Conference Transcript - DSP 2026-05-13

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

Good afternoon. I'm Laura Martin. I'm the Senior Media and Internet Analyst here at Needham, and I am here to welcome Tim and Chris Vanderhoek, who are the CEO and CFO of COO of Viant, respectively. Tim is the co-founder and CEO, and Chris is the co-founder and COO of Viant Technology, ticker symbol DSP, where they have built the second largest independent DSP after Trade Desk. Their household ID and recent acquisition of Iris ID and T-Vision add unique data assets, which they are driving market share gains from competitors. Before Viant, they co-founded the streaming service Sumo, which was ultimately acquired by Comcast, and they made the high-profile acquisition of MySpace from Fox in 2011 for just $35 million, after Fox had originally bought it six years before that at $580 million.

Operator

Welcome, you guys.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

So nice to have you here. We are shrewd businessmen.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

You are shrewd businessmen. You always have been.

Chris Vanderhook, COO

Somehow MySpace is still in our bio.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

I know, but I really like that statistic that you buy for $35 what Fox buys for $600.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

And we still lost money.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

But you didn't lose near as much as Fox. That's true. I mean, everything's relative in the end, right? So let's start with recent earnings and go from there. And I'm going to try to find questions that pit you against each other, which I've never been successful doing. But the first one I want to start with is leadership, because you guys are really different kind of leaders, it seems to me. And I want to start with generative AI is changing. It's transformational. So my question is, what are the different things in leadership you have to do during a transformational technology change that maybe weren't relevant three or four years ago when things were more just execution excellence?

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

Yeah, I don't know if it's how we operate, which is I'll just talk how we operate. We get into the weeds, so we're a part of the team that's developing it. We understand it from the ground up because we want to be able to speak to it at a very granular level because we're always out talking to customers, talking to investors, and we want to make sure we know what we're talking about. So even if I look at some of the newer things that happen, like Vian AI, which we released two years ago, that prototype was built by myself after the engineering team said it's not possible. The PM said it's not possible. I basically got pissed off and built it myself and then delivered the working prototype to them. And I think that's the difference of a founder-led business versus that of the managerial class, some of the bigger companies. The founders have ultimate optimism. And, you know, I don't really care about optimism. I just want to get the job done. So for me, I like to dive in there and actually see if it's possible for myself. And if I hit a wall, well, I can't blame anybody else.

Chris Vanderhook, COO

Chris, what about you? I think just to tag on to the other part of Tim's story there, we had, when we went public, we had this vision, a product vision of autonomous advertising, which was powered by artificial intelligence this is pre open AI chat GPT all that right so we had a lab and we had a guy who ran that lab and he was an applied scientist and what we've came to figure out over three years was I don't know what he applied any of the science to because we weren't getting any product out it was more research and it was really that frustration that and I think just as founders who run businesses, you typically find the good ones are, to Tim's point, getting into the weeds. And we needed, we needed to launch, we felt that we needed to be first. We wanted to be first. I mean, that's what precipitates, you know, change in an organization. And that's why Tim, over a vacation, over a week, basically spent his vacation doing that. But on the other side of the coin, just as you run a company, what we look what we do constantly we're paranoid all the time and so we look around corners and we want to know where the boogeyman is we want to know what could be lurking and so we're we sit in the RTB infrastructure we're in programmatic RTB the real-time bidding infrastructure and so we look at what could be possible threats but oftentimes those threats become opportunities and so when you look you know AI only recently in the last few months have we had this AI apocalypse but it's something that we've been looking at and that we think it's an opportunity but at the same time and what

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

we don't want to do although we don't think it's going to be in mass in the next year or two we do want to be prepared for that we want to be able we want to be able to enable our clients and just getting back to the leadership question so like three days ago I just told my assistant cancel all my standing one-on-one meetings with all the department heads I don't care about that anymore I want to meet with these five people next week and next Friday when I meet with you I'll tell you the next five meetings I want in the next week because I think as a founder you're addressing the biggest problems in the company and you need to give the business context to the people working on the hardest problems and then you need to see it through and make sure that things get done versus before just the the general delegation of tasks I just don't see that working in the future. So if I have an IR problem, I'm meeting with Nick, the head of my IR, all week long, solving the questions that he's getting asked, understanding how to frame it on what the opportunity is versus the risk, all of these types of things. The AI story I gave you, it was pure product and engineering at that point with the data team. So to me, I just view it as what's the biggest problem? What's the biggest need for the business? And we just attack it because the business can't move forward until you solve that problem, and then you're able to actually move the business forward.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

So one of the big controversies that's erupted on this stage today, because you guys are, I think, the 10th ad tech CEO team I've had on this stage, is do you think that generative AI agents will be built on new rails or on the programmatic rails?

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

The answer is both. It's on the programmatic rails in the near term. I think in the long term, it's on the agentic rails. The question is timing. In zero to three years, very low probability that it's on ADCP, the new agentic rail, MCP, that's on the new rails. There's a founder who called it ADCP now. I shouldn't have said that, but yes. MCP as a way to communicate, absolutely. The question is zero to three years, low probability, three to five years, mid probability, five years plus, high probability.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

It might take 20.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

Correct. Because there's so much money, and there's so much at if you fuck this up absolutely but you know everyone thinks uh talks about the hallucinations a lot we've got hallucinations basically solved internally because i think most people think of uh ai like it's uh it can hallucinate a lot of times you when you make a statement into chat gpt it's unclear what you were saying so when we view ai we're building robots that do the same thing over and over and over and over again that's the way that you actually do it and then those robots become very good at solving the errors. So, you know, I think we're deep in the weeds of it. Vyan.ai is an agentic platform internally, but it's riding the RTB rails today. We fully plan that it will switch to a different rail at some point in the future, but it's just a question of time on when that is, but we'll be ready for it, no problem.

Chris Vanderhook, COO

And I can give you a good example where we've experienced this in the past. In 2009, 2010, Tim and I became obsessed with we're watching online video happen and we wanted to look to the future and we were obsessed with a television will eventually be internet connected and and content will be streamed not delivered over copper into your house and at that time we were going around all these what they were these industry shows for broadcasters and this technology was out there called IPTV that's what it was called we trial that we try we literally tried to hostile takeover bid a private company called move networks that was early in the space which has become sling yes and we started we weren't successful in that acquisition but we immediately started building zumo and this was in late 2010 and we believed that that was it was a sure thing it was going to happen and it was going to happen in the next two to three years and we built zumo we burned so much capital and we had installations with all the big television in oems we were getting our software installed on chipsets i mean we were so early it didn't hit until 2020 10 years later and we burned an insane amount of capital i got it back when you sold it to comcast we did but you know what we were first we were first it should have never sold yeah had we not done that we would have maintained control had we maintained control

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

zumo would be an independently publicly traded company in the billions it's worth two billion today, last valuation. But that's what happens when you're a founder. If you miss on the timing, then you've got to raise more capital, you lose control, then you have an idiot making the decision. And even when you were right, you were wrong. Yeah. So you can still be right, but you're still wrong.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

Well, it's like Wall Street on linear TV. We were right about linear TV. It's just going to take 30 years, not 10. And it might take 50, because people might have to die. But I mean, if you're too early, it's just as bad as being wrong if you're getting paid. It's the same.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

Same outcome.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

Same outcome. So let's talk about one of the things I wanted to ask just on this last thing on leadership. One of the most interesting things that's being said is that maybe we need to get rid of functional organizations, no more marketing, no more product, no more engineering, that what we need are these SWOT teams where you put teams of five people or ten people from all different areas, and you say, this is your deliverable. In six months, I want you to do this because we're getting requested by clients. And if you don't, you all lose your jobs. And if you do, you get to get the next project, which would destroy... And it's a big idea because it would destroy traditional architectures. And if you're flexible like you guys, you could implement that. Or a startup would start like that. They would never have functional designations. But big companies would be doomed because they can't get rid of the silos. Do you have an opinion on that?

Chris Vanderhook, COO

Why don't you start? I think it's what I think we try to put in practice almost every day. Not formally, per se, where we say there's no more marketing, there's no more engineering. They certainly are there. But every time, I mean, we have our top priorities, and that's basically what we do. Because let's say that you're going to build a new product, okay? I'll use our outcomes product that we launched at CES as an example. To successfully launch that, you can't just have a product manager. Why don't you tell them what it is first so they know what you're working for? our first fully autonomous advertising product, but it's for performance-based marketing clients. And it basically is fully automated. They give us four pieces of info, the advertiser name, the budget, what your goal is, you want sales, and what's the flight dates of the campaign. From there, the AI runs.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

They give you the creative, presumably.

Chris Vanderhook, COO

And they give us the creative. From there, the AI runs the entire campaign. It picks the media plan, auto-generates it. It decides how much budget it's going to allocate. It is in charge of all the optimization. It constantly regenerates new sites, new apps. It runs the measurement. It's incredible. However, to get this product, traditionally, a product manager would scope it out. They'd write a PRD for it. They'd give it to the engineer. They'd build it. And then they just expect that these things come out perfect. They don't. So you have to get people from the customer. You've got to get customer feedback on what kind of guardrails does this need. It needs brand safety. They need transparency. and see, okay, great. You have to bring in the product marketing team as well, because the minute we launch this, we need salespeople ready to go. You have to bring in sales enablement and training to learn how the product works so they can help train the salespeople. So that is kind of what you're talking about, these SWAT teams. Tim and I also just, we just started this, you know, kind of along the lines, we don't want these one-on-ones, but what we do is a stand-up call. It's the most expensive call in our company because because there's probably about 20, 25 people on this call.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

Isn't it just on internet protocol Zoom? It is.

Chris Vanderhook, COO

It's still an hour of 30 people's time.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

I see. It's expensive.

Chris Vanderhook, COO

From the labor. And every week, those topics can vary, but they're our top priorities. And not everybody talks, and they know.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

Is it presentation or Q&A?

Chris Vanderhook, COO

No, it's just us. It's we run it. We run it.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

We drill people with questions. What's the problem? I ask the next person. And then we play judge and jury as well. Nope, this is the right answer.

Chris Vanderhook, COO

And that's what we're trying to do is move at a pace that's very fast, break down silos, something's stuck again, second week in a row. What's the limiting factor? What's the issue? We have all the, I shouldn't say all, but we have a lot of context across the organization. And that person who might be an engineer or a product manager or a salesperson maybe doesn't have all the context. So we can provide that. That has proved very valuable. It moves things quickly through the org. But it goes back to the original point that Tim said. We don't believe in what we call the managerial class of the CEO. Yeah, you just preside over these meetings.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

If you went to Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, but you don't have the domain expertise, you are worthless. And that was a bill of goods that got sold to everybody, but it turned out not to be true. And so you just have an expensive college bill you've got to pay back.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

I think I would probably disagree with you on that.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

And by the way, let me just also bring up, just to answer the question, the absolute answer is yes. SWAT teams with heavy domain expertise are the future. If you just look at Stanford Engineering School, big tech used to suck all the talent that came out of all these schools, just looking at Stanford number one. Okay, they used to hire 50% of kids coming out of that school. It's down to 7%. Why? Because they don't have domain expertise. Therefore, you're not valuable in business today because AI has the coding expertise. It can help you get these things done. So to me, I think what you're going to see by big tech is many people are going to lose their jobs unless you are absolutely critical with domain expertise.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

You have good human judgment or you can interact with people because you're still going to have to manage people.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

Yep. Relationships are still important. Yeah.

Operator

Okay.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

Very interesting. Okay. So let's go to the, let's go to the quarter, which was excellent. But just to recap, but you should probably, I should let you do it because 18% revenue growth guiding to 23% revenue growth compared to Trade Desk at 12% guiding to eight. And almost every other today, Nexen came out and I think theirs was highest under yours, which was 13% revenue growth and guiding to higher. But the point is like you guys are like double. Okay, 50% higher than the rest of industry and accelerating as you get, you said every quarter will accelerate. So talk about what's driving that really formidable growth that the rest of the industry, because we cover 10 of these, nobody's close to you guys. And what's driving that and why does that continue?

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

It's just because we have the best product, you know, it's not like, you know, in the end, yeah, there's certain portions that are execution, but I think advertisers are very smart, there's lots of data, they measure everything, so ultimately it comes down to who has the best product in connected television, the most thing I'm most proud about, those are great stats and we're really proud of it. We didn't mention that EBITDA was up 81%. We should. Cash flow was up quite a bit as well. So from a management perspective, we're doing a great job. But we flat out have the best DSP, independent, buy-side only, and we think that's the right way. Others will disagree. But ultimately, our growth rate in CTV was up 40% for the third year in a row. So it's like, how many years can you put up before investors figure it out? Our stock is down today, so apparently another year. We'll wait until next year. So I think when it comes down to it is we just flat out have the best product in CTV. We think that is where the decision is made. We have Iris, which gives you content-level intelligence. It's exclusive data. We just did the acquisition of T-Vision, which customers are about to get the benefit of that. And so now a customer can target at the show level. We get the lowest price because we have the best bidding algorithm that's out there. AI Bidding has 90% adoption. It was the fastest-growing adopted product that we ever released. And now with T-Vision, we now have the data from a U.S.-based panel feeding us the data before the ad break hits.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

About attention.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

Around not just attention, but reach. What's the co-viewing, the number of people in the room watching this content? What's the demographics of those that are in there? And so when we take – and are there eyes on the screen or are they looking at the phone? That's attention. So I think when you think about the data that we have before the ad break hits, now we're able to buy the ad way more effectively than any competitor, and then single-handedly the product that's needed. Today, when an advertiser buys, they buy from Google Direct for YouTube, Prime Video Direct from Amazon, they buy linear TV from all the television networks, and it's measured by Nielsen. YouTube measures themselves, Prime Video measures themselves, and then the open internet provides an actual statistic. So you have four different measurement systems that are measuring. So for the first time, T-Vision puts all four of those, and we measure all of them as an independent provider. So now you can understand linear, NBC provided value number one, Peacock might have been low, YouTube we see over and over, it's not as high as everyone thinks, and Prime Video, depending on when you bought. So having unified measurement, which is there is no alternative product to it. That is what is the number one need for marketers today. And I think as we go forward, our revenue in CTV will continue to accelerate. The overall metrics of the business will continue to accelerate. But it's really due to that. It's just the best product. And over time, advertisers figure it out. And I think investors will figure it out too.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

And why wouldn't you sell, if that T-Vision really does, that's such a critical need in the measurement space to put walled gardens versus the open internet.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

Why wouldn't you sell that, productize it to sell it separately also as a measurement product maybe other DSPs can't integrate it but we do sell it advertisers by the measurement the content owners by the measurement but when it comes to media activation that's exclusive to our DSP so yeah there's we are we are garnering revenue across the board all of our competitors would like to have it some of them about it as of last month they could have and some of them licensed the data and so we chose to acquire it and there's contracts out that we're gonna let expire and we will pull that data back in to be exclusive to our DSP. Now, why do we want to do that? Nielsen is the currency in linear TV. We're not interested in being a currency from measurement because the old way was like measuring potential reach. We'll just say that's what Nielsen does a good job at. But when it comes down to being the currency today, this is the RTB transaction. I'm about to buy an ad from Peacock. What's the price of this ad? And so we think by putting it into a DSP, that's the best way to understand the value of one ad impression versus another.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

And you have this thing called CPM adjusted, no. Attention adjusted CPM. That's what it is, attention adjusted. So if there's three people sitting in the room, you can pay a little more and win the bid because you're reaching three people, not one person. Or if somebody's not paying attention, you're bidding half as much because they're not paying attention anyway.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

It's a low impact CPM. And just to add to that, the only people that have that information are the advertisers that work with Viant. They're the only ones who have the information ahead of time. Because we represent the advertiser. We want them to have the strategic advantage.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

Because when you sell it to third parties, it can't be ahead of the activation.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

If I was selling it to Peacock, they're going to raise the price. Do you see what I mean?

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

No, I don't see what you're saying.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

If Peacock was aware there are three females that are 18 to 54, they would raise the price of the CPM for that one ad impression.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

So how does the product that you're selling to third parties differ from what you're using for activation?

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

It's just not in real time.

Chris Vanderhook, COO

It'll tell you, let's say for the month, Peacock had 60% attention. It had 1.4 people on average watching. But really, marketers, that's good to know when you're media planning. And you might commit a certain amount of budget, let's say, to NBCU, Peacock. But really what you want to do is they have, you know, Peacock has 5,000 different titles in CTV underneath their umbrella. every show behaves differently right and second by second it's different right so the marketer wants to have the advantage of the information to know this impression right here before this ad pod before the javelin throw in the Olympics what is the co-viewership how many people are in the room how many of them are actually paying attention second by second and if it has really high attention signals you might bid up might bid a little more and if it has low, you might bid less or not at all. The point of advertising is to grab the attention of the consumer so that they're watching, so they watch for as long of your 30 seconds as you have them. You have to gain the attention of the actual consumer. And then persuade them. Yes.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

And do you guys feel like this pushes you into content? Because content is a really big driver to whether people sit in the room and watch the full ad.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

I mean, we license the data to the content owners, and it's Netflix, it's Prime Video.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

I was thinking the ad.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

The ad content, not the programming content. Absolutely. That's what's on the product pipeline. And so we've shut off Vying AI, which does autonomous media planning. It implements it. It executes the campaign. It optimizes after reading the reports. Making the ad is the next critical component. And so I've listened to John Rant of Omnicom, and he mentioned it's all about media. And I think where the profits currently are is media, but I think you're going to see creative and media come back together. And the best example I can give you is if I know I'm going to show a 30-second spot on the Kardashians on Friday night, why wouldn't I make a custom 30-second ad for that? And now with Gen AI, you have the ability to make that ad for $1,000, whereas before TV ad production cost a million dollars for 10 spots. But they're all basically the same, slightly different. So if I know where the ad is going to be placed ahead of time, I can actually make a custom creative. And when you put the creative matching the content, the performance, the attention, the persuadability, and ultimately the buy rate, the conversion rate into sales, skyrockets. And that's where advertising is going to have a renaissance and where Gen AI plays a big role.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

Because what I was thinking on Product Roadmap is since you can tell ahead of time, you can A, B test five ads that you create. Like, let's say they deliver you one piece of creative that they've approved. You can do five things, turning the watch over. You can turn it into blues and then do A-B testing over the first five ad blocks and then say, okay, the one that works best is the red one that doesn't move and serve that one the rest of the time. It feels like that's a natural place for you guys to go, given that you can do these very fine distinctions about what's holding customer attention versus what's getting people to look at their phone.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

Yeah, and what Gen.AI gives you the ability right now, a marketer like Molson Coors, one of our customers, they only have 10 spots for Coors Light. Why? Because the ad production shoot is a million plus dollars. So they can't go do another shoot that the longevity, it takes forever, the time frame. So now you can start with a baseline ad. Let's say it has 60% attention and the goal is improvement. 60 to 65, 65 to 70. So that way the working media dollars are actually working harder and you're leveraging creative as another lever to do that.

Chris Vanderhook, COO

And if you look at a trend over in the social space, if you look at Meta, they do all of their Advantage Plus system when those e-commerce marketers come in. They control all the targeting and the media optimization. Meta controls all of that. But what is the advertiser responsible for? Creative. And the trend in that for the last two years is more and more and more creative. They have to pump out so much creative. because what Meta needs is to be able to make, whatever you're watching on Instagram Reels, if you're looking at mine, I can't chip worth a damn right now in golf, and so I'm just watching short game chip stuff, and next thing you know, what am I getting? I'm getting an ad for a golf aid for chipping, and they have ads matched to micro categories of content. That shows you, and they need, some of these advertisers are pumping out hundreds of pieces of creative every month. Now, it's cheaper than television creative, but that is where the future is going. Molson Coors needs to be able to create hundreds or thousands of variations of creative to match the content. Is it NFL football? Cool. Make it a football-themed ad. Is it Kardashians? Make it women-themed. Whatever it is, you want to theme the creative so that it matches the content. To Tim's point, it grabs attention. every one percentage point that the marketer gets in attention, every increase, it's a 1% increase in awareness for their product, a 1% increase in ad recall. And what we need to do now is tie outcomes, the sales. What does that translate into sales?

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

But then you would have a different business model because wouldn't you take a percentage of the lift in the outcome and the percentage sales lift?

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

Or a commission on selling the product. We'll see where the business model goes to. But ultimately, if you have an advertising engine that moves product off the shelves, that's very valuable. Whatever the right business model is, it'll reveal itself to us.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

Okay, so you think you're moving. You think that this new T-vision with the attention actually helps you drive outcomes, which then maybe implies a different business model.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

I mean, over the long term, it implies a different business model. Today, as a percentage of the spend is the way that it operates today, that's a frictionless way to drive revenue. Obviously, we're public and we're worried about quarterly results, so throwing a brand new business model as a public company is harder. But certainly, if you're making the ads, you're automating the creation of the ad campaign, the optimization of the campaign in a self-reinforcing loop, that is very valuable. And I think with the acquisition of T-Vision, our focus on strategic proprietary data that's valuable that we've described, we're transforming from what was a once media execution platform like the Trade Desk or DB360 into an advertising intelligence company. And that's where I see our transition moving, one that offers proprietary data that doesn't exist anywhere else, independent measurement, and then media execution, all in a self-reinforcing loop. To me, that's an advertising intelligence company, and that's our future.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

So one of the things that a lot of DSPs have done is layer in data, like 300 data providers when you're making audience segments. So are you now in channel conflict with those because you have these two proprietary data assets, so you lose all the revenue you were making from those 300 third-party?

Chris Vanderhook, COO

No, I mean, take a look at Iris. It's a one-of-one solution. They're the only ones that went out and did the dirty work and heavy lifting to go out to the content owners, do all the integration with 1,900 different content management systems, gain the trust of the content owners to be able to send all their video files of every show and episode that they have, let them index it, run all the computer vision, what's this video about, and then pass it through the bid stream. There is no competitor to it, and we acquired it.

Operator

So no channel conflict.

Chris Vanderhook, COO

No channel conflict. There's no other content identifier in the bid stream. It's only iRex.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

There's no other T-Vision, U.S.-based panel. There's Nielsen, but it's a people meter, 1989 technology. We have a camera that's passive, that does facial recognition, and no one does anything, and it's just automated. So these are one-for-one assets that we look for. That's what we're looking for in M&A. To understand that Tim Vanderhoek's email is blank, blank, blank at gmail.com. I don't want to do it on video.

Chris Vanderhook, COO

I'm going to get spam. We get enough spam.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

So just to know someone's email address, that's commodity data. There's lots of third-party commodity data. most of it is stale. People know what car I drive, that I drive a Tesla. You can get that data from 100 different providers. So in the end, does that data have value? It has some value versus not knowing it. But when there's 10 providers with the data, ultimately it gets commoditized. And that's most of the data that's out there today. There is very valuable data assets out there, very few.

Chris Vanderhook, COO

But as part of our strategy, when we go and pitch a marketer and And they're like, hey, I'm using another DSP already. The only reason why I would switch is if you have unique data that's exclusive to you or you represent content that I can't get anywhere else. Which one of those two are you? And tell me. And for years, it was okay to compete in the space because you could win two out of ten marketers. But if you want someone to switch, you have to have something exclusive to you that they want.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

That's very valuable. so one of the things that's come up on this stage a lot over the last couple days is there's sort of a new entrance on DSPs using agentic buying platforms so there's just like one of the reasons the stocks are under pressure I think on the DSP side is we're not seeing this on the SSP side because you've got to be talking you've got to get a guy to adopt your agents but on the DSP side it's cheaper to enter the market now and then just be a buyer so sort of talk to that competitive threat about how agentic how agentic systems make the entry into your competitive set of the sps like more it's more competitive yeah you know if you go to buy let's say 100 ads 99.9 percent of the time you would

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

buy the wrong ads if you used agentic and i think again it comes back to which users within peacock or within espn are you going to buy out of the hundred that are presented to you and answering the question why the agentic protocol exists today there's very little adoption but the technical capability is there in our business if that were to come and come to fruition we would lose no customers because our customers choose us because we have iris because we now have t-vision and because we have household id we can resolve back to we know this is chris vanderhook's household we know he's watching this show and we know you know he's likely in market for coors light He's in market for Coors Light.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

All the time, because now you have to drink Moulson.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

Post earnings, post earnings, you're always in market for Coors Light. So that's what I mean is, again, it all comes back to your value proposition is about exclusive data. It's not that we can bid and buy an impression. Because Agentic or RTB, everyone can already bid and buy an impression. Let's say it gets cheaper, great. Our operating costs drop and our EBITDA skyrockets. That's the real reason why we want Agentic to happen. And I hope the adoption happens faster. But no one's choosing us because we have the RTB protocol. There's 1,000 DSPs that are involved in the RTB protocol today. There might be 10,000 in the agentic protocol of tomorrow. What I mean by that is there's tons of competition for bidding and buying for ads. The advantage is which users should I buy, what price should I pay, and what's the estimated ROI to the advertising?

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

Okay, but let's go back. One of the things you said up front is we really believe that single-sided DSPs are the way to play. Well, you just said, and Wall Street agrees, that unique supply, either content or ad units that are unique, are actually preferenced, like they have pricing power. So just like unique data, which you guys now have bought, why wouldn't an acquisition of a proprietary content base becoming two-sided be actually on your roadmap of M&A?

Chris Vanderhook, COO

Well, I mean, let's see. I could buy YouTube. YouTube, you know, if you think about it, if I owned content, let's say that we turned MySpace ad-supported, which it's not ad-supported at all today, because we were tired of nasty articles being written about us. So we said, that's it. Take all the ads off. It's not worth it. It has to be large enough for it to draw a large marketer, right? So if you bought some news publication.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

We call it, is your content of high enough quality or reach that you're a must-buy?

Chris Vanderhook, COO

There's very few must-buys. let's say there's 10 or less that are out there yeah so i that's not that's not in our thinking and it's also not in our thinking because it would it would it would just change the thesis of the company if i become a content owner i'm in my business model completely switches if you're the marketer it's not about doing what's best for you i need to fill that inventory you're maximizing and i that's my number one priority zumo our previous business that was we were on the sell side that that's what that business was you get you get a hundred ads that you can sell you must fill all 100 otherwise your margin is less so you fill it whether it's good for the advertiser or not and this is why as a buyer of ads you can't trust a seller to actually deliver the ads for you we give it they're going to give you the worst ads yeah we gave a talk at zumo once and we had one slide and it said cpm times fill rate equals your business and we were telling the team like get religion on this we have to fill more ads so if you're a content owner that's your business model it's not bad we're not saying it's evil it's just that you can't actually it's a conflict the marketer because my incentives are conflicted so we don't want to we don't want to do that I think that the proprietary beta data piece is all angled towards when we go and talk to a marketer I'm want to figure out a way to grow your business and I would Let's say we're getting RFP'd a lot right now. The ones where we are most- RFP, just fine. Oh, RFP, request for proposal.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

New customers, sales pipeline, baby.

Chris Vanderhook, COO

Like backlog. The lifeblood of all business, new customers. The ones that we feel that we have the best chance where we feel we're in the driver's seat, and it's many of them. We look at the corporate earnings of that company, and if they're lagging, the top 10 companies in the S&P 500, we know how they spend their money in marketing. They're predominantly giving it to the sell side, Google, Meta, Amazon. They're spending 60 plus percent of their budget with these guys. We know that we can come in with the information and insights and show them how they can actually spend more efficiently. And it'd be like getting, when you work with us, it's like getting another 20 or 30% bump in ad spend from your CMO or your CFO because not only are we more efficient, but we're going to put those dollars to work much harder. We want to grow their business. Whether that was Molson Coors or Whoop or any of the other ones that we've announced, that is our pitch when we walk in the door.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

I would just put it differently as well. The total addressable market for the buy side is the entire advertising industry. The total addressable market, if you're on the sell side, let's say I'm an SSP or a content owner, is a percentage of those budgets. That's true. Okay, so that's the way I look at it. I can help Molson Coors spend their entire ad budget. But if I was Prime Video, let's just say, in a great streaming app, you're still going to get a percentage of the share of wallet. YouTube will get a percentage of the share of wallet. So I view the TAM, when you're on the buy side, as the total ad industry, versus if you're on the sell side, it's a percentage of the ad industry, depending on your size and scale.

Chris Vanderhook, COO

And I wanted one other point. If I'm Amazon and I have the Amazon DSP, what do I think that their future is? If you want to buy Prime Video and you can only buy it through the Amazon DSP, great, that's what's going to get it. YouTube, the only way to buy it is through DV360, great. They're a walled garden, that's fine. They will get their sliver. But for us, we want to be able to sit on top of much of the spend as possible to help the marketer actually grow their business, not just in a small sector.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

All right, I get it. Okay, questions?

Chris Vanderhook, COO

We have about five minutes left. any questions for this Chris yeah it's the panel in the US is 5,000 it's in the US only 5,000 households to come and it's about 14,000 people within those households to compare that to Nielsen Nielsen's people meter is between 10 and 12,000 households we are a nationally representative sample Nielsen is both national and local so they're in 210 DMAs but they have announced their retreating from 130 DMAs. They're not going to support. So you're going to see their panel size shrink. It's too expensive. What's great about the T-Vision panel, it's a much lower cost to operate the panel. Neil sends out a whole team. It takes them three days to interview you and set you up. They have lab coats. It's ridiculous. They literally wear lab coats.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

And they have high churn.

Chris Vanderhook, COO

Yes, very high churn. This is a passive panel. We send a box into the household. They plug it into a power source. It does the ACR of what's on the screen. And then there's a camera that you mount on top of your TV, plug it into a power source. You register on the app. Everyone in the household, they take a picture of everyone.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

It takes three minutes to set up. I have it. I'm a panelist now. You have a box the size of a MacBook Mini. The camera plugs into the box. You give the QR code because you pre-registered for the panel, and then you're up and running. And so you don't have to push buttons. You don't do anything our churn rate is very very low of people leaving the panel and there's you know that's as it as it stands today the excitement that we have of the R&D we're doing what we can provide advertisers with that panel and market is going to be exceptional it's so cheap why wouldn't you make it 50,000 like why wouldn't you ship these things out to anyone who yeah make it a really good point we have 5,000 households today and we are scaling that panel across every single dma you really just have to get to statistical significance and then there's no in in each market we are we're statistically significant for national buying so that's the and in 35 dmas yes out of the 220 yeah oh yeah from a national basis absolutely okay so and and let's talk about how we do it because t-vision had we not acquired iris we would never be able to bid and buy in real time. So T-Vision is measuring streaming apps, linear television networks, and shows. Iris is supplying that content ID, which is the show. And that's how we can model onto real time who's watching, how many people are watching, what's the attention, and bid and buy in the RTB stream. If we had not acquired Iris, we wouldn't be able to do this.

Chris Vanderhook, COO

If we had not acquired t vision we would not be able to do this so it was a very focused strategy of iris scale the iris system and now buy t vision and scale the t vision system so and although we're not interested in being in the currency business we do in effect believe that t vision is going to grow the iris carriage penetration penetration and market because we're going to be buying on it and And it goes that we see the data across the entire panel. Many of the broadcasters that are out there stand to gain because they have a lot of under-monetized content. They have a lot of content that we see the CPMs that they get for it. It's like, this stuff is really valuable. And you're getting $18 CPMs. You should be getting in the mid-20s. So whereas you look at YouTube and 30% of their content has zero people in the room. 30%. Why? Because it's a fire log burning puppy videos or white noise. But yet they got ads playing the whole time, and they're getting $40 billion a year.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

So yeah, I think YouTube has the most to lose because a lot of their inventory, let's just say low quality, but there's no one in the room on a third of their inventory. A huge chunk is playing at night. It's for their dog, so the dog doesn't have anxiety.

Chris Vanderhook, COO

That's it, Tim's house. He cares about that stuff.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

This is all by design as well. The walled gardens understand how media planning works. Media planning is, if I'm Molson Coors and I want to reach 21 to 54-year-olds, because that's legal age drinking in the target audience. They start with, give me a report on media planning on who reaches the most 21 to 54-year-olds. YouTube, by design, comes up. And so Google is the smartest company in the world. They understand how things work, and they rig the results for everything. So yes, they have the largest reach. However, when you actually go to who has the actual attentive reach when people are in the room and paying attention to the screen, the number one reach is not YouTube, it is Netflix. YouTube falls down quite a bit. And so there's going to be huge changes if we're able to drive adoption of the T-Vision data. Obviously, people have to believe the data. But when you have a camera running in the family room, the truth comes out. And so I think that's where you're going to see...

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

Maybe you have a bigger panel, it seems more.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

Absolutely, and we're scaling the panel. And that's what's so great with a modern panel, the cost to scale, very, very cheap.

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

Do they make money? Like, why does somebody agree to do this in their house?

Chris Vanderhook, COO

They do it for two reasons. Everyone says the number one reason. We interviewed all households. So the number one reason is money. They do get paid to be part of the panel. But increasingly, the upper income households, we're like, you don't need the money. Why do you do it? And it's because they believe that their viewership matters. T-Vision pumps out, they know that Netflix, Amazon, Disney, they license this data. And what they use it for is what shows are people actually paying attention to? And it helps them decide if they're going to renew a show, if they're going to cut it. It's sort of like, and they pitch it, like, you're kind of like being in the academy. Like, your vote matters. And that's how they pitch it. And so, and they pump out a bunch of content. And they pump out a bunch of content to the panelists about, you know, hey, these are the top shows, things like that, that people are interested in.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO

And it gives just tremendous information. Like, I'm watching Prime Video. It's the Laker game versus OKC. I mean, a huge percentage of the ads were house ads of Amazon. So as an advertiser, you know there's a large percentage unsold if you're negotiating with Amazon. But you would never have that data. We would not want Amazon to know that we have that data. This is, again, being on the buy side gives an asymmetrical advantage to the buyer. And that's why we stay strictly buy side. And again, agentic, blah, blah, blah, all that doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is, do you have exclusive data that's very valuable to the advertising transaction?

Laura Anne Martin, Analyst — Needham

And we're three minutes over, so I need to call it there. But thank you very much.