Viant Technology (NASDAQ:DSP) is gaining share in the programmatic advertising market as advertisers seek more data-driven tools for targeting, content relevance and campaign measurement, Co-Founder and CEO Tim Vanderhook said during a Canaccord discussion.
Vanderhook said the company’s advertising platform is differentiated by what it calls an “intelligence layer,” including its household identity graph, the IRIS.TV content-recognition business it acquired, and the recently acquired TVision television measurement panel. He said these data assets allow advertisers to target audiences, understand the programs in which their advertisements appear and measure viewer attention.
Enterprise wins and advertising environment
Vanderhook described the broader advertising environment as stable, saying ad budgets have remained healthy despite macroeconomic uncertainty. He said Viant has expanded from serving primarily small and midsize advertisers into pursuing enterprise accounts through a larger sales force and requests-for-proposals process.
The company recently disclosed enterprise customer wins including Molson Coors and WHOOP. Vanderhook said WHOOP consolidated its advertising spending onto Viant’s platform beginning in late in the first quarter and early in the second quarter, with spending continuing to ramp.
According to Vanderhook, enterprise contracts are typically multiyear arrangements that begin with a smaller allocation in the first year before budgets expand as more campaigns and media channels move onto the platform. He said advertisers may increasingly shift linear television budgets to streaming in later years.
Viant has its largest sales pipeline in the company’s 28-year history, Vanderhook said. He explained that enterprise RFP processes can begin in the second quarter, followed by legal, technology and data reviews and platform testing in the third and fourth quarters, with decisions potentially made for 2027 budgets.
Data assets underpin platform strategy
Vanderhook said Viant’s Household ID enables advertisers to target streaming-TV advertisements at the household level. The IRIS.TV acquisition adds a content identifier that can determine which show, season and episode is associated with an advertising opportunity, he said.
That capability can help advertisers avoid unsuitable programming and better align advertisements with the content being watched, Vanderhook said. He cited regulated categories, such as alcohol advertising, as an example where advertisers seek assurances that ads will not appear in children’s programming.
He also said content relevance can improve campaign performance. For example, an outdoor retailer could show a fishing-related advertisement following a scene involving fishing, he said. Viant is also using computer vision and artificial intelligence models to assess the emotional sentiment of video content, Vanderhook said.
TVision, which Viant acquired in April, provides information on whether viewers are present in a room and whether their attention is directed toward the television screen, he said. TVision currently measures 15,000 people across 5,000 households in the 35 largest designated market areas, according to Vanderhook.
Viant plans to expand the panel to 15,000 households, approximately 50,000 people and 70 designated market areas, he said. The expansion is intended to support both national advertisers and local advertisers that require statistically significant measurement in specific markets.
Outcomes seeks performance-advertising budgets
At CES in January, Viant launched Viant AI Outcomes, a product designed to automate campaign creation and optimization. Vanderhook said advertisers provide a product or service URL, budget, campaign objective and timeline, after which the company’s AI determines media allocations and selects websites, mobile applications and streaming programming for ad placement.
The system then adjusts campaigns based on performance data, including prices, publisher selections and budgets, he said. Vanderhook said Outcomes has grown from no spending at launch to about 5% of total spending within six months, entirely from existing customers shifting incremental performance-marketing budgets.
He said the product targets a category historically dominated by search and social platforms, including Google and Meta. In one example, Vanderhook said home-goods seller MacKenzie-Childs initially tested the product with a $20,000 budget and a $60 customer-acquisition-cost target. He said the campaign generated transactions at a $15 acquisition cost, leading the advertiser to increase spending into the six figures.
Vanderhook said Viant is still determining the upper limit of budget scaling for individual advertisers. Over the next 12 months, he expects the company to sell Outcomes to existing enterprise customers as part of a “full funnel” offering that combines brand advertising with performance advertising. Over a longer three- to five-year period, he said Viant aims to build a self-service customer-acquisition model targeting a wider base of advertisers.
Outlook and potential catalysts
Vanderhook said Viant guided for third-quarter contribution excluding traffic acquisition costs, or contribution ex-TAC, to grow about 25% at the midpoint of its outlook. He said the company has delivered contribution ex-TAC growth of more than 20% for three years and has increased revenue visibility as it adds enterprise customers.
Potential upside to the outlook could come from political advertising, new customer wins and faster adoption of Outcomes, Vanderhook said. He added that political advertising has not historically been a major category for Viant, but the company sees an opportunity to apply its data capabilities to political agencies and campaigns.
About Viant Technology (NASDAQ:DSP)
Viant Technology Inc (Nasdaq: DSP) is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) advertising technology company that delivers data-driven solutions to marketers and agencies. Its core offering, Adelphic, is a programmatic demand-side platform (DSP) that empowers clients to plan, execute and optimize digital ad campaigns across desktop, mobile, connected TV and other emerging channels.
Complementing its DSP, Viant offers PeopleCloud, a people-based data management platform (DMP) that aggregates and normalizes first- and third-party audience data.
