No ad tech company has exploited the outstream opportunity more than Teads, one of the French companies to have come out of Montpellier’s tech hub. Earlier this week the company announced it had raised an additional $46 million. Here Pierre Chappaz, founder and Executive Chairman of Teads, discusses how the company intends to use the money in APAC and how his company are innovating in a bid to stay ahead of the outstream pack.
How big is the opportunity in Asia for outstream video?
Being a global company with offices across the globe, including our very successful Japanese operations out of Tokyo, the Asian market poses exciting opportunities for us. The combination of the vast internet population, the explosion and innovation of mobile technology and the every increasing consumption of media across multiple devices shows the appetite for media within this region. Mobile is clearly the device of choice in this region – Ericsson projects that by 2021, 51 percent of the world’s mobile connections will come from Asia, totalling $4.6 billion by 2021. Video advertising in APAC is expected to grow by more than 20 percent a year to be worth $16.7bn in 2021. These numbers alone explain why we’re so interested in expanding into this market – after the US it’s one of the biggest markets in the world.
At Teads, we are reinventing video advertising across all devices, putting the user at the centre of the branding experience by providing them with non-intrusive video ads within a premium context. Today, we are the only global company able to offer video formats which have been developed specifically for the mobile experience. This is how we guarantee the highest levels of user acceptance and viewability.
Where do you think outstream is winning money from? Is the money coming from TV to you think or is outstream more likely to be chipping away at display advertising?
At the inception of Teads, our mission was, and still is, to reinvent video advertising. We wanted to find an advertising solution comparable to TV in terms of quality and scalability, but put the user first and provided impact branding experiences across all devices – this is how outstream, and our ground-breaking inRead, was born. We also saw the lack of premium video inventory and wanted to find a solution to this challenge for advertisers, as well as helping to create incremental revenue streams for our publishers.
We’ve seen a lot of companies moving into outstream video over the last year or so, and in the last week alone we’ve seen both Google and Taboola make moves into that market. Are these formats becoming commoditised or are there still important points of differentiation that advertisers and publishers should be aware of?
Competition spurs innovation. And with our latest round of financing, we are able to further develop our offering in Asia, and look to make acquisitions that will add further value to our company. As the world’s number one video marketplace, with 1.2 billion unique users every month, our perspective is always to maintain and strengthen our position to support the premium demand and supply of outstream video advertising. Just recently we have launched new mobile products, Square and Vertical video for our flagship product, inRead, and we are now running inRead 360 campaigns with inRead Live coming very soon. We are excited about the future, and are in the best position to continue growing and helping more brands run their video campaigns, and publishers to monetise their premium inventory.
Our approach was very disruptive in the marketplace and we plan to maintain this. Not only did we partner with the majority of the leading premium publishers across the world, but we were the first player to openly discuss viewability and sustainable advertising in 2011. We were also first to market with our outstream supply platform (SSP) and have since launched the industry’s most innovative outstream formats – such as vertical, square, 360 and Live. Due to this, our outstream offering is now mainstream and has been recognized by the IAB as a new standard. I’m also very proud of our partnership to run our formats on Google AMP.
