Viant Technology Inc.

Well, hello again, everyone, and welcome to Viant Technology's third quarter 2023 earnings webinar. My name is Kelsey, and I will be your operator today. Well, before I begin the webinar or turn it over to the Viant leadership team, I'd like to go over just a few housekeeping notes for the program. As a reminder, today's webinar is being recorded. Attendees are in a view and listen only mode, but following the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please click on the Raise Hand tab located at the bottom of your screen, and please ensure your Zoom name reflects your full name and firm. We thank you for joining us today, and I will now turn the webinar over to KC Carey with Viant Technology.

Good afternoon, and welcome to Viant Technology's third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. On the call today are Tim Vanderhoek, co-founder and chief executive officer, Chris Vanderhoek, co-founder and chief operating officer, and Larry Madden, Chief Financial Officer. I'd like to remind you that we will make forward-looking statements on our call today, including but not limited to our guidance for Q4 2023 and our platform development initiatives that are based on assumptions and subject to future events, risks, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These forward-looking statements speak only as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise these statements except as required by law. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements and our entire Safe Harbor Statement, please refer to the news release issued today as well as the risks and uncertainties described in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2023 under the heading Risk Factors and Other Filings with the SEC. During today's call, we will also present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, are included in the news release issued today, which has been posted on the investor relations page of the company's website and in our SEC filings. I would now like to turn the call over to Tim Vanderhoek, Chief Executive Officer of Viant.

Thanks, Casey, and thanks everyone for joining us today. We wrapped up a very strong third quarter with accelerating growth across our business and results that exceeded our guided range on all key metrics. We continue to win larger shares of budgets from our clients by offering best-in-class products supported by industry-leading AI. We have focused execution and a commitment to enabling mid-market advertisers to get the highest return on their ad spend. As we look to the fourth quarter and beyond, we continue to see a number of favorable drivers of the business, most notably the ongoing migration and accelerating transition of approximately $60 billion of linear television advertising moving into connected TV. Second is the pending signal loss due to Google's deletion of cookies in 2024. And third is the application of artificial intelligence and generative AI, which we discussed in detail during our inaugural Innovation Day event on October 26. I want to share more on each of those areas and provide more clarity on how we see them driving our long-term growth and profitability. I'll start with the continued shift from traditional linear TV to connected TV. Linear TV represents an additional $60 billion of ad spend coming into the programmatic ad market as this trend accelerates. Our growth is outpacing the market and we believe a big driver of our success comes from our Household ID technology. This enables us to deliver addressable advertising as well as provide attribution and reporting in this cookie-less environment. In CTV, Household ID is available on over 85% of all ad requests. Q3 saw us deliver another quarter of strong double-digit growth in connected TV. Again, outpacing the market, and Chris will talk more about that growth in this channel later on. I also want to take a moment to share some of the ways that we're leveraging AI to develop the most advanced DSP in the market. And for anyone who wasn't able to attend our Innovation Day event, I highly encourage you to check out the video replay. That link is available on our investor relations website. The primary objective of our Innovation Day was to highlight the progress we're making in our journey towards our North Star of autonomous advertising. We're bringing the ease of use of advertising on search and social media to the purchase and measurement of advertising in the programmatic ecosystem. We believe we can leverage AI to reduce the friction involved in onboarding a customer into a DSP, saving them days or even weeks of ramp up time, enabling them to more quickly utilize the full suite of tools and features available on our platform. Our push to further simplify and automate our platform should continue to expand our addressable market to millions of mid-sized advertisers that can now use our DSP to reach new customers and expand their businesses. I want to highlight how we're helping our customers solve two widespread challenges in the programmatic ad market. The first is choice overload, and the second is campaign optimization, both of which are tied to the same dilemma. The programmatic ecosystem is moving too fast for even a seasoned trader, never mind a new entrant entering this space. How can we use AI to provide a platform that helps ad buyers to easily and efficiently maximize their campaign performance? During our Innovation Day event, we explained what we call choice overload. Traders today are forced to deal with an insurmountable number of options when planning an ad campaign. Making decisions across channels, audiences, devices, and ad formats. They are faced with countless combinations. One way we've helped to address this challenge is with our recently announced AI Recommendations Engine, which is capable of processing and optimizing these options at a speed the human brain simply can't match. The result is actionable suggestions that save time while improving campaign performance and ultimately trader productivity. The second topic from our Innovation Day event I want to highlight is our AI bid optimizer solution. It uses artificial intelligence to analyze historical bid opportunities to predict the lowest media costs for all of these ad opportunities without sacrificing any ad performance. We first announced this new feature over the summer, and I'm pleased to report that adoption to date has far exceeded our expectations. Over half of our customers are currently utilizing AI Bid Optimizer, and we're continuing to see an average savings of 35% of their CPMs. This is notable for multiple reasons. First, it allows our customers to concentrate their time on strategic tasks rather than the time-consuming ones. They don't have to manually adjust their bids. And last, it speaks to the advantage of a buy-side only DSP like ours. Any technology provider representing both the buy and sell side of the transaction has an inherent disincentive to drive down CPMs. Our customers recognize this misalignment, and this is contributing to our growth. The final driver of our momentum is Google's deletion of cookies, which is reported to begin in Q1 2024. Viant has long been a leader in this space through the use of our patented household ID, a scalable, interoperable, and privacy-compliant identifier present in over 80% of ad requests. We believe that Google's deletion of cookies and other identifiers will further accelerate the growth of ad spend flowing through Viant as we offer one of the only scalable and now proven solutions available today in the form of our household ID. We look forward to continuing our growth momentum into the fourth quarter, and I now will hand the call over to Chris to discuss more around our products and our customers. Thanks, Tim. I want to start to talk about the Viant Data Platform, which has long been a massive advantage for those customers who have the vision and expertise to leverage its potential. Our data platform offers the ability to safely and seamlessly join first party data with all the top third party data providers in a privacy friendly way. And it should come as no surprise that the insights, reporting and attribution opportunities here are substantial. It must also be noted that historically the barrier of data skills necessary to access these insights has also been very high. At our recent Innovation Day event, we announced a new product called Chat with Data. This product allows our customers to unlock the power of the data platform simply and easily through a natural language set of commands. We believe chat with data makes our data platform more accessible for even the most novice data analysts and business people. And more importantly, it means a programmatic trader with no background in data science or engineering can simply and efficiently unlock critical insights from their data in real time, ultimately driving a higher return on ad spend as they execute their campaigns. Seven out of our top 10 spending customers rely on the Viant Data Platform. And now, Chat with Data will democratize access to the Viant Data Platform to marketers of all sizes and provide them with a competitive advantage in data. The Viant Data Platform is further differentiated by integrations with dozens of industry-leading data providers, as well as the top clean rooms such as Snowflake. These data and clean room integrations, combined with our new Chat with Data product, unlock the value of first-party data using simple, natural language access while providing the required data privacy and protection. The Viant Data platform and Chat with Data are unrivaled and provide for a winning combination. The AI-enabled tools that we are rolling out are designed to allow marketers and their agencies of any size to deliver high-performing campaigns while enabling customers with best-in-class attribution. But where these tools really provide an advantage is in Viant's historical area of strength, the mid-market. There are several reasons why we've been successful within this market segment, and it begins with product performance. Our investments in AI enabled solutions like AI BitOptimizer and our buy side only strategy has consistently allowed us to deliver lower CPMs than our competitors. And that results in superior campaign performance for our customers. That's important for any customer, but particularly when budgets are more demanding. Similarly, we believe we offer the best attribution and reporting capabilities available. That means better tracking of return on ad spend and ultimately more efficient spending as campaigns can be consistently adjusted to ensure objectives are being met and ineffective spend can be redirected. Now add to that a powerful product like the Viant Data Platform. With the depth of insights it provides, a capability many of our mid-market customers have never dreamed of being able to access because of the high data and analytics skillset historically required. And we've now leveled the playing field in a truly unprecedented way. Finally, I want to dive into what's become a hot topic in the programmatic advertising industry, supply path optimization. Put simply, how can the industry streamline the path between advertiser and publisher and ensure we are removing waste in the middle? As with many topics in the ad tech space, this can be confusing. We often get the question, is Viant trying to develop an SSP or eliminate the SSP? The answer is emphatically no. We're working hard to eliminate the additional cost to advertisers resulting from the unnecessary reselling of inventory amongst middlemen with our ultimate objective of providing a tighter connection between advertisers and publishers. Earlier this year, we launched our supply path optimization program called Direct Access, where we partnered with leading CTV publishers to create a more cost-efficient direct path to premium inventory. These are the largest publishers in the CTV space and represent a majority of the premium inventory available. Direct Access is a program that provides clear benefits to both the buy side and the sell side. The digital supply chain is unnecessarily complicated by resellers who drive up the tech tax while delivering no added value to the customer. With direct access, we're removing resellers from the process and delivering lower media costs for the advertiser along with tighter, or excuse me, higher revenue for the publisher. Our primary focus of direct access is in CTV. And Q3 saw us again outperform the inherently high growth CTV market. In Q3, over 25% of our CTV spend was through direct access publishers, a figure that continues to grow as we move through the year. Last month, we hosted an industry event in New York called The Future of Supply Path Optimization in CTV. Many of the leading CTV publishers and advertisers were in attendance, and the message could not have been clearer from both parties. They want to streamline what has become an unnecessarily complex supply path. That complexity leads to financial waste, higher instances of fraud, and less favorable viewing experiences for consumers. And direct access is injecting efficiency, transparency, and ultimately improvement to the entire ecosystem. Our unique approach with direct access enables seamless access to premium CTV inventory at no additional cost to publishers, while other supply path optimization solutions focus on web and display inventory while layering on fees. As part of our program growth, we recently expanded our direct access partnership with Disney to include the launch of their biddable CTV inventory, inclusive of Hulu, ESPN+, and Disney+. Direct access is picking up steam with an increasing amount of premium CTV publishers looking to connect directly to our customer's demand, while more and more marketers recognize direct access as a way to maximize the value of their CTV ad spend with Viant. We will continue to drive innovation in the supply path for our customers as we represent their interests in the market. And with that, I'll close by saying we had an excellent first three quarters of the year. we believe we're well positioned to continue to take share amidst a broader market landscape that is continuing to trend upward we are focused on delivering best-in-class product solutions and support to our clients and we believe the gains we've made so far this year will only continue to increase in the coming quarters thank you and i'll now turn it over to larry to provide more details on our financial performance