Good morning. I'm Laura Martin. I'm the Senior Media and Internet Analyst at Needham & Company. I'd like to welcome to my stage Tal.
Thank you.
Jacobson. Okay, so he is the Chief Executive Officer of Perion Network, the global Ad Tech company that delivers integrated digital advertising solutions across search, social display, video, CTV, and programmatic channels. He assumed the CEO role in 2023 after leading Perion's CodeFuel search advertising business, where he transformed it into a significant driver of the company's market share and revenue growth. With more than two decades of leadership experience across digital media and technology, including senior roles at SimilarWeb, McCann Erickson, Watchitoo, and AOL, Tal brings deep operational and strategic expertise to Perion's evolution in a rapidly changing advertising landscape. His tenure emphasizes innovation and expansion of Perion's technology-driven offerings to better serve advertisers and publishers worldwide. Welcome, Tal.
Thank you.
Nice to see you. So for people not as familiar with the Perion story, why don't you give us an overview of your position with Perion's position within the ecosystem, and how do you see Perion going forward?
Yeah, absolutely. So we've, at the beginning of 2025, we've made a huge pivot towards understanding there's a big, big problem in digital advertising. There's a $1 trillion going through the pipes. There is no one company that is trying to see things from the advertiser standpoint. Everybody's optimizing for their own inventory. So Google is great, but they're optimizing for the Google and YouTube inventory. Meta is great. Amazon is great. The Trade Desk is great. But they're great for their own inventory. We're not thinking about the inventory. The inventory is just inventory. We're thinking about the advertiser. So that's the customer. That's the person. Those are the people who spend $1 trillion a year. And we're building an ecosystem, the only ecosystem currently, that's going to unify everything into one centralized platform. We're not going to replace DSPs. You still need Google. You still need Meta.
You still need everybody else. But you need to activate that from a centralized place so you would understand what's going on. And you would know if you need to switch budgets between one channel to another channel. Because even though everybody's great, they're not going to tell you to push the money to their competitors. And we will. Because our job is to make advertisers make money, nothing else.
Okay, so this is the Perion One idea?
Yes.
You guys have a really strong out-of-home presence.
Yes.
So sort of what it sounds like you're doing now, so DoubleVerify has this thing called Scibids, which compares DSPs, specifically DSPs, to figure out who's giving you the best deal and who's not. So Perion One feels like it's an auditing layer, like it's another layer of, I'm going to call it overhead or take rate, to determine whether one walled garden is better than another than the open internet. So are people really adding layers of?
It's an interesting way to. So I would look at it differently. So we bought a company called Greenbids six, seven months ago. It's now called Outmax. And that's the activation layer for everything. So we're not an extra layer. We're saying, just like with stocks, where you have high-frequency algo trading, right? This is high-frequency algo trading for media. So activate with Outmax, which is our AI algorithm. Let it do its job. So every single impression, every single click on your campaign, Outmax will go back to DSP and say, I need more of those. I need less of those. Change this. Change that. Every single impression. Now, it's not about verifying after the fact if that was good or not. It's within the campaign itself optimizing to make sure that you're getting better results.
We have already proven to our customers that with the algorithm, you can get up to 40% better yield on the exact same budget than without the algorithm. Now, we're deploying that algorithm to all the channels. Outmax is soon going to be also available for out-of-home. It's already available for CTV, for Meta, for YouTube, for web. We're deploying it to more channels. Deploy that through the algorithm to make sure that you're getting a better yield.
Okay, but my confusion, so 40% is actually pretty typical of what people are seeing in terms of improvement when they use some kind of generative AI optimization tool. The confusion I have, as you mentioned, Meta and I think you mentioned Google, actually, also. So I get why somebody should use your platform that's an AI tool on your platform that's optimized. I don't understand why anyone would hire you to tell Trade Desk that they should be doing something different. Their DSP does that. Their DSP finds the best.
Yeah, absolutely.
Ad solutions.
Even The Trade Desk invested in two algo companies that are sitting on top of Trade Desk and optimizing the algorithm of The Trade Desk for the customer. They invested in two companies. Custom algo for specific campaigns on top of DSPs has become a part of life.
It's standard.
Yeah. Now, if you use their AI, great. You get the optimization of maybe 40% of what they have. If you use us, you'll get an extra 40%. Us, other algorithms. Because it optimizes that specific campaign. What DSPs have is kind of a vanilla algorithm for everybody. It's the same algorithm. We have an algorithm specifically for that specific campaign, for that specific brand. The algorithm will behave differently for another campaign. So custom algorithm is a whole new thing in the past year and a half, maybe. Trade Desk invested in two companies in that. I think we're seeing us versus the competition. We do feel very comfortable about our results. We have pretty significant results with our technology. And now we're deploying it to other platforms. So Trade Desk is one.
Meta, if you want to buy Instagram and Facebook with high-frequency trading algorithms, I think we're the only company that does that.
How do you get access to deliverables in the Meta walled garden?
We work with them. We work with them and with the customer itself, who owns the account of advertising, right? So we do always, we constantly look at what the campaign does. We also have the attribution of the customer. Did a person see that ad and then went on and downloaded an app or bought a shoe or completed a video, right? And then we go back to the campaign and say, okay, we need to change this. We need to improve this. We need to finalize that. We need to remove those. We constantly optimize on the fly, which up until the AI era, that wasn't possible. It's too much data. It's too much work. Now it's possible.
Okay. So, would you call this a new product? Would you call Perion One a new product, maybe like 12 months old or something?
Yeah.
So, stepping away from that new product and going back to the core business, one of the things you guys have always had at Perion that differentiated you is you had a DMP. You had both sides, SSP, DSP, and you had a DMP in the middle. And then you had SORT, which was like a data kind of thing.
Yeah. It's a targeting.
Similarly, under your predecessor, the idea was to take SORT and then sell it externally, which didn't work.
No.
So when we think about things that you're doing internally, let me call it the core business, not the new product. What's happening in the core business in terms of growth, in terms of out-of-home, which has been a big bet you made on out-of-home? What's happening in that part of the business?
All right. So in the past year, we've really pivoted everything. So one, we took all our products. Everything that wasn't performance-driven, we either sunset or rebuilt to focus on performance. We know that advertisers need to drive performance if you want to make sure that they're coming back, right? So the whole stickiness part of the platform is about performance. So we shifted even the core parts. We just shifted them, rewrite them, and they're now part of Perion One. So it's part of the platform. The only legacy part is the old search that we have. But anything else either got rewritten or sunset.
But search is pretty performative, wouldn't you say?
It is.
So you didn't have to touch it because it was already in a performance silo.
It is. But in 2026, our supply search part is only based on our Yahoo agreement. And since we do not think there's a possibility to add more agreements, it is what it is. We're going to put the effort needed to make sure that that works. But it's not part of the strategy. No, it's not.
Got it. Okay. And what parts of the business were not performance before? Because I always think of you guys as a performance engine. So what wasn't performance?
The previous Undertone, which the company Perion bought 11 years ago, was a high-impact ads for web, which basically is brand awareness. No one interacted with them. But you would see on your entire page Home Depot, which is great. Brand awareness, great. But now, even that specific product is now shifted towards attribution and performance. So if it appears there and nobody clicked on that and nobody bought anything, it will not continue to appear there. So even that goes in towards performance.
So you moved the whole structure to CPC? When you say performance-driven.
No, we didn't move it to CPC because we are buying that inventory on a CPM basis from publishers on behalf of our customers. But our algorithm, exactly like our Performance CTV, the algorithm decides where to place those ads based on performance. So at the end of the day, we're being measured. Our technology is being measured, does it work? Exactly the same thing like Meta or Google. You would place more and more money into their systems if it works. If it doesn't work, you're going to take it elsewhere. So that's how we're thinking about it.
So you guys have historically focused on large clients, whereas Google and Meta really specialize in $5,000 budgets, $10,000 budgets, like small and medium businesses, but really 10 million advertisers on Meta, so really small. Is that something? Are you doing self-service projects so you can go down to those kind of budget levels?
Yeah. So the way we're thinking about it, you're absolutely right. I think Perion One, we do have the majority of our customers, which we call enterprise, big brands. We're now getting more and more into the SMBs. But within this year, we're going to put two focuses on our platform. One, a lot more self-served. And for that, we don't think people have the patience to do training on platforms anymore. So a lot of the self-serve is actually going to go on agentic. So you would go online and say to that agent, which is already in the works, I have $100,000 of budget. This is what I'm trying to get. I'm trying to get people to sign up for a form for a new car insurance in New York. Those are the ages. What do you suggest? And the agent would say, we can do CTV.
We can do out-of-home. We can do web. We can do TikTok. We can do Meta. We can do YouTube. Here's how I'm thinking about it. And you would tell it, okay, so go. And then when you say go, our DCO, which is our technology for building creative, is going to play. And our Outmax, which is our activation component, which knows what would work better and constantly improve it, will go into action. And then you'll have your insights. And then you'll see, okay, that made sense. Let's approve this. Let's change that. That's how we're thinking about it. And once this is ready, definitely Longtail will be able to join. But that's going to take a bit of time. But that's the roadmap.
Okay. And are you finding? So let's talk about the big growth products right now in Ad Tech or CTV, retail media. And I'm forgetting the other one. So let's talk about those products. It sounds like you're pivoting towards performance, which I think is great. But you're not getting paid on a CPC basis. So it's not being paid on your performance. It's arguing that your products make their ad budget more performative. Okay. And can you charge more for that because it is tied to performance? Do you find your take rates going up? Or can you get better?
We feel that with everything we've done in the past six months with Outmax, which is the algorithm for performance, we see that we can charge more. But more than that, we get a lot more budgets. So people are just pushing more and more budgets pretty much automatically because it works. You don't need to convince them, right? So yeah, on CTV, you're absolutely right. That's the growing part. Q3, we saw 75% growth, which is great. I mean, the market grew.
In CTV.
In CTV. Market grew 14%. We grew 75%.
But it's small, in fairness. It's small.
Absolutely, absolutely small. But we did launch a few new products for CTV this year. So Performance CTV, which is aligning attribution. So you would know if somebody looked at a TV ad, where they're doing something after that, installing an app, ordering an Uber, whatever it was, right? So that's kind of new. And the algorithm itself will shift between channels and deploy more budgets on channels that are more performative. So that's great. The other thing is Outmax, which works on YouTube. The biggest CTV channel is actually YouTube. And Outmax works perfectly for YouTube.
I'm surprised the biggest CTV. I'm surprised that's the [trade case] . But okay. So in CTV, why you just said it was up 75%, so let's stay on that. What do you think is driving the growth in CTV for Perion?
I think it's performance. It's actual performance.
When I think of performance, I think of MNTN, right, who we'll have on stage later, which is doing Performance CTV.
Yeah. Well, MNTN is self-serve.
Performance CTV.
Performance CTV, yes.
So how is yours different?
So again, we would work with the enterprise clients and not middle market smaller ones. We do not take $5,000 campaigns. Our campaigns would be tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands for campaigns. But within that, you do have the customizable elements like DCOs, right? If I'm watching a TV ad and that would say why.
DCO is dynamic creative optimization.
Yes.
So, just audience knows.
Yes. So the technology that knows how to place elements on the screen, right? And it also treats a TV as a computer. So through that, you have all the elements that you would have available on the computer, you're going to have on TV. For example, you would say, why cook your dinner? Go to Golden Corral, which is just five minutes away from your house. Here's a map, right? You won't be able to do that, I think, with platforms like MNTN, which are doing a great job. But the whole dynamic, or we know it's raining outside, order something through Uber Eats, right? Here's a QR code just because it's raining. How would you know it's raining? Because we have that DCO. The DCO knows what's happening around you. It knows where you're based because it's basically a computer.
Just so you're not going to be surprised when you open your Google Maps on your computer, it knows where you are, right? Why would people be surprised where the TV knows where you are? So we're taking all the elements that you have in your computer to the TV. And by that, we do show companies like Golden Corral, but others, that this is very performative. People do order things through that. People do take action through that. And I think that's driving the growth.
TVs are stupid. Their margins are like 3%. They're dumb, and they keep pulling costs out of them, and TVs are like $200 now. I mean, they're so expensive.
The TV itself.
The TV itself. So how are you, Telly? I understand because it's got this smart brain down below. But I don't understand how you're bringing these kinds of interactive capabilities to dumb screens that are televisions.
They're not dumb. This thing is basically a mini computer. It does have the capability of understanding where this TV is at, location.
You need the IP address, not the TV, but the IP address that ties into the internet.
You can open an HTML page, which basically is a browser. A browser can show you a map and can show you the weather and can show you whatever you want. It's not as dumb as you would think because if it can run a browser, it can run everything.
But people don't use their TV like this. I mean, this is the whole vision of Vizio, the vision of LG, now the vision of Telly. Oh, we're going to make this big huge screen central to the home. It's going to be an agent. And everybody's talking about voice, like Alexa kind of capabilities coming out of your, I don't know. But I just don't think consumers do that. They use a TV to lean back and be entertained.
No, you're absolutely right. I think you're absolutely right. People do not use their TV as a computer. But Ad Tech capabilities are taking advantage of what the TV can offer technically. So even though you're watching Netflix, our capability of running ads, creative ads, dynamic ads within Netflix is as if it is a computer. You don't know that because you're thinking TV is just a TV. But in fact, it has the capability of a computer. Less computing power, but we're not running anything that you need to compute. We're just showing you images. But every person would see something different.
Okay. So there's a long sort of pendulum swing towards personalization. So it sounds like you're personalizing. Usually, people are telling me that they're using AI, GenAI, to do creative, I'm going to call it versioning. I was going to use Coke. You can't because they would never let you do it. JetBlue, something a little more avant-garde. They'd say, here's three ads we've done. Go ahead and make 10,000 ads using GenAI to make it more personalized. So there's 10,000 ads, which is not a, it's more personalized than having three ads or one ad. But it's not person to person. You're not seeing a different ad than I am, right? It's cohorted in a way.
So we're not using AI to create ads because we do not think, especially on the enterprise level, like companies like Nike or United.
Versioning. Not even for versioning.
We actually use that for versioning. So we would take seven different versions and would let the AI figure out what worked best for people at that screen size and that neighborhood when it's raining. Absolutely.
But it's not creating the seven. Some human created the seven. So that is where the world's going, is letting a GenAI create that.
I think at enterprise, so companies like MNTN, absolutely. If I'm a hairdresser and I don't have a lot of budget, I'm not going to hire publicists for this, right? And I'm not going to hire a creative person. I just need people to see my store and a beautiful girl with nice hair and say 50% off or whatever.
Or something.
Yeah.
Okay.
Great. For this.
MNTN is doing this too because self-service content creation.
Absolutely. But we're a bit different. I think what we're trying to achieve is getting AI to make decisions to create better yield on your media investment. We're not trying to compete on the creative part. We're trying to make sure that if you're spending $100,000, you should get the result that you need. And if you're not, then we'll switch channels. Then we'll switch versions. Then we'll switch attribution until AI can figure this out. So I think that's the power.
Okay, and you're getting larger budgets. What you're finding is as you optimize, it doesn't hurt you because, I mean, there's a lot of benefit in your, because you get paid as a percent of the media spend. It's bad to optimize at some level because if you only can spend 50% as much to reach the million target impressions, suddenly you got paid less. But you're saying that you're getting higher budgets because of the optimization.
Yeah. So the way our algorithm works or optimized is on results because we know that if you get the results, we're going to get more budgets. It's not about how do I extract more margin through that because we need to get into that place where we can scale our business, right? So 2025, we're pivoted a business. 2026 is about scale. How do we scale this? How do we get more customers? How do we get more budget through the customers we have now? And that goes through what we believe, how do we add more value, right? And adding value is if you're a customer, you're looking for new customers to buy a car, a vacation, a cruise line, whatever. That's our goal. Our goal is to make you happy because we know you're going to come back. So that's what we're focusing on.
So this pivot that you're talking about sounds like it doesn't involve out-of-home at all.
It does. It absolutely does. So as part of the mix, the media mix, we will always give you the option to activate out of home. And we do see a lot of companies, a lot of advertisers are now seeing out of home as a performance channel, which is something.
How is that possible? You're walking by a billboard and somehow.
We do see, and if you guys are interested, go into our website. We have a lot of case studies how that works for specific brands. But an example that I always love giving is we've done Uber used our systems to buy all the video screens in Hong Kong. And because they use our DCO, if you were on a bus station.
Dynamic creative optimization.
Remember that? And it was raining. The DCO decided to put somebody with an umbrella and saying, stop standing in the rain, order an Uber. Or if it's heavy traffic, the DCO would replace that and see somebody looking at the watch and say, you're going to be late, order an Uber. And Uber saw a huge lift in orders, right? But we have so many different examples on our website. Estée Lauder saw a huge lift in buying their anti-aging new face cream in Hong Kong as well. Burger King, we have an amazing case study with Burger King, with lululemon in Germany. We know how to measure success at out of home. But even more than that, as you said, retail media is really, really growing. And now out of home is starting to be within stores, within malls, within, on your way to a store, right?
So how do we make sure that if you're on your way to Target, we want to make sure that you're going to actually end up in Target and not go into the competition. And we want to make sure that you know it's 50% off on what we want to sell you. So how do we use out of home to make sure that you're going into the store and you are aware that there's a big sale now, right? So out of home now becomes part of the offline retail journey. And in the U.S., it's, I think, over 85% of people still buy physical stores and not online. 85%, which is a big number. So out of home plays perfectly into that.
It's just so funny because you said you jettisoned everything that wasn't performative. And I don't think of out of home as performative. But you guys have figured out a way to link performance to it. And performance, do you get paid differently on this? Because sometimes when companies link to performance, they get a percent of the cost savings. They change their business model. You're still doing a take rate as a percent of ad spending, ad budget spending.
We're sticking with the exact business model that Meta has, Google has. Push as much budget as you want through our pipes. If it works, push more. But we're only going to take a cut out of your media. That's it. There's nothing else, right? Google doesn't take a success fee, right? We have the exact business model that Meta has and Google has.
That you guys have always had. This isn't different than your historical fee structure.
No. It's the same thing.
Okay. Any pressure on take rates to the downside?
I think as we're going to scale up, we might need to incentivize customers to spend more money on bigger volume commitments. We might see lower take rates. But that should come with volume commitments, not just.
Volume discounts, sort of. Like you'll have stair-step functions or take rate is this. And if you hit this benchmark, it steps down to here like that. That's your thinking?
Yeah. And when you think about it, most ad platforms have that, right? Traders has that. Magnite has that. Buy through us this. We'll give you a discount, right?
Yeah. A good volume discount. In this pivot of products, did you end up losing a lot of customers? Because it's a pretty big pivot.
So when we started this, we did find a few products that didn't make sense that we didn't want to continue with. We shut them off. And by that, we did say our goodbyes to a few customers. But that wasn't a profitable part of the business anyway, so.
So you got rid of revenue, but it didn't really have a profit margin with it. So it didn't hurt the business itself.
Yeah.
Okay. Questions from the audience for Tal? Yeah, sir.
Do you have any type of business on the local side of media? I mean, how do you go out and win new business? And do you go into the communities and go door to door? I mean, or is it all internet?
That's a good question. So currently, because our platform is a bit more complicated than just going business to business, we do go through the major agencies or the bigger brands that have the capacity. First of all, every brand comes with hundreds of thousands of dollars and not $5,000. But again, I think part of our way of thinking about our roadmap is how do we get this to be as simple as possible? So even if you're a real estate agent.
Or you mentioned a hairdresser.
Right. I think the world is going to get there, and I think if we're the infrastructure of a agentic AI, kind of think about it as a gateway to advertising, and you don't need to be trained on Meta. You don't need to be trained on Google. You don't need to be trained on whatever. You just need to tell us what you want. Give us the budget. Tell us what you want. Let's deploy it, so we're absolutely going to get there. It's a matter of priority what would provide us the bigger scale now, but that's definitely part of the roadmap.
Do you talk about customer acquisition costs as part of the model? Or is that not significant?
It's not very significant. So currently, we have our salespeople that are going to the major agencies or the major brands. So it's mainly our salespeople and marketing. We do not acquire customers online. But as we would go into more and more self-serve, that will get there.
Thanks.
Sure.
Let's talk about your capital allocation approach. How do you balance? Yeah. Yeah. Go.
Go ahead.
You're on the topic. I was basically going to.
You ask your form of the question.
I'll follow up.
In my version, which is a little more self-serving.
Go.
I'm a shareholder. Empirically, you're the cheapest stock in the world at 1.4x EV to EBITDA. And just to update us to her point on capital management, just to reiterate, what are we doing? What are your thoughts there?
Yeah. Absolutely. So we did just announce last quarter. We announced that we're going to increase our buyback to $200 million. For a $400 million market cap, that's quite big.
$200 million?
$200 million total. Yes. With that, I do not have the final number for Q4, and I'm not going to go into that, but I think over half of that was already bought in 2025.
Over half of $200 million?
Yes. And we're filling the, you're absolutely right, the stock is extremely cheap. Extremely cheap. So we.
You put your money where your mouth is, I guess you did.
Absolutely. And within that, we also think we're generating a lot of cash. We're going to continue to generate a lot of cash. We're a very profitable company. Our DNA is to stay profitable. We do not know how to operate a business that is not profitable. Thank God.
How about quarters?
Profitable on an annual basis. Cash flow positive, generating money. Ad Tech should be about generating cash. Within that, yes. $200 million buyback, $100 million roughly already got through the pipe. On the rest of our money, investing in our organic part, continue to invest in our system. We are becoming more and more an infrastructure for AI. Investing in inorganic. So what else do we need? What more algorithms would we need to provide more value to our customers so we can scale faster, right? That's how we're thinking about budget allocation.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
Let's talk a little bit about 2027. You mentioned 2026 is an investment year in the dialogue. How can we think conceptually about growth opportunities once the investments have been made?
Yeah.
Growth rates should accelerate as you know.
Yes. Yes, so we're defining 2025 was a pivotal year. 2026, we're still building our product. 2027 is really about scale. It's all about scale. The product should be completely ready to really, really scale this. AI should accelerate our scale, and yeah, 2027 is.
Just for perspective, if we're successful in 2027, can we grow like the Zeta's of the world? We're growing 20%. Is there that opportunity for us?
I can't give you guidance on this. But yeah, that's the goal. That is the goal. That's where our mind is at.
Market and media growth.
Yes. Yes. Yes. We're really thinking about how do we consolidate everything into one platform. We want marketers to use only this. Do not use anything else. Just use this. The same budgets, the same everything. We'll show you better results. We'll show you you need less people on your team, and we need you to be able to shine to your CFO. That's the goal. So that's how we're thinking about it. Yes. Without going into guidance. Yes. That's exactly how we're thinking about it.
So Tal, this pivot you're talking about for 2025 sounds like a remake of the entire company. So what was going wrong? What was the catalyst that you basically threw out what came before and pivoted so hard into this Perion One product?
Yeah. The old Perion, so let me just say, Perion existed in 1999, been on the market, stock market since 2006. It's a very long time for a company that kept pivoting and kept buying more and more things. I think within that time, we also had four or five different CEOs. I'm not saying anything bad about anyone. They all had their own idea. That's fine. But when I started this journey, they.
Revenue half.
Yeah. When the board asked me to take that seat, I said, one, we have to stop being a holding company. It's just not efficient. So 2025, we restructured our entire cost structure. All our very high-paying people that were just duplicates had to leave. So in 2025, we replaced nine out of 10 Executives. Nine out of 10 Executives.
Nine of you?
Yes. Nine out of 10 Executives got replaced in the past year and a half, which for a public company, it's a big deal to replace everybody. So change the cost structure. We pivoted away from managing inventory. I don't think it's the future unless it's your inventory. If you're a walled garden, you own YouTube, great. It's yours. If you're just reselling CNN.com, then what's the value there, right? If you want to buy Disney.
CNN.com is the value there.
For CNN. Not for anybody else.
There's a take rate on that. If you're representing CNN and you're an SSP, there's a take rate on that.
So, if you want to buy CNN or you want to buy Disney, you want to buy Hulu, you can buy through me. You can buy through 300,000 other companies. There is no unique value.
There's no exclusivity. That's what you're saying. Okay.
There's a reason why Google and Meta are really, really growing. They have the unique asset that nobody else can sell, right? Since we do not have an asset on the inventory part, we didn't see why we should continue to invest in that. The only asset we see is the one that nobody actually sees. I don't know why. I cannot get my head around it. The customer. There are customers that are spending $1 trillion a year. Nobody's focusing on them.
Sorry. Trade Desk, Jeff Green says that the main asset is the buyer, the guy that's putting money to work. That's just what you're saying.
I don't.
But you prefer DSPs to SSPs.
Again, I'm not going against Jeff or anybody else.
No, he's agreeing with you that the primary asset is the customer.
I agree, but Jeff Green of Trade Desk, which are doing an amazing job on Open Web, they're focusing on Open Web.
That's true. You're not wrong.
If Open Web grows, doesn't grow, that's human behavior. That has nothing to do with Jeff Green or anybody else. Humans are not going to continue to read editorial websites for the next 10 years. That's going to change because AI is changing it. But advertisers and brands are always going to continue to look for customers. And they're always going to spend more money on advertising. I do not care if now it's TikTok and tomorrow it's VR and the next day it's whatever, spaceships. I don't care. I want them to be able to log into one place now and in 20 years from now and manage everything through their AI agent, which is customizable to Nike. Because it knows Nike and it constantly works with Nike. That's what I want. I do not want to focus on Open Web or this or that inventory.
I want to focus on the customer.
Okay, so a year ago, I asked you on the stage what was the most controversial thing you were saying. You said, "The Open Web is dead." And at the time, you were 100% Open Web revenue stream, so this pivot is a result of that belief that you've moved sort of to the DSP side. You sort of agree with single-sided DSPs that the customer who has money to spend is the primary asset, that the Open Web might be under threat from search links being replaced by answers, maybe traffic falls in the Open Web, and/or there's commoditization and take rate squeezing out of take rate in the Ad Tech ecosystem, so you're pivoting away from the Open Web, which was, so this is the answer to my catalyst question.
Yes.
That you've come to a decision about the future of the Open Web, so you've moved the positioning of the company away from the Open Web.
Yes, and you know you asked me that a year ago in CES.
I did.
A year ago, that was for me to say Open Web is about to die when the entire company was Open Web.
It was controversial. Definitely counterparty.
But I've done what I believe. I believe that I shouldn't think about today. I should create value for the long run. I should create the infrastructure that's going to stay here. And that's how we're building our company.
So as you pivot away from Open Web, how do you define this? What business are you now in if you're not Open Web?
You can buy Open Web through us. You can buy CTV. You can buy social. You can buy whatever you want. We're not focusing on the Open Web specifically. We're focusing on you have $100,000. What do you want to get? Well, I want to get customers that are doing this. Great. Let's see if Open Web answers that need or not. If it does, great. Then OutMax will buy it on Open Web. If it doesn't, we'll buy it on Meta. If it doesn't, we'll buy it on YouTube. If it doesn't, we'll buy it on out of home. If it doesn't.
How do you buy YouTube? I thought the point of a walled garden is you couldn't get to their inventory without going through them.
No, we definitely go through them. But the algorithm sits on top of them and optimizes what they suggest.
The algorithm optimizes across the Open Web and the walled gardens. But if you decide that the walled garden is a better place to spend money, you still have to use the Facebook interface or the Google Ads DV360 interface.
The customer doesn't need to use anything because Outmax will do that for them.
I get it. [MediaTech] does that.
Yes.
Okay. So instead of just figuring out and telling people where to spend money, it goes and spends the money for them and optimizes.
Yep.
Okay. And when you say performance, since you can't get any feedback loops from any walled garden, assuming that just pick a number, if somebody gives you $100,000 and $50,000 gets spent in a walled garden, Amazon, Google, or Facebook, how do you then tell the customer it was performance?
No, we can. We can absolutely do that. Because the person who implemented attribution at the walled garden is the customer. That's Nike. That's how Nike knows if Meta works, right?
No, I don't know. You lost me.
Okay. If I'm an advertiser, if I'm Nike or Uber or whatever, and I place an advertisement on Meta, my own team plays that on Meta, then I would let Meta know what is conversion. So let's say conversion is somebody opens Uber and order it right. And I would place a code that goes through Uber to Meta and say, "That worked. That didn't work. That did work." So that attribution, Uber needs to set up. Uber already has that. The only thing we do, so Uber already tells Meta what works, what doesn't work. What Outmax does is it sits on behalf of Uber and says, "Okay, now that you told Meta if it worked or didn't work, let me work with Meta on real-time basis, milliseconds, and say it worked, it didn't work. I want more of this.
I want less of this, this, that, that," because Meta is optimizing on margin. I'm not optimizing on margin for Meta. I'm optimizing on results for the customer. We have different.
Versus other channels, if you will.
Yeah.
And percent of this total revenue you think is going to be CTV versus basically desktop and mobile?
I think CTV is getting more and more.
Even with this product, the Perion One product.
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I think CTV is definitely going to.
It feels unperformative. If the whole idea is we're moving to performance.
We're seeing.
Out-of-home feels unperformative and CTV, those feel like objectives that are not performative. They feel like at odds with the strategy of moving towards performance.
Yeah. So we're seeing more and more app companies that are driving performance to download their app through TV. So that is becoming performative.
All right. I'll call it there because we're against time. Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.