A More Focused Message for Taboola: Scalable Performance on the Open Web
Taboola appears to have a common marketing problem: a lack of clarity. They’re saying a variety of compelling things, but the variety makes it hard for any one message to stand out.
Taboola’s homepage is a good reflection of this vagueness. Their hero text is “Reach your customers on websites they trust.” The subtext is “Drive business results by reaching people genuinely, effectively, and at the right moment.”
A message should accomplish three objectives:
Clarify what the company does and for whom
Differentiate it from competitors
Drive urgency or underscore why the mission matters
Taboola’s homepage message sort of accomplishes the first goal (they claim to enable advertisers to reach their target audience on trustworthy websites) and hints at the second (they’re different because they have trustworthy inventory).
However, lots of DSPs and exchanges claim to help advertisers reach audiences on premium sites. Plus, reach on trustworthy sites doesn’t necessarily capture the most compelling part of Taboola’s pitch. Moreover, the subtext, “Drive business results by reaching people genuinely, effectively, and at the right moment,” is essentially a slight reworking of the most cliché phrase in adtech: “right person, right place, right time.” Because it is vague and undifferentiated, the most likely impact of Taboola’s current message is the impact most adtech marketing has: nothing. It’s forgettable.
The company’s earnings call suggests a more focused and effective direction. In the transcript, Taboola mentions a lot of initiatives and advantages. But the most compelling through-line in my view is essentially enabling Google’s Performance Max for the open web, or using AI and access to high-quality inventory at scale to drive performance. In other words: “It’s the money, stupid”: performance for advertisers and guaranteed revenue for publishers.
Taboola is already gesturing toward this message. Consider the following statements, which I’ve excerpted from their most recent earnings call:
“Our growth rates are accelerating, which is great to see. This is a clear result of our investment in AI, the unique data we have access to, and the laser focus we have on our strategy and execution.”
“Maximize Conversions, our first AI-powered bidding technology, continues to make significant strides… It’s exciting to see more and more advertisers adopting our AI as most of our revenue is performance driven, which means we don’t need to wine and dine people to use our technology. They try it out, if it works they stick around, and if not, they stop using it.”
“You see, there is no scalable bridge for advertisers to reach the open web with a focus on performance. And we’re hard at work making it happen.”
The ingredients for a provocative, differentiated, galvanizing message are here. The key is to cut the fat.
Instead of “Reach your customers on websites they trust,” Taboola might try: “Unlock scalable performance on the open web.” The subtext might be, “With unique data, the most premium publisher relationships, and AI optimization, Taboola actually delivers results.” We’d have to workshop it — and I’d be curious to hear what Taboola’s customers have to say — but this message more clearly communicates what the company does and for whom, puts it in a category of one (the leader at driving scalable performance advertising on the open web), and fosters a sense of urgency (because performance advertisers will view Taboola as an option they need to try, seeing as the company is specifically talking to them).
You only get to be known for one thing, and the problem most companies face is they are trying to be known for several. In Taboola’s case, a productive and bold decision might be to say, “We are going to be known as the adtech company enabling scalable performance on the open web for advertisers.” When people think Taboola, they will think about precisely that. And if they want to know how, they’ll think about two things: AI (Max Conversions) and premium inventory (the company that fuels ads for the likes of CNN and its peers).
Another thing I like about this message is that it defuses the most common critique of Taboola: namely, that they peddle low-quality ads and content. Check out the Twitter thread that developed when I asked the adtech industry about Taboola and competitor Outbrain’s advantages. Folks essentially said that they engage in “clickbait and ad stuffing,” to quote one user, but, as Eric Tilbury effectively summarized, they also “generate high clicks and the publisher makes a lot of money.”
In other words, Taboola should take a bold stance: it’s the money (which is another message in its own right or potentially the copy for a cool ad campaign). When you actually drive incremental demand and revenue guarantees for publishers as well as performance for advertisers, you don’t need to twist yourself into knots to make the case. You don’t need to repeat meaningless adtech clichés, either. You can actually just say that you make advertisers and publishers a lot of money — something that not every adtech company can confidently or believably claim.
Or, as founder and CEO Adam Singolda provocatively put it on the earnings call, “We don’t need to wine and dine people to use our technology. They try it out, if it works they stick around, and if not, they stop using it.”
That’s the message. Shout it from the rooftops.
