How Streaming TV & Household Measurement Work with Jon Schulz, CMO at Viant

Tim Rowe, Host:
Welcome to the very first episode of the State of Streaming podcast, where you'll be hearing from industry voices who are shaping the future of television as we know it. And today, we have a very special guest, Jon Schulz, who's the CMO at Viant, a leading buy-side platform specializing in streaming TV. And what's unique about Viant is that they've been in the digital advertising game since 1999. And they started working on streaming TV all the way back in 2011 when Viant with Panasonic co-founded Zumo before exiting to Comcast in 2020. They've continued to build and integrate and acquire companies at the intersection of TV and digital advertising. And today, Jon and I are talking about the biggest opportunities for advertisers, the challenges that are holding them back from cashing in, and simple frameworks for making it all make sense, no matter where you sit. Enjoy.

Jon Schulz, CMO @ Viant : Yeah, no, for sure. Yeah. Viant's been operating in the ad tech space for 26 years now. So I guess in that vernacular, we're one of the OGs and OGs. That is certainly early days and early days, phase one, you know, ad network and. and kind of evolved over time. But, but today we're really a leader in CTV and AI powered programmatic advertising. That's really kind of our calling card. We, we operate only on the buy side. That's an important distinction for us when we're in the market. A lot of the platforms out there have a supply side, uh, or sell side as well. So there's that kind of inherent conflict, right? When you have your own owned and operated inventory. in terms of pushing that through your demand or by side only. So we just focus on the success of advertisers and marketers and their agencies and driving the best outcomes for them.

Tim Rowe, Host: For folks that are maybe newer to the programmatic conversation, why can that present as a conflict?

Jon Schulz, CMO @ Viant : Well, if you break down like earnings, and I know some companies have been public when private, but you look at somebody like Yahoo or Google or whatever, and you break down their earnings, you know, 75 to 90% of their revenue is on the sell side, right? It's if you look at Google at search, it's the network, it's YouTube, right? They, do they have a DSP? Yes. But that's, that's really just a gateway to their supply. Right. And a lot of cases you can only use their tools to buy, you know, YouTube and, and, and things like that. Yahoo, very similar, way bigger on the publisher side than on the DSP side, but the DSP creates a demand channel, right. To, to move their inventory. So if you're an advertiser and, and I spent the first half of my career on the client side, right. In pharmaceutical and automotive. And if you're an advertiser, you want to make sure you're, there's no bias, right? If I'm an automotive and I'm looking for in-market auto intenders, I don't want to be biased by somebody's own agenda. I want to make sure I'm buying the right inventory. That's going to drive the right outcomes. And so that's why by side only I think is a, is an important distinction.

Tim Rowe, Host: Makes sense. And 26 years is a long time to be in ad tech and certainly been through a lot of evolutions, but really involved in streaming TV, connected TV before cord cutting was cool. And in our first conversation, you mentioned Zumo TV and I'm like, I definitely know Zumo TV. Can you, can you take us back? How did Viant get involved so early on with streaming?

Jon Schulz, CMO @ Viant : Yeah, it was it was kind of like a little internal Skunks Works operation that we had back in 2012, where we had a team actually in Cardiff in the UK that was building out this what is known today as a fast channel, you know, a free ad supported television channel. And we called it Zumo. That's X-U-M-O. And we brought in Panasonic in 2014 as a joint venture partner. We launched the service. You know, back then, I guess some people are familiar because we were on the Vizio remote control for a few years. You know, you had the Netflix button, the Prime button and the Zuma button. But but back then, you didn't have the big premium content owners embracing streaming. Right. That was that was what you would call early days or first generation. You did have People like Netflix out there and prime early days and stuff like that, developing their own content. But for somebody that, you know, was looking for premium content, it was a little bit more challenging. And since it was free ad supported, we needed the content and then the eyeballs to drive. the ad revenue. And so I always joke that our sports channel was a fixed camera on the 16th fairway of the Nike tour. It wasn't Sunday afternoon at the Masters, right? So you can understand the difference in terms of customer impact and viewership and things like that. But we learned a lot. We worked with all the TV manufacturers. We were in the firm where of the of the smart TV obviously worked with the content owners that were favorable to streaming back then. So we got a pretty early education on streaming. And so we you know, that that really served us well. And then through a lot of kind of iterations as our company evolved, we ultimately sold Zumo to Comcast. And that today is their fast platform. So they, they leverage it and use the platform. So if you go out to Zumo.com, you can see all this stuff. So it's, it's, it's rewarding. And the fact that, you know, the vision was kind of recognized and realized and certainly helped us immensely understand the space. And so we just started focusing our energy and effort on that's going to kind of be the future of advertising, right? Linear was kind of the last. and has been the last traditional advertising component and seeing that, wanting to move over. And you saw it, I mean, about that same time we sold the Comcast, Disney Plus launched, Paramount Plus launched, Peacock launched. So all the big networks now are embracing streaming, going NESPN, what, last month? They're bypassing cable altogether with their new ESPN service for all of the sports. And of course, they're big in college football and the like. So it's really interesting. We weren't wrong. We were just early. Just early.

Tim Rowe, Host: I think about, I don't know if you've ever seen the pictures of the The guy who invented the first selfie stick and it was like, you know, just an old school care. It was, it was a good idea just early and you were early and a great obviously re result from that. But I'm sure taught you a ton and prepared you for where Vian is today and where Vian's going. What were maybe some of those key takeaways that that really kind of accelerated the growth into connected TV as a DSP?

Jon Schulz, CMO @ Viant : Well, if you go back to that time period, what was happening in the digital landscape was the rise of smartphones. Right. So from the very first iPhone that came out in the late 2000s to all the other ones that followed and then mobile. back then looks a lot like CTV looks today, which is the usage was much higher than the ad spend. So you knew eventually that was going to catch up to itself. And with mobile and the app environment and stuff, we kind of saw that cookies were probably a little bit more of a temporary identifier. You know, if you look at the long term, our our thesis was more that that the smartphone and mobile was going to kind of be the demise of cookies, not that it would be more privacy and or ctv that came later that eventually for the most part i mean obviously google is is holding out but you know for the most part but but ctv never used cookies it was never part of the ecosystem of course mobile web yes but you know not not in the app ecosystem so we were already working on you know, cookie list identifiers, our household ID and the patents around that came out around that same time. So we'd been working in that space for a while. So when all the conversations came, oh my gosh, what are you going to do when cookies are gone? Well, our household ID has 95% coverage of U.S. households, and we've continued to develop and advance that. Partnerships with the likes of TransUnion and others, our integrations with major publishers, just continues to make it more robust and has really positioned us well to be successful. And like I talked about earlier with the vision of CTV being the future, as we moved more programmatic, we built our technology around that thesis, right? And today, 45% of the ad spend that runs through our platform is connected TV, which proportionally is probably higher than any platform out there because a lot of them were kind of, 1.0, right? They were banners and, and, you know, online video and kind of the early days of DSP. So we had the vision and the site to really kind of design and develop for CTV.

Tim Rowe, Host: How important, I don't want to, I don't want to glance over it. It's something that I think will become a prominent theme from conversations like this. The household identifier, just thinking about this all very holistically at the household level, we see user numbers and subscriber numbers and addressable numbers, and some platforms are now not going to publish it. It doesn't really matter if we just think about this as a household. Why is that so important?

Jon Schulz, CMO @ Viant : Right. Well, and it fits it fits the vision. Right. So, again, you go back, then we're thinking connected TV replacing linear. The TV is a shared device in the household. It's the biggest screen in the household. Most major purchase decisions are household level decisions, whether it's your next vehicle, your vacation, whatever. So we felt, and it's a little bit more privacy friendly from that standpoint, all of this tracking individuals and emails and stuff like that, that all rolls up. The household is the entity. And the other thing that we recognized is physical address is not owned by big tech, right? So if we're anchored on physical address, unless Google buys the U.S. Postal Service or something like that, that's not going away, right? So you have the physical address of the household. You can have multiple email addresses or IPs or different identifiers that tie back to that household, but the household is the unit. and is the anchor and is largely the buying unit that, that drives the commerce and the transactions.

Tim Rowe, Host: Okay. Makes sense. So if I'm now thinking about this from a buyer's perspective at the household level, now I'm really starting to think about, okay, well, what are the different types of content that those families or viewers, what are they sitting down to watch at the end of the day? How do I, as an advertiser, how do I start to think about stitching that universe together? That seems like it's getting more fragmented every day and there's M&A activity and apps are being rolled inside of it. That just is crazy and overwhelming. This weekend, I was canceling duplicate subscriptions for services that I didn't even know I was paying for. And I know that that's a pain point as a consumer, but how do you approach that as an advertiser?

Jon Schulz, CMO @ Viant : I think as an advertiser, and there's different categories of advertisers, right? But I mean, one of the things that we've talked about and we are partners with the ANA, so we like to talk to the brands directly and the marketers because they're the ones closest to kind of their business and their issues. And, you know, we were having some conversations. And when you think about the spend today, And you think about how the spend is broken up, because we have some very big tech companies out there, right, that command a lot of the money. If you believe the eMarketer numbers, which I think are generally pretty on track, search social and retail media is about 70%. of the ad spec, right? And the other 30% is kind of open web, linear, whatever. But a majority of it goes to what you classify as like the walled gardens, right? Amazon and Meta and Alphabet. And so But when you really think about it from through an advertiser's lens, what what are you doing with those tactics? Right. Whether it's, you know, branded search or whatever, you're capturing demand. Right. I have to know about your product to search for it. I'm not going to just pull it out of thin air. Right. I have to know about it and be aware of it in order to take those. So really what you're doing there, they call it performance, but it's really capturing that demand that you've already built. Well, how do you generate the demand? The other side is how are you actually generating that demand in the first place? It's linear, it's connected TV, it's the biggest screen in the house, right? When you see that ad for that new product, maybe it's the new iPhone or something like that, now all of a sudden you're just like, wow, That looks really cool. And then all the things that follow are where a lot of the credit gets captured in the current system of Lash Touch attribution. But really, it was that CTV ad that got you fired up and got you interested and made you aware that the product existed that then started that chain. So if you look at the data or you look at the research, it's like the CTV ad hit and then the branded search site visits, you know, purchase that all immediately follows minutes after that ad exposure. And to your point about all the devices in the house, right? You're not sitting there watching TV, but with nothing, you've got your phone in your hand or your tablet on your lap or something like that. So you're, you're activating as you get that exposure, that, that moves you, that, that drives you. So that's really a lot of what we see. And so when we're talking to people, it's, they're like the, the vanity metrics and the attribution, it's like, wow, it's through the roof. You know, the, the CMO always struggles for credibility with the CEO and the CFO, because it's like, look at my great metrics, but they do the quarterly earnings. And the quarterly earnings aren't showing the growth, right? So it's like, well, if all these marketing metrics are amazing, but it's not translating into business growth and revenue, that's a problem, right? So it's really, you've got to balance that. We're not saying demand capture is not important, but is it 70% of what you want to do? I think it needs to be a little bit more balanced. And that way you're, you're filling the funnel and pulling it through at a little bit more equal clip. And so that's really where I think, you know, we're thinking is starting to change and, and clearly the biggest. Audience platforms are CTV and specifically live sports. If you look at any of the data, a couple years ago when I was starting to research this, like in 2003, because it wasn't an Olympics year, it wasn't an election year, it was like 92 of the top 100 shows were NFL. 92 of the top 100, right? And last year that dropped to like 83 or something like that.

Tim Rowe, Host: Because it was an election year.

Jon Schulz, CMO @ Viant : An election year. So debates get a lot of viewership. You had, you know, the Olympics, which, you know, finals of certain events get a lot, you know, so, but, but still 83 of a hundred is still a lot for a single sports league, right? So now the NFL just kicked off a week ago. And you think about all the, you know, and, and what are the big platforms? Well, tonight, Thursday night football is, is Amazon, right? Prime Netflix is involved. They've added like a Christmas day game, a black Friday game for Amazon. You've got peacock, you've got paramount plus. I mean, there it's, it's all streaming now. And so is a lot of the other sports leagues, NBA, you know, NHL, Major League Baseball. So that's where the big audiences are. And that's what the big brands want, right? The big mass reach consumer brands. I know back in my automotive days, we didn't want to talk to five people. We wanted to talk to 50 million people. Right. So so it's it's really, you know, that's where CTV can really be key.

Tim Rowe, Host: thinking about that, thinking about live sports as that, that opportunity where it's the biggest audiences, the biggest moments, but with streaming and the fragmentation factor, how do you, how do you solve that? How do you make it easy to activate at scale with the same confidence that maybe a traditional linear buy would have offered now in exchange for the eyeballs?

Jon Schulz, CMO @ Viant : I think that's really that's a great question, Tim, and we all struggle with it. You just mentioned your duplicate subscriptions. I'm the same way. I don't even sometimes know somebody tips me on a show and it's like, what service is that on? I got to go scroll through all of the different ones to try to find it. But, you know, that is a challenge, right? Because it went from just a bundle. to being fragmented. Now we're starting to see some stuff get bundled again. I know that ESPN Fox announcement that came with the ESPN launch and stuff like that. I think we'll probably see more of that. But I think that's really where having a strong DSP partner comes in. Because through our direct access program, we're integrated with Disney and Paramount and NBCU and all the big platforms, right? So you as the advertiser want to manage your reach and frequency across platforms. The Thursday game might be on one, but then the Sunday games are on various platforms. Sunday nights on a different one, Monday nights on a different one, right? So it's, it's how do I, how do I manage across that? Because if you're working with each one individually, there's no kind of accounting for all the duplication, right? And so I think the reach and frequency management is really an area where you have a strong partner, a strong programmatic partner that can help you manage that across you know, publishers, because at the end of the day, you're looking for that right audience, right, wherever they might be. But if you're keen on live sports and live sports is a great platform because attention is really high. I mean, I don't know about you, but when I'm watching my teams, I'm leaning in pretty hard. If there's a if I'm watching Shawshank Redemption for the 55th time, I'm probably not as zeroed in and focus is probably more background noise. But when my team's playing on Sunday, I'm leaning in pretty hard. And so, and, and a lot of times it's co-viewing. That's the other benefit with CTV is you get the benefit of just like Nielsen always rated TV programs with 2.5 people in the room on average or whatever, you get the benefit of that co-viewing. co-viewing as well, whereas a lot of the other channels are a little bit more one-to-one. So you get that benefit of co-viewing. So if you start to look at it from a CPM perspective or an impact and how many people I'm touching, certainly that mobile ad's a one-to-one, but that CTV ad could be two-to-one, three-to-one, four-to-one, you know, it's a bigger impact.

Tim Rowe, Host: it's probably not quantifiable or maybe it is just that the multiplier of Doing it with other people like it's now and now it's an experience I am more tuned into the moment and something I'm probably gonna remember at least a week from now I can't remember what I had for lunch yesterday But I could remember if we were both sitting around watching the game last weekend certainly right and and I think that that matters when we're thinking about how do we capture attention inside of a moment so yeah makes a lot of sense and i don't want to spend a ton of time obviously talking about measurement but i think it is important because it's what allows us to all keep doing what we're doing proving proving out the return on this it seems like we have to maybe think about performance a little bit differently we think about that demand gen demand capture relationship a little bit more but Also, just in how we measure it, and you alluded to some of the touch points about what happens after someone sees a TV ad. Can we kind of come back and revisit that?

Jon Schulz, CMO @ Viant : Yeah, yeah, I think I think the the vernacular today and it changes over time, but I kind of call it incrementality. But I think the buzzword is outcomes. Right. Everybody now is talking about outcomes. So we're moving away from clicks or impressions or likes or things like that. And it's like, I need the outcomes. Again, it goes back to that CFO CMO dynamic, right? Don't just give me all these amazing metrics. I need to see it on the top line and the bottom line. It needs to move the business forward. And that's what we mean when we say outcomes is whether it's gym memberships or store visits or whatever that metric happens to be for that company vehicle sales. You need to drive those real outcomes, measurable outcomes to justify the marketing spend. And so it's an interesting segue as we looked at fortifying our position further in CTV. One of the one of the things that we looked at was innovators in the space that can really advance what we're already doing. And we acquired Iris TV. almost a year ago now, I'd say about a year ago. Yeah, it was November of last year or so. And they're on the contextual side. And so when you think about TV, especially when you think about linear, you're kind of demo buying and it's just, you know, it's it's reach numbers and how many viewers are in the program. Well, now that CTV is in the digital realm, we should be a lot better. at what we do and a lot more accurate and the idea around contextual is really just what is the content you know getting down to even like scene level content and that's right before the ad break and where where can the ads then be more more of a tie in or a fit Right. So if you're coming out of, you know, you're coming out of a scene where a house is on fire and then you go into a home insurance ad or, you know, something like that. And it's just like it's just kind of a pretty good fit or a pretty, you know, kind of top of mind based on what you were just experiencing in the program to the ad fits better with the content. And what's interesting is Iris did a did a study with Upwave, which is a company that does a lot of like brand lift studies and research, and they did a series of CTV campaigns that were using the Iris ID and contextual targeting. And they had a 2x lift in awareness, 3x lift in ad recall, and 5x lift in brand favorability when leveraging Iris against Upwave benchmarks. So it wasn't like us, you know, grading our own homework, you know, OpAway was looking at it relative to their benchmarks across all the research that they do to kind of make those determinations. So contextual definitely works and it's very impactful, you know, when you think about things like connected television and and formats and there's lots of examples, right? It's the beer ad after the party scene. It's, you know, there's all these ways to do it, but when, when ads are mismatched, you feel it as well, right? You could be watching a, again, a football game and there could be a feminine product ad or something like that. And you're just kind of like, eh, I don't know if that was kind of the best, you know, the best fit for the content or, or for that advertiser. Was that the best placement for that advertiser to get the biggest reaction in terms of outcomes. And that's really what you want to get to.

Tim Rowe, Host: Makes sense to me. And I think that the integrations roadmap that you've kind of outlined in previous conversations and just thinking holistically again about the buy side and, hey, we're approaching all of this from the buyer's perspective. You recently had news about an integration with Whirl and that scene level targeting. Can we can we touch on that?

Jon Schulz, CMO @ Viant : Yeah. Yeah. We're all Earl is a, um, it's an app love and company app love and acquired world. Um, uh, it's been a little while now, but yeah, they've, they've been actually working with Iris for a little while, but we, you know, Viant, you know, we have, we, this is a new partnership with them and they, they have a few things. They obviously have their. technology with a scene level targeting, but they hadn't integrated with the DSP at that point. And then they have their fast channels, right? So their business where they create channels, free ad supported channels for content owners. And so they have a lot of, you know, ad opportunity as well. So it really was an interesting, probably not what we would think about as a traditional partnership when we think about our direct access program, the whole idea there is supply path optimization and going directly to the premium content owner, right? Because there's so many intermediaries and resellers and the digital ecosystem, and it doesn't add value. Again, taking the advertiser perspective, get them right to the source. save the money, right? Everybody needs to get paid that wants to touch it in the cycle. So if you want to buy Disney, let's buy it right from Disney. Let's not buy it through 27 hops before we get to Disney. Let's just go right to the source. And as we've been meeting and talking to companies, Whirl was one that continued to come up as a real innovator and opening up new and different opportunities. And I just think it's exciting because we're tapping into so many new things, whether it's, you know, acquiring Iris, our partnership with Whirl and just the things that we can unlock and get out there. Now, many of these are pretty early. days, you know, relative from an adoption perspective. So there's a lot more education, there's a lot more test and learn and things like that. But we've got a good, I think we've got a really good foundation there. And they've they've proven to be a great partner.

Tim Rowe, Host: almost three decades of a foundation to build on. I think that no one better qualified in the space to figure these things out for us. So, Jon, thank you for being here. Thanks for being part of this kickoff to the State of Streaming podcast. If folks want to learn more about Viant, connect with you, where should they go? Give them the household address.

Jon Schulz, CMO @ Viant : Well, our site's viantinc.com. But yeah, I mean, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm happy to connect with anybody and chat about the business. Uh, yeah. Thanks for having me, Tim.

Tim Rowe, Host: Excellent. We'll make sure all that stuff is easy to find. It'll be linked close by. And if you found this conversation to be helpful, please share it with a colleague, share with a client, start a conversation today, wherever you're listening, make sure to smash that subscribe button, like follow, do all the things that help us grow. And we'll see y'all next time. Thank you.