Proprietary!
Viant reported $104.3 million in Q2 revenue this week, up from $77.9 million a year ago, outpacing the market by a third. Wall Street’s reaction? A shrug. Viant’s shares have been roughly flat since the report on Monday.
But, hey, that still counts as outperformance in this corner of the ad tech market. The Trade Desk has been down by roughly a third since reporting earnings last week.
During Viant’s call with investors, CEO Tim Vanderhook and COO Chris Vanderhook collectively used the word “proprietary” 18 times. Specifically, they highlighted the value of the exclusivity Viant gets from the identity graphs and data sources it’s acquired, citing IRIS.TV and TVision – and there might be more to come.
At one point, Tim said that Viant is open to opportunistic M&A to “help build our stack on more proprietary data.”
That’s in contrast to The Trade Desk, which has made few acquisitions, and those mostly acqui-hires. (TTD has only two known acquisitions: cross-device graph Adbrain in 2017 and ad metadata startup Sincera last year. A third acquisition remains unreported, and if anybody knows, they should tell us.)
From Viant’s perspective, there’s little point in data if it belongs to the whole market, and vice versa. Like, why continue selling data to competitors? “When it comes to The Trade Desk, I think their focus on third-party data is really hurting them,” Tim told investors. “It’s undifferentiated data that’s out there.”
(In other news, if you’re curious about the reported planned revival of Myspace – which Viant owns – the Brothers Vanderhook remained mum about that.)
No More Neutrals
Third-party intermediary tech vendors have long cast themselves as Switzerland, and the reference made sense. They want to do business with everyone.
But the neutrality analogy isn’t all that applicable anymore.
A combination of factors has made this moment an opportunity to snap up those middlemen. A looser regulatory environment means it’s easier to get M&A done, and valuations are down. But also, frankly, the ad industry no longer seems to care as much about the historical firewalls between ad buying and ad selling – or between campaign management and campaign measurement.
The latest example is DoubleVerify, which was snapped up by Nielsen for $2.15 billion last week. Although it’s worth pointing out that DoubleVerify was already a part of this trend, having itself acquired custom bidding startup Scibids in 2023, thus crossing a Rubicon between pure campaign measurement and activation.
Nielsen’s DV deal follows the acquisition of LiveRamp by Publicis in May – another $2.2 billion sale.
And we’re not through yet. Only last month, two deep-pocketed private equity firms (one of which is Vista Equity, which IPO’d Integral Ad Science once upon a time) made a credible takeover bid for Criteo.
In a world like this, even The Trade Desk, now with a market cap of $6.25 billion, could be a target for opportunistic takeovers.
Perplexing Ads
TIME is facing backlash after reports that it deliberately served ads designed to influence chatbots as part of a plan to monetize growing bot traffic. Perplexity responded by blocking those ads from its AI models.
Publishers that deploy “deceptive advertising like markdown ads” – simplified versions of webpages that are easier for AI to read – risk their reputation, Perplexity’s chief communications officer, Jesse Dwyer, tells Digiday. Dwyer says Perplexity strives to protect its users from those kinds of formats. In TIME’s case, the markdown ads look like FAQ-style branded content and are labeled as sponsored.
Zooming out beyond the Time-Perplexity tiff, ad industry experts are concerned that AI monetization tactics are outpacing rulemakers and regulators. It’s a story we’ve all heard before.
Other LLMs and AI agents may follow Perplexity’s lead and strip out ads that publishers serve specifically to shape AI responses. AI search engines have to carefully protect the quality of their organic answers, even – and especially – as they introduce their own ad products.
But Wait! There’s More!
Anthropic will watermark AI-generated text in Claude and its other models in compliance with European regulations. [TechCrunch]
Entrepreneurs gripe about the harmful effects of Google’s AI Overviews on their businesses. [Business Insiders]
PHYND, the cloud-based gaming platform founded by ad tech veteran André Swanston, is launching its service in beta on Amazon Fire TVs. [release]
Polaroid joins the trend of advertisers using anti-AI sentiment in their branding campaigns as a way to relate to consumers. [Marketing Brew]
Google TV Freeplay now supports video on demand in addition to free ad-supported TV channels. [The Verge]
You’re Hired!
Christine Cassis joins Twitch as CMO. [LinkedIn post]
Disney promotes Joss Hastings to SVP of marketing for Disney Consumer Products. [Adweek]
Cold-pressed juice brand Pressed Juicery names Tina Reejsinghani as CMO. [QSR Magazine]
