"We are now part of the global platforms"

MK: You announced in early April that your company grew by 30 percent in 2018. You've been steadily increasing your operating profit for six years. For those who still don't know Teads: Can you outline your offering very simply?

Alex Savic: Teads describes itself as the "Global Media Platform". This means that we bring together the world's most important publishers to offer their inventory to advertisers via the Teads platform. Just as Facebook is a platform for social advertising and Google is a platform for search engine advertising, Teads is a platform for serving ads in professional and high-quality content environments. Today, Teads reaches 1.5 billion people worldwide, is present in 26 countries and works with over 600 of the most important premium publishers - which is why we can say with good conscience that we are now one of the global platforms.

Following on from that, what makes you special and distinguishes Teads from other media agencies or platforms?

Teads originally came to prominence in 2011 with the inRead format, which at the time established the new digital advertising category called "Outstream." Today, outstream has become mainstream, so to speak. In the UK, for example, more than 50 percent of video spendings are converted into it. What also differentiates Teads in the market is our close collaboration with premium publishers and our clear focus on technological innovation. Teads has long since moved beyond simple video distribution. We help advertisers achieve their desired brand outcomes with our full-funnel video & display solutions. We exclusively use our own technology, which combines Ad Server, SSP, Ad Manager, Creative Studio, DMP and Formats. This full-stack approach is what ensures the high quality of our service.

What do you think are the biggest challenges for someone who wants to promote a product or service these days?

There are indeed so many media channels and products that it is very difficult for customers to keep track of them all. To be able to compare different products and providers, you have to be willing to really look at the details of the respective products and make the purchases in such a way that the KPIs can be compared afterwards. In the video space, there is often confusion in the way the different players work. For example, an instream player does not pause the commercial if it is not in the viewable area. The resulting view rates cannot be compared with those of an oustream player, which pauses the commercial as soon as it is less than 50 percent in the viewable area.

On your website, you write "Ad Experiences That Drive Attention: We embrace the swipes, the scrolls, the pinches and the taps to build ad experiences that delight the user and deliver business results for brands." Can you elaborate on that a little bit? What do you place in your partner publisher's copy, and how does the experience that addressees have with ads played out by you differ from "traditional" advertising - popups, banners, etc. - on the web?

According to Nielsen, 49 percent of the advertising impact lies in the creative implementation of an advertisement. That's why we always try to design the advertising material in such a way that it is interesting and surprising for the user and motivates him to interact. To do this, we build on our customers' existing creatives. Above all, it is important that these work well in the mobile environment. To do this, you can use the scroll or swipe behavior, or use the gyroscope. We sometimes also use the smartphone's geolocation to dynamically adjust the creatives, or the front camera for augmented reality ads. 

But the changes can also be something very simple, like adapting the format of the advertisement from 16:9 - landscape - to 9:16 - vertical. Most users hold their devices vertically and not horizontally. Often, we simply cut a spot down to 10 to 15 seconds so that it is better received on mobile. You wouldn't believe how often we get 30-second spots for mobile campaigns! In an internal study, we found that in 2018, the average video length of our clients across all countries was 25 seconds - even though the majority of traffic comes from mobile devices. We're happy to help with our "Teads Studio". 

Is there a way for advertisers to go beyond placement in certain media environments - business only, tabloid only, or similar - to target specific groups, for example? 

On the one hand, we have been offering keyword targeting for several years. Customers can define words that must or must not appear in an article. This reduces the potential, but increases the relevance to the advertised product. In addition, Teads now offers the option of targeting users based on their interests. To determine the interests of individual users, we evaluate the user's reading behavior across the entire Teads network. Based on this data, we can create an "interest graph," similar to how Facebook creates a "social graph" for its users.

How do you evaluate the impact of the advertising you play out for marketers?

Our approach is to offer our customers "brand outcomes," i.e., cost-effective units that are as close as possible to the customers' business objectives. We currently offer the Cost Per Completed View (CPCV), Unique Cost Per Click (uCPC) and Cost Per Incremental Visitor (CPiV) billing models. We think this is much more exciting for customers than buying classic impressions. Our customers want to book a guaranteed "outcome" anyway and carry less risk on their site. Thanks to our technology - especially our machine learning algorithms - we are able to offer this added value to our customers.

In which areas would you like to improve or grow?

We definitely want to push the "Brand Outcomes" further. We can imagine charging according to cost per lead or cost per sale in the future, but we still have to train our algorithms a bit for that. In the creative area, we want to continue producing the most innovative new advertising formats on the market! This is helped by our 60 designers in the company and a global sales team that is constantly developing new ideas with its customers. Our customers in Switzerland also benefit from ideas developed in other countries.

How important is the Swiss market for Teads - and how many users do you already reach here?

We now reach around 85 percent of the Swiss population with our inRead player. Perhaps even more exciting is that we have around 300 million ad calls per month, which makes us by far the biggest local video platform in Switzerland. That's why Switzerland has become an important market for Teads in Europe. I think many foreign tech companies underestimate the potential in Switzerland and try to work the market from Germany or England. Teads chose the right strategy and decided six years ago to build a local team here - this was the only way we could build relationships with publishers and offer the best possible level of service to our customers.