Viant 创始人谈 2000 万美元收购 Waymark：复刻 Meta 模式打造 CTV 广告闭环

Viant would like a crack at your video creative, please.

Earlier this week, Viant announced its $20 million acquisition of Waymark, a generative AI video ad platform that media companies, including Comcast, Fox, NBCU, Spectrum Reach and Gray Television, have used to generate more than a million ads over the past year for local advertisers.

“Ten years ago, no one would even let you touch the creative,” Viant CEO Tim Vanderhook told AdExchanger. “Our bet is that’s changing.”

Waymark is the latest in Viant’s string of acquisitions over the past two years, including Iris.TV, which supplies content signals, and TVision, which tracks attention.

Viant’s pitch is that it can now offer advertisers a tidy loop. Iris matches ads to the content, TVision shows whether anyone is paying attention and Waymark can crank out fresh versions when the old ones wear out.

If that sounds familiar, it should. Viant is borrowing right from Meta’s playbook.

“Meta takes over all the media optimization and audience targeting, and then they just tell brands to produce as much creative as they possibly can,” said Viant COO Chris Vanderhook. “That’s a big part of their success, and it’s something we’re looking to replicate.”

The Brothers Vanderhook spoke with AdExchanger about the cost of creative fatigue, understanding frequency and who’s really to blame for the open web’s troubles.

AdExchanger: So, why Waymark and why now?

TIM VANDERHOOK: We were missing a piece. The mid-market and DTC brands we want are spending tens of millions a month on Meta, and Meta has the field to itself because you need a self-service model to do that. You can’t staff salespeople and account managers for those customers. To do the same for TV, you’ve got to generate the spot for them. We couldn’t do that before Waymark.

CHRIS VANDERHOOK: And creative wears out. When we did diligence on TVision, we’d ask what marketers do when that happens and the answer was basically, “Well, we already spent that money and we don’t have it in the budget to make new creative, so…”.

Big brands may not be first movers on generative creative, but they’re testing it now and many of the brands we work with already use AI for editing. We think that’ll only accelerate.

What keeps CTV from just filling up with AI slop, though?

TV: We’re moving past that time when every hand had six fingers.

I think the sensitivity comes from two places. One is the lack of disclosure that something is AI, and the other is putting AI-generated humans in ads. If it’s just the product with no people in it, there’s more leeway and less backlash.

It’s not perfect today. You can still tell an AI voice, for example. But because these tools are improving at a hockey stick curve, soon it’s going to be hard to discern whether something is AI-generated – which is why proper disclosure will be so important.

It’s great that Waymark can churn out ads at scale, but how many versions of an ad does anyone really need?

TV: It’s different for every brand. Look at Morgan & Morgan, the biggest personal injury ad spender in the country. One of its ads has run for five years and gets 21% human attention. Its newest ad is at 86%.

Once people recognize an ad, their brain almost subconsciously tunes out. To hold their attention, you have to keep coming with another message, another use case, a different angle, a funny one. It’s entertainment value, to a degree.

What’s the right frequency?

CV: There’s no such thing as one frequency standard. In TVision’s data it’s all over the place. Healthcare ads need a frequency of 50 over time and they keep driving engagement, while a Super Bowl ad falls off a cliff after one view. And when CTV serves the same ad five times in a row, the publisher doesn’t get blamed. The advertiser does. So you need a lot of creative.

I remember when you bought lockr last year, some investors were confused because they didn’t know what it was and didn’t seem to get the vision. Do they get it now?

CV: I hope so. I think it was Mark Benioff who said people have to hear something seven times before it sinks in.

Sounds like an argument in favor of overfrequency!

CV: Well, we try to be succinct, but we go through our strategy step by step to make sure people get it, and I think our core investor definitely does. We’re not building products just to get an advertiser’s money. We want advertising that works.

Viant owns the buying platform, identity, content data, measurement and now creative. Do you get questions from investors and marketers about grading your own homework?

TV: Everything we do is auditable. Nothing the walled gardens do is. And I don’t own content, so I have no dog in the fight over whether you give money to Disney or CNN or even YouTube.

Google, Amazon and Meta have reporting to maximize their share of wallet. We’re trying to show who’s actually driving sales.

During your Q3 earnings call this week you said that the open web is just 10% or less of Viant’s business these days and that it’s not a growth driver. Be honest, you can tell me, do you guys still care about the open web?

TV: Display still serves a purpose, just a much smaller one. A banner gets about 2% ad recall, a TV ad gets 32% and a TV followed by a display gets 38%.

Web traffic is shrinking because Google controls it. If they decide they’re not going to send you web traffic anymore, then you don’t exist. It’s a monopoly eating all the traffic, because they have to compete with ChatGPT or their stock goes down.

That’s why I’ve said Facebook didn’t kill MySpace. Google did.

Over the summer, you came out and said you want to relaunch Myspace, which you’ve owned since 2011. So, when will Myspace ride again?

TIM: Long live Myspace! We love Myspace, which is why we never sold it, although I get at least three to five offers a day from people who want to buy it. There’s a thirst for non-algorithmically controlled social media.

But a product needs repeat usage above 30% for it to work. When we first relaunched Myspace, the repeat usage rate was 13% and we knew it was in trouble. It was very expensive.

The good news is that the cost profile to deliver a product has drastically plummeted since we ran Myspace the first time after we bought it. And now that the cost barrier has come down, we’ll see. Never say never.

Are you still in touch with “Myspace Tom?”

TIM: Tom’s living a great life between Southern California and Hawaii. Of all the founders, he’s actually the least interested in a comeback.

What’s funny is that so many people think I’m Myspace Tom, because my name is close. They get confused and call me “MySpace Tim,” and I have to be, like, well, no… not exactly!

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

For more articles featuring Tim Vanderhook, click here.