I recently caught up with Viant co-founders Tim (CEO) and Chris (COO) Vanderhook – or, as I like to think of them, The Brothers Vanderhook – to get an update on their business.
During Q1 this year, Viant reported that streaming audio and CTV combined represented more than half of the total ad spend on its platform. Viant’s Household ID, which advertisers can use to target multiple connected devices in the same home, is helping drive this growth.
Meanwhile, more than 50% of its CTV spend in the quarter came through Viant’s Direct Access program, up from 40% the previous quarter.
Direct Access is a supply-path optimization solution for connected TV ad buying that Viant released last year. It allows advertisers to tap into direct connections with more than 20 CTV publishers, including Disney, Paramount, Fox and Peacock.
The tool has very similar vibes to The Trade Desk’s OpenPath offering, but Direct Access focuses on CTV publishers, and OpenPath is more about curating the open web.
“With Direct Access,” Tim Vanderhook said, “the question we’re essentially asking our clients is, ‘Do you want to buy direct from premium content owners, or do you want to continue to buy through a middleman at higher rates and with more fees?’”
That sounds like a rhetorical question.
The Brothers Vanderhook spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: Talk to me about the momentum you’re seeing in CTV. Sounds like hockey-stick growth.
TIM VANDERHOOK: We started in CTV, and that’s why it’s the biggest percentage of ad spend on the platform today. But CTV is one of those huge tailwinds for all of digital advertising, because linear TV is imploding.
A lot of that money is going to programmatic players, but the fact is that the vast majority is going to YouTube. So, thank god for Netflix and all the other streaming companies opening up advertising and helping make the open web bigger.
In that vein, we’re also seeing more “walled gardens” like Roku shifting toward the open web to fill their need for more demand. It’ll be a slow process, but I think in the long run we’ll see all the CTV players tap high-quality DSPs to represent them to advertisers.
Do you think you’ll be battling it out with The Trade Desk on that front?
TIM: We represent mid-market advertisers, and that’s where our strength is, whereas The Trade Desk and Google are focused on the Fortune 500. They operate in many countries, and we focus on US advertisers.
Most of our advertisers weren’t able to buy TV before because they weren’t big enough to hire a holdco to execute a large TV campaign.
So, there’s still value to be had even though “TV is imploding”?
TIM: Linear TV performs really well and it always has, despite the fact that there are issues with it.
For example, TV ads absolutely drive people to search engines. If someone is exposed to an ad on TV, the first thing they’re likely to do is to go and type the brand’s name into Google Search, as opposed to going to the company’s website.
CHRIS VANDERHOOK: And then who gets the credit for that? Probably Google, because of last-click attribution. Google has been a big beneficiary of this whole misattribution game.
That’s why everyone is so excited about CTV, because you’re able to connect these dots better and see the customer journey so you can give the proper credit to what’s actually leading to behavior.
How is Viant’s Household ID helping drive the growth you’re seeing in CTV?
TIM: We initially took a lot of flak for our Household ID, which is a hash of a physical address. When we integrated it into Adelphic years ago, the fact that we were focusing on people-based identifiers was effectively used against us, because third-party cookies were still here.
But we picked an ID tied to a physical address for a reason, because it can’t be deleted or taken away from a programmatic player the way a cookie or even an email address can. And this has parlayed well in the CTV space, where there are no cookies. The fact that we can tie ad exposures to store visits is really what’s been driving omnichannel growth for us.
But do you still buy linear?
CHRIS: Yeah, we do. We also buy traditional radio.
For the presidential debate, we bought TV ads in the preshow, during the debate itself and in the postshow. Our bet was that something like a quarter of the country would watch the debate live, just to see what would happen, and that’s exactly what happened.
It was the most cost-effective reach you could get, because so many advertisers wanted to stay away from it. Some advertisers don’t want to be associated with the news, but who isn’t consuming content about the presidential election right now?
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
(Oh, and here’s a CTV-related fun fact about the Vanderhooks: In addition to running Myspace back in the day, Tim and Chris also co-founded Xumo, the ad-supported OTT streaming service that was acquired by Comcast in 2020 for more than $100 million.)
