Thanks again for joining us at this year's Raymond James TMT and Consumer Conference. I'm Andrew Marok, and I cover advertising technology and digital media here at RJ, and we're thrilled to have with me Tim and Chris Vanderhook, the CEO and COO of Viant. Thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah. And as usual, we'll start with the overview, the 30,000-foot view. So for those who maybe aren't as familiar, can you give us an overview of the Viant story and where you sit within the digital advertising industry?
Sure. Viant is our ticker symbol is DSP. We're a demand-side platform, and we represent the buyer of advertising in the programmatic ecosystem. Our competitors, just to give you the way it is, there's very few. There's five. In terms of size and scale, we compete with Google's DV360 product, The Trade Desk. Then you have Yahoo actually has a DSP as well. Ourselves in the newest entrant, Amazon DSP. But where three of those five represent, they try and sell ad inventory to the actual advertiser, we're different that we have no conflicts of interest, where we just represent the buyer of ads.
That's pretty good.
Nailed it.
All right. Yeah. First shot. So maybe let's kick off with a couple of macro questions because we've gotten kind of an inconsistent feedback from many of the companies in our coverage coming out of the 3Q earnings cycle. You're one of the companies who highlighted strength. Is that still the case? And kind of how should investors think about maybe the health of the consumer as we head into the all-important holiday season?
Yeah. I think in the end of the first quarter, just the tariff announcements I think had definitely a weight on the market. You saw some advertisers pulling back spending just around the uncertainty. But I think it was right around June or July is right when we started seeing strength as we went into the third quarter, and that's continued in the fourth quarter. So the business is doing really well. We are also looking at consumer data as well, and it looks like especially around holiday spending. I forget exactly what the stat was, but I think it was an all-time high for Black Friday. So we see a very healthy. We had a great, better than expected third quarter, and definitely the outlook in the fourth is pretty strong too.
And then kind of to your point around the tariff announcements being one of the inflection points for advertiser behavior, have you seen kind of any pre- and post-tariff announcement persistent advertiser behavior changes? For instance, one of the things we've heard is that visibility is a lot lower structurally. Now, planning cycles are a lot faster.
Not really. Yeah, I would say that there was that period of disruption where everyone was to digest what this new cost is to their supply chain. But most organizations figured it out, I would say, somewhere in the third quarter and kind of turned it back on. And we've seen kind of traditional cycles. We've seen the environment strengthening. Could be unique to us, but to us, it feels like a healthy environment.
Really interesting. And then we've heard this big industry debate about, if not a collapse, at least a blurring of the lines between the buy- side and the sell- side. But even in your opening remarks, probably we are a buy-side platform.
Yeah.
I guess how has that blurring affected your business and kind of affected the way that you are positioning yourself within the industry?
We try and be consistent, and the biggest issue that we see in the market is if you're an SSP or an end-to-end platform or you make money on the sell side, you have a natural conflict of interest. Advertisers, or the buyers, are aware of this conflict of interest, and it puts you in a tough position to make the right decision on behalf of that advertiser. We love this concept of objectivity. Our competitors have run away from it, even though we think it's a strength that we offer, and we think that's what marketers are actually looking for when they're trying to identify which company should I partner with going forward, so we view objectivity as a source of strength that we don't have a conflict of interest, and we don't really care who gets the money.
We just want to distribute the money fairly on who's driving value for the advertiser. Most of our competitors can't say that. Even The Trade Desk in this day and age has now lost some of their objectivity in that they created their own SSP called OpenPath, and they make money through that path. Where we don't have any of that, we try and just what we negotiate with the advertiser is the way we make money. And then it gives us clear conscience on how we actually distribute the money, and we're buying the things that are providing the most value for our customers. So we see it as a source of strength. We will not change. That to us is the right way forward.
Great. Really interesting. And then again, you mentioned at the top of your remarks, Amazon. It's a topic of much discussion recently how their entry into the DSP space has been affecting the competitive dynamics. So one, I guess, carte blanche, how would you describe how Amazon is affecting the industry? And two, what is the extent to which you run across them in some of your auctions?
Yeah. Yeah. If you look at Amazon as Amazon. So I think they're doing an incredible job of PR right now. They are making announcements about upgrades or new product features in their DSP. But if you're an insider in the space and you read all those, everybody knows those are sort of catch-up product releases. Every year we do a survey of our own customers about how they rate our product. And what we're doing is calculating NPS scores. We also get that of all the competitors too that they use. And Amazon for the last three years has negative NPS scores. Trade Desk does really well. Trade Desk has a good platform. I would imagine that Amazon's DSP is getting better.
But if all you had to do was just have feature parity with the market leader and then expect that everyone switches, I can promise you we tried that. They don't switch. We also tried years ago offering just slashing rates. They also don't switch. And if you understand the DSPs, it's very similar. It's like changing your ERP system. If I have a buddy who works at Paychex and he comes to me and says, "Hey, I want you guys to switch over. Can I get a meeting with your HR and finance team?" I'm like, "Good luck. They are not ripping out what we're using now and moving to you.
And we probably don't care about the minimal cost savings you might give us." The feature lift, when we go to market, we know that if we're going to unseat an incumbent platform, we have to have major differentiation in order to get the marketer to switch. Because not only do they have to retrain their people on your software versus their incumbent, it's also the data that they have, their CRM data they've onboarded in the platform, all the reporting systems that all your data is wired up to in the agency and the client. I mean, it's a pretty heavy lift. So I don't believe that Amazon's slashing of the fees is working. I also know that they're not getting serious consideration by some of the largest marketers that we're in the throes of. They're not in the consideration set.
So that shows me now, does Amazon? There's a slight nuance. There's Amazon DSP. In order to buy Prime Video, you have to go through Amazon DSP. In order to buy sponsored listings, you go through Amazon DSP, so when they say that there's $54 billion and they're 90% of that or more are sponsored listing ads when you search on Amazon.
Which isn't an ad.
Correct. It's not an ad. But let's say they license the Thursday Night Football. Yeah, they're going to sell Thursday Night Football. So they are a content owner. So they will monetize that content. But are they out competing in the open market to manage marketers' spend on other platforms? We do not believe so.
And just to add to that, recently we just won Molson Coors as a big customer. And so we'll be buying all their digital ads. And you have to ask yourself, that's a CPG beer company, theoretically Amazon's data, which is the greatest data in the world that everyone talks about. And they talk about, well, why weren't they a finalist in that? If they have, they know who's buying beer and they know the preference of brands. And in theory, they have registry notes. You got to be 21 +. So there's a regulatory environment to it. Amazon wasn't at the finish line. They weren't considered in the final three. And you have to ask yourself why. It's because their DSP is not good today. Do they have exceptional transaction data within the Amazon walls? They do.
But even the CPG manufacturers don't think that's enough to power all of their advertising across all these channels. So Amazon is always going to be a percentage of the budget because they own Prime Video. They're never going to be the DSP that buys 100% of the campaign. But they're all just like Google has YouTube, and they're always going to be some percentage of the budget. And it makes sense there logically, just like Meta with Instagram if you have a younger target audience or whatever. So these are all publishers on the buy. They're not the technology platform that manages the entirety of the buy. And that's why objectivity matters in this setup.
I appreciate the color. That makes a lot of sense. And I appreciate the transparency on the industry dynamics. But let's get into the fun stuff, some of the Viant-specific stories.
I think the first thing we need to discuss is the product because that underpins everything else. So Viant AI being kind of the exemplar of that. So can you just give us an overview of what you've implemented in Viant AI, any stats that you have around the lift that it's providing to customers, and what we can look forward to?
Yep. So Viant AI is the overarching name of our artificial intelligence product. And the long-term vision is that we run an autonomous ad platform. That's the way we describe it. You need no humans to actually create an ad campaign, execute the ad campaign, optimize the ad campaign. We believe the human in the loop is causing most of the problems and that AI is going to be able to deliver much better returns for these marketers than humans because there's so many choices to choose from in today's environment. So first thing we released was AI Bidding. And that's determining the price that we're going to pay for the ad across various publishers and partners. We launched AI Bidding. It has 85% of adoption. It was the fastest adopted product we've ever released. And that is making lots of money for us.
We keep 30% of the savings that we actually drive, so this has been a tremendous increase to our revenue in driving this, so that's been product number one. It's had tremendous success. We launched AI Planning, which basically constructs the ad campaign using AI and our data, so which publishers should be included for a Molson Coors? Which audience segments should we do? What should the frequency cap be? What that means is how many times should I show the same household an ad before I stop, so all of these decisions are now being made by AI, whereas humans used to make them manually and maybe change them twice or three times a day, but in the programmatic advertising ecosystem, it's a 365, 24/7 liquid market. The prices at midnight are different than noon, are different than 5:00 P.M., and you've got time zones that are all there.
So at the end of the fourth quarter, we will launch the fourth and final phase, which is Decisioning. And I would best explain that as it's the brain that kicks on full autonomy. Right now, it's human in the loop checking everything the AI does. Are you okay with these 10 websites? Are you okay with these 20 apps? All these things, and the human approves, yes. When we launch Decisioning at the end, just think of that as full autonomy where it takes no human in the loop. And we will release this. So we said at the end of the year, we will release it when the AI is generating better or equal results to the human traders that we have using our campaign every single day. So we've made tremendous progress.
When this launches, it really ushers in a whole new era of advertising where you're out with people, you're in with AI, and it's making all the decisions, and obviously, from a cost perspective, there's lots of savings, but it's more from a growth perspective, it's not really about cost savings so much, it's more about, wow, this thing is producing 20% more new customers for my brand. That is worth way more than the fees that we negotiate between ourselves, Trade Desk, et cetera, and this is so great because our competitors have a tough road ahead. If you look at the Trade Desk, their customer base is primarily the large five holding companies, which is all about employing full-time employees to manage a self-service portal. That's what the Trade Desk offers. We offer the same today.
But with autonomy, you no longer need self-service portal because the AI is making the decision automatically. And every few milliseconds, it's making changes. So we see the launch of AI Decisioning really as revolutionary for everyone in the industry. Everyone believes we can't do it. The only other person I've said that I've heard say something like this is Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, famously came out. Chris and I said that two years prior, but no one cared. Once Zuckerberg said it, then everyone believed it and felt that we were going to go there. So we think we are light years ahead of our competition. We're going to release a product way before even the big tech guys are going to release one. And I'll just tell you from the internal results we're seeing, they are exceptional.
And AI is certainly better at this job than human traders because simply humans need to eat, sleep. And this is a 24/7 market.
And I think a lot of.
Very tough to compete.
A lot of people view what we're saying as it's threatening to certain players in the ecosystem, but if you look at 70% of our customers are agencies, with AI Bidding being adopted by 85%, AI Planning being used by more than 30% of our customers, our measurement analysis function, tons of customers are using. We do believe that all of our customers will adopt this product, and I think what you're seeing us do is really condition the human, and what you have to do is let them be in control. When we first launched AI Bidding, it's not like it immediately took off like a rocket ship. You saw some customers testing it, and they realized, wow, I'm spending way less time managing bid price, and I'm getting all these savings, and it slowly started to build.
Once it hit around 30% is when we saw it really just shoot up. Because if you work in an agency and you're spending way less time doing data entry on setting bid prices, and you're not doing a good job of it, and now you're letting the AI do it, and you're getting way better results, you tell the guy next to you who's managing the other campaign.
Turn it on.
Yeah, check that, and so that's when we really saw the explosion. The time savings alone that we're giving people, we're giving back to them is huge, and it's drawing a lot of loyalty to our platform. The traders who manage these platforms, they don't want to bleed out their fingernails. They want to do the more strategic work. They don't want to do the data entry work, so we're winning a lot of loyalty of our current customers, and it's also, you mentioned Molson Coors, that was a big reason why they selected us. They saw that we are going to, yes, be able to lower our operational costs for advertising, but it's actually going to produce, it's going to give our teams back more time to do the strategic things that actually bring us more value.
Great. And I think you kind of led into my next question here on Molson Coors and that large advertiser opportunity more generally. So historically, Viant has been focused on the mid-market, kind of that step down from the largest enterprises. But now we've seen Molson Coors. We've seen an emphasis on the head of the market. So how is that sales pitch going? And Chris, it sounds like Viant AI is a big leader in that pitch. But what are some of these larger customers saying about it?
So Viant AI is what definitely got us into the mix and a serious consideration. Because I think when we launched Viant AI and we launched the planning function, that's what really got the attention of the market. And we did that in September of last year. So that kind of got us into the mix. But there were some core things. This is a very sophisticated customer when it comes to digital advertising. And one of the things that they, if I go down the line of where we won and beat out the competition, it starts at the scale of our Household ID. They want to onboard customer data and not just match, do you have the same people in your database, but they want to test, can you find them? When they're on Hulu, can you find them? When they're on Yahoo, can you find them?
So we won, and they even rolled out a press release. They were so proud of how high our find rate was. They coined this term called Findability, and it's in the press release, and they talked about how we basically had the highest find rate of their CRM list, which is really big across all their brands. They want, because what are they trying to do? They want to deliver addressable advertising. They want to show up as relevant, and they have to do that because they can only market to households or people that are 21 plus, so from a regulatory standpoint, so they have to do it. We outshined everybody from that metric, and it's really because of the scale of our Household ID. The second thing that they really loved was, a year ago, we bought a company called IRIS.TV.
They go to the content owners, and the content owners send them their CTV video assets, every video that they have. Today, when you log into a DSP, you can only buy at the app level. You can only buy Paramount or Hulu. But you don't know, are you buying NFL football? Are you buying Kardashians? Or are you buying kids' cartoons? You don't know that. That's a huge problem for someone like Molson Coors. But it's a big problem for all brands because what do they want to do? They want to show up against content that's relevant to them. So because we bought IRIS and this increasing scale of IRIS' adoption in the marketplace, it was 7% a year ago. We're now over 30%. And all the largest content owners are now adopting this.
So when you log into Viant, you're actually able to buy not just the show, you can buy the scene and know what it's about right before the ad pod. This is going to allow companies like Molson to drive higher relevance. And again, if you look at the data, we said it on our last earnings call, it's a 48% increase in conversion rates on television. So it's huge. So just with Household ID and IRIS_ ID being matched, and then Viant AI with the innovation there, that was the reason why we won out.
Definitely. Great. And then while we're on the topic of customer size, you've also kind of pointed out Viant AI opening up a smaller advertiser opportunity for you as well. So I guess two things. One, what's most attractive about Viant AI from a small business perspective? And two, you're not that large of a company from a headcount perspective. So how do you prevent yourself from stretching yourself too thin, chasing too many opportunities?
Yeah. When you think of the open internet, there's 25 million websites someone could buy ads on. There's nine million mobile apps. And we'll just stop there. There's also digital out-of-home boards and CTV apps and all the targeting we talked about. But which websites across the open internet are relevant for a small advertiser? So I have a 14-year-old son, and I'm crafting him into being an entrepreneur. So he opened up his e-commerce website. It's called LZR +. And it sells like, he has a bearded dragon, so he sells like a reptile carrier. Viant AI picked out the 30 websites that are about lizard adoption, tortoise adoption, instantly available, puts it on the ad campaign, identifies audience targeting of pet owners, reptile owners, this and that, constructs an entire ad campaign, and it delivers positive results from a cold start.
And this is what Meta has done so well about these 10 million advertisers. They know the niche content. They know I'm a golfer, and I'm constantly looking at tips on putting and whatever. So if you feed me clubs, this little device, that device, it's very engaging and relevant to me. That content is kind of like the interest category, and then you can tap into that content for relevant advertising. So going down market, what do they need? They need to know, where should I show my ads? If I buy it through Meta, I'm just placing my ads on Instagram. Meta takes over the hard work of, you're going to pair with content that's relevant to you as an advertiser. To really execute this, we need to make the ads. And that's another frontier that is not far away.
But in terms of media strategy, media planning, and media optimization, the AI is doing all of that on behalf of these small advertisers. So for us, we're not going to hire a sales force to go after SMBs. We think channel partnerships are the right way to go through that. However, that being said, if I'm LZR +, a Shopify store, and there's a million of these out there that are advertising on Meta, I still need an ad campaign that's relevant to me and to actually execute. And so we view channel partners, and the automation that we're able to bring is going to deliver campaign results that are better than what they're seeing in social or search. And that's the long-term goal.
And I think one other point too, these marketers, the SMBs and the direct-to-consumer companies, e-commerce companies that are huge on Meta. If you contrast the open internet, really only caters to about 10,000-20,000 advertisers. And if you look on TV, there's a much smaller set of advertisers that buy on TV. We believe in the power of TV. Actually, we know the power of TV. We see it. It's 46% of the money that is spent in our platform is in CTV. It's probably the highest share of any competitive platform because we measure what drives new customer growth for our advertisers. And TV drives new demand.
Net new customers.
Yes. And the problem, how do we get to the 10 million that are buying in Meta? Well, they're not going to learn how to use these DSPs that are like Bloomberg terminals that require specialized training and knowledge. When they go into Meta, they enter a few selections. They upload maybe their product catalog. They tell you, for every $20 I spend, I need a customer. And Meta's platform does everything for them. They make the ads now. They're doing all that. We have to deliver, and this is why AI Decisioning that we're launching at the end of the year is so important. We have to deliver a fully automated, or think self, it's like the self-driving car. We have to deliver that in advertising to be able to attract these SMBs and e-commerce companies.
And we think that that not only is big for us, we think that approach is big for all constituents in the open internet. And we think it's going to grow the total pie. But we're leading in that effort. And it has to be product-led. We are not going to go out and hire scores of salespeople to go after. It will not be profitable. You have to be able to house them in really a self-service and automated user interface for them to operate the campaign.
Our management philosophy is we've achieved operating leverage in the business at very small levels, much lower than what our predecessors had done. It's because we have so much artificial intelligence; we're able to keep that headcount down to about 400. Our philosophy is to grow OpEx slower than the top line so that investors share in that operating leverage as well. To give you an idea, for an incremental dollar coming into Viant now, about $0.75 flows through to the bottom line. That is just an exceptional position that we have. We have achieved very small scale. Like you mentioned, Molson Coors, that's the first big win of that echelon of advertisers. Every incremental customer, 75% of it is going to flow to the bottom line. We're going to stick to that philosophy.
So I think there's fantastic sustainable growth on the top line as well as the bottom line. I just want to talk about that sustainment. We talked about Molson Coors. It's a three-year contract. We buy all their digital ads except for YouTube and Meta. And what does it have? Year one is going to be small as we onboard them, small relative to their budgets. But then in year two, they have more streaming because linear continues to move into streaming. In year three, we'll be multiple levels above year one as all of linear moves into streaming. And so just in these types of customers, you have sustainable year-after-year growth just in the way that the natural cycles of linear TV moving into streaming and us onboarding a new customer. So for investors, you can count on solid growth on the top line.
We talked about our philosophy on OPEX, which means it's all going to flow through to the bottom line, and I think we're going to have outstanding financial results in 2026.
Sounds great, and we've got about five minutes left, but I definitely want to make sure we touch on CTV a little bit more granularly. CTV has been a very successful format for many in the open web, even in 2025. Although maybe in later 2025, not as good for some, but you have definitely been on the more successful end of the spectrum, so what are some of the unlocks that you guys have made that make CTV such a performer for you?
On the cover, one of the things we did a few years ago was we created a product called Direct Access. Typically, a DSP or historically, a DSP wants to bid into a publisher, but the publisher is represented by an SSP. Typically, the DSP bids into the SSP. SSP places the ad essentially on the publisher. In CTV, if you look at it, there's about 30 apps that represent about 80% of viewership. What we did was start integrating directly into the ad server of a publisher. We've done that now across nearly every major name in CTV on the content side. This product is called Direct Access. When we do this, our clients are not absorbing SSP fees.
So when you buy CTV through Viant, you are getting your CTV dollars are working harder, and we're saving them, call it 15%-20% in their CPMs. So they're getting more working media going to the publisher. That's a huge win. When we go to market, we say, hey, we have Direct Access. They say, why do I care? Well, do you want to buy direct, or do you want to buy through a middle man? It's pretty simple that they want to buy direct. And we pass all of those savings. The Trade Desk came out with a similar product called OpenPath. The problem that they're making is that they're charging for it. So they basically are charging the same fees that an SSP would. So it's not really any different to the marketer from a cost perspective.
So right away, it's a winner for the marketer that we have Direct Access. The second thing that we do very well are our measurement products that our clients subscribe to. Think of it like a premium product that they pay us for. They want DSPs doing measurement because they want real-time optimization off of sale information or whatever it is that they're measuring. And we do something very unique where about half of our customers are basically buying a product called incrementality. And I talked about it earlier, but when you see how impactful CTV is from a net new customer growth, it starts cannibalizing money from other channels. Think Google branded search, Ford buying their own keyword of Ford F-150. But when they do incrementality tests on it, they start to see, wait a second, that keyword didn't drive any new customer growth.
What drove that person to search on Google? It was the TV ad. So now, over the last 10 years, marketers have been cutting TV and buying more search. Now what we're seeing is they're cutting branded search, and they're buying more TV. And our platform, why is the share so high? It's because we're using the measurement of it to prove the value of the channel. So it's sort of reinforcing. That's why our spend in CTV keeps growing so much.
Yep. That's great. And we're coming up on the end of time here, but I do like to ask this question of all my companies. And since we have two of you here, I guess you get two cracks at it.
All right.
So if you had to call out one product, one feature, one factor that investors should focus on that you're excited about for the Viant story in 2026, what would it be?
Viant AI. I mean, when you see fully autonomous at work applied to an industry, it's unbeatable results, and to me, it's going to be very tough for our competitors to match, so I view 2026 as the year of autonomy. I think we're going to deliver a product. Meta will probably deliver a product around there on their social media side, but that's where I think you're going to see the separation of real companies that use real technology and everyone who has a wrapper on ChatGPT that used it for a demo or whatever, so to me, 2026 will be for Viant the year of autonomy, and that's how I would answer it.
Yeah. I mean, I'm excited about a few things on our product roadmap that I can't talk about, but I will say, to tag on to Tim's, I'm excited for this Viant AI is really going to be increasing our TAM. It is in the larger customer segment. It's also going to allow us to move down market as well, which is really exciting, but even in the market that we're in right now with the current customers, even, say, mid-market, there are budgets that we typically don't that we do not compete for, and I think that even within the same marketers, we're going to be able to grow our share of wallet much faster because Viant AI is going to bring us into certain campaign executions that we didn't touch before that we're now going to touch that are maybe even a little bit more performance-based.
That typically those budgets go to the Googles and the Metas, and we really think that that's a huge opportunity for us, so we think it's going to be a good year next year,
and we're definitely going to be keeping an eye on it. Thank you for your time, Tim Vanderhook, Chris Vanderhook, CEO and COO of Viant. Thanks for joining us.