Viant Technology Inc - Ordinary Shares - Class A Aktie

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Viant Technologies Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. My name is David, and I will be your operator today. Before I hand the call over to the Viant leadership team, I'd like to go over a few housekeeping notes for the program. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] Thank you for your attendance today. I would now like to turn the call over to Nick Zangler, SVP of Investor Relations for Viant.

Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to Viant Technologies' Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. On the call today are Tim Vanderhook, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer; Chris Vanderhook, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer; and Larry Madden, Chief Financial Officer. .

I'd like to remind you that we will make forward-looking statements on our call today, including, but not limited to, statements regarding our guidance for Q3 2026 and other future financial results, our strategy, our growth opportunities, performance and benefits of our products, our platform development initiatives, including bind AI, expected benefits of our acquisition of TVision our pipeline and potential partnership opportunities, our share repurchase program, potential tailwinds and industry trends that are based on assumptions and subject to future events, risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected.

These forward-looking statements speak only as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise these statements, except as required by law. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements and our entire safe harbor statement, please refer to the news release issued today as well as the risks and uncertainties described in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, under the heading Risk Factors and in our other filings with the SEC.

During today's call, we will also present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are included in the news release issued today and in our earnings presentation, which have been posted on the Investor Relations page of the company's website and in our filings with the SEC.

I would now like to turn the call over to Tim Vanderhook, Chief Executive Officer. Tim?

Thanks, Dave, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. We delivered strong second quarter performance achieving new company second quarter records across all key metrics. Revenue increased 34% year-over-year, well above the high end of our quarterly guidance range and contribution ex TAC increased 24% year-over-year.

Growth was broad-based across most verticals, driven by strong CTV demand increase utilization of our proprietary intelligence and expanded use of Viant AI. Most notably, customer CTV spend surged by nearly 50% in the quarter. Attributable to the unique performance advantages we deliver for advertisers within this secular growth channel.

And finally, adjusted EBITDA increased 26% year-over-year to $14.2 million for the quarter exceeding the high end of our guidance range. As our second quarter results clearly indicate Viant has entered into a new phase of accelerated growth propelled by the continued adoption of our platform by major U.S. advertisers.

Ramping spend from these clients contributed to one of our strongest top line quarters ever as a public company. Our momentum is accelerating and is supported by the largest pipeline of new business opportunities in our company's history.

Our differentiated value proposition further enhanced by the integration of T Vision's attention insights is resonating with advertisers and agencies more so than ever before. Viant has evolved from a demand side platform into an advertising intelligence company, uniquely capable of empowering advertisers with proprietary data independent measurement and cutting-edge AI solutions, which collectively work in concert to optimize media execution.

Viant is in market with an industry-leading arsenal of technological solutions, specifically engineered to drive superior ad campaign performance. Our intelligence layer synthesizes proprietary viewership signals, spanning audience identity, content selection and viewer attention into real-time actionable insights that best inform campaign targeting strategies.

Late spring, our AI-powered decisioning architecture operationalizes these insights, dynamically refining every campaign to ensure that performance is continuously optimized. In our Direct Access supply path connects brands directly to premium publishers, lowering costs and eliminating bidstream inefficiencies to maximize working media spend.

These solutions exclusive to Viant are attracting new advertisers to our platform while simultaneously fueling organic growth through deeper value-driven relationships with existing clients. Our commitment to innovation is solidifying Viant as an essential must-have partner for today's outcome-oriented advertisers.

In a moment, Chris will provide some perspective on today's market environment and detail how Viant is strategically positioned to capitalize on emerging market opportunities, to deliver sustainable long-term growth into 2027 and beyond. But first, I will provide an update on our recent performance and progress across our 3 key strategic priorities.

Viant's proprietary intelligence layer, Viant AI and CTV. Beginning with our intelligence layer, Viant empowers advertisers to deploy sophisticated campaign strategies through 3 core pillars of proprietary intelligence, spanning identity, content and attention.

These proprietary data signals allow our advertisers to parse through the 15 million bid requests made available to them every second and identify the specific impressions that will drive performance.

Leveraging our proprietary intelligence, advertisers can precisely target their desired audiences within contextually relevant high attention environments and capture value by acquiring inventory where the intrinsic value exceeds the market price. Walking through our intelligence layer. Viant's identity intelligence is powered by our household ID, a patented solution for audience targeting.

Household ID delivers superior addressability for advertisers looking to activate their first-party data to reach specific audiences and measure campaign performance. Household ID is widely available across the digital landscape, embedded in 80% of all programmatic bid requests and 96% of all CTV requests.

Offering 4x the coverage of competing identity solutions. It has mapped to 95% of U.S. household addresses through our identity graph. Enabling advertisers to activate first-party data at massive scale. A large grocery store chain has been utilizing household ID for several years.

By leveraging the pervasive reach of household ID, they are able to deploy sophisticated audience-targeting campaigns at a scale that is simply unmatched in the market. We link their first-party data directly to our identity graph to establish a precise one-to-one match because household ID is so ubiquitous, we can scale their strategy across the entire programmatic ecosystem.

More broadly than any competitor, while providing simple, clean, closed-loop measurement back to their own internal IDs. Household ID utilization reached new heights this quarter. fueled by a growing number of advertisers deploying sophisticated targeting strategies. This adoption drove robust performance. With contribution ex TAC attributable to household ID, achieving its strongest year-over-year growth in 5 quarters.

Viant's content intelligence is powered by the Iris content ID, which empowers advertisers with show-level targeting a significant leap in granularity compared to that of our competitors who are limited to app level visibility. We achieved scene level targeting through direct integrations with publisher content management systems which provides Viant with high-resolution contextual intelligence that is not available elsewhere.

Leveraging the Iris content ID, advertisers can align their ad creative with specific shows, contextual categories and even emotional sentiments enabling a level of micro targeting that drives better outcomes. A brand like MOP will combine the audience precision of household ID with the contextual intelligence of the Iris content ID to achieve superior return on ad spend.

By stacking household ID with Iris content ID, group only reaches fitness enthusiasts, they reach fitness enthusiasts in the specific contextually relevant moments that matter most, like during premium sports programming, which significantly boosts campaign performance.

We are seeing a powerful feedback loop Advertisers are prioritizing Iris content ID for its granular targeting capabilities and publishers are rapidly adopting the standard to make their inventory more competitive and attractive. Iris content ID is currently enabled across a number of leading CTV OEMs, including Samsung, LG, VIZIO, TCL and Zumo.

Along with leading streaming services, including Paramount Plus, Tubi, AMC Networks and A&E, among others. Presence across enabled publishers has pushed Iris content ID to nearly 50% penetration within the bidstream. Over the course of the third and fourth quarters, we are scheduled to launch the Iris content ID across Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, Roku, DIRECTV, Sling TV, spectrum and Filo pushing penetration to approximately 70% of [ vitable ] inventory by the end of the year.

Viant's attention intelligence is powered by TVision and its nationally representative panel of U.S. households. Each of which is equipped with TVision's computer vision and automatic content recognition technology. TVision attention data provides advertisers with 4 unique signals of attentive insight. In room presence, co-viewership, second-by-second [indiscernible] screen attention and associated viewer demographics.

These signals quantify viewer attention across the entire media landscape, which includes linear TV, connected TV and the walled garden platforms of YouTube in Prime video. To date, TVision attention measurement data has been an essential asset for advertisers looking to optimize market planning and elevate creative performance.

Publishers also rely on TVision's insights to pinpoint where viewer engagement gravitates allowing them to better refine their content strategies. But together, Viant and TVision are pioneering a new standard of advanced targeting. We can now deploy attention data as a prebid signal which empowers advertisers to target inventory based on its attentive value, a breakthrough capability that has not existed until now.

To be more precise, TVision's attention signals effectively act as a proprietary lens for price discovery. We can now calculate the real-time intrinsic value of any impression based on its attention score. By comparing this intrinsic value to the prevailing market price we can identify when an impression is undervalued and capture it for our clients.

This is a distinct decisioning framework and algorithmic mode that no other competitor in the market can offer today. Consider this illustrative example. Think back to Game 5 of the NBA finals where the Knicks were mounting a historic comeback.

As the game tightened, viewer attention surge, in-room presence, co-viewership and eyes on screen engagement all peaked driving the advertising inventories intrinsic value up to a $120 CPM as determined by TVision. Because this intelligence is unique to Viant, we would be willing to bid for this inventory up to $120 but competing ad platforms would be left unaware of the true value of the impression.

Lacking the data to justify the higher cost they would most likely refuse to raise their bid beyond a modest premium, allowing Viant to strategically secure high-value inventory for our clients at a significant discount. This is a performance advantage we believe no other platform can compete with today and one we look to roll out across the course of this year.

On that note, our TVision integration is tracking well ahead of schedule and early results validate our strategy. We recently executed 42 pilot campaigns with advertisers targeting TVisions, high attention inventory segments. Across this cohort, over 80% of these campaigns achieved higher conversion rates versus the benchmark. Delivering an average lift of 1.4x.

We saw even more significant outperformance in specific verticals, including a 14x lift for a home improvement brand. 3.7x for an online university and a 3.1x lift for a state tourism office.

While our technical integration remains ongoing throughout the year, the exceptional progress we have made thus far allows us to accelerate our commercial rollout ahead of schedule. TVision has already become a key instrument in our pitch to both new and existing clients.

And we are highly encouraged by the strong reception from advertisers and agencies eager to leverage these attentive insights. Together, household ID, Iris content ID and TVision can unlock performance capabilities that distinguish Viant from competitors.

But to maximize the effectiveness of these proprietary solutions, we feed these insights directly into Viant AI's latticing decisioning architecture. The volume and velocity of real-time data signals are likely impossible for a human to efficiently synthesize, but our AI processes this information instantly.

Automating and optimizing campaigns with a level of precision no human could ever achieve. This takes me to buy an AI. Earlier this year, we launched outcomes our first version of a fully autonomous ad product designed to capture performance-driven budgets deployed across the open Internet.

Outcomes complements our existing suite of AI products. Representing a do-it-for-me solution, built to compete with walled garden performance products, namely Google's [indiscernible] and Meda's Advantage+ but with a distinct advantage of utilizing Viant's proprietary intelligence across the entire open Internet.

The workflow is simple. An advertiser needs only to provide their name, budget, flight dates and goal. And Viant AI takes it from there. Our AI autonomously constructs an optimal media plan executes it and continuously optimizes performance in milliseconds, entirely without any human intervention.

We are in the early stages of our go-to-market rollout, yet the market reception has been exceptional. Outcomes is already accounting for 5% of total ad spend year-to-date. An impressive level of adoption for a product launch just 6 months ago.

We are validating CTV as a destination in which advertisers can deploy performance spend. which unlocks a massive opportunity to attract spend from the 10 million advertisers currently confining their performance budget to search in social media environments.

Moving to CTV. In the quarter, total CTV spend increased nearly 50%, reaching yet another new all-time high. And once again, CTV spend accounted for over 50% of total ad spend in the quarter. reflecting the growing preference of advertisers to designate the CTV channel as the cornerstone of their holistic campaign strategy.

Clearly, our growth within CTV is multiples above the industry growth rate. And the reason is simple. We are taking share within CTV because on our platform, ad spend goes further, targeting and measurement is better, and Viant AI makes the entire buying process easier. With each passing quarter, Viant continues to establish itself as the ideal platform for advertisers looking to deploy CTV campaigns across the open Internet.

Driving this momentum is the rapid adoption of our direct access solution. As a reminder, direct access offers an efficient, targetable and measurable path to the premium inventory by facilitating transactions directly with publishers. This combination of superior data resolution with a streamlined path to purchase significantly enhances media execution, driving 35% reductions in CPMs, resulting in real measurable savings for advertisers.

In the second quarter, we saw a step function lift in CTV ad spend allocated through direct access. Over 80% of CTV ad spend on our platform was transacted through direct access, a steep increase from just over 50% reported in the first quarter of the year. These results are a clear indication of how buyers seek to transact today.

They want transparency, data-driven precision and return on ad spend efficiency all of which is made available through our direct integrations with publishers. In July, we expanded Direct Access to include streaming services powered by [ Publica. ] A leading ad server representing multiple premium publishers.

As these new publishers are onboarded, we expect over 90% of on-platform CTV spend will be distributed through direct access in the near future. Over time, through integrations with every major streaming service, we would expect nearly 100% of our clients CTV spend to flow through direct access.

Lastly, there's been a lot of discussion about whether AI eliminates parts of the advertising technology stack. We think that's asking the wrong question. AI changes the interface, but it dramatically increases the amount of real-time decisioning required underneath it.

In an Agentic world, inventory becomes easier to discover and transact. That makes proprietary intelligence more valuable. Someone still has to determine which impression an advertiser should buy, what it's worth, whether that consumer has already been reached what creative should be shown and whether that dollar would be -- would generate a better return somewhere else.

That's the role Viant is building for. We don't represent publishers, we represent advertisers. Our job is not to maximize the CPM for every ad impression available. Our job is to maximize the value of the advertisers' next dollar by selectively deciding which impressions drive value. And increasingly, that decision is powered by Viant's proprietary intelligence.

From identity, content and attention through independent measurement. Before turning it over to Chris, I would like to take a moment to welcome Craig Abrams to Viant's Board of Directors. Craig is an experienced entrepreneur, founder and executive with over 25 years of experience in technology in digital media.

He is the cofounder of Caesars Interactive Entertainment a digital gaming business subsidiary of Caesars Entertainment. Wallet Caesars, he orchestrated the acquisition of Playtika a leading mobile gaming company, which he would go on to lead as President and CFO, guiding the company through its IPO and aggressive acquisition strategy. His experience scaling a rapidly growing business organically and through strategic M&A will be instrumental as Viant enters a new phase of accelerated growth, and we are thrilled to have him join the board.

I'll now turn it over to Chris to walk us through our strategic positioning and how we are building for long-term growth.

Thanks, Tim. Viant has reached a clear inflection point exemplified by our record-breaking second quarter results and strong third quarter guidance. Looking forward, we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on powerful industry tailwinds, including the ongoing migration of linear, search and social budgets into as well as our own proprietary growth drivers.

I want to start by addressing the ongoing migration of linear TV budgets into connected TV, a fundamental market shift where Viant is better positioned than ever to capture incremental growth. Currently, industry-wide CTV spend stands at approximately $37 billion, with $51 billion still residing in linear TV.

As those dollars migrate, they become increasingly addressable for Viant, particularly because we are now aggressively targeting the enterprise level accounts that command the majority of that legacy linear spend. This migration represents more than just a shift in channel. It is a fundamental evolution of the advertising model.

The old TV model was built on simple reach and frequency, measuring how many people were exposed to an ad, the new model is built on attention. valuing media by the real second consumers are actually engaged. With TVision, we are helping advertisers move beyond paying for impressions that are merely delivered.

We are helping them value media based on cost per attentive second. This allows them to compare inventory accurately, optimize campaigns and finally, understand the value of what they're actually buying. We are seeing this shift in thinking play out in our RFP pipeline.

Just 2 years ago, enterprise brands were largely out of reach for Viant. Today, we are actively engaged with some of the world's largest advertisers. Representing hundreds of millions of dollars of potential spend. They are migrating from linear to CTV to find new efficiencies, and we are the partner showing them how to achieve it.

When these brands look at our platform, they see a solution that solves their core challenges. By eliminating ad spend was through direct access, sharpening audience targeting with household ID, ensuring contextual alignment with Iris content and securing high value-add placements with TVision.

We are delivering measurable performance driven outcomes that materially improve both the top and bottom lines for enterprise brands. We are also seeing brand advertisers take a more active role in DSP selection's, a shift that serves a significant tailwind for Viant.

Today, a growing percentage of our ad spend involves direct brand relationships. Allowing for greater synergy as brands work alongside their agency partners to maximize campaign performance on our platform. As we deepen these relationships, brands are increasingly prioritizing Viant's independence and objectivity.

They seek a partner aligned with their strategic goals. Not a walled garden DSP with conflicting incentives. This is playing out across our current RFP cohort, where walled garden providers are being sidelined early due to a fundamental misalignment of incentives that is quickly recognized by the brands.

Advertisers are increasingly viewing Wild Garden DSPs like Amazon and Google as sellers of their own inventory rather than neutral strategic partners. Because these platforms serve as both publisher and DSP, their incentives are fundamentally conflicted.

They are driven to maximize budget capture often at the expense of campaign efficiency by deploying self attribution tactics to justify diverting spend toward their owned and operated content. TVision can help us shift this power dynamic.

By quantifying actual viewer attention, we provide advertisers with the objective intelligence required to hold these platforms accountable, independent of their own self-serving claims. While Prime Video and YouTube remain part of a balanced CTV strategy, our data suggests that many advertisers are vastly over-indexed.

We are providing the necessary insights for them to reallocate those budgets more efficiently across the broader open CTV landscape. Now as advertisers increasingly seek independent objective partners, we believe there are only 2 viable enterprise-grade self-service buying platforms to consider reset friction between agency holding companies and our primary competitor has already triggered budget reallocations to our DSP, along with the surge in new RFP opportunities, which we expect to realize in the coming quarters.

The emergence of CTV as a performance channel represents another major catalyst for growth, and we see an opportunity for advertisers to divert their existing search and social performance budgets to CTV. Today, search and social together command over $300 billion in U.S. ad spend, and we aim to tap this market.

Performance advertisers are most commonly represented by niche brands and niche brands speak to niche audiences, which are often defined by location, demographics, interests, income levels and so forth. Viant is uniquely equipped to power performance budgets given the inherent need for precision targeting, which ensures ad spend is allocated to those audiences exhibiting the highest propensity to respond.

Our outcome solution was engineered specifically to capture this performance budget opportunity and the traction we have achieved in a short period is significant. As Tim noted, performance-driven spend now accounts for over 5% of our total platform spend year-to-date, all of which has been secured by existing customers electing to divert a portion of their performance budget to buy in.

Outcomes is in a perpetual state of improvement and will soon incorporate T Vision's data expected to further enhance performance. Our immediate priority is to drive performance budget adoption among our existing clients, tapping into incremental spend that complements their traditional brand budgets.

Over the long term, we plan to broaden this initiative to capture new performance-based demand from brands outside our current ecosystem. On a related note, we also believe advertisers are simply over indexed in search and social, misled by self attribution tactics that reward walled gardens for organic sales that would have occurred anyway.

I recently spoke with the head of a major beauty brand who experienced this firsthand. Despite favorable lower funnel KPIs, his top line growth installed -- he realized his social media spend was hyper focused on consumers already in market, those actively looking for cosmetic products.

While this strategy certainly drove clicks, he was only reaching 8% of his target audience, which is women between the ages of 15 to 54 years old. You cannot grow market share if you only advertise to the 5% of consumers currently shopping for your product.

This brand was burning budget on customers who would have already purchased anyways while starving the company of the brand awareness investment needed to reach incremental customers. I have heard variations of this dynamic from advertisers time and time again.

As walled gardens continue to pump out double-digit revenue growth, their customers see their own top line stagnant. We believe more advertisers will come to this realization, and this serves as yet another reason advertisers are considering diverting their search and social budgets to CTV Beyond these industry tailwinds, our opportunity for growth is propelled by catalysts unique to buying.

Namely the accelerating adoption of direct access, household ID, Iris content ID, TVision and Viant AI. Collectively, these solutions are the key driver of the momentum we are seeing across major U.S. advertisers. As we continue to prove their efficacy, we expect advertisers to expand their on-platform commitments capitalizing on the performance gains that we enable.

Provide this growth is accretive from both a volume and unit economic perspective. Our model is this -- as advertisers deepen their adoption of our solution suite, we have the ability to capture higher margins when we deliver superior performance. This creates a compounding effect.

As advertisers find success with household ID, they naturally expand their budget to scale their audience targeting strategy across the platform. By layering on Iris content ID for content targeting, they see further performance gains, which drives additional spend at even more attractive margins to buy it.

As we integrate TVision for attention-based optimization and leverage by in the eye for autonomous decisioning, the results further compound. Each layer of intelligence not only elevates campaign performance, but also allows Viant to capture more value, fueling a virtuous cycle of success for our clients and our business, the hallmark of a true partnership.

This strategic alignment reinforces our commitment to relentless innovation. While we have already established a formidable arsenal of performance driving solutions, we will continue to make strategic investments that enhance performance on behalf of advertisers.

Backed by a healthy balance sheet with nearly $200 million in cash, 0 debt and accelerating free cash flow we are uniquely positioned to pursue the launch of new innovative offerings, both organically and through opportunistic M&A with the goal of delivering superior outcomes for our clients.

We believe the best is yet to come. We are committed to extending our lead as the most advanced buying platform, powering the next generation of ad spend deployment across the open Internet. And with that, I'll turn it over to Larry to provide more detail on our financial performance. Larry?

Thanks, Chris. Before I begin, I would like to remind everyone that we have posted a presentation on our Investor Relations website that includes supplemented financial information to accompany today's call. In terms of our results for the second quarter.

Revenue for the quarter was $104.3 million a 34% increase year-over-year and an 18% increase sequentially. The year-over-year growth rate accelerated 9 percentage points from 25% in Q1 and exceeding the high end of our guide by 3%. Contribution ex TAC totaled $60.2 million in Q2, up 24% year-over-year and 20% sequentially.

The year-over-year growth rate accelerated 6 percentage points from 18% in Q1 and came in just short at the high end of our guide. At the midpoint of our Q3 guidance, which I'll speak to in a moment, we expect year-over-year contribution ex TAC growth of 25%. This would extend the quarterly progression from 18% in Q1 to 24% in Q2 to 25% in Q3.

We delivered strong performance across most customer verticals in Q2 with health care, public services and travel leading the way. Our top 5 verticals representing approximately 60% of platform spend increased almost 30% year-over-year. CTV remained a core growth driver in Q2, accounting for over 50% of total platform spend.

In addition, CTV reached an all-time high in the quarter, reflecting continued momentum as advertisers increasingly prioritize premium addressable video to drive performance. Advertisers industry-wide continue to shift their media mix towards emerging digital channels, including CTV, streaming audio and digital out-of-home.

Reflecting this secular trend, customer-directed purchasing on our platform across these channels collectively represented over 60% of advertiser spend in the quarter, up from 54% for the full year 2025. Viant remains well positioned as a leading partner for advertisers moving beyond search and social media spending to capitalize on next-generation media formats.

Video inclusive of CTV set a new record, representing over 65% of total platform spend in the quarter, further reflecting the continued shift towards high-impact measurable formats. Turning to our expenses. Non-GAAP operating expenses totaled $46 million for the quarter, reflecting a 24% year-over-year increase and a 13% increase sequentially.

This increase in non-GAAP operating expenses both year-over-year and sequentially is partly the result of the TVision acquisition, which closed on May 1, 2026. Importantly, we remain focused on scaling efficiently. Even as we continue to invest in innovation across Viant AI and our broader technology stack, we have been delivering measurable gains in productivity increasing trailing 12-month contribution ex TAC per employee by over 7% year-over-year, marking 12 straight quarterly increases, a clear signal of improved operational efficiency.

Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $14.2 million, representing an increase of 26% year-over-year and 46% sequentially, exceeding the high end of our guide. Adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of contribution ex TAC was 24% for the quarter, expanding approximately 30 basis points compared to the prior year and 50 basis points higher than the high end of our guide.

Non-GAAP net income, which excludes stock-based compensation and other adjustments, totaled $9.9 million for the quarter, up 23% from $8 million in the prior year period. Non-GAAP basic earnings per Class A share outstanding increased 50% to $0.15 in the second quarter compared to $0.10 in the prior year period.

In terms of share count, we ended the quarter with $66.5 million total shares outstanding, consisting of 21.1 million Class A shares and 45.4 million Class B shares. We ended the quarter with $193.1 million in cash and cash equivalents and $200.6 million of positive working capital with no debt and access to a $75 million undrawn credit facility.

Our solid performance is enabling meaningful positive cash flow generation. For the quarter, cash flows from operating activities increased $7.5 million year-over-year to $28.5 million. representing a 36% increase. Free cash flow increased $6.3 million year-over-year to $22.4 million, representing a 39% increase.

And for the 6 months ended June 30, 2026, Cash flow from operating activities totaled $31.4 million, representing a year-over-year increase of 90%. Free cash flow totaled $21.4 million, representing a year-over-year increase of 169% and an approximately 89% conversion of adjusted EBITDA.

Year-to-date, we have used $1 million for share repurchase under our existing share repurchase program and $3.1 million for share repurchases related to tax withholdings on vested equity awards.

Since launching the share repurchase program in May 2024, we have returned $6.6 million to shareholders. As of August 7, $39.4 million remains available under the current authorization. We believe our strong financial foundation, combined with the consistent execution and the balanced capital allocation strategy positions us well to capture growth opportunities and drive shareholder value in the quarters ahead.

Turning now to our Q3 outlook. For the third quarter of 2026, we expect revenue of $107.5 million to $110.5 million up 27% over the prior year period and a 5% increase sequentially at the midpoint. Contribution ex TAC of $65 million to $67 million reconflecting a 25% year-over-year growth and 10% quarter over growth at the midpoint.

Non-GAAP operating expenses of $46.5 million to $47.5 million up 27% year-over-year and 2% sequentially at the midpoint. Adjusted EBITDA of $18.5 million to $19.5 million, representing a 19% year-over-year increase and 34% sequentially at the midpoint.

And finally, we expect an adjusted EBITDA margin as a percentage of contribution ex TAC of 29%. The midpoint of our guide assumes record Q3 performance across revenue, contribution ex TAC and adjusted EBITDA. I would also like to make a couple of general observations about our outlook for 2026.

In 2026 and 2027, we expect contribution ex TAC growth to continue outpacing the broader U.S. programmatic market, which is projected to grow approximately 13%, driving further market share gains. We expect year-over-year growth in contribution ex TAC to continue to accelerate sequentially through the end of the year, supported by the continued ramp of recently onboarded customers expansion with an existing customer relationships, sustained demand in CTV, the incorporation of TV into our results and political.

We also expect revenue and contribution ex TAC to continue growing faster than non-GAAP operating expenses on an annual basis, leading to modest adjusted EBITDA margin expansion for the full year 2026. More broadly, we continue to operate the business with a goal of delivering consistent 20% or more annual top line growth and adjusted EBITDA margin expansion.

With an opportunity to reach adjusted EBITDA margins of 40% or higher over the next several years. In closing, we delivered another record quarter, executing against our strategic priorities and advancing innovation across our platform.

We believe we are well positioned for sustainable long-term growth given our strategic alignment with secular growth trends, including CTV, proprietary intelligence and Viant AI and with that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions]

Our first question comes from Andrew with Raymond James, Andrew.

Two, if I could. One, great to see the direct access penetration figure grow so quickly. But was there any specific unlock that caused the big step change in the span of one quarter -- was it anything to do with new customers coming online and going all direct access, existing customers leaning in more or a specific product kind of feature unlock? And then I have a follow-up.

Yes, Andrew, thanks for the question. One, I would just say, just generally, existing customers just continuing to educate them on the cost savings we're seeing on average, 35% lower it's kind of a no-brainer for them to move money there.

That's one to just the quality of the names of the company's indirect access. It's just -- it's everyone in there is of highest quality, whether they're a content owner or a -- so that definitely is a big benefactor. And then I would say on our go-to-market with new customers, that's front and center in our offering.

And for these large customers will be able to save -- or excuse me, 35% of their CTV investments by running through direct access. So all of those are really what added to the step-up.

Got you. Appreciate it. And then maybe one more on CTV, if I could. Tim and Chris, you both talked about the synergies of a lot of your products from household ID to Iris and content ID to TVision, when you think about kind of the holistic offering that you've built, is there anything else that you think you want to really add either via inorganic or organic means?

Yes. We really focus on this concept of the intelligence layer. We think one of the big differentiators as we move forward as Agentic comes online, is proprietary data. And so we continue to look out in the market on any opportunistic M&A that comes up that can help build our stack there on more proprietary data that adds value for our customers. So certainly, keeping our eyes peeled and seeing what else comes up. Thanks, Andrew.

Our next question comes from Tom White with D.A. Davidson.

Just one for me on the sales force and specifically the enterprise sales force where I think you guys made some sizable investments kind of late last year entering this year. Would you say we've started to see the impact there on the top line yet?

Or is that cohort kind of still building out pipeline? And just, I guess, how do you feel about the size of the sales force now? Like as you touched on, there's sizable budget moving away from a large incumbent competitor Curious whether it would make sense for you guys to invest more to go after that?

Yes. We certainly are seeing some contribution from that. We have a number of brands testing right now. We also have other brands who are not in testing, but in the RFP phase. So we're definitely seeing the impact there. We're across a handful of verticals, but we're continuing to expand the amount of verticals that we're going to be in just because the opportunity in the large customer segment is really just -- it's getting larger every day. .

And just in terms of forward-looking, those investments we build into our go-forward plan. So any of the projections that we put out were slowly and methodically adding to that staff to kind of maintain the philosophy where we grow OpEx slower than the top line.

Our next question comes from Jason with Craig Hallum. Jason.

Congrats on another good quarter. So you talked about the inflection in growth. You also talked about improvements in the RFP pipeline. Just wondering if you could like tether those 2 things together? Like if you comment on today's pipeline and how that has the potential to have an impact either late in '26 or or more into 2027 just in terms of growth and profitability?

Yes, Jason, thanks for the question. One of the big ways that we operate that we love about this business model is the operating leverage that we have in the business model. So every incremental dollar that comes in really flows through.

Obviously, we're growing OpEx a little bit this year with the acquisition of TVision. And so we continue to manage that. In terms of the pipeline, some will probably hit in Q4 -- most of the pipeline is on an annual cycle. And so there will be testing as it comes through. So I would expect some lift in Q4, but with the major shift happening in 2027.

And then maybe just piggybacking here. When you look at the opportunity that's growing due to kind of a disruption on the demand side of the ecosystem -- how do you go after that? How do you position Viant to be the biggest beneficiary of the disruption that's out there?

Well, I think clients want differentiation. If they're going to move platforms and maybe they're already going to move platforms, but we come in and we lead with differentiation. But that differentiation has to matter for the brand.

And that's why specifically within CTV, whether it be the scale of household ID or -- the fact that we have a content ID and everybody else is only at the app level in CTV or direct access, saving you 35%. TVision attention data. The list is huge in terms of differentiation.

So we like to lead there and really, it's all about customer value. It's not about having these IDs or these tools. You have to translate that into value for the brand. And really, what we do is our focus is if you're -- if we're going after a brand and they're a public company, our whole focus is that hey, if we're getting more efficient marketing, then that should translate into your public company reported financials.

We want to see the top help those -- their top line actually grow. And I think that's in stark contrast to a lot of the walled gardens. They don't -- that's not in their vernacular. So that's really our angle.

Yes. And just to add to that, I mean, it doesn't matter who we're competing against the decision-making framework on which DSP to go with is increasingly coming down to your capabilities in connected television Chris talked about household ID, the Iris IDT vision, both from targeting on the attention, the example we gave during Game 5.

But even more importantly is the independent measurement capabilities of TVision and really showing the brand, here's what you're getting from YouTube, here's what you're getting from Prime video. Here's what linear TV is providing a whole lot of trust built up with that measurement platform there.

And so I think as the RFP pipeline plays out, when it comes down to it, we lead with product and increasingly, we are the best platform to buy CTV .

Our next question comes from Barton Crockett with Rosenblatt. Barton.

I wanted to talk for a minute about the big elephant in the sector, which is the performance of the Trade Desk, which has historically been the largest kind of DSP and kind of the bellwether has historically been how it's seen yet their growth trajectory is really very different, right? I mean, they're guiding to a 12% decline in the next quarter and they were up only 3% missing guidance in the June quarter.

You guys are growing at a completely different pace. What -- how would you explain that differential? They've attributed their exposure to macro issues in CPG and auto and obviously, you guys are taking share at some level, but that can't be all of it for the Trade Desk being so much larger.

So to what do you ascribe the differential on their performance versus yours? And their status is kind of the bellwether what it means for that?

Yes. I mean just to piggyback a little bit on my answer to Jason earlier, Barton, proprietary data is continuing to be one of the most important factors. If you look at the really big competitors that we have around Google, we all know they are advantaged about having search data. .

If you look at the next big Goliath out there around Amazon, they have fantastic e-commerce transaction data. So for certain categories, they provide a lot of value there. We have a fantastic proprietary data set that kind of horizontally applies to a lot of marketers in CTV.

And again, I can't stress enough. CTV really is the channel that's deciding the DSP RFPs back and forth. When it comes to the Trade Desk, I think their focus on third-party data is really hurting them. It's undifferentiated data that's out there.

It's available on every platform, whether you're a large DSP or a small DSP. But having this exclusive intelligence that you can bring to the table has seen certainly has been a big advantage for us .

When we show up. What would you -- just one other piece, too. This company has a strong history and measurement. I regularly use the stat over 70% of our customers use our platform for measurement to understand really what's the value that they're getting. We've talked about that for years as we've been a public company.

I don't hear other companies really stressing that. So we have a lot of investments around our measurement products. TVision only adds to that. And then the other piece is, while other companies may claim to be buy side only or they only service the marketer.

I think a lot of our products and what our customers hear from us, they know that we're focused on driving advertiser value and value for them and helping grow their business. I think our customers know that we care about that. It's a big focus of ours.

Any time we're doing our monthly business reviews of them, we are very focused on their overall health of the company and are we driving that top line. So I just think we show up differently.

Okay. And then if I could ask just one other question. Just to understand, there's been some press reports about my space. I think stemming from a documentary that you guys were apparently part of -- and could you just elaborate on what your thinking is about my space at this point in your asset there?

Yes. We've seen the recent news reports around space that came out from that documentary that you correctly cited. We don't really have any direct comments around my space today. But what I would reiterate is we are extremely focused on the opportunity in front of Viant.

It's very large, and it remains our #1 focus. I think the results that we reported today and we'll continue to report kind of put an exclamation point on that.

Our next question comes from Naved Khan with B. Riley.

Great. Maybe just on the margins. How much of a drag was divisions on the last quarter's margins? And just talk about even going forward in 3Q, how much of a drag you're baking in so that I can say that one.

So for Q2, it was about a 150 basis point drag on EBITDA margins. In the Q3 guide, it's about, call it, 200 basis point drag.

Okay. And then the other question I had is around political. Maybe just talk about what kind of contribution you saw in the last quarter? And maybe remind us on like what expectations you've baked into your back half and second half of this year. from political.

And then maybe on that theme, so if I had to kind of think about the durability of growth into next year, how should we be thinking about that political, I guess the 2 are related, so speak to that?

Yes. And kind of our thought process around political, we've never been a big political player historically. There are incremental budgets that we get access to but for instance, we don't have a political team focused on that.

In our expectation, it's about 200 basis points, so pretty de minimis to the overall number. In terms of durability of growth, that RFP pipeline we talked about, the number of wins that we've already posted and we continue to expect that will win. We think the growth is very durable and sustainable into the future.

Our final question comes from Brianna Diaz with JMP Citizens.

Just you highlighted the largest pipeline in the company history. Can you help us understand where the accelerating growth is being driven from in terms of whether the new customer budgets being added or just the increased spending within existing customers, driven by an AI or TVision and how that relates to guidance going forward. In terms of mix?

Yes. TVision is pretty de minimis from a revenue perspective. We talked about outcomes being 5% of ad spend. Those are incremental budgets from current customers and I would say the answer is both. The new budgets coming on the platform as well as expanding the existing.

So I know that seems like it's kind of all of the above, but it truly is kind of all are providing tailwinds to the business.

Great. And if I can just ask one more. You've spoken about Wilson & Cores and [ Wilp ] in the past. Can you just give us an update on those relationships? How spend is ramping on the platform and how that compares to your previous expectations from the beginning of the year.

Yes. They both continue to ramp their spend, both continue to do well as expected .

Thank you. At this time, we have no more questions.

Thank you, everyone. See you next quarter.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Viant Technology First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. My name is David, and I will be your moderator today. Before I hand the call over to the Viant leadership team, I'd like to go over a few housekeeping notes for the program. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

Thank you for your attendance today. I am now pleased to turn the call over to Nick Zangler, SVP of Investor Relations for Viant.

Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to Viant Technology's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. On the call today are Tim Vanderhook, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer; Chris Vanderhook, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer; and Larry Madden, Chief Financial Officer.

I'd like to remind you that we will make forward-looking statements on our call today, including, but not limited to, statements regarding our guidance for Q2 2026 and other future financial results, our strategy, our platform development initiatives, including ViantAI, expected benefits of our acquisition of TVision, our pipeline and potential partnership opportunities, our share repurchase program and industry trends that are based on assumptions and subject to future events, risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected.

These forward-looking statements speak only as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise these statements, except as required by law. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements and our entire safe harbor statement, please refer to the news release issued today as well as the risks and uncertainties described in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, under the heading Risk Factors and in our other filings with the SEC.

During today's call, we will also present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the mostly directly comparable GAAP measures are included in the news release issued today and in our presentation, which have been posted on the Investor Relations page of the company's website and in our filings with the SEC.

I would now like to turn the call over to Tim Vanderhook, Chief Executive Officer of ViantAI. Tim?

Thanks, Nick, and thank you all for joining us today. We delivered strong first quarter performance, achieving new company Q1 records across all key metrics. Revenue increased 25% year-over-year, well above the high end of our quarterly guidance range and contribution ex-TAC increased 18% year-over-year, above the midpoint of our quarterly guidance range.

Growth was broad-based across verticals, driven by strong CTV demand, increased utilization of our proprietary data and expanded use of the ViantAI product suite. Adjusted EBITDA increased 81% year-over-year to $9.8 million for the quarter and exceeded the high end of our guidance range. We are off to a strong start in 2026 and Viant's market position and opportunity for growth have continued to strengthen. We expect accelerating top line performance throughout the year, driven by a combination of new and existing catalysts.

First, the ad environment remains healthy as evidenced by strengthening customer demand trends observed throughout the first quarter. March performance was particularly robust, signaling strong business confidence to kick off the year, and we continue to see healthy demand trends midway through the second quarter.

Our new flagship customers, Molson Coors and WHOOP, among other major U.S. advertisers went live in the first quarter and are now scaling spend across our platform. On a related note, we are currently actively engaged with our largest sales pipeline in company history. Perhaps more than ever, we believe major U.S. advertisers and their agency partners are seeking a new buy-side partner, one that is independent and objective, free of conflicts of interest and can transparently deliver maximum return on ad spend.

Viant is meeting this demand with a differentiated offering, equipped with proprietary data and evolving AI capabilities. Propelled by current market dynamics, we expect to win incremental ad spend from current customers and secure additional major advertiser wins throughout the year. Tenfold viewership events are also expected to drive ad spend to the CTV channel this year.

The 2026 World Cup is hosted by providers within our direct access premium publisher program, and we anticipate strong contribution from political advertisers in the second half of the year, fueled by midterm elections and the ongoing shift of political budgets from linear TV to CTV.

We expect to benefit from ramping adoption and increased utilization of IRIS ID, our industry-leading content identifier, which recently reached nearly 50% penetration across all biddable CTV inventory. with additional major streaming services set to become Iris-enabled later this year.

Following our go-to-market launch in January, we are encouraged by early adoption of Outcomes, Viant's fully autonomous AI-powered solution. Within our existing client base, we are beginning to capture performance budgets previously allocated to search and social channels. Advertisers are redirecting search and social spend toward the highly effective CTV channel, where spend doesn't merely take credit for sales that would have happened regardless of a last second ad exposure.

CTV actually drives net new customers. While early, we believe Outcomes is fully capable of servicing the 10 million advertisers electing to allocate spend across search and social channels. We expect outcomes to be a meaningful growth accelerator for Viant in the years to come.

And finally, on May 1, we closed on our acquisition of TVision, a leading television measurement provider, uniquely capable of quantifying the true value of linear TV, connected TV and walled garden inventory through viewer attention-based insights. Together and for the first time, we will activate TVision's attention data within the bid stream on a prebid basis, enabling advertisers to optimize budgeting and bidding decisions to inventory designed to capture genuine human engagement.

In a moment, Chris will elaborate on the state of the market with specific reference to the growing number of opportunities available to Viant attributable to our commitment to innovate on behalf of advertisers. Our commitment to remain an independent and objective partner as well as favorable market dynamics well documented amongst trade publications.

But first, I will provide an update on our recent performance and progress across our 3 key strategic priorities: CTV, Viant's proprietary data and ViantAI. Within the CTV ecosystem, 2 major industry tailwinds are currently underway and remain in the very early stages. The continual migration of linear TV advertising dollars to CTV and the diversion of search and social performance budgets to CTV, as the most sophisticated buying platform in the marketplace for CTV ad spend deployment, Viant is exceptionally well positioned to capitalize on these tailwinds, both in the near term and for many years to come.

Reflecting these dynamics, total CTV spend on our platform reached a new all-time high for a first quarter, accounting for over 50% of total ad spend. Contribution ex-TAC increased well over 40%, and this performance in Q1 2026 marks the third consecutive year that CTV contribution ex-TAC has increased over 40% on a year-over-year basis. a rate that is 3x that of the industry growth rate. This outsized adoption reflects Viant's strategic investments in critical CTV infrastructure, publisher relationships and addressability solutions, which collectively establish Viant as the platform of choice for CTV campaign deployment across the open Internet.

Contributing to our outsized CTV growth is the continued expansion of our direct access premium publisher program, with new integration announcements coming in the next few weeks. Direct Access offers advertisers an efficient, targetable and measurable path to purchase CTV ad inventory. By facilitating transactions directly with publishers, we bypass midstream resellers, which reduces CPMs for advertisers and drives better return on ad spend for our clients. In the quarter, over 50% of CTV ad spend on our platform was transacted through direct access, which includes leading CTV streaming services, including Disney, Paramount, Peacock and many, many more. Viant's exclusive data has expanded and now consists of 3 primary pillars of exclusive proprietary insight into content, identity and now attention.

Through our acquisition of Iris TV, our proprietary content signal continues to proliferate amongst publishers, enabling advertisers to deploy show level and contextual campaigns at greater scale. In just over a year since its acquisition, the presence of our content identifier, IRIS ID, within the CTV ecosystem has grown fivefold, reaching nearly 50% of incoming CTV bid requests in the first quarter. Viant's content identifier empowers advertisers to target CTV ad inventory at the show level, providing a substantially more detailed and granular targeting capability relative to our competitors who are limited to app-level targeting only.

Iris uniquely enables advertisers to align their message with specific shows, contextual categories, emotional sentiments, tones and brand-suitable content, representing a degree of micro targeting that enhances return on ad spend and drives outcomes. This is made possible through direct integrations with publishers' own content management systems, providing Viant with a meaningfully higher resolution of content intelligence.

With new major streaming services slated to become enabled later this year, Viant's content identifier penetration is expected to soon reach over 75% of biddable inventory. Viant's household ID, our patented identity solution for audience targeting, saw utilization meaningfully accelerate in the quarter, fueled by a growing number of advertisers electing to deploy sophisticated campaign strategies.

Household ID delivers superior addressability for advertisers looking to activate their first-party data to reach specific audiences and measure campaign performance. It is embedded in approximately 80% of all programmatic bid requests and now 96% of all CTV requests.

And with 95% of all household addresses mapped to Viant's ID graph, we can connect advertisers to addressable audiences at a massive scale, offering over 4x the coverage of other competing identity offerings. On May 1, we closed on our acquisition of TVision, a preeminent television measurement provider uniquely capable of quantifying consumers' eyes on screen attention while watching linear TV, connected TV, YouTube and Prime video content on and ad inventory. TVision gathers this proprietary data point through their nationally representative panel of U.S. households, each equipped with TVision's computer vision and automatic content recognition technology.

TVision's attention data provides advertisers with 4 unique signals: in-room presence, co-viewership, viewer demographics and eyes on screen attention, with each signal offering critical insights exclusively available to Viant's advertiser clients. In-room presence lets our customers know if their ad was delivered to an audience or an empty room. Co-viewership measures the total number of viewers in the room, allowing advertisers to optimize decisioning to target larger audiences. TVision enables the most accurate targeting and reporting of demographics across linear TV, CTV and walled garden content.

Within a typical household, one logged-in user registers across various streaming services, but a typical household includes multiple individuals, each with their own viewership preferences. As an example, in my household, Amazon believes my wife is watching the NBA playoff game on Prime Video because she holds the Amazon account for our household.

TVision's technology identifies the actual viewers within that household that are sitting in front of the TV when the content plays. Eyes on screen attended viewership tracks whether the audience is actively watching the TV screen during content and ad airings or if they are distracted or disengaged. Together, these insights provide Viant with an exclusive lens of the CTV market and enable our bidding algorithms to price all CTV inventory on a first-of-its-kind attention-adjusted CPM.

Viant receives these attention signals in real time ahead of the ad break. enabling our AI-powered buying platform to assign definitive attention scores and corresponding attention-adjusted CPMs to all CTV ad inventory and direct purchase decisions toward inventory where attention and price are aligned to maximize return on ad spend efficiency and deliver optimal outcomes.

To be clear, Viant's proprietary data, comprising exclusive content, identity and attention signals is unique to Viant and cannot be replicated by competitors such as Google, Amazon, OpenAI or Anthropic. This is attributable to the strategic acquisitions of Iris and TVision as we are the only company currently capable of activating attention as a prebid signal for advertisers. providing an exclusive and differentiated performance advantage for our clients. This takes me to ViantAI.

Leveraging proprietary data spanning content, identity and attention, our fully autonomous AI-powered ad platform is actively building and executing campaigns without any human intervention and is delivering return on ad spend performance that human traders cannot beat. In early January, we launched Outcomes, a fully autonomous ad product designed to serve performance ad budgets. Outcomes is the do-it-for-me solution for the open Internet, ingesting just 4 basic inputs: the advertiser, the budget, the flight dates and the goal.

Based on these inputs, ViantAI constructs the most optimal media plan, leveraging our exclusive data. After the advertiser provides ViantAI with their goals and budgets, ViantAI automatically constructs the ad campaign and transparently shows the advertiser where their ad will be placed to which audiences it will be shown, the times of day it will run and before deployment, ask the advertiser for approval. Once approved, ViantAI implements, executes, optimizes and reports on the results without any human intervention, making decisions in milliseconds. Together, our exclusive data and ViantAI's the Lattice brain decisioning engine is producing better results than any form of manual optimization could ever achieve. And coming soon, Viant AI and our Outcomes product will lever TVision's attention data to optimize bidding decisions toward inventory that commands high attentive scores and features attractive attention-adjusted CPMs, driving yet another enhancement to return on ad spend efficiency that no other platform can offer.

A growing number of advertiser clients are utilizing ViantAI and our Outcomes product to deploy ad spend, and we continue to deliver impressive results. We will continue to expand the adoption of ViantAI's full capabilities amongst our current customers while continuously enhancing the solution based on learnings from every impression we deliver and every exclusive data point ViantAI receives.

In summary, Viant is transforming from a media execution platform into an advertising intelligence company. The competitive landscape is increasingly split between traditional DSP's focused on media execution and closed ecosystems built around owned data, owned inventory and self-contained measurement.

Viant is building a different model, one built around the advertiser. We are combining proprietary data, independent measurement and real-time activation into one self-reinforcing platform. Our identity, content intelligence, attention data and cross-channel measurement help advertisers understand what media is worth, which impressions deserve investment and how to activate against those signals in real time.

That combination strengthens our moat and separates Viant from platforms built primarily around execution alone as well as closed ecosystems where the same company sells the media and measures their own results. That is the model we are building, and it is the foundation for the next phase of Viant's growth. With that, I'll turn it over to Chris to walk through the current market dynamics.

Thanks, Tim. I would like to share our findings from recent interactions with agencies and advertisers across the marketplace, and I'll preface these remarks by noting that this is an extraordinarily exciting time for Viant as we are addressing the largest RFP pipeline in company history.

From our perspective, we believe there are 3 primary reasons why agencies and advertisers are increasingly engaging with Viant. Number one, our commitment to relentlessly innovate on behalf of advertisers and their agencies by creating unparalleled efficiencies and exclusive data signals that are in high demand, but only available in Viant's platform; number two, our commitment to remain a transparent, independent and objective partner; and number three, favorable market dynamics.

We believe advertisers and agencies have finally drawn a line in the sand with regards to the self-attributing tactics of walled gardens and the general lack of transparency provided by our competitors. To elaborate, begin with our commitment to relentlessly innovate on behalf of advertisers. The market clearly recognizes Viant as a platform provider in a perpetual state of innovation, as demonstrated by our recent strategic investments and a string of new product launches, all of which are designed to further establish Viant as the leading platform for CTV.

Our solutions are industry-leading and exclusive to Viant. Household ID is the industry's leading audience identifier, boasting over 4x the availability of alternative solutions. Direct Access provides the cleanest, most efficient path to purchase premium CTV ad inventory in the market. Leveraging our content identifier, IRIS ID, Viant was the first and remains the only buying platform that enables contextual targeting for CTV.

In 2 years, we rolled out 4 phases of ViantAI solutions, culminating in a fully autonomous AI-powered buying platform, producing results human traders and media planners cannot replicate. We acquired TVision, a leading attention measurement provider of TV, and we plan to strategically merge TVision's attentive insights with IRIS ID to create an attention optimized targeting and measurement solution for TV buying that does not exist elsewhere.

And there is more to come. We will continue to invent new solutions unique to our platform that are designed to maximize return on ad spend efficiency and drive outcomes, helping our advertiser clients win in market and gain market share against their competitors.

Last quarter, we announced a multiyear strategic partnership with WHOOP, the human performance company behind world-class wearable technology. Viant is now the DSP of record for WHOOP, responsible for powering their ambitious growth expectations. WHOOP's fitness and health-focused wearable device competes with big tech competitors like Apple and their Apple Watch.

But in partnership with WHOOP, we have developed a marketing plan that utilizes Viant's full arsenal of advertising solutions and aims to compete and win versus Apple among other competitors in market. Together, we expect to drive meaningful share gains for WHOOP's wearable devices and help fuel their growth. Moving to the second reason advertisers are increasingly engaging with Viant. Viant has remained steadfast in our commitment to provide advertisers and agencies with a transparent solution that fully aligns their best interest with ours.

And in doing so, we have established an unwavering degree of trust that ensures agencies and advertisers remain partners with Viant for the long term. Viant is an independent and objective platform. We do not own any publisher content, and therefore, we have no motivation to direct ad spend towards any specific channel or publisher.

We work on behalf of our advertiser clients to deliver optimal outcomes and return on ad spend efficiency regardless of channel or publisher distribution. Competing platforms lack this level of integrity. And quite frankly, the worst offender is undoubtedly Amazon. The Amazon DSP is effectively a margin trap, strategically designed to drain all profit from the marketer.

We hear these horror stories firsthand from advertisers leaving their platform. Amazon will first attempt to steer the vast majority of advertiser spend towards its owned and operated inventory, including Amazon Prime Video, where, of course, Amazon captures full margin. It then uses self-attribution measurement tactics to make the claim that all sales originated from its own inventory, compelling the advertiser to further increase spend with Amazon.

What's more, Amazon directs consumer audiences to purchase the advertiser's product on the Amazon website, leading to the advertisers' growing dependence on Amazon as a primary sales channel. This dependency enables Amazon to trap more and more and more ad spend from the advertiser if they want to maintain their positioning in the Amazon store.

As Amazon becomes an advertiser's leading distribution channel, it effectively crushes the advertisers' product margins because Amazon takes the largest cut of the sale amongst all retail distribution channels. And finally, Amazon leverages this sales data against the advertiser to benefit competing advertisers in the same product category and more egregiously to develop its own competing white label products.

How on earth does this model represent a viable option for advertisers? Where is the partnership? There is no partnering with Amazon, and the advertisers that have been spurned by this model are looking elsewhere. And what they are finding is that true independence and objectivity is hard to come by these days. Google's DV360 deploys the same self-attribution tactics as Amazon, claiming YouTube and Google Search are the only channels capable of driving sales on behalf of the advertiser.

Yahoo DSP is no different, claiming the same self-attribution across their publisher properties. Well, advertisers are finally waking up. They have learned you cannot trust the buying platform that also serves as a seller of ads because selling their own content will always take priority at the expense of the advertiser. We believe this leaves Viant and The Trade Desk as the 2 remaining independent and objective enterprise-level buying platforms in market, which, of course, in light of recent press coverage, brings me to transparency.

Viant's go-to-market strategy is fundamentally centered on providing advertisers and agencies with transparency, control and the option to utilize our platform in a way that best suits their needs. We believe we are widely recognized as one of the most transparent buying platforms in the industry, consistently receiving client praise for the high degree of visibility we provide regarding platform fees. Viant's commitment to transparency is rooted in the proven effectiveness of our solutions.

Essentially, our products pay for themselves. When advertisers opt to use Household ID or IRIS ID for audience and contextual targeting, they are rewarded with a significantly enhanced return on ad spend, an investment that pays for itself. The same goes for when advertisers opt into AI bidding, which enables our algorithms to purchase inventory on their behalf.

We generate savings that overwhelmingly accrue to the advertiser. We believe our go-to-market approach supports a mutually aligned business model that drives a win-win scenario for both Viant and our agencies and advertisers. This commitment is further demonstrated by Viant's direct access solution for which Viant charges no fee, passing the value of our direct-to-publisher integrations to our clients, allowing for more working media dollars and better campaign performance.

In fact, Direct Access is specifically engineered to completely eliminate all unnecessary fees charged by bidstream middlemen by creating what we believe is the most efficient programmatic route to premium inventory for our clients. Our business model is predicated on the success of our advertiser clients. We work on their behalf as a true partner, and therefore, when they win, we win. And finally, touching on market dynamics, which have been well documented amongst trade publications.

From our perspective, it is abundantly clear that agencies and advertisers are finally ready to take action and explore alternative demand-side partnerships. Notably, Viant maintains strong, long-lasting relationships with all of the major agency holding companies, which collectively account for approximately 1/3 of our ad spend mix.

As a trusted partner, continuously innovating on behalf of advertisers, we welcome the opportunity to service incremental spend from these existing agency partners. Additionally, our team is actively engaged with a growing number of major U.S. advertisers. These are household names across CPG, retail, QSR and health care verticals, representing ad spend opportunities that either match or eclipse ad spend levels associated with our recent major wins, notably Molson Coors and WHOOP.

Through a superior offering continuously enhanced by innovation, exclusive data signals, a model built on transparency and favorable market dynamics, we believe we have an unprecedented opportunity to secure incremental spend from existing agency partners and win amongst major U.S. advertisers, and we intend to capitalize. With that, I'll turn it over to Larry to provide more detail on our financial performance. Larry?

Thanks, Chris. Before I begin, I would like to remind everyone that we have posted a presentation on our Investor Relations website that includes supplemental financial information to accompany today's call. In terms of our results for the first quarter, revenue for the quarter was $88.5 million, representing a 25% increase year-over-year and exceeding the high end of our guidance range by 3%. Contribution ex-TAC totaled $50.3 million in Q1, up 18% compared to the prior year period and above the midpoint of our guidance range.

We delivered strong performance across most customer verticals in Q1 with financial services, health care, consumer goods and industrials leading the way. CTV remained a core growth driver in Q1, accounting for over 50% of total platform spend, our highest CTV mix on record. In addition, CTV spend reached an all-time high for our first quarter, reflecting continued momentum as advertisers increasingly prioritize premium addressable video to drive performance.

Advertisers industry-wide continue to shift their media mix towards emerging digital channels, including CTV, streaming audio and digital out-of-home. Reflecting the secular trend, customer-directed purchasing on our platform across these channels collectively represented over 60% of total platform spend in the quarter, up from 54% for the full year 2025.

Viant remains well positioned as a leading partner for advertisers moving beyond search and social spending to capitalize on next-generation media formats. Video, inclusive of CTV set a new record, representing over 65% of total platform spend in the quarter, further reflecting the continued shift towards high-impact measurable formats. Building on strong customer momentum, new flagship clients, including Molson Coors and WHOOP, among others, began deploying ad spend in the first quarter and are expected to aggressively ramp spend throughout the year.

At the same time, we are actively engaged with our largest RFP cohort in company history, reflecting our commitment to innovate on behalf of advertisers, our stance to remain an independent objective partner and market dynamics favorable to Viant. Working further down the income statement, non-GAAP operating expenses totaled $40.5 million for the quarter, reflecting a 9% year-over-year increase and a 2% increase sequentially.

Importantly, we remain focused on scaling efficiently. Even as we continue to invest in innovation across Lions AI and our broader technology stack, we have been delivering measurable gains in productivity, increasing trailing 12-month contribution ex-TAC per employee by over 9% year-over-year, marking 11 straight quarterly increases, a clear signal of improved operational efficiency. Adjusted EBITDA for Q1 was $9.8 million, exceeding the high end of our guidance by 3% and increasing 81% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of contribution ex-TAC was 19% for the quarter, expanding by nearly 700 basis points compared to the prior year. Non-GAAP net income, which excludes stock-based compensation and other adjustments, totaled $5.6 million for the quarter, up almost 100% from $2.8 million in the prior year.

Non-GAAP basic earnings per Class A share outstanding increased 125% to $0.09 in the first quarter compared to $0.04 in the prior year period. In terms of share count, we ended the quarter with 63.8 million total shares outstanding, consisting of approximately 18.3 million Class A shares and approximately 45.6 million Class B shares.

We ended the quarter with $185.7 million in cash and cash equivalents and $220.1 million in positive working capital with no debt and access to a $75 million undrawn credit facility. Our solid performance is enabling meaningful positive cash flow generation. For the trailing 12 months ended March 31, 2026, cash flow from operating activities totaled $60 million, representing a year-over-year increase of $16.5 million or 38%.

Free cash flow totaled $41.5 million, representing a year-over-year increase of $15.4 million or 59%. For the current quarter, cash flows from operating activities increased $7.4 million year-over-year, representing a 166% increase and free cash flow increased $7.2 million year-over-year, representing an 88% increase.

Additionally, in the current quarter, we used $1 million for share repurchases under our existing share repurchase program and $3.1 million for share repurchases related to tax withholdings on vested equity awards. Since launching the share repurchase program in May 2024, we have returned $60.6 million to shareholders. As of May 8, $39.4 million remains available under the current plan authorization. We expect to strategically deploy share buybacks to return capital to our shareholders, particularly when our stock is undervalued.

We believe our strong financial foundation, combined with consistent execution and a balanced capital allocation strategy positions us well to capture growth opportunities and drive shareholder value in the quarters ahead. Turning now to our Q2 outlook.

Our Q2 guidance includes a partial quarter contribution from TVision, beginning with the close date of the acquisition, which occurred on May 1, 2026. For the second quarter of 2026, we expect revenue of $98.5 million to $101.5 million, up 28% over the prior year period at the midpoint. Contribution ex-TAC of $58.5 million to $60.5 million, reflecting 23% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. Non-GAAP operating expenses of $45.5 million to $46.5 million, up 24% year-over-year at the midpoint.

Adjusted EBITDA of $13 million to $14 million, representing a 20% year-over-year increase at the midpoint, inclusive of the impact of the TVision acquisition. And finally, we expect an adjusted EBITDA margin as a percentage of contribution ex-TAC of 23% at the midpoint.

The midpoint of our guide assumes record Q2 performance across revenue, contribution ex-TAC and adjusted EBITDA. I would also like to make a couple of general observations about our outlook for 2026. In 2026, we expect contribution ex-TAC growth to continue outpacing the broader U.S. programmatic market, which is projected to grow approximately 13%, driving further market share gains.

We expect year-over-year growth rates of contribution ex-TAC to accelerate sequentially as we move through 2026, primarily driven by new clients onboarding, ramping organic growth, political contribution in the back half of the year and the incorporation of TVision into our financials. We also expect revenue and contribution ex-TAC to continue growing faster than non-GAAP operating expenses on an annual basis, leading to modest adjusted EBITDA margin expansion for the full year 2026.

More broadly, we continue to operate the business with the goal of delivering consistent 20% or more annual top line growth and adjusted EBITDA margin expansion with an opportunity to reach adjusted EBITDA margins of 40% or higher over the next several years.

In closing, we delivered another record quarter, executing against our strategic priorities and advancing innovation across our platform. We believe we are well positioned for sustainable long-term growth given our strategic alignment with secular growth trends, including CTV, proprietary data and buying AI. And with that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions]

And with that, our first question comes from Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum.

So talked a lot about the record pipeline. You certainly gave a lot of color on why that pipeline is building. Just wondering if you could talk about how the opportunities are progressing through the funnel and what that growth -- the accelerating growth story can look like in the coming quarters.

Yes. Thanks, Jason. As we said, it's a growing and very large pipeline right now. Part of that has to do with just the steady cadence of innovation that we've been going after for the last 2 years, but also the market dynamics.

We've definitely seen -- I would put it in stages. We've been winning large customers. We'll be getting test budgets from other large customers. And then we're also in the process of the RFP process that will largely be 2027 opportunities. But in all 3 stages, we just -- we see really good traction.

Great. Appreciate that. Maybe just ask on TVision, the early feedback you've heard from partners. And then you're adding the attention metrics to outcomes. Curious what the time frame is for that and what kind of investment is required?

Yes. The feedback on TVision has been outstanding. We just had an industry event in Miami that's called Possible, met with many agencies and brands. They understand our -- really part of our strategy is around building these exclusive data sets as signals to help marketers understand and value their investments.

The attention data from TVision is so unique. It's a one-on-one asset the fact that they have unified independent measurement across everything in linear television, CTV and walled gardens like YouTube and Prime Video, it really is a leg up for our customers to be able to evaluate how much attention is being paid across all of the programming that they're buying and helping them understand, right now, we're in the middle, upfronts are kicking off.

Marketers want this data at their fingertips when they're negotiating in the upfront. And not only that, they don't want to just measure it after the fact. They want to do something about it in real time when they're bidding and buying in the DSP. And that's exactly what we're going to do, bring the attention signal in real time in the DSP. It's going to be an unprecedented buying platform for marketers. They're going to have an incredible advantage by using Viant.

Our next question comes from Barton Crockett with Rosenblatt.

I'm sorry about that. Can you hear me now?

Yes.

Okay. Great. So I was wondering if you could detail the contribution of the acquisition TV Scientific to the second quarter guide. How much of the acceleration is that versus just more organic fulsome strength? That's one question.

And then the second question is, I was just noticing that you were talking a lot more where in the past, you've kind of spoken about Amazon is not really present in your competitive set. And I was just wondering if that suggests that you're seeing them more even if you should be if you're actually seeing them out there more.

Barton, we got your first question around the contribution of TVision, but you were broken up on the second question. Could you reask it?

Yes, sure. I'm sorry about that. You mentioned Amazon. You spoke a lot about Amazon. And in the past, you've said Amazon is not really particularly present in your competitive set. You just haven't seen them in the bids. But you're talking about them now. So I'm just wondering if that means you're seeing them more even if you think you should be?

Yes. I'll take the first one. In terms of TVision, we're not breaking out the revenue, so I can't comment on what the second quarter contribution would be. But we do see long-term advantages in the flywheel of our business with the TVision asset now consolidated under Viant.

One thing we do expect is it should increase the take rate of all ad spend flowing through as customers choose that measurement or using the data for bidding and buying. So it's the same flywheel. We're not going to break it out because it's fully integrated, but we do expect a lift in take rates on a go-forward basis.

Yes. And with respect to Amazon, we don't see them in the finals of these selections. So that remains consistent. I think that -- to also remain consistent, we do pay attention to them. It is Amazon. They are intent on competing in the space. We think that it's no different than what we've already seen with Google TV 360.

And really, what we're doing is drawing the distinction of what we're hearing from marketers that they want independence. There's a huge -- I think over the last 10 years, marketers have seen what happens when you use a buying platform that you believe it can be independent, but they also are selling their own content and owned and operated inventory to you.

It is a business model, and we want to make sure marketers and investors understand what that true business model actually is and how that differs from the opportunity that Viant offers in that we're not going to have any incentives on the sell side to direct to any particular channel or any particular publisher. We're going to help marketers make the correct decision regardless of where that goes.

Yes. And I would just add to that. 90% of the commentary comes from investors. That's why we decided to talk about it today and the differences of us versus the Amazon DSP. I would say 10% or less are coming from advertisers. And to echo Chris' comments, it's all about objectivity. Are you actually doing the right thing for my business? Or are you doing the right thing for your business, which is Amazon and Google's positioning in the market?

Our next question comes from Laura Martin with Needham.

Sure. So your numbers are excellent, especially compared to The Trade Desk. So they did 12%. You guys just did 18%. Their guidance is lower by 400 basis points for Q2. Yours is higher by 500 basis points. In theory, you're the same kind of company, independent DSP.

So could you sort of size for us or rank order why you think there's this dispersion in growth rates, like 1, 2, 3, what do you think the 3 biggest reasons are? And then secondly, I think Wall Street agrees with you, the proprietary data does have pricing power.

You now have these 3 assets that you have built this proprietary data. The other thing Wall Street really believes is the proprietary supply, like unique content or unique types of ad units also have pricing power. Do you guys have any plans to go into that aspect of sort of the programmatic stack that is -- has a moat around it?

Yes. One of the things I would say about your first question, Laura, thanks for that is really just our positioning in CTV. We want to have proprietary data around content, identity and attention. And that's kind of played out now with the TVision acquisition announcement. But I think we've just stayed very focused in CTV.

It's a massive growing market. It's a huge opportunity. And then when you couple our unique data assets that we have along with direct access that eliminates so many fees for marketers, it's just -- it's an unbelievable offering when you compare us to other platforms. And I think that's a big part of what's driving the faster growth.

On the second question around do we have any plans for exclusive content or being on the content side, the answer to that is plainly no. We view our partner as the advertiser. And in my prepared remarks, I said we're building a business model around the advertiser.

And at no point do we ever want to have a conflict of interest of our interest being aligned with the advertiser's interest. And when you get into that side of the business, there's no doubt Prime Video has great content. YouTube has tons of content, lower quality, but tons of content, and they deserve to be on the buy because of the reach that they bring to marketers.

But they consistently, for lack of a better term, rig the reporting so they get the highest share of wallet, and it's at the detriment of the advertiser. Our goal and objective is to be on the advertiser side independently staying objective and saying, what is the proper allocation of budget to Prime Video, what is the proper allocation of budget to YouTube? And then, of course, bidding and buying across the open Internet for everything else.

Our next question comes from Andrew Marok with Raymond James.

I wanted again to touch on that RFP pipeline that you guys were talking about. Are you seeing any particular areas of strength or verticals within that, that are powering kind of some outsized wins?

And maybe in connection with that, are you starting to see a snowball effect among large advertisers as some of your emerging large advertiser cohorts start to spend, you maybe get some case study data. Is that making it easier to go out and sell to subsequent large advertisers?

Yes. Thanks for that, Andrew. I broadly put the early test that we've got as well as the RFP process, if I had to bucket them, I'd say it's in CPG, retail, health care and QSR. Broadly, I put them in there. Yes, you want to take the second question?

I just repeat that second question.

Yes. Just wondering if you're seeing kind of a snowball effect among large customers. So as your initial crop of large customers starts to spend, obviously, in early stages right now and you start to get maybe some case study data off of them, is it easier then to go out and sell to subsequent large advertisers?

I would say definitely, the network effects of winning, let's call it, the Fortune 500 or companies that spend quite a bit amount of ad spend certainly derisks Viant from being selected by the next major large advertisers.

So if we were aligned 3 to 5 years ago, we weren't being included in RFPs. I would say we're being included in every single RFP now just in the awareness of the company and the differentiation of the product offering. and the objectivity that we bring.

And I think the big issue that advertisers face with, am I going to partner with the platform that owns the content where they have a conflict of interest? Or am I not going to do that and go with an objective platform? When you go with the objectivity route, you really only have 2 choices. There's Viant and what I broadly speak, the other guys, but I'm not going to say their name on this call.

But -- so I do think there's been a huge lack of transparency, which ultimately has led to broken trust with our buy-side competitor, and that's what's leading to more windfall wins to Viant.

And I would just say the other piece, too, is as CTV continues -- the shift from linear into CTV and the dollars are getting so significant, marketers are starting to ask the questions around, okay, well, CTV was supposed to be addressable versus linear. -- and they start looking at these addressability solutions in market that really aren't very scaled. And then they come across Household ID that has over 90% addressability in CTV.

That's a huge win. So that's a big feather in the cap for Viant. When you get to the content, hey, wait a second, why am I only buying at the app level through these other platforms and buying Paramount+, but I don't know what the content is. And our IRIS ID with the proliferation of that north of 50% of all CTV ad inventory has the IRIS ID on it and accelerating.

Now they actually get these shows that they want to buy. Do you want to buy the NFL or do you want to buy the? That's a big difference if you're, say, Molson Coors. So I think just our leadership position there, we've made our bets and they're starting to play out. So that's putting us in these RFP processes as well.

Our next question comes from Naved Khan with B. Riley.

Great. A couple of questions from me. So on the Outcomes adoption, maybe just talk about if you see any change in the growth curve for the spend once advertiser shifts over to outcomes versus the prior setup?

And then just on the elections and just in terms of the spend on your platform, what have you seen historically? And how should we be thinking about the contribution in Q2, Q3, Q4 from elections?

Yes. On the outcomes adoption, what I'd say is although it's early, we're seeing just incredible performance results for marketers. And then just to go back to our previous quarter when we talked about it, it's really because it is an autonomous product.

It's not -- we're taking away the latency that typically is experienced with humans making changes to campaigns and optimizing and it's doing it at the speed of milliseconds. So we just see tremendous performance improvements. Clients that are in the Outcomes product are loving it. I will say it is still early.

We're seeing tremendous growth, but it is off of a small base. And really, this was about -- this wasn't about going and diverting spend from our existing customers. It was going after an entirely new market of performance marketing, which we believe is north of 60% of total ad budgets in the market.

So we think that although early, we're seeing great growth signs, we have a very exciting product road map that we're continuing to enhance the outcomes offering, I think that we'll hear about in the coming quarters.

In terms of political advertising, Q2 is usually a light quarter for political. It really kicks in, in Q3 and Q4, almost equally split towards the back half of Q3, the front end of Q4 or up to midway through. So that cycle really hasn't hit. Larry, do you remember political last cycle?

Yes. The presidential cycle in '24, we probably added about 500 basis points of growth in Q3 and Q4, not -- as Jim said, not very much in Q2 though and very little in Q1. So this is nonpresidential, midterms, we think it might be lower than that number, but still looks like it's going to be meaningful.

Our next question comes from Stephen Ju with UBS.

Great. So can we talk about the time line of when you win an RFP and when budgets would start to actually roll in? I get that everybody is different, but is it 6 months? Is it a year? Is it 9 months?

And secondarily, I think the feedback that we're getting advertisers as more and more of the budget shift to online is that there's greater, I guess, volatility. It's easier to spool up campaigns and it's easier to kill campaigns when things are online. So -- versus back in the day when it was TV only. So I'm just wondering what kind of behavior you're seeing from advertisers as the geopolitical backdrop and everything else remains very fluid.

Yes. On the first one, the RFPs are largely about 2027. These are -- these DSP selections, they are heavy lift on the advertisers. So it's a pretty lengthy evaluation process when you're going through that. Some of them elect to do tests with some of the platforms that they're RFPing.

As I mentioned, we're underway on a lot of those. But they're going to be 2027. I would say that most of them, you expect that will hit in January, but they all have -- depending on the categories, they have different budget cycles throughout the year, but we would expect a lot of these to really begin in the first quarter of '27.

In terms of the volatility of CTV versus linear TV, it certainly is more volatile than an upfront committed television ad spend because one of the greatest parts of the demand-side platform is the flexibility that we actually bring advertisers the ability to hit pause.

So certainly, that risk is there from our business perspective. But I will say the moment you hit pause because it's such a large percentage of ad spend now, all you're doing is hurting consumer demand in the future for your product or service.

So to give you an idea, like during the COVID time period, a large chunk, the majority of advertisers paused their ad spend, and that lasted for between 10 and 14 days before they turned it back on and ad spends were even greater. So I think in the long term, what you have is, yes, the ability to pause, it's great flexibility for advertisers if something is massively disruptive.

But ultimately, they need to stimulate consumer demand for their product or service and digital is where they activate and most of the budgets are going to go there. So I think we're in the right tailwind. We haven't noticed any increased volatility or anything different. Conversely, we're winning bigger customers, which usually are planning out their budgets on an annual basis versus quarterly or monthly the way we built the business. So I think for us, we should be fine. We don't see anything from a macro perspective where that volatility would kick in.

Our final question will come from Wyatt Swanson with D.A. Davidson.

Appreciate the question on for Tom White. There's been a lot of reports in recent weeks and months about potential disruptions to the status quo in terms of the relationships between large brand advertisers and their agencies and their legacy DSP relationship.

Can you talk about whether that's been a tailwind to your business in recent weeks? And maybe how meaningful an incremental spend opportunity could these developments be for Viant over the next couple of years?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Wyatt. We don't see any disruption between advertisers and their agencies per se. I think it's the latter around DSPs. And I think -- as we talked about in our prepared remarks, certainly very public about that. We're definitely seeing that there is I would say the sentiment. There have been a lot of sentiment already in the market around lack of transparency and really whether or not they were going to actually go through with RFPing their platform looking for alternatives, and that's well, well underway.

We're already seeing the tests because of those things. We do expect that we'll get an increased amount of spend throughout the rest of the year because of some of that. But what I would say, though, is we're not getting that spend because of the issues that are happening that are showing up in the press. We're getting that because we built a superior offering and marketers are now realizing it, and they're ready to make the jump.

Okay. At this time, we have no more questions.

Thank you, everyone. We'll see you next quarter.

Welcome to TVision conference call. My name is Melissa and I will be your operator today. Before I hand over the call to the Viant's leadership team, I would like to go over a few housekeeping notes for the program. As a reminder this call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] Thank you for the attendance today and I will now turn the call over to the Nick Zangler, SVP of Investor Relations of Viant.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining today's conference call to discuss our agreement to acquire TVision. On the call today are Tim Vanderhook, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer; Chris Vanderhook, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer; and Larry Madden, Chief Financial Officer.

I'd like to remind you that we will make forward-looking statements on our call today, including, but not limited to our agreement to acquire TVision, the expected timing and completion of the transaction, the anticipated benefits and synergies of the acquisition, plans for integration and platform enhancement, expected financial impact of the acquisition, our guidance for Q1 2026 and other future financial results, our strategy, our platform development initiatives, including Viant AI, our pipeline and potential partnership opportunities, growth of our total addressable market and industry trends that are based on assumptions and subject to future events, risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected.

These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the risk that the acquisition may not close on the expected timeline revise these statements, except as required by law.

For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements and our entire safe harbor statement, please refer to the news release issued today as well as the risks and uncertainties described in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, under the heading Risk Factors and in our other filings with the SEC.

During today's call, we will also present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. We will also reference certain preliminary unaudited financial information related to TVision. This information has not been independently audited or verified and is subject to change.

I would now like to turn the call over to Tim Vanderhook, Chief Executive Officer of Viant. Tim?

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us this afternoon. We are excited to announce Viant has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire TVision, a preeminent television measurement provider uniquely capable of quantifying the true value of linear TV and connected TV ad inventory through viewer attention-based insights, sourced from a demographically balanced, nationally representative panel of U.S. households.

This acquisition offers profound technological synergies which we expect will fundamentally reshape how advertiser budgets are allocated, shifting away from outdated frameworks based on delivered impressions to our first-of-its-kind real-time, AI-powered attention-based optimization platform, where budget allocation scales across inventory proven to capture genuine human engagement. Today, the prevailing industry standard for budget allocation is based on impression counts purchased via a CPM metric.

This valuation methodology directs spending across content providers based on the sheer delivery of an ad with advertisers currently using impressions as a proxy for attention. However, this conventional approach is deeply limited because it accounts only for an ad being delivered, the technical opportunity for the ad to be seen and completely fails to account for the actual level of attention each ad placement receives.

This absence of attention data results in inefficient budget allocation and prevents advertisers from accurately calculating the true return on their ad spend. TVision measures attention by capturing 3 signals of human engagement, in-room presence, co-viewership and eyes-on-screen attention, with each signal serving as a multiplier utilized against publisher rate cards to determine the quality and attention-adjusted value of available linear TV and CTV ad inventory.

When nobody is in the room, an ad delivers no value. TVision measures in-room presence across available ad inventory, enabling advertisers to optimize toward placements with a verified audience. The bigger the audience, the greater the value. Optimizing for co-viewership multiples enables advertisers to expand their reach without incurring additional cost. But above all else, advertisers seek undivided consumer attention when making their pitch.

TVision tracks eyes-on-screen viewership to identify the specific placements that command the focused attention of viewer audiences, which is the ultimate measure of value. Now equipped with attentive intelligence, Viant will enable advertisers to strategically optimize budget allocation toward ad inventory that delivers the most compelling value as determined by our new proprietary valuation metric, the attention-adjusted CPM.

Let's examine a recent data set that clearly illustrates TVision's ability to properly value ad inventory based on genuine attention by comparing app-level data between YouTube and HBO Max.

While traditional metrics suggest YouTube's $22 CPM represents a greater value when compared to HBO Max's $30 CPM. TVision's attention insights definitively invert this valuation. After applying appropriate multipliers that account for YouTube's comparatively low in-room presence, co-viewership and eyes-on-screen viewer attention, YouTube's true cost per attentive viewer surges. In stark contrast, HBO Max's comparatively higher engagement scores shows that advertisers are actually spending 21% less per attentive view on HBO Max versus YouTube, underscoring a substantially higher return on ad spend on HBO Max and compelling a more aggressive budget allocation.

TVision is uniquely positioned to surface this attentive insight through its proprietary dataset, sourced from a demographically balanced nationally representative panel of U.S. households, each of which is equipped with TVision's cutting-edge computer vision technology and automatic content recognition or ACR. From this panel, TVision processes daily household content consumption and eyes-on-screen viewership data, which enables the company to surface detailed second-by-second insights into viewer behavior, content selection, co-viewing size and the exact level of attention paid to all linear and CTV content on display within each household in its panel.

TVision works by integrating 2 powerful data streams; content consumption data and eyes-on-screen viewership data, which together generate an unmatched viewer attention data set. Content consumption data is captured by the company's ACR technology, which processes both linear TV and CTV content and is capable of tracking a wide spectrum of engagement data. This includes identifying the CTV operating system, streaming device and streaming service in use at any given time and drills down further to the specific content consumed, including movies, shows, sporting events and advertisements, even amongst walled garden streaming services like YouTube and Prime Video.

Eyes-on-screen viewership data is captured by the company's computer vision technology, which is embedded in cameras mounted to each household's primary TV. This always-on technology continuously tracks in-room presence, the number of co-viewers and precisely measures when a viewer's eyes are directed toward the TV screen. Together, these data streams are fused to produce an unrivaled viewer attention data set, offering valuable insights that we plan to deeply embed across our entire buying platform.

Leveraging TVision's comprehensive viewer attention data, our AI-powered buying platform will be uniquely equipped to assign definitive attention scores and corresponding attention-adjusted CPMs to virtually all available linear TV and CTV ad inventory at a level of granularity that is fundamentally unattainable on any other buying platform. This is because Viant is the only buying platform capable of linking TVision's attention insights to our exclusive proprietary content identifier, the IRIS_ID.

Using the IRIS_ID, we will inject TVision's high-fidelity viewer engagement signals directly into the programmatic bid stream. Together, IRIS_ID's content intelligence and TVision's attentive insights will enable Viant to apply attentive values to ad inventory with surgical granularity, not just broadly across networks and streaming services, but deep into individual shows, distinct ad breaks, specific ad pods and even amongst individual ad slots that reside within each ad pod, all while simultaneously accounting for real-time demographic insights such as viewer age, gender, income and location.

This micro-level intelligence decisively informs programmatic targeting and bidding decisions, leading to significant enhancements in return on ad spend and optimized outcomes for advertisers. Across a digital ad landscape plagued with self-attributing walled gardens, TVision measures what actually matters, genuine human attention. As one of the industry's leading independent and objective buying platforms dedicated entirely to driving outcomes for advertisers, this strategic addition establishes Viant as the advertising industry's arbiter of truth, properly valuing ad inventory across the market based on demonstrated effectiveness in capturing attention and producing results.

We believe we can provide unbiased market-wide insights into verified audience engagement, enabling advertisers to compare and weigh the true value of all TV inventory across both linear TV and connected TV ecosystems. While our competitors continue to measure themselves, Viant will have the ability to measure the effectiveness of the entire market, enabling advertisers to confidently direct spend toward the ad inventory that truly performs and delivers optimal outcomes.

I will now turn it over to Chris to further discuss how we will embed TVision into our AI-powered buying platform and expand upon our suite of services.

Thanks, Tim. We are thrilled to integrate the undisputed leader in attention measurement trusted by television's largest advertisers and content owners into Viant's AI-powered buying platform. Today, major advertisers, including Procter & Gamble, AT&T, American Express and TikTok leverage TVision's viewer attention insights to broadly allocate ad budgets to destinations with high attentive viewership as well as to assess the performance of their own ad creatives, enabling for continuous refinement of their go-to-market creative strategy.

Leading content owners, including Netflix, Disney, Amazon, NBCU, Paramount and Fox leverage TVision's viewer attention insights to maximize audience engagement and inform content strategy. They use TVision data to gauge audience interest and compare performance across genres, new versus repeat content, bingeable formats, linear versus CTV distribution and so forth. This deep understanding of viewer attention supports informed content development decisions for future programming.

But with Viant, the game changes as together we will move TVision beyond measurement to establish an entirely new standard in programmatic advertising. Within Viant's AI-powered buying platform, TVision's attention data will be activated, creating a truly novel first-of-its-kind solution capable of transforming viewer attention into actionable signals, enabling real-time viewer engagement to directly inform planning, bidding and optimization decisioning exclusively within our platform.

Fundamentally, TVision adds another key pillar of critical insight to our intelligence layer, which includes household ID, IRIS_ID and now TVision viewer attention data. When these signals are used in conjunction with one another, targeting and measurement granularity compounds, enabling for the construction and execution of a highly refined advertiser targeting strategy, leading to optimal campaign outcomes.

Consider the holistic solution set Viant now offers to advertisers. We have strategically architected a complete and unmatched stack of proprietary high-fidelity identity, content and viewer attention-based targeting and measurement solutions, uniquely capable of delivering optimal outcomes through the industry's first fully autonomous AI-powered buying platform.

To refresh, Viant's household ID is our patented deterministic audience targeting and measurement solution, providing superior addressability for advertisers looking to leverage their first-party data to reach specific audiences and measure performance. It is deeply entrenched in the programmatic bidstream, present in over 80% of all bid requests and over 90% of all CTV bid requests, which is approximately 4x the coverage of competing audience identifiers. Viant's IRIS_ID is our proprietary content targeting and measurement solution, which uniquely enables advertisers to target CTV ad inventory at the show level, going beyond the app, making it possible for advertisers to bid on unique contextual signals, emotional sentiment, tone and brand suitability. IRIS_ID's presence in the bidstream is expanding rapidly, now available in nearly 50% of all incoming CTV bid requests.

TVision's viewer attention data adds yet another dimension of high fidelity proprietary insight to our intelligence layer, enabling advertisers to target CTV ad inventory based on the genuine level of human attention various placements attract. These signals in combination with our proprietary household identity graph, custom supply scoring models and repository of historical campaign performance data collectively formulate an intelligence layer exclusive to our buying platform that is simply unmatched in the industry.

Our recently launched Outcomes solution, the open Internet's first fully autonomous AI-powered ad product founded on our AI Lattice brain decisioning architecture will draw upon these signals that reside within our intelligence layer to build and execute campaigns with a level of granularity and precision that does not exist elsewhere.

To demonstrate this level of granular execution at work, let me highlight one of the best available placements an advertiser can purchase in the market today as determined by TVision. The hit show, Only Murders in the Building on Hulu commands a very high rate of in-room presence, co-viewership and eyes-on-screen attentive viewership, making it one of the most attractive destinations to align an ad creative.

Beyond show-level attention scores, TVision provides deeper insight that precisely detail the specific moments and distinct audiences where value peaks. In fact, as TVision dictates, Only Murders in the Building ad inventory is most valuable during prime time amongst 18- to 34-year-old females and households generating over $100,000 amongst the first ad pod and most ideally, the first ad slot within the first ad pod. This is phenomenal insight. But to enable an advertiser to act on this programmatically, these signals need to be actionable in the bidstream.

It is only by combining these signals with our audience identifier, Household ID and our content identifier, IRIS_ID that TVision's insights can be utilized for programmatic activation. Furthermore, given the sheer breadth of various parameters, the only way to efficiently and effectively acquire ad inventory at this heightened level of granularity is autonomously through the use of Viant's AI-powered buying platform.

For these reasons, we mutually believe Viant and TVision have technological synergies that create a truly unequivocable (sic) [ unequivocal ] offering in the market. Before turning the call over to Larry, I will say this. Viant's core differentiator has always been defined by a commitment to independence and objectivity and the desire to drive optimal outcomes for advertisers through the use of proprietary intelligence. It should be clear, we are doubling down on this strategy. TVision significantly expands our moat around programmatic targeting and measurement industry leadership. While our competitors claim differentiation through owned and operated content, inherently, we can all see them for what they truly are, sellers of ads with major conflicts of interest.

Conversely, Viant continues to innovate on behalf of advertisers, connecting them to ad inventory that performs, drives return on ad spend and delivers optimal outcomes. I will now turn it over to Larry to discuss transaction details and modeling considerations.

Thanks, Chris. As both Tim and Chris have detailed, the acquisition of TVision presents highly compelling strategic and technological synergies, capable of accelerating top and bottom line growth at Viant. TVision is a high-performing asset with well-diversified and growing revenue streams. On a stand-alone basis, for the full year 2025, TVision generated approximately $10 million in annual revenue on a preliminary unaudited basis. We anticipate the incorporation of TVision will have a modest negative impact on Viant's consolidated adjusted EBITDA in 2026 as we invest to scale and integrate the business.

These figures are preliminary and subject to customary post-closing verification. By fully integrating TVision into our technology stack, we expect to materially strengthen our targeting and measurement capabilities, which we expect will drive increased ad spend from new and existing clients, elevate our platform take rate and lead to adjusted EBITDA margin expansion over time.

The consideration for the TVision acquisition is $40 million, subject to customary adjustments and holdbacks, consisting of $22.5 million in cash and $17.5 million of Class A common stock. We anticipate the transaction will close in the current calendar year quarter 2Q '26. Lastly, we are reaffirming our 1Q '26 guidance, which calls for revenue growth of 20% at the midpoint, contribution ex-TAC growth of 17% at the midpoint and adjusted EBITDA growth of 67% at the midpoint.

Going forward, we continue to operate the business with a goal of delivering consistent 20% or more annual top line growth and adjusted EBITDA margin expansion with an opportunity to reach adjusted EBITDA margins of 40% or higher over time. With that, I will turn the call back over to Tim for some closing remarks.

Thanks, Larry. In combination with TVision, we have established Viant as the only independent and objective buying platform capable of measuring and valuing the entire linear TV and CTV landscape, positioning Viant as the industry's sole arbiter of truth and the only platform capable of directing advertiser spend to the very best destinations, where human engagement is real and optimal outcomes are realized.

Our fully autonomous AI-powered buying platform is anchored to proprietary intelligence spanning identity, content and attention, making Viant the most sophisticated and effective platform in the industry for driving advertiser outcomes.

Through numerous synergistic revenue opportunities, we expect to meaningfully accelerate top line growth, will improve profitability and seize market share in the years to come.

I will now turn the call over to the operator for questions. Operator?

Our next question comes from Maria Ripps from Canaccord.

Congrats on the deal. So first, our understanding is that TVision's data has historically been licensed to a few competitors in the measurement space sort of to enhance their own measurement offerings. Do you anticipate to make TVision sort of data exclusive to the Viant platform after the acquisition? And I guess, what does that mean -- what would that mean for sort of for the relationships that the platform built and for existing revenue stream?

Thanks for the question, Maria. Good morning. Yes, we do plan to make the TVision data exclusive to the Viant platform. There are some contractual obligations that we'll have to abide by in the near term. But as those contracts expire, like you said, they are primarily around measurement, we will fold that back into Viant.

Next question, operator?

Our next question comes from Matt Condon.

This is Brianna Diaz on for Matthew Condon. Just can you help us understand what makes TVision's data truly proprietary and timeline to weave those signals into the Viant AI platform over time?

And then just on the customers, how much overlap exists today between Viant's customer base and TVision's existing clients and how does that inform your go-to-market strategy?

Thanks for the question. So I'll take the first one, Chris, you could take the second and fill in. Why is it unique? What's unique about the TVision data is it has the ACR data of what's playing on the screen and a camera on top of the TV to understand who's exactly in front of that screen. Beyond that, it's more than that. It's actually tracking the eyes of the consumer.

So when we talk about attention data, it's not just that a person sitting on the couch with the TV on, it is that their physical eyes are looking at the screen, not at their phone. So the data itself exists nowhere else. There's no LLM that has it. There's no other ad tech company that has it. There's no walled garden that has it. Additionally, it's the largest U.S. person-based panel that exists in the U.S.A. So it's pretty unique data and one that is very tough to replicate.

I would just add I think what's incredibly unique is what this gives -- what type of a capability this gives marketers. When they're planning -- historically, we mentioned in the prepared remarks, when they plan, it's all about -- they're planning based on reach and frequency, and the currency is basically delivered impressions. But they have no idea if someone's in the room, they have no idea how many people are in the room if someone is in the room, and they have no idea if people are paying attention to the programming or if they're paying attention to their ad.

This is going to give an incredible signal to our customers that's going to give them a competitive advantage when planning and buying television. And the great part is it's not just linear, it's not just CTV. It crosses both, and it also gives you purview into the walled gardens as well.

On the second question, Brianna, just on customer overlap, this is what was so unique about TVision. Hardly any customer overlap whatsoever given their business. And the panel business is very unique, and they've done an amazing job of building a nationally representative panel. But we're really excited to be able to bring something that is typically outside of a platform to bring that intelligence in for our customers.

And Brianna just last point on why it's so unique. The entire industry operates off of delivered impressions with no ability to tell if anyone's in front of the screen and how long they paid attention to the advertisers 15- or 30-second ad spot.

So we're moving the industry away from impressions and now towards attentive seconds that a consumer is exposed to the ad, and we think this is the future for TV buying.

Next question, operator?

Our next question comes from Jason Kreyer from Craig-Hallum.

Congrats. This seems like it makes a ton of sense. I wanted to just ask about the integration and rollout time line just to get this kind of data embedded into your bidding platform. And it seems like TVision really has the ability to strengthen things like Household ID and IRIS_ID. Just wondering if you could talk more about how those solutions become more durable with TVision.

Yes. Chris, why don't you take the latter part of the question. So the integration today, we actually did the legwork of integrating TVision data as prebid segments available in the DSP starting today. So that is live. We will finish a complete tighter integration where we get second-by-second measurement fed back into the DSP in the very near term, like in the next 4 to 6 months, to complete that from a measurement perspective, so we can have a real-time feedback loop right into the DSP.

Chris, you want to add?

Yes. I would just -- I would add, Jason, we've been talking a lot about one of the -- we've long talked about when we go to market and we speak to an advertiser, they're asking 1 of 2 questions, which is, if I'm going to use your platform, what exclusive inventory do you have access to, which we do not play in that game since we're buy side only or it's what exclusive data do you have?

And that's squarely where we play. We want to have unbelievable intelligence. That's why we name it the intelligence layer. And this starts with our household ID then because we have -- we believe we have the largest amount of addressability of any platform, we're 4x the next closest competitor of our Household ID in the bidstream. The second would be around IRIS_ID, our acquisition we did in 2024.

It now has penetration of content owners in the bidstream and CTV of over 50%. Not only that, when you take the TVision attention data and you overlay that on to Iris' IRIS_IDs and which shows are driving the most amount of attention, that gives marketers an incredible ability to bid differently. Maybe they are going to purchase that show based on their attention, maybe they're not. If they have high amount of attention, they bid it up. If they have low amount of attention on that show, they bid less. Marketers have no ability to do that today. That's really the network effects that we believe by adding TVision into our intelligence layer, the network effects of that now onto the IRIS_ID are going to be incredible.

Can I ask one more question on the go-to-market? I'm curious, historically, like how much does the go-to-market change here? Is TVision primarily going to market as a measurement solution historically and then you're pivoting that to kind of putting that into the bidstream? Or did they already have that kind of bidstream-like capability in the past?

So TVision will still sell -- they have a -- they do sell a stand-alone measurement product to marketers. And they obviously, as we talked about as well as the content owners. But measurement is very powerful and customers do need measurement out there and independent measurement is so important. The problem with most measurement companies and most offerings is it's typically a report that happens after the fact. It's not in flight. And then marketers, when they get results, they want to do something about it, not 6 weeks later, not in the next quarter, they want to do something about it now.

When they can't make a decision on data right now, that adds latency, and that's where performance leaks. And that's what -- by bringing a dataset like this that has never existed in a DSP before. In real time, that's what's going to be very, very interesting for marketers.

And Jason, just to add to that, had we not done the IRIS_ID acquisition, it would be nearly impossible to bring the TVision data set through the bidstream. So it really is the one-two punch of the IRIS acquisition together with TVision is what's enabling advertisers to have this level of granularity for targeting.

The next question is coming from Naved Khan from B. Riley.

Maybe just to get a better handle on the monetization of this offering. So would you be offering it as an opt-in to your customers? Or is it going to be more of a market share where you would probably embed it across the -- as a standard offering and then be able to get more share? Just give us your thoughts there.

Yes. Really good question. So there's really 2 forms of monetization. So we're going to scale the number of advertisers that license TVision measurement capabilities for use in linear, walled gardens and of course, the open web programmatic where our DSP plays. So that goes as more like a SaaS-style revenue stream where customers sign up on an annual commitment of dollars for the measurement capability. Additionally, we see this is improving our take rates or contribution ex-TAC rates that we're able to charge. It's paired with the IRIS_ID, which is more on a CPM, and it would be by usage in the DSP. So we see it as a dual benefit from a monetization perspective.

Our next question comes from Tim Mitchell, from Raymond James.

This is Tim on for Andrew. Just curious if you could talk a little bit more about the demand from advertisers for attention measurement? Like how are they using it in terms of their targeting decisions, et cetera, that made this such a compelling acquisition.

I mean the demand is off the charts for attention. Everybody knows that the current setup of buying delivered impressions that it's broken, but there's been no solution brought to market and it's commonly talked about that the need for attention but it's just been an inability to bring it to market. And I think it's -- we had the unique asset sets of our DSP with the IRIS acquisition and now layered on with TVision, and the ability to bring objective level truth as to what the value of linear TV is what the value of Open Web is and what the value of walled gardens are. I would say if you talk to any advertiser today, what are they looking for, unified measurement of what that value is across all 3 channels that they're deploying money today.

Thanks, Tim.

This was our last question and concludes our Q&A session.

Thank you, everyone, for joining the call this morning, and we'll be in touch.

Okay. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Viant Technologies Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. My name is David, and I will be your operator today. Before I hand the call over to the Viant leadership team, I'd like to go over a few housekeeping notes for the program. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] Thank you for your attendance today. I'm now happy to turn the call over to Nick Zangler, SVP of Investor Relations for Viant.

Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to Viant Technologies' Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. On the call today are Tim Vanderhook, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer; Chris Vanderhook, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer; and Larry Madden, Chief Financial Officer.

I'd like to remind you that we will make forward-looking statements on our call today, including, but not limited to, statements regarding our guidance for Q1 2026 and other future financial results, our strategy, our platform development initiatives, including ViantAI, our pipeline and potential partnership opportunities, growth of our total addressable market, our share repurchase program and industry trends that are based on assumptions and subject to future events, risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected.

These forward-looking statements speak only as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise these statements, except as required by law. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements and our entire safe harbor statement, please refer to the news release issued today as well as the risks and uncertainties described in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, under the heading Risk Factors and in our other filings with the SEC.

During today's call, we will also present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are included in the news release issued today and in our earnings presentation, which have been posted on the Investor Relations page of the company's website and in our filings with the SEC. I would now like to turn the call over to Tim Vanderhook, Chief Executive Officer of Viant. Tim?

Thanks, Nick, and thank you all for joining us today. We delivered strong fourth quarter performance, achieving new company records across all key metrics. Revenue increased 22% year-over-year and contribution ex-TAC increased 19% year-over-year, both above the high point of our quarterly guidance range. When excluding political advertising, revenue and contribution ex-TAC increased 28% and 24% in the quarter, respectively, and more accurately reflects the true strength of our business.

Growth was broad-based across verticals, driven by accelerating CTV demand, strong digital out-of-home and mobile demand, increased utilization and further adoption of Viant's addressability solutions and expanded use of the ViantAI product suite. Adjusted EBITDA increased 45% year-over-year to $24.7 million for the quarter and exceeded the high end of our guidance range.

Our fourth quarter performance completes a solid year for Viant. In 2025, revenue increased 19% to $344 million. Contribution ex-TAC increased 18% to $209 million and adjusted EBITDA increased 29% to $57 million. While these are standout results as reported, our underlying performance was far stronger than these results indicate. Our contribution ex-TAC rose nearly 20% in 2025, while absorbing the effects of tariff-related pressure, cycling a difficult political comparison and navigating the migration of a material client off platform due to a corporate merger.

We were also able to increase adjusted EBITDA nearly 30% while absorbing incremental operating expenses associated with our strategic acquisitions of IRIS.TV and Lockr. As we shift our focus to 2026, we foresee a year of accelerating performance, attributable to a number of catalysts worth noting. First, we see a healthy ad environment, evidenced by strengthening customer demand trends observed through this point in the quarter.

Our new flagship customer, Molson Coors, is live and actively deploying ad spend in the first quarter with plans to ramp throughout the year and in the years to come. Joining Molson Coors are several major U.S. advertisers who have recently launched ad campaigns with Viant, including WHOOP, the human performance company behind world-class wearable technology. Other notable wins include a leading CTV streaming service, a national charitable foundation and a national convenience store chain.

We expect these advertisers to significantly ramp ad spend in the coming quarters, and we look forward to securing additional major U.S. advertiser wins throughout the year. We also expect major tentpole viewership events to drive incremental ad spend to CTV channel this year. In February, the most watched Winter Olympics since 2014 averaged 23.5 million U.S. viewers and the 2026 World Cup is projected to exceed a prior record of 26 million U.S. viewers later this year.

Both marquee events are hosted by providers within our direct access premium publisher program, Peacock for the Winter Olympics and Fox, Peacock and various virtual MVPDs for the World Cup. Furthermore, we anticipate strong contribution from political advertisers in the second half of the year, fueled by midterm elections and the ongoing shift of political budgets from linear TV to CTV.

Within our addressability suite, we expect to benefit from ramping adoption and increased utilization of IRIS ID, our industry-leading content identifier. And finally, I could not be more excited about the recent launch of Outcomes, our new branded AI decisioning solution powered by our AI Lattice Brain and intelligence layer, which is aimed at winning performance budgets across advertisers of all sizes.

Chris and I are going to spend the bulk of our time today highlighting the capabilities, features and use cases associated with the launch of Outcomes. But I do want to provide an update on recent performance and progress across all 3 of our key strategic priorities: CTV, addressability and ViantAI.

The migration of advertising dollars from linear television to CTV continues to accelerate, and our platform is strategically positioned to serve advertisers capitalizing on this shift. Reflecting this market dynamic, our customers increasingly directed their purchasing decisions towards CTV, with total CTV spend on our platform reaching a new all-time high in the quarter and representing 46% of total advertiser spend.

For the second consecutive year, CTV contribution ex-TAC increased by more than 40%, over 2.5x the broader industry growth rate. This outsized adoption reflects Viant's strategic investments in CTV infrastructure, publisher relationships and addressability solutions, which collectively position Viant as the platform of choice for CTV campaign deployment across the open Internet.

Contributing to our outsized CTV growth is the continued expansion of our direct access premium publisher program. Direct Access offers advertisers an efficient, targetable and measurable path to purchase CTV ad inventory. By facilitating transactions directly with publishers, we can bypass bidstream resellers, allowing advertiser spend to be allocated to working media, not middlemen, driving better returns for our clients.

For the full year 2025, nearly 50% of CTV ad spend on our platform was transacted through our direct access premium publisher program, which includes CTV streaming services from leading providers like Disney, Paramount, Peacock and many more. Our addressability suite is the bedrock of our buying platform. It includes the industry's leading audience identifier, Household ID, and the industry's leading content identifier, IRIS ID.

Viant Household ID, our patented deterministic audience targeting and measurement solution continues to see strong utilization amongst advertisers and was a meaningful contributor to top line growth in the quarter. Household ID delivers superior addressability for advertisers looking to leverage their first-party data to reach specific audiences and measure campaign performance.

Our household ID is truly ubiquitous, embedded in over 80% of all programmatic bid requests and over 90% of all CTV requests. And with 95% of all household addresses mapped to our ID graph, we can match advertisers to addressable audiences at a massive scale, with Household ID offering approximately 4x the coverage of competing audience identifiers.

IRIS ID, our proprietary content targeting and measurement solution, continues to proliferate amongst publishers, enabling advertisers to deploy contextual campaigns at greater scale. In just over a year since its acquisition, the presence of IRIS ID within the CTV bid stream has grown fivefold, reaching nearly 50% of incoming CTV bid requests during the first quarter.

IRIS ID empowers advertisers to target CTV inventory at the show level, going beyond the app, making it possible for advertisers to bid on unique contextual signals like emotional sentiment, tone and brand suitability. This is made possible through direct integrations with the publishers' own content management systems, providing Viant with a meaningfully higher resolution of contextual intelligence.

Looking across our client base, financial institutions use IRIS ID for brand-safe ad placement, targeting categories like fine art and family and content that conveys inspiration and reflection. Outdoor fashion retailers deploy IRIS ID for brand relevance, targeting categories such as nature and travel and content that exudes reliability and ruggedness.

Given the enhancement in performance, we have seen several advertisers and agencies mandate the use of IRIS ID across the entire CTV budgets, which is quite the endorsement and one that is likely to incentivize further adoption across CTV publishers. In the quarter, revenue attached to IRIS ID utilization increased 90% sequentially.

Moving on to ViantAI. In early January, we announced the launch of the fourth phase of ViantAI, our AI decisioning functionality. AI decisioning introduces a new standard of autonomous optimization. It moves beyond initial ad campaign setup, providing for real-time campaign refinement and the technological agility to continuously react to fluid market conditions with the goal of delivering optimal campaign outcomes.

The launch of AI decisioning was accompanied by the introduction of a new branded solution appropriately named Outcomes, which we have built to service performance advertisers. At the surface level, the user interface level, Outcomes ask for just 4 basic inputs, the name of the advertiser or the advertiser's product or service, the budget, the flight dates and the goal, be it incremental revenue, return on ad spend or cost per action. Once submitted, the advertiser's work is done, and ViantAI does the rest.

Beneath the surface is a decisioning architecture purpose-built for autonomous campaign operation, which we call the AI Lattice brain. Based on the advertiser inputs, the Lattice brain constructs the most optimal media plan by leveraging differentiated and proprietary signals unique to Viant from within our intelligence layer, signals that support a multitude of functions.

For identity resolution, Lattice Brain utilizes signals like Household ID and our custom identity graph to build and execute sophisticated audience targeting strategies, frequency capping and sequential messaging capabilities. For supply quality evaluation, Lattice Brain leverages our unique integrations with direct access, premium publishers and our custom supply scoring models.

These models rank supply paths based on impression quality, brand safety, fraudulence, bot activity and more, providing critical intelligence that informs channel and publisher mix modeling and price discovery. For performance enhancement, Lattice Brain taps our high-fidelity signals like IRIS ID, along with attention and creative placement scoring models to maximize campaigns for viewability, engagement and overall impact, aligning media delivery directly to advertiser-defined outcomes.

Our AI Lattice Brain operates against a signal set that no competing DSP or stand-alone AI tool can replicate because it is dependent on proprietary identifiers, unique supply integrations and optimized intelligence that accumulates only through our integrated stack. Importantly, Lattice Brain launches with this intelligence already in place, activating against a mature high-fidelity signal foundation from day 1.

As campaigns execute, our platform continuously incorporates incremental performance data, further sharpening precision and efficiency. We believe this flywheel to decide, execute, measure and refine operating against the highest fidelity proprietary signals is capable of delivering newfound levels of ad efficiency and performance that compounds over time.

Historically, advertisers and agencies have been burdened with the responsibility of manually constructing and executing ad campaigns. They have had little choice but to navigate a highly complex and fluid bid stream. which operates at the staggering speed of up to 15 million bid requests per second independently. This is a difficult task even with the use of our proprietary data signals at their disposal.

But with the launch of Outcomes, the onus shifts to AI and performance optimization becomes autonomous. Outcomes assumes the role of media planner, trader and data scientists autonomously optimizing every decision in service of the advertisers' defined performance objective. As the culmination of all 4 phases of ViantAI, Outcomes is a complete autonomous performance solution.

Governed by our Lattice brain decisioning architecture, it leverages proprietary data signals within our intelligence layer to deliver measurable performance outcomes in a way that has not been done before. We have built the open Internet's first fully autonomous AI-powered ad product designed to compete for performance budgets against the walled gardens.

In a moment, Chris will discuss our go-to-market strategy and run through a few early case studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of our new outcomes solution. Before concluding, I want to briefly address the broader industry discussion around AI and its impact on software platforms, including companies like Viant.

We believe AI strengthens businesses built on proprietary data and domain-specific infrastructure. In our case, AI amplifies the structural advantages already embedded in our platform. There is an insurmountable gap between the theoretical ability to assemble a DSP interface using AI tools versus operating a scaled enterprise-grade programmatic platform supported by irreplicable infrastructure.

While an LLM may generate generic bidding logic against commodity signals, our AI operates against deterministic household level identity, proprietary content level signals, exclusive direct access supply paths and years of accumulated optimization intelligence. LLMs cannot replicate a Household ID covering over 115 million U.S. households.

Selectively embedded IRIS ID across more than 1,400 publisher content management systems or recreate direct publisher integrations, representing over 75% of addressable CTV through prompt engineering alone. While AI may transform user interfaces across categories such as CRMs and analytics dashboards, at Viant, AI is not an overlay. It is fused with proprietary data and programmatic infrastructure. That fusion defines our platform architecture and reinforces our competitive positioning.

In summary, we delivered on our commitment to reaccelerate top and bottom line growth in the fourth quarter. anchored by our 3 strategic priorities: CTV, addressability and ViantAI. Our business is strategically aligned to capitalize on the industry's largest and most transformative growth opportunities where we continue to lead and innovate. We believe this positioning uniquely equips Viant to capture the next wave of brand and performance budget growth in 2026 and beyond. With that, I'll pass it over to Chris.

Thanks, Tim. I'll provide an update on our customer go-to-market strategy, particularly as it pertains to the launch of outcomes. But first, let's take a step back and survey the broader advertising landscape. This year, in the U.S., total advertising dollars are expected to reach nearly $450 billion. Of this, 30% will be allocated to brand budgets, while 70% will be allocated to performance budgets.

To date, performance budgets have largely been dominated by search and social walled gardens, including Google, Meta and Amazon. With the launch of Outcomes, we intend to compete directly for performance budgets, aiming to divert spend to the open Internet by leveraging a complete end-to-end view of attribution across the entire customer journey, connecting initial CTV exposure to final conversion.

Our go-to-market approach starts with our existing customers, where we see an opportunity to drive significant organic growth as we increasingly service their performance budgets in addition to their existing brand budgets. Virtually all of our customers allocate spend to search and social walled gardens as part of a well-rounded holistic marketing strategy.

We intend to leverage our existing relationships to showcase the effectiveness of outcomes and win new performance budgets from our existing customers. This initiative is well underway, and I would like to highlight a few examples of our outcomes product at work. Over 20 existing customers have extensively tested outcomes with a number of them implementing outcomes on an ongoing basis, one of which is Mackenzie Childs, a luxury home decor brand and prominent seller of tableware, kitchenware and decorative home furnishings.

In our initial test, we ran 2 separate ad campaigns for Mackenzie Childs, each identical in scope with both campaigns seeking to maximize sales conversions over the same time period with the same budget. The only difference was that one campaign was planned, executed and optimized by a human expert, which served as our control group, while the other campaign was planned, executed and optimized by our new fully autonomous outcomes solution.

We even handicapped outcomes by restricting the use of retargeting strategies, which would have further enhanced performance and yet still the campaign utilizing outcomes delivered a 58% lower cost per conversion compared to the control group. Let me clearly articulate this result. For the first -- for this test, the human expert campaign was able to generate a $135 sale for every $33 spent on advertising, while Outcomes was able to generate a $160 sale for every $14 spent on advertising, a 58% reduction in cost per outcome.

So for the same budget, Outcomes generated over a 180% increase in total sales versus the control campaign. There are 2 primary reasons behind Outcomes superior performance. First, at any given moment, amongst trillions of potential campaign configurations, by definition, there must exist one ideal campaign that best allocates spend across the right channels, publishers, audiences and content and does so at the right price to yield the most optimal outcome.

In the pursuit of this optimal outcome, we believe our AI Lattice brand is simply far better at digesting and interpreting all of our proprietary data signals, which serve as inputs utilized to create the most ideal campaign. And second, in a fluid marketplace, the ideal campaign configuration is always changing. Lattice Brain is uniquely capable of iterating and redesigning campaigns in real time in response to fluid market conditions at a speed that is simply impossible for humans to replicate.

And therefore, it is far better equipped to continuously reconfigure for the most ideal campaign configuration, which results in driving superior business outcomes for the customer. And another client test, UMass Global, a private university with over 19,000 students, pitted outcomes against human experts with a goal of driving high-intent student inquiries. Even with a short training period, Outcomes achieved an 82% lower cost per outcome compared to the control group.

Camp Grounds of America, one of the nation's largest campground franchise businesses, tested outcomes during a recent holiday season with a goal of driving confirmed purchase events. Outcomes delivered a 76% reduction in cost per purchase event compared to the control group. Tire Discounters, one of the largest tires and automotive service retailers in the U.S. recently tested outcomes, seeking high-intent lead events. Outcomes delivered a 43% reduction in cost per lead compared to the control group.

EucorRa, a biotech health care company, saw a 95% reduction in cost per outcome, while the Alzheimer's Association saw a 68% reduction in cost per outcome and the list goes on. Based on these results, we believe Outcomes is clearly capable of driving a meaningful inflection in return on ad spend for advertisers. As utilization scales amongst our existing customer base, we see an immediate opportunity to accelerate organic growth.

We believe that over time, clients will move toward autonomous platforms that deliver increased performance and greater reliability in achieving outcomes. Beyond our existing customers, Outcomes enables Viant to aggressively pursue performance budgets across the more than 10 million advertisers currently spending with search and social walled gardens.

And because virtually all of these prospective advertisers are yet to utilize the highly effective CTV channel, we simply need to prove that their first dollar allocated to CTV via Outcomes will outperform their next dollar allocated to search and social walled gardens, where we believe they are already overinvested and seeing diminishing returns.

We are also seeing strong enterprise adoption with major U.S. brands. WHOOP chose Viant because they recognize CTV as the most effective digital channel for growth and value our capacity to deliver measurable incremental results via proprietary high-fidelity data signals. With aggressive growth ambitions, WHOOP plans to deploy a sizable ad budget over the next 2 years through Viant's buying platform.

We believe major U.S. advertisers are increasingly partnering with Viant because of our unique value proposition, rooted in independence, CTV leadership, proprietary data and addressability solutions and AI capabilities. To capitalize on recent momentum, we have expanded our enterprise sales team, appointing tenured executive sales leaders across key industry verticals, including health care, CPG, QSR, retail and travel and tourism.

These seasoned leaders bring deep long-standing relationships with major U.S. advertisers and are tasked with securing new flagship accounts. And to best serve the diverse needs of major U.S. advertisers who manage both large brand budgets and large performance budgets, our buying platform remains flexible in use. Advertisers may choose to run campaigns manually as they have traditionally done or they can choose to leverage various individual components of our AI suite, including AI bidding, AI planning and AI measurement and analysis or they could choose to go all in on autonomous advertising. delegating the entire construction and execution process to our outcomes solution, powered by our Lattice Brain AI decisioning architecture and intelligence layer.

In closing, I want to reiterate that our long-standing vision has always been to deliver autonomous advertising to the open Internet. After years of dedicated investment, focus and persistence, we are thrilled to be in market with a fully autonomous buying platform uniquely equipped with proprietary high-fidelity data signals. With this new asset, we see an unprecedented opportunity to expand our total addressable market and accelerate growth throughout 2026 and beyond, winning incremental spend from our existing customers, performance advertisers and major U.S. brands. And with that, I'll turn it over to Larry to provide more detail on our financial performance. Larry?

Thanks, Chris. Before I begin, I would like to remind everyone that we have posted a presentation on our Investor Relations website that includes supplemental financial information to accompany today's call. We concluded 2025 with a strong fourth quarter, executing against the key strategic priorities Tim outlined, CTV, addressability and AI and translating that momentum into record financial performance.

Before diving into our detailed fourth quarter results, I will provide a high-level summary of our full year performance. For the full year of 2025, we achieved record results across all key metrics. Revenue totaled $344.2 million, increasing 19% year-over-year. Contribution ex-TAC totaled $208.7 million, increasing 18% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA totaled $57.4 million, increasing 29% year-over-year and adjusted EBITDA margin expanded nearly 250 basis points year-over-year to reach 28%. Finally, non-GAAP net income totaled $41.1 million in 2025, increasing 19% year-over-year.

I'll now move on to our results for the fourth quarter. Revenue for Q4 was $110.1 million, up 22% year-over-year and 5% above the high end of our guidance range. On a sequential basis, revenue increased 29% from Q3. Contribution ex-TAC in Q4 totaled $64.6 million, up 19% year-over-year and 1% above the high end of our guidance range. On a sequential basis, contribution ex-TAC increased 22% from Q3. Both revenue and contribution ex-TAC represent record results in the quarterly period.

It is important to note, as Tim mentioned, our underlying business is performing stronger than our results -- reported results indicate, primarily attributable to the difficult comparison brought about by last year's high political ad spend contribution. When excluding political ad spend contribution from the prior year election cycle, which weighed on revenue growth by approximately 600 basis points and contribution ex-TAC growth by approximately 500 basis points in the quarter, revenue increased 28% year-over-year and contribution ex-TAC increased 24% year-over-year on a pro forma basis.

New customer momentum also remains strong as evidenced by the recent announcement of a new multi-formed multiyear partnership with WHOOP, alongside a number of recently established wins with other major U.S. advertisers, including Molson Coors. We believe these trends reinforce our strong competitive positioning and support our ability to continuing outperforming the broader programmatic market over the long term.

We delivered strong performance across most customer verticals in Q4 with financial services, public services and CPG leading the way. Advertisers continue to select Viant for access to emerging digital channels with CTV adoption reflecting the broader industry shift toward premium addressable video. In Q4, customer-directed CTV purchasing accounted for a record high of 46% of total platform spend with nearly half running through our direct access premium publishers.

CTV spend reached an all-time high in the quarter as advertisers increasingly prioritize CTV to drive performance outcomes. Advertisers industry-wide continue to shift their media mix towards emerging digital channels such as CTV, streaming audio and digital out-of-home. Reflecting this secular trend, customer-directed purchasing on our platform across these channels collectively represented approximately 54% of total platform spend for the year, up from 51% in 2024 and 43% in 2023.

Viant remains well positioned as a leading partner for advertisers moving beyond traditional display to capitalize on next-generation media formats. Reflecting advertiser preference for high-impact measurable formats, customer-directed video spend, inclusive of CTV reached a record high and represented 63% of total spend in the quarter, underscoring Viant's strong positioning to serve this demand.

Non-GAAP operating expenses totaled $39.8 million in the fourth quarter, representing a 7% year-over-year increase and an 8% sequential increase. Notably, operating expenses include strategic investments related to the acquisitions of IRIS.TV, which closed in November 2004 and Lockr, which closed in February 2025, both of which expand our long-term product capabilities and are intended to support long-term growth.

Excluding these acquisitions, organic non-GAAP operating expenses increased a modest 5% year-over-year and increased 8% sequentially, reflecting continued operating leverage and disciplined expense management. Importantly, we remain focused on scaling efficiently. Even as we continue to invest in innovation across ViantAI and our broader technology stack, we are delivering measurable gains in productivity, increasing trailing 12-month contribution ex-TAC per employee by over 8% year-over-year, marking 10 straight quarterly increases, a clear signal of improving operational efficiency.

Adjusted EBITDA for Q4 was $24.7 million, exceeding the high point of our guidance by 5% and growing 45% year-over-year and 54% sequentially. Adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of contribution ex-TAC was 38% for the quarter, above our guidance range and representing nearly 700 basis points of improvement over the prior year period. Non-GAAP net income, which excludes stock-based comp and other adjustments, totaled $19 million for the quarter, up 37% from $13.8 million in the prior year.

Non-GAAP basic earnings per Class A share outstanding was $0.23 in the fourth quarter compared to $0.17 in the prior year. In terms of share count, we ended the quarter with 63.3 million total shares outstanding, consisting of 17.6 million Class A shares and 45.7 million Class B shares. We ended the quarter with a strong balance sheet, including $191.2 million in cash and cash equivalents, $219.2 million in positive working capital, no debt and full access to our $75 million credit facility.

During the quarter, we generated $33.1 million of cash flow from operations and $28.2 million of free cash flow, up 101% and 132%, respectively, year-over-year. We also remain disciplined in our capital allocation. Since launching our share repurchase program in May 2024, we returned $59.6 million to shareholders. As of March 9, approximately $40.4 million remains available under our current authorization.

We intend to continue executing this program opportunistically with a focus on maximizing value for long-term shareholders, particularly during periods when our stock is undervalued. We believe our strong financial foundation, combined with consistent execution and a balanced capital allocation strategy positions us well to capture growth opportunities and drive shareholder value in the quarters ahead.

Turning now to our Q1 outlook. For the first quarter of 2026, we expect revenue of $83 million to $86 million, up 20% over the prior year period at the midpoint. Contribution ex-TAC of $49 million to $51 million, reflecting 17% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. Non-GAAP operating expenses of $40.5 million to $41.5 million, up 10% year-over-year at the midpoint. -- and adjusted EBITDA of $8.5 million to $9.5 million, representing a 67% year-over-year increase at the midpoint.

And finally, we expect an adjusted EBITDA margin as a percentage of contribution ex-TAC of 18% at the midpoint, representing over 500 basis points of improvement over the prior year period. The midpoint of our guide assumes record Q1 performance across revenue, contribution ex-TAC and adjusted EBITDA.

I would also like to make a couple of general observations about our outlook for 2026. In 2026, we expect contribution ex-TAC to continue growth to continue outpacing the broader U.S. programmatic market, which is projected to grow approximately 13%, driving further market share gains. We expect year-over-year growth rates in revenue and contribution ex-TAC to accelerate sequentially as we move through 2026, primarily driven by new client onboarding, ramping organic growth and political contribution in the back half of the year.

We also expect revenue and contribution ex-TAC to continue growing faster than non-GAAP operating expenses, leading to continued adjusted EBITDA margin expansion in 2026. In closing, we delivered another record quarter, executing against our strategic priorities and advancing innovation across our platform. We believe we are well positioned for sustainable long-term growth given our strategic alignment with secular growth trends, including CTV, addressability and ViantAI. And with that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Jason with Craig-Hallum.

I appreciate that. Maybe I'll start off just, Larry, where you ended that. You talked several times about the opportunity for accelerating growth through 2026. Maybe frame expectations for the year relative to the guide for Q1, kind of what drives that upward swing as '26 progresses?

Yes, certainly. Thanks, Jason. Well, if you break down -- we've talked a lot about the tailwinds we're having right now. And if you break them down relative to our Q1 guide, which can kind of speak to what we see in the future quarters, first of all, Q1, we had limited contribution from Molson, Coors and WHOOP. Both of the advertisers onboarded during the quarter and only have spent modestly. We expect that for both of them to significantly ramp beginning in Q2.

Similarly, with Outcomes, very little contribution in Q1, really a lot of early stages of testing. And as we move through the quarters, we expect that to obviously contribute nicely. We've talked about other customer wins that we haven't announced. We talked about them a bit generically. Many of those are also ramping up in the second and third quarters. So we expect to get a lift from that.

And relative to Q1, Q1 is historically our lowest quarter. And I think this year, based on our mix of clients, maybe we're over-indexed a little bit towards customers that have the lowest or the most seasonality, negative seasonality in Q1, which impacted Q1 guide a little bit, certainly relative to Q4. But we see a nice ramp-up as we move through based on the new clients we're winning, outcomes coming through and starting to build up that it will build nicely. We're pretty -- we're very confident that we'll build nicely as the quarters progress in terms of growth.

All right. Good color on that, Larry. I want to step back and maybe talk about the late-stage deal pipeline that you guys had talked about a couple of quarters ago. Just wanted to get an update on how you feel that's progressed the last few months, how you feel about win rates in deals that have closed? And then just maybe what has been your ability to add or to replenish to that pipeline of additional late-stage opportunities?

Yes. I would just -- I'll start with that. One of the big areas of investment around operating expenses is building out the enterprise sales team. And so I think we've done a great job of putting leaders in place that are from high-quality places. We've pulled leaders, vertical categories from TikTok, Yahoo!, many other very high-quality companies. So that investment is going to continue to replenish that sales pipeline there.

It's not just the win rate, I would say, it's who we're beating, much larger competitors at late stage in the game. We're always up against a very large competitor. And typically, you're seeing the advertisers select Viant for the innovation that we're pumping out. So that pipeline continues to grow. We talked to most investors. We mentioned last year around $250 million of pipeline. We've closed very big wins in that. Some of those have been delayed to this year.

A lot of times, when we don't win a customer, they've chosen not to make a change until a future period because it is a fairly big lift to change platform providers. And so I think some of those will get kicked into the back half of this year as that determination of when to switch. Do you want to add anything?

I would just say, though, the -- in these pitches, it's becoming very apparent of our advantage around our proprietary data, both around Household ID, the continued scaling of IRIS ID, our supply quality models that doesn't get enough attention, but clients find incredibly valuable. our direct access program of being able to be direct to the largest content owners in the world.

All of that is really opening a lot of eyes with a lot of these large brands. And really, these large brands, and I think they all have a commonality is that they have to drive higher growth. And they've looked at -- many of them are looking at their playbook that they've run for the last 4 or 5 years, given the largest platforms in the world most of their money. While those companies have outsized growth, the largest platforms in the world, their business suffers. And I think we're a great counterpunch to that, and a lot of marketers are really taking a look at the proprietary data that we have and saying that's a way for them to deliver more growth in the future years.

Our next question comes from Laura Martin with Needham.

Okay. So these are fantastic numbers. Somebody just has to tell you that because -- and I'm going to ask about you versus your growth in the quarter. So when we look at DV360, their third party was down 2%. The Trade Desk up 13% in net revenue, you guys up 19% in net revenue, really big size difference. Like you guys are tiny compared to those 2.

My question is, are you taking share from these -- you just said you were taking share from these bigger companies, but how much of this is sustainable over time? Because I sort of feel like Wall Street thinks globally scaled large footprints have competitive advantage over smaller companies. Right now, you are disproving that. but convince me that small kind of can win at these much higher revenue growth numbers than Google and Trade Desk, who are your sort of globally scaled competitors in your direct business because these numbers are amazing.

And then the other -- I wanted to drill down on the IRIS ID. I remember at CES a year ago, we were talking -- you had just bought IRIS, maybe it was 2 years ago, I'm sorry, forgetting. You said it was up 5x year-over-year, and you are now at 50% of the incoming CTV bidstream had IRIS IDs. What's the gating factor there? Would you expect that to get to 75%, 100%? What's stopping more usage? Or do you expect that kind of up 5x to continue over in '26 and '27?

Why don't you take IRIS? Yes. So with IRIS, we've seen incredible adoption of the IRIS ID. What that means is that we need content owners to carry it. And we've made announcements with some of the largest content owners, the largest television manufacturers. We've had -- and the IRIS technology in and of itself to be able to run computer vision to contextualize video, pull out emotional sentiments, check for brand suitability. This is checking a lot of boxes for marketers.

Most marketers, I will say, they're completely unaware of the fact that when they buy CTV, they're only able to buy at the app level through other platforms. So you can only buy the app. A lot of these large apps have 20,000, 30,000 titles of content. So a brand has not -- may not be the right fit for half of those content titles. And so most brands are unaware of that. And when they -- when you give them that problem statement, IRIS completely answers that. That's number one.

Number two, marketers have been testing it. As we said, revenue from IRIS ID was up 90% from Q3 to Q4. So huge growth. Why? Because they see the performance improvement. When they see the performance improvement, they bid higher for those IRIS IDs that are relevant for that brand. It's driving, on average, we've said, a 46% increase in conversion rate. Forget upper funnel metrics like brand awareness and consideration, just straight up conversion rate and sales.

So marketers bid up for it, content owners get more money for it. That increases the amount of content owners that will then carry the IRIS ID. So we're at approximately 50% now. We believe we're going to continue to scale that. We think it's reasonable that we would get to 70% penetration this year. And so the future looks really bright for IRIS, and it's also really bright for our customers because they're taking advantage of that and they're driving greater returns.

Again, being a buy-side player, we only care about what drives our customers' business. If we drive their business and their growth, they're going to spend more money on our platform. So on your first question, just can the smaller company beat the larger companies? I think we're proving it now, and we really believe it's sustainable over the long run due to proprietary data.

When you -- when you can only target at the app level and not achieve the performance, but Viant can deliver the performance, that's really a big gating item. The second concept here is that the large platforms have been self-reporting their own success. back to these brands. Meanwhile, the total sales of the brand are actually down. So these things aren't correlating and they've had now half a decade or a decade of working with these larger companies where this is just a continual output year after year.

So they've really lost faith in the reported metrics that the platforms are using. And I think they're looking for an independent buy-side platform to help them understand what's driving success for their business. So what drives our success? It's proprietary data and ViantAI, which is the automation and the autonomy where they can get way more productive with their media dollars at work.

And I would add to that direct access. By pulling out all the middlemen, the same dollar has more working media. They're getting more ad impressions per the dollar than they were with -- prior to Direct Access being there. It's really the combination of all of this that's driving better efficiency when you work with Viant relative to -- you mentioned Google, Trade Desk or in Amazon.

Amazon has a different type of perspective where they're really good at subsidizing businesses in the near term. I think you're seeing that with their 1% fees that they've been out in the marketplace or bundling of the products of AWS plus subsidization. But in the end, Google and Amazon, the 2 very large platforms that we compete with, Platforms sell media. We help the buyers of that media allocate their budgets appropriately across. We're only on their side of the table. We're not on the other side of the table.

And I think that's another thing that the Fortune 500 or large advertiser set has come to grips with is like, actually, I can't believe these numbers because I have a decade's worth of data that says it doesn't correlate to overall business results. And I need a partner just on my side with proprietary data and the automation of the workflows to actually improve efficiency of their business. So I firmly believe that it's sustainable.

I think -- when it comes to WHOOP, we beat -- the Trade Desk. When it comes to others, we beat Google. You're seeing with down on third party. So we've proven it many times. And although Amazon has had a banner 20, 25 years, certainly in the space, that I don't believe is sustainable over the long run as marketers are smarter and smarter to not trust a platform who's selling them media or ads is a better way to say it. You can't trust the metrics that you're looking at.

Our next question comes from Tom White with D.A. Davidson.

Nice end of the year, guys. Maybe just with regards to your commentary about the expansion of your addressable market, if I think back, it seems like a lot of the recent product innovations that you've launched were initially conceived around like kind of going towards the smaller end of the market, right, those sort of those search and social advertisers. But over the last several quarters and thus far this year, it seems like you're getting traction with kind of the bigger boys with some of this innovation or at least getting their attention.

Like when you look out to '26, '27, '28, what sort of the bigger opportunity do you think for you? And then just if you could quickly comment on IRIS ID as a competitive moat. Obviously, you guys have a head start there, and the numbers look great. But like I don't know what's stopping any of the other big platforms from going out and trying to convince content owners to start embedding this idea or coming up with something similar?

Yes. I'll answer the first one on the expanding TAM. I think that you have to have -- what we see as a commonality, if you think of big brands, they have brand-based budgets where they're looking to raise awareness and consideration for their products and services that might pay off in a future period. But they also have performance-based budgets where they got to get sales now. And really, what you have to do is create ad products that address both of those. And that's really what we've aimed to do.

So -- and if I look at these DTC brands, many of them start only in performance, but they quickly realize that they tap out in Meta or Google's Performance Max or demand gen or search, they tap out there because they can't drive growth after a certain period. So then they realize, oh, we have to invest in our brand to raise our baseline sales. And so what we're seeing is that when we go down market to these direct-to-consumer e-commerce companies, we're seeing that what they need is they need to tap into CTV. That's really going to drive growth for them.

But they need tools, they need a level of workflow automation that they're used to in some of these platforms like Meta's Advantage+ or Google's PMax. So we deliver that with outcomes. But they're tapping into a really high-growth channel that not only drives brand awareness, but also is capable, as I said, with solutions like IRIS ID, they can drive the lower funnel performance for SalesNow as well.

So what's bigger Look, the down market DTC and e-com companies are small businesses, Meta, Google, they have an audience of 10 million businesses that buy advertising from them. If you look at the open Internet, I don't know, 10,000 to 20,000 companies buy advertising in the open Internet. And how many companies buy television, maybe 1,000 to 2,000, something like that. So we're looking at addressing. We want to -- again, all marketers of all sizes have similar challenges. You have to create products for both. But we see them just both equally as appealing.

On the IRIS ID question on why the -- why someone couldn't just copy it, it really is the network effect of IRIS ID, and it's why we hit it so hard last year in scaling that ID. Network effects of tying the ecosystem around this identifier. And that's why getting to critical mass was so important for us in 2025 and scaling that. And how do we do it? We've done over 1,400 integrations with content management platforms, all various content management platforms. Even a big content owner, they'll have many content platforms underneath it.

So we've done all these integrations, again, over 1,400. That takes time, resource and effort to actually get done or you could just adopt the IRIS ID. And every big platform would have to go do the similar types of integrations to replicate what the IRIS ID brings. The second area of that network effect is just the open RTB protocol that we operate in. There's only one spot for a content object ID in the open RTB protocol and IRIS ID is implemented nearly 50% of the time in that spot.

So the content owner is really not incentivized to bring a second one in because you can't even get it through the RTB protocol with IRIS ID installed. So there's a number of factors there. I would just ladder it up in total to network effects of this content identifier that we've captured in 2025.

Congrats on the quarter. First, I wanted to ask about outcomes. You mentioned that you ran about 20 outcomes pilots in Q4 with a number of clients implementing outcomes. Anything you can share maybe on the initial conversion rate and where you see that over time? And then how should we think about sort of incremental uplift to monetization as you roll out this functionality across sort of your broad advertiser base?

Yes. I don't have the exact numbers on conversion rate, but there's just a number of factors. Obviously, the cost efficiency relative to the sales that Chris touched on in our prepared remarks there are really, really good compared to what anybody has seen from an autonomous platform. So I think overall conversion rate, it's hard to give you an exact answer to that other than we're beating what the current status quo is, which is manual optimization or some level of automated optimization that's out there today.

And I would just say the real throughput line here about the performance improvements is the fact that we have proprietary data signals that are extremely valuable. But when you couple that with an autonomous workflow, the speed of that is what's driving the improved campaign results or the performance improvements. And it's doing it at a level of reliability for marketers that is way greater than that of human-based stressed out workflows.

When I think of the jobs of traders, really what they're -- the gun that they're under, so to speak, they have to come up with the optimization strategies and the tactics that they're going to pull, and they do that on a day-to-day basis. And it is an absolute grind. And that leads to an instability in the reliability of the metrics. And really, the autonomous workflows that we've put out here are really driving tremendous value, and it's what we think marketers over time are going to continue to adopt.

Got it. That's very helpful. And then just would love to hear your thoughts sort of on the Trade Desk OpenAI partnership and what that means for the programmatic space more broadly and then for your platform more specifically. And I guess, what are your thoughts on being involved in monetizing those emerging AI services?

Yes. Obviously, the number of users using chatbots is really exciting when you look at it as a brand-new channel. It's kind of like social when it started to originally emerge and users flock to it. So there's a ton of real estate available there for advertising. I think OpenAI's strategy in partnering with third-party DSPs is kind of like Facebook's early strategy. They were a part of RTB, everyone was involved, and then they pulled it all back and went with their current go-to-market.

So we're always a little slower in going to work with organizations like this. because we're mindful that they may change strategy overnight, like you saw a gentic checkout with commerce transactions. That's already been abandoned. So I would caution investors about putting any level of excitement until you really see what is the ad format, how does it actually work and what level of data would be shared.

I think with the announcement around -- the Trade Desk, it doesn't really fit with the RTB protocol as we do. You would have to have sensitive user level data be sent across. Usually, big platforms don't pass that level of granular information due to consumer privacy reasons. So the truth is we don't know what OpenAI is thinking here at Viant. We're watching, but there's a huge amount of users, a huge amount of real estate and time spent and certainly a whole bunch of interesting insights that OpenAI knows that no one else knows.

Kind of like search data is unique. But when I chat with an application, I'm very rarely ready to buy right now. I'm usually middle of the funnel doing some research information. So although very interesting and exciting around future opportunity, I don't think that's a 2026 revenue generator in a large-scaled way. Of course, these guys are innovating at incredible rates. And so I may eat my words in the back half of the year.

But we're watching, we're paying attention to it. And it appears to be -- chatbots appears to be a brand-new channel that's opening up tons of available inventory for advertisers to get after. So as we learn more and go throughout the year, we'll certainly participate where it makes sense. Relative to Trade Desk, I think Criteo, who's actually been announced, I do want to say Trade Desk was a rumor and interesting timing there, but Criteo has been announced.

That makes more sense around product listing or shopping-based ads that they could provide given Criteo's customer base. So Criteo feels more like a natural fit. I would say Trade Desk and Viant seems a little bit different.

Our next question comes from Matt with Citizens.

My first one, just to follow up on some earlier comments about Amazon. They've announced new partnerships with Netflix and also their integration with Roku. It seems like they're obviously pushing more and more into their ability to service third-party inventory. Can you just talk about just how would you expect -- I mean, obviously, today, most of what the spend is going to is Prime Video and into Amazon's own platforms. But they're clearly more aggressively going after that third-party inventory. Just how do you see that shaping up here in 2026 and 2027? Why aren't they as big a threat as maybe the media seems to portray them?

Well, I don't want to say they're not a threat. They are a threat. They're subsidizing their products. They're doing the bundling strategies that Google executed. So it definitely is a threat. And we're paying a lot of attention to Amazon. So I don't want to discount Amazon as a competitor in the space like some others have. I think we do focus on Amazon. But what Amazon knows, they know a lot about customers of Amazon. They know very little in all the other retailers like Walmart, CVS, all these other products.

And so if you're a QSR, is Amazon DSP a good fit for you? -- likely not based on the proprietary data that they have. If you're a product that is sold through Amazon, Amazon DSP makes a lot of sense to actually partner with to track the sales and reach consumers on Netflix or some of the other platforms. I caution the other big content owners out there because if Amazon runs the same playbook as Google, what they do is they say Prime Video outperforms every other app on the buy.

And it's all about by doing that integration, we bought the ad, but hey, the ROAS was not as good as Prime Video. I can basically write what the report is going to say as long as they follow that same strategy and they have been. So I think they have a major trust issue when it comes to the metrics that they're reporting in the platform if the transaction doesn't happen on Amazon.com. That being said, a lot of products and services are sold on Amazon. And I think it makes sense for those customers to use the Amazon DSP in that way.

But if your product is also sold in 50 other retailers, the Amazon DSP really isn't a good fit for you.

Great. That's very helpful. And then just a follow-up on -- I believe when you landed Molson, they talked about findability being like the key metric that was the reason why they went with you guys. for WHOOP, was there a similar metric that they found? Or what was the product that really got them over the goal line to go fine?

Yes. So they had a huge focus in CTV. This is a growth brand. They're very -- they're a fast-growing company. They're very focused on continuing to grow their brand. And in CTV, what do you want? You want addressability, both in terms of I want to reach the right households, the right people. And then I also want to know what type of content they're consuming, so I can make my ad relevant to that content that drives performance.

So yes, heavily looked at our addressability solutions. That -- a lot of clients kick the tires hard on that right now. And they see our scale relative to other players, ours is dramatically longer. And one of the big reasons is we've been at this. This isn't a 2- or 3-year effort. We've been at this for over 10 years. We're a leader in this space. So I expect many more brands to continue to focus around addressability.

A lot of people think addressability just for targeting. The largest advantage of addressability is measurement. For you to truly see, I showed a CTV ad, did I get a sale. But it's not just that. It's what else did they do in the journey? Oh, we showed a CTV ad. They then went to Google, searched, later, we're exposed to a social ad and then purchased. That level of visibility that you can give to a marketer to help them properly allocate their money accordingly is incredible.

Without an addressability solution for measurement that we offer, they will continually just put money to whoever showed the last ad, which marketers are increasingly not following for anymore. I just want to add to that too, not about WHOOP, but about Molson Coors around the addressability solutions of IRIS. If you're a regulated industry like alcohol, you cannot show ads in children's content. And so IRIS becomes a critical content identifier as well for you to actually deploy money with confidence that you're not going to get a fine for showing ads in children's content.

And it's the combination of these 2 proprietary data signals that we have that's really pulling the large enterprise customers our way.

Okay. Our final question will come from Barton Crockett with Rosenblatt.

So I was wanting to ask 2 questions really. First is just looking at the growth rates that you're talking about, CTV ex political or contribution ex-TAC ex political up 24% in the fourth quarter, but slowing to the high teens in the first quarter. Do you see the ex-TAC revenue number at some point returning to what you were doing in the fourth quarter? And I know there were some seasonal factors in the first quarter, but that is kind of a notable slowdown. So I was wondering if you could address that first.

Yes. First is it's just the mix shift of our advertisers in the way that they spend their money. It's better to look at it on an annualized basis. So if you look at our contribution ex-TAC on an annualized basis of 2025, we're going to hopefully outperform that in 2026, given the customer wins. And as we mentioned, WHOOP, Molson Coors, some of the large advertisers were, I don't want to say de minimis in Q1, but slowly coming on, learning, understanding how things go. So those ad spends will kick in, in the later quarters.

And so I think the biggest thing to take away from our call is we're going to grow these numbers sequentially throughout the year. And as you look at the second half, political really kicks in about half the money is spent in Q3 and about half the money is spent in Q4, roughly is the way that it goes all the way up until that election cycle. So I would really caution everyone to look rather than quarter-to-quarter, when you look at advertising-based businesses, there is some seasonality.

There's a mix shift of the various advertisers on our platform that's really driving the Q1 number that you're seeing. But I can tell you, the pipeline is strong. The growth of our business is very strong, and we think we'll deliver just like we did last year.

Okay. And then one of the things I was just wondering about in terms of the LLM debate. You mentioned that it might be easy for an LLM to code an interface, but the value is really elsewhere kind of the data and presumably the execution. Would it make sense for someone like Viant to perhaps use an LLM though as an interface as a way to perhaps penetrate clients that are now wedded to the Trade Desk interface at the agency level, essentially to be an MCP where the execution is through you, but maybe the front end is clawed. Is that conceivable? Could that be an opportunity over time? Or is that something that's just not on the table because of the risk of them getting too much leverage or scraping your data?

No, look, the ViantAI interface is an LLM interface today. The users of that interface are not interacting with the traditional self-service user interface. So I think we've already delivered on that. It's getting users comfortable with that. I hate to say old habits die hard, but people like to click buttons. It's just a lot of work. And they want to know, is there a hallucination in the data. So a lot of this is test and learn and users getting comfortable with this new interface is a big one.

As far as an MCP, certainly going to be a big factor in the future. We're thinking about it each and every day. But again, these -- the market is moving so fast quarter-to-quarter. You kind of have to project out. And so I think absolutely, if the interface is your moat, you're in serious trouble in 2026 this year and in the outer years. So I think we have a lead there. We've delivered it, I think, 18 months ago or so, we delivered that interface to customers for them to initially test and learn on.

And people love it because there's no training, there's no certification. You don't need to go to Trade Desk Academy for 2 weeks and still make mistakes after that. So I think overall, the interfaces are dead. Dashboards are dead. You really want an LLM to deliver the input.

And I would just say what we're doing today, if you look at digital advertising and programmatic, these are human workflows. There's entire organizations that are built around these human workflows. When Tim saying old habits die hard, although there's an incredible amount of innovation, and I believe that we're leading in that. We are the ones who are bringing -- moving from human-based workflows to autonomous workflows, autonomous base word autonomy. Where is all of tech going? It's going autonomous. So we are leading there.

However, if I rolled out and said, all brands today, if you want to interact with me, you must build your own agent that then plugs into my MCP. We are so far away from that today. I know that there are early, I would say, kind of the green shoots that are out there that we are looking at. And I think those are going to be in kind of the DTC e-commerce space that we're first going to see that. We are very focused on that market.

So as we think about our own go-to-market as going after these DTC and e-commerce brands, we think that's a really good solution there. But over time, it does make a lot of sense that an agent will come to the infrastructure that provides all of this and will want to go to infrastructure with incredible proprietary data, which we also have. So we do look to enable that in the future.

And let me just add, we believe that LLM is the commodity. It's the proprietary data on top of that LLM, which is unique or the application layer tied to the RTB infrastructure that we actually have. And I think getting to Chris' point here around humans, right now, you have humans in a 5-step process. The human is in the middle of it all. We've taken the human out of the middle and put it at the very front of the line. You set the guardrails, you set the goals and then you let autonomy actually happen.

And so that's really the big difference that I see. The LLM moat that they have is with consumers. ChatGPT has 650 million consumers spending tons of time per day on that. That's -- that's not commoditized. That's very valuable as a media seller. But for us, from an enterprise perspective, the LLMs are commoditized. I could swap out Gemini with OpenAI. I could swap out OpenAI with DeepSeq. It doesn't really provide very high levels of difference in the output that's there or noticeable levels of difference in quality.

So to me, from an enterprise perspective, the LLM is the commodity. Proprietary data is the moat.

And I think the commodity piece is that the reasons why many of them give you back the same answer is that they're all trained off of the same data. They're all trained off of scraping the web, all of them. Certainly, you can argue some of them have certain proprietary data assets, certainly. But that is very -- I think that's becoming understood that, that is the piece that is commoditized. But that said, we do -- your core question, will we enable third-party agents to be able to intersect and interface through an MCP into our infrastructure? Yes.

That concludes the Q&A portion of the call. Thank you.

Thank you, everybody.

Have a good evening.

All right. Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us. My name is Matt Cost from the Morgan Stanley U.S. Internet team. I'm very happy to be joined by Chris Vanderhook, Co-Founder and COO of Viant. Thanks for being here.

Yes. Thanks for having me.

Just before we begin, for important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your MS sales representative.

And with that, maybe for those in the audience who may be newer to Viant, maybe let's start with a quick overview of the company, where it sits in the ad landscape. And you've been with the company, I think, since it was founded 25 years ago or a little more even. Talk about how it's -- how the landscape has changed?

Well, yes, so my brother and I co-founded the company together. Tim is usually here, but he likes the vacation. But we -- so yes, we started in 1999, actually, the first iteration of our company. Back then, we were -- this is early, early Internet. Everybody was 468 by 60 pixel banners, pop-ups. I was wild. There was no third-party ad serving. Google didn't even exist. It was the Wild West of the Internet. And kind of the -- I'll fast forward this story.

But we actually sold the business to Time Inc. in 2015. That was quite a trip, and we thought that was going to be the end of it. And then we really saw the opportunity on the DSP side. And while we were there, we acquired a company called, Adelphic out of Boston. And they had great tech. They were self-service DSP. We saw that landscape consolidating big time, and we knew that there would only be a handful of companies.

Long story short, we ended up. They get acquired by Meredith, hostile takeover bid of one magazine company over another. It was insane. We bought the company back in 2019. And we took it back. We used our own capital and bought the company back. We took the business public in 2021. But what we were at that point was just a DSP. And today, the landscape is there's a handful of DSPs that exist in the world that are self-service enterprise-grade DSPs. That's Google, that's The Trade Desk, it's us, Yahoo! and a new entrant into the space in Amazon.

Great. So maybe let's talk about addressability. I think it's one of three major strategic areas of focus. But let's start there because I think it's where you have some pretty unique assets from a data and signal perspective. Talk to us about Household ID, about IRIS_ID and the other unique data assets that you're leveraging as part of your go-to-market? And how are those differentiated from those competitors that you just mentioned?

Yes. So if you look at digital advertising, if I go back to when we first started, we used to go to advertisers and say, why are you buying in linear television or traditional media. Digital is data-driven. You can measure everything. You can target ads, everything. And really what we were doing was laying the groundwork, which later became known as addressability. So the #1 thing that we think the largest platforms will have to have is addressability. Marketers want to be able to address or target their audience they're looking for men 18 to 34. Women, 25 to 49. Whatever it is, you need to have -- you want to deliver highly addressable advertising, so there's no waste.

And I know that people who are like, well, doesn't everybody do that in digital? No. they don't. So our Household ID, basically this is household level addressability. We think that is a more privacy-friendly approach that we've gone down, and we also have a big focus on CTV, which I'll get into. And those are household level devices. And so Household ID has 80% scale of every bid request that we see. We get 15 million bid requests a second. 80% of the time, we resolve that back to the household. We know which household that is. That's very powerful. In CTV, it's actually 90%. We can resolve back to who the household is instantly. This is very powerful for marketers because they're not wasting their dollars on households or people that aren't in their target.

If you compare that to our head-on competitor, which is The Trade Desk, they have UID2. Their idea is public in the bidstream. We see it. They have about 20% addressability. The next closest one is LiveRamp, and they have about 30 to 35 depending on the day. That's their level of addressability. We've been at this since 2013. What this process is, is what's called identity resolution. I have some data in a database, a name and address, an e-mail or whatever it is. And can I resolve that back to who this household is right now? And it's somewhat complex, but just the headline is that we resolve 80% of the time, that's our scale, and the competitors are in the 20% to 30%. So we're instantly much more addressable.

The second thing is to building a really good ad product that's going to deliver great returns or sales or Outcomes for advertisers. I want to know what content you consume. And I don't take my cues from the Trade Desk or Yahoo!, we really study -- I think who does a very good job of -- in their ad platform, especially in using AI, which we'll get into, is Meta. Meta does a very good job. They have something called Advantage+. And Meta knows two things. They know who you are when you're logged into the app, addressable. And they know what content you're consuming, because it's on their platform. And if you've ever used like reels, it's somehow, you're consuming whatever niche piece of content watching and they're really good. They have an algorithm that feeds you more of that. And then they match an advertiser that closely associates to that content. That's what drives the power of Meta ads business. It's completely lost on people. And lost on even our competitors in the space, like no one is really interested in that.

So there's a company that we -- Tim and I actually invested, there's a VC firm, that invest in like ad tech companies called Aperum. We're an investor in that, and they invested in a company called IRIS. I met the two founders of that. I thought it was really interesting. They work with content owners in CTV. They go to them and they say, hey, send me Paramount, you have 20,000 titles in your VOD library. Send us every video we will create -- they stamp it with what's called an IRIS_ID. Behind that IRIS_ID, what they do is they take that video, they run computer vision. And they say, what is this content about? It's season 1, episode 2 of Yellowstone. It's a Western. It has Kevin Costner in it. In this scene, there's fishing. The next scene, there's a bar fight, blah, blah, blah.

What we're doing is pulling out all the content intelligence about that video file. So that a marketer, when they go to target in CTV, they can show up relevant. My customer Cabela's, when there's a fishing scene, they want to then show an ad about their fishing rods and all that. If I have a customer that sells women products, I'm probably not going to show it here. They probably don't want to buy that. This is -- offers incredible content intelligence that helps us in CTV. And that was the thesis behind the acquisition.

Problem was they were a small company. They only had 7% penetration in CTV. In our last quarter, we reported we were in the high 30 percentiles of penetration. We have earnings next week. I'll give the update on where we are there, but we're signing more and more content owners every day. We have every OEM. Publicly, we've announced we have every major television manufacturer who's adopted that. And we have a bunch of large content owners that we'll make announcements of that as well.

Great. Let's shift over to ViantAI. I think that since really you went public, you've been pretty consistently talking about autonomous advertising. And over the course of the year, past couple of years, you've been launching these AI products with the goal of kind of a fully autonomous ad platform, if I have that right. So talk about the various components of ViantAI, the launch cadence and then where we stand with that.

Yes. So we saw this migration. The industry went from managed service, where people manage absolutely everything and then DSPs came out, and then it went to self-service. And what that meant was agencies wanted to control every decision. They wanted to pull all the levers. They wanted all the transparency and self-service has been amazing for the industry for 10 years. But now these systems, these DSPs, they're like Bloomberg terminals. If somebody new started, when I look at these DTC, e-com companies, they want data-driven advertising, but they don't have like reams of staff and traders, they don't. They want automated systems, they just deliver themselves. That's what they want.

And so again, we looked at the future was going to be autonomous. These platforms are overly complex, and it's too much for a human, trader or a room full of human traders to make optimal decisions. And so we came out with ViantAI and we started that about 2 years ago, all with the goal of moving towards full autonomy. The first thing we launched was AI bidding. And 70% of our customers are the traders, they belong at an ad agency for us. And the first thing that they do is they set up a campaign it's complex. Then what they do is bid on every publisher, every audience segment. They're trying to bid the right price at the right time. And that actually is, I don't know, there's no -- that's an exercise of utility for them because this is a 24/7, 365, 15 million bid requests per second, a human can't possibly change price at that speed.

So we launched AI bidding 2 years ago. And it's just an AI model that predicts a bid the lowest possible price for that ad request, what's the price that we should bid. We have 85% customer adoption on that product. And what we're saving customers 40%, our model does versus human bidding. And so that's been a tremendous product that we have out there.

The next thing we launched was AI planning. Agencies have tons of people that work in planning. And a traditional media plan takes at best, 6 to 8 weeks, tons of market research. It's very expensive. And they're designing a media plan for their marketer. We do it in 60 seconds. You give us the URL of the advertiser or product that you're going to advertise your budget, your flight dates and what's your goal? Your goal might be to raise awareness, your goal might be to generate sales. Whatever the goal is, in 60 seconds, it builds out a full media plan. It's incredible. And we use all of our unique data signals behind that, all the bidstream data, our Household ID, IRIS_ID that I talked about, and we build plans in 60 seconds.

From there, the trader builds a plan and it clicks a button to build it in the DSP. We save -- a typical ad campaign may take anywhere between 2 and 7 days to set up in a DSP. It's very time-consuming. So we eliminate all that time. We have about 30% customer adoption of our AI planning.

The third thing we did was we launched AI measurement analysis. Just think if you're in a DSP, there's so many reports, what are trader is doing after setting up a campaign and then bidding, they're trying to get insights as to what's driving performance, and they want to double down on that. But that's very complex for them to get at a lot of that data.

And so what we want to do is completely automate it. You just basically chat with it, you make great prompts and it gives you all the insights. You could say, hey, for my CTV campaign, what are the top-performing publishers? What are the top-performing IRIS_ID and segments, which shows are driving the best performance? What should I do to improve performance? And it makes recommendations to you. We have great customer adoption on that. We have tons -- that's a phenomenal product.

And then the last thing we did was AI decisioning. This is our move towards full autonomy. We want to create a decisioning architecture, decisioning system that will make human-like decisions, but it will do it at the speed that a human can't. We launched -- so we committed that we would launched that in 2025. We did that in the fourth quarter. We launched a product called Outcomes, which is the first fully autonomous ad product that we launched. And what makes this possible is an innovation that we built and we -- it's called a Lattice Brain.

Most autonomous systems that are out there today, whether it be self-driving cars, or guided missile systems or unmanned drones, they all have some type of Lattice architecture that makes decisions based on a set of inputs in real time, but they make human-like decisions. I like to use the self-driving car example because everyone gets that with like a Tesla.

But it's the same thing in these advertising platforms. We want to make human-like decisions, but at a speed that humans can't. And what we're trying to do is compress what we call decision latency. Where in these current systems, we make recommendations or our platform make recommendations to traders every day on how to improve performance. But then they think about it. And then they sometimes got to take that recommendation to their boss and say, well, hey, we want to make this change. Boss might call a client, and the end advertiser and say, hey, we need approval to do this or that. And then they think about it. And then a week later, they might make the decision. Most of the time, they don't make the decision. And then ad performance, campaign performance leaks all over the place.

And we want to compress that, and that's what our Outcomes product is about. It's our first fully autonomous product. It makes -- we ran a series of about 20 pilots in the fourth quarter, and the performance results were incredible.

So let's stick with Outcomes there for a second. I mean it sounds a little bit like Performance Max or Advantage+ from Google and from Meta. I guess when you're talking to advertisers about this product, where are you differentiating yourselves? And what is that process like for pitching Outcomes?

Yes. So -- okay, about $400 billion are spent in the United States in digital. About 70% of that is performance-based advertising, is where those dollars are going. And those are -- that's predominantly in three companies: Google, Meta and Amazon, right, sponsored listing ad on Amazon, that's performance-based.

We want to go after that market because it's largely untapped by anyone on the open Internet. So it is true that some of the more automated ad products are Advantage+ for Meta and Google's PMax or Demand Gen that they have. And it is aimed to compete with those companies. They operate those automated systems, but they do them in their own walled gardens against their own content that they own. And we want to bring a solution like that for the open Internet. And I think that, that is just an incredible opportunity, and we think that we have advantages over them.

And really, those advantages, we know that we have to deliver performance that are on par or better with them. I think a lot of the performance that you will get -- that a marketer will get in Meta and in Google operates off of the thinking that whoever showed the last ad gets credit for the sale. I tell our customers all the time. I promise you that Google, Meta and myself, we know who's about to buy your product.

But just because I snuck an ad right in front of them before they purchase doesn't mean that your total business is going to grow. And so we're aimed at -- we're a buy-side only player. We don't have any content that we own. I only represent the marketer, and my whole goal is to drive business performance for them, but not business performance in a dashboard. I want business performance that you report to Wall Street. And this is an insight that a lot of companies had they've been in digital for years. They've been seeing customer acquisition costs go down and down and down, get more and more efficient. But results they report to Wall Street don't tell the same story. There's lots of customers who have this problem.

And we want to drive incremental growth in their business, not the same growth or the same sales they were going to get anyways. And Meta and Google pray on less sophisticated advertisers who don't know the difference. And we are out, when we deliver our Outcomes product, it's about delivering new growth to the brand, not the same sales. And we think that the vehicle that does that most effectively is actually in the CTV channel. And so I think that those are some of the ways that we're different than them.

So it sounds like you're kind of in the business, at least with this product of eliminating, I don't want to say, wasteful spending, but certainly helping people focus on the spending that they can actually tie back to dollars on the P&L. So it's a more focused way of doing it. I guess what's the financial opportunity for Outcomes?

The Outcomes, I think it's absolutely massive. Just start with the 70% that we -- I believe we currently don't touch today. There's probably about 10,000 advertisers that buy on the open Internet. There's probably 1,000 or less advertisers that buy in television. Meta has 10 million customers. So that right there, like I really like that opportunity.

To me, that's sort of like freedom because if I produce a return on ad spend for you of whatever your goal is, when I do that, you give me more money. In the television business, if you raise unaided awareness by 2 points, you don't get more money. Like the brand has a fixed budget amount they're going to spend for the year. So we like being able to go after this performance opportunity because it heats -- that money is heat seeking. They don't care who they spend it with.

The other insight, too, on Meta, these e-com and direct-to-consumer -- of the $10 million, I believe most of their growth is driven by a few hundred thousand of these e-com and direct-to-consumer companies. And they are -- most of these companies spend all their money with Meta. They're only on Meta. They run their whole business there. But a lot of them tap out on performance, and you can see it if there's a whole, they call it a DTC on X, like these groups on X. And they put a bunch of content out and you see them regularly. In the fourth quarter, they get absolutely squeezed on Meta's pricing, performance dips, they have nowhere else to go. We think that it's an unbelievable opportunity to go to them, deliver an autonomous product, yes, in Outcomes.

But we can bring them into CTV, and we see it across all customers. The incrementality or the net new sales that you get in a channel like CTV, it absolutely trounces Google Search, which has 0 incrementality. I have not had one customer where I've seen any notable point gains of incremental customers from Google-branded search, which is 40% of all search buying. And in Meta, you typically see around 20% incrementality in Meta. But in CTV, on average, we see somewhere around 150% to 200% growth on average.

So it will be interesting to see how that develops. It sounds like a really big opportunity. I guess flipping the AI debate around to the other side, there's a lot of questions being asked right now about the durability of software business models, really across tech. We hear about it for the past couple of years at this conference, but certainly very intense this year as well. Can you talk about these set of concerns? How do you believe Viant may be insulated from this idea that AI can stand up a software solution that could replace their replicated DSP in an afternoon.

Yes. Well, first, I think this -- first, it was the SaaS apocalypse, then it was the AI apocalypse because then it was like it was going to take out all enterprise software. And then it was like, oh, wait, it's also going to take out all marketplace businesses like DoorDash. No one said Amazon. I mean, that's the biggest marketplace. And this is -- and then basically, I watched through that, our stock had absolutely hammered with everybody else. And internally, everyone is like, no, wait, we are the company that's moving towards autonomy. We are attacking the workflow of like that is what we do. We're leading that.

So it is a bit of a lazy take, I think, by investors. However, just to hit it head on. I do not believe that people are going to vibe code everything. And I don't think that they're going to vibe code all software. I think you can vibe code UI. Like I have a DSP, you can vibe code in my UI and you can vibe code The Trade Desk UI. Sure. And I think that's your moat is your UI, which is for a lot of software companies. Once you get someone who knows how to use your software, you get lock in on that. We benefit from that, The Trade Desk, they benefit from that immensely.

But there's so much more that I think is lost on people with this narrative. It's the last mile that everything. And what I mean by that is, when we are competing against The Trade Desk for years, my whole original thinking was we just built a -- we build a UI that's very similar to theirs, and we get to feature parity, and I should be able to win half the customers because I don't know, I can sell pretty well. And I think I'm charismatic and you'll like -- half the people will like me, half, they won't, I'll win half of them. It didn't happen.

Then what I did was we introduced fine. When we go head-to-head, I'll just beat them on pricing. And in some cases, some customers we literally dropped our fees down to 0% or 1%. Someone else is doing that in the space right now, it's called Amazon. It didn't work. the level of differentiation that you have to have to win customers is immense in this industry. That's number one.

And two, you have to build for the customer. You have to know what they want and you have to build for that. And that's that last mile that sure, you can vibe code something that looks like what I have, but you're not going to win any customers. You're not going to be able to customize it for their exact needs. All the integration work that you have to do with CDPs and all these data warehouse companies where all the customers house their first-party data, their CRM data. They want to use that in advertising. You're not going to vibe code that. The infrastructure that it takes, the actual technical infrastructure to handle 15 queries or ad requests per second, you can't vibe code that. So I think that, that makes it defensible for all DSPs.

Now when I think about other enterprise software apps and things like that, I'm saying, well, these tools have been out there, the #1 target is Salesforce, no one like Salesforce, myself included. Anything about them. But okay, like cool. But vibe code it, please, someone just do it. The tools are here. Like why do we have to talk about the bogeyman that's going to do this. Like it's someone actually do it. If it only takes 2 days and like someone nerd a basement, like bring on the nerds, let's go. But no one is doing it.

So I think that -- I don't know. I think that some enterprise apps will definitely be appended. We license tons of them internally. It's unbelievable how these businesses are created off this like little niche use case in enterprise software. And I think some of them that aren't infrastructure -- that don't represent infrastructure that aren't connected into all other data systems, if they're very skinny. I think they can be appended.

Yes. And the last thing I'll say about all the AI companies, keep in mind, 60 days ago, no one knew who Dario Anodei was. No one knew who he was. He's everywhere right now. Remember what he's doing in a middle of a fund raise. I did invest in his route. But I think that the whole like AI apocalypse, like he's selling that. like to his -- like, that's what he's selling. He's raising money. Sam Waldman is doing the same thing. So a guy who's on my Board once said, be careful of the loudest guy in the room. He's always selling something.

You mentioned Amazon in there, and I want to talk a little bit about kind of what they're doing in the space. There are definitely reports coming far and wide that they're being aggressive in trying to sell this product. So have you observed heightened competitive intensity from them? And why should investors not be uncured about it?

I think that my competitor, The Trade Desk publicly is every quarter, he says that Amazon is not a threat. And no, he doesn't see him and all that. We don't take the same -- we don't have the same take. It's Amazon. So why are they a threat? Yes. Why? Because they have the lowest cost of capital of anyone. So I don't care where they put that canon, they can point it anywhere and you have to be concerned about that. So that's just being honest.

We don't really -- they have a DSP. Their goal of what I do believe about them is their entire existence is to sell ads on properties that they own. They are out offering 1%, what I do for 1%. Like I haven't seen any degradation in my business because they're offering 1%. And for what they're talking about, this 1%, we charge 3% for it. Trade Desk charges 3%. No one's making a change to save 2 points. To switch DSPs is an incredible effort for a brands. And I don't think anyone is moving for that.

I think a lot of brands, we recently won a customer we announced Molson Coors. I said to them, you sell product on Amazon. Why were they not in the mix? Just curious. And they said, well, we do sell product with them. I've seen their DSP. They've been in here a lot. They do not have a good DSP, which I know, I hear that a lot. It's not built for us. And their whole goal is to sell more Prime Video. And we are going to buy Prime Video from them. The have a Thursday Night Football. They have the NBA, like we are going to spend with them. But we don't believe that they have our interest in mind. Why would I give them my customer data, and let them plan all my buys on Disney and Paramount and all the other ones. Like we're a little weary of them, was their point and their biggest fears is that they come out with Amazonia Light, which they said they've done in many categories. So no, we're not going to choose them.

So I think that again, I think it's Amazon. So you got to watch them. But we haven't seen -- they've talked about a lot in the press. But they themselves have a long way to go from a feature set standpoint, to even get to a par with some of us -- the other four that are out there.

Got it. So you brought up Molson Coors, and I want to stick with that because I think historically, you've served mostly U.S.-based mid-market customers. But with Outcomes and this Molson Coors launch, it seems like you are kind of expanding there. So talk about that win, what it means for Viant and kind of how that relationship was established? And then what does that mean for your ability to go after customers that maybe investors would associate more with DV360 or with The Trade Desk?

Yes. Well, every time you go to market, and this has always been the case for, I don't know, 10, 15 years. Customers say, all right, I get you have your DSP, blah, blah, blah. What unique data do you have or inventory that you represent that would get me to switch? And like that's everything. What exclusive data do you have that I can't get anywhere else? Or what inventory do you own or have access to that I can't get through anyone else? Those are the two like headline value propositions.

Molson selects us really based on -- and they had a whole press release around this, but scale of our Household ID. They have about 180 million plus people in their CRM system. They own a ton of different brands. They are big time and addressable advertising. I talked about our Household ID. But what they realized they're very sophisticated. A lot of people, what they wanted to do was not just take their 180 million CRM file, match it in a database. They want to see how many you actually find out on the Internet. How many people do you actually find. And that's actually the real test of addressability. It's not like you matched 180 million e-mails in a database. No, go find them on Disney+. Go find them on Paramount. Go find them on those apps. Because I want to serve them addressable advertising. That was the first one that we separated ourselves. We absolutely crushed The Trade Desk, we crushed their incumbent platform. We really stand out there.

The second thing was -- so again, what unique data do you have? They realized it in Household ID. The next piece was around IRIS. This is a regulated company. They need to show ads at a certain level of 21-plus households. They can't be showing Coors Light ads on kids' content. They get sued for it all the time. IRIS_ID was huge in that. that when you buy today, if you buy CTV and any other platform, you don't get to know the content that's behind it. So if you buy Paramount+, they have 20,000 titles, which content is it?

If they show ads on kids programming, they can't do that. IRIS_ID was an amazing solution for them because we know what the actual content is. We know the name of the show, and we know everything about it. And so that was big for them, not just from avoid getting sued, but if this is live NFL football, you're going to have a football theme ad. If this is -- and you're going to -- let's say, you're going to show a Coors Light or Miller Light that they own. If it's a romantic comedy, you may show a different one of your products, you may bid differently. They saw the value of that is being able to increase campaign performance.

The last thing is, and another unique data signal that we have is something that we call the supply quality model. Beer sells are down, only 52% of drinking age Americans say that they actually drink alcohol. It's the lowest point in 70 years, probably why our birthrate is depleting. But what they have to do is get their ad dollars to work harder. When sales go down, marketing spend as a percentage of sales. And so they have decreasing budgets likely because of sales, yet their CEO is still calling for growth.

And in that pitch this year because I've been pitching them for the last 3 years. And it's what are we going to do to get -- you have a lower ad spend, but how are you going to grow? And they're like, yes, that's like topic du jour internally, how are we going to do that with less money? I said, we are going to use not only our Household ID, you're going to be more addressable, you're going to show ads on more relevant content. But you're going to use and take advantage of our supply quality model.

And I'll give you some facts that you may not like, but the truth is about the Internet that at least 30% to 40% of the ads that you buy are not seen by a human, are not shown to a device that's a real device or -- and it's not on a site that you think it is. And it's likely I made -- what we call a made for advertising site. That has a boatload of ads all over it. There's no content, and they get people to just click on the ads, and you think that they work.

We audited and took them through their whole media plan. We used our supply quality model, showed them that for the same dollars, just by using our supply quality, we're going to get you another 30% of more working media, and this is how we're actually going to use a lower dollar amount of ad spend this year, but to actually drive more results.

That is usually controversial for people because I'm not selling a brand safety solution. I'm not. I'm just selling, how do I get my clients' dollars to work harder so that they use advertising to grow their business more effectively. That's all I want.

If we start growing sales at Molson Coors, that's good for me because sales go up, budgets go up, they spend more money with me. That -- The last piece that I told you, either gets us thrown out of the room or it's a big buying signal.

Got it. Well, I think that's our time. But Chris, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me. Thank you, guys.

Are we on? All right. Awesome. So great. This is Stephen Ju with the UBS U.S. Internet team. Sitting to my left are Tim Vanderhook, who serves as the CEO of Viant. And to his left is Chris Vanderhook, who serves as the COO. So welcome to the both of you, and thank you for joining us in Arizona.

Yes. Great to be here, Stephen. Thanks for the invite.

Awesome. All right. So let's start at the very top, at a high level. How does Viant describe its position within the broader digital advertising landscape today? And how is that going to change and evolve over the next few years.

Yes. So for those of you that aren't familiar with Viant, we're known as a demand-side platform in programmatic advertising and what is that we represent demand or the buyer of ads. So our economic commercial relationships, we take a small fee to represent the buyer, and we're bidding electronically into available inventory supply to try and get the lowest price and drive the highest returns for the advertiser.

Amongst our competitive set, there's really only 5 for advertisers to choose from. In terms of size and scale, we'll start at the top. Google has a product called DV360, which is the largest by market share, following them is the Trade Desk. You have the Yahoo! DSP, ourselves and a newest entrant is Amazon has created their DSP as well.

But amongst that 5, there's only 2 of us that just represent advertisers. The other 3, Google, Yahoo! and Amazon represent inventory that they own and operate. So we think there's a large conflict of interest there to partner with those other 3. So if you're an advertiser looking for a buy side only player, it's either the Trade Desk or Viant are your selections.

Yes. And who are the advertisers for whom like that's becoming -- and that remains very important consideration and the underlying consideration for why you get invited to pitch?

It's every advertiser, yes. We think the conflict of interest is the biggest issue in programmatic advertising. So if you rely on Google, what ends up happening is they redirect all of your ad budget to YouTube. If you rely on Amazon DSP, they redirect lo and behold when you get to the end of the month, all your money gets spent on Prime video.

And what does Google say? They say YouTube is much better than every other premium content owner out there. This is all by design, but advertisers have wised up as the years have gone on and realize there's no objectivity coming from these, we call them sell-side players, people trying to sell ads. Their goal is to sell every ad at the highest price. When you contrast to Viant, our goal is to buy just the ads in front of the audience you're interested in at the lowest possible price to drive your returns higher.

And if you look at just the incentives, if you're on the buy side, it's what we call on the buy side and the sell side. If you're only on the buy side, we make a small fee. So market rates on a DSP is somewhere around 15% to 20%, whatever the advertiser spends.

Now in our case, that's what we make. We don't care where the money goes. We're looking, as Tim said, we want to get the lowest possible price for the audience on the content that they want to reach someone on. But we're trying to drive the highest returns for the advertiser. That's what we do.

We go out and protect their interest in the market, but we make between 15% and 20% when we do that. If I also own content, well, I can make 15% to 20% by placing on somebody else's content or I make 100% by putting it online. If you just follow the incentives, it's natural. And again, it's not that these are bad people running those companies, but it just is what it is.

Right. So you shouldn't -- I mean, fairly obvious statement, but you shouldn't be handing the wallet to your kids and letting them go well with the credit card and making them -- letting them make the decision on where they spend the money?

Exactly. And I think over time, there was the Google Do No Evil mantra that started, and many advertisers trusted them in this space. But post the antitrust trials, there's been so much documentation of e-mails that have come out, data that's come out. So if you look at DV360, it reported more than 80% of the money through the Google DSP was running directly on YouTube.

And so this is by design to drive the economic interest of Google. And that's really where advertisers are just so much more intelligent. Amazon has entered the market and offers this low fee. 1% is what they're claiming. But if you contrast that to where the money actually runs in Prime Video, they're making 100% margin there. So these are all just marketing tactics. I think they're all going to fall flat on their face. And this is why companies like the Trade Desk, Viant were growing so much.

Okay. So is it 1% on the entirety of the aspect or just the money that's going to external parties, is that 1% as well?

1% on programmatic guaranteed, they call it, which is to the third parties.

Okay. Got it. All right. I think you guys have talked about having a $250 million pipeline, right? And the majority of that pipeline is still TBD undecided, right? So what is your key value proposition to win these deals versus, say, the other ones that probably are not as conflicted?

Yes. I'll go ahead and start. So historically, we've always existed in what we call the mid-market. Mid-market for us, how we define that. That is a U.S.-based national advertiser, they spend between $50 million to $500 million a year in advertising. They're not a multinational, they're not buying global. It's more U.S.-based. We find these marketers are much more data-driven and results matter.

And they -- when I say they're more data-driven, they're literally moving the money around to which audiences, which content are driving the highest returns for them. We find those marketers to be a better fit for us historically.

And so we've always done really well. We dominate in that market sector. Whereas you look at Google and the Trade Desk, they're kind of in the Fortune 100, more brand-based advertising, I think P&G and Unilever harder to tell what works when you're selling toothpaste and toilet paper. You also don't need to be very data driven to do that. I don't -- I probably don't need to explain why. Everybody needs that.

So if you look now in this new -- we talked about the $250 million pipeline. In and of itself, that's probably a smaller percentage of our total pipeline of our core business in the mid-market. But these are these large brands that are multinational brands that we typically stay away from, but we launched ViantAI about a year ago. And we started getting pulled in into these RFP processes, reaching out to us. We didn't have a sales force going after any of these companies.

And so over the course of the last year, we just started getting brought into these RFP pitches, lo and behold, we're finalists in many of them. Molson Coors was one. And you asked what is it that we bring to the table? I'll just highlight what Molson Coors has already said publicly.

One of the things they did was Molson Coors has a very large customer database. You'll hear marketers talk about they want to use their first-party data. That's their customer database, their CRM. And what they do is they want -- they want platforms like a DSP. They want to onboard that, they want to match it and then they want to reach those consumers of their customers across all their brands. We outflanked every one of the -- every one of those 5 that Tim mentioned were in this pitch, minus 1 Amazon.

So we outflank them all. And what the customer said publicly is that Viant Household ID has the largest scale, and this is -- that was a big reason that they chose us, one. Two, with ViantAI. ViantAI is -- and we'll get to this, but it's an autonomous advertising platform, think full self-driving of a car, but that for a programmatic buying platform. We don't want -- DSPs historically have sees of traders that operate in them to pull all the levers to set up the campaigns to optimize them. It's very manually intensive. They're like Bloomberg terminals.

ViantAI is a way to go out and automate this. So we can go to marketers like Molson Coors, who has -- who employs hundreds of people in the U.S. through ad agencies to bring down their fixed cost of advertising, should take less people to manage these campaigns. ViantAI was a big interest for them as well to be able to lower their total fixed cost of operations of their advertising.

And there's lot of videos online. Chris and I released that product. Last year, we talked about, but what is it? You give it 4 pieces of information, the URL of the advertiser product, your budget, the time frame you want the ad campaign to run and what your goal is. And from there, across the entire Internet, it assembles an ad campaign that should hit your target, in terms of the budget you want to spend, it automatically selects every website, mobile apps, CTV apps, streaming audio podcasts that are relevant based on your brand or product or service.

So it has really brought AI into the advertising landscape. It's by far the best product in market because it's real, it's actionable. And once you see that media plan, it's also fully transparent, which is different than a Google. Google does have great AI technology, but they're constantly a black box. If you spend money through them, you don't get to know where your ad ran.

Most advertisers are pretty uncomfortable with that proposition. Ours is fully transparent where you see every single location that your ad will actually execute in. And so that's a big, big advantage.

One thing I just want to add, Chris talked about Household ID another really important data set that we have that's proprietary and unique to us is an acquisition we made last November of a company called IRIS.TV. And that gives us IRIS_ID, which basically tells us what you're watching in CTV, all the way down to the scene level.

So Household ID tells us which home this is, IRIS_ID tells us what they're watching on the screen and the goal for marketers is to get down to the scene level targeting. I'll give you an example. If you're watching some show, it's a family show and the father dies. When the ad pod loads, that's a perfect time for health -- life insurance.

If they're in a bar, that's a perfect time for a Coors Light ad. So the matching what's happening on the screen, who the household is and then modifying the ad delivery to drive attention. This is what -- where the future of advertising is going, and we have the proprietary data signals that enable all of this.

Contextual to CTV.

Contextual and CTV, it starts there, but it's exploding. Now new data sets by applying AI, computer vision on all of this, we generate -- what's the emotional sentiment of this content? Is it happy? Is it joyful? Is it sad? What is going on there? Certain brands have -- that's much appealing.

So we're inventing new data for advertisers to explore and target celebrity identification. If you have a spokesperson like Shohei Ohtani for New Balance. If we recognize Shohei in a show, it's a clip about him. That's a great time for New Balance piggyback that type of content.

So this is going to keep exploding brand suitability, contextual targeting, scene level targeting, emotional sentiment, these are all brand-new data sets that we are inventing in bringing to the market using our AI in the IRIS.TV asset.

There has to be a safety angle as well, right? There has to be...

Brand safety?

Yes.

Absolutely like -- nudity. Is there a nudity in the show? Is there not nudity in the show?

I mean, think of -- it's well documented. Many alcohol brands they get sued all the time for showing an alcohol ad it mistakenly ends up on kids' program. That was -- IRIS.TV was a big feather in our cap in that win with Molson Coors. Not only is Household ID important to them because they want to reach households 21 plus, they have to, they're regulated, but they also don't want to show up in content that is out of context with them.

Yes. So you're saving your clients' time, you're saving your clients' money, right? So...

Most importantly, we're driving the growth of their revenue. Remember, advertising stimulates consumer demand for that product or service. When you get advertising right, that's what drives growth for these organizations. Molson Coors, what do they need? Kids are drinking less alcohol today. It's the lowest percentage of society...

21-plus kids are drinking less alcohol.

Youth. The next generation, I should say. The younger generation is drinking less alcohol and it's -- that is the big challenge for these types of companies. And when you're able to find legal drinking age audiences, match with relevance and entertain them, it's a way to bring them into the fold. So to me, we view this as how you're going to drive growth for your business in the future is the application of buying AI, all of these signals and reaching these right audiences, hopefully, the beer market can grow again inside of the United States and not just contract.

So that's our goal there is to drive growth for all of these advertisers, where if you look at a Google, if you look at Amazon, the only thing they care about is their own growth, which is show the Molson Coors ad to the wrong user, show the Molson Coors ad just to fill my ad supply. And advertisers have recognized this, and it's why big tech is in serious trouble representing advertisers as we go forward.

Okay. So saving time and money, they can either pocket that or they can redeploy those dollars and time into new campaigns or digital campaigns. So what are you seeing them doing? I would imagine they want to be pointed toward growth, but.

Yes. So if you look at -- I'm not giving anything proprietary here, but let's say, Molson Coors, they're eroding market share in the category in general is going down. Sales are down. Marketing is a percentage of sales. So one of the things that we use, and we use this with a lot of marketers, and I don't -- I'm guessing, but I always get the head nods in a meeting, which is, okay, so budgets might be going down, but I'll bet your CEO is still calling for growth. And the whole senior marketing organizations shaking their head, yes. And it's like, well, how are we going to do that?

Well, one, our whole pitch is about driving growth for their business. And we feel that we're going to get fired if we don't drive growth for the business. Tough challenge with Molson, but we think that we have a great strategy to do that. The second thing we do, you talked about saving time and also saving money. When we -- as a buy-side representative only, we are like your inside man. We are in the industry -- we are actually in the industry. We know how everything works.

And interestingly, for the last 70 years in advertising, advertisers, this is controversial -- advertisers are basically considered the sucker or the mark. Everyone else on the sell side is trying to extract the most dollars out of them, not really drive their returns. So we create products that, yes, save them time, but also money. So in CTV, nearly 50% of all money in our platform goes into CTV. We believe in that channel. We know that it drives growth. So what we did was create something called Direct Access.

Direct Access traditionally a DSP bids into an SSP who represents a publisher, if you look, there's about 30 apps that represent 85% of the viewing in CTV. Why not just create direct integrations or connections to these content owners, and that's what we've done.

In Direct Access, we skip the 15% to 20% of the sell side charges to represent the publisher. And so if you're a Molson Coors and the lion's share of your money is in TV, most of that is still linear. It's moving into CTV, but I'm going to save you 15% to 20% right off the bat. So you might have gotten a 4% decrease in marketing spend, how are you going to grow?

Well, you're going to be able to do -- you need to do more with less. And so we did a calculation for them based on what the savings that we think that we're going to -- from a fee perspective. And we're going to get a ton more working media out in market so that even with less money, it's like they got a 20% budget increase.

Yes, but exactly as your question posed, what do they do with the savings? They redeploy it to reach more consumers to try and drive growth of the business, which then kicks up our revenue as well.

And that seems like it's a particularly important consideration as a lot of these brands, not just Molson, but we've all had to sit here and watch a lot of these companies deal with an increase to their input costs. So I would imagine the conversations right now are probably especially more acute in terms of what you can do for them?

Absolutely. The inflationary cost of the inputs coming in, they're looking for savings everywhere they can to help balance that out.

Okay. Got it. Now kind of going back to the $250 million in pipeline. That's not reflected in your fourth quarter guidance, is it? Or is some of it in there already?

No, none. So we got fantastic growth. We did face headwinds this year with tariffs, et cetera, et cetera, all these black swan events that no one was expecting, entering the year. So we've just continued to execute year after year. The fundamentals of our business, if you go back over the last 8, 9 quarters, you can see the trend that this is a very fast, very profitable company, growing that has operating leverage.

So the more -- the name of our game is just continue to win advertisers, and we've got many years of growth getting back to the Molson, they've got a lot of money in linear TV. So year 1, they're going to spend some, they'll bring in their display buys, their online video buys, their TV buys. But over year 2 and 3, as linear TV continues to cannibalize and that money shifts into streaming, it's going to provide tremendous organic growth for our company as we go forward.

Okay. Is Molson potentially part of that $250 million in [ pipeline ] consideration?

Molson was -- when we talked about the $250 million, Molson was part of it, they are not the largest brand in there. And prior to Molson, there are others that we've already won. We just haven't publicly announced.

When do we get that announcement?

Some of it is customer-driven. They don't -- they're tactic as they keep their partners proprietary. They view that as their go to market. So some of them will never allow it, but we encourage all of them because there's really no risk in talking about the partnership.

But we still have a sizable amount that is out there, and we always get asked, well, what percentage do you think you're going to close? The way I look at it is we're pretty confident in what's out there. But it doesn't really matter what my win percentage is because this is just -- it's proving 2 things. One, the largest customers in the world, largest brands in the world, one platform, one that are objective and will represent their interest to market; and two, they're looking to get more and more data driven. I mentioned P&G and Unilever, you sell toothpaste and toilet paper. Okay. Maybe they're not that interested in getting -- historically being more data-driven, but look at Molson.

I mean they are -- this is a very sophisticated customer, very sophisticated. And we're seeing more and more of these larger brands look for platforms, like I said, to be objective and to be more data-driven. So we feel good about it. It's increasing our TAM. We've always stayed focused in the mid-market. We don't let our sales force -- we've been invited before into possibly pitching these, and we do decline them. They're long sales cycles, they're distracting.

And when we participate in RFP, we really size up the customer and whether -- and we want to know it's they're actually serious about moving in a direction with a platform that offers what we offer.

Yes. That's how I talk about the win rate, but you're not winning 100% of everything, right? So in those instances where you don't get the deal or the job, like why would that be?

There's -- to switch DSPs, there are switching costs, and it takes effort. It's kind of -- I don't want to say like swapping your database of Oracle for a different platform. It's not quite that level of integration, but there's first you got to connect into Snowflake to pull in data. So there's definitely work by the advertiser. A lot of it is they just don't want to put in the effort.

So Molson Coors is a great example. They didn't -- we had been talking to them but they weren't ready to put in the manual effort. However, fast forward today, input costs have risen, there's all types of activities in their business that they're getting pressure. When you feel that pressure as an advertiser, that's what drives the switching costs. So we're seeing that pressure kick up in this market. And whether we win it all this year, as you said, we're probably not going to win 100%. I'm the CEO, so I'm positive.

We're probably going to win 100%, but in the event we don't win 100% fast forward to next year, we're going to get all 100%. We have the best product in the market. We have exclusive data signals, and we have no conflicts of interest. This clarity is really an education process for advertisers to understand. And that's really why eventually, they're all going to choose us. It's just a question of when in my mind.

Okay. Got it. So it's not -- well, is there anything you can do from your end because it sounds like a little bit of a business problem on their end to make -- to take the switching costs down. So to ease the on-ramp to you guys, is there anything you can do from a product perspective?

It's ViantAI. And that really is. So that has removed the barrier of the switching costs tremendously. Historically, if I was running in the Trade Desk and I'm a sophisticated marketer, you have 1,000 ad campaigns running it at any given time.

You've got a general population campaign. You've got certain ethnic markets that you're doing. You've got multi languages. So to take 1,000 and manually reenter them into another platform. That is what I was describing as the switching costs. It's the manual effort of doing that.

But with ViantAI, it's literally -- you type in, I'm this -- here's the campaign I want to run, it generates it one click button, automatic trafficking for you. So it's removed the human labor that used to be there, and that was the primary friction. So the application of AI has cut the moat of our competitors pretty tremendously. And that's why you're starting to see more momentum coming into Viant.

Okay. This is different from AI decisioning?

Correct.

Yes. So talk about that, what is that? And I think that rolls out end of this year, right? So what kind of measurable value do you think it will deliver to your clients?

So let's talk about what AI decisioning is. ViantAI has 4 major components of the platform. And we've launched 3 of them already decisioning, as you described, is the brain. So what have we launched so far, bidding, with AI bidding. What is that doing? The AI is determining the price we're going to pay for this ad spot in real time. That used to be human controlled, ad agencies used to fight over what the price should be that's there.

Now the AI is determining it every few milliseconds, and it demolishes humans trying to do it. AI bidding has 85% adoption amongst our customers, fastest amount of adoption we've ever had, and it's been out for 2 years, 1.5 years, almost coming up 2 years. So that was AI bidding.

Second, we did was AI planning, which I described. You give us those 4 inputs and it generates the whole ad campaign strategy, tactic and plan. We also launched AI measurement and analysis. You used to have to log in, go find the reporting, look for what you're looking at, like how well did ESPN do for me? That's 7 clicks, waiting 5 minutes, now you just simply ask the AI, tell me what my top 5 content owners in return on ad spend are. So that's there.

What we're adding in the very end here is the brain. And this is where it becomes fully autonomous. Up until this point, it's been human in the loop, always approving, always clicking, but we think once we launch AI decisioning, that will no longer be necessary. You can always look at what it's doing to understand, do I like it? But AI decisioning is putting a brain inside of it where you no longer need a human.

It's very different than every other AI product with the human in the loop. And as Chris described it, it's full self-driving for advertising once we launch this. And we think this is going to be game changing, not from cost savings because of the performance and the results. The truth is we get pinged with 330 billion ad requests every day.

For humans to operate in this setup, it's impossible. If you think of how many mobile apps, websites. When you layer audience segments on top of that, there are too many choices. It's like 93 trillion combinations. We're way past humans. So we've been running the test. The performance results is really what we're analyzing, is the AI brain outperforming the human or not. And that's where we're only going to release it when it's better, and we've indicated it will be at the end of this year. So it gives you an indication of the data we're looking at internally. It's going to be phenomenal, game-changing, and it's what will, I believe, move all these -- the large advertisers all in our direction because you can't do it without ViantAI.

Okay. So human cost savings, media cost savings, right? So -- and I guess there's time spent creating these campaigns and running them all of that, right? So even if you land a single new client in the coming year, it seems like there's budget savings, which theoretically should get redeployed. So that's going to be one anchor absolute growth, right? So how much do you think of typical large advertiser saves as you gradually peel the humans out of the equation?

Conservatively, 20% to 30%.

So you'll sit there...

Is being wasted into fees that are out there, and that's a very conservative number.

It's just right off the top.

Yes. If we could just say, what platform do you use? Just show us where you're spending your money. We could look at it, you show it to me on paper. I don't have to get in your system. We could easily just look at it and say, we'll easily save 20%, 30%.

When we get into just pricing that you're paying, we know that ViantAI delivers cost savings over 40% when the AI bids versus a human. You have to remember, this is a 24/7 365 liquid market, every second, if you get an ad request, let's say, from like Disney+. Well, from 1 minute to the next, the price might -- there may be -- it might be $30, $35 in 1 minute, and it might be $27 the next.

A human cannot possibly react. The AI actually -- it understands price discovery and knows what the patterns are. And look, the sell side does the same thing back to the buy side. They have sophisticated algorithms trying to extract the highest price from the advertiser. So we know that we can save significant amounts of money for our customers.

Yes. And I think the one thing that other companies can't do is grow the advertisers business. So even if an Amazon shows up with 1% or 0%, it doesn't matter. The opportunity cost of that advertiser is do you want to grow or do you just want to save in savings. You can take Amazon and save the savings, but your revenue growth overall of the business will suffer. And that's where because they have a conflict of interest.

And so we're really focused on driving the growth regardless of the fees we charge because in the end, that's what's long-term sustainable stickiness, is it ViantAI is the one providing the revenue growth for these organizations.

And I know there's a lot of focus on the larger customers, and it is a great opportunity, and we're really excited about it. But with ViantAI -- one of the things that we're faced with is fighting against traditional organizational behavior in these massive companies, and because there's teams built and people built around doing these functions like planning and buying and measurement and analysis. And it's like AI planning.

We see -- when you look at a plan, and I don't care who you are, what market or what product, you look at an AI output of a plan versus the human plan. That happened in 60 seconds, you took 8 weeks and it's all data backed and it's way more accurate. This -- what ViantAI is really about, it is applicable across all areas -- all sectors.

But the down market opportunity for the SMBs and the DTC commerce companies that traditionally advertise on meta, that is a -- we won't be fighting that organizational behavior. They need automation. They want this. And we think that's going to be another huge TAM increase for us.

Got it. I think we're out of time. But as we wrap up here, step in a time machine with me 12 months from now, we're sitting here December of 2026. So what do you think we'll be talking about in terms of what you guys have been able to achieve over the trailing 12 months?

The exceptional financial performance out of Viant technology. That's the way I look at it. We have so many layers of tailwinds behind us coming in. We're the leader in CTV. Chris mentioned almost half, it's 46% of the ad spend flowing through us, is going to CTV because of Household ID, IRIS_ID, all the stuff we've already talked about. There's going to be linear TV that gets cannibalized, pushing into streaming TV, which provides year after year of sustainable organic growth from these customers coming in.

So to me, it's going to be a fantastic year where everyone will be able to separate the players in AI-driven advertising on what's working, what's actually providing results whereas right now, I think it's hard for investors to understand what's real from what's fake out there. And so Viant is by far the leader in AI today in advertising, and I think we're going to extend that lead in 2026. And hopefully, the financial spoils that come with that will show up next year as well.

Awesome. So Tim, Chris, thank you so much for joining us, and good luck in the coming year.

Thank you.

Thanks, Stephen.

Okay. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Viant Technology'sTechnologies Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Dave, and I will be your operator today. Before I hand the call off to the Viant leadership team, I'd like to go over just a few housekeeping notes for the program. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] And thank you for your attendance today.

I will now turn the call over to Nick Zangler, VP of Investor Relations for Viant.

Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to Viant Technologies Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. On the call today are Tim Vanderhook, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer; Chris Vanderhook, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer; and Larry Madden, Chief Financial Officer.

I'd like to remind you that we will make forward-looking statements on our call today, including, but not limited to, statements regarding our guidance for Q4 2025 and other future financial results, our strategy, our platform development initiatives, including ViantAI, our pipeline and potential partnership opportunities and industry trends that are based on assumptions and subject to future events, risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected.

These forward-looking statements speak only as of today, and we take no -- undertake no obligation to update or revise these statements, except as required by law. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements and our entire safe harbor statement, please refer to the news release issued today as well as the risks and uncertainties described in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2025, under the heading Risk Factors and in other -- our other filings with the SEC.

During today's call, we will also present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are included in the news release issued today and in our earnings presentation, which have been posted on the Investor Relations page of the company's website and in our filings with the SEC.

I would now like to turn the call over to Tim Vanderhook, Chief Executive Officer of Viant. Tim?

Thanks, Nick, and thank you, all, for joining us today.

We delivered a strong third quarter performance, achieving new company records across all key metrics. Revenue increased 7% year-over-year and contribution ex-TAC increased 12% year-over-year, both well above the midpoint of our quarterly guidance range. When excluding temporary items like political advertising, revenue and contribution ex-TAC increased 19% and 22%, respectively, and more accurately reflects the true strength of our business.

Growth was driven by new customer wins, accelerating CTV demand, a surge in streaming audio demand, greater adoption of Viant's addressability solutions and the expanded use of the ViantAI product suite. Adjusted EBITDA increased 9% year-over-year to $16 million for the quarter and surpassed the high end of our guidance range.

On our previous earnings call, we discussed an incremental $250 million in potential ad spend opportunities associated with ongoing discussions with major U.S. advertisers, representative of a new addressable market for Viant. We are thrilled with our recent progress, which includes multiple client wins and is highlighted by a flagship multiyear partnership with Molson Coors, one of the world's largest beverage companies. Viant has been designated as the advertising platform for Molson Coors and will power their programmatic ad campaigns deployed across the open Internet throughout the U.S. beginning in 2026.

Viant was selected because of our proprietary intelligence layer, which combines our industry-leading addressability solutions with our autonomous advertising capabilities to uniquely activate first-party data, reach targeted audiences and achieve measurable outcomes at scale. Molson Coors manages a diverse product portfolio, including core power brands, premium brands and value brands, each of which services a distinct customer demographic.

Viant is uniquely capable of finding both existing and potential customers by leveraging our intelligence layer. By integrating their first-party data into our autonomous ad platform, we aim to empower Molson Coors to reach the appropriate legal drinking age audience for each brand while ensuring that every impression delivers measurable value.

This is precision marketing at scale made possible through Viant's autonomous ad platform. Molson Coors joins one of many major U.S. brand advertisers who share our vision of achieving outcomes through autonomous advertising. With multiple wins in place, the broader market is increasingly recognizing Viant as the autonomous advertising platform for the open Internet.

And for good reason, our value proposition is unmatched. First and foremost, we are an independent and objective partner, free of the conflicts of interest that exist with our competitors. Remember, many of our peers either sell owned and operated inventory or they monetize certain supply paths, putting their interest at odds with their advertiser clients. Google direct spend to YouTube, Amazon direct spend to Prime Video and the Trade Desk direct spend through OpenPath, all to extract more margin for themselves and ultimately to the detriment of the advertiser.

At Viant, we pride ourselves in directing spend to ad inventory that drives the highest return on ad spend for the advertiser. We own no publisher content, and our incentives are directly aligned with those of our advertiser clients. Viant is also a leader in proliferating secular growth channels, CTV and streaming audio, offering advertisers the ability to purchase ad inventory through our direct access premium publisher program, the industry's most efficient path to purchase premium CTV and streaming audio ad inventory. Through direct access, more ad spend is allocated to working media, which means dollars deployed on Viant's platform go further, generating more ad impressions for advertisers than on many competing platforms.

And as referenced a moment ago, at the core of our autonomous ad platform is an intelligence layer that is giving our customers the ability to drive higher returns in open Internet advertising. Viant is the only platform where advertisers can leverage AI to harness what we believe to be the industry's most powerful audience identifier, Household ID and the industry's most powerful content identifier, IRIS_ID, to cut through the noise and deploy precise hyper-targeted campaigns at scale through the most efficient supply paths.

This value proposition is resonating with brand advertisers more so than ever before. And I am pleased to report that throughout the quarter, we made tremendous progress, further enhancing this value proposition as part of our relentless focus on innovation.

On that note, I will provide an update on performance and progress across our key strategic priorities: CTV,; addressability; and ViantAI. CTV was the strongest driver of contribution ex-TAC growth in the quarter, exhibiting an accelerating year-over-year growth rate. Our results consistently demonstrate our leadership position in CTV, and this quarter was no different. Total CTV ad spend on our platform reached a new all-time high and represented 46% of total advertiser spend on our platform, also an all-time high. Year-to-date, approximately half of all CTV ad spend on our platform has been directed by our customers to run through our direct access publisher program, which offers an efficient, targetable and measurable way to purchase CTV inventory. The vast majority of leading streaming services have joined the Direct Access program, including Disney+, Paramount+, NBCU, Tubi, Samsung and many more.

Increasing adoption of our addressability solutions, Household ID and IRIS_ID, both of which are purpose-built for CTV, further propel demand for CTV on our platform, leading to outsized growth relative to our peers. Viant Household ID, our patented audience targeting and measurement solution, continues to see strong utilization amongst advertisers and was a meaningful contributor to top line growth in the quarter.

Household ID delivers superior addressability for advertisers looking to leverage their first-party data to reach specific audiences and measure campaign performance. Household ID identifies approximately 95% of U.S. households and is available across roughly 80% of all biddable ad inventory, 4x times the coverage of key competing identifiers, which reach only about 20% of biddable ad inventory.

Our content targeting and measurement solution, IRIS_ID, continues to ramp across publishers, enticing a growing number of advertisers to deploy contextually targeted campaigns on our platform. We recently added Tubi, a leading fast streaming service with over 100 million monthly active users to our pool of IRIS-enabled publishers, joining the likes of Paramount+, AMC Networks, Wurl, Lionsgate, CNN, LG, VIZIO and many more. In just 1 year since acquisition, we have more than tripled the presence of IRIS_ID across the CTV bid stream, and we believe we have a clear path to achieve 50% of the CTV bid stream penetration in the next few months.

IRIS_ID is a powerful performance solution, enabling advertisers to achieve unprecedented levels of precision by targeting CTV ad inventory at the video level, which includes scene-level targeting. Consider for a moment the possibilities of scene level targeting where brands align with a seemingly infinite assortment of themes. Imagine brands like Tide laundry detergent targeting stains, Bounty paper towels targeting spills and Coca-Cola targeting Happiness. The possibilities are limitless. And most importantly, IRIS_ID works.

When utilized on our platform, advertisers are seeing, on average, a 48% increase in conversion rates versus control groups. Given the effectiveness of contextual targeting strategies deployed with Viant, advertisers are buying in. In fact, in Q3, revenue attached to the IRIS_ID more than doubled sequentially versus the prior quarter.

Last quarter, we announced a partnership with IPG Acxiom, where IRIS_ID is powering their content targeting offering. IPG is requiring all content owners with upfront commitments to carry IRIS_ID, and we believe this partnership will help further drive IRIS_ID into the CTV ecosystem.

Moving on to ViantAI. Our autonomous ad platform is powered by the ViantAI product suite. We have successfully rolled out 3 of the 4 phases comprising the ViantAI product suite. ViantAI consists of AI Bidding, AI Planning, Measurement and Analysis and AI Decisioning. I'll provide a brief update on all 4 phases.

AI Bidding continues to automate approximately 85% of the ad spend on our platform. With AI Bidding, advertisers enable Viant's algorithms to find and buy optimal ad placements across the open Internet, aiming for the lowest cost while meeting their desired KPIs, which often include reach, frequency and other targeting requirements. With surging use, contribution ex-TAC generated from AI Bidding more than doubled year-over-year in the quarter and growth accelerated for the fourth straight quarter.

We recently launched AI Bidding 3.0 ahead of schedule, which is expected to deliver even greater media cost reductions to our clients. AI Planning most clearly showcases our intelligence layer at work and represents the future of ad campaign creation and execution at Viant. AI Planning enables any advertiser from an SMB to an enterprise marketer to create a brand or product-specific ad campaign in seconds. We replaced the complex DSP UI with a single prompt that requires just 4 inputs: the advertiser, the budget, the time frame and the goal. Within seconds of submission, an ad campaign designed to maximize return on ad spend is fully constructed and ready for deployment.

Our intelligence layer identifies the ideal audience segment for any brand, product or service, then utilizes advertiser first-party data together with our addressability solutions, historical campaign performance data and bidding algorithms to most efficiently allocate the budget across various digital channels, publishers, geographies, audiences, video level content, time of day and more, to execute campaigns capable of delivering the most optimal outcomes.

In preparation of our launch of AI Decisioning, AI Planning has been significantly enhanced, now capable of building and executing campaigns for niche performance advertisers and even individual products or services. For example, AI Planning can now build and execute a campaign for every single pair of shoes on Nike's website, each uniquely tailored to address a specifically defined audience through calculated digital channel allocations and use of specific audience and contextual targeting segments.

With this new enhanced level of precision, enterprises and mid-market advertisers can reconfigure marketing strategies for increased efficiency and performance advertisers, including SMBs and direct-to-consumer e-commerce companies. They can readily engage the most highly effective digital channels like CTV. Of course, powering this enhanced level of precision are our proprietary addressability solutions, Household ID and IRIS_ID, both of which are now fully incorporated into our intelligence layer.

AI Measurement and Analysis launched earlier this year and replaces traditional reporting with on-demand insights. Historically, campaign performance data has been spread across multiple dashboards, buried in spreadsheets and has required the expertise of specialized data scientists to interpret results and identify actionable insights. AI Measurement and Analysis surfaces actionable insights and optimization opportunities in an instant via an intuitive chat-based interface. Think of Measurement and Analysis as a trusted copilot, providing on-demand answers and recommendations to all campaign performance-related queries, an essential feature necessary to properly support performance advertisers.

AI Decisioning set to launch at year-end will truly usher in the outcomes era of programmatic advertising at Viant by combining AI Bidding, AI Planning and Measurement and Analysis with the added capability of dynamic spend deployment. AI Decisioning proactively reacts to fluid market conditions and adjust campaigns in real time to deliver optimal campaign results. AI Decisioning is expected to enable Viant to expand our addressable market to include performance advertisers who are in need of a do-it-for-me solution that can service them across the open Internet.

Our autonomous advertising platform will compete with Google's PMax and demand gen solutions as well as Meta's Advantage+ solution, but will direct spend to demand generation channels like CTV and streaming audio, that drive incremental lift, as opposed to demand capture channels like search and social, where ad spend is directed to audiences that often would have converted anyway.

To summarize, we delivered impressive results attributable to strong underlying performance, particularly in CTV, where we are continuously expanding our leadership position. We believe our partnership with Molson Coors underscores our platform's unique advantages over our much larger competitors. And we strengthened our value proposition through improvements in our CTV offering, addressability solutions and the ViantAI product suite. With headwinds easing, underlying performance strengthening and a marquee client win established, we are poised to meaningfully accelerate growth going forward.

With that, I'll pass it over to Chris.

Thanks, Tim. I will provide an update on our customer go-to-market strategy. We intend to maintain our dominant position within the mid-market. With the success of ViantAI, we will opportunistically expand upmarket with major U.S. advertisers like Molson Coors, who share in our vision of achieving measurable outcomes through the use of autonomous advertising and expand down market to enable the millions of performance advertisers, including SMBs and direct-to-consumer e-commerce companies, to participate in the open Internet, just like they currently do in search and social.

Touching first on the mid-market. We continue to execute across our core customer cohort as demonstrated by the acceleration in demand we generated in the quarter, which can be seen in our underlying performance. After accounting for political ad spend in the prior year and the departure of a seasonal advertiser due to a corporate merger, contribution ex-TAC increased by 22% in the quarter. Mid-market advertisers are increasingly relying on our intelligence layer and embedded solutions like Household ID, IRIS_ID and AI Bidding to successfully navigate today's complex digital landscape. As a result, Viant is becoming more deeply integrated into the fabric of our clients' marketing efforts, opening up more opportunities for collaboration.

For example, we recently expanded upon an existing partnership with a leading grocery chain to power their retail media network. By leveraging their extensive first-party data set, along with our industry-leading addressability solutions, we are enabling this grocer's numerous vendors to target relevant audiences with highly effective off-site ads.

Beyond this existing partnership, we are in active dialogue with a number of additional major retailers exploring opportunities to utilize their first-party data set in combination with our addressability solutions to better enable their vendors to market products more effectively across the open Internet and ultimately drive sales growth across these retailers. Across major U.S. advertisers, we have been actively pursuing over $250 million in potential ad spend, all of which would be incremental to our mid-market growth opportunity.

As Tim mentioned earlier, major U.S. brands are increasingly looking to partner with Viant due to our independence, our leadership in CTV and to leverage our intelligence layer that is core to our autonomous advertising platform in ViantAI. Our multiyear partnership with Molson Coors not only demonstrates our ability to win amongst major U.S. advertisers, but we believe this win is indicative of a growing preference amongst large brands to deploy data-driven campaigns at scale.

Historically, the world's largest advertisers have executed ad campaigns built for reach and frequency with minimal emphasis on addressability and the need to tie all media to outcomes. We see a changing landscape where even the largest brands in the world seek to advertise with precision, measure and drive return on ad spend and improve the overall effectiveness of their marketing budget. This is exactly what Molson Coors is striving to achieve, and we expect they will rely on our intelligence layer within our autonomous advertising platform to build and execute sophisticated campaigns designed to achieve maximum efficiency. Together, we can connect their brands to the right audiences in the right moments to deliver measurable outcomes while reinforcing Molson Coors's legacy of brand building.

At the end of the year, we plan to launch the fourth phase of our ViantAI product suite, AI Decisioning, enabling Viant to better serve performance-based advertisers via a self-service do-it-for-me solution. The opportunity across performance advertisers, including SMBs and direct-to-consumer e-commerce companies, is substantial, representing 10 million advertisers and over half of the $240 billion currently allocated to search and social digital channels.

Performance advertisers prioritize targeting and measurement, a capability that has emerged within CTV through the use of our addressability solutions. Performance advertisers tend to be overinvested in search and social platforms and stand to benefit from shifting spend to CTV, where they can drive and measure incremental sales and improve their return on ad spend. To date, we believe there is no true self-service solution in the marketplace capable of addressing this customer segment for the open Internet. DSPs as they currently exist are far too complex to attract the performance advertisers and mass until now.

AI Decisioning is the component of our autonomous advertising platform designed to enable any size advertiser to deploy ad spend across highly effective digital channels, including CTV, streaming audio and more. The team is hard at work preparing for the launch of AI Decisioning by the end of the year. And because we have embraced a product-led go-to-market strategy, we see an opportunity to deliver faster growth and higher margins than that exhibited by early entrants currently targeting the space through their numerous sales reps and rented technology. We believe our in-house do-it-for-me autonomous advertising platform limits the need for extensive personnel investment to support new client acquisition and expansion.

Clearly, Viant is executing across a wide range of market opportunities. In the mid-market, where we have traditionally dominated, we continue to exhibit strong growth as demonstrated by our results. Amongst major U.S. advertisers, a new addressable market for us, we have been in active pursuit of over $250 million in incremental ad spend with multiple wins in place. And to address the emerging opportunity amongst performance advertisers, we are launching the industry's first autonomous advertising platform built for the open Internet.

With that, I'll turn it over to Larry to provide more detail on our financial performance. Larry?

Thanks, Chris. Before I begin, I would like to remind everyone that we have posted a presentation on our Investor Relations website that includes supplemental financial information to accompany today's call.

In terms of our results for the third quarter, revenue for the quarter was $85.6 million, representing a 7% increase year-over-year and 10% increase quarter-over-quarter and was above the midpoint of our guidance range. Contribution ex-TAC totaled $53 million in Q3, up 12% compared to the prior year period and up 10% sequentially, reaching the high end of our guidance range. Both revenue and contribution ex-TAC represent record results for the 3Q period.

It is important to note our underlying business is performing far stronger than our reported results indicate. When excluding political ad spend contribution from the prior year election cycle, which weighed on revenue growth by approximately 600 basis points and contribution ex-TAC growth by approximately 400 basis points as well as the departure of a seasonal advertiser due to a corporate merger, which weighed on revenue and contribution ex-TAC growth by approximately 600 basis points, Q3 revenue increased 19% year-over-year and contribution ex-TAC increased 22% year-over-year on a pro forma basis. We believe this underlying performance more accurately reflects the true health of our business and adjusts for material factors outside of our control.

During the quarter, we also continued to see meaningful expansion in the number of customers generating significant levels of contribution ex-TAC. On a trailing 12-month basis through Q3, we saw a 39% increase in the number of percentage spend customers generating over $1 million in contribution ex-TAC. Additionally, contribution ex-TAC across our top 100 customers grew by 18% year-over-year on a TTM basis.

New customer momentum also remains strong, as evidenced by the recent announcement of a newly formed multiyear partnership with Molson Coors, one of the largest beverage companies in the U.S. We are encouraged by our performance and demonstrated ability to bring major U.S. brand spend onto the Viant ad platform. We believe these trends fueled by growth from both existing and new customers, reinforce our strong competitive positioning and support our ability to continue outperforming the broader programmatic market over the long- term.

We delivered strong performance across most customer verticals in Q3 with ad spend across our top 6 verticals, which include health care, retail, consumer goods, public services, business services and automotive leading the way. CTV remained a core growth driver in Q3, accounting for a record high of 46% of total platform spend, with nearly half running through direct access premium publishers.

In addition, CTV spend reached an all-time high in the quarter, reflecting continued momentum as advertisers increasingly prioritize premium addressable video to drive performance. Spend across all emerging digital channels, which includes CTV, streaming audio and digital out-of-home, collectively represented approximately 56% of total platform spend in Q3, also a new record and up from 50%, in 2024 and 43% in 2023, highlighting the accelerating adoption of next-generation media formats and underscoring our position as a leading partner for advertisers moving beyond traditional display.

Video, inclusive of CTV, reached a record high 62% of total platform spend in the quarter, reflecting the continued shift towards high-impact measurable formats. Non-GAAP operating expenses totaled $37 million in the third quarter, representing a slight sequential decline and a 13% year-over-year increase. Notably, operating expenses include strategic investments related to the acquisitions of IRIS TV, which closed in November 2024 and Lockr, which closed in February 2025, both of which expand our long-term product capabilities and are intended to support long-term growth.

Excluding these acquisitions, organic non-GAAP operating expenses increased a modest 7% year-over-year and decreased 1% sequentially, reflecting continued operating leverage and disciplined expense management. Importantly, we remain focused on scaling efficiently. Even as we continue to invest in innovation across ViantAI and our broader technology stack, we are delivering measurable gains in productivity, increasing contribution ex-TAC per employee by over 7% year-over-year, a clear signal of improved operational efficiency.

Adjusted EBITDA for Q3 was $16 million, exceeding the high point of our guidance by 7% and growing 9% year-over-year and 42% sequentially. Adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of contribution ex-TAC was 30% for the quarter, well above our prior guidance, which called for 28% adjusted EBITDA margin at the midpoint. We are -- We were able to deliver strong margins despite temporary pressures impacting our top line and while absorbing elevated year-over-year operating expense growth stemming from the integration of the recent acquisitions, both of which represent critical investments that have materially strengthened our competitive positioning.

Non-GAAP net income, which excludes stock-based comp and other adjustments, totaled $11.2 million for the quarter, down 9% from $12.3 million in the prior year. Non-GAAP basic earnings per Class A share outstanding was $0.12 in the third quarter compared to $0.15 in the prior year. The year-over-year declines in both non-GAAP net income and earnings per share are primarily attributable to lower interest income and higher income tax expense in the current period. Non-GAAP net income before interest and taxes increased 4% year-over-year in Q3.

In terms of share count, we ended the quarter with 62.4 million shares outstanding, consisting of 16.6 million Class A shares and 45.8 million Class B shares. We ended the quarter with a strong balance sheet, including $161 million in cash and cash equivalents, $194 million of positive working capital, no debt and full access to our $75 million credit facility.

We also remain disciplined in our capital allocation. Since launching our share repurchase program in May 2024, we've returned $59.6 million to shareholders, including $10 million in Q3 and $37.9 million year-to-date through November 7. In total, since inception, we've repurchased 4.8 million shares at an average price of $12.42, signaling our confidence in our long-term value.

As of November 7, approximately $40.4 million remains available under our current authorization. We intend to continue executing this program opportunistically with a focus on maximizing value for long-term shareholders, particularly during periods when our stock is undervalued. We believe our strong financial foundation, combined with consistent execution and a balanced capital allocation strategy positions us well to capture growth opportunities and drive shareholder value in the quarters ahead.

Turning now to our Q4 outlook. As a reminder, our Q4 performance is being measured against a difficult comparison largely due to last year's high political ad spend contribution. This headwind is expected to pressure revenue growth by 600 basis points and contribution ex-TAC growth by 500 basis points in Q4. This is fully reflected in our guidance for the fourth quarter of 2025, which is as follows.:

Revenue of $101.5 million to $104.5 million, up 14% year-over-year and 20% sequentially at the midpoint. Excluding the impact from political, revenue is expected to be up 20% year-over-year at the midpoint on a pro forma basis. Contribution ex-TAC of $62 million to $64 million, reflecting 16% year-over-year growth and 19% sequentially at the midpoint. Excluding the impact from political, contribution ex-TAC is expected to be up 21% year-over-year at the midpoint on a pro forma basis.

Non-GAAP operating expenses of $39.5 million to $40.5 million, up 7% year-over-year and 8% sequentially at the midpoint. Excluding the impact from the IRIS and Lockr acquisitions, organic non-GAAP operating expenses are expected to increase a modest 5% year-over-year and 9% sequentially at the midpoint, reflecting continued operating leverage and disciplined expense management. Adjusted EBITDA of $22.5 million to $23.5 million, representing a 35% year-over-year increase and a 44% increase sequentially at the midpoint.

And finally, we expect an adjusted EBITDA margin as a percentage of contribution ex-TAC of 37% at the midpoint, representing over 500 basis points of improvement over the prior year period. Despite these temporary political headwinds, the midpoint of our guide assumes record Q4 performance across revenue, contribution ex-TAC and adjusted EBITDA. Based on the midpoint of our guide, we now expect full year 2025 revenue and contribution ex-TAC growth of 17%, adjusted EBITDA growth of 25% and adjusted EBITDA margins of 27%, an improvement of nearly 200 basis points year-over-year.

Notably, excluding the temporary headwinds we discussed, our Q4 guide at the midpoint implies full year 2025 revenue and contribution ex-TAC growth of 22% on a pro forma basis, indicative of strong underlying performance. As a reminder, the political ad spend headwind will no longer be a factor starting in the first quarter of 2026.

A few other considerations worth noting for 2026 modeling. We anticipate accelerating year-over-year growth in revenue and contribution ex-TAC throughout 2026, driven by new client onboarding. Additionally, while we expect to start servicing Molson Coors in Q1, more significant spending is expected to commence in Q2 and beyond. In terms of non-GAAP operating expenses, beginning in 2026, we will have lapped nearly all of the OpEx contributions associated with the recent acquisitions, and therefore, we expect to grow non-GAAP operating expenses at a lower rate in 2026 than in 2025. Given these assumptions, we expect to deliver significant EBITDA margin expansion in 2026.

In closing, we delivered another record quarter, executing against our strategic priorities, advancing innovation across our platform and returning capital to shareholders through opportunistic share repurchases at compelling valuations. Our growth pipeline has never been stronger and is supported by over $250 million in potential annualized ad spend opportunities associated with major U.S. advertisers, a new addressable market for Viant. We are clearly executing against this opportunity as evidenced by the flagship partnership with Molson Coors, among other sizable wins. We believe we are well positioned for sustainable long-term growth given our strategic alignment with secular growth trends, including CTV, addressability and ViantAI.

And with that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Laura Martin with Needham.

Great numbers, guys. I have 2. One is you guys have always had a self-serve platform and you have had 2 like products out of the 3 AI. So what is it about the third AI product that you're delivering in the fourth quarter that opens a new SMB TAM? Is it content creation? Or why wouldn't -- what was -- why is it different from what has been possible to date?

And then, Larry, just on your guidance, your same-store guidance has a 600 basis point headwind for a merger client that took spending. That isn't onetime, right? That's going to be a 600 basis point headwind for 4 quarters in a row. Do I have that right? Or if not, tell me.

Larry, do you want to take the first one?

I'll go first. So no, this was -- this particular client was a very seasonal client, spent the majority of their budget in Q3 and relatively modest amounts in other quarters. So that -- it will be very modest in terms of the headwind on that one. We're not even calling it out, but it's really the Q3 quarter that was the big hit for that particular.

Super helpful.

Laura, and on the first one, when we launch AI Decisioning, that will complete the cycle of the 4 phases of ViantAI. And what that will do is effectively make it full self-driving. Right now, we would classify ViantAI as still human in the loop, approving everything, needing to add extra information or optimizing the campaign based off the results. But with AI Decisioning, it will take over the complete campaign from start to completion, hopefully hitting the customer goals that the advertiser is looking for.

And Laura, just to remind everybody, DSPs traditionally are very complex. we liken them to like a Bloomberg terminal in finance. And with these smaller direct-to-consumer e-commerce companies or SMBs, they need a more simplified user experience, and they really want the platforms. They want to give you limited information. They want the platform to hit their goals. And we liken it also to -- it's like the self-driving car. That's kind of what we're doing with AI Decisioning that it is -- they're going to give us some basic information, their goals and then the platform is going to just deliver them the results.

Our next question comes from Matthew with JMP.

My first one is just on the Amazon DSP. It seems like they're offering 0% DSP fees that's been out there in some of the articles. Just have you guys seen any increased competitive intensity here over the past quarter or so?

I would say no on increased competition. Certainly, the Amazon DSP marketing team deserves a trophy for how much coverage they've been able to get over the past couple of months. But I would say, no, the competitive side of Amazon's ads business has been pretty consistently there. Most of their revenue is sponsored listings. The DSP, I would guess, is a very small portion. And we don't see them in the competitive bake-off processes at the finish line.

Got it. And then my second one is just on -- as you launch the AI Decisioning product and expand into the SMB performance market, just how do you grow awareness with that type of advertiser? Is there different investments in sales and marketing that you need to make? Or how do you think about that go-to-market strategy?

Yes. There's a lot of channel partnerships that you end up doing. There's a whole ecosystem of direct-to-consumer agencies, also measurement firms that we may look to partner with as well. But that SMB and direct-to-consumer e-commerce market is really dominated by Meta and Google. And there's a lot of interest out of those marketers to get into the open Internet, to get into CTV.

But I would say that the thing that you have to produce is true performance. And I think that's really what we're showing with a lot of our current customers today, whether mid-market or the larger advertiser segment. And we know that we're able to show the results there. And we're really confident once we launch AI Decisioning, we're going to be able to attack that -- the lower end of the market as well.

But Matt, just to put, I guess, a finer answer on that. We view electronically reaching advertisers that are out there in this segment, direct-to-consumer e-com. So we see a self-service sign-up flow and hopefully, no humans having to interact with them to use the platform. That's the goal.

Our next question comes from Wyatt Swanson with D.A. Davidson.

I'm on for Tom WyattWhite. I got a question on the client win you announced last week with Molson Coors. Can you talk about the incremental spend you expect to see from that? And maybe how that impacts the pipeline of $250 million incremental spend that you talked about last quarter? Is there still a lot of remaining incremental spend you believe you could capture for 2026?

Yes. I would say there definitely is a lot of incremental spend. I can't talk about any client-specific spend given the proprietary nature of that information. But Molson Coors is a huge win. Obviously, we're very proud of it. We've got Coors Light's on our desk right now for the earnings call. So we're pretty excited about that partnership. But I will say that, that should continue to scale. Look for that to start coming on board in the second quarter as that client onboards, and that should continue to scale for many years. It's a multiyear partnership, so that should get bigger and bigger each year.

I will point out, though, that Molson Coors was not the largest advertiser in that spend amount that we talked about last quarter. We've won some other customers in there already that we weren't allowed to announce their names. So some of those are rolling forward into 2026, but there's still even bigger companies that are in there that we can win for next year. So we're excited about what's ahead, and we're excited about the partnerships that we've struck heading into the future.

Got it. That's really helpful. And then kind of a follow-up to the elevated competition recently in the DSP space. From your guys' perspective, how do you see the competitive environment evolving as companies like Google and Amazon sort of try to evolve their DSPs?

Yes. Why don't I start and then -- I mean, I view the competitive space is getting smaller and smaller. Trade Desk has made specific moves around OpenPath and charging for what used to be SSP territory. So we made in our prepared comments, Google wants to sell you YouTube, Amazon wants to sell you Prime Video and Trade Desk wants to redirect your spends through OpenPath, their own SSP, where they're making incremental margins.

Viant takes a different approach from that. And so we see less competition when you look at truly objective buy-side-only platforms. Historically, there was the Trade Desk and ourselves. And I think with some of the Trade Desk recent moves that puts them more in the, I guess, no longer independent or objective when it comes to the pathways. What would you add?

Yes. And I'd just add on to objectivity. We see a real opening in the market, and as evidenced by the Molson Coors win and some of these other wins that we've already achieved, objectivity is a big piece. We think that we can be kind of the inside man for marketers that this industry is so complex in programmatic advertising and digital overall. We talked a lot about our intelligence layer.

This is really required. Marketers need someone who's going to go out and defend their interest in market and get them their returns. Most -- historically, most of the largest players in advertising are on both sides of the transaction. They're looking to sell you their own inventory. They consistently, -- and this has been proven, they rig the results to show that their content or their own inventory is driving the best results. Mmarketers regularly figure that out that in the end, that ended up not being true. And I think just as a lot of these, especially with the larger brands, as now most of the money is in digital, they're now realizing that even though their KPIs in digital may have gotten better, their total sales and total market share don't -- they don't tell the same story.

So we're really looking to connect senior marketing leadership with the CEO and the CFO's expectations of revenue growth, market share growth. That's what's unique about Viant. We think we're -- from a competitive standpoint, we're really the only one left on the buy side that has true objectivity to actually serve that role.

Our next question comes from Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum.

So obviously, that $250 million pipeline delivered some nice wins this quarter. Just curious if you can talk about how the sales teams are backfilling additional opportunities behind that?.

Well, really, the larger advertiser opportunity has really been product-led. We didn't go out and make a huge push, and this is what has really been so exciting for the team. We're getting pulled into that. And it started about 1a year ago with the launch of ViantAI. A lot of these large marketers are looking to get more efficient, drive better results. Like I said, they got to tie out what the CEO and the CFO are saying in terms of tying outcomes, true outcomes to their actual ad spend. So this is a product-led initiative. We're being pulled into this.

And so, really for the sales team, it hasn't been a massive sales effort to date to go after this market. And I think we're going to continue with being pulled in from a product standpoint. When we launch AI Decisioning as well, that's going to be product-led as well. So we're really excited about that. This hasn't been a heavy drain on our current core sales team. But we think that we're good with the investments that we've made throughout this year to be able to serve this end of the market.

Just a follow-up for Larry. You talked about greater margin -- EBITDA margin expansion in Q4, and I think you alluded to kind of similar trends as we get into 2026. Are there AI efficiencies driving that? Or are there some other elements driving that, that you can call out?

I think a lot of it is just the operating leverage in the model. As we grow spend, it's not linear to growing our overhead. So, as we get bigger, we can grow our overhead quite a bit lower than the rate at which contribution ex-TAC grows. Certainly, AI has -- plays a role in that. We have a lot of use cases where we're using it internally that's making things more efficient, making people just easier to research and get tasks done. But it's really -- it's the leverage -- the natural leverage in the model more so than pure AI.

Our next question comes from Andrew with Raymond James.

Maybe again on the large advertisers. Within that incremental cohort that you've kind of spoken about and maybe some of the unannounced companies there, what are the characteristics of the clients that have seen -- that have been more promising either as unannounced deals or as prospects, whether that's by vertical or maybe some aspect of the advertiser that makes them a uniquely good fit for you?

When I think of the type of customer that's ideal for Viant, it's someone that's going through a shrinking market. If you think of the beer market in general, it's shrinking in size., Youngeryounger generations of Americans are drinking a lot less. And so they need to get more efficient really fast. For businesses that are crushing it, -- I don't think NVIDIA is looking for new ad partners. Their businesses off and running.

And so for us, we're always looking for the challenging environment where the marketer really is looking for the truth on what's driving growth in their business, and they're very open and receptive to the data that we can point to and the case studies that we've been able to show that drive market share growth even in declining markets or grow the overall category as well. So I would say we're looking for advertisers that are somewhat feeling pain that know that what their current setup isn't working and they're looking for a new way forward.

And Andrew, the reason for that is that oftentimes when businesses are challenged, this is when most of the innovation takes place, almost out of necessity. We're not looking -- we have a very specific point of view in the market when we go out and talk to customers. We understand that what -- the way that we talk, some marketers don't want to hear it, and they may not like to face the music that the partners that they've chose and the measurement systems that they use are flawed. Many of these companies, it's not that they don't want to do the right thing for the end customer or for the brand. But a lot of times, people's incentives are at play, and they themselves may have made that decision in a year or 2 previously.

But when we see the customers, -- it's really the customers that want to know more, that they want to see that someone can save them money in the supply chain. They want customers -- they want a platform to show them what's truly driving incremental sales and new customers, not just the same customers to them. So we really attract customers who think that way. Those are the ones that we want to help service. And we think that the whole market gets here eventually, it will just take some time.

Yes. That's really interesting. And maybe one for Larry. We've heard kind of some mixed reviews on October trends from some of the companies that we've talked to you to date. I guess what are you seeing right now? How are you incorporating the holiday season playing out in your guidance?

I mean you're seeing our guide, which for CXT was 16% before the pro formas, I believe. So we're seeing strength. We're not experiencing weakness. I mean there are some pockets where you do see certain sectors with our customer verticals a little bit weaker than others, but we're seeing strength across the board.

Our next question comes from Barton Crockett with Rosenblat.

So yes, so I was curious when you -- first on just the numbers, just a basic thing. When you talked about an acceleration of the revenue growth rate next year over the quarters, is that inclusive of political? Or is that exclusive of political?

Inclusive. That would be inclusive.

Okay. So ex political, is it more kind of a steady trajectory?

No. We think -- certainly, we're going to benefit from political. It will not be as big, probably not as big as it was 2 years ago, or last year. But really, the uptick in where we think we feel great about growing the growth rate, really comes from a lot of these new business wins. We think we can -- from that, we can -- we believe we can increase growth rates in the couple of hundred basis points next year from 2025. So a lot of that is coming from the new business wins.

Okay. All right. That's great. And on the new business wins, I was curious if you could give us a sense of how much of this has already played out and how much is to come? So I think you've said Coors is one win and you've gotten some others, and there's still some other deals that could be decided. Of the $250 million, I mean, what portion has been decided? And can you also give us a sense of your win rate on these bids? And I'm also curious just to probe deeper, who are you competing against when you're winning these things?

Yes. So our win rate has actually been really good on the ones that we've already won here. There's still a good amount left.

I would say the minority of the $250 million has been decided with the majority still up for grabs is how I would describe it.

Yes. But the win rate has been good. And like I just said in the earlier -- one of my earlier responses, I think that it's really good because we actually choose on which customers we pursue. There's another very, very large CPG company that we've talked to in years past. We actually haven't pursued an opportunity with them, mainly because we don't actually believe that, that's their head space on where they're at, that they're going to be right for us. We want customers who want out of necessity, feel like they need to do something different, that they can't just run the same playbooks that everyone else runs. They can't just rely on last touch attribution. These companies sell billions and billions worth of consumer goods. And you can't -- we need customers to understand that you can't treat CTV as a last touch vehicle.

We also want them to understand that everything -- just because 7 or 8 years ago, certain companies in the space will deem that ad fraud is no longer an issue or that direct path inventory isn't important. We need customers to actually assign value here for us to pursue them. And again, when you get a customer who thinks the way that we do, this is typically where we're going to drive the most value for them.

Okay. But just in terms of who are you competing against and who are you winning against,? -- can you give us any color there?

All the players that --

With Molson Coors, Trade Desk, Google, Nexon, I believe, was in there, was Yahoo!. I'm not sure I believe they were in the... All the majors that you would expect.

Yes. I mean there's, call it, 5 -- what you would consider that have an enterprise-grade DSP. There's about 5 companies that exist. And again, we think that we're really truly the only objective player that is specifically on the buy side. No allegiance to any sell side or supply path out there, and we think that it gives us a very unique position.

And just one last comment. It was cited in the press release, this concept of findability, and it's a testament to how advanced Molson Coors is in the space that it's not just about, hey, we have first-party data, we'd like to match to you. Matching is one thing, but actually deploying and getting ads and messages in front of that audience in a real-life environment is a whole another thing. And most DSPs fall down when it goes to actually find those households that are in that customer's first-party data set.

And so where it came to Molson Coors, it wasn't just the scalability of our Household ID that it's 4 timesx greater than the next best partner. It's also the ability once your data is active in the DSP to actually reach them and deploy real dollars against them. And that's where Viant's DSP far outshines all those enterprise-grade DSPs that we were up against.

Our final question will come from Zach Cummins with B. Riley Securities.

Congrats on the strong results here. Tim, I was curious, just in terms of the CTV growth rate, nice to see that become record amounts as a percentage of ad spend as well in the quarter. Can you give us a sense of the durability of that growth rate, especially now that your identifiers are largely integrated into that moving forward from here?

I think that growth rate is going to stay very high for many years. I think when most of us look at a TV becoming a computer, we're just thinking linear TV translating into streaming. But I liken it more to the mobile app ecosystem. When smartphones came out, it was hard to imagine that mobile phones would be such a big opportunity from gaming to health to all types of different apps that are now created on there. And I think you'll see the same thing with smart TVs. It's going to be, yes, one leg of growth from linear TV moving into streaming, but it will be new growth that is created from new apps and gaming and time spent there as well.

And also remember that smart TVs are Internet connected. So you have interactive capabilities that are still coming down the pipe in the future of -- it's 2-way. You're allowed to vote during games and things like that. There's going to be all types of fantastic content that comes online. That's going to grow time spent with our connected TVs pretty tremendously. So I see no risk in the growth rate for CTV. I think that thing stays very high for many years.

There's also, Zach,Zachs some basics. Every time you see us make an announcement of another large content owner moving into direct access for us, you can expect that growth to grow even faster. IRIS_ID, again, we want to have differentiation within CTV and a lot of our customers recognize that. It's not just the direct supply path that saves them 20-plus percent just straight off the top. It's also our AI Bidding capabilities. They love that. That's -- probably the most loved thing we have by our customers is AI Bidding. And then also the penetration of IRIS_ID.

In competing platforms, when marketers log into those platforms and they go to buy CTV, they only can buy at the app level. If you log into Disney, you can only buy Disney. You don't know what show you're buying. If you log into Paramount -- if you log in like Paramount+, you don't know what the content is. IRIS_ID actually unearths what that content is about, so the marketer can show up as being relevant. And as Tim stated in his prepared remarks, we're seeing the performance increases, they're huge. So again, these are just basic things that we want to do around differentiation that drives value for the advertiser.

Understood. And my one follow-up question is, I know you had a 600 basis point headwind from a lost advertiser in Q3. Is there a chance that client could be won back at some point in the future?

Yes, I think there is. Obviously, that was a little bit different. The customer was acquired, and it was part of a cost synergy that was realized. I did listen to the earnings call, and I will say their revenue was down in the most recent earnings, and the CEO cited that it was due to advertising changes that they made. So hopefully, there's an opportunity there. But with cost synergies being realized via M&A, it's a little bit different path that we'd have to go down. But I think with the way that this year turned out, I think there likely is an opportunity for next year.

At this time, there are no further questions.

Thank you, everyone. We'll see you next quarter.