Independent digital advertising demand-side platform (DSP) Viant is looking to boost advertiser confidence in its recently launched ViantAI offering, training the generative AI-based programmatic media planning platform on audience and rating data from Comscore as part of a new integration.
Specifically, Viant inked a deal to license data from Comscore about site rankings and audience reach, initially leveraging the measurement vendor’s Media Metrix.
ViantAI launched last month and is significant step towards the DSP’s vision of so-called “autonomous advertising.” The platform aims and promises to both ease and speed the process of building out cross-channel digital programmatic media buying plans. Starting with just a few simple inputs about brand or advertiser, timeframe of campaign, budget and objective or KPI of the advertiser, the model delivers a data-driven media plan within minutes, which can be executed on the Viant DSP that provides automated ad buying across CTV, mobile, desktop web, streaming audio and digital out-of-home. With conversational prompts, it serves up recommendations - based on historical data from thousands of campaigns that have run through the DSP - about what, where and how much to allocate of ad budgets to optimally meet advertiser-specific goals.
Now it’s looking to add further confidence in and validation of those recommendations for advertisers by utilizing Comscore data to inform ViantAI’s existing site recommendations and reach numbers.
In an earlier interview with StreamTV Insider, Viant CMO Jon Schulz acknowledged that while historical data is a really good input, it isn’t necessarily always the best indicator of the future, particularly in a fast-moving digital advertising ecosystem, and said the company intended to bring third-party data into the mix to continue to train and improve the model as part of its roadmap. Making good on that plan, Comscore – which has been a long-standing data and measurement partner for Viant - represents the first external partner announcement for ViantAI.
“ViantAI is making AI-as-a-Service a reality for advertisers. As a strategic enhancement to our robust ViantAI platform, this partnership with Comscore provides an additional layer of reliable third-party data,” said Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Viant Technology. “By training ViantAI with Comscore data, we’re reinforcing our credible AI-powered planning recommendations with trusted rankings and reach data, giving clients the confidence to make informed decisions.”
The company expects to keep enhancing ViantAI with more data partner announcements in the future.
The ViantAI platform is meant to make the complex and time-consuming process of programmatic digital media planning simpler and more effective. To illustrate, Schulz noted there are some potential 98 trillion possible combinations when factoring in the different ways to slice budgets across various channels, publishers and different formats within each, among other choices within the DSP. More than a human can compute, the ViantAI is trained on all those combinations and distills them down into digestible, actionable recommendations based on what advertisers are looking to achieve. Recommendations can be further tailored and refined as planners interact with the tool.
And while citing recognition by customers at the power of the platform, Schulz last month also acknowledged some hesitation. Bolstering the model with trusted third-party data from Comscore could help advertisers feel more confident in leaning on AI to do some of the heavy lifting for media plans, where human expertise is still always able to override suggestions made by the platform.
“We're thrilled to integrate the industry's leading audience data with ViantAI, delivering groundbreaking solutions to the market that advertisers can trust,” said Steve Bagdasarian, Chief Commercial Officer at Comscore, in a statement. “Our data equips advertisers with essential insights on digital audience reach and site rankings, all seamlessly within the ViantAI platform.”
Speaking to StreamTV Insider when ViantAI first launched, Needham analyst Laura Martin said her gut feeling is the platform is a play to pull money out of walled-gardens like Facebooks and YouTube by attracting small and medium-sized advertisers who aren’t already clients of Viant’s DSP and don’t necessarily have the means or know-how to create programmatic media plans by offering the simplicity of genAI-powered self-serve planning capabilities. Those brands might then be inclined to use the Viant DSP to execute those buys.
These SMBs represent an expanded total addressable market (TAM) opportunity for Viant, according to Martin, that the buyside analyst categorized as “huge, huge.”