AI-focused ad tech player Viant generated company-record connected TV ad spend in Q3, with CTV accounting for 46% of total ad spend on its programmatic demand-side platform in the period.
The DSP reported 7% year-over-year quarterly revenue growth, reaching $85.6 million in the period while contribution ex-TAC (excluding traffic acquisition costs) was up 12% yoy to $52.9 million. Quarterly net income was down 20% yoy to $5.2 million. Adjusted EBITDA grew 9% versus the prior year quarter to $16 million in Q3.
On the earnings call Viant Co-Founder and CEO Tim Vanderhook said growth was driven by new customer wins, accelerating CTV demand, a spike in streaming audio demand, as well as greater adoption of Viant’s addressability tools and expanded use of its ViantAI product suite.
“Viant delivered record third quarter results, with revenue, contribution ex-TAC and adjusted EBITDA all exceeding the midpoint of our guidance," said Vanderhook in a statement. "We believe we are well-positioned to accelerate top-line growth, fueled by strengthening CTV demand, broader adoption of our proprietary addressability solutions, Household ID and IRIS_ID, and new brand partnerships enabled by ViantAI.”
Viant also touted expanded reach of the IRIS_ID contextual identifier, which helps deliver targeting and came under the Viant roof when it acquired contextual ad vendor IRIS.TV last year.
While not during the Q3 period, in October the DSP deepened its relationship with leading free ad-supported streamer Fox’s Tubi, integrating the AVOD player’s CTV inventory with the IRIS content ID sync, which it says enables advanced contextual and emotional targeting as well as measurement capabilities for advertisers.
In August, the company paired the IRIS_ID with tech from Wurl to enable scene-level contextual on CTV, which Viant claimed as a first for a demand-side platform.
Speaking on Monday’s earnings call, Vanderhook noted that in the one year since acquiring IRIS, Viant has “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.”
Helping on that front is a recent partnership with IPG Acxiom, where IPG is requiring all content owners with Upfront commitments to carry the IRIS_ID.
“We believe this partnership will help further drive IRIS_ID into the CTV ecosystem,” Vanderhook said.
Matching brand messaging and targeting advertising against content people are viewing is one avenue that has been seen a way to boost relevance and resonance of ads, while avoiding personal identifiers (the CEO used examples of scene-level targeting and emotion, like Tide targeting stains or Coca-Cola targeting happiness). And per Vanderhook, the persistent IRIS_ID works.
“When utilized on our platform, advertisers are seeing, on average, a 48% increase in conversion rates versus control groups,” he said, adding that given that effectiveness, advertisers are leaning in.
“In Q3 revenue attached to the IRIS_ID more than doubled sequentially versus the prior quarter.”
Earlier this month Viant secured Molson Coors as a major brand advertiser, where under a multi-year partnership Viant is the beverage company’s designated advertising platform and will power its programmatic ad campaigns deployed on the open internet in the U.S. starting in 2026.
“We are thrilled to partner with a number of major brand advertisers, including Molson Coors Beverage Company, who collectively share our vision of achieving outcomes through autonomous advertising, powered exclusively by ViantAI," continued Vanderhook in Monday’s Q3 earnings release.
The genAI-based ViantAI planning tool debuted last year with an aim of addressing programmatic complexity by making digital media planning easier and more efficient. It does so via simple conversational inputs that result in a media plan with AI-powered answers or recommendations on things like what, where and how much to allocate of ad budgets to meet advertiser-specific KPIs and goals. Soon after its launch, Needham & Co. analyst Laura Martin told StreamTV Insider she saw the move as expanding the total addressable market (TAM) for the DSP by opening the door to smaller advertisers and brands that could benefit from simplified tools and self-serve capabilities and which hadn’t used agencies to build media plans. And then could use the Viant DSP to execute.
As we previously detailed in this deep dive special report, the SMB advertiser market is a large and potentially previously untapped opportunity of advertisers for CTV, as many haven’t spent on TV advertising before but some, including marketers focused on performance, funnel digital ad spend into walled gardens with platforms like those from Google and Meta that make it easy to plan, buy and target. Publishers, CTV players and others like Viant have made respective efforts on self-serve and simplified tools, in part to potentially court this SMB market.
Speaking last year about ViantAI’s genAI prompt-based digital media planning capabilities, Martin said “advertisers can do this on their own, and [Viant’s] simplifying the on ramp” for them into the open internet.
But planning is just one aspect of the ViantAI suite (which powers the company’s autonomous ad platform), which also includes AI bidding, measurement and analysis and AI-powered decisioning.
Company executives noted that three of the four ViantAI suite phases have been successfully rolled out, with the final stage - automatic decisioning capabilities - now set to launch by year end.
That follows earlier updates, including training on Comscore data, and it appears Viant expects the upcoming ViantAI functionality to help deliver on a widened pool of potential advertisers for the DSP.
Per the Q3 presentation, the launch of AI decisioning is “expected to expand Viant’s addressable market to include performance advertisers.”