So great to see you guys. So we will get started. I'm Laura Martin. I'm the Senior Media and Entertainment Analyst at Needham & Company. There's two seats here, team. One here, one there, one there. So.
Fill them up.
Yeah, fill them up. Here's one here. There's one there. Whatever. Yeah, go ahead. Okay. And so we just let me start with a personal question, as I always do on my stage. Can't wait to hear your answers, you guys. So what is the hidden skill that doesn't go on a resume that has been mission-critical to your professional success?
Mine's X-ray vision. No, I'm just kidding.
I don't know how that's true.
That wasn't until you were 12. Yeah.
Yeah.
Gosh, I would say that doesn't go on your resume.
Yeah.
Something that's pretty topical for us right now is narrative building. I think it's very important. A lot of times, companies in ad tech, you hear it from investors, like, "I don't understand. I can't tell the difference between anybody. There's lots of, you know, it's confusing." I think, you know, building clear narratives around your value proposition has been very helpful for the company, both for investors, also advertisers. We have very clear tailwinds that we align ourselves with. We talk very clearly about what the value propositions are and how our business works. So I think that's been a pretty good skill that both of us have.
I mean, I would say Chris and I, when you have so much expertise in an industry, you have a sixth sense of what's going on, and so everyone's got five senses. I believe we have six. We have the ability to predict the future, and we build the company for the future that we have the vision in our head, and I would say that that sixth sense has really kept us ahead of our competitors for many years.
Which means we can see dead people.
Yeah, and X-ray vision. It's another version of X-ray vision.
Yes.
Okay. Okay. Okay. Let's start with CES. We got together at CES, the loudest possible aspect of your huge activation. They had this entire wall of a room, and for some reason, their team had put their meeting room, which didn't have a hood, didn't have a roof, next to where the speakers stayed.
A stage, yeah.
Right. Even though they had the whole room, so they could have put it at the back corner, which is further from the stage. That was funny. Luckily, they stopped talking right before I got there. So I didn't have to compete. But tell me, did you get my takeaways from CES, my provocative statements, some of which were yours? Pick one and agree or disagree with it.
I disagree that the open web is dead.
Okay.
Whoever said that.
By the way, he was on stage and said it again today.
But that's good because usually individuals who say that are losing in the market. And so they're usually licking their wounds. We see the contrary. The open web is expanding. You've seen T-Mobile acquire a digital out-of-home company that operates in the open web space for $600 million in cash. So I don't think T-Mobile thinks the open web is dead. We see the opposite. Walled gardens and what is a walled garden, social networks like Meta, Snapchat, X, we see them opening up. And we see more and more they're calling us saying, we need to tap incremental revenue, incremental demand. This huge pocket of the open web represents billions of dollars that's currently excluded. So as their growth rates slow, they're calling DSPs and saying, can we integrate into the programmatic ecosystem as well? So I think it's the opposite. I think the walls are coming down.
The open web is going to expand to just one internet. And there's not two classes of companies on the internet. And I think with the new administration coming in, you're going to see even more aggressiveness towards the large mega-cap companies in the tech space that are the walled gardens. And I think they're all going to open up starting this year. And it will carry into 2026. That should be music to our investors' ears, any investor in programmatic.
I completely disagree with this, by the way.
That's okay. That's okay.
This is completely provocative and controversial. If you are right, oh my God. Like, this is really problematic.
Not only are we right, it's already happening in Europe. I mean, just look at Europe as what's going to happen in the US. Meta has been opened up to other competitive players like Criteo in Europe to be able to bid and buy on. Why? Because it's been deemed they have a monopoly. And so they're opening it up to third-party players. You also have Elon Musk who comes in. And he is the game changer. He sets new rules, starting with firing 75% of his employees. But X is actively looking to open up into the open web. I'm sure Snapchat's going to follow. We'll see where TikTok ends up in the DOJ setup there. But this has already happened across Europe. And it's only a matter of time until it happens.
I completely disagree but love the controversy. Love the courting controversy, Chris.
I think there's a huge appetite. I think around AI, there was a lot of things in there. But there's just a huge appetite for AI right now.
So wait, what's the provocative? That's not provocative. What's the provocative statement you're agreeing or disagreeing with?
I think just. Period. And most AI that you hear about is marketing. It's not real. And I think in our space.
Just think, Siri.
Yeah.
Doesn't work.
Yeah. And I think just in advertising, though, right now, I think there's a lot of companies that talk about AI, but well, you should show the AI. Like, what is your AI product? Customers should be able to touch and feel it, use it. What use cases is it solving? You should be able to differentiate there. So I think there's a lot of AI that is being talked about. There's not a lot of AI product, which we're pretty prideful around, around launching those. But I still think, though, that will change over some time. I think that there will be AI is going to eat a lot of things in advertising.
Starting with SaaS.
Yes.
Okay. So explain that sentence. AI eats SaaS. Explain.
Yeah. Because, I mean, SaaS, you pay Salesforce.com per seat for everyone to manually enter data into a system. But now AI, why are you paying per seat? AI should be importing all that data for you in a more automated fashion. So I think the SaaS pricing model, investors loved it for the visibility into the future revenue and the ability to predict that. But as AI rolls out, I do believe that companies like Salesforce are going to have a tougher time growing their revenue in the future.
Okay. Especially on a per seat basis.
On a per seat basis, it doesn't make sense. Now you have agents that are doing things. So I do think there's a whole upending in SaaS. I think their model is going to move more towards programmatic advertising, which is SaaS-like. It is usage-based that drives the revenue. And I think you're going to see more and more companies come this way in terms of pricing, the way they set it up.
Okay. The two things I like most about the third quarter was that you grew your fixed revenues, which means you're growing your new clients, and your Direct Access was up double digits in connected television, so can you talk about what's happening with new clients, especially momentum of new clients, and what's happening in connected television?
Yeah. I think on the new clients, it's not so much the fixed price. It's not so much that fixed price offering. What we're seeing is a lot of new customer wins are in the percentage of spend. They are and intend to be self-service customers. But the amount of new business wins that we've been winning, we have seen an increase in customers who are saying, hey, we want you to help onboard us and add your staff to help manage it for a short period of time. What we do now compared to in previous years, we used to charge a large premium for that. So our contribution ex-TAC, what we would keep of that was much larger than a typical self-service contract. We no longer do that because what happens is once they move self-service, the percentage that you make on the account goes down.
And that would cause some fluctuations in our contribution ex-TAC. So now we don't charge a massive premium. We do charge a little bit, just really essentially to cover the labor. But once they move to self-service, you don't see the wobbliness in that. But look, the headline is that we're winning a lot of new customers. Customer pipeline is, we said it going into 2024 that it was the biggest that we've ever had. In 2025, we expect to say the same thing. So the new customer wins have been substantial. You want to talk about CTV?
Yeah. CTV.
Who's the new customer wins? Are you taking them from Trade Desk? Where are you getting the new customers from?
Yeah. So if you think of Trade Desk, I like to say, is kind of in that Fortune 100. They care about the multinational mega corporations. In order to compete for that business, think P&G and Unilever, you need to be in 30-40 countries.
Operations in those countries.
Right. We focus in that mid-market, U.S.-based national advertiser. They spend between $100 million a year and $1 billion a year in advertising. They win McDonald's. We win Whataburger. They win Nike. We win New Balance. That's our customer, and who we're really taking share from in there, Trade Desk does have mid-market customers. And we do take share from them in the mid-market. But predominantly, our wins come from Yahoo. Yahoo was acquired by Apollo. I think it's almost two years now, been two years. Anytime we see private equity move in or a competitor get swallowed by a larger organization, they cut costs, priorities change. And we typically go out and we pick up customers there. That's really where we stay focused, but I would say those are the two that we're winning market share from.
Yeah. CTV, it's growing really fast, as you saw on the last earnings call, almost tripled the market there or so. And we just see those tailwinds continuing. It's the number one thing that marketers talk about is CTV when evaluating partners. We believe we have the best DSP when it comes to connected television. We recently made an acquisition of a company called IRIS.TV. And just to explain what they do, when you go to target ads in connected television, you can only target at the app level. So I can target ads inside of Hulu or inside of Paramount.
No, outside. Only at the app level.
Only at the app level. So yes, accessing. So in-market car buyers on Hulu. So that's the extent of it. But the number one request that marketers really care about, and it stems from linear television, is which show is my ad showing up within the app? And IRIS.TV gave us the data for the show-level data that is so requested out there. They do it in a privacy-anonymous way because there's a law called Video Privacy Protection Act from the '80s. But basically, long-winded way of saying the buyers need the show data. And IRIS.TV supplies the show data. Where all of our competitors are still at the app level, we now can go more granular. It helps with optimizing the ads, helps make the ads more relevant to the scene that's going on, the mood, the type of show it is.
So if you have a very happy-go-lucky, let's say, brand, you don't want that showing up in a horror film. It's going to be a mismatch with what your brand attributes are. So it's a much cleaner way to target connected television. And so we think that growth can actually accelerate on top of what is already very, very high growth compared to the market.
One of the pieces of feedback I'll give you guys is I think I met with you at like 10 or 11, the very first day I was there. Then I did two full days of meetings at the Aria. Every time somebody brought up Viant, they immediately said the IRIS acquisition was the smartest acquisition anybody's done in the space. People like the name. They think you guys are really smart for buying it. I mean, nobody talks about price or anything. It really, like Viant, IRIS, big halo glow, big glitter glow because of putting them together.
That's great feedback.
It is. I mean, they're only, you know, I think we said they're about a 22-person company. So it's small, and one of the things that's why we made the decision to do it, we believe that the industry needs something like IRIS. I mean, the fact is a lot of these ad tech companies, you can't just fund them and expect that these things are profitable in two to four years. A lot of them, you know, it's very early in CTV. They were in this early. We believe in the value prop. So the industry needs something like this, and that's number one. Number two, the two founders who run the business, this is a big part of our strategy.
When you're out recruiting, everyone's trying to get the 10x employee, whether it be a 10x engineer, the ones who produce 10x more than the average, or you want the top-level salespeople or whatever it is, it's hard to find these people in the traditional recruiting process. Many of the best talented people don't work at companies anymore. They go and they start their own. Problem is they might be a great product person. They might build a great product, but they're terrible at running a business, and they realize that after they raise money, they have preferences over the top of them. They're losing a ton of money. They have to cut costs and fire people. They don't want to do that, so being able to attract the two founders, Field and Richie, was a big part of it as well. We want them in our company.
And I think it's emblematic of other potential deals that we might do in the future, you know, that maybe aren't these humongous deals. But we're, yeah, it's a great product, but we're actually bringing in top-level talent.
It's almost like an acquihire. You're buying their tech to get them and their 10x players.
Exactly. IRIS.TV uniquely came with unique data and connected television. So it was a double win.
Double win.
Yep.
Okay. Great. One of the things that's going on is there feels to me like there is a transition to joint business proposals, JBPs, which give you sort of visibility, and the biggest guys tend to sign these. Is this growing in your business, book of business, joint business proposals?
It is. I would say JBPs are used primarily by the larger competitors of ours to try and keep innovative companies like ourselves out by locking up a contract, similar to a SaaS-style contract for three or five years, so that way it goes away, so definitely more and more we're being asked to put together JBPs as we're moving up market to bigger customers. Those customers like JBPs, and really all a JBP is, it doesn't guarantee revenue in this space. It's a target revenue amount that the marketer is going to spend. If you build X, Y, or Z, that would be more custom for them, so it's giving engineering resources from companies like Viant or our competitors in exchange for a target ad spend number.
What if they don't hit the target ad, but you built the tech?
There's really no repercussions, which is why we kind of stay away from them. Exactly.
Oftentimes, let's say somebody. I do think that most of the customers that do them, they do endeavor to spend that amount. But stuff happens in the business. I mean, what are you going to do if an ad recession hits like it did in 2022? Everybody kind of throws some.
Don't you become the tail, not the dog in these situations? Because the guy's committed to spend, let's say, The Trade Desk says 40% of their revenue is under JBPs. Don't they have to spend that first? And if so, if ad spending goes down, they're still going to try to meet that commitment. And you become the tail going like this.
I think the JBP is less about that. I think it's a way, if I'm The Trade Desk and I got built by agencies, and they name themselves The Trade Desk after the agency trading desk. So they pledge allegiance to the agency saying, I'm not going to go around you like Google did. But yet they did. If 40% of their customers are signing JBPs, I think it's a way that they have. It's why I think a lot of agencies get upset with, not just them, but others like them that do these because the agency then has no control over which platform they're going to use in that case.
Less influence.
Right. I think those were probably better for those companies over the past three years. But I think that the space is changing dramatically. I think the appetite for AI and the lack thereof in those platforms is making those, if I were running that, I'd be less reliant on those.
If you were running what?
If I were running, if my strategy was hook you up and lock you up contractually in some way.
Just means you have a subpar product in your world.
Right. And we'd rather focus on the innovation side. And I think Viant AI, for us rolling that product out, we've seen a lot of those customers that were turned off to us because of, oh, I had a contract with Google or whatever. They're certainly opening up their eyes more because they look at what AI can do for their business, both in terms of helping grow their revenue, make their advertising more effective, but also provide them lower costs at the agencies.
Okay. So we're going to sort of move to connected television. So my question is sort of long-winded here. Sorry. But five large DSPs, which is Google, Trade Desk, Viant, Yahoo, and Amazon, are about 80% of open web ad demand. That's our estimate, as well as dozens of smaller ones. You've stated that you believe that the largest connected television sellers, which are Disney, Netflix, Warner Bros, and Paramount, and I guess Fox, will ultimately be bigger than that and that they'll tie their programmatic tech stacks directly into DSPs. And I know you guys are doing; you have a product called Direct Access. Tell me what's going on with the growth in Direct Access and whether you're therefore winning more auctions from these five big ones.
Yeah. Traditionally, a DSP bids into an SSP because the SSP represents the publisher. That's largely been true for web-based advertising like display ads. And I think that that continues. However, in CTV, there's not a long tail. There's 25 million websites out there. So there's definitely a long tail in websites. But in CTV, you're really talking about.
25 or less companies.
And a lot less than probably 25. But really, most of the viewing is in six or seven companies. And so there isn't a real need for a publisher to have to use an SSP to aggregate all of the demand. There's less of a proposition there. So we definitely see this trend. We have this program called Direct Access, where if you're a content owner, you can connect directly with, or the most direct path to our DSP is possible. That's a benefit for the content owner because they get higher CPMs. It's also a benefit on the other side to our customers that they don't have to incur the sell-side platform's fees because that's another tax to them. So when we go to market, we just say, we have something internally called the Battle for CTV.
That's just really a war cry to our sales team to go out that we're winning. There's a lot of money coming from linear into streaming. We want to make sure that we're the platform for that against our competitors. So we ask the advertisers, do you want to buy direct? Do you want to buy through a middleman for your CTV? Nobody says middleman. It saves them fees. This is why, one, it certainly is a big factor why our CTV is growing much faster than the market. And really, it's huge for our customers because it's saving them money. Last quarter, we were up just shy of 50% in CTV. And the Direct Access program is a big part of it.
Right. And it also helps you win bids because somebody can bid, like if there's a 15% SSP fee that's not being fed, they can bid 5% more. You only get paid if they win the auction.
Correct.
You're winning more auctions because they can bid 5% and still save 10% because the 15% SSP fee went both to the publisher, and you won more auctions.
Our competitor on the buy side, The Trade Desk, charges a sell-side fee for this as well, where we do not. We just don't want to make money off of the sell side. We think that's the conflict of interest that marketers are looking to avoid. They want independence, that we only make money by helping them figure out who's providing value, and we allocate the budgets with no financial incentive to do it. Now, with TTD charging on the sell side, there is the same conflict of interest that exists for Google when they're trying to sell you more YouTube, for Yahoo when they're trying to sell you more Yahoo Finance or Yahoo Fantasy Sports, whatever it may be. So we think it conflicts them in a way.
We're very, very calculated to make sure that we don't have that conflict of interest or any perception that it exists.
I think Wall Street likes more fees. We'd rather have you have a conflict of interest.
There's other ways.
Where's the pitch to?
There's other ways to make money.
Yeah. So one of the things on industry design, so we're disintermediating a bunch of SSPs, which is lowering fees in the overall ecosystem, putting people out of business in the ecosystem. My question is, at the end of this, five years from now at maturity, what does industry design look like? Let's say we're starting with 15 SSPs and 7, sorry, 15 DSPs and 10 SSPs. How many survive five years from now that haven't been put out of business by this? Because by the way, SSPs are pissed about this. And now they're going direct to the big agencies because there's only three big agencies after Omnicom buys IPG. So after we get all this disintermediation, how many open internet companies, how many DSPs and how many SSPs do you believe?
The SSP technology has been made available publicly through open source software. I do believe running your own auctions, yield management, it's called Prebid. I can go stand up the same functionality an SSP does if I go get a server and download this open source code and run it. I think most publishers will choose open source versus commercializing a deal with a Magnite or a PubMatic, et cetera. I think most are going to do it on their own. The bigger you are, the more likely you are to do it on your own. There is still a need of long tail websites that need ad sales representation. There is a purpose for SSPs. I would say probably two to four SSPs on that side. Right now, on the buy side only, there's only two companies. There really isn't anyone else.
Companies call themselves DSP, but that's coined for ad network, and really, they're running their own managed service advertising operation.
End to end.
End to end. They're running an ad network. Right now, there are two DSPs for you to choose from. I would fast forward five years. I think there are two DSPs. There has been no venture capital investment. It's all been shut off on ad tech for the last, let's call it, seven years. There are no new entrants. The moat around ourselves and The Trade Desk is very, very high because you've got to integrate every possible place someone will buy an ad, every possible data company they want to work with, every measurement company. It takes years to build out the features and functionality of a true enterprise omnichannel DSP.
Let me explain what he's saying because I totally disagree. But I'm just going to say what he's saying. So what he and Trade Desk have, which is the same, is they are independent of any source of supply.
Yes.
So he's saying, by my definition, meaning his, a DSP is only if it's standalone, not tied to supply. Amazon today is the third largest DSP. It didn't exist five years ago. They built a DSP, but he's saying, no, no, they're not a DSP because they own a bunch of supply that is captive and they're in a walled garden, but rather than not, they're in a walled garden. So he would say, for example, Taboola, who was just speaking, has a demand side platform linked to a bunch of inventory. And about 80% of their demand gets sent to their own captive supply. And then the other 20% leaks out to the internet. He's saying they don't have a DSP. Of course, they have a DSP. They have a DSP. It's just mostly putting ads. But he would even say, you would even say, if a guy had.
Can I give an example of why it won't work? Roku acquired a DSP, and it didn't work. Why? Because that DSP only represents one publisher or one partner, like Taboola would be considered a partner. You're just some small percentage of the budget. You're never 100% of the budget. You might be one of 20 partners on a buy. A marketer is looking to compare all 20 against each other on who provided the best value. They're not going to independently log into Roku, pull back out, log into. Obviously, Amazon's so large, they get more leniency here. They can demand it. But no one, just like no investor would go to the investor relations of every company's website to buy their stock. You wouldn't do that.
You would use E-Trade or a terminal to connect and be able to purchase that equity everywhere and then be able to track your portfolio. A DSP is very similar with advertising investments. You're not going to go log into Taboola's, log into Roku's, log into Disney's, log into Paramount.
You want their supply, you are.
Not at all. Not at all.
Not at all. No. Because none of that supply is exclusive. You can use an independent partner. Let's say it's The Trade Desk. Take us out of it. Why? Because you need centralized reporting of how each partner did for you. You need to deduplicate ad exposures. Someone might have shown an ad on Paramount, and that same household saw an ad on Disney. You have to deduplicate that and look at the measurement independently. So to me, this is just the sell side not understanding what the buy side uses DSPs for, just the same way that I don't understand at the same level of detail what publishers care about with SSPs.
Okay. Okay. Agree to disagree, no problem. But that's what he means when he says there's only two DSPs. I cover 12. So I don't know what they are if they're not DSPs, but.
They're ad networks.
They're end to end. Okay. New title. Okay. Let's turn to the TV, the IRIS.TV, which, like I said, everybody thinks you're really smart. You stated that you bought IRIS.TV because you wanted to get your hands on their content ID product that's already integrated into Samsung, LG, and VIZIO TVs, although not Roku. So my question is, when you came public and for a long time, you were really, really talking about your Household ID and the competitive advantage, and I asked you this as a CES too, the Household ID and how much can you get advantage. And now you're coming along and going, oh, no, no, we need to buy IRIS.TV and commit more capital to this idea. And I sort of thought you had a competitive advantage in CTV, but now we needed IRIS.TV to get that competitive advantage.
No, it furthers the advantage. I mean, look at our growth rates in CTV. Clearly, we have a competitive advantage because we're growing faster than everybody, even faster than the market leader and The Trade Desk. So we obviously have a competitive advantage. What you describe is Household ID. So that's who is seeing the ad. That's what Household ID is looking at. Which household is getting exposed to this ad? Do they buy milk? Do they not buy milk? Do they buy Bud Light? Do they not buy Bud Light? That's what we're focused on. But equally as important, if I'm Pampers, I want to know the show that my ad is showing up in, the content. And I want that content to align with my brand attributes as well. So Pampers is going to be family friendly.
They don't want their ad to show up directly after a nudity and sex scene on Max. That would be not adjacent to their brand attributes. So marketers want both. They need to know who they're showing ads so they can calculate, did that person buy my product or service and were the returns positive? But equally as important is if I'm Bass Pro Shops and I sell fishing rods, man, every time my ad shows up in Yellowstone, we sell 10x more rods per spot than when it's running on a college basketball game of whatever. Because these people are into fishing. That group is not into fishing. The content is also an important data point to look at when trying to make ads relevant to those homes. So it's not that one is better than the other. It's that both are better together rather than just independently.
When we go to market and we talk to an advertiser or an agency and we want them to switch DSPs, number one, the answer is always no initially, but if they were to consider it, they ask this question, which is, what unique data and what unique supply do you have, and that has been true for more than 10 years. I mean, for a long time. That's what they want. Unless you give me some advantage in data or you have some advantage in data or advantage in supply, why would I switch DSPs? IRIS does that for us, where our goal, our first order of business is to scale the IRIS ID or the IRIS business to the largest content owners. The same content owners that partner with us in our Direct Access program, we believe we're going to get them to carry the IRIS ID.
You mentioned that they're on all the TV OEMs. We estimate that they're in about 15%-20% of CTV supply today. But we want to get that by mid-year. Our goal is to get that north of 50%. So if we can get that north of 50%, meaning we get the big content owners to integrate that, we are going to be able to better merchandise CTV, not just Hulu, but I can give you all the shows underneath it. We're going to be able to better merchandise CTV. We think that's going to be another leg of growth in our CTV business.
Do you think Netflix has never been willing to share show-level data? Do you think now that they're doing ads, or at least on their ad tier, they might be willing to do this?
Whatever drives their revenue.
Yeah, I think at the end of the day, if you talk to Field and Richie, the founders of IRIS.TV, they have great meetings with the biggest content owners in the world. They have for years, but they haven't implemented it. And one of the insights is because those guys aren't going to do anything unless there's money behind it, so we can put money behind it.
Okay. There has to be something in it for them.
Yes.
Okay.
Getting to Netflix, I mean, it's even the walled garden. Netflix is not a walled garden, and they've chosen the open web to drive their demand. So I think whatever the open web demands will eventually be there. We have to make IRIS ID or the content ID important for the sell side to understand what it is, how it works, and the buy side to understand what it is and how it works. 2025 will be a period of education, and I think 2026 will be a period of scaling.
Of adoption.
Yeah.
Okay. Makes sense. Okay. We have about 10 minutes left. How about questions from the audience?
Yeah. That point you made about brand attributes of Pampers, maybe this is just my ignorance, but if you have a household that your data set or your product understands just had a baby, I'm not super familiar with how these brands make decisions, but doesn't the purchase intent matter more than like, oh, no, there were boobs on that show?
Brand safety, brand suitability, I think IAS and DV's success, it's very similar. It's more in that vein. It's very much they want brand suitable content. They use the term suitability. They're not saying that content's bad. It's just not right for me as a brand. Even if it's a household that just had a baby, they would rather wait till they're watching Disney+ versus the sex scene during that episode because their brand attributes matter very, very much to them. They want to make sure that their ads are in suitable content. They also don't want journalists to write an article that Pampers is running in porn or something like that. So the fear of getting fired if you're an ad agency is a very real fear, which is why all these brand safety and suitability companies have popped up in the space. So you are right.
Most important thing is, is this the right household for us to reach? Would they likely buy my product or service? If they had a baby, that would be a huge indicator, but they're not willing to run on nudity to do it.
I can guarantee you all the brand managers would tell you, I'll forego the sale, then have my ad show up in a place that I deem isn't. Appropriate.
Yes.
That's probably more TV. That's probably most important in TV, less important for display advertising on the web, on a website or app.
Okay. Perfect. What else? Yes, sir. Go ahead.
It sounds like this IRIS.TV competes with IAS and DV. Do they both compete in TV?
No, they don't compete. DV and IAS offer brand safety metrics. And also, was it a bot? Was it a real human? They sound similar, but they're different. IRIS is information about the video file that's being streamed. Who are the actors in it? Is it a genre? All this metadata about the content. Yeah.
Comedy.
IAS and DV are just doing brand safety, and is it a bot or is it a human for the most part? Was the ad viewed by a human? They're answering that specific question.
They don't have a play on CTV. Everything about IRIS.TV is connected television. That stuff for them is mostly open web and social, especially.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah. I was under the impression you can't advertise at the show level connected to TV.
Absolutely true.
That's where he started.
Yeah. So the video.
IRIS can tell you, hey, you do well if you're a fishing company advertising on Yellowstone, but you can't take that. It doesn't sound like you can take that information, go to connected TV and say, only show my ads on Yellowstone.
Okay. Really good question. No, but you can.
You hit the nail on the head.
You can know that my ads do well against this IRIS ID, let's just call it 123. For some reason, and you look up the metadata on IRIS ID 123 about that video file, and it says Western, it says fishing, it says Kevin Costner, it's got the. Takes place in Montana. What the sentiment is, all these things.
Sounds like Yellowstone.
This question is going to target on that.
Yes. What are we targeting? We're not targeting the name. The name, like let's say Yellowstone season one, episode one, dot MPEG, right? If you downloaded that, that's what it would look like. That turns into 12345.mpeg, IRIS ID. So it anonymizes the name. It makes what was a known video into an unknown anonymized number, and you target the unknown anonymized number. It's the privacy-friendly way to get around this lot.
Show-level data.
To target show-level data. You don't know the name Yellowstone season one, episode one doesn't come across. It's 12345. It's in video 12345, and that's what the buyers are targeting. Importantly, it's a global content ID. In the case of Paramount, Yellowstone may show up. That video file may get distributed through Paramount+. It may get distributed through DIRECTV. It may get distributed through Samsung. It could come across.
The same show.
But the same ID shows up. So we're a DSP. I will get Yellowstone through all these different providers, but I want to know that IRIS ID 12345. I see the same IRIS ID. So I know that if Bass Pro Shops targets that IRIS ID when it comes across the video stream, I know it's the same video.
And then Bass Pro Shops is buying it from everybody, from Paramount, from VIZIO, from Samsung, because they can now see 12345. When it shows up, they're like, dang, that thing sells fishing rods at a high rate. Buy it. And then they're paying a high CPM because they're seeing the returns. They want to win the auction. So it's a benefit for the sell-side provider as well as it's lifting their revenue because by passing that visibility, Bass Pro Shops can figure out that show across five distributors of that show. And in television content, the same show has many outlets. Could be on YouTube TV, could be on Roku, could be on Samsung, could be in Hulu. It's all across the board, but it gives the buy-side the same number to target regardless of who's selling the ad spot that moment.
Does it create frequency problems? Because Bass Pro Shops is always targeting that 12345. Suddenly.
They also have frequency capping. They layer that on too. So they're going to target that show five times and then stop. And if the expected results are good, they'll then re-up it. That's where Household ID comes in.
Yeah.
Because the household ID frequency cap. This household has consumed this same IRIS ID three times in the last, I don't know.
Three hours.
Sure.
Don't show another ad.
Okay. Did that answer your question? Okay. Awesome. Yes, sir. Go.
Besides this Fortune 1000 versus the mid-market, can you just help me understand from a technology perspective how you're different than Trade Desk?
Yeah. So one of the things I mentioned, Viant AI, has been a huge differentiator. We rolled out our first Viant AI. It has really four core functions. Bidding, we rolled out in 2023. 90% of our customers have adopted it. It basically saves. It takes away the burden.
Changes the price from the human, and AI determines the price.
So the platform does it for you. You don't have to sit there and change price. And it saves on average 35% on CPM savings on average anybody who adopts it. So that's a huge value. The second really was AI planning. And really what AI planning is that we wanted to go after a very arduous task in the agencies that takes weeks, and they spend incredible amounts of money doing market research, doing media plans for brands. So we created an AI product where you come in, you give it the URL of the advertiser, your budget, your flight dates, when you want it to run, and what your goals are. And within 60 seconds, it pumps out a full media plan across all channels. It's pretty incredible. If you guys want to see it, go to either of our LinkedIn profiles. You can watch it.
We did a live demo, something that nobody does.
There's 800 comments from industry people on there.
You can see what people say about the product. But we wanted to purposely roll that out to show the difference in our product versus other platforms that, you know, I'll tell you, many of our competitors will talk about their new platform launch, but you'll never see it.
Usually a PowerPoint.
You have to ask yourself, well, why do you never see it? They'll tell you they want to protect their UI and they don't want people to copy them, but you know at some point, you should show a real product. For us, being a challenger brand with a challenger mindset, and we're both short, we want to punch above our weight class. So we show our product. So we believe we have incredible differentiation. My last one I'll give you is measurement. 70% of our customers actually buy measurement products from us. And it shows the difference of our customer versus maybe the Fortune 100. They care more about measurement. They want to know what they get for their money. And here's a line. If I spend another dollar on advertising, I should get another sale.
Most of the largest digital media or digital advertising players don't give you another sale. They show ads to people who are already going to buy your product.
I mean, I would say it a little bit differently. Viant AI is the differentiation now that we've brought it to market. What takes weeks to do inside of The Trade Desk, campaign setup, uploading creatives, targeting all the websites, lots of mistakes happen in that because it's transferring data from a spreadsheet into a SaaS-style system. Now with the AI, what used to take weeks takes minutes. There's no more ad trafficking necessary. You click one button, it builds it all on the DSP for you. That's bad for business if you're The Trade Desk and you adopt that model because they power big holding company ad agencies, which are on an FTE model, which is hiring people like staffing. I'll pay you $200,000 a year. Reducing the number of personnel is bad for business for holdco agencies, which that's primarily The Trade Desk customer base there.
So when we rolled out, hey, AI is going to replace all these humans, the holdcos were not fond of this pitch or this product at all. And in fact, they told us that to our face. But over time, without the productivity gains of AI, your product falls behind. All of a sudden, you wake up one day and your offering is not competitive. So I think with the addition of AI, what used to take weeks now takes minutes. And that ultimately is the differentiator of our system versus theirs. Access to inventory, data providers, measurement companies, they're identical between The Trade Desk and us. Everyone can buy ads electronically.