Viant Technology Q2 2026 Earnings Call: Complete Transcript

Viant Technology (NASDAQ: DSP ) released second-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Monday. Read the complete transcript below. This transcript is brought to you APIs. For real-time access to our entire catalog, please visit for a consultation.

The full earnings call is available at Summary Viant Technology reported a strong second quarter with a 34% year-over-year revenue increase, surpassing guidance and setting new records across key metrics. The company highlighted its strategic initiatives around its proprietary intelligence layer, Viant AI, and CTV, emphasizing the integration of TVision's attention insights. 2 million, driven by increased CTV demand and the expanded use of Viant AI. Viant's Direct Access solution saw significant adoption, with over 80% of CTV ad spend transacted through it, showcasing cost savings and efficiency.

Future guidance for Q3 includes expected revenue growth of 27% year-over-year and an adjusted EBITDA increase of 19% sequentially. Management emphasized the importance of proprietary data and AI in differentiating Viant from competitors, particularly in the CTV space. 1 million in cash and no debt, positioning it well for future growth and potential acquisitions. Full Transcript David, Operator Hello everyone, and welcome to Viant Technology's 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. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session.

If you plan to ask a question, please ensure you set your Zoom name to display your full name and firm. If you would like to ask a question during the call, please use the Raise Hand feature located at the bottom of your Zoom toolbar. Thank you for your attendance today. I would now like to turn the call over to Nick Zangler, SVP of Investor Relations for Viant.

Nicholas Zangler, SVP Investor Relations Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Viant Technology's 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 Viant 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 of Viant. Tim Vanderhook, Co-Founder and CEO Thanks, Nick, 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, increased 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. 2 million for the quarter, exceeding the high end of our guidance range.

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 TVision'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. Lattice Frame, our AI-powered decisioning architecture, operationalizes these insights, dynamically refining every campaign to ensure that performance is continuously optimized, and our Direct Access supply path connects brands directly to premium publishers, lowering costs and eliminating bid-stream 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 three 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 three 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 four times the coverage of competing identity solutions. 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 five 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 achieve 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 Whoop 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, Whoop not 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 Xumo, 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 bid stream. 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 Philo, pushing penetration to approximately 70% of biddable inventory by the end of the year. S.

households, each of which is equipped with TVision's computer vision and automatic content recognition technology. TVision's attention data provides advertisers with four unique signals of attentive in-room presence, co-viewership, second-by-second eyes-on-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 and Prime Video. To date, TVision's 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 pre-bid 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 moat 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 surged: in-room presence, co-viewership, and eyes-on-screen engagement all peaked, driving the advertising inventory's 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 TVision's high-attention inventory segments.

4 times. 1 times 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, and 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 Lattice Grain 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 Viant 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 PMax and Meta's Advantage Plus, but with the 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 launched just six 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 and 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 premium inventory by facilitating transactions directly with publishers.