Viant Technology Inc.

Hello everyone and thank you for joining. We will begin momentarily. Hello everyone and thank you for joining. We will begin momentarily. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining. We will begin momentarily. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining. We'll begin momentarily. Hello everyone and thank you for joining. We will begin momentarily. Hello everyone and thank you for joining. We will begin momentarily. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Viant Technology's second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. My name is Annabeth, and I will be your operator today. Before I hand the call over to the Viant leadership team, I'd like to go over just a few housekeeping notes for the program. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you plan to ask a question, please ensure you've set your Zoom name to display your full name and firm. If you would like to ask a question during this time, please use the raise hand function located at the bottom of your screen. Thank you for your attendance today, and I will now turn the call over to Nicole Kunzman from the Blue Shirt Group.

Thank you, Annabeth. Good afternoon, and welcome to Viant Technologies' second 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 Q3 2024, our platform development initiatives and industry trends 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 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 June 30, 2024 under the heading Risk Factors and in our 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 and in our earnings presentation, which have 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 Viant. Tim?

Thanks, Nicole, and thanks everyone for joining us today. We saw continued momentum in the second quarter with record advertiser spend on our platform, a notable milestone that exceeded our seasonally strong Q4 of 2023. Revenue in Q2 grew 15% year-over-year, while contribution XTAC grew 23%. Our ongoing focus on improving efficiency and disciplined expense management continues to drive outperformance in adjusted EBITDA, which increased 41% year-over-year to $9.6 million in the quarter. I am pleased with our team's ongoing commitment to innovation and execution, which drove our consistency and strong results. We remain laser focused on building on our differentiated position as one of only a couple independent, self-service, buy-side platforms in the market. As advertisers look for alternatives to the largest legacy players in the industry, Viant is capitalizing on the shifting sentiment and committed to growing our market share across the programmatic advertising market. Discussions across the ecosystem, such as the Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit against Google, demonstrate that advertisers are unhappy with the dominating behavior of a handful of players in the industry. Many ad tech partners are frustrated with the centralized power exerted over the ecosystem. Our ability to capitalize on this changing sentiment is reflected in our results and the growing number of partnerships and integrations we are building. Major content owners, data companies, agencies, and advertisers are coming to us for an alternative solution to the largest DSPs in the market. We believe we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on this changing sentiment. A key area of differentiation for us is our vision for autonomous advertising, supported by our award-winning and ever-evolving suite of AI products and features. Today, I am thrilled to announce a significant milestone in our journey. Given the amount of AI related initiatives in development, we are ready to properly brand our AI suite. So today we are announcing the rebranding of our AI suite under the name Viant AI. Viant AI is designed to revolutionize digital ad campaigns by seamlessly crafting high impact multi-channel ad experiences that reach the right audience at the right time with precision. We are rebranding our suite of AI products previously announced as bid optimizer chat with data and AI recommendations under Viant AI. Viant AI is focused on developing AI agents that deliver automation for the four key components of programmatic advertising planning buying measurement and optimization. Under planning, our latest innovation is a large language model or LLM. Already launched internally, it delivers comprehensive omni-channel media plans in seconds. This LLM has been heavily trained on thousands of ad campaigns, encompassing years worth of historical ad spend, enabling us to create high impact media plans that are designed to achieve the goals of any advertiser. This includes selecting high quality CTV apps, mobile apps, websites, and digital out of home locations. It makes recommendations of campaign budgets across channels like display, CTV, streaming audio, and digital out of home. We are showcasing this to clients now and are receiving tremendous feedback. Under buying, we released version two of our bid optimizer in Q2. The improvements achieved with version two are substantial, and Chris will talk more about this in a bit. For measurement, we previously announced chat with data, which is continuing to be tested internally with live customer data. We have made great strides and expect this product to be out in Q4. Our final phase towards full autonomy is the application of autonomous optimization, which we expect to release in 2025. This will be an AI-driven agent that dynamically adjusts campaigns in real time, employing advanced ad strategies like channel allocation, publisher selection, day partying, and audience discovery. Investing in Viant AI is investing in the future of advertising. We are excited about the transformative impact that we'll have, and we'll look forward to sharing more updates as we progress. Our vision is resonating with customers who are continuing to scale with us as evidenced by the expansion we are seeing with our largest customer cohort, our top 100 customers, where we have grown Contribution X-TAC 29% on a trailing 12-month basis. We are scaling well with our agency partners and continue to add new advertisers within these agencies, which we believe is a testament to the superior service and results we are driving for them. We expect to continue to capitalize on the market tailwinds in our favor and drive more spend from existing customers. We also have had great success this year attracting new customers to our platform, which Larry will talk more about shortly. Our pipeline of large customers continues to grow, and we feel very good about our ability to win more of these advertisers over the long term. Our success with customers is also driven by our focus and investments into the fastest growing channels in programmatic, notably CTV and streaming audio. We continue to see particularly strong momentum in these channels, with both reaching record spend levels in the quarter. The growth in CTV spend on our platform continues to outpace the market, growing more than 40% year over year in the quarter, while streaming audio almost doubled year over year. Together, these channels represented more than 50% of spend on our platform in the quarter. We expect them to continue to see outsized growth relative to other programmatic channels as they provide access to some of the most premium content in the market at scale, while also allowing for advanced targeting and measurement capabilities despite the absence of cookies. We are continuing to make investments in our direct access program, which gives our customers more seamless access to these channels, and Chris will touch on this in a bit more. In addition, our patented household ID technology continues to be a differentiator for us in the market, enabling customers to plan, buy, and measure campaigns across all channels, regardless of the presence of cookies. Before turning things over to Chris, I wanted to share some thoughts on Google's recent announcement to reverse course on cookie deprecation. We touched on this briefly last quarter, but this news doesn't change our overall vision of making programmatic advertising easier, more efficient, and more effective for our customers with leading measurement and targeting capabilities across all ad formats. CTV is a core driving force across the ad industry as a whole, beyond even linear TV and social channels. And the only way to plan, execute, and measure omnichannel campaigns to include CTV is with alternative identifiers such as our household ID. As we noted last quarter, less than 10% of spend across our platform leverages third-party cookies, and we see this number continuing to shrink over time given the industry's increasing focus on cookie-free channels like CTV. If anything, we believe this announcement from Google is helpful for the industry as it eliminates the uncertainty overhang that has been complicating the landscape for the last few years. Our long-term strategy and focus remain unchanged, and we look forward to continuing to drive growth and capture share in this very large and growing market for programmatic advertising. With that, I'll turn it over to Chris.