One acquisition often begets another.
Take Viant, which announced its plan to acquire TVision for $40 million on Wednesday. That deal simply would not have been in the cards if the marketing platform had not picked up IRIS.TV in 2024.
“You really needed IRIS for TVision and Viant to come together,” CEO Tim Vanderhook told AdExchanger shortly after news of the deal broke on Wednesday.
IRIS.TV specializes in identifying and targeting contextual signals, such as genre, sentiment analysis and brand safety concerns. Meanwhile, TVision uses an opt-in audience panel to measure attention via metrics like how many people are in the room and how long their eyes are fixed on the screen.
Viant still plans for both companies to run independently. But their complementary data sets will allow advertisers to figure out where their target audience is paying the most attention, bid on ad placements during those shows in real time and even test the effectiveness of their ad creative against different types of content, said Vanderhook.
Pay (for) attention
Properly understanding attention rates will also have an effect on the CPMs that advertisers are willing to pay, Vanderhook said. Despite high demand for live sports inventory in the abstract, if a particular broadcast is getting kind of boring and viewers aren’t actually watching that intently, a brand might want to pull back their spend and relocate to where it will have a greater impact.
After all, it’s not enough that an ad is playing in front of someone – they have to be engaged enough to be able to recall it later, said Vanderhook.
Does that mean attention metrics are functional enough to be transacted upon currency across the entire ad tech ecosystem, not just in select DSPs? Probably not immediately, both company leaders admitted. But that prospect is definitely much closer than it had been previously.
For TVision, the challenge in becoming a currency was always that the company operated “a step away from the media transaction,” CEO and Co-Founder Yan Liu said. But he expressed confidence that, under Viant, they will be much closer to the action going forward.
Not that Viant is trying to replace Nielsen or any other alternative currencies on the market, Vanderhook was quick to add.
“Seconds of attention is where the value is, and we’re going to evaluate impressions based on that lens now that we have the measurement capability and the ability to transact in the DSP,” he said.
Vanderhook also suggested that because TVision’s data is rooted in an objective observation – whether a panel member is looking at the screen or not, for example – it could be a more reliable form of attribution than what gets filtered through the CAPIs of walled gardens like YouTube and Amazon.
Data over dashboards
The stronger emphasis on data is a relatively new direction for TVision, Liu said.
A few years ago, TVision’s clients primarily accessed their data via either the company’s dashboard or that of a measurement partner. Now, however, advancements in AI software development have made that middle layer less expensive and “pretty much redundant,” he said.
Clients “don’t need the dashboard, they don’t need a spreadsheet, they don’t need a PowerPoint. They just need data,” Liu added. “And that really opened up our customer base significantly.”
As a result, TVision started to position itself less as a measurement business and more as a data as a service (DaaS) platform. That transition came in handy when the company partnered with Viant in June last year, with the goal of making that data accessible within Viant’s ad buying platform.
Just four months later, Viant proposed the deal. Which feels like a rarity, given how quiet the ad tech industry’s M&A scene has been in recent years – a phenomenon that Vanderhook attributes to higher interest rates and more venture capital interest in AI over programmatic.
“It did probably go faster than most acquisitions, but we knew we were in a unique place,” said Vanderhook.
