The current geopolitical tensions can nudge advertisers towards performance advertising companies like Taboola to ensure effective ad spends, said Eldad Maniv, President and Chief Operating Officer of the company during an office launch in Gurgaon. Maniv also talked about the shift in search and social towards AI trends like chatbot queries and driving ad performance ahead of these trends.
How do you see the current geopolitical discussions influencing the market?
We have a big opportunity ahead of us. The macroeconomic situation around us underlines and strengthens our vision in the performance world. Every chief marketing officer is more accountable to their CFO for ad spends and we are perfectly positioned to be able to support that. Businesses are a macroeconomic phenomena but they still need to sell new products, scale up and acquire new customers. We anticipate more macroeconomic pressures to drive more advertisers towards performance advertising.
Why do you consider India to be leading in terms of the adoption curve in the industry?
We’re seeing that the publishers and advertisers here are just at the very forefront of cutting-edge technology. We’re seeing publishers that are building Gen AI tools and capabilities that we’re not seeing elsewhere. Our advantage here is that we have been here for a very long time, and we have extremely long-term and very deep relationships with our customers here, and that is what is creating the competitive advantage, first and foremost.
You put out a report that said social media is not giving the returns that advertisers or investors were hoping. Do you see a similar trend in India as well?
Yeah, I think it’s a global phenomena. At some point it gets to a scale issue where the cost goes up. Pretty much all of our businesses across the globe show that customers, advertisers are getting to that diminishing return phase.
In that case what happens to the influencer industry? Do you see it dying out in the next few years?
I don’t think it impacts that. The industry is scaling. We work with influencers when they get to a certain scale and in essence become a publisher. I believe they are effective. The way we look at it from an advertiser perspective at the end of the day is return on investment. The influencer economy is on the rise but that is not in essence where we play.
Is Realize Taboola’s answer to the AI age where everything is changing and shifting to a Q&A format?
Realize is a platform to drive performance for businesses beyond search and social. So it’s all about outcomes companies are looking to bring on board new customers in a performance drive. Everyone spends money on search and social and there’s a whole world which is the open web and we bring the scale and performance of the open web to advertisers. Search is a main driver today but it’s prices are going up, scale is going down via the GenAI changes and this is a third beyond search and beyond social, a third way to scale up customer acquisition.
But isn’t that what you have been doing before as well?
We’ve been doing native advertising but we realised that there is a $55 billion market opportunity for us globally which is beyond native. That’s the amount of dollars spent today on performance advertising outside of the core search and social and we see different paths of why advertisers would be interested. Particularly, advertisers’ return on investment in search and social are diminishing. The first dollar you spend is very very effective but as you grow your spent to become less and less effective and so 75 per cent of the advertisers we speak to have reached that level of diminishing returns and are not getting the performance they need.
Do you feel that the trend is now shifting towards OTT platforms?
OTT platforms are getting more budgets from what used to be linear TV budgets. Most of it today is still branding and less performance. We’re very focused on performance and so on direct conversions and less on CTV at this point. We’re looking to help our advertiser close a deal, get a specific lead, drive an acquisition.
What are your plans for India specifically in terms of expansion for the next year or so?
India is our fourth largest office globally and the biggest in APAC. We have over 170 employees here as business team, professional services team, marketing team, HR team. We have a lot of operations here and it’s becoming more strategic as a hub for our business. We continue to focus both on working with our publisher base and growing our publisher base and with the advertiser base. We currently operate here in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.
What are your 2025 goals for India?
We believe that we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of market potential in India. That is from the business perspective. As a global company focusing on talent centre in India, it is our intention to max out this facility and grow to the next.
