Using “Outcomes” to Win the War for the Open Web
A number of my clients (e.g. tvScientific and Viant) have embraced and informed the Outcomes Era thesis I first shared last year, but one company is all in on it, and that company is Taboola. I’m sharing this to brag (Ari Paparo dropped the “Outcomes Era” term when talking to Taboola CEO Adam Singolda on his pod last week, for example, and Terry Kawaja and his co-presenters dropped it a bunch of times at DMS by LUMA) but also to analyze where the market is heading and how GTM stories will evolve in tandem.
In September, Taboola’s hero copy on their site was “Reach your customers on websites they trust,” and I argued that they should pivot to the message of “scalable performance on the open web.” Fast-forward eight months, and the hero copy on their site now is “Performance beyond search and social.”
Moreover, in his appearance on the Marketecture podcast last week, Singolda said the company is all in on performance, noting that all advertisers are moving toward that model and that performance is what the open web and the companies that represent it need to deliver if they want to compete with the walled gardens.
This is essentially, as Ari noted, the Outcomes Era thesis — that, with offerings like Performance Max and Advantage+, Google and Meta have set an outcomes-oriented standard for this era of advertising wherein they say, “Tell us what outcomes you want, and we’ll do the rest.” Advertisers have gotten hooked on this, and now every media seller and adtech company is increasingly held to that standard.
There is a wrinkle in the Outcomes Era thesis: transparency and control. As aforementioned clients of mine such as Viant co-founders Tim and Chris Vanderhook and tvScientific CEO and co-founder Jason Fairchild argue, Google and Meta are black boxes. This comes with a few problems:
You can’t independently verify the results they claim to drive, especially supposedly incremental sales.
You can’t use your learnings from Meta and Google to get better at advertising across platforms and inventory sources. You risk becoming dependent on them (as most advertisers already have). This fosters bad behavior (see: Google’s allegedly anticompetitive behavior).
You lose control of your data, and it may be used to benefit your competitors.
The lack of transparency and control offered by Google and Meta doesn’t undermine the need to drive outcomes. And, indeed, I’m not quite sure how much advertisers care (they’ve been plugging so much money into the walled gardens regardless for years). But Google and Meta’s black-box algorithms do give open web adtech companies an easy hill to own and means to compete.
Any and every adtech company marshaling the entire open web to drive outcomes — and doing so transparently — can and should argue that the ability to independently verify those outcomes, tweak the approach, control their own data, and repurpose the learnings from those campaigns makes those companies and the open web a better place to spend advertiser dollars than the walled gardens. In other words, adtech companies still need to compete on outcomes, but they should emphasize transparency and control.
That is, in a sense, the message of the Outcomes Era for open web adtech companies — drive outcomes with more transparency and control — and I talk every week to CEOs, from very established adtech companies to unheard-of startups, that are embracing different aspects of that story.
So, it’s no surprise to see Taboola shirking what was in essence a quality message — “reach your customers on websites they trust” — in favor of an outcomes-oriented performance message. Quality is a proxy, and Taboola has never been thought of as a paragon of it. Now the company is leaning into what advertisers really care about, and that message is more aligned with its existing reputation (and therefore more believable).
But if open web adtech companies are able to compete with Google and Meta on the points I raised (transparency and control), they should enrich their messaging by further integrating those talking points into the story. That would clarify why advertisers shouldn’t allocate 60% of their dollars to Google, Meta, and Amazon.
That broader contest with the walled gardens is, as the Vanderhooks always point out, the real war every open web adtech company is fighting despite our predilection for fighting among ourselves. It also seemed to be top of mind at DMS by LUMA for The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green, who was at pains to underscore that the open internet is the no. 1 place for advertising investment because it packs the most competition as well as the best content library (including virtually “all” the movies and TV ever created, plus professional and journalistic content instead of mostly user-generated content).
For the open internet, outcomes, too, must be the end goal. But outcomes shouldn’t be reducible to direct-response tactics. They shouldn’t be delivered by black boxes. And they are easier to drive when you have great content as well as a leaned-in audience for it. Those are the ingredients for a compelling open web adtech company message in 2025. It’s no wonder you see so many established companies and startups putting the ingredients together.
