From Native Advertising To Everything-Performance, Introducing Realize

One of the benefits of working with many thousands of advertisers over the years is that you get to hear from them and see what’s working—and what isn’t.

We recently deepened these conversations when we spoke to more than 70 advertisers from companies like ERGO, Verisure Brasil and Noom to get their perspective on the current state of performance marketing. It was clear that advertisers repeatedly face the same dilemma: Search and Social channels deliver results, but the path is getting steeper. Costs are skyrocketing and creative fatigue is a persistent challenge causing advertisers to reach the point of diminishing returns faster than ever. 

These skyrocketing costs are both steady over time (Meta, Snapchat and Tiktok have seen CPMs surge since the low point of the pandemic, as has Google search), and also in massive spikes impacting predictability and consistency of performance at crucial times. All it takes is a couple of huge advertisers heavily investing to cause huge hikes in price – this is exactly what happened over the 2024 holiday season where Shein and Temu added so much competition it contributed to a 16x increase in search ad costs. 

This isn’t sustainable. And outside of these channels there are no consistently good options to help advertisers diversify their marketing mix.

Going Beyond Search and Social

Advertisers know that Search and Social alone aren’t enough, but as they seek to reduce their reliance on them to meet their Performance Marketing goals they face a complex, disjointed landscape. There are no great solutions out there which deliver meaningful results at the scale they need, and so they exhaust themselves chasing performance across different channels.

DSPs are complex and not performance specialists. In fact, they are increasingly becoming CTV companies, which means focusing on big-screen, brand video experiences and on upper funnel outcomes. They’re a good investment for the brand teams at advertisers, and on the most part give these teams the transparency and control they crave, but the channels they are doubling down on don’t provide an ideal canvas for performance advertisers.

Most smaller ad tech companies may offer good performance solutions here or there but they don’t have anything unique to offer, and if they do it’s not at scale or driving the performance outcomes that aren’t at the desired levels. And many of them are now treading a similar path to that of the DSPs, focusing increasingly on ‘full funnel’ (eg, CTV and brand video) vs specialising on tools that performance marketers need.

The bottom line is that advertisers want and need a performance channel that can deliver measurable results at a scale that drives significant, near term, needle-moving growth for their business. But outside of  Search and Social, achieving that consistently feels nearly impossible.

No More “Full Funnel” Promises, Focus on Performance. Introducing Realize

Realize isn’t just an update, it’s a reimagined approach that solves performance marketing’s most critical challenge: finding and converting users at scale. By focusing exclusively on the performance funnel (consideration and action) vs the ‘full’ funnel, it provides advertisers with a set of tools which simply don’t exist outside of social networks. These tools enable them to prospect for high intent users, to actively drive these prospects down the funnel and turn them into customers. 

Here’s just some of what Realize will deliver as we launch today:

• Creative options beyond native on new high visibility placements. Our new display and vertical creative will allow advertisers to drive engagement and interaction in a whole new range of high impact placements on premium sites. We’ll also make it easy for advertisers to use their existing display and social assets with our creative importer tool
• Enhancements to our Performance AI to deliver measurable results at every stage of the performance funnel. With the launch of Optimize for Engagement, advertisers can now define custom engagement metrics—such as time on site or session depth—with just a few simple settings. Our algorithms then optimize towards finding users who meet these criteria, helping advertisers identify and scale high-intent audiences more effectively.
• Powerful new Predictive Audience Targeting that is built for performance based on what users do/their intent vs who they are/their identity. In beta testing we have seen CPAs consistently reduced by 15% and advertisers increasingly adding additional budgets to these campaigns. This fast-follows the major audience releases in 2024 including our proprietary first-party segments and custom mail/search retargeting audiences.
• A Simplified Experience including streamlined workflows, additional reporting capabilities and enhanced reliability in the new Realize UI.
• Unwavering Quality, multiple brand suitability controls, robust fraud protection underpinned by our ongoing commitment to deliver you full transparency on exactly where your ads are running, and full control to make the right decisions for your business

And this is only the beginning of our journey for Realize. We have an exciting roadmap ahead of us full of new features and products that are squarely focused on driving results at scale for performance advertisers.

A New Era of Performance Marketing

When speaking to performance marketers, we heard time and time again that they felt underserved outside of Search and Social, and that these channels are becoming less efficient. They told us that they are having to use generalist tools for their specialist tasks, and having to invest time they don’t have in constant trial and error to find new paths to performance. These highly skilled marketers control budgets of tens of billions of dollars, and are critical revenue drivers for their businesses. However, much of their spend on the open web – approximately $25B – is on sub-optimal tools, and on social platforms approximately $30B – despite experiencing diminishing returns.  

Performance marketing has always been about navigating challenges and seizing opportunities. Realize is about empowering advertisers to conquer the open web with confidence. It’s about creating a meaningful solution for advertisers where the world beyond Search and Social isn’t a daunting obstacle, but a powerful engine for growth.

We’re excited about the path ahead of us and hope you join us on this journey.