How TV Took Over: Viant Q2 2026 Earnings Brunch with Jon Schulz, CMO

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 0:52

Jon Schulz, welcome back to the State of Streaming Podcast. We're uh officially calling this the Viant Earnings Brunch, but don't turn off if you heard earnings and you're like, I'm not a finance bro, like it's okay. What we're really going to inspect here is what is driving the growth and success of best quarter ever. Best quarter ever for Viant. So, Jon, welcome back.

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 1:14

Thanks for having me, Tim.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 1:16

Absolutely. I want to I want to start with some of the statistics, some of the highlights that stood out on yesterday's call or on Monday's call, rather. Revenue up 34%, 50% of revenue coming from connected television, 5% of revenue coming from the end-to-end VIANTAI Outcomes product. 80%

Welcome And Earnings Highlights

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 1:36

of connected TV is being transacted on a direct basis versus open auction up from 50% in Q1. The Irish content ID is on 50% of the connected TV bidstream, 70% by end of year. And this one really blew my mind. I think everyone was tuned into the Knicks NBA finals, but game five, peak CPM, almost 2X the Super Bowl. $120 CPM. Crazy. These were some of the stats that stood out to me on yesterday's call. What's driving the success?

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 2:11

Well, I think it's I think it's a number of things. I think, like with any company, we've been around for a while. We've been around for 27 years. So there's no lightning in a bottle, right? It's a calculated plan and strategy and working the strategy. And we decided uh a few years ago that we really needed to focus on differentiation for the platform. And some of the things you mentioned, Tim, with uh Iris ID, that was an acquisition we made about 18 months ago, T TVision and the attention signals, doubling down on identity around household ID and really cleaning up the path to the inventory, right? And that's that's the direct access. I think we launched direct access back in 22 and really focused on, you know, how do we go directly to publisher

What’s Driving Viant’s Momentum

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 2:55

and really take a lot of the inefficiency, the non-value added resellers out of the middle, because then that creates a scenario where both sides win, right? If you grab that 20 or 30 percent of margin that's just going back and forth to the resellers, the publishers get a higher yield, and at the same time, the advertisers get a more efficient CPM. And that that can happen in tandem because you're splitting all that inefficient margin that sits in the middle. And so none of these are things that just came about. These are things that we've been focused on and working on for quite some time.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 3:30

And that was apparent throughout the call that this is not, this wasn't just a quarter that things went really well. This is a long-term plan and vision, well executed. What really stood out to me was that the call actually didn't sound that much different than like just Viant marketing in general, what the team is saying on socials. It was very much a uniform story and a narrative that is aligned and a testament to the 27 years of being focused on solving this one problem for the buy side. Can you talk to us about how that's different? How the buyer focus for Viant is a unique distinction because we obviously would talk about Amazon DSP, we talk about Google's DV360, we talk about Meta. Ironically, three of the companies in the Mag 7, the only segment of the market that seems to be growing distinctly different than Viant's approach. Can you take us through that?

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 4:26

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it but part of the history, and I've been around for a good chunk of that history. You know, back in the early days, there was this idea around exclusive inventory. So we could do deals with publishers where we could represent their inventory exclusively. That kind of changed and evolved. We spent a period of time as part of a content company. So we were under Time Inc. and then Time Inc. got acquired by Meredith, and then we spun out independently. And all of that background gives us a really interesting perspective of both sides, right? And understanding the motivations for the publisher and the publisher monetization, as well as what the advertisers focused on. And for me personally, half of my career was on the brand side, on the advertiser side and automotive and pharma.

The Buyer-First DSP Difference

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 5:11

So it's easy for me to take that perspective. And the fact of the matter is, these companies, if you break down their financials, 75 plus percent of their revenue comes from ad sales, right? So do they have buying products? Sure, they have buying products. You know, Google has DV360, Amazon has Amazon DSP, but when you look at the monetization, take Amazon, for example, 80 plus percent of it is listing ads or the things that they own. They're owned and operated. Google, it's YouTube, it's paid search, it's their network. I mean, that's what really drives it. So they do have buying interfaces, but the buying interfaces are really a gateway to their inventory. And I don't blame them for that. I'm not being critical. I think it's actually, if you can pull it off, it's it's a good business model. I mean, going back to the the stat that we like to use, it was the exact stat is 52% of the top advertisers have only grown on an average of 1% annually in the last 15 years. GDP is only 2.4%. They're not even keeping up with GDP. But if you look at the Mag 7, over that same period, they grew 550%. So what that means is the platforms getting the ad dollars are doing quite well, but the advertisers are not, and they're not showing the growth. And it's it's a complex problem, but it's one that we can solve.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 6:39

And when you draw a big circle around it like that, it starts to become obvious. And the Outcomes product that we talked about in the lead up is Viant's attempt at and maybe offering an alternative to kind of the set it and forget it products, performance max with Google and with Meta. Obviously, they have kind of these end-to-end outcome related products or workflows. How does the Viant approach differ and what is it that that's resonating with advertisers?

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 7:07

Yeah, I think there's really, I think there's really two things here. So picking up on the on the growth story, right? The first thing to keep in mind is the problem is the overfocus on performance, right? At any point in time, only 5% of customers are in market, right? You can take automotive, you can take, you know, travel,

Escaping The Performance-Only Trap

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 7:28

you can take whatever vertical you want, you know, and it's going to vary by vertical, but say five to 10% of people are actually in market at this moment. Like you're in market for brunch, right? You're in market for, you know, everybody is, right? Not everybody is. So, but that overfocus on performance has funneled a majority of the ad dollars against that five percent to try and convert that demand now. It's very measurable. And again, everybody's looking to hit the number, chase the number. The problem is you're not doing anything for future demand or demand generation, right? And that's really where CTV is at its best. TV for decades has been the best format for with site, sound and motion to really generate that demand and and and you learn about things. How can I search about something or type something in Chat GPT if I don't know it exists, right? So you you you need that ad to really stimulate that interest and that that demand that leads to consideration and ultimately purchase. And so I think that is a bigger issue that's dumping growth right now is just an overinvestment on the performance side, looking for instant results. But when you come to Outcomes, you're exactly right. What we're basically offering is a solution outside of the walled gardens, so across the open internet to be able to drive performance campaigns and deliver, you know, measurable Outcomes for advertisers.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 8:57

Help us define the open internet. Seems like that's an active debate. What is the open internet? What's the open internet to Viant and for for the Outcomes product?

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 9:07

Yeah, I think the open internet is anything that you can buy, you can buy programmatically, you know, outside of the walled garden. So, for example, as a demand side platform that sees 150 billion bid requests a day, we can't buy YouTube. We can't buy into YouTube. You have to go through Google's tools to buy YouTube. We can't buy into Amazon, we can't buy into Meta, right? So, so if you want to buy those properties, you have to use their tools and you have to buy into them that way. Everything else,

What “Open Internet” Really Means

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 9:41

so if you want Disney, if you want Paramount, if you if you want Warner, if you know Fox, you know, any of that other content, Peacock, that is all available and viable through the open internet. You know, the example from the earnings call on the you know game five of the NBA finals and the big comeback and the $120 CPM, you know, and we can dig into what that means and how that works. But, you know, that is the open internet. So, yes, YouTube is interesting. Yes, prime video has Thursday night football, which is a great property, but they also have a lot of other stuff that's maybe lower attention or not as high in demand, right? So as an advertiser, it's about meeting my audience where they are, and so it's not always going to be in the wall gardens.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 10:29

The Irish acquisition back in 2024, earlier this year, acquiring T TVision, which enabled that that Knicks insight. Can you take us through that? What did you learn? How did we learn it? And how are advertisers using that?

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 10:44

Yeah, so so T TVision is is really interesting. So they're the second largest panel in the US. So it's a in-home opt-in panel, nationally represented, and they really are able to measure three things very effectively. Is someone in the room?

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 10:58

Right.

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 10:59

Okay, that's important. 30% of the time ads run to an empty room, right? Wow. So how can 30%? How can an ad work if I didn't see it or if nobody was in the room, right? So is someone in the room? If someone's

TVision And The Attention Breakthrough

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 11:14

in the room, how many people are in the room? Right? Co-viewing is an amplifier. If there's one person in the room, it's a lot different if there's five people in the room in terms of the impact or potential impact of that ad, right? So in-room presence, co-viewing, and then second by second eyes on screen attention, right? So that's basically we're all sitting watching the game or watching whatever we watch, probably with our phone, maybe with a tablet, maybe with a laptop, your eyes go down, right? You're responding to a text message, you're scrolling for something, you heard something you're looking up, your eyes aren't on the screen. So we're able to capture second by second eyes on screen attention. And what that allows us to do then is look at ads and ad effectiveness. So if you're an advertiser, why would you want that data? Well, I just launched this new ad campaign. At the 10-second mark, people are turning away from the TV. Maybe there's something with that ad that I could improve or I could do better. Or maybe it was the placement. Maybe I was in the last position in the pod and I should have been in the first position in the pod or something like that. So the advertiser or the brand, and then oftentimes what we see when we look through the data is bigger brands might have six or eight TV commercials running at any point in time and they're not all weighted equally. Well, very often one of the lower attention ads is getting the highest weight. Oh, wow. And so, so if I'm again putting my my advertiser hat on, if I'm the advertiser, I'd want to know that, right? I'm either running it too much, or it's actually not the highest attention or my best creative. I might feel like it is, but the customers are voting with their attention, right? So that would inform me to maybe change my mix or my rotation. And then you can look at the attention by programming. So if I'm running programming, if I'm running YouTube, because of course TVsion can measure everything that comes through the screen. So whether it's linear, whether it's streaming, whether it's walled garden, if it's prime or YouTube, so we can see where that attention is by day part, by programming, etc. And that's that is amazing information. And then if you take it a step further to you know what Tim was talking about on earnings, all of a sudden now you can start to bid against that attention and either bid up or down. And it goes both ways, right? The example they gave was one of the greatest comebacks in NBA Finals history, where I think I myself and everybody else watching that game in the third quarter was like, this one's over, right? Over.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 13:52

We're tuning off, right? Like it's not a hundred and twenty dollar CPM, actually.

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 13:56

It's probably two. Or interestingly, I'm not turning it off because I got my buddies over. I'm just not watching it, right? It's background noise. The attention goes to zero, right? Because I'm gonna go have some pizza, or I'm gonna go yuck it up, or I'm gonna, you know, I'm not watch, I'm not attentively watching that program at that point. Then all of a sudden the comeback happens and somebody's like, hey, this is uh this is a five-point game. Now all the attention is going right back to the roof because first of all, you can't believe it. And then secondly, you're locked now. You're like, my my goodness, they could pull this off. They could actually win this game. And so those are the kinds of things. So right there, you went from a plummet and all in the same program, by the way. You went from a probably a pretty big dip in attention right when they hit that huge 40-point or 50-point lead, but then all of a sudden the attention shot off the charts when the game got closed again. And that's where having that signal in the platform and being able to buy against that signal is such a benefit because you're not overpaying or underpaying, you're lining it up based on the attentive signal.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 15:13

Let's stay on that. Let's stay on the signal conversation because what I see is like a full streaming stack from Viant. I'm gonna share some some additional statistics here. The Viant household ID is in 80% of programmatic bid requests, covers 96% of connected TV requests. It's mapped to 95% of US households, which is amazing. That's more than the internet connected number of households. So you've got a great purview of what the actual population looks like. The Iris content ID, we mentioned this earlier, is on 50% of the bid stream and targeting 70% by end of year. Stats, signal,

Identity And Content Signals At Scale

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 15:58

buzzwords, what does it mean?

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 16:01

Well, it means a lot, right? Because I think the one thing that we can say with certainty is if you look at the Walled Gardens, they have high fidelity in their identity signal, right? You're logged in all day, all the time, and that's very difficult to match, right? So you look at a lot of the third party, you know, live ramp's been in the news a lot because of the Publicis acquisition, you know, ramp ID in the bid stream, we see at maybe 30 to 35%. You know, that's good. It's it's a good proxy as a third-party signal and a good proxy. But when you start to get to 80% of the bid stream, 95%, 96% household coverage, you're kind of consensus at that point. And you've got the ability then to really target at scale a lot higher accuracy. And again, at the end of the day, as a buy side only platform, we are looking for Outcomes and performance for the advertisers. We want to deliver on their goals and objectives. The more fidelity you have in your signals, the more accurately you can target. I mean, you look at contextual, right? When we acquired Iris, they were about 7%. Now it's north of 50%, and we're continuing to scale that, right? So at 7%, it's not really a currency, right? At 50%, it certainly is in the conversation. And at 70%, you're you're there, right? So I think those are the things that that were, and that's why these things don't happen overnight. You know, you continue to invest, you continue to do the partnerships, the matches, the integrations, and you scale over time.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 17:32

There was a great example on the call about a grocery store, about a grocery store that uses their first party customer data, matches to the Viant household ID, and then applies that to their campaigns. Is that is that an example? I'm sure that there's lots of them like that that you're familiar with. Could you just maybe take us through the workflow and specifically scale? How do we apply like really precise targeting and still get enough scale and reach from that?

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 18:04

Yeah. So there are a lot of advertisers, not all, because if you look at CPG brands, they don't really have customer data, but the retailer does. So there are brands that have customer data and they want to,

First-Party Data Workflow And Political Use

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 18:16

in the case of the grocery store, right? They're the retailer, right? So they probably have the loyalty card data or whatever, they're capturing the basket, they're capturing the transaction data. So where they do have first party data, because of our depth and identity and our identity spine, we can do the matching and onboarding. We've always done that ourselves. We've never used a third party. Now, some people do use third parties to do matches and onboards, and we're agnostic, so we'll integrate with anyone. But we've always done that. If you look at what we're doing now, we're in a political cycle, right? So the political advertising, whether we like it or not, that's a lot of what we're going to see for the next several months, right? Most of the political agencies have constituent lists. They have voter lists, they have, you know, lists that they want to go against, or they're very geobound, right? It's a state issue or it's a local issue or whatever. So your accuracy, your ability to match and be very accurate at that level is critical because if it's an election in Kentucky and I'm serving an ad in Wyoming, you know, it's probably not going to have much effect on the outcome of that election. So that's where it really does matter.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 19:29

So, Jon, all of this comes down to one kind of key imperative word, measurement. And I think for the advertiser, it's did I sell more stuff? And we talked about how growth has really been limited for the SP 500 outside of a few companies. And that trickles down to small local, medium-sized businesses. How are your advertisers, how are Viant advertisers and brands, how are they approaching outcome as a measurement proxy?

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 20:01

Yeah, I I think I think that what's happened, and and again, this is you hear about all the friction between the CMO and CFO and stuff like that, and going back to the growth numbers, right? What when you do your quarterly earnings and when

Measurement That Ties Back To Growth

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 20:13

you do your report, did you hear any mention of clicks or impressions or views or no? It's it's about it's about revenue growth, it's about profitability, it's about adjusted, you know, shareholder return. Those are the metrics that matter, right? And so everything else is a proxy, could be a leading indicator, but it's it's really about coming down to what's moving the needle. And and like we talked about, most of the brands, a lot of the brands are just not experiencing the growth. Now, some of that is market trends, right? You look at things like alcohol consumption on the decline, that's kind of a generational thing. There are macro factors that can impact that. I'm not saying that advertising is the only thing that, you know, that drives everything. There are macro factors, but I do think that too often advertisers are kind of hitting the easy button. They're overinvesting in just a few platforms and basically putting all of their fortunes against that bet. And it is a bet. And so I really believe, you know, if I was good, the message I'd leave anybody with now is choice is key and being able to reach as much of your target audience as you can in as many different ways as you can is critical. And that kind of circles back to our open internet discussion. You know, there are a lot of people that watch YouTube and consume the walled gardens, but not everyone. And certainly if you look at time spent, they're not there all day. And so they're they're doing other things. And so if you really want to surround a customer, if you really want to drive demand generation and new customer growth, you have to have a diverse approach and you have to be pulling a number of levers. It's it's never going to be easy to just spend money in one or two areas. And so that's that's probably the biggest thing I would tell advertisers is really to think about that and expand their reach. We look at the data we look at now with TTVision, and we see a lot of people, their streaming plan is YouTube. That's it. And and it's like you think about Disney, you think about Peacock, you think about you know Paramount, you think about all of the quality programming and content that's out there. There's no way you're maximizing if you're just leveraging one channel.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 22:35

Absolutely. We caught up with Emily from MRI Simmons recently on the podcast. And there was an inch insight that she shared was oftentimes advertisers think that, hey, I'm reaching my audience through this one place or by adding these layers. That's not necessarily the case. It it does require deeper inspection of where is the audience, where is the attention. And a lot of what you've described here today, Jon, I think helps advertisers accomplish that. If folks want to learn more about Viant and what you're up to, where should they go?

Jon Schulz, CMO Viant 23:10

They can visit our website, Viantinc.com, or you know, reach out. I'm on LinkedIn. I'd happy to talk to you.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 23:17

Beautiful. We'll make sure those are both linked close by, easy to find. I'm sure we'll have more conversations like this, maybe after future earnings calls. Jon, thanks so much for being here. Thank you, Tim. Appreciate it. Anytime, if you found this conversation to be helpful, please share it with a colleague or a client and start a conversation yourself today. We'll see y'all next time.