MySpace Owner Viant Wants Advertisers to Move Away From Individual Tracking

Viant today added its name to the list of public companies in the soaring ad-tech sector. Trading as DSP on the Nasdaq, Viant opened at $25 a share and quickly saw its stock price jump 20%. Fellow publicly traded companies like The Trade Desk, Magnite, LiveRamp and Criteo have all seen their valuations skyrocket over the last year as investor pour money into ad tech. Much of that bullishness has been brought on by the pandemic: Digital advertising has been a bright spot as consumers stream and play more while they stay at home, plus Wall Street is betting advertisers will open the floodgates once vaccines roll out and industries reopen, leading to ad-tech companies reaping the benefits. Viant, which operates demand-side platform Adelphic, has taken a circuitous route to going public. Brothers and co-founders Tim and Chris Vanderhook sold 60% of Viant to Time Inc. in 2016 for a reported $87 million. Meredith then bought Time in early 2018 and sold back the 60% stake in Viant to the Vanderhooks in late 2019 for $25 million. Adweek spoke with Vanderhook, who serves as chief operations officer of the Irvine, California-based company, about market dynamics and what’s next for Viant. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Adweek: Why do you think investors are so bullish on ad-tech?Chris Vanderhook: This crop of companies that are public and are going public are really high quality companies. These are all software companies that serve a real need in the market. So that's one. Two, I think investors understand all the tailwinds that are in anything ad-supported that's digital right now. There's a lot of really great tailwind. CTV is another big tailwind that marketers love. And there are other companies that are tangential. Look at a Roku: Their growth has been incredible. Investors love that. … CTV growth was north of 65% in 2020 and represents more than a third of our revenue in Adelphic. How ‘Horizontality’ Is Driving M&A in Ad Tech How will the deprecation of third-party cookies and Apple’s IDFA impact your business?Viant launched people-based in 2015. We were all about cookies going away, either from consumers deleting them, browsers deprecating them or regulation. We didn't know that all three would happen, but we were out evangelizing that very early. We're a people-based platform. We're different than our competitors who, many of them, are based on the cookie, and they want to keep the cookie game alive but we understand where the puck is going, that Google and Apple don't want to allow that moving forward. And we think that the entire industry will coalesce around this concept of moving back up to a household, and you don't need to track consumers across every device, or device tracking across every site. On the household ID, we have a patented process around that. We don't utilize cookies on the device; we don't utilize the IDFA. We focus a lot around network identifiers. ... These are real world identifiers, whether it be name or address, phone number or email, that our clients house on their customers. We allow them to then match that up with our data partners. … Some companies do that with a third party. We do that natively within the software. How do you plan on competing with Google and The Trade Desk, the dominant DSPs?I do believe that there is going to be multiple winners. This is a humongous space. Advertisers want choice. The agencies want choice, so I think there's going to be room for multiple winners. A lot of what we've been saying for six years, around cookies going away, really is playing out pretty nicely for us in our strategy. If you think of the cookieless environment, it used to be just all Safari. Now we're talking possibly all of the iPhone, including in-app. Then you look at connected TV, those are all cookieless environments. Marketers know that, even in other platforms, they can't even do basic things like frequency capping, let alone targeting and measuring the effectiveness of that. That's a big reason why we're in play, and why marketers and agencies are selecting our adult software. What are your plans with MySpace? (Viant bought the social networking site in 2011.)We do love the brand. It is a bit nostalgic; we get asked about it all the time. What I'll say right now is that we're really focused on the advertising opportunity [of Adelphic].