Fast Forward: Gumgum's Ophir Tanz On Bad Ads And Good Ai

Fast Forward: Gumgum's Ophir Tanz On Bad Ads And Good Ai

- Dan Costa

Fast Forward is a series of conversations with tech leaders hosted by Dan Costa, PCMag’s Editor-in-Chief. Dan recently spoke with Ophir Tanz, CEO and Founder of GumGum, which is quickly becoming a full-stack vertical-AI solution company. They spoke about the current artificial intelligence boom and its potential to alter every business it touches.

Dan Costa: How are you using AI today in the advertising space?

Ophir Tanz: GumGum, at its core, is a computer-vision company. We express that technology in a variety of ways. Our largest business unit is our advertising unit, and we invented an advertising format called In-Image Advertising, where we currently work with about 70 percent of Fortune 100 brands and many of the largest publishers in the world. What we do is we contextually place marketing messages in line with content users are actively engaging with. We’ll identify the context of images, in this case, and actually align marketing messages to it.

You’ve got a number of examples of this on your website. It’s really cool. I don’t think most people know that it’s happening when they actually encounter a website and they see this type of advertisement. They think it may have been programmed that way, but you’re actually taking the content of the photo and then delivering an ad that’s based on the photo, not necessarily the site or even the article.