POSSIBLE: Taboola CEO Adam Singolda Explains its AI Tools DeeperDive, Realize

If you're not waking up in the morning and the first thing you do is take your coffee and go to your office or computer and see how the prompt from last night ended, you're missing out.

Thanks for having me. This is great to see you again. Yeah, great to see you here, especially in Miami.

It's a lot of quality time with really senior people. We get to meet, socialize, and come up with ideas. I think the comparable is probably Cannes Lions, but it's a bigger schlep. I go to that too, but this is really effective, productive, and a lot of people are here. It's getting bigger. I don't know if it's getting too big. This hotel is mayhem. I tried to get an elevator, but it's really working. It's really good.

It's interesting to see how there's so much change in an industry. It's almost hard to catch up because by the time you're catching up, something new has been introduced. Deeper Dive, which we launched in September of last year and it's growing really fast, is essentially our version of ChatGPT but for the open web. So if you know what you want and you go to ChatGPT, you can ask a question, but when you go to the open web, a lot of the time in the context of I'm trying to learn something, I want to take a trip with my family, or I want to buy a product, or I have a healthcare thing on my mind. ChatGPT is a good quickie: I ask a question, I get an answer, but it's not giving me the material I need to really be educated on the topic. So we launched Deeper Dive. So if you go to USA Today or Huffington Post or Nexstar, which is a huge broadcaster, and many of these great sites, you can ask a question in your own language. You get the short answer which you expect as a consumer, but then you get articles and videos to read that are relevant to what you just wanted to learn about, and through that you get educated. You can ask a follow-up question, and the performance is, I've been doing this for quite some time, I've never seen anything like that. Traditionally, people use web products about 1% of people, 2% are coming and trying things. This is one in six people. So 15 to 20% of people are using Deeper Dive. People love chatting and conversing with publishers. So I'm really excited. I think there's going to be a whole new revolution of how we consume the internet, which will be much more conversational and different than what we see from Gemini and the ChatGPTs, because consumers, when it comes to important decisions, they need journalism, the open web, they need what you do to really give a human point of view about something.

So today, if you go to a publisher, the traditional experience is there's a homepage, I may click on something to read an article, I may read one more article, but that's what we've been doing for the last 30 years. We used to have a site search, it's still there, but it's not really being used. With Deeper Dive, I can ask any question in my own language. I don't have to be searching, I don't have to be discovering. I can ask it in any way that's on my mind. Let's take an example. I like the Knicks.

There's a very important game tonight at 8:00 p.m. which we're obviously going to win.

So, I can go to USA Today and say, "What are the chances the Knicks win the championship? There's a big game tonight. What do you think?" And then it will give me a very brief answer, but then it will say, "Here are seven things you should read about it." And the performance of that is just unbelievable. The chances I read one more thing is 10, 15, 20%. So people are really leaned in. And then for advertisers, we show an ad as part of the search results, like in kind of what Google does, and the performance for advertisers is just, it's our number one ad placement as a company, and is a two-plus billion dollar revenue company. So to see something that works so well for advertisers is exciting. And I think as we see here at Possible, the advertising community is eager to see AI monetization, what's going on, where is it going?

Everybody wants to talk about AI. AI is a real thing. No one is questioning whether something will happen. We're seeing some publishers that go all in with us. My career, the chairman and CEO of USA Today not only was the first one, but also spoke to investors about it. I was invited to all hands, 10,000 employees, and we talked about the AI revolution. So you're seeing executives that are very leaned in and saying we don't want to catch up. We want to be first. We want to make mistakes. We want to fix those. And I think that's really fun. But also that's how you innovate in a big way. And then I think others are trying to see and learn what others are doing. There's no, when we do this, hopefully you and I in a year from now, I'm pretty sure that most of the internet will have an AI engine, an answer engine that I can interact with. We hope that's going to be Deeper Dive, because while ChatGPT focuses on ChatGPT, Google focuses on Gemini, we want to focus on everybody else: OEMs, publishers, apps. And again, I think this is going to be not only great for consumers, but phenomenal for publishers and advertisers. And we need growth. We need all the growth we can get in times where search traffic is going down a little bit, too much change. This is to me a very optimistic view of the future.

It's a very provocative area, I feel, because if you go to Claude Code now and say, "I'd like to buy search on Google. I'm trying to sell. My wife has a flower business. She says, 'I want to find clients.'" Historically, she would have to go open an account with Google, open an account with Facebook, open an account with Taboola, maybe open an account with some CTV company. And now with Claude, she can tell Claude what she's trying to do and Claude will do a lot of it on her behalf. So one, we launched a skill for Claude. So you don't have to, Claude doesn't have to go and open a browser and go to Taboola. You can just talk to Claude about your open web advertising goals and Claude will do it for you with Taboola. So that is incredible from your own computer. You talk to Claude, Claude's talking to Taboola, Taboola's talking to the rest of the internet, and you sell flowers. And the second thing we've done is we launched Realize Plus.

TV is a great medium. Obviously, when I see you on TV and you speak about a topic, it means something. I'm a lean consumer. I'm not scrolling on a feed late into the night. I'm watching something I care about. I'm leaned in. That's why advertising on TV really works, because I'm not doing something else on the sofa waiting for the next game to come back.

However, advertisers never historically knew if the ad really drove a sale or if it was something else I did at the same time. There's no clear connection. So a lot of case studies were done and attribution models, it's a complicated space. I put a lot of money on TV and I hope it's working. I hope this is why it's working, but you don't know. And Amazon has done a phenomenal job with Prime saying, "Well, you can give us the money. We'll put you on Yellowstone on TV on Prime, which we have a lot of inventory." And because Amazon is the same company, Amazon is Amazon. We know when you watch that on TV, we know you're the same person opening your app later. And we all buy on Amazon a lot. A lot of boxes outside my door. So now Amazon can advertise to me on my app. Amazon can show people like me the same ad and then when I click and buy it, Amazon gets to go to the advertiser and say, "You see, we're really good at this." Which created a lot of pressure for the industry because now other broadcasters are saying, "How can we do that too?" So we actually had a lot of broadcasters come to us and say, "Can you be our Amazon? Help us connect TV to performance. Show us. I see an ad on TV and then you see an ad on Taboola's side on a publisher side." And we worked on that for the first time. We got into the TV space. We announced it in June of last year with Paramount, which was amazing.

And then we announced with LG, 250 million devices all around the world. So if you watch an ad on, we were in upfronts just now with LG, which was fun. But if you buy an ad from LG through this partnership, those consumers and people like them will see your ad around the web, they may click on it, buy the product, and we close the whole loop. So I think that's going to grow the TV market significantly, because if you know it's working, you're going to spend even more money. And we're humbled to work with Steve at Paramount, Serge at LG, and now we're here talking to many broadcasters and platforms. Christian joined us from Amazon. He built the advertising business, the TV ads business, and I've known him for 10 years from his NBC days. So he has a lot of TV in his nature, and so we're having a good time.

Build something on Claude. I mean, if you're watching this and it's been more than 20, if you're watching this and the first thing you, and I don't care what you do, you can be anyone. If you're not waking up in the morning and the first thing you do is take your coffee and go to your office or computer and see how the prompt from last night ended, you're missing out.

All right, Adam. Well, thank you so much for joining us here at the NYC Speakers Corner.

Until next time. Go Knicks.