Hello, everyone, and welcome to Viant Innovation 2023. My name is Marielle Lyon, and I'm Director of Communications here at Viant, and I will be the moderator today. Before we get started, I wanted to remind everyone of a few things. Certain matters discussed in today's virtual event and/or answers to questions asked are expected to include forward-looking statements. Our actual results are subject to risks and uncertainties that may differ materially from such forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially can be found in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ending June 30th, 2023. We would like to encourage you to ask questions during our program today. You can enter your questions in the chat box throughout the program, and any questions we do not get to will be answered via email over the next few days. Now, I'd like to turn it over to Tim and Chris Vanderhook. Welcome to Viant Innovation 2023. I'm Tim Vanderhook, CEO and Co-Founder of Viant, and joining me is Chris Vanderhook, COO and Co-Founder. Today marks a special occasion as we provide you with an advanced glimpse into our product pipeline and our progress as we execute towards our long-term vision. We'll be diving into emerging areas in our industry, including Supply Path Optimization, artificial intelligence, and sustainability in advertising. The media landscape is in a state of constant evolution. Digital spending is on the rise, fueled by the accelerated growth in Connected TV, while traditional linear television is on the decline. Adding to this is the complexity of sunsetting of third-party cookies by the end of next year, a change that will pose a significant challenge for marketers in continuing to deliver relevant advertising and their ability to measure their return on ad spend. What worked for marketers in the past is no longer effective today, and the landscape is only getting more complex. It's becoming increasingly difficult for any human to navigate this dynamic ecosystem. That's where Viant comes in. We believe that the future of ad tech will be driven by AI, the foundational component of our vision we call autonomous advertising. As one of the few buy-side-only DSPs in the market, our focus is squarely on supporting both advertisers and their agencies. This focus also informs our investment in AI, aimed at delivering cost efficiency, campaign performance, and a market-leading user experience, backed by a best-in-class data platform and our advanced reporting suite. Our vision for autonomous advertising is both aspirational and practical. At Viant, we are focused on applying AI to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our customers and their ad investments. In simple terms, we aim to enable advertisers to get more return on their advertising investment while reducing the need for human resources. For marketers, the ease of use to buy advertising on search and social media is a breeze, and almost anyone can sign up and buy ads without any training necessary. This is in stark contrast to the programmatic ecosystem, where the user interfaces are as complex as a Bloomberg Terminal. The friction requiring certification and training to onboard a customer into a DSP for them to buy advertising can take weeks to even months, and this is what reduces the accessibility of the open web. Our vision is to break down these barriers, making programmatic advertising as simple and as easy to use as search and social in order to accelerate our growth. Some of these solutions are already available, with a lot more in development. Today, we'll share what our clients are already utilizing and what they'll soon be able to accomplish with our new technology. Chris and I have discussed our long-term vision of autonomous advertising, and Viant has been hard at work inventing new technology to solve our industry's biggest problems, some of which we're gonna discuss today. But before we get started, I want to describe the single biggest problem holding back the open web from achieving its full potential. It is a classic problem that many of us are familiar with. It's called choice overload. In today's world, a programmatic trader logs into a self-service DSP and is faced with an impossible set of choices. The sheer number of options available for advertisers to spend their budgets is staggering, and it's not humanly possible to sift through them all to make optimal decisions. Let's first quantify this complexity with some math. There are 50,000 different applications in CTV, 25 million websites, 7 million mobile apps, 3 million streaming audio options, 100,000 digital out-of-home boards, and 300,000 audience segments, with greater than 25 ad formats. From the perspective of a programmatic trader, when designing an ad campaign, the trader has to select the channels, the publishers, audience segments, and ad formats. To calculate the number of choices a programmatic trader must make a selection from, we'd multiply the options in each channel by the number of audience segments, and then by the number of ad formats for that channel. For example, for CTV, that's 50,000 applications times 300,000 audience segments times 3 ad formats, totaling 45 billion choices... and that's just CTV. Most marketers buy across all channels, and when we do this math for all channels, add it all together, and it's 98 trillion choices, which is mind-boggling! Now, let's pivot to the solution: a new product from Viant called AI Recommendations, where we remove the complexity for a marketer by surfacing recommendations that improve performance while saving them time. But take notice that we deliver high-value recommendations to the marketer, but still keep the best of the open web, transparency and control. We're embedding AI directly into our DSP to manage the multitude of choices a programmatic trader has at their fingertips. Viant's new AI Recommendations features streamlines all of those into pointed recommendations to drive better results, simplifying the decision-making process for campaign management, anything from optimizing an underperforming campaign click-through rate to increasing the reach of a target audience or lowering your bid price to maximize return on ad spend. Here is a sneak peek at AI Recommendations. The Viant AI Recommendations engine greatly improves the traditional campaign optimization process by providing proactive, AI-driven recommendations designed to deliver outsized campaign results while saving programmatic traders valuable time. Launched directly within the campaign screen, specific AI-generated recommendations display in the right column, making it easy for programmatic traders to review and simply accept the recommendations to start optimizing their campaign. So in a nutshell, we're moving the programmatic trader from a world of nearly 98 trillion digital advertising choices to a streamlined, AI-driven experience. Viant's customers can look for AI Recommendations to start appearing in 2024. Another big area we are focused on is how we use generative AI in our DSP in an effort to broaden access to programmatic for all types of marketers. The innovation we have coming down the pipe in 2024 is very exciting. One of the major roadblocks to customer adoption of any self-service DSP has been the specialized training required to use that platform. This not only hampers the onboarding process but also restricts the speed at which customers can scale their ad spend. Our first generative AI product is called Viant Chat. Chat is a whole new way for marketers to use our DSP. We have a mission to simplify the programmatic ad buying experience across the open web, and Chat presented us with an opportunity to use natural language to unlock the full potential of our advanced self-service offering. Here's a look at a new way to interact with our DSP. Introducing Viant Chat. Let's take a look. Viant Chat is a feature that brings the recognizable ease of a chat interface into programmatic campaign planning and execution for the open web. Now, a programmatic trader can manage functions like creating target audience segments or evaluating top advertising channels through a simple natural language interface. For example, if an advertiser wanted to create a new targeting tactic, they could simply type in that request and immediately get back a set of options to evaluate and implement. This powerful AI engine drives better campaign design and performance while making the Viant DSP simple to learn and easy to navigate for new traders. Look for the rollout of Viant Chat in 2024. In prior earnings calls, we have talked about the Viant Data Platform, and when it comes to programmatic advertising, it's all about the data. The real magic happens when marketers start interacting with that data. Seven out of our top 10 customers leverage the Viant Data Platform in addition to our DSP. These tend to be our largest-spending clients because they get outsized campaign performance. Their use of the Viant Data Platform is a key ingredient to their success. These customers all have incredibly talented data science teams that have the technical skill set to write custom SQL queries against their first-party data, campaign impression logs, sales files, and so much more. These customers are able to unlock insights from their data to drive outsized campaign results compared to other marketing teams that lack data scientists in-house. These clients' use of their data in their marketing activities is a superpower, and we want to enable all of our customers with this competitive advantage without the need to have in-house data science teams. And that's why we've built our second generative AI product called Chat with Data. Chat with Data allows you to engage with your first-party data, assess campaign performance, conduct custom analysis, schedule automated tasks, and so many more things, all through simple conversation. In essence, we've democratized data science for the mid-market, turning advanced capabilities into everyday tools accessible through chat. Let's take a look at Chat with Data. Viant Chat with Data applies a simple natural language interface to the complex work of data management and advanced analytics. No longer will you need to write SQL query in order to do robust data analysis and workflow management. Instead, everything from determining the number of locations in a particular market to identifying top-performing segments is now available in a simple-to-understand output that enables more robust analysis and decision making. Said simply, what once required a data scientist is now as easy as chatting with a friend. Viant Chat with Data is the key to unlocking the power of data for all and is available today in the Viant Data Platform. We've talked about the overwhelming number of choices, nearly 98 trillion, that marketers face. Now, let's talk about time, or rather, the lack of it. In the programmatic world, time is of the essence. When a DSP receives a bid request from a publisher, it has a mere 100 milliseconds to process that request and respond with an ad and a bid price. Most DSPs operate within a 50-100 millisecond window. During this blink-of-an-eye timeframe, DSPs are crunching massive amounts of data to determine the best price to bid. It's our core function, and it's where AI can be a game changer. With AI, we can achieve better bid price discovery, real-time data processing, and superior predictive capabilities for ad performance. Entering the third quarter of this year, we took a significant leap forward. We rolled out our new bidding infrastructure based on our breakthrough patented technology, leveraging one of the most advanced chipsets available today, Graviton3 by Amazon. And the results? A groundbreaking response time for bids, clocking in at a mere 1.2 milliseconds. We are talking about being up to 50x faster than our competition. This technical breakthrough, though, is not just about having the fastest bidding infrastructure in the industry, it's for a bigger purpose of making room for AI. By only using 1% of the available auction window to bid, it opens up our ability to now run a series of advanced AI models on every single ad request. This fact will drastically improve our platform's capabilities compared to the competition. When it comes to applying AI to advertising, the more time you have, the more data you can analyze. The more data you analyze, the better the campaign performance. That better performance drives more ad spend in our software. So let's connect the dots. On one hand, we have a complex ecosystem with nearly 98 trillion choices for advertisers. On the other, we have a time-critical bidding process that happens faster than a human can blink. So what's the solution? An AI-driven DSP that works on behalf of the marketer. By embedding AI into our DSP, we're simplifying the decision-making process while also making it exponentially faster and more efficient. And with our newly patented bidder, we're setting a new industry standard for speed. We believe that this will transform the programmatic advertising landscape. We're making it simpler, smarter, and faster. And hot on the heels of our groundbreaking new bidder infrastructure, we recently introduced one of those new AI models that Tim referenced. Our clients can select a new feature called AI Bid Optimizer. Operational since June, this feature runs an AI model aimed to get our clients the premium ad space they desire at the lowest possible cost. The results speak for themselves. Over 50% of our clients have already adopted it, achieving an average CPM savings of 35%. When our clients save 35%, this savings translates into an immediate increase in their return on ad spend, effectively lowering their customer acquisition costs. But here's the kicker: it's not just a one-time win. They reinvest those savings to buy more impressions, reaching even more potential new customers. This creates a flywheel effect that enhances their experience with Viant while increasing their investment in our platform. There has been a lot of discussion in our industry in the area of Supply Path Optimization. Basically, how can the industry streamline the path between advertiser and publisher and ensure we are removing waste in the middle? Earlier this year, we launched our Supply Path Optimization program called Direct Access, where we partnered with leading CTV publishers to create a more direct path to premium inventory and drive efficiency. These are the largest publishers in the CTV space and represent a majority of the premium inventory. Direct Access is a program that provides clear benefits to both the buy side and sell side: lower media costs for the advertiser, along with higher revenue for the publisher, which comes at the expense of non-value-added resellers that drive up the tech tax and unnecessarily complicate the digital supply chain. In addition, we have joined Prebid.org and are certified as we continue to connect with premium content owners that allow direct access to our clients' demand. We are extremely pleased with the progress we are making with this initiative on behalf of our clients. In the third quarter, our customers allocated over 25% of their CTV spend into the Direct Access program. This is a huge win for our customers as they incur less tech tax in the middle, which results in lower CPMs, more impressions, and ultimately a better return on ad spend. I look forward to the continued progress in this area as more and more of our customers adopt Direct Access for their CTV buying. Now, let's pivot to an issue that's bigger than all of us: sustainability in digital advertising. Believe it or not, digital ad campaigns contribute to around 3.5% of global carbon emissions, growing at a rate of 6% annually. It's an impact on our planet we can no longer ignore. Our efforts around sustainability are focused in two areas: our company and our clients. For our company, we're not just talking about sustainability, we mean it. For the calendar year of 2023, Viant will be a carbon neutral company through our use of renewable energy and the purchase of carbon offsets. Our cutting-edge bidder infrastructure has already slashed carbon emissions by a staggering tenfold. To put that in perspective, we've eliminated the equivalent of 526 tons of CO2 emissions a year. That's akin to wiping out 250 round-trip flights from New York to Paris. But we didn't stop there. We've also transitioned to sourcing 100% of our platform's energy needs from renewable sources. When customers run campaigns in Viant, our platform runs on renewable energy, which lowers the emissions of the marketing supply chain. As customers get serious about lowering their emissions, they will start to choose partners that are leaders in sustainability. We believe that our efforts and leadership in this area will make us a top choice among marketers. Our Direct Access program also provides a more direct, and therefore much cleaner, path to premium inventory, creating a measurable carbon reduction. Leadership in this area, though, starts with transparency, and we're pioneering new standards for sustainability in the digital advertising industry. We are introducing a new Carbon Label watermark, positioned right next to the AdChoices icon. The Carbon Label details emissions data to the consumer, providing a nutrition label of sorts, but for the emissions of the ad being delivered. 75% of consumers cite sustainability when making purchase decisions, and that's why this is important for marketers. For our clients, we've shouldered the burden of sustainability in digital advertising, so you don't have to. Our initiatives are designed to help our clients minimize their Scope 3 emissions, which are a significant part of their carbon footprint. For instance, a leading public video game developer recently disclosed that digital advertising activities constituted over 30% of their total greenhouse gas emissions. The client is looking to lower their emissions without impacting the performance of their advertising. This is a common paradox among many companies: achieve sustainability targets without disrupting the performance metrics of the business. Our answer to that, make the switch to Viant and drastically reduce your emissions overnight. As one of the few buy-side-only DSPs on the market, Viant offers a trifecta of innovation, efficiency, and responsibility. We're leveraging AI to simplify a complex ecosystem of choice overload. We're setting new speed benchmarks with our patented bidder infrastructure, and we're driving cost efficiencies for our customers with our AI Bid Optimizer, all while leading the charge in sustainability. Once again, thank you for attending our first-ever innovation event. We're now gonna bring up the lights, transition to our Q&A. Please stick with us, and we'll be back in a few seconds. Now we are opening the event to live questions from the audience. As a reminder, please enter your questions into the Zoom chat box. Our first question is: How will the AI recommendations function if my goals during the campaign change? Well, yeah, any, any trader using the DSP, one of the primary things they're doing is they're setting their primary and secondary KPIs or goals. If at any moment they, let's say, made a campaign, they go from a click-through rate goal as their primary... or suggestions, or suggestions, that are, that will then hit those new primary and secondary goals. Rest assured, the minute you change, the recommendations then adjust. It's a great question. Our second question is: AI Bid Optimizer is driving pretty significant savings. How is that possible? Yeah, that's a good question. That works from 9:00 A.M.- 5:00 P.M. I have to make two, three, four changes a day to a campaign to try and hit metrics. You make a change, you go to lunch, you come back, you see if you've improved the results. You know, if you contrast that to AI Bid Optimizer, we're adjusting bid prices 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, across so many choices of variables that we can adjust on bid price. The ability to take all that in and do it on a nonstop basis produces these outsized savings, and I think it's relative to the status quo, not that it was a bad price. If you remember, programmatic advertising is a fully liquid market that is constantly ebbing and flowing throughout the day between prices, demand, and supply, and I think you need a high-powered technology like our AI Bid Optimizer to take advantage of those changes in liquidity throughout the day. Our next question is about the Direct Access program. Almost everyone is talking about Supply Path Optimization solutions right now. What makes yours different, especially when it comes to the CTV space? Yeah, you know, there are a lot of initiatives around Supply Path Optimization. I think why ours is different is, one, we only serve the buy side. We're beholden to the marketer. Our job is to go out and get them, yes, the best possible price, but why is because they want the most of their working media dollars going towards the publisher. That's one. Two, we also offer pricing transparency to these premium publishers. They know what we're bidding, and that ensures our clients that they're getting the most amount of working media dollars going to those publishers. Why is that important? Ultimately, if they're getting more working media dollars, that's more impressions, and it's gonna be ultimately more impact on their business. Our business only thrives when our customers' businesses are doing well, and so we see that's just right in line with it, and I, I think that's why it's different. I would just add one thing to that, which is carbon emissions of an impression is now a real metric that gets imported into the DSPs that people are taking action off of. When you have the Direct Access program, the ability to transact direct with the publishers, it has one of the lowest emissions footprints available out there, and we see this as a big opportunity for those advertisers that care about sustainability. Great. Our next question is, Viant Chat and AI Recommendations look pretty easy to use, but what's the business case for these, and who do you think will use these solutions? I'll take that. Yeah, I think if you... Really, I said it earlier in the when I was talking about how search and social are incredibly easy to use from a marketer buying ads on search and social. And really, what we're trying to do is we're trying to democratize the access to the open web programmatic. And really, you can see our kinda product path here. And really, what we're trying to do as a company is increase our total addressable market. Today, it's really meant for mid-sized to large-sized marketers, and we really see that open web programmatic is gonna do really well in actually the the smaller-sized companies, just like search and social does. Search and social advertising isn't that it's a superior channel, it's that they offer an easy-to-use buying experience, so anyone can buy an ad there, and really that's what we're aimed at. And we really want it to be as easy to use as that, and not as it's been in the past, it's kinda like a Bloomberg terminal. So, I'm really excited about both those products. Okay, we have time for one last question. There were a lot of product innovations discussed today. Which one are you most excited about? Well, there's ones that are already live, but I'll talk about one that's coming down the pipe. I think, Chat with Data really is game-changing for digital advertisers. You know, one of the big things we all talk about is how data-driven, digital advertising is. But the reality is to be data-driven, that means you need to have a data science team. And that's a huge friction point for many advertisers, not... You know, the Fortune 100, of course, have many in-house data marketing teams, data science teams, lots of ad tech companies do. But the ability for us to onboard and ingest campaign data, your first-party data of sales data, site visitation, transactions, and then, of course, our third-party data partners, and give a simple natural language interface for people to ask questions of where that data intersects, I think is a huge opening for us. I think, you know, for us, we view that product as democratizing data science for the programmatic trader or the buyer of advertising, giving them their own data science team at the touch of a chat box. So it's a powerful tool. We've played with it internally. I think when our customers get exposed to it in the data platform, this is gonna really show the importance of how impactful having a data platform combined with a DSP will be in the future in this fully integrated product. I'm most excited about Chat with Data. I don't know, what would you say? Well, I'm gonna give a nod to all the ad techers and our infrastructure team here. Our new, our new bidder infrastructure is pretty remarkable. The fact that we are now responding to bid requests, and we're handling that in 1.2 milliseconds, is pretty badass, right? Just—it's—I know as a long-time ad tech industry person, and as so many of the people in our company here, that is quite the point of pride here. Really, what's the whole purpose? I mean, I think the one that our clients are... that are seeing the most impact from right now is AI Bid Optimizer. The savings that they're getting right now, in a diffu- let's just say, in obviously a, a difficult, economic climate as we went into this year, the fact that we're saving clients 35%, reinvesting those, creating greater impact, it's also driving more spend, it's pretty remarkable. That would only happen, unless we were- w- we had our new bidder infrastructure. That's, that's the one that I would say. Yeah, I mean, and just to close, what do, what do all these actually mean from our perspective? It's that long-term vision of autonomous advertising that I think ultimately drives all the employees of Viant each and every day, which is, you know, how do we rem- remove the unbelievable amount of choices that we're all faced with when simply trying to, plan, buy, and measure ad campaigns? And so all these products ultimately are towards our long-term vision of autonomous advertising, and that's really where you won't need really too many people to actually execute that ad campaign that we do today with a whole group of individuals. So something very excited about. With that, I'll close. Thank you so much for all of you that attended our first-ever Innovation Day. We'll look forward to see all of you again this time next year. Thanks very much. Thank you.