new AI-based ad platform

News from an Israeli company at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2023. Israeli content recommendations company Outbrain (Nasdaq: OB) has launched a new product meant to triple the market it addresses. Its new advertising platform Onyx was built to maximize web surfers’ involvement, and will use AI (artificial intelligence) to publish effective targeted video.

Outbrain co-CEO David Kostman said that this represented a strategic expansion of the company’s business into additional areas, addressing brands and advertisers and not just content sites. “Every advertiser has a different goal, for example, performance, or improvement in brand awareness,” he said.

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“If we take Disney, for example, which is a fairly large advertiser through us, today we help them recruit subscribers to the Disney+ streaming service. The new product gives us access to their budgets when they launch a new movie or a new park. The product has been received very enthusiastically, partly thanks to our large presence in Cannes with the biggest content sites in the world, and that’s what advertisers look for.”

The Onyx platform is supposed to help advertisers understand how much attention their advertisement received – whether the user looked at it, whether there were other advertisements around it, how many seconds the user “sat” on it, and so forth. “Thanks to our technological capabilities in AI, in the future we will be able to sell advertisers packages that guarantee a certain level of attention – the advertisement will not be displayed if it isn’t relevant,” Kostman explains.

As mentioned, this is an AI-based product, the buzzword of the past year, with every technology company seeking to show that it is part of the trend. “Outbrain has used AI since its first day; all our models are based on machine learning,” Kostman says.

“We have been working on this launch for a year and a half, and we even bought a Swiss company in the process. It’s not a game,” he says, and adds jokingly, “In the end, it’s about Attention and Impact, which is also AI, and Outbrain has AI in its name.”

Kostman says that, in general, the adtech market has stabilized somewhat, partly because of more positive expectations for the US economy. “There are many advertisers at the Cannes event, and a great deal of enthusiasm over new advertising technologies,” he says.

Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on June 22, 2023.

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