Could you tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at Teads?
I currently oversee several teams at Teads including our strategic sales and agency partnership teams, as well as our creative studio and global marketing teams. The benefit of having all of these groups aligned under the commercial umbrella is that it ensures that our messaging and go-to-market strategy are aligned throughout, from the way we are communicating with the market more broadly, to how we structure and support global partnerships with clients. It allows us to put our client needs at the heart of what we’re doing and gives us a high-quality feedback loop for our advertising products and our go-to-market from the frontline.
Our technology is centered around multiple areas. First, Teads for Publishers, a deep stack for publishers to manage and monetize high-quality ad experiences. Second is Teads Ad Manager — a buying interface for advertisers and agencies to execute programmatic transactions; third, Teads Audience Suite — an advanced audience targeting suite. Fourth is Teads Studio — a creative studio allowing brands to easily create data-driven ad formats and lastly, Machine Learning capabilities to intelligently optimize campaign delivery based on campaign objectives.
How did you make the transition into 2019 and fulfill your goals?
While we still have plenty of room for growth. We have successfully shifted from being transactional partners to becoming strategic partners to some of the world’s largest advertisers including P&G, Samsung, Adidas, and many more. This is largely because we have been executing on a strategy that is focused on helping our clients deliver business results. I’m excited at the pace at which we’re seeing large brands grow their share of wallet with us as a result. This translated into a strong financial performance as we generated $430 million in revenue in 2018, which represented 35% organic growth year over year.
What were the most outstanding events and milestones for you in terms of partnerships and technology innovations?
Our platform allows marketers to reach approximately 1.5 billion unique users on a monthly basis across the globe. We achieve this through our partnerships with hundreds of high-quality publishers across the planet from The Economist to Vice. Over the last year or so, we have added nearly 300 million unique visitors on a monthly basis. This puts our reach on par or above Facebook and YouTube in most major markets in which we operate. In 2018, we made this ad inventory transactable through Teads Ad Manager a self-serve programmatic buying interface that has been adopted by agencies such as WPP, Publicis, IPG, DentsuAegis, and Havas.
How do you see the application of AI and Machine Learning justifying their hype and trends?
Everyone is not talking about AI, not everyone is really doing AI. We have been investing in our AI/Machine Learning capabilities for more than three years through a team of Engineers and Product Managers entirely focused on these areas. What we developed were three solutions to improve advertising outcomes on our platform using Machine Learning: Outcome-oriented solutions, data clusters and audiences, and creative. A bit more detail is below.
- Outcome-oriented solutions: Thanks to our AI framework, we can commit on guaranteed outcomes for our customers. In Video advertising, we sell completed views and not only impressions. For this, we need to predict the likelihood of reaching a KPI like video ad completion or clicks to an advertiser’s website. To make these predictions, we use logistic regression with features such as the connection bandwidth, and the advertiser site load time, etc.
- Data: We use AI to create the clusters and score audiences because advertisers want to target specific users. For this, they can provide us with their CRM data (first-party data), but very often the reach of this data set doesn’t have enough scale. We help brands extend their reach by using our look-alike model capabilities.
- Creative: We use AI to ingest inputs on a given campaign and serve the right creative based on things such as location, time of day, etc.
Which new geographies and markets are you currently eying to grow your customer base?
We have teams in 27 countries and operate media campaigns in more than 55 countries in total. We have also expanded our product set to focus more on performance marketing. This is one of the most exciting new developments for us.
What are the major pain points in your Customer Success initiatives and how do you plan to overcome these?
Generally speaking, clients have two sets of KPIs when considering the advertising products they are investing in. At a basic level, they are looking to achieve certain media objectives such as click rates, viewability rates or completion rates for video. At a deeper level, they are ultimately, looking for their advertising to be effective for their business, i.e. moving brand metrics such as awareness or purchase intent, or driving actual sales of their products. Delivering success in both requires the right convergence of creative, media and technology working closely together. The ad industry often operates with these three areas in silos. We have been hard at work to help our clients bring them together to deliver the best possible outcomes for their businesses.
How do you inspire your people to work with technology and what are the results?
Teads is a company of entrepreneurs, and we generally start with the results we want to achieve and work backward to build the technology that will achieve the KPIs we’ve set out. For example, four years ago we began investing in Machine Learning because we wanted to automate campaign optimization. We started with the objective of delivering stronger campaign results for our clients, as one of the challenges we faced was knowing when to deliver the right ad to the right user to drive the right outcome. We built the Machine Learning capabilities and are now one of the only companies that deliver real business outcomes based on the advertisers’ KPIs such as driving new traffic or video completion rate.