Outbrain launches new AI-based ad platform

News from an Israeli company at the 2023 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Israeli content recommendation company Outbrain (Nasdaq: OB) has launched a new product that aims to triple the market it covers. Its new advertising platform, Onyx, is designed to maximize engagement for web surfers, and will use AI (artificial intelligence) to post effective targeted videos.

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

“If we take Disney, for example, which is a fairly big advertiser through us, today we’re helping 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 met with great enthusiasm. This is partly because we have a large presence in Cannes with the largest content sites in the world, which is what advertisers are looking for.”

The Onyx platform is supposed to help advertisers understand how much attention their ads have received – whether a user looked at them, whether there were other ads around, how many seconds the user “sat” on them, etc. “Thanks to our technological capabilities in artificial intelligence, in the future we will be able to sell to advertisers packages that guarantee a certain level of interest – the advertisement will not be shown if it is not relevant,” explains Kostman.

As mentioned, this is an AI-based product, the buzzword last year, with every tech company striving to show that they are part of the trend. “Outbrain has used artificial intelligence since day one; all of our models are based on machine learning,” Kostman says.

“We’ve been working on this launch for a year and a half, buying a Swiss company in the process. It’s not a game,” he jokes, adding, jokingly, “In the end, it’s about interest and impact, which is also AI, and Outbrain has an AI to its name.”

Overall, the adtech market has stabilized somewhat, Kostman says, in part due to the positive outlook for the US economy. “There are many advertisers at the Cannes event, and they are very excited about new advertising technologies,” he says.

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

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