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

Good afternoon. Welcome back to the UBS TMT Conference. My name is Lloyd Walmsley, Internet Analyst here at UBS, and I'm excited to have the founding executive team from Viant joining us now. We've got Tim and Chris Vanderhook, CEO, COO and co-founders. Guys, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having us, Lloyd. It's great to be here with you.

All right. Well, look, why don't we just start off for anyone who needs a refresher on the company in the audience, give us the quick overview of Viant and where you guys sit in the ecosystem?

Yes. Viant is a demand-side platform that helps marketers buy any form of advertising across device or channel and in any partner. We really focus on helping marketers onboard data by the advertising that they're looking to purchase and understand what they're getting for their money in a nutshell. That's really what a DSP is. But at a 50,000-foot view for some of your audience that may know ad tech, we represent the buyer of the ad. Some of our counterparties in the industry represent the seller of the ad.

Got it. Okay. And so compared to other DSPs, how do you guys position Viant differently? What makes advertisers choose you guys?

Well, I think in the end, it's all about how easy is your software to use if you're a buyer of advertising. That is the ultimate and fundamental differentiator. We offer a great electronic buying platform in our DSP called Adelphic. It's one of the easiest to use. It has the highest customer satisfaction scores of more than 95% for more than 4 years running. And anytime you have customer satisfaction scores like that, you tend to keep a lot of them. And that's really what's powered our growth for Viant over the last couple of years.

One area where we do focus where we are different, there’s s a lot of talk in the industry right now around cookies going away and ID's going away from Apple, this is something that we saw years ago where we started investing along these lines, and we are known as a people-based platform. What people based really is, is that it -- really, as big tech moves -- gets rid of identifiers where they evolve, we host all of our data against personal identifiers or really the home address is kind of the differentiator that we're known around. Now as Tim said, when you go -- when you're winning -- pitching and winning business and retaining your clients, getting them to increase spend year-over-year, that's all about the value of the software. And a big area where marketers look to DSPs is one is how easy is it for me to electronically buy. But then on the back side of that is, well, what did I get for my money? How can I measure? I think that measurement is very important, and that's a big area because we're people-based where we outshine the competition. I think you saw that recently with Apple's changes around the ATT framework. You saw money coming out of Facebook, money coming out of Snapchat to Google's to some extent. That was really all around measurement. They could no longer really measure the impact of their advertising. And we saw -- we were a big benefit of that because we're people-based we're able to measure in these channels. So we have a level of differentiation. But again, the core is about how automated and how easy is the software to use and measure the impact of advertising.

Okay. And when you all focus on certain customer segments, how do you view your bread and butter in terms of what size customers for Viant?

Yes. So our customers, we break out into 3 groups: large advertising holding company, the big agencies, think WPPs, the Omnicoms, Google systems of the world, there are 6 of those. That's 1 group. You have your mid-market independent agencies is the kind of second group. And you have the client direct themselves, ones that really by advertising on their own, maybe they don't use agencies, these are more digital first direct-to-consumer companies. We operate in all 3 of those areas. We -- our largest growth really historically has been in that kind of mid-market agency group. And the reason is, is that all the advertising that they run it has to perform. There's -- the minute that the money stops working, they may move that. The clients may move that to another platform. So we do really well there. We recently cited how big our growth has been there. Holding companies, we also do well at. We cited 2 companies that -- 2 of the 6 where we had significant growth both greater than 60% year-over-year. And the client direct side is really a fast-growing channel, the more direct-to-consumer companies, these digital-first companies that continue to come out, we do really well there. Look, at the end of the day, programmatic advertising is growing like crazy. These marketers and their agencies, they want the control that it offers, the transparency, the efficiency, the amount of money moving to programmatic is tremendous. It was already big pre-pandemic, but post pandemic has really fast forwarded the growth in the industry. So a great spot to be in. And we play in all 3 of those levels.

And just to add one last thing there, a big differentiator compared to many other companies that operate in ad tech is the self-service nature of our platform. When we started this and really talked about our vision for where it's going, it really is about being [ e-trade ] for advertising, being able to electronically purchase ads in any channel easily and understanding what you get for your money.

Yes. Got it. Okay. And then in your go-to-market, how does that go to market differ across these different segments?

Yes, definitely. Well, let's talk about the competition in the market and really how we approach it. We're a people-based DSP. All of our competitors are identical. 99% of them, there's big competitors like Google and The Trade Desk, all the way down to smaller competitors. And those are all ID based. We say the word cookie, but cookie means IDs given to you by big tech, and that's a bad spot to be in, and our competitors are finding this out today. Today, where you're given an ID, it used to be a cookie for web browsing, but -- and then it was IDFAs and mobile apps and IDs and CTV don't even exist. So if you really think of the landscape of our competition versus us, we're a people-based DSP, and we work across all device types, browsers and apps or in the web browser. That's what marketers are looking for is a consistent platform where they can access consumers using an Apple iPhone. In our competitive platforms, you can't do targeted advertising across Apple products. You can't do targeted advertising across connected television. But worse off, even if you buy ads out there, the marketers can't tell what they're getting for their money because of this cookie [ dilution ] on Apple products today, the deletion of IDFA. And so it's a lack of measurement. They lose that feedback loop. And so if you look at the -- what we call, the QPS pipe, all available ads that we can buy as a DSP, 80% of that ecosystem, our approach works perfectly. If you contrast that to our competitors today, the only area of cookie or any form of an ID works is on a Google-based phone. So that's Chrome in a web browser or Android in mobile apps. So if you're using our competitor, all your money is being funneled into those 2 ecosystems. And that's what I think has been a big misperception by investors and customers is understanding how big this problem is today. When I look at the total bid stream, a cookie or any form of ID is only present 31% of the time. That's down from 48% to start this year. So you see this precipitous decline, but our competitors do a good job of covering up what is a really big problem in a really big market. And I think as we go forward here in the next couple of quarters, customers, investors, everyone will understand the magnitude of this problem and how important our technical solution is.

So when you share the statistics on the identity falling precipitously, that's across the industry and you guys are still holding up a lot better than that. Is that what you're saying?

Absolutely. When you look at IDs given to you by big tech, we're able to analyze the bid stream and understand how often is that ID present for someone to bid and buy that ad. And that's that 31% number. And it's important. We share this data because this is the big secret. What is the number of cookies available or any form of ID by big tech today. We see it at 31%. That's every possible ad request we've analyzed. So this is a huge problem today, and that is the big misperception, I think, between investors and our offering that's out there. But it's not slowing our growth. Customers clearly understand this is a huge issue. You've got to reach and show ads to consumers using Apple products. You've got to reach and show ads to consumers who are streaming. Those environments are where we fit best.

And, Lloyd, I think how to make it tangible for people, and this is kind of in our go-to-market. I think a lot of people are puzzled initially, where they say, well, what do you mean, there's no ID in these places or there's no ID in CTV? Well, think about your own experience when you're streaming and you see the same ad over and over and over again, when you're watching, you're streaming just -- I've been talking about Sunday Night Football, I don't know what they're doing on Sunday Night Football we stream, but man, you could see the same ad 10 to 12x throughout a game. It's unbelievable. Why? There's no ID issued when that ad goes up for auction. So the DSPs out there think that it's the same -- they think it's a new user every time. They don't know it's the same household. So marketers recognize this because they see they're shifting, they and their agencies are shifting a lot of money out of linear television into CTV this year. That's why CTV is so important. There's so much money coming to it. However, they recognize this ad repetition is wasted money, it turns off consumers. So we give them the ability to what we call frequency cap, serve that 1 or 2 ads throughout that game and stop. And then you can redistribute that to reach new potential customers. So we solve a real big drop in out there.

The consumer experience that Chris mentioned is the exact proof point. Everyone experiences the same ad over and over. Those ads are being served by the leaders in ad tech today. So clearly, if that's the consumer experience, marketers need to take an understanding that this is a bad consumer experience and has a negative effect, the advertising actually does. That's that use case that we do so well.

You all might have an interesting answer for this. I subscribe to YouTube TV and mystifyingly, a large amount of their avails they do not sell. I mean you get the black screen. Why YouTube cannot sell all that? Or is it technology? What do you think is the reason for that?

Well, YouTube is a walled garden. So to buy YouTube ads, you have to use Google technology, et cetera. I think it would behoove Google to open up YouTube to outside DSPs to bid and buy, but that's been their strategic choices to keep YouTube behind just Google ad technology. So I think that's one limiting factor of it. But YouTube as a streaming publisher, is the largest in the world. So they've got a lot of ad inventory to be able to sell just like a lot of these streaming providers. The user consumption is up into the right by so many magnitudes, it's hard to keep up with the consumers' shifting needs of streaming over the old pay TV through cable or satellite.

Yes. Yes. Yes. It's fascinating. Do you all think that, that will change either kind of on their own or potentially from a regulatory? And what would that do for -- do you think, for you guys and the industry more broadly if YouTube opened up their inventory?

Tough to predict because there's just a lot of pressure either regulatory or -- I don't think that -- well, if I make a prediction, I do think that, that opens up, I think that's an easy sacrificial lamb that Google can offer up to avoid any enforcement. I do think it will. Plus I think it's better. Think like YouTube TV, right? They're licensing a lot of that content. It goes unmonetized. A lot of times, too, they may not own the rights for the streaming rights for some of that content as a digital MVPD they're operating as. But I do -- I think at some point, that opens up. I think it would benefit them too because you're going to get a market price for the inventory and you're going to have more buyers of the advertising. And that's a big advantage if you're a large publisher like YouTube.

Yes, yes. So going back to Viant and some of the -- it sounds like you guys -- it's interesting because we’ve thought of you guys as benefiting from the ultimate deprecation of cookies. That's been pushed out. But it sounds like all these changes at Apple are also highlighting your relative advantage. Are you seeing good customer -- are you kind of leveraging this in your pitches to try to win more business? And is it resonating?

Yes. I mean absolutely, it's resonating. We publish these statistics live on our website and update them daily. So you can track it yourself if you're in the industry, an investor. So if you go to viant.com, click World Without Cookies, scroll down, there's a bid stream report. And you can track. And we put our ID, other available IDs, mobile ad IDs, competitors’ IDs, like the Trade Desk Universal ID 1.0 and LiveRamp. We try and publish all these statistics to drive truth of what's available in the bid stream for marketers to actually buy. Lots of companies can say, I have an ID, but the question is at what scale. And that's the misperception. Viant’s scale is roughly 80% of the bid stream, alternative providers are less than 10%. So this is the big unknown out there is the scale that we bring to this really big problem.

Yes. Okay. And then as we think about how Google will eventually deprecate cookies. Is that another kind of tailwind to growth when that happens, do you think? Or does some of that benefit you before that happens as people prepare? How do we think about that?

Look, the awareness level is already there among customers, both the agencies and marketers. Is there more education that needs to be done? Yes, in terms of the impact. However, they're all looking at different solutions to be able to plan for that. Now you already mentioned Apple's ATT, right? That's a massive area because, again, the talk track is around cookie lists, but it's any ID that is no longer present. It undermine -- if there's no ID present, well then, how do you do the basics, like I said, around frequency capping? So that's important. But what I will say is that even if Google doesn't get rid of cookies, it's not going to stop. There's a big dislocation and misunderstanding here. It's not going to stop our customer wins. Here's the reason why, as Tim said, it's already in the minority of the ad opportunities today. And I would argue that the ad opportunities that the cookie is available on aren't the most desirable. The most desirable are big video formats. That's where a ton of the money is going. It's why CTV is such a juggernaut, and there's so much money going there. It's addressable advertising on the television screen. They all want that as opposed to a small banner on a website, right, that doesn't perform as well as the video does. I would just say, again, I’d refocus it all back. Google can get rid of cookies. They cannot get rid of cookies. It's not going to stop our growth because the game is really about how good is your software. They can -- we could have the greatest ID solution in the world, but our software doesn't make it easy for that marketer to buy across all channels easily right through the UI and then know what they're getting for their money. Well, then that was all for 0. Our biggest focus is really around continuing to invest in our software. We spend a ton of time around automation, making it super simple for someone. We talk about it all the time. Tim and I have -- we both have 4 pretty young kids. We think that -- look, my 14-year-old daughter should be able to log in and buy an ad anywhere and know what just happened. That's as easy as we want to make it. That's really what programmatic is about in the software. There happens to be a lot of discussion right now around cookies and IDs going away. But in another year or 2, we won't be so focused on that. The real game is really around how good is the software.

And when it comes down to if cookies don't go away, we see that as no problem either. A cookie-based DSP versus a people-based DSP are substantially different. Cookie-based DSPs are limited in where you can bid, buy and measure advertising only to Google products, so it's a small percentage of the ecosystem. And people based gives even bigger advantages like measuring in-store sales activity, if you're a car manufacturer or if you're Starbucks, or if you're a QSR, there's lots of advantages that people based come. And even with cookies, we still beat them on whatever the performance metric is that, that marketer is looking to achieve, whether it's reach and frequency in connected television or driving in-store sales if you're a QSR out there, people-based will outshine cookie-based every time. So our competitors can keep cookies. That's not the point. We're only saying that's a tsunami of a problem that's happening when big tech takes that away from our competition.

So just to understand it at a little deeper level, people based, is it effectively kind of you use a lot of -- whether it's cookies or other IP addresses and you kind of basically you have an underlying identifier tied to an address and like you've got enough persistent ways of identifying people that you track it all back to that? Like walk us through how you do it from a technology standpoint?

Yes. It's really 2 steps that you're different. People based, what does that mean? It means we're not taking everything we know about a consumer and putting it behind a unique number that Google or Apple give us. That's what a cookie is. It's a random number, and then you have different information you collect about that consumer through there. When we say people-based, it's things that the advertiser, the marketer has about you, your name, your address, your phone number, your e-mail and data comes in many forms and formats. We -- all that type of information is what we call people-based. That, if you're a marketer is what we call first-party data. We're a leader in first-party data onboarding, and that's how that whole matching process goes. Here's what Apple wants: away from third-party to first-party. What is third-party? These are pixels on websites that drop cookies on you, so the ads follow you around the web. Apple wants that to go away, and that's what the iOS 14.5 changes were about and what iOS 15 changes are about as well. And so that will have another further degradation on our competition there. But for marketers, the way it works is they onboard their sales data. They onboard their customer data into what we call a server side or a data lake is how we do it. And all of it happens in the cloud, not with a pixel on the page, trying to track consumers unsuspectingly, it's the marketer having a relationship with us in the cloud, and we run all those analytics for them in the cloud itself. That's the primary difference: away from third-party to first-party, and this is going to be a tectonic shift in the industry.

And once that service side migration, which is already underway throughout the industry, where, again, the pixels in iOS 14.5 and forwards running ad auctions client side, so in JavaScript on the page, you can no longer do that on Apple products. Most of the ad auctions are moving service side. The publishers themselves now can't auction things off client side, so they have to move service side. Those publishers are also coming to us. We recently announced a deal with Fox. And what's that about? That's hey, we want to do all the identity resolution. We want to onboard to you guys in the cloud though, not on the page. We want to be able to authenticate consumers. And then I want to be able to match that. If we have an audience that matches one of your clients, an automotive manufacturer, great, we want to make that connection. That's what we do so well between advertiser onboarding data, publisher onboarding data, and also we have a roster of 75-plus off-line data companies. We're kind of the identity sync between all of them. That's really what our software does. We don't claim that we have all this magic first-party data. We're the connector of all of those 3 entities. That's what allows for rich addressable advertising as well as the measurement.

And it works across modern households today, which have many connected devices on the Internet. That's why we talk about the household ID. If you're being exposed to an ad on Hulu, you buy the product on your phone. How would a cookie measure those 2 separate, disparate IDs, et cetera? This is all about the household ID, how we put it together, how we tie it so it makes sense to marketers who are buying those ads so they can control reach, frequency, improve their user experiences and understand what they're getting for their money. It's complex and in the weeds and ad tech has always been hard to understand for investors on where that quality revenue is. But we believe the quality revenue is on representing the buyer and having a technical solution to this huge problem that everyone is faced with. We say we have a product in market, and we've had it in market for many years. We were kind of the first people whoever said, "Hey, this ID problem is a substantial problem," and we did that back in 2015. So when you hear competitors say, "Hey, Apple's changes don't affect us." Well, that just doesn't make sense. Are you the largest DSP in the world, but you weren't buying ads on Apple products? We -- it is actually driving our business, the recognition that we can execute properly in these ID-less environments. And that's the growth we put up in Q2 and Q3 and we'll hopefully continue in the future.

Yes. It's been a huge topic of debate in the investment world thinking about how these changes at the iOS, ATT, IDFA deprecation, like how does it impact shifts in budget. Curious to get your perspective. I mean, it sounds like for your clients, they can navigate this really well. How do you think this all unfolds for, I guess, in particular, the big social platforms that have relied on them pretty heavily?

You already saw it unfold.

Yes, I think you did. You saw the early impacts of that. In Q2, when Apple rolled out these changes, these ATT changes, what you saw was Facebook and Snap and Google, all they did was just raise prices on Android. That's what they did. So you can no longer -- so let's -- we can unpack this a little bit. If I'm Facebook and a marketer comes, say, a mobile app marketer, and I want app downloads, new user acquisition, I can go in and I want -- I'm buying advertising, and I can measure how many downloads of my app that I got for every $5 I spend or $10, whatever it may be. And the reason why Facebook can do that is because Apple issues the IDFA to Facebook, okay? That's number one. Number two, they see -- between Facebook and Instagram, they see the consumer in terms of number of page views that, that consumer times they see them in the app is just is enormous. Their reach is huge. They also run one of the largest ad networks on the planet, where they partner with other publishers, where they have their pixels on those pages and they serve ads on those pages. What Apple did was took away the IDFA so they could no longer recognize, "Hey, if I showed this person an ad and then did they convert, did they download?" That's number one. That's super important. Number two, Facebook does their own measurement. When you're a walled garden, you don't let other people measure you. You claim your own measurement. So here's how it works. If I'm Facebook and I show a person an ad and then they later -- they download that app, that IDFA registers to me, and I claim credit that I was responsible for that. But CNN may have shown them an ad, too. And then maybe Snapchat showed them an ad or somebody on Google showed them an ad or maybe we showed them an ad through one of our clients. However, Facebook claims credit for it. So because they're a walled garden, money shifts there, where did you drive it or did somebody else drive it. Now they lost the ability to claim that credit. So the efficacy is no longer there. The measurement’s gone. So in Q3, what you saw is marketers, they paid up for Android, but they weren't -- their costs were higher. User acquisitions were down because they weren't reaching people on iPhones. So what do they do? Money came out of the walled gardens into alternative platforms not only to show ads to reach people on iOS, but they're trying to reach them in other channels, too, like CTV, streaming audio, digital out of home. I think this is going to be big, and it hurts a company like Facebook because they're just a mobile app. Think about that. We're an omnichannel DSP. We allow our clients to buy every single channel you can think of. If you're Facebook, you don't have the ability to shift that money around. The pain was there for Google, but less so because they have YouTube. They have many more channels; they’re not just a mobile app. So I think the companies that are the mobile apps, they're going to be the most affected, and it goes to -- the money seeking marketers will move it around. They don't cut their budget by 50% because the IDFA isn't there. They just find new methods. But in the end, what we're hearing from clients is actually, I'm not seeing when I shift the money around, it's not as big of a dip as I thought I would get in user acquisition. And why is that? That's because Facebook was claiming credit for things that they weren't the only ones that drove the ad impact.

Social media gets impacted tremendously due to IDFA dilution. And if you're just a mobile app, it's like Chris said, it's hard for you to create an alternative.

So do you think like that -- we've seen a big impact. You've seen budget come off Facebook. People are trying other things. Do you think that they are able to claw back better measurement? They've talked about it such that some budget will move back to that platform. And then I guess, specific to Viant, like do you all use it? Does your solution provide more visibility into the performance even on Facebook on iOS? Or is that just blind for everyone?

It's a -- let's say this. Within -- if a marketer was buying and the user was on Facebook, of course, Facebook knows. It's the third-party mobile apps that Facebook was powering for monetization where that breaks. So the answer is a bit of yes and no. One thing that's unique about a people-based DSP. And because we're not attached to a cookie or a connected TV ID or some other ID given to us, we focus on the marketers’ data, helping them onboard it and get it ready so they can partner with walled gardens and the Open Web. We talk at Viant about the new Open Web, and that is all publishers are the same. You have super publishers like Facebook and you have small publishers like a blogger on a website. But the new Open Web needs to power all of that. And marketers don't look at walled gardens and Open Web like, A is better than B. If you're General Motors or Ford or Procter & Gamble or a major Fortune 500 company, you work with everyone, and you need a software that can buy across everyone and measure what you're getting for your money across everyone. And when you're people-based and you take our approach, we hand the publisher their own ID back so they can execute the advertising effectively. And that's what makes us unique. So in the long term, we believe the DSP that's people-based will actually be buying the social media for that marketer. And then we'll be buying across the long tail of the web, all using whatever identifier is available in that channel. That's what we've done so well over the last 6 years is using this first-party data, the first-party data of the publisher, the first-party data of the marketer and helping them transact with each other electronically, so it works for targeting and measurement.

So I wanted to go back to a topic you guys started talking about earlier, which is like CTV. And it seems like you guys have talked about that as kind of a foot in the door with customers. Can you elaborate that -- on that a bit? And just give us a sense of how big this is in your mix and how that's trending?

Yes. So CTV is something that's close to the heart for us. We love the channel. We've always known that television advertising works. It's just hard for -- linear television was just always hard to measure, but you know that it provides an impact. We know that we, as consumers, watch those ads. When CTV came about, Tim and I actually back in 2010, we started a free streaming ad-supported business called Xumo. It competes with Tubi and Pluto. We actually sold that to Comcast this year -- early...

Beginning of '20.

Beginning of -- yes, 2020, we sold it to Comcast for $145 million. And we tell you that because we have a rich history in CTV. We believe in the channel, and we know how to target measure. There's some very unique things technically with CTV. That said, marketers moving money out of linear is undeniable, moving it to streaming, and they want to catch the consumer way of happening there. We do things -- we focus around the basics of what does a marketer really want? They don't -- no marketers want to track consumers. They don't want to do that. Apple is trying to convince you that marketers are trying to track people around the web. No. They want to be relevant to consumers and they want to know what they're getting for their money. Those 2 things, we do really well. Talk about relevancy, we enable addressable advertising. We don't -- and we make it so that you don't show -- you don't wear out the consumer by showing the same ad over and over. And the last one, you show a CTV ad, you want to know the impact. Well, if I call my mobile phone and I go to the website and I buy, how do you connect it to? We do that very well. We also -- because we're people-based, if you walk into a retail store and you buy from -- as a consumer, if they buy in the retail store, we connect that CRM data in their sales system, we connect that back to ad exposure. CTV, there's a ton of money moving. We do very well there. We're very complementary there for the marketer. With CTV for the first 9 months of this year, grew 69% in our platform. It represents about 40% of the activity in our platform. I think it was about 39% of our revenue. So marketers are spending a lot there. It's an area where we shine very well. But look, we like that because what it allows the marketer to do is test us in CTV. And then the goal of a DSP again, the software, how easy is it to buy CTV, right? That's number one. Number two, how easily can I buy the other channels? And that's what we're seeing. We want to consolidate the whole budget of the marketer. That's why they're doing programmatic. They want to consolidate everything and then know what they get for their money. So that's the benefit. We get in on CTV, but we're moving into other channels like mobile, streaming audio, digital out of home.

Yes, it's a good point that Chris brought up. When we get in with CTV, we have the same customers as all of our competitors. There's only 6 holdcos. We have master services agreements with all of them. The difference between us and our competition is the share of wallet that Google’s getting, Trade Desk is getting versus Viant’s getting. Our share of wallet amongst the holdcos is small today relative to our competition. But what's mispriced here, cookies only work 31% of the time, but those companies have roughly 90% of the budget. And that's the misperception. Just like eyeballs moving to mobile and ad dollars changing, right now, you have over investment in these cookie-based technologies yet they're only available 30% of the time. And I think that adjustment of the budget is what will drive our growth in 2022, 2023, 2024 and beyond. The Internet keeps expanding. This problem is huge. It's -- in all the new channels like connected TV, it's 100% of the channel. 0% cookies on CTV, 0 mobile identifiers, 0 any identifier, yet our ID works 91% of that time in the channel, if you go look at that -- the data on our website. So there's not a lot of competition in CTV because no one's got a scaled product to, again, this huge problem. A lot of people just don't understand what's working and what's not.

Got it. So on your second quarter call, you mentioned retail travel and auto was about 27% of rev ex TAC or contribution ex TAC. How are your kind of conversations with customers evolving with the pandemic and, I guess, supply chain in some of these channels?

Yes. Retail and travel, we saw really, for the most part, come all the way back. We don't think that's a limiter for us. In our Q3 call, we highlighted that it's no longer a laggard for us. Automotive is definitely out there, that's supply chain related. And we see some pockets of supply chain-related stuff, but we really feel that the marketers have become -- our clients become pretty resilient. I don't -- and our view on, I guess, the future of the pandemic or any flare-ups that happen or new variants and whatnot, when it hit the first time in March of 2020, I think everybody had the pullback effect. And then you had some marketers that were able to take advantage of that. We saw health care take advantage of that. We saw entertainment, streaming and gaming take advantage of that of others pulling back. I think that was a lesson for a lot of people that remained out of the game. Certainly, travel isn't going to spend a lot. But I think that everyone has been conditioned now and I think are taking more of a longer-term view. So we feel really good about all the categories. I know that automotive production is going to come back. When production fires back up, the budgets will be there. We're having great conversations with our automotive clients. It looks like they're going to be really turning up the spending in 2022. So we really feel that a lot of that is behind us.

Okay. And in terms of 3Q, you guys had great customer ads numbers. You’ve been investing in your sales force. What else have you been doing to drive that? Obviously, some of the trends we talked about, but anything more specific you'd share on the customer ads?

Yes. I mean the customer additions were we kind of over exceeded everyone's expectations in Q2 and Q3, and we're kind of seeing a new baseline of number of new customers using the platform, which is great because the customers that come in today will spend a lot more 1 year from then, and will spend a lot more 2 years from when they come on. And it's kind of a cohort-based model of once they come in, they grow their spending, and we grow our revenue over time. And we think that's been one of the biggest positives that we've had since becoming a public company is watching the influx of customers come in. But I don't think it's really anything we're doing. It really is Apple driving all of this with the release of 14.5 and 15 and all the changes happening. Everyone in this industry, if you look at Apple, Apple deleted cookies in something like 2016 or '17, yet everyone in ad tech pretended cookies worked in Safari. And this is -- these are the first grumblings of where they were going, but Apple is really driving the awareness level of, "Hey, this old way of doing things and it includes your old technology providers are not going to work in the future across these products." And so they're really driving the awareness with marketers, with agencies, with publishers and developers of mobile apps all across the ecosystem. But the companies that are moving the fastest are clearly those mobile apps who are facing that stark reality today.

And what -- you mentioned there's more changes coming in iOS 15, what do you see evolving with iOS 15 and then thereafter that's going to further make targeting and attribution difficult in that environment?

I think it really is, it’s the understanding what we were talking about earlier, Java -- all of ad tech historically and from the early days -- we've been in the business for over 20 years. So early days, and it's really lasted for almost 20 years, this client side, measurement or pixels on a page is how you target and measure advertising. You drop cookie on someone, they go to the advertiser’s website, they buy an ad. That same cookie fires back to you. You know that they bought an ad. Same exact way with IDFA and Apple, same concept. Apple wants everything off of the page. One, it's a flaw. And really, they -- but they're not trying -- this is what’s the misunderstanding. They’re not trying to nuke all of advertising companies. They're just saying, “Publisher and advertiser, you own either the side or the app. If you want to do anything with third parties, you do it in the cloud.” So you have to have service, what we call that service side as opposed to client side. You have to have the alignment service side with those entities to be able to do any data matching that you want to do because the data matching that historically has been done in ad tech, is again done on the page, on the client's browser on their machine. They don't want it done there. That's an easy spot for people to place malware. They don't want any of that. This is also this -- if this sounds like a monumental shift for, let's say, advertisers, it actually isn't. Digital transformation of these organizations has been happening for many years. The first move in digital transformation is out of your own data centers into the cloud. Growth in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, you see that. Then you start adopting applications once you're in the cloud. You see that in HR, you see it in accounting and CRM. You look at Snowflake even, they're making a lot of noise in advertising. That's good. These companies like us are able -- if you're a marketer and you want to do server side measurement, you can either use our data lake that we offer, you may use GBQ, Google’s, or it's called Ads Data Hub or you maybe use Snowflake. We're interoperable with all of them. So that is a change that's happening. It's actually a -- we do believe long term, it's a benefit for the whole industry, and it's more secure as well.

Got it. All right. Well, look, we're running a long time. I wanted to just get your take on kind of what are some of the main learnings you guys have had as a public company now. It's been a good bit of time.

Yes. Well, so far, our run of being public. We had a very successful IPO. The stock price has traded off. We've faced things that I'm sure all public company executives face where headwinds or headwinds, tailwinds or headwinds, no winds or headwinds. I mean we -- our stock has gotten pummeled over the lack of understanding. And there's market leaders that say, “Hey, everything is fine.” We're saying, “No, this is a big problem, and we're executing nicely.” I think for us though, we stopped looking at the stock price. We know the growth of the business is there, and we just continue to execute. The customer wins. The beat and raise that we've done 3x as a public company, all these things added up, I think investors will take notice over time. And I think as those wins start to shift away from cookies and IDs, I think it's going to be quite a tsunami of investors moving their money as well as marketers moving their money and agencies as well, too. Because I think it's hard to think through that without that cookie or that ID, our competitors' software platforms just stop working. And I think that's a hard pill to swallow if you've got an investment in a cookie-based DSP. Once that's gone, it's 100% gone. It's not a slow transition. So we've got the product for the future. We've had it out for more than 5 years. We've invested. We're the leaders in people based. We almost invented the whole category and concept. So I think that thought leadership that we've been out there with, going public, we've broadened our team. We've added huge talent to our executive team and we'll continue to do that. And so we've attracted an influx of talent that's helping us execute really nicely. And I think you'll see the quarterly prints that we've done historically and to come in the future will be more of the same.

All right. Well, that sounds great. Thank you guys for being here and participating. Hopefully, get you to a real conference in person next year.

You got it.

Thanks for being here.

Thank you for hosting us, Lloyd. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Yes. All right. Have a good one.

You too.

All right. Bye.

All right.