I think we're good to get started. Appreciate everyone joining us. My name is Alec Brondolo . I cover small and mid-cap internet for Wells Fargo. I'm very pleased to be joined by Tim and Chris Vanderhook, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Operating Officer, respectively. Guys, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah.
For those that aren't familiar with Viant, could you maybe just give a brief overview of the business model, how you help marketers, and then how you monetize that?
Yep. We're what's known as a demand-side platform. That is the platform that helps buyers of advertising buy their ads. We don't help the sellers of advertising. We only represent the buyer of advertising. The business model is, if an advertiser spends $100 through our software, we negotiate what percentage they pay us in fees. Like, say, 10%, we would keep $10, and then the $90 would go towards buying the ads. That's the overarching business model. We lack competition. There's five competitors in the space, and I'll just name them by size in the DSP space. Google is the largest, so we compete with Google, massive competitor called DV360. In our world, they've been shrinking due to the antitrust issues that they've been going after. Next largest is The Trade Desk. You have Amazon, Yahoo, and ourselves.
That's really the competition if you are an advertiser looking to buy ads. Out of those five, though, three of them have a conflict of interest because they're trying to sell ads to the marketers simultaneously. Google tries to pitch YouTube. Amazon tries to pitch Prime Video. Yahoo, of course, sells finance or fantasy sports on their properties. They have a natural conflict of interest. If you're an advertiser wanting no conflicts of interest, your choices are the Trade Desk or Viant. Those are the two remaining independent objective DSPs. We differentiate from the Trade Desk in that about half of our money is spent in connected TV, which is the area of the market that's growing the fastest. If you contrast that to Trade Desk, they are basically a display and online video.
DSP, they were created about 12, 15 years ago in that original era. We were invented later and more modern and more for CTV. Anything else to nail it?
That was pretty good.
All right. Good.
He might be the CEO.
I want to jump straight into the AI conversation because I think you guys are leveraging it in the DSP in a couple of different ways. I think right now there's a couple of different AI modalities. I think AI Planning is kind of the most prominent one, and then that might be changing a little bit going into 2026. Could you maybe help the audience understand how a campaign might have been planned the old way and then how AI is augmenting that on the platform today?
Yeah. A year ago, we rolled out ViantAI. ViantAI, the goal of it is to be an autonomous platform. When we say autonomous, we think like Tesla full self-driving mode. That is what we want. DSPs are traditionally Bloomberg Terminals. they take specialized training and knowledge. Also, once someone knows how to use your software, it is a moat. Really, we only really attract, DSPs only attract, call it 10,000 advertisers use DSPs. Contrast that to, say, Meta's Advantage+ platform. They have 10 million advertisers. They have much more automation. We are going kind of long-term focus is autonomous. We want to provide the most automation, easiest to use. We do not want to put a lot of effort on the human. We have four functions in ViantAI. The first one that we launched is AI Bidding.
This is that we choose the price that you're going to pay to the publisher. The trader, let's say, in the platform will set the max price they want to pay. We basically, every five seconds, publisher by publisher ad requests that we get, we're aiming to get the lowest possible price. On average, we save customers 40%. 85% of our customers use this product. If we save you, let's say we save you a dollar CPM, we keep 30% of that. So it's value-based pricing. This has been a tremendous product, probably the fastest growing product that we've ever released. That was the first thing we launched in ViantAI. The second that you mentioned was AI Planning. This really melted people's face when we did this because an agency, if an advertiser uses an agency, they do media planning.
They spend 6, 8, 12 weeks of market research, tons of money, figuring out a brand's target audience and which media partner should we spend with and what the frequency should be and what messages we should show. Viant's AI Planning does all of that in 60 seconds. If you look at a mid-market independent agency, they probably have 20-30 people in planning. If you look at a holding company, they have hundreds. We are automating something, taking an immense amount of cost out of it, but also providing them better data-backed plans. It is leading to better campaign performance.
I want to, you're going to launch AI Decisioning, I think, into general availability next year. Before I get there, I want to ask about planning. I think there's kind of a fine line right between enhancing what the agency does, creating an operator benefit from the agency relative to kind of displacing them or disintermediating the value proposition that the agency creates, right? Because they're hands on keyboard with the DSP. That's what the customer is paying them for. How do you think about finding that balance as you roll AI products out?
It's a tough balance. Especially when your long-term North Star vision is end-to-end autonomy, no doubt. When we talk about our autonomous ad platform with holding companies, they do not like it. This is contrary to their business model. They are more like a temporary staffing firm. If you're General Motors and you do a review and you select an agency, you are buying 500 temporary staff to manage your ad account for you. Client advertisers love it. Holding company agencies do not like it because it's negative to revenue growth for them. Independent agencies, which are, think of like small business owner agencies, 100 person, they love it because they're able to have now capabilities that holding companies had without having to carry that staff. It's upskilled their ability to compete for bigger accounts. I would say holding companies, it's been a tough sell.
I mean, one woman told us, "Shut our laptop," a big holding company executive, and said, "Stop talking about this. It's bad for business." We said, "Look, at some point, you're going to need productivity boosts just like everyone else in society, and you're going to switch, even though I know it's contrary to your current go-to-market business model." I would say there's different pockets. The truth is we just stick to our North Star vision that the humans are kind of the problem in digital advertising because there's too many choices. There's 10 million mobile apps, 30 million websites that we all go to in the U.S., many CTV apps. Within that, you have audience segments of people in market for a car on cnn.com. The combinations are too many for humans to pick the top 100 combinations to show your ad.
It's like the choices are so complex, there is no room for humans in this space any longer. And it's just hard for people to accept that.
I will say, though, the business models, one thing about holding companies, people have said for years, those guys are going out of business. Here they are still.
They evolve.
Yes. They evolve. If you watch their moves, and we have holding company clients who do use ViantAI. And they use it. One, it's a great new business pitch tool. Incredible. It's unbelievable the success that has been had with ViantAI. We announced a big win recently, and ViantAI was a big part of that. So the holding companies are.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Say the name. Come on.
I was going to let them say it. We recently won Molson Coors. That was a big trophy account. Iconic brand advertiser, three-year commitment out of them.
Most importantly, huge ad budgets.
Yes, yes. They do spend a lot. But the agencies look at AI as, and maybe it's a forcing function, but they have to get more efficient. These guys are out pitching business for, I mean, it's razor-thin margins. And every time a huge account comes up, what do clients want? Well, with AI, you should be able to do everything better, faster, and most importantly, cheaper, right? It is going to happen no matter what. I think that holding companies will be adopters en masse.
You have AI Bidding live on the platform today, AI Planning. I think the next iteration is AI Decisioning. Maybe just help for the audience that isn't hands on keyboard with the DSP, help understand kind of how big of an evolution that is in the platform, what that's going to enable.
Yeah. AI decisioning is the brain. It is removing the human in the loop. That is the big next step. Right now, we have human in the loop. It is human supervised. I generate, I am Ford Motor Company. It is the F-150. I need to run a new ad campaign. My budget is $20 million or whatever it is. It generates that campaign and presents it back to the human. Once it is live, it is looking at who is hitting the goal of the advertiser. Like, I want website traffic or I want people in the dealers. They monitor those statistics. They manually make the changes. Once decisioning is live, the human supervision will be pulled out of that mix. The AI will be fully autonomous on creating the ad campaign, executing the ad campaign, optimizing the ad campaign, and determining budgets to every single budget, pricing, everything.
That will be that first era of end-to-end autonomy. Think it V1 of your self-driving Tesla. Is it going to be absolute perfection out of the gate? No. Our goal when we release it is that it's better than human traders. That's really, we look at internal traders that we have plus our customers. The AI is competing against them. When we eclipse them, that will be human-level intelligence in ad trading. Then we'll roll that product out from there.
Would it be fair to characterize the product as kind of like the Advantage+ moment for the platform?
PMAX.
That's PMAX. Okay. So that's the.
PMAX.
PMAX.
PMAX.
Absolutely.
The open web does not have a competitive offering there. That is our aim, to slot in. The open web is substantially bigger than Google or YouTube if we look at that environment. It is substantially bigger than Meta's properties. Just to give you an idea, CTV, YouTube is 13% consumption of CTV. The open web is 87% more. These walled garden threats, we really do not think they are much of a threat. They do have advantages. The open web offers so many more advantages in a scale that one company cannot compete with.
Yeah. If I look at the digital advertising market this year, I think that DSPs have been starting from a challenging position because brand advertising seems like it's growing slower than direct response. Obviously, DSPs historically have been used for brand advertising. It seems like the longer tail of digital advertisers, kind of like the Shopify storefront, certainly growing faster than the Procter & Gamble type large brand spender. The question is, does that kind of market segmentation start to change the way you think about the business, what markets you want to address? Do you want to introduce more performance capabilities into the DSP? Is there an impetus to go down market and find longer-tail customers? Or do you ignore it? I'd love to hear about it.
I'll tell you the direct response side or the performance area of the market, we. It's 75% of the money.
Yeah.
It is true. If you look in our platform, 46% of the money in our last quarter is spent in CTV. That is not historically a direct response channel. We do contend the reason why the share of CTV is so much higher in our platform versus, say, like a Trade Desk, which is in the 15%-ish mark, somewhere in there, is because we actually show marketers the true value of CTV and how it drives new customer growth relative to, say, banners and online video. CTV is eating share of other channels and formats in our own platform. It is eating share. It is taking because the performance is so high. I do contend that CTV is a performance vehicle. It is going to take some learnings for that to happen.
That said, with ViantAI and the launch of AI Decisioning, it is going to allow us to move into right now, I would consider, I do not consider us brand budgets, but I do consider us kind of like mid-funnel. Because although you are doing upper-funnel executions like TV, we are proving the performance of it. There is no customer that we have that just spends money on ads on our platform.
Without a goal.
Like reach and frequency, not one. They all have some performance metric. And just about all of it is some return on ad spend. Now, there are large parts of a marketer's budget that they link to what they call outcomes. You'll hear this in our industry a lot that's been going on this last year is outcomes, outcomes, outcomes. All that money is going into Google Search. It's going to Amazon sponsor listing ads. It's going to Meta's Advantage+ . Let's say Google's PMAX, which is just more search. That is eating a ton of money in the market because if they put a dollar in, they get $2 or $3 back. We think some of those results are skewed by those platforms.
Nonetheless, when we launch AI Decisioning, this is going to allow us to go to the performance side of the market and not just be in mid and upper funnel. We're going to be full funnel.
Similar to the Axon launch from AppLovin, very similar in a similar target audience of customer segment two, which is direct-to-consumer e-commerce. This group has been powering Meta's growth. Huge businesses have been created on there. Meta does a great job. Meta's number one in the AI advertising game from our perspective. That is the target audience that we'll be going after first. They have huge budgets. They're medium sophistication. They're not as sophisticated as others. We see areas up and down funnel that AI plays in.
How do you think when you think about the longer-tail Meta spender, the DTC e-commerce company, I'd love to get a sense for how you think about distributing into that channel. Because I think, look, there's like a lot of smart people in ad tech that can figure out how to build kind of a performant product that has the right attribution that delivers a strong ROAS. I think the challenge is actually like how you find the advertiser, right? They know about Meta. They know about Google Search. They're selling things on Amazon. It's very easy to find out about sponsored listings, right? How do you help them discover Viant?
Primarily channel partners. No doubt do we have some salespeople that call the bigger spenders, yes. Our go-to-market is primarily around the channel partners that e-com companies trust. Let's say Meta advertisers. They primarily spend all their budget on Meta. These companies are measurement companies, weirdly. The companies in this space, Triple Whale would be one name, Haus, spelled H-A-U-S. There are about eight providers, I would say, that are doing the majority of the measurement. What are they telling? They're the advertisers' auditor on what the advertiser's getting for their money from Meta. Now that AppLovin came out, these companies are the ones measuring AppLovin versus Meta. We're going to install ourselves right next to them as well.
The channel partnerships with the measurement companies are the most important because they, A, have the advertisers, and, B, they're the referee on the scoreboard of who's driving what.
There's also large e-commerce and direct-to-consumer agencies as well that represent a lot of these. It is not a we are not planning to go knock on the door of the local pizza store owner. We might get there one day. I think that would be all in a self-service fashion. Our first foray into this is, as Tim said, some form of a channel partner. The other thing I'll say is that I do not think that there's a lot of smart people in ad tech that can create a competing product to Meta that produces results on par with them. If they could, they would have already done it. Meta has advantages in their platform. Number one, they know who you are. You are logged in. They know exactly who you are.
Number two, they know every piece of content and every granular piece of metadata around that content. What Meta's good at is I know who you are, and I know what content you're consuming. If you're in Reels, it's why the experience in Reels, the ads feel like content. They're so synonymous to the content. It's unbelievable. That is a secret to their success that most people overlook. If you look at us, the number one thing that marketers look at us right after we're done giving you our boilerplate and they start getting into our platform, it's Household ID. Why? They want addressability. Our Household ID spans 95% of U.S. households. There's no guessing.
They know that we know who lives behind that ad request, which household that is, who lives there, what are their emails, what are their phone numbers, give me all their names.
Look at their shop ad.
We are a leader in addressability. Molson Coors put out a press release. And what did they say in their press release? One of the reasons why they chose us, they talked about a new metric called findability. They onboard CRM data. We match it in a database. But can you find those people when I serve ads? We ranked higher than anyone. We have the advantage of addressability and very similar. I talk about this in our earnings calls. We say it's walled garden-like addressability because that's what marketers know that the walled gardens have. The second thing goes into an acquisition we did a year ago. We bought a company called IRIS.TV. IRIS works in CTV. They work with content owners. The content owners send them their video files.
They index all their video files, run computer vision on it, and they know every piece of granular information about that video. You get a file for Yellowstone Season 1, Episode 1. They know we scan that. It's got Kevin Costner in it. It's scene-by-scene information, what the contextual category of the videos are, what the emotional sentiment is. Like, is this happy? Is this sad? Did Rip just kill a guy on the bar? Any of those things. If so, don't show a Pampers ad.
What we want.
We want the content intelligence and the granular information of the content that you're consuming so that I can show a relevant ad. I can already show a relevant ad based on who lives in the household. Now I want to make it in context to the CTV show that you're watching to drive higher performance. We do believe that when we launch AI Decisioning with our other assets, we have this incredible intelligence layer that nobody else has. We do believe we're going to be able to drive performance that's on par with Meta.
Something I try to do when I evaluate new advertising products is I try to think of like a mental model for why it works. I think Meta, you have a lot of user data and then $100 billion of CapEx sitting on top of that. AppLovin seems to have found this kind of like latent pool of unmonetized inventory in mobile games. It is kind of cheap. They have turned it into e-commerce ads. They have had some level of success. I think what I am hearing from you guys, if I was to re-summarize what you just said, is actually our kind of user graph is a lot better than one might expect kind of a DSP's user graph to be.
We have done a lot of work have bought things to help us understand the context of the placements a little bit better than we otherwise would have. If we kind of put that together with some sort of AI model kind of underpinning it, that will be a really performant product.
Yes.
Absolutely.
I think as you go in the future, how is our AI going to stay competitive with $100 billion of CapEx?
Yeah. It all comes down to what proprietary data you have. That's what makes AI models unique. If we have unique data, like does Meta know what you're watching in streaming? No, we do. We're able to feed all of that to ViantAI. When it comes to media planning, our media plans in CTV are much more accurate and resembling a good ad campaign because we have all that data already in CTV that we're training on. I mean, in the end, we're never going to compete with CapEx. We are going to compete with proprietary data that no one else has. Who's in the household, what they're watching in the household, and what stores you shop at. In general, those three things blended together.
Yep. I want to ask about Molson Coors, but I want to ask the question a little bit differently. I think you've identified a pool of $250 million of gross spend with kind of the largest, maybe top 500, top 1,000 advertisers globally to go after. Historically, kind of the company's niche has been the middle market. The question for me isn't so much Molson Coors specifically. It's more, in your mind, what is enabling you to go and win those budgets? What is your right to win with those larger enterprise spenders that didn't previously exist?
Yeah. Let me start and then you can add. I mean, number one is our objectivity and the fact that we have no conflicts of interest. It's half the decision. You still have The Trade Desk, which is considered objective. When it comes down to Viant versus The Trade Desk in an advertiser's budget, so think like a Molson Coors, half their money roughly is TV. Every marketer's budget, about half is TV. You have tertiary channels. In the old days, it was billboards and radio and newspapers or print. Now it's display, social, search, video. Half of it. If you're a large advertiser and you spend half your money in TV, the DSP that's the best in TV buying is kind of your decisioning framework.
We put all of this effort into understanding and having the best TV or streaming TV buying product because we know that's the natural selection criteria.
Yeah. I would say within CTV, we have a great product called Direct Access. Traditionally, a DSP bids into an SSP who represents a publisher. About two years ago, this started to change. In CTV, there are only about 30 apps that represent 90% of the viewing. Those 30 apps have now started coming to us over the last two years and saying, hey, we want to integrate directly with you. That allows us to take our marketer dollar. When we bid, we now are bidding direct to the publisher. There is no SSP in the middle. Believe what you want on what their take rates are. That is easy. It is not arguable. We are saving you at least 15%. If I save you 15% on your CPMs into Disney and Paramount and Peacock, that is real money.
They do not keep the money and put it in the bank. They just buy more ads with that incremental. You get more of a response. It is self-fulfilling.
I want to get back to Direct Access in a second. Perhaps I could ask, you know, look, you're a smaller company. You're resource constrained. There's a lot of large advertisers out there. I imagine the idea isn't we're going to go hire a million salespeople and go try to do every RFP we can. How do you pick and choose your spots? What are the attributes of an advertiser where you look at it and you say, hey, we have a real right to win. There's a good shot to get that account.
Yeah. This is a great question. My answer is going to it pisses off our salespeople a lot. We look for the right type of company because we need to see that the marketers, something's going on with their business that's forcing them to think differently. They're not going to just choose Google. I'm not going to just choose the Trade Desk because they're the next biggest by market cap. That's a trusted name. Certainly, trust is an important factor. We look at companies who are actually looking to do something different. That's kind of number one. Looking to do something different, here's a good example. Like Molson, the category of alcohol is in secular decline in America. Only 52% of people in America, adults, state that they drink. That means our birth rate is definitely going to deplete even further than Elon says.
Within alcohol, beer is actually performing even worse. They have a problem. It is forcing them to innovate. Marketing is a percentage of sales, so their budgets are probably down. The CEO is talking like they are going to return to growth. How are you going to do it? That was a big part of the discussion with the senior marketing leadership at Molson. We find other companies like this that are like, I need to figure out ways to get more efficient. The reason why we got brought in initially was ViantAI. They saw ViantAI and thought, we employ hundreds of people to do media planning, buying, and set up and execution in DSPs and measurement. We could save a lot of costs here. We look for the customers who are thinking in a certain way, number one.
Number two, they already understood. A lot of it had to do with the content that we constantly put out. Marketers who buy advertising in digital, many of them overspend in search, in social, in display advertising because they think that the metrics that they're seeing, just because you showed an ad and someone bought, they think that that's a new customer. It's not. CEOs and CFOs look at CMOs. When the CMO says, look, we're driving a 5 to 1 return on ad spend, give me more money. The CEO looks at them and says, why are our total sales down if you're doing better and better? They have to change the way they think. We help them. We give them the tools to change the way they think.
You can't just show the last ad to someone who's going to buy your product anyways. Don't show me a Coors Light ad. I promise you. I drink them every week. Do not show me an ad.
It will have no impact.
Yeah. If you want.
No, incrementality is low.
Yes, exactly. What's their problem? They need new customer growth. They got to grow sales. Invest in channels that are going to get you new customers. Guess what? It costs more than $5, like Meta is showing you. Meta is saying they're getting beer customers for $5. No, they're not. That's just me. I'm the same customer.
Yeah.
Yeah. I'd love to take a second and maybe put together some of these themes and link it to the financial model, right? I think in the fourth quarter, you guided to 16% year-over-year contribution x tax growth x political. It's closer to 21%, $250 million kind of pipeline of gross spend from large accounts going after smaller customers with the decisioning product. Would it be fair to maybe characterize next year as potentially growing faster than that 21% x political exit rate?
Oh, tremendously. I mean, we had so many headwinds this year. Like you talked about in Q4, we're guiding to 16. I think on the year, if we hit that number, it'll be like 17% growth. What were our headwinds this year? Trump announces tariffs. That suspended ad spending Q2, some bled into Q3. What are good examples of this, like a customer of ours, Avocados from Mexico, tariff impacted when that all got announced. What did they do? They withhold some spending. You have things like that. We got hit with a customer that got acquired by another one, Six Flags. We were a cost synergy in that. Once they put the marketing teams, they let go of the Six Flags. That was an unfortunate thing that happens in life. Really, no fault or anything related to the business.
We had two acquisitions. We had elevated OpEx as well this year. It is not political. We have the headwinds of political from the prior year that we do not have. All of that lifts off in 2025. In spite of all of those headwinds, we still grew at 17% for the year. We still grew the bottom line at 25% for the year. We have won Molson Coors in that $250 million pipeline. Year one of Molson Coors will be small. They push over display, online video, some CTV. Year two, they push more in. As linear TV comes into streaming, year three will be like a full impact of a large customer like that. Just in that one customer alone, you have a multi-year leg of organic growth just coming out of them. That is an exclusive contract for three years.
We buy all their ads, excluding search and social. You have unbelievable headwinds that are coming off there. If you think of next year, Q1, you have the Winter Olympics. Back half of the year, you have politics coming back in. That becomes what was a headwind this year is a tailwind. We have already digested those two acquisitions. Our OpEx growth should be low percentages, less than what we had this year. All that sets up for top line growing, OpEx kind of maintaining. The bottom line should spit out tremendous growth for 2020.
I think in the few other things, we won Molson, but we're going to win more.
Yeah.
I'll tell you, a big brand win begets other big brand wins. It's just the nature of the beast in our industry. The $250 million pipeline, there's still a lot of that up for grabs. Molson wasn't even the biggest customer in that. I know that we're going to win more of those. We talked about in our earnings call with the launch of AI Decisioning that allow us to go tap dollars of even our current customers that we never competed for before. Tim was talking about how we won't release AI Decisioning until it's better than the best human traders. We already committed that we're releasing it at the end of the year. We must think that it's better than the best human traders. We're very excited about that opportunity. I just think 2026 is set up beautifully. I think it's going to be a great year.
That's helpful. You gave us a flavor for revenue growth, I think, OpEx. Maybe in the last two minutes, we could touch on capital allocation. You bought Iris recently. You bought Lockr, which I think is more of a data play. What is kind of the disposition towards acquisitions right now? Are you looking to be acquisitive? Are you digesting? What kind of motivation?
Yeah. We are opportunistic. We typically aren't going to do some big, huge beast to try and integrate. If you look at the examples of that in the space, it's not good. I mean, we do like and we love exclusive data. We have this intelligence layer that we mentioned with Household ID, Iris, Lockr's part of that. There are other things that we are looking at there that will give us a competitive advantage and make ViantAI very, very unique and continue to be. I would just say we're opportunistic. We know we want to grow the top line a lot faster than our OpEx. We want that bottom line to grow. We keep that discipline when we think about acquisitions too.
Yeah. If you're an investor, we're trading at roughly six times EBITDA if you look at the enterprise value of it. Look at the historical financial growth rates, both on the top and the bottom. We announced Molson Coors. The only reason we're trading here is because investors believe that based on size and scale of our market cap and who we compete with, there's no possible way to win. Yet, we just keep proving everyone wrong year after year, quarter after quarter. We do exactly what we say we're going to do because we're in this business. We know what wins and we know what loses. I mean, it's up to you guys to determine who's telling the truth and who's not. We're obviously ripping off trophies, presenting them to investors.
If you do not buy the stock at this point, you are going to miss the boat. You are an idiot.
Wow.
Six times EBITDA. What do you have to lose?
I think we're going to have to leave it there on that note. Tim and Chris, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks a lot, guys.
Thank you.