Viant Technology Inc.

Thank you everyone for joining. We'll begin in just a moment. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Viant Technologies' third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. My name is Catherine, and I will be your operator today. Before I hand the call over to Viant's 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 that 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. I will now turn the call over to Nick Zangler, VP of Investor Relations for Viant.

Thank you, Catherine. Good afternoon and welcome to Vine Technology's third 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 be make forward looking statements on our call today, including, but not limited to our guidance for Q4 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 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 30th, 2024 under the heading risk factors and in our 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 and in our earnings presentation, which have been posted on the investor relations page of the company's website and in our followings with the SEC. I would now like to turn the call over to Tim Vanderhoek, Chief Executive Officer of Viant. Tim?

Thanks, Nick, and thanks everyone for joining us today. We had a fantastic third quarter with results well ahead of our guidance across all key metrics. Once again, we achieved a new quarterly record for platform spend, while revenue and contribution XTAC grew 34% and 21%, respectively, year over year. We also delivered record Q3 adjusted EBITDA of $14.7 million. I'm also very excited to discuss our acquisition of Iris TV, which we announced earlier today. Iris TV is a content identification platform built for connected TV, which provides a global content ID across connected TV applications. I will expand more on the Iris announcement in a moment. The strength we saw in the third quarter is further demonstration that Viant's product suite and overall value proposition for advertisers continues to resonate with customers. Our focus on enabling advertisers to buy programmatic advertising in smarter and more efficient ways is continuing to drive incremental spend to our platform. Our rollout of Viant AI, which we first announced on our Q2 earnings call, is garnering notable attention from our customers, prospects, and industry partners across the programmatic landscape. We believe our commitment to innovation and customer success positions us extremely well to continue growing our market share and capitalize on the ever-expanding market for programmatic advertising. I'll spend some time today digging further into our vision for Viant AI, how this is translating into better tools for advertisers, and how this is driving spend to our platform and growth for Viant. There's been a lot of thought and investment across the tech industry as a whole in terms of how generative AI can really benefit end users of software and applications. Some businesses have turned this AI euphoria into real solutions for users, while others are still figuring out how to exactly and effectively incorporate AI into their product roadmaps. At Viant, we believe AI is transforming the programmatic ad industry as a whole. We believe this new AI-enabled era in programmatic is as monumental as the movement 20 years ago from licensed software to cloud-based software as a service models, which has since completely changed the software industry. At Viant, we have created Viant AI, which is transforming every aspect of programmatic ad buying. Viant AI is the first fully autonomous advertising software platform, driven by the powerful capabilities of generative AI. The user interface of the platform is extremely intuitive and enables any individual within an agency or marketing organization to plan and buy complex programmatic campaigns without any prior experience or training. Vyan AI works straight out of the box and advertisers can see results of their campaign planning strategies immediately with limited effort upfront. We believe Vine AI is especially transformative in that it enables the whole agency, not just programmatic traders, to use the software to plan campaigns. Everyone within an organization, from C-level executives down to strategy and planning teams, can now interface with our platform and contribute to the planning, buying, and measurement of programmatic campaigns in real time. In addition to the speed and ease of use, Viant AI brings an additional level of sophistication to the campaign planning process. Leveraging years of data from thousands of campaigns executed through our platform, Viant AI is faster, smarter, and more precise in its planning capabilities compared to traditional planning software. The AI generated campaign strategies have gone through extensive testing with a number of experienced advertising customers, and the reactions have been universally positive, often with the proposed plans recommending strategies that even experienced professionals themselves might not have considered. We expect Viant AI to accelerate our market share gains and expand our total addressable market. For major agency holding companies and national advertisers, Vine AI provides substantial workflow and operational efficiencies, along with improved return on ad spend across executed ad campaigns. And for the 10 plus million small to mid-sized businesses actively marketing across search and social advertising, the simplicity and ease of use offered by Viant AI provides an opportunity to participate in open internet programmatic advertising in a way that has not been possible until now. Vyan AI democratizes programmatic advertising, enabling any advertiser to market their product or service to any household in the U.S. While we are still in the very early stages of the launch and rollout of Vyan AI, we're extremely excited about the long-term prospects of what our AI can do for advertisers and their agencies. The more campaigns that are run through our platform, the more our AI model will learn and adapt to customer preferences and campaign performance over time. And we are already releasing updates and enhancements to buy an AI, which are expanding its capabilities. we see a significant opportunity to add deeper integrations, more robust analysis and enhanced capabilities, to name a few. And we expect our ongoing innovation will keep Vyan AI at the forefront of the AI revolution. Switching topics, today we are thrilled to announce the acquisition of Iris TV, a leader in solving a critical challenge within the connected TV ecosystem. The Iris team has developed an exceptional platform that addresses the lack of standardization in video content signals across content producers, TV OEMs, video apps, and programmatic resellers. an issue that has long created operational inefficiencies in the industry. At the core of their innovation is the Iris ID, a proprietary global content identifier seamlessly integrated into the OpenRTB bid stream. The Iris ID is an anonymous universal identifier that allows advertisers to go beyond targeting at the CTV app level, enabling precise targeting down to the individual video file where their ads will run. All in a privacy compliant manner. Beyond this, IRIS enriches the IRIS ID with powerful data-driven insights, including contextual segments, emotional sentiment analysis, and brand suitability data. This added layer of context provides advertisers with a richer understanding of the videos accompanying their ads, empowering safer, smarter, and more impactful CTV ad campaigns. By combining Iris' cutting edge technology with our DSP, we are poised to elevate the CTV channel to new heights, making it safer, more transparent, and more effective for advertisers. Iris' mission to enhance the value of premium CTV content aligns perfectly with our vision for the future and we are excited to partner with their team to lead the industry at the intersection of ctv ai and ad tech we have an opportunity to lead the industry into a new era of programmatic advertising where ai drives every aspect of the process making it more accessible scalable and efficient for advertisers of all sizes While we aren't looking to eliminate humans from the process, we're excited to make individuals more efficient and effective at their jobs with the help of AI and continue to increase return on ad spend for our customers. We are at a pivotal time as advertisers push into AI and at the same time are looking for alternatives to the largest DSPs in the market. We have always offered the most cutting edge technology to advertisers and the acquisition of Iris TV will widen our lead when it comes to connected TV. This focus on innovation led growth has created the strongest pipeline of customer demand we have seen in our history and continues to drive record spend on our platform as a result. We aren't taking this opportunity lightly and are committed to expand upon our already award-winning platform to make programmatic ad buying easier and more effective while delivering market-leading innovation to our customers. With that, I'll turn it over to Chris. Thanks, Tim. The success we saw in Q3 was driven by our ongoing focus on innovation and investments in the fast-growing areas of programmatic, notably CTV and streaming audio, while we are beginning to see notable contributions from our Viant AI product suite. CTV spend across our platform remained very strong. It was up nearly 50% year over year in the quarter, while streaming audio continued to see strong double-digit growth. These channels together represented approximately 50% of spend on our platform in the quarter, consistent with what we saw in Q2. Many of the themes we have highlighted in recent quarters have continued to drive spend growth on our platform. Direct access provides clients with access to the world's most premium content, eliminating non-value add middlemen and enabling walled gardener level addressability by targeting logged in CTV users with our household ID. We continue to see strong adoption of our direct access program as more than half of our CTV spend came through direct access in the quarter. as advertisers are increasingly seeing the value of incorporating premium CTV content into their omnichannel programmatic campaigns. We regularly hear from our clients that direct access combined with the scale of our household ID is one of our biggest competitive differentiators. We recently hosted a very successful direct access CTV event in New York with a number of our publisher and media partners to discuss how CTV continues to accelerate in its strategic importance for advertisers. We had a number of participants from across the industry join in the conversation, and we heard insightful perspectives from some of our agency partners, along with senior executives from the likes of Disney, Paramount, and NBC. The overarching takeaway from the event was that CTV is becoming an increasingly critical channel for advertisers as they are shifting more budgets into CTV and away from linear, a trend which we expect will only further accelerate. While CTV as a whole is generally recognized as a high value channel due to its targeting, addressability, and measurement capabilities, we're excited to be adding even more contextual intelligence and targeting sophistication to our CTV offering with the acquisition of Iris TV, which Tim mentioned just earlier. Iris has heavily invested into their technology to build out the distribution of their global content ID for CTV called the Iris ID. The Iris ID is now integrated with an impressive network of CTV content owners, TV OEM platforms, and over 1,400 content management systems who are currently building on top of the Iris ID. These integrations will enable Viant to enhance our direct access program by making the Iris ID available to our marketers. As Tim mentioned today, marketers are still in the very early stages of CTV buying. Most CTV buying is done by just targeting the app name The problem with this is that marketers are not able to easily target specific types of content, and they can't measure which types of content drives the best results. This is where the Iris ID comes in. Iris ingests millions of CTV content files and normalizes all of the metadata associated with that video, so marketers have a standard taxonomy to target against in CTV, regardless of what app or platform that video is consumed in. Marketers love to buy data-driven advertising, and the Iris ID enables them to see which video within a CTV app is driving better return on ad spend. From there, marketers will then bid up the price of those high-performing videos, resulting in content owners getting higher CPMs. For example, Carl's Jr. was recently looking to reach younger adult males who are watching anime content and certain titles of video game content in their CTV campaign. Carl's Jr. leveraged the Iris ID to easily buy this content and programmatic across a range of CTV apps and platforms by using the Iris ID. The results were amazing, as the campaign leveraging the Iris ID generated a 300% lift in ad recall, a 35% lift in incremental store visits, and a staggering 152% lift in incremental sales. CKE restaurant CMO Jennifer Tate stated that they are always looking for strategies that drive business outcomes at scale and that Iris TV delivers a unique combination of targeting ability, contextual relevance, and high ROI. We think that the Iris ID is an important part of the mission for the open ecosystem and CTV in particular. We believe that the IRIS idea will enable content owners to create more compelling ad products that will rival the walled gardens and ultimately increase the share of spend tilting back to the open ecosystem. We're really excited to further develop this technology and expand IRIS' reach to deliver best in class CTV products for our customers and the industry. we believe that with the addition of iris tv to our already robust direct access program for ctv viant is becoming the dsp of choice for advertisers looking to spend more in ctv our customers have seamless access to much of the market's most premium inventory and through our direct access program are able to buy ctv at better pricing compared to the rest of the industry coupled with our advancements and measurement and reporting, our customers are driving superior returns on their ad spend through the Viant platform. Another major appeal for our customers is that we are making programmatic advertising much easier and effective to use through our advanced suite of AI-enabled products. As Tim discussed, we are still in the very early innings of the Viant AI rollout, but initial receptivity has been overwhelmingly positive, and our go-to-market effort around the product has been extremely effective. In mid-September, we released a 12-minute launch video across a number of social media channels to showcase VyanAI's media planning capabilities. The video garnered over 150,000 views in just the first couple of days post-launch, and it's driven over 500 early access signups. We have already begun enabling access to many of our current customers, and the response has been incredible. Many customers are generating high impact media plans in seconds, which is saving them countless hours, and the early customers are seeing campaigns that are generating better performance. And on the point of efficiency and return on ad spend, AI bidding, formerly known as bid optimizer, is a key product within the Viant AI portfolio, which is continuing to garner strong adoption from our customer base. Approximately 90% of our customers are currently leveraging the product, which is delivering significant cost savings to our customers through our AI-driven bidding technology. With the official launch of our end-to-end via AI platform, we have AI-powered tools that drive better efficiency across the four key areas of programmatic ad buy. Planning, bidding, measurement, and decisioning. With the enthusiasm behind this new product rollout, our engineering and sales teams are firing on all cylinders, and we are poised to continue growing our market share into 2025 and beyond. We are seeing a number of positive indications across our business that give us confidence in our opportunity with Viant AI. First, we are having more meaningful discussions with larger brands. While our sweet spot has always been with mid-market agencies and brands, we see an opportunity to move up market and partner with larger advertisers, given the ease of use and improving efficiency we offer through Viant AI. Also, these larger brands that are leaning into Viant have historically defaulted to the legacy industry players. But now with the recent Google ad tech monopoly trial and the rising negative sentiment with the trade desk, they are taking a look at alternative options in the market and Viant is frequently becoming an alternative these larger brands are turning to. Second, we are continuing to expand our partner network with larger and more influential partners in the programmatic ecosystem. And finally, we believe our full suite of Viant AI products expands our addressable market by enabling us to serve a larger customer base. Although we are currently winning with larger brands today, We believe that products like Viant AI will ultimately attract the millions of smaller advertisers that are currently confined to search and social media channels. We believe we can help the open ecosystem create superior ad products that compete with the walled gardens for market share. We are extremely excited about our progress and look forward to announcing more updates to Viant AI in the near future. With that, I'll turn it over to Larry to provide more detail on our financial performance.