Meet Onyx: Empowering Online Advertisers to Win Real Attention

For the past 15 years, we’ve obsessed about building technology that revolutionizes the way advertisers worldwide engage and acquire customers through online advertising. We harness the power of AI to predict the exact moment a user is ready to engage and take action.

Driving real results, concrete outcomes, has always been in our DNA. Today, we’re taking it one step further. 

You Get What You Measure

Brands have created various currencies to measure the effectiveness of their media spend – reach, viewability, video completion – but we know how well-trained our brains are at ignoring intrusive ads. 

Attention has gained momentum as a better success metric. In fact, research shows a direct correlation between high attention and better campaign outcomes. This got us excited about how we could empower advertisers to maximize the value of their media spend – and user attention. 

Introducing Onyx

Onyx is a completely new branding platform designed to drive stronger brand impact from display and video ads by optimizing for user attention.

Here’s how Onyx uses the powerful trifecta of Environment, Technology, and Ad Experiences to maximize user attention from every campaign:

1. The Right Environment

If you’re like me, then you know how accustomed we are to ignoring everything that sits around the content we intend to consume. This is why ads that are placed in-article have much higher chances of garnering real attention.

Together with our publisher partners, we’ve worked to create new in-article ad placements that appear as the user gradually scrolls through the page content, in the moment when they’re ready to explore something new.

These are high attention moments where ads stay longer on the screen, and stand a much higher chance of actually being noted. Onyx ads run precisely and exclusively in such moments ensuring your ad is not only viewed, but actually gets the attention it deserves.

Our partnership with DoubleVerify, built into the Onyx environment, ensures Onyx ads run only in brand safe and fraud free settings.

2. The Right Experience

Creativity in advertising is a critical tenant to capture your audience’s attention and connect with them emotionally. In today’s noisy digital environment, ads-that-look-like-ads will drift into the user’s blindspot.

This is why we have worked with the Outbrain Brand Studio team to create new digital experiences that help you cut through the clutter. Experiences that spark audience interaction at the highest attention moments to drive business impact.

Onyx contains exciting, new creative formats for Video and High-Impact Display, giving users the ability to lean in, pay attention, and engage. Check out some of these new Onyx experiences here.

3. The Right Technology

Our heritage of engagement and performance using code-on-page insights gives us the two most valuable data signals that contribute to attention: context and interest. That data is also what informs our core technology – an AI-powered prediction engine that ingests over 1 billion signals per minute – to predict moments of high attention across the Onyx environment. 

Integrated into the Onyx engine is Adelaide’s Attention Unit (AU) measurement, which analyzes a range of media quality signals, eye-tracking data, and full-funnel outcome data to reflect a precise and nuanced media quality score. 

According to Adelaide, initial findings show that Onyx units outperformed combined AU benchmarks for display and rich media formats, across device types, by an impressive 26%. Onyx also scored 53% higher than standard mobile banners and exceeded mobile rich media formats by 20%. 

These moments of focused attention can be extremely valuable for brands, and are prime for business impact.

The Center of Attention

When it comes to delivering the full potential of attention-focused advertising, we’re just getting started. In the same way that we revolutionized customer acquisition on the open web over the past 15 years, we’re excited to move the industry forward with Onyx.

Onyx is now available in the US, UK, Germany, France, and Italy with additional markets coming later in the year. Read our press release here.