Vice Media Doubles Down on Digital With Global Teads Partnership

Teads has inked an exclusive global partnership with Vice Media that will see the youth media brand use the Altice-owned outfit’s display and video ad tools to help bolster ad yield. The announcement of the partnership comes the same week as Vice was named as a founding member of the Global Video Measurement Alliance (GVMA) alongside BuzzFeed and Group Nine whereby the publishers will work with Tubular Labs to standardize how advertisers measure the effectiveness of such media buys. Amid a challenging media environment, Vice Media wants to augment its revenues with its latest agreement with Teads—a ploy to scale its video and display ad opportunities using the company’s suite of ad tech including AI-driven ad delivery and creative optimization. This will involve selling such opportunities directly as well as the opportunities posed by the Teads ad stack, which can aggregate global demand. In a statement, Alex Payne, vp of global programmatic solutions at Vice Media, said earlier work with Teads demonstrated how it can help deliver on advertisers’ demand for quality video placement. “We see them as part of our growth internationally, supporting our strategy to align with demand partners that share our presence and aspirations on a global scale,” he added. Meanwhile, Jim Daily, Teads president, noted how its suite of ad tools was designed specifically to perform well on mobile devices, a key platform for Vice’s core “millennial” audience. “Using the ‘Teads Publisher Suite,’ publishers can autonomously leverage real-time reporting, actionable optimization analytics, unique AI-driven programmatic ad decisions and outcome-centric creative optimization,” he added. Elsewhere, Vice’s membership of GVMA will see it work with Tubular Insights and fellow publishers, some of whom have also announced significant staff cuts in recent times, to establish a standard measurement for the global online video and digital media markets. Discussing the partnership, Neil Patil, CCO at Tubular Labs, noted how many publishers are reliant on video ad units to help deliver on their revenue targets. “With massive growth expectations in digital video comes massive pressure to deliver high CPM video monetization,” he said. “But we have seen recent headwinds in the media industry, further proof that it is still challenging to find the right metrics to accurately measure, understand, optimize and demonstrate digital audience performance.