Welcome to Markitecture, where you can get smart fast with in-depth interviews of leading tech executives. I'm Ari Papero. I'm joined today by Tim Vanderhoek, the co-founder and CEO of Viant.
Tim, thanks for being here. Hi, Ari. Thanks for hosting this and having me on. So, Vyan's a public company, a scaled ad tech player, been around for a long time. How long have you been at this?
We started in August of 99, so we've been at this for quite some time. I think I can tell the whole history of ad tech. Yeah, right.
And you found it with your brother, right? So, it's a team sport here. That's right.
Two brothers, actually. Oh, did you? Chris and I run it day to day, and Russ still works here, too. But, yeah, certainly there was three of us. I didn't realize that.
It must be some really boring conversation at the Thanksgiving dinner table. We don't talk to each other at Thanksgiving since we work together. Yeah, is your mom like no ad tech at the dinner table? No, none, none. So I want to get into Vine because probably a lot of people aren't that familiar with what you actually do.
You have the best ticker symbol, DSP, is your ticker symbol. Are you a DSP? Like, should we put you in that category right next to Trade Desk, MediaMath?
beeswax etc yeah our primary product is adelphic the demand side platform we acquired in 2018 and moved that from what was a mobile dsp primarily focused in app and was fantastic and expanded it to all channels uh that was one big change that we did and of course we're we're a leading player in connected television where chris and i have a lot of background in um but i think what sets us apart from other dsps out there is our data foundation that we call ourselves a people-based DSP. So we've been, since we acquired Adelphic, the whole goal was to get off of cookies or digital identifiers in general. And that's when we chose people-based data as the way forward.
Hashed email is obviously very popular and the trade desk has adopted that as their UID2 approach. We take a different approach. We have a patent on something called household identification. So we aggregate everything up to a household level.
And ultimately, if you unlock that in our system, it comes down to a physical address, home address. Oh, that's interesting. So I want to talk about how the DSP goes to market.
I also want to dive into this idea of the household resolution. So why don't we do that in that order? So let's talk about the DSP first.
So is it primarily a self-serve DSP, or is there also managed serve? And who is the typical customer? Yeah.
Typical customer is a mid-market agency or client direct. We do work with holdcos, but the majority of our business is independent mid-market agencies and client directs of that realm. But, of course, we have MSAs with all the holdcos, and we work with them modestly is the way that I would characterize that.
So, yeah, that's the customer base. It is primarily a self-service, I would say, about. The vast majority, three quarters or so, is self-service users logging in, self-directing all their activities.
And really, we don't even know why they're using the DSP. Of course, we touch with them, but they have their own businesses that they're operating, hitting their own goals. So the vast majority of it is.
Weirdly, the pendulum has swung back the other way, where programmatic traders are hard to come by, and some customers need services to help with the trading itself. Right, because historically, before the Adelphic acquisition… Would it be fair to characterize your company as more of an ad network? Yeah, absolutely.
Specific Media was probably one of the world's largest ad networks up through pre-programmatic or RTB coming in. And then with the acquisition of Adelphic and continuing to build on that platform, have transitioned to fully self-service DSP, just in time for the market to swing back to managed services. So mid-market, that would be competitive with like Centro and Simplify? Yeah, absolutely. We compete.
And Yahoo is a big competitor to us in that space as well, too. Although, you know, with some of the changes that they've made with dropping their SSP and refocusing their sales force, you know, we'll see where they end up. Sure.
That makes sense. It's a big market, the mid-size. I've had this conversation with folks where they ask me, you know, isn't it just whoever has the holding codes wins? And I'm like, no, actually, it's pretty... big and pretty profitable, in the U.S. at least, for that regional agency space.
Certainly. And we only operate in the U.S. today. We have pared back all of our international operations. We focus every dollar over investment here in the U.S., where the regulatory framework's a little bit easier to stay up to date, although getting challenging. Yeah, state by state.
So let's talk inventory. So you mentioned CTV. So what's distinct about your solution in CTV? Well, I think if you look at other demand-side platforms that are digital identifier-based or cookie-based and you think about how they operate, let's take the use case of retargeting.
You get a pixel on the website, dropping cookies. When you go to put that and port that into CTV, the cookie really fails or the old IDFA fails. And that's really where we centered around people-based data as the way to make multiple channels work together.
We started for a period there, we were owned by Time Inc. We started with hashed email when we were acquired by Time Inc. And the goal there was really simple.
It's, hey, let's throw a registration window up in front of all the timing properties, and we'll make the lion's share of our money out on the open web powered by Vient's AdTech platform. What we saw was not many customers were willing to register their email for what they viewed as free web-based content. So much so that it only scaled to about 20% of the audience could we actually get to convert to a registered user. And that's really where we saw hashed email failing as the way forward.
And we kind of had to go back and rethink about this problem. And that's when we centered really around the household as the best way to go forward.