Team from Viant. Really appreciate you all coming here today, joining us again. It's been a great year. Yeah, yeah. It's been a great year for you guys. So it's not that it hasn't been that 2023 was a bad year. I would say 2023 was more of a transition year. But it'd be great maybe just to kinda kick the conversation off as for maybe people who are ramping on the story a bit, like, what have been those one or two changes that investors need to be thinking about of Viant of today versus maybe a year ago or later? Yeah. I would say the number one theme I would highlight of Viant is the launch of Viant AI, a big suite of AI tools that has really taken the programmatic advertising industry by storm. I think we have a leading position in artificial intelligence. We launched a 12-minute video through LinkedIn, and in about three days, we had 150,000 views of the video, so it was very interesting from a B2B ad tech product launch to see something actually go viral like that, so Viant AI has been a huge boost. We showed AI planning. It's four phases to our Viant AI suite, so we launched Viant AI Planning. That's the video I just described that really went crazy about two months ago. In 2023, we launched AI Bidding, which has driven our contribution ex-TAC margin expansion from 2023 into 2024, which was a huge driver for us. And the second thing I would highlight outside of AI is CTV. And so the two themes that we are very, very focused on is artificial intelligence applied to connected television. CTV growth for us last quarter was just shy of 50% growth, up from 40% growth the prior quarter. So we continue to go down these themes. In our last earnings call, we announced an acquisition of IRIS.TV, which is more granular targeting and measurement within CTV. And we think the combination of Viant and IRIS.TV really gives us a huge lead in connected television against some of our larger competitors. I think, you know, at the end of, really, I'll go back a little further, 2022, 2022, started out okay. But in the second half of 2022, there were some macro pressures. But really, we ended up getting caught. I think just us as a management team, we really refocused the business. We told them that we spent too much money in 2022, chasing growth. We peeled that back. We told everybody at the end of 2022, "We're gonna refocus the business on our core customer group, which is the mid-market." These are advertisers who spend anywhere between $100 million-$500 million a year, still a really big customer, spending category. We weren't chasing the Fortune 100, the P&Gs and the Unilevers of the world. We weren't trying to be everything to everyone. That made a huge difference in the company. It got everybody focused. We attacked that customer set. So that's the first thing we did. The second thing we did, we said, "We're gonna keep our costs under control. We're gonna grow contribution ex-TAC faster than OpEx." Committed to that. And we just said, "We're gonna put our heads down. We're gonna prove it." So we've posted five straight quarters of 20% or greater growth with our guide. That'll be six in the fourth quarter. So I think right now people are just seeing that, "Okay. These guys, they did what they said they're gonna do. They have a strong focus on CTV, big tailwind there." So I think that's really been the difference. And I think the response to the stock price in Q3 was we grew 20% on top of a very tough comp of 20% the prior year. It's been a question of investors is, "Is the growth sustainable?" And I think we've kinda proven that out. Yep. This is a high-level question I like to ask. Obviously, there's been a lot going on that a lot of things that are pointed in the right direction. But as you think about kind of the key levers of just framing shareholder value creation, like, how do you think about what you've been doing so far over 2023 and 2024 versus kind of the levers you may be flexing going forward? Yeah. Really good question. One of the great things about the business model of a demand-side platform, so the biggest in the space is Google, offers DV360. And we have another large independent, The Trade Desk, which most are familiar with. These are great business models. You basically have a fixed cost basis of people. We're at operating leverage. We're generating cash flow and EBITDA. So every incremental dollar that comes into the platform, about 60% of it in Q3 flowed through to the bottom line. And we see that expanding as we grow OpEx slower than contribution ex-TAC. So a lot of, a lot of leverage that we're able to flex. And it's just a question of execution and scale, getting more advertisers on the platform, and then driving ad spend. And with the launch of Viant AI, the tailwinds in CTV, there's tons of money coming into connected television. So we have great tailwinds behind the business, which gives us tons of confidence. You wanna talk about some of the product expansion around that now? Yeah. I mean, I think if you look in 2023, Tim had mentioned AI Bidding, which was our first AI product out there. 90% of customers have adopted that. And it equates to about 75% of the spend on the platform. That's incredible adoption inside of a year. Definitely our fastest growth from a product perspective adoption. It makes sense. We're basically saving clients money on CPMs. That's a huge piece. I think the other thing, you know, investors understand CTV is a tailwind, certainly because of how much money's going there. But you should also look at our growth in CTV. CTV market, on average, has grown about 18% a year. In our last quarter, it's actually accelerating. It was 40% growth. It's now nearly 50% growth. Makes up about 40% of spend on our platform. You should dig into why we're growing faster, and it's really around, you know, our stance around identity or our Household ID. The scale of that relative to other players on the market, like Trade Desk UID2, it's about 10% scale. Ours is in excess of 80% of all ad opportunities on the internet. That has huge benefits for customers, for targeting, and most importantly, for measurement. In the channel of CTV, it's incredible. So marketers are buying CTV through our platform. They're buying it direct through our Direct Access program. And they're targeting and measuring so they can see their returns. So they keep spending more. That's the flywheel. Got it. And you, since you brought it up, the name up twice, twice Trade Desk. Yeah. Just for investors that may be less familiar with the Viant story, kinda what are those kinda two, three key differences as they think about Viant versus Trade Desk? Yeah. First, I would start with artificial intelligence. I think one thing that The Trade Desk does is, you know, they'll claim artificial intelligence. But anyone in the audience or anyone watching this, have you ever seen any AI? They say Koa is their product. But no investor's ever seen it. It's something behind the scenes, and so it's a question of, is it real? Is it not real? We show off what the product is, and we let people see it, touch it, feel it, play with it, and you can see the artificial intelligence. That's number one. Second is our ability to do targeting in connected television. We acquired IRIS.TV, and just to back up for everyone, when it comes to CTV, the current landscape today is targeting at the app level. So they'll allocate budgets like $1 million to Hulu. But you don't know which show in Hulu your ad is showing up in. With the acquisition of IRIS_ID, it gives us more granular data at the show level. So we can actually see which show is it. Is it Paramount? And which scene within the show? Were they at a bar? You probably don't want a Pampers ad right after the bar scene. So being able to drive brand suitability, better safety for these brands in CTV has been a huge boost. So I think those are two big key areas of differentiation. You know, if anyone has ever seen a DSP, it's like a Bloomberg Terminal for ad buying. It takes specialized expertise. You need to train on it and get certified. With the launch of Viant AI, we see a big differentiation that there's no training needed. If you know how to send a text message through, you know, through texting, you now know how to use our DSP. So we think that helps us go down market into the SMBs. But with the AI planning, it also is driving lots of excitement up market with the bigger advertisers who spend lots of money just creating media plans, identifying and figuring out consumer research, spending money there to figure out who the target audience is. Or you can come to Viant AI and get all that information in 60 seconds. So it's been a huge TAM expansion for us as well, just simplifying that user interface to buy ads and TV. I think the conversation I would say maybe two years ago with investors was very much dominated that, "Isn't this just a Google and Trade Desk game?" You know, one of the things it is true there's only a few. There's a handful of DSPs, specifically there's four. There's Google's DV360, The Trade Desk, Yahoo DSP, and Viant. That's it. There's only four of them. The reason why there's only four of them, it's rarefied air. The investment it takes to build one of these is incredible. And there has been a dearth of venture capital in the space. And it probably isn't a great move, and it's risky to build these things to get to operating leverage. It takes a long time. We were just dumb enough to do it. However, once you make it out to the other side, what you realize is that there won't be just one winner. You know, what you see is happening right now. Every marketer, for the most part, uses DV360 'cause they wanna buy YouTube. So they have that exclusive. But Google is steering customers to The Trade Desk and has been for the last couple of years because they wanted a counterbalance to Google. What we're seeing now is, as The Trade Desk has grown, as they've made other moves and maybe some of the behavior that they've had in the market, you're now seeing that marketers are looking for an alternative, agencies looking for an alternative to The Trade Desk. And if you look at the four that I named, two are buy-side only, us and The Trade Desk. The other two, Google and Yahoo, are conflicted. They're on the buy and the sell side. So it makes us a natural selection for someone who's either spilling out of Google or The Trade Desk or, like I said, who's our core customer set, that mid-market advertiser. And why are they our core? Because they're the most data-driven marketers out there. Much of the top, you know, multinational companies, Fortune 100, that The Trade Desk or, you know, has, they sell toothpaste and toilet paper. They're not the most data-driven marketers. They're not trying to measure, you know, every dollar. They really are. It's these mid-market customers that need a platform that is the most data-driven. So I think that really highlights the differences between us and, let's say, a Google and/or a Trade Desk. Last, it's just we have a patented technology around identity called Household ID. The scale of our Household ID at 80% of the total bid stream versus the competing alternative, which is owned by The Trade Desk, UID2, is between 10% and 20%. So far outreaching the scale that we've been able to achieve with our patented technology and approach relative to where they've been able to get to. Got it. So let's just take it back to the model here for a second. And it'd be really helpful to frame how you think about the growth drivers in 2024 from a revenue ex-TAC perspective and how that evolves in 2025. Like, we've talked about Viant AI. We've talked about IRIS.TV. Maybe talk about how those fit in with customer ads and expanding kinda same advertiser budgets. Yeah. Well, I, I would say one of the big drivers that we will keep highlighting is gonna be continued growth in CTV. We believe that we can continue growing, well above the market because of the things like our Direct Access program, which, you know, yes, saves advertisers fees. You're not going through an SSP. The content owners, and it's the largest content owners in the world, connecting directly to our DSP. And they eliminate the middleman in the middle. Typically, in that, there's no SSP fee there. So advertiser gets the inventory cheaper. It's actually better for the content owner. They're getting higher CPMs 'cause there's no fee in the middle. So that was the first wave of growth of Direct Access. The second wave of growth is what we've been announcing throughout our partnerships, which is these content owners offer authenticated experiences. They're taking their subscriber data, and they are integrating directly with our Household ID. Because we have scale of 80%, and actually in CTV, it's closer to 90%, we are making all of those ads, those ad requests addressable. They are passing us our Household ID, so we know who the household is. So marketers on our platform, that's why it does so well, is because our Household ID is there. That, I think, is going to be another leg of growth in CTV for us, in 2025. Direct Access represents about 50% of total CTV spend. We think that we're gonna continue to grow that in 2025. So. Lastly, continued expansion of the Viant AI product. We have a new product coming out, AI Measurement and Analysis. So the old way is you could log in, click the reporting dashboard, find the metric you're looking for. If I print out, you know, all the metrics of programmatic trader who's buying ads through these platforms, if I printed out the reporting and on a PDF, it'd be 47 pages of just reports and different data points by state, by creative, by type of ad format, etc., etc. It's just too much information for humans to consume and retain. So being able to take AI on top of all that data, which is really what the AI Measurement product is and analysis, and in 60 seconds, it tells you what you need to do to improve your campaign results, taking all that data in. It's just another advancement. These are premium products. So it grows our contribution ex-TAC. Even if we have adoption similar to AI Bidding, it could expand our contribution ex-TAC margin by another three or 400 basis points in 2025 as adoption of that product goes. So we've got a great product cycle, a great cadence, and a great business model behind the AI that we're bringing to market. Got it. And one of the questions we'll get from investors is just on the incrementality of the CTV spend. And sometimes when you're looking at the numbers, the question we get often is, how much of this is truly incremental spend versus shift from other channels? Like, how should we be thinking about it at this point? And how has that kind of evolved over the last year or so? I guess if on some level, it's all taken from somewhere. So I don't know. Is it a shift from linear? Yes. It definitely you're shifting money from linear. Is it cannibalizing and/or is it producing better returns for clients than other formats or channels like display or search or social? Absolutely. And I think that's something that investors are not aware of. And this is kind of inside baseball within ad tech right now. When the marketers that are seeing it for the last 15 years, there's been this term called attribution, which is whoever showed the last ad gets credit for the sale. That has directed nearly all of marketers' spend. Now what everyone's realizing is that after years and years of cutting the TV ad because I can't measure it and giving more money to a branded search term on Google because I can measure it and someone typed in my Ford F-150, clicked on it, went to the website and built and priced the vehicle and requested a quote. Well, they keep pumping more and more. They cut the TV ad. They keep pumping more and more money into Google. They realize everybody who's hearing this realizes, "Oh, yeah, someone sees a TV ad, they go to Google for navigational purposes, types in Ford F-150, then gets directed to the website." Everyone understands that. But in kind of digital advertising, what's been happening is the money's just been shifted to the attribution model. What's happening now is that marketers are realizing, being in streaming TV, so in CTV, I can measure. It's addressable now. So I can measure, "Did you see an ad?" Yes. "Did you go to Google and type in that branded search?" Oh, if I cut the TV ad, then less people will go and type in search. Cut money from search, pump more money into CTV. We're seeing that. We see money coming out. And this is what I'm saying is the inside baseball. We believe that search spending is way over index and is going to decrease over the midterm. And we also think that about social media advertising. So we think that we're seeing it with clients right now that it is cannibalizing some of those channels because they see the incrementality factor of CTV. Everyone expects if I spend another dollar in advertising, I get yet another sale. Or a new customer. Right. You don't get the same search. You shouldn't get the same sale. Otherwise, that's wasted ads. That's what Google searches. And it's a lot of what is in social media. The highest incrementality factor of any channel or any format out there is CTV. So I believe that will continue. And I would say that, again, there's growth coming to CTV from all angles, shift away from traditional and from other channels. And it's still so early in CTV. I don't think anyone recognizes how big the growth can be. Yeah. I mean, if you think about where we're at in CTV, live sports is really just coming online. This is billions of ad impressions that were in linear that are now gonna be available for us to bid and buy. So the market is really just exploding. And to put in perspective why sports is so critical, of the top 100 shows, in 2023, 94 of them were the NFL. So, I mean, it really is all about sports when it comes to live TV. Very few companies have the infrastructure. Really, it's only The Trade Desk and Viant that have the infrastructure and capacity to bid and buy in live sports. Yeah. And I think my understanding was that it's like somewhere around in the 30% range is what live TV represents as a part of advertising. It is. Okay, of your viewership. I guess as we think about those ad budgets shifting more from linear to CTV here, like, what role will programmatic play here? And like, I guess, what should we be on the lookout here over the next year for what's gonna unlock this? Yeah. It's all programmatic. I think the IAB released a study that 90% of ad buying in connected television is programmatic. So the programmatic advertising. Just like when the NASDAQ showed up and electronic trading showed up, it took away the paper-based trading of the individuals on the NYSE floor. That electronification of the ad buying process, that's what programmatic advertising is. It's already eaten the industry. So we're at 90% in TV. We never see that going back. It provides flexibility for advertisers, and it provides a unique way for content owners to sell this inventory without having to hire a thousand-person sales force. It's very, very cost-effective to enable this electronic buying. And I would say in live sports, we're so excited about it because the returns are crazy. Like, the results when you buy live sports are through the roof. Part of it has to do with the engagement of live sports. You know, people are glued to the TV more so than, say, news or, you know, some drama that you hit on on demand. That's one. I would just think for the content owners, they see it as a huge revenue boost. Everybody realizes that, you know, sometimes games go into overtime or there's an injury and then there's an unscheduled ad break. I won't get into the infrastructure of delivering this and making sure that there's no such thing as you can't sit there and buffer a live sports stream game waiting for an ad. All this stuff is called ahead of time, a few, you know, maybe a minute or two ahead of time. In some cases, it will be live. But to run an auction and to know which household that is and then bid, "What price are you willing to pay?" and have that ad show up in a few milliseconds, that takes a lot of infrastructure. But we were willing to do the investment because our early tests when we first ran it a few years ago was these results are big. So we want to bring our customers to live sports. And many of our customers have never bought live sports. Many. I think, NBC stated or Peacock, they recently stated an industry event that we brought something like 1,200 advertisers to the Olympics. And it used to be a $20 million-$25 million minimum investment to get on the Olympics. And we put over 1,000 customers on the Olympics. Clearly, they didn't spend 20-some million dollars to pop. But they found households that they wanted that were relevant to them. They wanted to show their ads there, and they got great returns. So that was kinda like us wetting the palate of a lot of our clients, was on the Olympics. And in 2025, we think there's gonna be a lot of spend going there. Got it. You mentioned maybe two minutes ago kind of CTV is very early on. And like, one of the broader views or longer-term ideas around CTV is this is moving towards direct response. You said it's fairly, very early days in CTV. I would think that that would kind of fit into that bucket here. But as we think about addressing that direct response opportunity, where would you kind of position that in your own words? And kinda should we be thinking about potential unlocks here and, and as we move into 2025? Yeah. I mean, I don't know if I would hate separating so much brand versus direct response because. They all. They're all, yeah, they all kinda blur. At the end of the day, nobody buys an ad and doesn't expect some sort of performance, but I do think, I definitely think, and we certainly see the benefit of this. Marketers are buying. It is early, so there is a decent amount of money that's shifting from linear that they're just buying ads. They're just buying ads. They know that it works, but they are contractually obligated to buy that ad, whether it's in linear or in streaming, so they have to because the consumer viewership is moving, so that's why we state that it's still early. But what we see that's coming and I think 2025's gonna be a big leap in continuing to do more targeting and more measurement in CTV. That in the end, I think that it will be the most measurable channel is my own personal belief. I believe it will be more measurable than search because it does sit a little bit upper funnel, but you're going to be able to measure who you reached, which household saw the ad, and then what the downstream effects of that are. A lot of people think that the most measurable medium is search, but it's just search is a tax. It's a navigational tax to get to your website or to get to your app. So I don't believe it's really that measurable. But I do think CTV will continue to get more and more measurable. And our investment in acquiring IRIS.TV is right alongside that. We 100% believe in being able there's gonna be a future where we are going to match the ad to the content of the whatever the content right before they go to ad break. We are going to match the ads so that they are contextually relevant, on the same mood, the same sentiment. We are gonna make ads feel almost synonymous with content. And that's gonna be a huge boost to campaign performance. Got it. I wanna talk about macro here, as we're starting to wind down in the last couple minutes. Our checks so far have been directionally relatively positive, I would say. And just curious, as you look at your visibility here, like, what have you seen through November and just kind of how does where you sit today compare to last year? And how is that visibility as you look out into 2025 compared to this point last year? Yeah. I mean, Q3 last year was good. Q4 last year was good. I would say, you know, so far, it's been a strong quarter. It's a healthy environment. More and more advertisers are buying more and more digital advertising. And usually at a macro level, that's the only thing that derails it. It's like the economy goes into recession. If interest rates go up, that's where you'll see pullbacks in ad spend. But we're not seeing that at all. October, November have both been strong. It seems to be generally healthy, and nothing that I see that provides any risk. Yeah. I think if you look at. It's pretty rough. We're at 21% contribution ex-TAC growth in third quarter. If you look at the midpoint of our guide, it's 22. So it's accelerating. We're on pace for that. If you look at our EBITDA margins expanding 31%-32% in the fourth quarter or so. So we feel great about it. The market's actually all year has been really strong, and usually we have a saying that's called the tale of two halves. Sometimes you have a strong first half. It's like you go to Cannes in June and July, and the sentiment might change. You could tell when you're on the ground meeting with clients. But didn't see that at all. It was, I mean, Cannes was back this year big time. I mean, people were out in full force. And there was a lot of bullishness, I would say, out of marketers and agencies. And I think it's gonna continue. We're really looking forward to 2025. We think 2025's gonna be strong. Yeah. Our theme heading into 2025 is, "Gentlemen, start your engine. Love it. Let's bring back IRIS.TV though. Yeah, just how should we be thinking about the IRIS_ID and, like, what that brings as far as incrementality to that Household ID? And, like, when could this potentially be translating towards that accelerating budget growth? Yeah. We see IRIS. We've got to integrate. We are integrated into the DSP. But what IRIS did a good job and what it. Let's first talk about what it is. They provide a Content ID. In the CTV space, you're there's a law called the Video Privacy Act where you're not allowed to know what someone's watching. It was from, like, the '80s. Someone rented a video at a video store, and it got released. So it's a gray area, but there's litigation going on. The general theme is no one is passing you the show. The way what IRIS did, but obviously advertisers are very interested to know which show is my ad showing up in. IRIS provides something called a Content ID. It's not the show name, but it's a number that represents season one, episode one of Yellowstone. That's one, two, three. And so when that comes through the bid stream, advertisers are able to buy this anonymous number, but it's representative of a show. And you'll know things about it. It's a Western. It has Kevin Costner. It takes place in Montana. You don't know it's Yellowstone, but you know a lot about the content. So this IRIS_ ID is a content ID that comes through the bid stream to make everything regulatory compliant. So it's very, very friendly there. They have no competition. The competition of IRIS _ID is the publisher like Paramount passing you genre would be the next best thing. The problem with that is the genre groupings of Paramount are different than the genre groupings of Disney that are different than HBO Max, etc., etc. So from a buyer's perspective, IRIS _ID enables a consistent calculation that this is about fly fishing. And if you buy that video, it's gonna be consistent across all the apps that a marketer has. So when we think about what IRIS is, the content ID, it's information about the content that can be targeted for advertising. What Household ID is information about the household and who they are. And so when you know who they are and what they're watching, we now have the best targeting in CTV, better than The Trade Desk, better than Yahoo DSP, better than DV360, that they offer there too. So it's a very unique setup. We're scaling that ID. So IRIS did a great job getting all the TV manufacturers, Samsung, LG, Vizio, Roku, etc. They were more on the manufacturers. The content owners, they had some of the smaller ones like AMC. They do have Warner Bros. Discovery, I believe. We need to work on scaling the ID across the other major partners out there. Those are our partners in the Direct Access program. We feel very good that our partners will carry that ID and send it back to us in the bid stream. We see IRIS having more of a financial contribution in the second half of 2025. Got it. And I think I asked the same question last year to wrap up. But, where are you most excited? Where are we gonna be or what are we gonna be talking about on stage next year? Artificial intelligence and CTV. It's just these two tailwinds. AI creates so much productivity and efficiency for humans in operating their job. It's not gonna be fully autonomous in 2025 where it's making every decision. But as a tool for humans to use, it's gonna create huge boosts to productivity. I think this is gonna be across most companies across every industry. We've already seen the success with AI Bidding, the 90% of customers adopting it in 12 months effectively. We've never seen an adoption of any product that we've rolled out. So I think as we roll out AI measurement and then moving to decisioning, which is towards that autonomy, I don't know if we'll get there fully in 2025, but AI is gonna continue to drive innovation and connected television with live sports. What are you seeing with Netflix? They've opened up programmatic advertising. They're moving into live sports. That's a consistent theme that we see across every major content owner, which bodes well for us representing the buyers of those ads. We make a fee as if there's more supply, that's gonna drive our revenue. Anything else? I think, just on Tim's point on AI, the appetite is huge. And I think the appetite's huge 'cause there's a lot of talk about AI. There's very little show. A lot of people saying the words AI, but let's see it. Our marketers using it. And I think that's why we've gotten such a strong response. When we launched that Viant AI video, over 150,000 people watched that video of an ad tech B2B product launch in the first three days. Over 500 people requested early access to it. That's more than our customer base. So you see the appetite. And he said this earlier, yeah, there's a lot of appetite for it, but it's varied all over in the market. It's not just one customer segment. But without a doubt, it is allowing us to move up market with larger customers, bigger partnerships. But I think as you see us have success on that in 2025, that's really gonna open up 2026, which is then going to go after who advertises in social and in search. These e-commerce brands that stick to one channel only, that's a huge opportunity for the open internet that we are gonna exploit with AI. We have to make DSPs and programmatic advertising very easily accessible to people who buy, let's say, on Meta or TikTok. A 12-year-old can buy on Meta or TikTok. They can't through these DSPs. But our investments in AI are gonna allow them to do it. We're gonna make it that easy. So it's gonna expand our TAM. It'll probably take till 2026, but that's definitely gonna happen. All the big advertisers on Meta would love to buy connected television. If you think of what Meta's strengths are, it's a logged-in user base, big advantage for them that's driven their business. But it's on the world's worst content. And that's what social media really is. We used to call it user-generated content. It's low-quality content. What you get in connected television is the same logged-in user base across all these on top of the world's most premium content like the NFL. And that is what I would leave with investors in the audience. And that's what marketers actually want is the logged-in user base on the world's most premium content because the effectiveness of the combination of those two is what's driving that flywheel of ad spend. Got it. Well, let's leave it there. Chris, Tim, really appreciate the time. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us.