• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 31, 2020

Taboola on Tuesday announced a collaboration with Oracle’s Moat that gives advertisers the ability to purchase video impressions on an outcome-based method that includes viewable or video completions.

The deal makes Moat an independent third-party verification partner for more than 20,000 companies to reach about 1.4 billion people monthly across Taboola’s network.

Despite analysts reporting a slowdown in advertising amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, “we're seeing some categories of advertisers actually spend more now, since the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, we've seen growth in several categories,” according to a spokesperson at Taboola. 

In the U.S., since the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, Taboola has seen 78% growth in ad spend from tech brands, 62% growth from auto brands, and 51% growth in pet brands. Several media outlets report adoption rates for pets are on the rise during the stay-at-home orders. Entertainment has seen a 22% increase.

As brands and media agencies in these categories pivot to spend more, they must prove return on investments and remain vigilant to ensure their ads are seen.

Video comprised almost half of programmatic spend in 2019 and is forecast in the U.S. to reach nearly $35 billion in 2020, per eMarketer.

With this collaboration, ads on Taboola’s network that fail to meet a brands’ viewability or completion threshold will run at no cost as well.