Viant Technology Inc.

Hello, everyone. You have joined Viant Technology's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. We will begin momentarily. We are still admitting additional participants. And again, for those of you just joining us, you are currently holding for today's Viant Technologies first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Again, we will begin momentarily. Thank you for your patience and holding. Again, everyone, thank you for joining Viance Technologies' first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. We'll begin momentarily. Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to Viant Technologies' first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. My name is Kelsey, and I will be your operator today. Before I turn the webinar 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 a listen-only mode, but following the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Now, 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 your firm's name. We thank you all for your attendance today. And I will now turn the webinar over to Nicole Kunzman with the Blue Shirt Group. Nicole, over to you.

Thank you, Kelsey. Good afternoon and welcome to Viant Technologies' first quarter 2024 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 Q2 2024 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 other, in 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 March 31, 2024, 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 filings with the SEC. I would now like to turn the call over to Tim Vanderhoek, Chief Executive Officer of IAM. Tim?

Thanks, Nicole, and thanks everyone for joining us today. We had a very strong start to the year with results ahead of our expectations in the first quarter. Revenue in Q1 grew 28% year over year, while contribution XTAC grew 22%, driving adjusted EBITDA of more than $3 million in the quarter. The momentum we saw in the second half of last year has carried into 2024 as expected. Our strong results in Q1 were driven by accelerating momentum in CTV, which outpaced the market with more than 50% growth year over year as we continue to take share, capturing a larger percentage of our customers' budgets. Simultaneously, we are continuing to improve the ease of use and efficiency of our platform by delivering on our vision of autonomous advertising through ongoing releases of AI-related platform enhancements and products. The rapid adoption of our patented household ID is driving strong campaign performance and measurement results for our customers. CTV was again a bright spot for us this quarter, and the success we're having is a testament to the value we're driving for our customers through this channel. As advertisers are looking for more impactful formats and channels to drive the biggest return on their ad dollars, we are capturing market share in CTV. This increase in share is due in part to our direct access program, which connects our customers directly with premium CTV inventory from the likes of Disney and Paramount. And this is becoming a notable driver of CTV spend on our platform. With more than $60 billion in linear TV budgets shifting to connected TV, we see our strong foothold in CTV as a significant long-term tailwind for Viant. Chris will elaborate on this a bit more in a minute. Another area of strength for us in Q1 was streaming audio, which has historically been growing very fast and has now reached critical mass. Streaming audio had a record quarter for buy-in, accounting for 10% of ad spend on our platform. Streaming audio is another channel that is gaining momentum with advertisers due to its scale, premium content, and targeting capabilities. Streaming audio and CTV together represented more than half of total ad spend on our platform in the first quarter. A notable milestone for us as desktop in particular continues to fall out of favor with advertisers favoring higher performing channels like CTV and streaming audio. The performance of our household ID technology positions us extremely well to increase our share while simultaneously benefiting from advertisers shifting more of their ad budgets to these channels. Our patented household ID tech is a differentiator for us as it enables our customers to achieve superior campaign performance across all channels. Brands using our household identifier have seen increased reach, better frequency control, and improved closed-loop measurement in their campaigns. As we look to make programmatic advertising easier and more effective for our customers, we continue to invest in our technology and platform with the ultimate vision of autonomous advertising. There are four key elements to this vision. First, making programmatic ad buying as simple as search and social while delivering best in class campaign performance. Second, enabling our customers to unlock insights from their own first party data and seamlessly use those insights to drive campaign performance. Third, leveraging AI driven automation to minimize choice overload for our customers while they manage complex campaigns. And fourth, providing the most comprehensive campaign reporting and analysis suite. The overarching goal of this vision is to enable our customers to get the most out of every advertising dollar they spend. We're continuing to win share of Wallet from customers due to our ability to deliver on this vision and make our customers more successful with their campaigns. Before turning it over to Chris to discuss recent product updates, I want to take a minute to address the latest announcement from Google regarding their plans to delay cookie deprecation. We have proactively managed through this dynamic situation since prior to 2020, when Google first announced the deprecation of cookies, and our conversations with customers have not changed. We remain focused on making programmatic ad buying easy, efficient, and more measurable, and we are winning share as a result. Our customers already have the ability to compare their results using household ID versus the alternative use of cookies side by side, and they continue to choose household ID over cookies for their ad campaigns. In fact, we estimate less than 10% of total ad spend across our platform utilizes cookies today. Because of the strength of our household ID, we continue to see tremendous growth and opportunity across all advertising channels. Google's announcements related to the Chrome web browser doesn't impact the trend of advertisers increasing spend with platforms that offer smarter and more efficient ways to buy programmatic ads. And we are continuing to stay focused on this. With that, I'll turn it over to Chris. Thanks, Tim. I'll spend a few minutes today revisiting our strategic priorities for 2024 and some recent updates in a few key areas. We remain extremely encouraged by the customer activity we are seeing across our business, both in winning more share of wallet with existing customers and building on our pipeline of new, larger customers. Our vision for autonomous advertising is a big part of what's driving this, as the new products and features we've recently added are attracting larger customers to our platform. We're onboarding new customers who are more quickly adopting our newer products, which we believe is further evidence that our strong product market fit will continue to drive more advertising dollars to our platform over time. Our pipeline of customers coming into Q1 was as promising as ever. We've now seen a number of these larger customers get onboarded and expect them to become meaningful spenders with Viant over the course of this year. A key area of differentiation for us is our AI product suite, which includes AI BitOptimizer, chat with data, and AI recommendations. These tools together are designed to allow for simplified yet more effective media buying and campaign execution for our customers. We've highlighted AI BitOptimizer on recent calls, and I'm excited that we will be releasing version 2.0 of AI BitOptimizer ahead of schedule in June. BitOptimizer 1.0 has historically been able to help customers achieve 35% average savings from a CPM standpoint. And we're excited about the updated version because we expect it to drive even more savings for our customers. BitOptimizer has been one of the key products that new customers are really gravitating to. And we're pleased to be able to help them lower their media costs and drive higher return on ad spend as they quickly ramp on our platform. We're also excited about the continued adoption of the Viant Data Platform and additional AI-based features in our pipeline, including Chat with Data. Our internal teams have made great progress improving the reliability and usability of Chat with Data to give our customers a more intuitive experience and enable greater insights from their first-party data with the help of generative AI. We expect to release Chat with Data to more customers later this year. Another big area of strategic focus for us continues to be our direct access program, which is seeing incredible adoption. As one of two buy-side-only self-service platforms, we are in a unique position to be able to connect directly with publishers to offer premium CTV content directly to our advertiser customers. This program is helping drive a lower cost of media and higher win rates for advertisers in ad auctions, ultimately delivering better return on ad spend and improved campaign performance for our customers. Direct access enables our customers to match their first party data with the likes of Disney and Paramount, enabling walled garden level addressability and closed loop measurement on the world's most premium content. we are seeing growing adoption of direct access as part of the overall strength we're seeing in CTV. And over 50% of our CTV spend in the quarter was through our direct access program, up from over 40% in Q4. With that, I'll turn it over to Larry to provide more detail on our financial performance.