MarTech Interview With Tal Jacobson, General Manager at CodeFuel

Tal Jacobson, General Manager at CodeFuel chats about the evolution of search advertising in this quick catch-up with MarTech Series:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Tal, tell us about yourself and your journey in the B2B-tech market, we’d love to hear about your role at CodeFuel…

I’ve been in the online business for over 25 years now. I was lucky enough to be part of some of the most successful companies, among them Micromedia (acquired by Adobe), ICQ (acquired by AOL), McCann Erickson, SimilarWeb, and Now CodeFuel, which is part of the Perion Network family.

CodeFuel is the Search Technology Division of Perion Network (NASDAQ: PERI), and I joined the company four years ago as the General manager.

CodeFuel is probably one of the biggest supply partners for some of the most well-known Demand partners in the world. To put it simply, we provide technological solutions for Publishers that enable them to show to their loyal customers ads from companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and others; all while our technology also ensures high quality for the advertisers.

Although Codefuel has achieved extraordinary growth in the past four years, it still feels like we are just at the beginning of our journey.

How are you seeing the search advertising niche evolve today: what are some of the core trends that are now redefining the market?

Search advertising plays the most important role in the online consumer acquisition process. For advertisers, there’s no better way to reach their customers than right after they explicitly inquire about a specific product.

For instance, if I need to identify people who are looking to renew their car insurance right away (in 10 minutes from now, it might not be relevant anymore), seeking out those who typed in the search query “Car Insurance” is a goldmine.

This example demonstrates why Search Advertising will always be the most effective online advertising channel.

While all search engines aim at influencing that exact moment of fulfilling a purchase intent, in recent years, we have noticed many different ways search results are presented to consumers through different platforms. We now understand that Search Advertising is a lot broader than just Web Search (Like Google, Bing, etc.). Consumers are also searching with vertical search engines, such as the top Commerce Search engine – Amazon.com, Travel Search engines like Booking.com, or visual search engines like Pinterest.

At CodeFuel, we understood that this is a growing trend and developed technology that supports this trend. We are currently focusing on understanding consumer intent and working with the world’s leading search engines to provide consumers with exactly what they need.

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How can B2B teams optimize their search advertising tactics today to meet goals faster and cut through the noise better?

Now that we understand that Search engine advertising is more than just web search – ask yourself, where are my customers? It doesn’t matter if it’s B2B or B2C; your customers are actively looking for information through search engines, so what you need to do is figure out what they are looking for and how you can provide that information to them while also gaining them as customers.

Search advertising is always the best way to cut through the noise and reach high quality customers.

Thoughts on the future of B2B advertising and adtech?

B2B advertising is going to continue to grow and play a big part of the AdTech industry in the next coming years.

When you think of it, B2B advertising hasn’t changed in the last 25 years; what has changed are the advertising channels. When I worked at Macromedia (Now Adobe) 25 years ago, we used highly targeted lists of Fax numbers of potential customers; we let our fax machines work all night, sending our offers to all the marketing agencies and graphic studios. In the morning, our sales team phones rang non-stop, and we succeeded in meeting our revenue goals. Your customers can be on TikTok, Bing, or Pinterest, but its tactics are the same:

– Understand where to find them

– know what to tell them

– Deploy

– Measure your success.

In that sense, Search engines are where all customers are, all the time.

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