Viant Technology Inc. (DSP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us. I'm Laura Martin, I'm a Needham analyst. And welcome to the 16th Annual Needham Technology and Media Conference. With me today on my stage are Chris and Tim Vanderhook, and thank you guys very much for joining us. And they are the co-CEOs of Viant. They're sort of the co-CEOs, the co-CTOs, the Chief Marketing Officers. They sort of do everything. So you have every answer you could possibly need, and we have Larry on the background. If you need some numbers help, he'll comment from the wings. Let's start with company progress. So you went public in February, and you had your the second earnings call last week. And why don't we start by discussing, since the IPO, what progress you've made, and what you hope to achieve by the end of the year 2021; and keeping within that context like your guidance and how you hope to achieve your 2021 guidance.

Yes. Absolutely. Well, first, Laura, thanks for having us here at the Needham Conference. It's great to be here. Yes, we had a very successful IPO in February. It was really exciting for all the team members here at Viant. We -- as you mentioned, we've had 2 earnings calls, and I think one of the most things that we're proud of is beating our -- both of the estimates for those earnings announcements and raising our guidance in 2021, really due to the hard work of our team, but the effectiveness of the solution that we're bringing to market. One of the big things that we've noticed post going public is the awareness of Viant has picked up tremendously, and the offering that we're bringing to marketers. And one area that's really resonating amongst marketers with our technology solution is Connected TV. A ton of success in Connected TV. We grew 66% year-over-year in Q1, and we see that just continuing with what feels like an unbound opportunity. I don't know, what else would you add?

Yes. I'd say, one of the things in our S-1, if you read it, one of the risk factors that we highlighted was if cookies -- we were out talking about how cookies were going to be going away. And there is this cookie-less future out there and what were marketers going to do. We offer a patented -- and we're going to talk about this -- our patented Household ID, but that's really -- that's a huge tailwind for us. So cookies not going away would actually be a risk factor for us. So the awareness level, Google's doing a lot of that work for us out there. Clients are coming, needing a scaled solution. So I think that's also a lot of progress that's being made, just the understanding in the market. Our team is out educating, and we're seeing that play out in the adoption of the platform right now.

Okay. And let's stay on Connected TV, because I don't [ have to buy ] cookies. So in Connected TV, as you said, your platform grew 66%, and it represented 25 -- 45% of the total spending on your platform. And then one of the things -- I just got off the stage with the CEO of Magnite, and he was saying, which I thought was really interesting, that linear TV, which is where people are focusing on that $60 billion coming to Connected Television, is about 300 advertisers. But what they're seeing on the supply side, but it also affects you guys, is lots of -- there's about 3,000 advertisers who thinks will end up in CTV, not just the 300 from linear, and that Wall Street is sort of missing that TAM for CTV, that there is like the purple mattress, which is a direct digital-first advertiser, or the Warby Parkers. Like these digital-first advertisers that are coming from Facebook and Instagram into CTV because they could never afford linear television. So could you talk about that? And how you think about like the upside overall demand for CTV from advertisers that you're seeing now? And how big you think that market can be?

Yes. Well, I mean, let's just first start at a very high level. Buying a linear television ad, there is a lot of friction. A local pizza store owner, it's tough for them to buy a local TV ad. What we do, we represent anyone who wants to buy advertising. Our Adelphic software is really try -- we try and make it like e-trade for advertising. If you want to buy a Connected TV spot, it's real easy inside of our software to do that. But most importantly, marketers want to know what they're getting for their money. When they invest 5, 10, 100,000, millions of dollars in advertising, you need to understand what the return on ad spend actually is. And that's why CTV is such a strength of our Adelphic software given the patents that we have around. Now a use case, what does the patent cover? When a marketer shows a CTV ad, a consumer pulls out their smartphone, sitting on the couch, visits the marketer's website, and buys the product or service. Our software ties that transaction and links it to the Connected Television spot. It's that measurability is what's going to drive the explosion. I think 3,000 will be a small number when you remove the friction to be able to buy a Connected TV spot compared to what linear TV was, and then actually provide a measurement platform. So marketers truly understand, hey, the revenue or the expense of media that we're driving in advertising, using Connected Television, is driving returns for their organization. And when you unlock that flywheel, we talked about a national pizza chain where that exact use case just came through. We talked about it on our last earnings call. But that is the flywheel, which drives increased spend into these new platforms like CTV. So measurement of Connected Television is really going to be a huge catalyst is why that money is going to pour into that channel.

I would also say, 3,000 probably is understating what the number could be. If you look at both Google and Facebook, they have millions of advertisers. Why? Because they make it super easy for anyone to be able to buy an ad [indiscernible] search. As Tim said, it's very difficult to buy TV, but what programmatic software like ours enables you to do is seamlessly be able to buy television. We also -- you can buy linear television in our software as well. Why there's such great growth in CTV is really 2 things: One, marketers can't reach everyone that they used to be able to reach in linear television because consumers are now moving to streaming. That's one. And then two: the software makes it so easy to buy that I actually think those millions of advertisers on Facebook and Google Search are just as easily as you can buy a keyword, you're going to be able to buy a CTV spot and see what your returns.

Let's push on one of those topics. So I have had other people on stage who said there is this disparity in CTV between what I'll call managed service. And a lot of these digital-first people really do need a managed service. They really need this hand-holding for onboarding. And they don't really -- they don't just adopt programmatic platforms. That's too overwhelming for them. Could you just speak to that? Because you're making it sound like it's all very easy to adopt your software, but that isn't what I'm hearing in this transition towards CTV.

Well, what I'll say is, I think that's probably more around the -- some talk about that in-housing trend where -- and I will say that it is a long-term goal that we want to make it very simple for anyone. As easily as I said as you can buy it on Facebook or Google Search, we believe we're going to get there with all forms of advertising pretty soon. It's going to be that simple. However, I do think the knowledge is missing in a lot of organizations. So if I'm a direct-to-consumer company and I don't have an ad agency, let's say, to lean on, I'm going to do it in-house, I maybe you don't have the people. So in some of those cases, they are relying on third parties to help service them. But the long-term trend is marketers want control. They want transparency, and they want to see what they get for their money. People in the middle, they obfuscate some of them. So I think that the trend is, is that marketers want more and more control. Our Adelphic software actually provides a ton of that. So we see just -- we see a very, very strong trend towards self-service. And look, self-service for us is when a marketer self-directs everything they do, that's a scalable financial model for us. We add customers without adding staff. So that's a market we want to keep. That's an area that we're going to keep investing in to make marketers really kind of really self-sufficient on their own. We offer a self-service platform. And who is providing that managed service layer? You're right, it's still complex today in the way that these channels interact and all the available inventory that you could buy, which -- who should I put on the plan and how do we measure it. But agencies do a great job of providing that managed service layer on top of our Adelphic self-service platform. So a lot of our efforts are in training the ad agencies that are there. That's where the vast majority of the revenue of our organization comes from. And as we train them and provide the expertise on how to use our self-service platform, they can then service their clients with the level of professional services and managed services that are necessary for that company.

That's super helpful. And then one of the things is you're now at 45% of your first quarter revenue with CTV. And I think it was like 30% of your total revenue 30 seconds ago, and that's because your mobile and your desktop were down a little bit like 15%. So are you seeing the -- it sounds like dollars are shifting. So that's my question. In your existing client base, it feels like your clients are moving out of mobile and desktop into CTV. Could you talk about that cannibalization? And what's driving that? And will that continue? Or is that sort of unusual, do you think?

I think in our last quarter, on our first quarter results, I think it was slightly unusual, mainly because we over-indexed in travel, retail, and automotive. And those marketers are typically very heavily direct response-oriented, and direct response-oriented companies, historically, have bought banner advertising or display ads, and those are on desktop and mobile. So as those COVID -- what we call COVID-impacted kind of segments were down, I think that was a little bit of an aberration. However, I do believe that as cookies go away in the display world, you'll see marketers -- they're heat-seeking. They're going to push their dollars where they can get a return. So if they're getting a return in CTV, and they are getting a return on CTV, that's really where they're going to continue to invest. So whatever you can measure, that's where marketers are going to put the dollars. We've been a long-time believer in CTV. We had a separate business that we started called Xumo, a CTV streaming platform that we sold to Comcast last year. We invested in that business in 2010. Why? Because we knew that the trend towards TV wasn't going away. The trend was going to be just towards streaming, and we were finally going to answer the question, which is, does TV advertising work? Of course, it works, Marketers just needed the ability to actually truly measure it. CTV gives them the ability to do that.

Okay, with the measurement. And so you see this trend into CTV, out of other media, continuing?

Well, think of it as a share of wallet. Who do we serve? We serve the CMO to help them electronically buy and electronically measure their return on ad spend from all their channels, and then media vendors and partners within those channels. So for us, what we see is CTV is producing an outsized return for marketers. So they absolutely are finding pockets of money to push towards Connected Television. Does that mean display advertising on desktop and mobile don't work? No. Of course, they work. They work for many years. But how they work in tandem together, I think marketers are going to be constantly trying new tactics and strategies to get the most out of their dollars.

I think one other important point with DSPs actually is, when a marketer, let's say, is getting a better return on one publisher versus another, they shift those dollars. They don't actually shrink their money. And so it's like air in a balloon. And so they're constantly changing where they're going to be placing their dollars based on return and where they're reaching consumers. So we see -- look, the long-term growth of U.S. advertising has gotten 11% CAGR. Programmatic is a 21% CAGR. So the market is going to continue really to grow. Where those dollars get placed is going to be based on where marketers are getting their returns.

And is CTV being measured well enough that people feel that these marketers feel comfortable they're actually getting the return that's the -- on CTV that they did on the more well-measured older media.

It's certainly better than the -- really, it's different metrics. I'll definitely say, the 300 advertisers that you mentioned, these are the big national advertisers you see in linear television. They were really about reaching -- they have a media mix model that says, hey, if you reach 20 million people 5x, we're going to sell x amount of cases of toilet paper. That's really how a lot of those guys work. In digital, it's really -- it's still the same reach and frequency game, but they actually truly can measure who comes to my site and buys. So I think that it's not really the -- it's not exactly the same currency or is it the same measurement, but in both cases, they are seeing that it does prove a result, which is why they continue to spend in areas like linear television. As long as it exists, we think that marketers -- if there is an audience there and they can get some return, they're going to continue to invest there.

That makes sense. And so just going back to your share shift. So the CPMs are quite a bit different, right? So you're seeing marketers find a positive or higher return on spending. That's why they're moving into CTV on your platform. Aren't the CPMs like 10x bigger for CTV? So that would mean the return has to be even bigger to justify moving out of the things that are like...

Exactly. Yes. The CPM is one -- it's the unit economics of the way advertising is transacted. But the return on ad spend, what the returns are for every dollar of investment, what the incremental revenue was, there's tremendous amount of production coming out of Connected Television, and we see that continuing. It's just a very impactful ad format, and it captures the attention of everyone in the room. It's that adage of sight, sound and motion really can move product off the shelf. When you combine that with audience targeting and measurability, this is nirvana for what marketers have been looking for, for a long time. So CTV, just being in the business, it feels like an unbound opportunity. People always ask us, what's -- where does it stop? Or when does Connected TV stop growing? The answer is, it doesn't for probably a decade. As more and more content comes online, as more TVs become pulled out of a home that aren't smart and aren't connected, that then gain that capability with newer, more powerful chips in them, you're going to see this explosion. I liken it very much so as we watch the smartphone revolution. Apps get created, new money get created, and it became bigger than anyone possibly thought at the very beginning of the smartphone revolution. Connected Television is yet another revolution. The Internet -- the IoT, Internet of Things, is just making the Internet bigger and bigger into this huge vast digital universe. And I think Connected TV is going to be bigger than anyone ever imagined, both in the number of advertisers buying and the number of content owners pushing content, and the number of consumers and devices accessing that content.

Have you seen CPMs come up as the ad demand has come back? Like thinking starting with Q2 where ad demand sort of disappeared to Q4. We're seeing a lot of silos are back to normal. Are CTV -- CPMs back up to $30? Or they're still shy of that?

Well, I think it depends on really where they're placing their investments. We're right in the middle of upfront season right now. I do think a lot of broadcasters -- as their scale is increasing on the CTV side and streaming side, which is something that they lacked, I would say, 2 years ago. I think that they are still somewhat really -- I think they're still growing their streaming side of the business. They're making a lot of investments there. Tim talked about how much content is coming. That's only going to grow. I think that we've seen CPMs at the broadcasters and premium content guys have [indiscernible] I think those guys' CPMs have held pretty well. And I will say in the -- but there are new crops of large distribution in CTV. So our former business, Xumo is growing like crazy. You have others like Pluto, that's ViacomCBS; you have Tubi and Fox. These guys are really aggregating a lot of content. So I think that they are providing and relieving some pricing pressure that you might see at the head with the biggest guys, but I don't see CPMs really dropping. It is a premium format. There is limited supply out there. It's not unlimited supply. We're certainly not there. But...

I think one -- sorry. One unique aspect is, as consumers shift to streaming, well, that means linear ratings drop. And so as you're transacting with marketers on both, how they're managing inventory between those 2 is more complex now as well as consumers are shifting that they prefer streaming versus the linear pay TV model that everyone was used to. So I do think content owners are struggling with how do we handle ratings drops on one side, but increase in digital streaming households that are there. So there is lots of challenges and all of these will be worked through. But one thing that's big and notable on the CTV side, why is it growing so much? It's the number of users are increasing tremendously that are streaming and the users who were streaming starting a year ago or 2 years ago are consuming many more hours of content. So it's dual levers that are driving the available inventory and the amount of consumption on the platform. So lots of exciting stuff. If you hear Roku, very exciting. Anyone on that side. You're focused on driving usage and consumption, and then, of course, it's all being put up to auction via these programmatic pipes, and marketers are loving the returns that they're getting.

Yes. you're at 66% of your revenue in the first quarter with CTV. What do you think the peak is for you? Does it get up to...

Well, 66% growth. It was 45% of our revenue in CTV. 67% was video in general. But CTV, it's all about just explaining the benefits, but marketers don't need that much explaining. What they need is, okay, how do I electronically buy it? How do I electronically measure my returns? Once they get that infrastructure in place, it's treated just like any other digital channel when they use the buying platform itself. They can electronically buy and understand how many sales are happening in their website or happening in their stores as well, tying in our people-based data framework. So once marketers understand return on ad spend, like I said, that's the flywheel that drives the investment into that channel.

So my question -- this question I'm asking is, how big a part of your total revenue does it get to date, CTV?

I think that -- I think we -- probably, in the shorter term and this year, will see that we -- we're at 45%, call it. Do we eclipse half? Most likely. I think -- and here's a big factor of that. In the DSP landscape, when you win a customer, in year one, they test with you. For us, most of our customers test in CTV. And then in year 2, they end up spending more with you. And you typically, over the time, you consolidate more and more of their dollars in all the channels. So not just CTV and mobile and desktop, audio, all those things. I believe that as we continue to scale, we are a challenger brand out there, and as we continue to move up the food chain and win larger and larger marketers, which we are winning, we'll consolidate more and more of their dollars. When they do that, they're consolidating all of the -- let's say, CTV, they're consolidating all of their CTV in the DSP. There's a misconception out there that if I have a customer in my platform, when they strike deals with NBC in the upfront, they transact those through our DSP software. So that spend that goes on NBC actually runs through our software. So we do actually see that if you took linear television plus CTV, it's typically greater than half of a lot of these -- those top 300 marketers, it's greater than half of their total advertising. So I think that, that would be represented in our platform as well.

But in terms of growth rate of Connected Television, we don't see that slowing down at all in the near future and will continue as consumers are really driving that growth rate. It's really their change in behavior that's pulling the marketers in.

Well, you're growing CTV at 66%, you're going to end up at 80% of the revenue -- of your revenue going to be CTV with that kind of relative growth rates of the other stuff. So that's amazing. All right. Let's go to -- let's leave CTV, which is my favorite place to be, and let's leave CTV and go to other. So you don't have cookies risk, I get that. But I do think there's this existential worry that the open internet doesn't survive. That after Google cookies go away, which I think will get pushed to the end of next year, that the open internet will not be able to -- the pricing will fall. We did have a guy on stage earlier saying that after GDPR, 70% of CPMs fell by 70%. Ad budgets didn't, but CPMs did. So I think that's -- I think let's start with that question. Why does the open internet, in which you compete, survive? I understand you have no cookies risk, but I'm asking the bigger picture of 30,000.

Well, the open internet has all the content, number one. So the consumers are always going to go after the content, and that content currently exists not in a walled garden. Obviously, that content is shared across walled gardens like Facebook, et cetera, where there's huge consumption because of the great product that they've built. But ultimately, content is king when it comes to consumers and consumers are going to continue to seek out that content. What publishers need is a way to make more money from their content. And when you think of the world of the third-party cookie going away, let's just talk about what that means in financial terms for a publisher. If you show up to a website and you're in the chrome browser and you have a third-party cookie enabled, that publisher is going to make on the banner ads about $5 for every 1,000 banner ads for a good quality site. If you show up using the Safari web browser, where there is no third-party cookie, the price of that inventory is going to be about $1, and so CPM. So it's literally 20% of the revenue opportunity of these identified environments or what used to be the third-party cookie. So I think publishers are really focused on, now that the third-party cookie is going away, how do we replace this revenue? That's why the need -- our partnership with Fox News, there's a need on that side for them to understand who is my audience, who's the same user. Audiences are touching their content on CTVs, on desktop, laptops, smartphones. The ability to create a household ID and tell them, here's the number of households you reach, here's with what frequency, here's the content they're consuming; and to be able to transact with marketers in a way where marketers will pay a fair price for their ad inventory, that's what publishers need in the future. So we're bringing our Household ID with partnerships like Fox News to help prove out, hey, here's a way forward for you to make more money. We represent marketers on the buy side. We don't really work with publishers. But it's important for the whole ecosystem to come together to try and create an alternative that isn't reliant on Google or Apple, allowing us to exist. And that's what we've delivered with this Household ID solution, and we're excited more and more to partner with publishers to help them figure out these cookie-less environments. We've got a lot of credibility, many years of expertise and a platform that's been running for a couple of years now, with great coverage at 80% of any visitor on any device. We're able to help them link all that together. So I think over the long run, the open web does have challenges in the near-term as it transitions away from a cookie-based platform, but we've been running the new people-based infrastructure for many years. It works. It works really well. And I think everyone will realize there's benefits when you shift to a people-based platform, starting with revenue and performance for marketers. Revenue for publishers and performance for marketers.

I'd just add a couple -- just little tidbits. We've been in the business for over 21 years. We founded our business in 1999, very early internet. The only ad format back then was the 468 x 60 pixel banner, right? So -- and those things, by the way, back then, used to get 10% cookie rates. They don't even register a decimal anymore, right? So the Internet has gone through so many different iterations, but I will say, over the last 21 years, there is always been these incumbent massive players that everyone assigned, that, oh my gosh, they're going to take over everything. And it just doesn't happen. And look, no one -- I'll tell you, early on, it was all AOL, and AOL had a strategy like this, which was basically they would hold -- you would hold AOL's hand as they led you around on the internet, right? They told you when you got mail, and they tried to put content behind their wall, and it worked for a while. But innovation is something that you just can't stop. There is tons of innovation that happens in this space. There are new players that become larger. And I think as far as content owners go, that I don't believe and I don't assign that all their content just like goes back behind Google and Apple's walls. I do not think so. I don't think that they have a strong history of doing that with content owners. And I think if you look at a place like CTV, look at that level of innovation. These are areas where these are -- both Google and Apple outside of YouTube, right? They're not dominant players in that ecosystem. So I think that -- I bet on the innovation side. I bet that I don't think content owners are just going to assign their content and be behind Google and Apple. I don't assign that at all, and there's a lot of companies, in addition to us doing some great stuff out there for content users.

I like the innovation point a lot, and you guys are experts because you have been around for the last cycle. The question that I have the worst answer to, and I'm really interested in your expert opinion is, why is this ad tech different than the last one? Because the last one, ad tech, 80% of the market blew up. Why isn't this again what's going to happen this time?

Yes. Well, like in all areas of enterprise software, advertising is lagging in this move to the [ cloud ] -- the big shift as organizations move their data to the cloud, they then started saying, "Okay, how do we utilize this in a data-driven way to deliver better returns for our shareholders?" So it starts with an organization moving to the cloud. And just like HR moved into the enterprise software market, moved into the cloud-based platform, so does advertising. And that's what I think most people have missed. Ad tech used to be this proprietary black box system that one company had. Now it's how do we actually activate Google Cloud platform and build our advertising software directly into it. So I think what -- like all areas of that software is eating every part of the organization, advertising is no different, but there is unique complex areas of integration. Publishers have their own stack. Buyers of advertising have another stack. The early rendition was all of that in one place. I think the second wave of this, and programmatic split those apart, which is where they should be, and I think the future of this is investors, customers understanding that software drives better decisioning based on data, and it drives better returns. And I think as marketers understand that, you're going to see that pendulum shift where more and more dollars move into software platforms just like Viant.

Okay. So Chris, do you have any answer to why this time is different? And why this ad tech group won't blow up the way the last ad tech group blew up?

So this group that's public right now. Tim and I know every one of these companies, and we know them very well. We've competed with them. Some of them at multiple companies before. What I will say is, this group that's public right now, I do think they're all very quality companies. I think that they all have incredible -- they made incredible investments in software, in their technology. And marketers, whether it be a marketer or a publisher, they're using that software themselves. It's not -- you had mentioned earlier, kind of this managed service piece, right? The managed service part of the last iteration of companies -- and I don't want to name them all, but you guys all know the big...

The big blow up.

Yes. Yes, the big blow ups. Really, no one was using their software. No one was. It was you threw your dollars over the wall, and they kind of told you what you got for your money. And I think that marketers, there's just this huge trend towards transparency, control, cost efficiency, and ultimately, proven out the return. And those last crop of companies didn't have the level of software needed to where you can turn it loose and the marketer can log in it and gain ultimate control. When a marketer's happiness goes up on your platform, I mean, it's really sticky. I don't think those businesses were very sticky. I don't think those marketers actually knew what they were truly getting for their money. I think it was a mystery. It was a black box. Everything we try to do, and we -- look, we have massive investments we have for a while in machine learning, leaning towards artificial intelligence. But 10 years ago, these companies were claiming everything was autonomous, right? Obviously, that's not true, and that wasn't true. So I think the technology is getting a lot closer there, and that's certainly where the trend's going. But I'll just say, I think that all of these companies are public right now in our sector. They're all high-quality companies. They have great software. They have great leaders. And at the end of the day, you can see their customers are awarding them with the dollars and their satisfaction's continuing to go up. So I think this is a really good crop of companies right now. And I think there's a few more companies that are going to becoming public soon that are also really high quality.

That's super helpful to me because I have a bad answer, and now my answer is better. So Tim, going back to something you were talking about. You were taking out the Fox deal, and you were saying it's really important because these publishers have to solve like unduplicated reach and who's coming to their site. But I had a couple of SSPs on my stage earlier today, and that is exactly why they think that they are well positioned, because they have this sort of lead, your DSP, the Viant side platform; SSP, supply side platform. They've gone out and they collected for the last decade or 5 years anyway, clients where they have first-party data, and then they're going to say -- they're saying, "Hey, our data's better because we take all the first-party data from our 20 clients, let's say, and we put it there. And then the next plant is more likely to come because he wants access to the aggregated data. And by the way, we are more attractive to DSPs because when they come, they don't need 10,000 women like Washington Post has, they need 1 million women. And that takes bigger and bigger aggregation on the sell side." So that's my question to you. If it's a core advantage as a DSP, which is where you are at Viant, to have a sell-side relationship, aren't you actually just giving credence to that argument of the sell-side platforms, that they will actually be in a better position going forward because they have all that -- those permissions from the first-party?

Look, I think SSPs provide critical infrastructure to sellers of advertising, and I think DSPs provide critical infrastructure to buyers of advertising. And that's where the line is drawn. So we want SSPs to be successful. I believe third- party data plays an important role in the future of programmatic ecosystem. We're going to rely on publishers to pass in that first-party cookie ID via SSPs. But SSPs need DSPs to drive the buying activity from that ID. I think the challenge is, of course, you can understand that this user on CNN, some publisher website, controlled by that cookie. The important piece that needs to translate is the buyer of the advertising. Let's say, it's Nissan Motor Company. If Nissan is buying the ad, if someone ends up on their website, they need to understand that, that user was previously on CNN. So first-party cookies aren't the answer to the marketer understanding that and being able to attribute, hey, this visitor came from that ad campaign. That's where it breaks down, but it's why we all have to work together. Why DSPs need to work with SSPs. And so we provide the reporting from the advertiser. They provide the critical connection to the consumer reading the content on the publisher's website. So I honestly think there is going to be a lot more industry push in working this together. So the advertiser understands exactly who's on the publisher site so we can report and target effectively.

One thing I'll mention about the -- you mentioned the Fox News partnership that we announced on the earnings call. And that's a -- I would say just candidly, that's probably -- really, it's the first of its type that we're doing. And really, what do they need? They have users who show up that don't have a cookie on them. And so they need to know more -- they want audience insights about those consumers. They want to be able to target -- offer up targeting measurement to the advertisers that want to buy them. And how we're going to actually pull that off, we are leveraging our Household ID. That Household ID will end up getting passed through the chain of an SSP to then a DSP. It's a test run for us to be able to show a -- really a publisher who wants to increase monetization ultimately, but in the end, it's about the marketer being able to bid and buy and know what they offer their money. So it's -- we're not looking that we're displacing an SSP. We just happen to have unique -- we are a people-based DSP. We have unique data assets and the way we do things. So I think we're unique in that way. But it is, again, we need to continue to strengthen these publishers and these large content owners to continue to make them viable when cookies go away, and this is an early iteration of a test that we're running. And I think it's already proving out to be pretty successful.

And what does Fox get -- so let me ask it a different way. Because why would Fox find you -- I get that they love you. Like I get that there's a great relationship with the people front. I get that, that's valuable. But stepping away from the relationship side, why would Fox be better off going to you rather than going to an SSP, which has a collection of 20 companies data?

Right. Well, I think it's that unique -- let's just go to the cookie-less environment. So user shows up on an Apple device using Safari on their website. SSPs aren't providing anything in that scenario that would translate into increased revenue for FOX News. So for us, we're really focused on helping them drive revenue inside of these cookie-less environments, creating an ID solution that works at a scaled wave there. That's really all they're looking for, is an increase in yield. There's many other benefits like unduplicated reach that you talked about across the various devices, because they'll have the same Household ID, even if the user is using a connected television or their smartphone. It will still produce the same consistent, reliable ID at scale. And we're not saying our solution is perfect. It works 80% of the time. But in CTV, it works 91% of the time. And these are the cookie-less environments where if we can help publishers, it's also benefiting us because our marketers then get access to that inventory in the consistent way that they've been bidding and buying using our software.

One other important point, our Household ID, this is a patent that we filed the same year that Facebook went public, 2012. We have a long history in this. I think that what publishers and marketers, everybody needs something that scale. And they are concerned that when cookies go away, call it, January 1, as Google has announced, they're looking at -- they don't want that drop in monetization. So I think that what we uniquely offer in that capacity is we're leveraging our patent here of our Household ID that really nobody else has. That's really why I would say something unique. Yes, SSPs probably have access to some data that we don't, and they serve a different purpose than we do, but it's an easy way that we slide in here and actually help out the publishers.

Tim, you wanted to show some data, maybe some updated metrics from your slide show. Let's try it and see if DJ doesn't kill us for bad quality. DJ, we're going to try to stress you out now. He's our tech operator behind the scenes.

You got it.

I'm sharing screen. Let's see how it goes.

So we have a new software release called WWC that we created, World Without Cookies. Not World War Cookies, but World Without Cookies.

That's like a game design.

Yes. And so I think some of this helpful in looking and analyzing the problem that we've described. And so can you see the screen, Laura?

I can. It's fantastic. It's fantastic.

Great. Okay, great. So when we talk about this problem, let's first look at cookies and their presence by channel and format. And I think this is -- ad tech is confusing and complex. But what does a marketer need? What does a publisher need? We need a consistent id by both parties, so we're all talking about the same person on the website. And that way we can track what works. We talked about our Connected TV growth at 66%. This is live data from the bidstream over the last 15 days. We've aggregated every exchange, every ad request and processed all this data to show your audience. So we first look at the Viant Household ID, you can see 79.8% of all bid requests, regardless of device type, we've been able to generate this Household ID consistently and reliably. If we look at cookies...

[indiscernible] on the screen. You're on a different -- you're on all members screen now. Do you want to go back to the prior screen? Maybe the summary page? That's okay. It's just a lot of numbers, but if you want the summary page?

Get the summary page. You went to the -- there you go.

That's okay. It was just lot of numbers. But if you want the summary page....

Yes. Sorry. So you've got a 79.8%, where we've been able to generate a Household ID, and that's what FOX News is interested in. They need coverage on 80% of their visitors they're leveraging our approach. If we rely on cookies and just look at the cookie universe that's available across the midstream, there's only a cookie present 54.6% of the time. So only 1 out of 2 ads are containing a cookie ID. And remember what that means for a publisher. That means $1 versus $5, if we're talking about banner ads. And so when we look at mobile IDs, a lot of changes have happened across apples ATT and just showing the impact of mobile IDs, you see it's now 20%. There's there, 1 out of 5 ads in the midstream, and we expect us to go down over the course of time. But when we really look at, what does the marketer need? They need a consistent ID that works on CTV, on personal computers.

Can I just -- Tim, we're only seeing...

Smartphones and tablets, yes.

Okay. Yes, I guess this is what DJ was -- this was his worst nightmare, sort of.

So the other thing I think that's just important. Can you see that?

Not really. No. It's only a vertical, it's not like -- at least for mine, it's not the most [indiscernible].

Well, no problem. Well, we can go through it all. But one of the things that it's trying to show is just the fact that on Apple, a cookie exists 10% of the time. Our Household ID is still there at 76.5%. It's consistent, it's reliable, regardless of the device that the consumer is using to access the publishers' content, the web browser they're consuming, whether it's in a browser or an app, none of those matter to us whatsoever. We can generate this consistent ID, and we think publishers are going to be a big beneficiary, and by default, will be a beneficiary because marketers will be able to buy more of their ads, which is what drives our business model. So we're excited about the possible solutions. We think we're going to deliver, not just for ourselves, but for the whole ecosystem, the solution necessary for this economy to keep growing at the rates that we have been.

Okay. And why don't we just -- we're almost out of time in like a couple of more minutes. So let's just talk about like -- let's just answer with what do you think Wall Street's missing about the DSP fundamental story upside?

Well, I'll echo, I think we mentioned earlier, which is cookies going away is actually a tailwind for our business. That the status quo of clients on entrenched DSPs, whether it be DV360 or other competitors that are cookie-based, when cookies go away, we think that, that's a tailwind for us. And we do believe that marketers need something that's scaled. We're getting incredible reception right now among potential clients right now. We feel great about going into the back half of the year around what some of those trends will look like. But that's where I think -- although, yes, cookies may hurt other cookie-based platforms. Cookies going away may hurt them. For us, it's a tailwind. And we need that actually happening for our value to really shine through. So for us, we're really excited. The inflection point for us is going to be in 2022 when Google Chrome does sunset the cookie, and we think that's going to be big for us.

And then I guess my only push back on that a little bit is that the growth of your CTV, which doesn't have a cookie at all, if it continues at 66%, by the end of 2022, cookies are going to be irrelevant to yours and everybody's revenue. So it's not going to be a competitive like differentiator anymore, right?

Well, it's certainly what's driving the growth for us right now, because cookies -- to your point, they don't exist there. So it's an easy way. I don't have to tell someone that they're going to go away, I can really focus in the areas that they don't exist in an exciting area that just so happens where marketers want to spend a lot of money. So that's an easy area. But what we want to do [indiscernible] this model of DSP is to consolidate the spend of a marketer. They want to buy in one platform, and they want to be able to programmatically buy and then electronically report to them what they got for their money. That's the business model of a DSP, is consolidate everything. There still is a substantial amount of money spent in environments where an ID exists, whether it be a browser or in-app, and we think those dollars are going to move, to your point. But in the end, we think, yes, we're seeing strong growth right now. We know that, that will continue. But 2022 is going to be big for us.

Okay. That sounds great. Thank you very much, you guys. We are out of time, and I really appreciate being on stage with me. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you very much.

Thanks very much, Laura. Thanks for having us.

Thank you. Bye.

Bye.