Taboola is looking to compete with Google and Facebook for small-business clients using a new generative AI tool for ad campaigns

• Taboola on Tuesday is set to unveil a new generative-AI-powered chat assistant called Abby.
• Abby aims to make it easier to create and run an ad campaign.
• Taboola hopes the product will help it expand further into the small-business-advertising market.

The content-recommendation company Taboola is set to announce on Tuesday a new generative-AI-powered chat assistant called Abby, which it hopes will encourage more small- and medium-sized businesses to use its platform.

Business owners will be able to spark up a conversation with Abby, entering prompts such as, “I own a florist and I want more people to come to my site to buy flowers.” After a few back-and-forths, it can quickly spin up an ad campaign across its network of publishers and choose the best images to use.

The tool was built using OpenAI’s GPT-4o and data input from years of Taboola ad campaigns. The company says it has around 18,000 advertiser clients and that its network reaches almost 600 million daily active users. It works with publishers including the BBC, CBS, Yahoo, Apple News, and Business Insider.

Adam Singolda, Taboola’s chief executive, said Abby is designed to take the pain points out of advertising for busy, resource-sapped business owners who aren’t necessarily familiar with the latest marketing jargon — like CPAs (cost per acquisition) or CPCs (cost per click).

“They want alternatives. They’ve maxed out Google and Facebook, not because their threshold for margin is tapped, but the way most spend on Google and Facebook, they will spend, and spend, and spend, and they stop because it gets expensive,” Singolda said in an interview. “They don’t spend on the open web because they don’t know for the life of them who to go to or how to do so.”

Singolda said Abby was designed to help Taboola bring on more advertisers and tackle the onboarding process. Over time, Abby will evolve to become more like an account manager to help retain those advertisers, he added.

Taboola, which reported $428 million in revenue and a net loss of $4 million in its second quarter, said around one-third of its advertisers currently use its self-serve buying platform.

With the launch of Abby, Taboola is the latest in a raft of advertising companies harnessing their own campaign data and generative-AI technology in an attempt to simplify and cut down the time it takes to create ad campaigns.

Big Tech giants like Google and Meta have trumpeted the gains made by their AI-powered performance advertising software, Performance Max and Advantage Plus, respectively. Advertising holding companies like Omnicom, WPP, and Publicis have committed to spending millions on the tech over the next few years.

The independent adtech companies that Taboola more directly competes with have long touted the use of AI in areas like targeting and data analysis, but have more recently added generative AI features, too. And Taboola itself already offers an AI tool called Maximize Conversions that automates its clients’ ad bidding strategies.

Amid this crowded field of competition, Taboola intends to use its existing sales teams as well as its ad inventory around the web to encourage prospective advertisers to spark a conversation with the Abby assistant.

But gaining adoption among SMBs could be an uphill challenge, according to industry analyst Andrew Lipsman, a self-confessed generative-AI skeptic, who said the industry is offering such products way ahead of consumer adoption of AI tools.

“I don’t see generative AI tools as likely to drive near-term adoption of new ad platforms among SMBs,” Lipsman said. “Even a theoretically more intuitive UI still requires a behavior change from advertisers, and inertia is a powerful force — especially among SMBs where advertising isn’t a core competency.”