Can DSPs Save Publishers?Keith Petri and Rich Hyden on Viant Publisher Solutions, Identity, and the Future of Monetization
- Jun 18
- 49 min read
Publishers create the content. Publishers build the audiences. Publishers bear the costs. Yet somehow, after two decades of digital advertising innovation, many publishers capture only a fraction of the value they create.
In this Signal & Noise exclusive, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Keith Petri, SVP of Data, Identity & Supply at Viant, and Rich Hyden, SVP of Publisher Solutions at Viant, for a deep discussion on one of the most important questions facing the open internet: Can publishers reclaim their economic future—or are the economics of digital media fundamentally broken?
This conversation coincides with Viant's major announcement of Viant Publisher Solutions, a new suite of capabilities designed to improve transparency, signal quality, monetization, identity activation, and supply-path efficiency for publishers while simultaneously improving advertiser outcomes. It represents one of the most significant publisher-focused initiatives launched by a major DSP in recent years.
But this episode goes far beyond a product launch.
Together, Keith and Rich unpack the realities of modern publisher monetization, the hidden inefficiencies inside today's programmatic supply chain, why signal quality increasingly determines revenue, and how identity has become one of the most valuable assets publishers possess.
Along the way, the conversation tackles some of the biggest debates in advertising today:
Why premium publishers continue to struggle despite creating enormous value
Whether supply-path optimization helps publishers—or hurts them
The role of identity in driving publisher revenue
Why signal quality may be the new currency of digital advertising
How CTV is reshaping publisher economics
The growing power of walled gardens versus the open internet
Why contextual intelligence is becoming increasingly important
How AI and agentic media buying may transform programmatic advertising
Whether DSPs can play a meaningful role in helping publishers thrive
What the future of publisher monetization looks like over the next decade
For anyone working in digital media, ad tech, publishing, identity, programmatic advertising, retail media, CTV, measurement, or AI-powered marketing, this is a conversation packed with practical insights and big-picture thinking.
The future of the open internet may depend on whether buyers and sellers can become more aligned.
Watch the full episode and join the conversation.
🔑 What We Cover💡 Key Takeaways🎯 Why This Episode Matters
Read the full transcript below.
Brett House (00:01.554)
Hey everybody, Brett House, signal and noise. I'm joined by my co-host Rio Longacre. today's guests are Keith Petri and Rich Haydn. I should have asked if I pronounced those correctly from Viant. hopefully I did. Did I get those both right? I think I did. we've got, and and this is sort of a a newsworthy podcast. We're gonna be talking about some of Viant's new publisher solutions, a long form exclusive in a way.
Richie (00:17.518)
Yep. Yeah, you're good.
Rio (00:25.961)
It's a long-form exclusive, isn't it?
Brett House (00:30.218)
and just to give a little, a little, yeah, totally. And to give a little intro with about Keith and Richie for those that don't know him, Keith joined Vyant following the acquisition of Locker, which he founded and was CEO. He's the SVP of Data Identity and Supply, or Plus Supply. and and you've been focused on publisher, helping publishers improve addressability identity, data activation, monetization for a long time. you've been sort of through the rapidly changing ecosystem that we've all sort of lived through.
Rio (00:30.379)
Something that's definitely a thing.
Brett House (01:00.014)
So you're battle-hardened, we'll say Richie or Keith. and Richie joined Viant, also a builder and a founder from iris.tv, which he co-founded and was president and chief operations officer. and you are the SVP of Publisher Solutions, right? And work closely with publisher partners across CTV, digital media identity, and programmatic advertising. And we are going to, you know, so both you guys really sit at this at at one of the most interesting.
or or or cover a lot of the the very interesting questions facing digital media today, which is how do we build and Rio and I talk about this on a lot of our pods, a healthier relationship between advertisers, publishers, and the technology platforms that connect them, with a common theme being that publishers often get screwed in the mix and have lost a lot of potential monetization ability or capabilities over the last twenty years, 50% of and it's getting worse.
Rio (01:52.088)
It's getting worse.
Brett House (01:54.33)
Right. And the news, which I I re I preface with, Viant just recently launched Publisher a Publisher Solutions set of capabilities. and I guess it's designed to improve transparency, monetization, signal quality, supply of SPO.
Rio (02:08.696)
Yeah, we thought this is really interesting for DSP to be doing this. So we'll let you both talk. There's a lot to dig into here. Sorry, House, I cut you off.
Brett House (02:15.972)
Yeah, totally. And so so it's certainly a fascinating announcement. you know, we we we did say earlier that we don't want them to shill, but I think you guys have both been around the block, just like Rio and I have, more more times than once and can really add a lot of value to understanding how this ecosystem works and what you guys are doing to help make it better. So Keith and Rich, welcome to Signal and Noise. Thrilled to have you. yeah. So
Richie (02:39.066)
Thanks for having us. Happy to be here.
Keith Petri (02:40.155)
Yeah, excited to be here.
Brett House (02:42.094)
So so Keith, Keith, why don't we start with you? can you you know give a little introduction of yourself? I mean I I I really summarized your entire history. tell us kind of what brought you through Locker to Viant and what you're doing over there.
Keith Petri (02:54.981)
I got nothing left, Brett. You did everything. That's my social life, my work life. You just you know, yeah. I could just walk off stage now.
Brett House (02:57.104)
I I didn't I didn't I didn't actually introduce your college major, which sometimes I'll occa I'll do, right? But
Rio (02:58.776)
crushed it.
Keith Petri (03:05.903)
Well, you know, I listened to enough of these episodes that I know that I'm on the phone with two linguist professors over here and I certainly failed at any English courses. Fun fact I did actually Instagram DM my high school English teacher last night because somebody just didn't hand in their final report. I thought that was brilliant. I didn't know that was an option.
Richie (03:26.647)
Yeah.
Rio (03:26.72)
It is now, right?
Brett House (03:27.814)
Yeah, yeah.
Keith Petri (03:28.101)
It that's exactly what I told her actually. so yeah, my name's Keith Petrie. I I certainly am excited to hang out here with Rio in my first official podcast with him and Brett, good to reconnect. I was checking you out on LinkedIn and I'm surprised our paths didn't cross when you were back at Exulate in the in the early days of my career. But yeah, you you hit you hit the nail on the head in terms of Locker was providing a data collaboration platform for publishers to better
Brett House (03:46.53)
Yeah. Yeah, same with me.
Keith Petri (03:56.345)
articulate the signal which they do collect from their audiences over to the buy side and have better control on that. And that was something that Viant after the acquisition of Iris very much felt would fall into their wheelhouse as they explored what they were going to do and seeing the issue with signal quality in the market that was precipitating in late twenty twenty four and into twenty twenty five. So excited to be here and have our hard work come to a culmination.
Brett House (04:24.242)
That's awesome. And how about you, Richie?
Richie (04:26.52)
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here. yeah, what kind of brought us to Viant at Iris TV, we had a couple of of different product offerings. We started in the video recommendation space. So we worked with publishers and broadcasters, helping them recommend their own content to their own audiences in a more effective way, basically helping them boost supply so they could monetize that inventory themselves. and what we sort of learned along the way is that inside this recommendation engine,
We had a lot of information on the content that people were viewing. And maybe ignorant to us at the time, we didn't know that the advertising world wasn't able to transact on what type of content some was someone was watching. and in other formats, you know, like display, contextual targeting's been around for a long time. And most of those solutions work by scraping text on a web page and helping a bidder understand the type of article it is.
and there was sort of some connective tissue that was missing. And so we sort of repurposed our recommendation technology into a content data platform, basically helping buyers and sellers transact on the topic of content someone was watching, as opposed to just the person. And this was sort of amplified when GDPR happened and you know, basically signals disappeared overnight.
Brett House (05:46.192)
Yeah, k kid the rise of contextual, but a deeper form of contextual than what we kind of grew up with. Yeah.
Richie (05:50.156)
Yeah. Yep. So we were we basically built a content graph and a and a content identifier we call the iris ID. And we spent probably the better half better part of six years trying desperately to get this ID from a content management system on one side of the ecosystem to a DSP on the other. And man, it was really hard. And we'll talk about all the reasons why it was really hard to get it through. Yeah. Yeah.
Brett House (06:12.676)
Yeah, we we should definitely we should definitely dig dig that dig into that 'cause that's certainly a topic we hear a lot is like how do you actually pass all this rich publisher data over to the the actual ad serving infrastructure, right? And oftentimes it gets squeezed out, which kind of defeats the purpose of personalization and our ability to target effectively and that sort of stuff.
Rio (06:18.712)
Yep.
Rio (06:22.734)
How do you get to buy side? Yeah.
Richie (06:24.399)
Yeah.
Richie (06:30.904)
Exactly, exactly. So you know, we worked with Viant and they were one of the DSPs that we had successfully started to get these IDs through to the DSP. And we realized that if you could tie together all the rich audience data, all the first party data that an advertiser has and the campaign objectives with what someone's viewing, we could drive way better results. And that didn't mean that it was just better results for the buyer, it also meant better yield and monetization from the from the seller.
And so we had an opportunity to join forces with the team and so we took advantage of it and we've been here about eighteen months now.
Brett House (07:07.834)
Yeah. And the Irish ID, just a quick question before Rio gives the the th the theme of the show, so to speak, captures just I'm assuming it goes pretty deep in terms of the level of video content metadata that you're actually capturing and communicating back to the ad servers, right? So like is it how detailed does that get and how was it differentiated from kind of your grace notes and your typical sort of metadata companies out there?
Richie (07:20.591)
Yep.
Richie (07:30.69)
Yeah, so there's a there's a big range. So when we started, we were basically creating almost like IEB categories for each piece of content. So we would call it call it asset level, it'd be like the entirety of the piece of program. that started with, as you can imagine, the basic 30, 40 tier one segments and sort of just getting started. fast forward, you know, five years now, there's probably 17 to 20,000 different segments that are available. And those are available at
The asset level, the channel level, the scene level. it's available for video on demand content. It's available now for true live, it's available in audio. So it's sort of expanded to generally solve the problem of what are people watching, what are they listening to, and how do we tie signal around the content to the transaction in in real time.
Brett House (08:23.132)
That's awesome.
Rio (08:23.832)
Well, Keith and Richie, we're thrilled to have you on here. And I know that we are talking to Vion about getting someone on to talk about some of the interesting things going on there. think Vion is one the more innovative companies in this space. So there's a lot of interesting, no shortage of interesting news, let's put it that way. So, but the background for this is you originally launched, Brett mentioned, Publisher Solutions. There was a big announcement. was just, think Thursday last week that came out and a lot to dig into there. But then ostensibly the title of this episode is going to be.
Can DSPs save publishers? This sounds almost kind of like paradoxical, right? mean, you know, one of the themes, Brett, as you mentioned earlier, we've explored again and again, a signal of noise, whether it's talks to Luke Pascales or Jessica Ho from Hearst, that publishing has become really, really tough business and you know, publishers, I mean, it's a heavy lift. They create the content. They haven't managed the audiences. They bear a lot of the day-to-day operational costs. You mentioned CMS. have to, websites have to be hosted somewhere. Someone has to pay for that, right? Yet somehow.
Year after year, innovation after innovation, they seem to capture not only the smallest share, but a diminishing share of the value created by the overall ecosystem. We've talked a lot about this on this pod. So wanted to start with the background for this is, okay, this vine announcement, like looking at publishers, is it an economics problem, a tech problem, market structure problem? I know you're DSP, you're representing BISI, but what is the implication here about what you're offering and what is it?
Like looking into the future is just going to help publishers and like, it make a difference in supporting their business model? Cause they certainly need the help.
Brett House (10:00.794)
Yeah. And and Keith, you Keith, you definitely had a a a reaction and I saw your v your visual reaction here on on video, to the can't the I I think you suggested in our our pre notes, our pre communication, pre podcast communication, that that can publishers save DSPs? you were questioning that that theory that nobody's saving anybody here. can you can you talk a little bit about that? yeah, sorry.
Keith Petri (10:01.572)
Yeah.
Rio (10:23.468)
Okay, DSPs say publishers, yeah, yeah. mean, it's,
Keith Petri (10:25.593)
Yeah, I I think that Richie will have a pointed perspective on CTV publishers in particular, where Viant leans heavily, but generically it's not about saving publishers. It's just about trying to reconnect the advertiser, who's the client, with the publisher who's providing the inventory. And historically, over the past decade or two, you've had publishers who
Have a lot of responsibilities, as you just clearly articulated, that are well outside my area of expertise. And they've had individuals come up to them who are supposed to act as their representation, their fudiciary, and they've said, leave it to us. And the publisher has entrusted them. And that's like entrusting our retailer as a CPG brand to represent your inventory in the way that you've negotiated on the shelf. You, you know.
do a joint business venture, you commit to spend and marketing, you say, I want NCAP, I level, that's the placement, and I want this certain price. And you walk into the store and there's garbage all over the floor. Your product is on the bottom shelf and it's halfway down the aisle in the middle of the store. and
Brett House (11:24.549)
Yeah.
Brett House (11:32.646)
Yeah, I've I've got pers I've got personal experience. I wor I stocked shelves for Nabisco earlier and like right after I graduated college. Supermarkets varied. The like the quality of where the Nabisco product was and the in the i it varied from place to place. So that's a good point.
Keith Petri (11:38.329)
So it's pr so Brett, it was probably your fault. You put it the wrong place. But at the
Keith Petri (11:48.635)
Well, that that's a great see, my metaphor started, Brett. You just brought it home because each of the retailers have a various level of quality around how they represent and commercialize their product. And the issue is that publishers, and I think that this is where publishers who are premium and forward looking are leaning right now, is they're no longer looking for that provider who's like, hey, we'll take care of you. We want to cut of the upside.
Brett House (12:00.371)
Yeah.
Keith Petri (12:14.597)
Don't take on any type of liability. And that's pretty much the promise of the internet since anything went online to these publishers is hey, pass it to us, we'll handle it, we'll take a cut of the upside. And as a result of not taking on that onus and that responsibility and the diligence and the management of it, they've actually just resolved to the fact that this person, this entity is going to look out for their best interest.
Now we've matured to a point where there's way too many of those middlemen, and each one of them is looking for the opportunity to arbitrage, generate some type of value, whether truthful or not. Loved your Dr. Foo episode. and they've manipulated those attributes to ensure that buy-side partners like us, who are in trusting that the legal representation of the other side is providing all truthful attributes.
we're gonna buy off of that. And what we quickly saw, especially with tools like Iris and Locker, that could see what was happening on the client side and what we were seeing through various exchange paths, we're not aligning. And so we felt that we needed to minimize the obfuscation of that signal.
Brett House (13:19.984)
Yeah and and for and for and for con
Yeah, yeah, and for context around that, I y you could even call it sort of highway robbery, premium publishers routinely routinely generate about thirty cents every do every advertising dollar spent, right? because of be
Richie (13:25.722)
Mm-hmm.
Richie (13:33.381)
Yeah.
Rio (13:34.158)
Yeah, think for open exchange programmatic, it's around 39 cents that they're keeping on average, which is, and it can be lower. Yeah.
Brett House (13:38.32)
Yeah, there's a lot of intermediaries during that that process of delivering data to actually serving an ad that are taking cuts. Yeah.
Rio (13:44.974)
And that's not even talking about the fraud, right? That we talked about in the foot, that's just tech tax, DSPSSP fees. exactly. Toll taking, you could call it. So yeah, so publishers are getting pennies on the dollar in many instances. So mean, that's one of the challenges they face. I guess with AI and the diminishing referral traffic, it's probably more acute. mean, because Keith, you're point earlier, the promise of the internet, the promise of programmatic was...
Richie (13:49.744)
That's just tax in the middle.
Rio (14:11.584)
scale demand and automation of that scale demand, right? For the publishers connect with, but it really hasn't worked out great for them, has it?
Keith Petri (14:19.619)
No, I think that any of it future future history always repeats itself. That's why I was saying future. And with history always repeating itself, you need to make sure that the publishers who did take on that onus and responsibility and vetted the tech and made a strategic decision and took on the liability of bringing infrastructure in-house, owning that first party relationship with their audience, generating that authentication, controlling the data, selling direct.
Brett House (14:41.231)
Yeah.
Keith Petri (14:46.629)
They they built a good sustainable business. And those are the same businesses today that are like, hey, let's figure out how we can negotiate content licensing fees. Let's put up a fence, maybe a a chain link fence. Like we're still gonna let some type of interaction with the business world, but we need to make sure that we protect protect our asset. And
Brett House (14:58.426)
Yep. And
Brett House (15:06.908)
Yeah, and and it's the data advantage through authentication, through capturing subscriber authentication, people providing their information. They've they should if yeah, and and the and the premium publishers that are thriving today are the ones that have the largest subscriber bases that they can leverage and and build motes around that data, right?
Rio (15:12.962)
Well, should be if they're authenticating. I think a lot of them are not though.
Richie (15:21.294)
Yeah.
Richie (15:24.93)
Yeah, I mean I think there's there's all I think just the industry has sort of updated our point of view. I think is is also just like a natural evolution. I think, you know, when programmatic started, there was the game of how do I trick the bidder into bidding more? And it's just a volume bias. And if I can inflate the number of requests that is sent and I can give them some of the signals that I think are the things they want, then you know, from a short term perspective.
You know, the DSP will probably bid more and dollars will clear to that location. And I think that's fine, you know, when when markets are a little bit earlier. But things are are far more advanced at this point. And what we what we're trying to do is to bridge, as as Keith said, the buyer and the seller and put them as close as is technologically possible, with the least amount of fragmentation in an effort to increase the signal quality. Like
That at the end of the day, there's so much conversation about AI. Like all these LLMs, they're all commoditized. Like they all popped up and they all, you know, blew Yeah, they blew up and then they got commoditized immediately. So and you know, I can ask my LLM to build me another LLM and it'll probably do a pretty good job to build one for me. So that's not the differentiation. The differentiation is the data that these models have available to them. And I think what
Brett House (16:29.788)
Yeah.
Rio (16:31.287)
Increasingly so, yeah.
Brett House (16:35.365)
Yeah.
Brett House (16:40.966)
Yeah, yeah.
Brett House (16:45.852)
Yeah.
Yeah, and and that's a common theme. And we talked about with Joe Rudon from Primitive, and we've talked about that in a bunch of different forums. Stephanie Laser, right, about how the signal, which is which is incredibly deep on the publisher side, the contextual signals that you guys are are capturing within video or within editorial content, not not a lot of that is actually passing through the pipes. Yeah, and and that could, you know, and the whole promise of digital wasn't it personalization, effective targeting.
Rio (17:08.6)
Just a fraction of it, yeah.
Brett House (17:15.662)
less noise, more signal, whatever you wanna say. but but but the reality of that is we're still getting bad targeting, right? and which is gonna affect outcomes. It's gonna affect your your return on ad spend or your attribution capabilities, right? Because you're you're not really hitting the people you think you're hitting.
Richie (17:23.386)
Yeah.
Richie (17:29.572)
Yeah.
Yeah, I th I think there's a there's a couple things that are like wrapped in here and I I kind of point to to two primary things that we're essentially sort of focused on how do we how do we solve. the the first is I'd say access to supply, right? And I don't mean like do we have it or do we not have it.
Brett House (17:49.97)
Yeah.
Richie (17:52.568)
Right. Like we we play in the open internet world. We're not playing in in the walled gardens. So, you know, generally speaking, everything's available. You know, it just depends on the economic terms that are set with the publisher. what I'm more focused on is is how we get that inventory to the door. Right. And so when when everything started, DSPs integrated with SSPs, multiple SSPs, not one. And so what's sort of happened over time is that
Brett House (18:08.24)
Yeah.
Richie (18:20.75)
You know, we as a as a DSP, like any other, can have a hard time seeing all the inventory from a given publisher. And so like what that really means under the hood is if we just take a you know a made-up example, if we had a publisher that had a billion ad requests per day, and we would have consume those requests through 10 different exchanges, which is very common in in every format, there's two inherent problems with that. One is the duplication, the potential duplication.
Of the number of requests that we're seeing. I put that Yeah. And I'd I let's take it, take the like, is anyone doing nefarious off the table? Like there's just an inherent like inefficiency in consuming supply through that many paths, even if everyone's doing all the right thing. so that that's that's one problem. The bigger problem is that we don't know what percentage of the total 1 billion we ever saw. So as an example, obviously SSPs.
Rio (18:52.494)
85 % duplication rate is what I've been reading recently.
Richie (19:19.514)
They don't talk to each other. They don't say, hey, I'm going to send this 5%, you send the other 5%, and let's together make up the total picture. We probably get the same 10% 12 times. And one of the fundamental problems with that is that if our job as a DSP is to place bids on behalf of advertisers to drive value, and we don't know all the inventory to place said bid on, we already have one hand tied behind our back.
Brett House (19:47.322)
Yeah.
Richie (19:47.716)
And that and that's nothing to do with is someone arbitraging the auction or charging too much or taking fees out. That's just a fundamental problem with the duplicate supply paths that are out there. So, you know, so our general thesis and how do we help publishers is let's create dedicated paths to to those publishers. Let's do it with no duplication, let's also do it with no caps so we can see the full picture.
And once we see the full picture, we can get into stage two of like how do we decorate that with good signals? How do we determine whether those signals have quality? But there's an inherent like visibility problem that exists in this space when you have the number of middlemen that that currently exist.
Brett House (20:30.566)
Does this scale across the publisher sorry?
Rio (20:31.194)
So, Richie, at, well, yeah, so looking at like Viant Publishers Solution, then, I mean, and look, I know Viant has done a good job in the last couple of years building relationships with publishers. I know you've had different events where you've invited them and publisher forums. I think it can, you actually have one. That was quite interesting. But that said, this announcement of Viant Publishers Solution probably did take some people by surprise because DSPs, as we all know, are typically focused on buyers and on the buy side, on demand side. So like,
Why did Viant decide now is the right time to build and launch these new publisher focused capabilities, which it seems to me is more just giving transparency to supply side, correct?
Keith Petri (21:11.883)
Yeah, we we sorry, I couldn't tell if Richie was gonna jump in, but th this was certainly not an overnight thought process. This was methodical, this was based off of a number of different trends in the market, and this was off actually after a number of different introductions of lighter weight versions of this. So internally at Viant, just like many buy-side platforms, we have a
Richie (21:16.697)
No yeah.
Brett House (21:32.336)
Yeah.
Keith Petri (21:37.475)
A number of different mechanisms to determine if we bid or not bid, and then to what extent do we desire that impression for any number of our advertisers in that moment. And so combining all those signals, we would refer to that as supply quality. And as we built out our own internal supply quality model, we identified that a number of the attributes that were supposed to be incorporated were not always present.
So we began communicating with a number of our different supply partners, pre current exchanges.
Brett House (22:07.996)
Can you give some examples of that, some of those attributes just for illustrative purposes?
Keith Petri (22:11.909)
Yeah, I mean it's anything from like the ad density on the page, it's the actual domain, it is the actual GPID, it is the historical performance of a various number of combinations. It it everybody else looks at two factors. They look at MFA and they look at IVT, and they have a number of different partners who they can incorporate those attributes to make a determination.
Brett House (22:17.478)
Yeah.
Keith Petri (22:37.987)
We have that in addition to some other signals as a result of working direct with publishers via Iris and Locker. And
Brett House (22:44.56)
Yeah, it's it sounds and so just just to interject for one second, it sounds very similar to the media quality argument that Ares Levin is making. He just published a a paper with Sim in partnership with Sim. And it's all about, you know, the MQ, the media quality, because you're you're trying to is is i am I going down the right path and and thinking that you guys are actually architecting something that's gonna help increase
Keith Petri (23:04.194)
Yeah, I'm certainly not gonna argue with Arez on quality versus outcomes because I think that's a moot point at this point at this stage. but yes, w when I finish Arez's paper and reading it with my own two eyes in twenty twenty eight, I will have a conclusion. I I love him to death. you know, I'll I'll end up going camping with him maybe on his next father outing in a in a year from now. So yeah.
Brett House (23:09.57)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Duh, right?
Brett House (23:29.424)
Yeah, just do what I did. Just dump the paper into k into chat and get a summary and you'll Yeah. But go on, sorry.
Keith Petri (23:32.697)
Well, that's what I meant in terms of actually reading it versus summarizing it. So so we we we looked for these to go back to the supply quality model. We looked to our exchange partners and we also looked to s shaping our own supply in-house. And immediately what we saw is as a result of only centralizing bids on inventory that met our supply quality thresholds, we saw a forty six percent lift in outcomes. And from that alone, we were seeing tremendous efficiencies.
And when we dove deeper into why could we not apply this to all inventory, there were a number of different factors, but at the end of the day, it came down to ensuring that we had those signals from every supply path without any manipulation. And that's when we began kind of going down this route of what do we need to build to engage publishers directly? And how are we going to do this differently than other players in the space? You already had, and I
Rio (24:24.11)
How much of this Keith was just getting rid of, was just like supply path transparency and cleaning up supply path, getting, you know, let's say like, you know, eliminating hops and with that, you know, eliminating markups. How much of it was that versus how much of it was just digging into that rich contextual signal you mentioned or is it both?
Brett House (24:24.444)
How how
Keith Petri (24:41.165)
No, I mean, look, a byproduct of our SPO efforts focused on supply quality is efficiency with media budget and bringing our advertisers' budgets and making it go further. But it is not what we set out to do. We set out to generate performance and performance was a result of cleaning up the quality of the inventory. If you buy a piece of inventory that has no capability of generating a click or conversion or human traffic to begin with.
Brett House (24:56.018)
Yeah.
Rio (24:56.696)
Got it.
Keith Petri (25:10.885)
That is a wasteful impression. If you just focus on brass tacks, you should see improvements over time. And the
Brett House (25:12.72)
Yeah, but yeah.
Brett House (25:19.28)
Yeah, performance is directly correlated or c or yeah, maybe it's causation, but directly correlated with media quality. And media quality can be defined in a whole in kind of multi dimensions, right? It's it's so so what when you gu you said threshold, you guys have a threshold for quality. What goes into that threshold? Like how is that architected? What what specifically is determining that metric that you guys have determined that you gotta meet this in order for us to bid on this particular inventory?
Richie (25:20.228)
Yeah.
Keith Petri (25:45.669)
So we'll probably stay away from individual attributes just because I'm pretty sure your audience is going to glaze over whenever they listen to this, probably getting onto their red eyes to can. However, what we can go into is what we introduced to these publishers and how we held their hand in the development of Viant Publisher Solutions and how that enables them to improve what signal they send us and how much of the share of wallet from Viant they see.
Brett House (25:54.757)
Yeah.
Keith Petri (26:15.173)
And so we introduced supply IQ, which is a dashboard that represents for all of these current publishers how Viant sees their supply through all the various supply paths that we have today. And candidly, it sort of turns into a house of mirrors because they're shocked at the number of supply paths and the different representation of their inventory and attributes that they share with us. And that is the upsell. That's getting to the checkout counter, Brett, where you had Nabisco cookies.
Brett House (26:15.516)
Yeah.
Brett House (26:27.025)
Yeah.
Richie (26:35.312)
That's right, there you go.
Brett House (26:41.841)
Yeah.
Keith Petri (26:43.267)
And you have in VPS, Viant Publisher Solutions, a pop-up that says, if you'd like to have a better working relationship with wet with Viant, here's our hand. Grab it. That first integration is direct access, where we have direct integrations with premium CTV publishers live today. And we'll be expanding to open web through a various number of different means, including pre-bid, ORTB, and mobile and app as well, and streaming audio.
That's the first step is to get direct access to minimize any manipulation. The next step is that
Brett House (27:14.33)
And so right and so right now so that direct th those direct paths right now is limited to a certain amount of of C T V primarily, premium inventory, is that what saying? And then it's going to expand to Yeah.
Richie (27:19.28)
We had a lot like I cared it off.
Keith Petri (27:23.385)
That that's where we focused as a business. I mean, Richie will have stats here. I'll I'll tie things up and then Richie can dive into CTV. But basically where we care about next is our two primary signals, which is the iris ID when you have video content available and making sure that that is announced like bl broadcasted within the bid request so that we can understand the context of that add impression opportunity. And secondarily to that is Vine's household ID.
Richie (27:49.312)
And guess I'm sure we're almost like people and we have
Keith Petri (27:51.781)
Which is our ability to understand and connect that audience behind that impression to our identity spine. And you can do that with our in-house solution, but it's better when you have a premium publisher like we have who does a data match with us where we do a one-to-one match with their authenticated audience tied to our identity spine.
Richie (27:59.652)
Yeah, yeah.
Brett House (28:11.408)
Yeah, which strengthens that, yep.
Rio (28:11.726)
So, so, Keith, before we kick over Richie, I'd love to dig into the CTV aspect a little bit. So just to summarize for the audience too. And I think this is important point. This because you're a DSP, like the initial goal here was to help advertisers get the best return in ad spend the best bang for the buck in terms of where they're putting how they're spending their media dollars. Right. And to do that, you had to improve transparency, remove duplication, clean up the entire supply path and really focus on where is quality inventory.
Richie (28:31.12)
Yeah.
Rio (28:39.65)
And how can you access it for the best price, which makes a lot of sense. And based on that, I understand why you would initially focus on CTV, but the outcome of this, right? And outcome of this was it ends up being better for publishers too, which I think is a very important point.
Richie (28:53.614)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It it like and that's the probably th one of the most important points. And and I think that's where I mean, we're an in we're an industry full of circular and sometimes perverse incentives. And and the the take rate of media is a good representation of unfortunately that sometimes. but at the end of the day, some of the principles for this are really, really basic. I I spent until I got here, I never thought I'd end up at a D S B. It's kind of funny that I'm at one.
Brett House (28:53.68)
Yeah. Yeah.
Brett House (29:07.61)
Yeah.
Brett House (29:23.708)
Yeah.
Richie (29:23.754)
it's very fun, it's very different, not not what I'd expected in a good way. but it is shocking to me that publishers send out billions and billions of requests all day, every day, as a massive part of their business, and they have absolutely no idea if it got to the door of the platform that they hope to God is gonna buy the impression. Like no, that that cannot be the way this operates. And so, you know, once once we got here.
Brett House (29:44.444)
Yeah.
Richie (29:51.086)
We spent probably the first six months screenshotting and sending QPS signal coverage reports to a bunch of publishers asking them if they could send over X, Y, and Z field and you know, some of them just standard open RTB fields. And the publisher's typical response was, Well, no well, that's in there. It's like, well, it's not coming through X, Y, and Z paths. Can you go and check check on that? And publishers went and checked on it. Like they're not trying to hold these things back and
sometimes it's not that the the the platform in the middle is also doing anything nefarious. Like we're running trillions of auctions all in real time at lightning speed pace, like things fall off off the cart. It's just you know natural. And so we almost spent too much time sending internal reports to external partners that we were like, this is doesn't make any sense. It's non-efficient. Why don't we just build a dashboard that enables a publisher to see?
Everything that they sent through all the pars that they sent and we'll give them coverage reports. and obviously, like people like Michael Sullivan and Sincera, you know, built products to do exactly this, like commend them for it. Like DSBs need and should be providing that transparency back to pubs so they can get the things they want. And that's really like, as Keith said, that's the very first plus part of of the equation. Once we started doing that, we realized in in combination with the supply quality.
Is there's a bunch of signals we need, like we will not bid if you don't pass us S chain and a you know ads like TXT. So some basic things like don't pass it, we won't bid, period. The end. But then there's a lot of other ones that have varying impact on the outcomes that we can drive. And so we've got one thread on how do we ensure we get the signal quality that we want, and a natural second, you know.
Part of that is, okay, well, if we can minimize the number of paths in order to get those things, we make it easy for us and we make it easy for the publisher. And yes, along the way, there's some economic benefits to doing that. Like we are a buy side advertiser-only business. We don't charge for these. We don't believe in the concept of why we would take a tax to charge a publisher to access or demand. Like we we already charge the buyer. We're that that's our core business.
Richie (32:12.088)
So those that's sort of like what got us here. Now, what we're seeing is that when we get full visibility to the inventory. So we know all the inventory that's there, we make sure we pick the right bids, and then we make that decision to pick the bids based on good signal quality, we get better results. That that that's obvious. Well, what happens when they get better results? We bid more. The bid rate goes up. Then we what do we want to do if we bid more? We want to win more. So what do we do? We increase the bid price.
And so over time, what we're seeing is that the publishers that, you know, lean in, they adopt certain signals or they fix certain macros that we're not populating, or they go direct so we can see the full picture, is we spend more with them. We have higher bid rates, we have higher win rates.
Rio (32:58.754)
Do brands push back Richie at all when they're single? Our CPMs are going up. Cause that's the one complaint I hear a lot of times is well, the brands are driving this race to the bottom because their procurement is always making decisions for, you know, for whether it's agency or DSP, based on like what, what are your CPMs with major pubs?
Brett House (33:04.411)
Yeah.
Richie (33:04.698)
Yeah.
Richie (33:16.1)
Y yeah, totally. big headwind that we dealt with internally was we would get yeah we we had an interesting a deal popped through on a Friday night, I remember in the fall, and it was a you know big football package and it came in at some ungodly CPM, if you would ask the sales team. And so we sent this package through and everyone sort of like threw up all over this ridiculously high CPM.
And so we were like, well, what like what's the problem? And they're like, well, we couldn't possibly buy that if it's fifty, sixty dollars. Like it needs to be ten. It's like, but but the well, I don't want to disclose who the publisher was, but you know, big yeah, yeah, it was it yeah, it was CTV, big premium live sports, and and but but the reaction to that was we thought the wrong reaction. Well
Rio (33:47.553)
That's high,
Brett House (33:48.358)
What what was the inventory then? What was the impact?
Yeah. No but w was it was it but it was C T V or was it was yeah.
Brett House (34:00.275)
Yeah.
Richie (34:05.4)
Wha why is fifty or seventy or twenty like the right or the wrong number? Like do you know what the outcome is that it drives? Because maybe the thirty dollar you know, high quality, highly engaged audience on the other end is four, three, four times as performant as the nine dollar
Brett House (34:19.714)
yeah, on on the big s yeah, on the big screen, sound sight and motion, you know, equivalent to linear television, right? Do you think this is something that has just been bred into whether it's principle based buying on the agency side representing the brand, that people have just gotten habitually used to cheap CPMs and kind of chasing kind of cheap reach, which
Richie (34:26.255)
Yeah.
Rio (34:39.884)
Yeah, chasing price and scale over everything else, right?
Richie (34:42.638)
Yeah. I mean, yeah, like chasing cheap reach is a real thing for sure. and I think it depends on different formats, right? But in C T V we've got a huge variance of price. We have stuff at the six, seven, eight dollar range. We got stuff at the seventy-five dollar range. And in those ranges, we've got a huge difference of audience engagement. We've got stuff that's passive and you know, as as you guys know, we we acquired T vision recently. And why why we think that's such a huge unlock for us is
Brett House (34:48.912)
Yeah.
Brett House (34:57.35)
Yeah.
Brett House (35:07.782)
Yeah.
Richie (35:12.356)
you know, the attention that someone has, like are they in the room? How many people are in the room? Pretty hard to sell something to to a human that's in the other room, right? So like that ad
Brett House (35:20.754)
Can you and can you explain how that tech works? 'Cause I the I certainly have read and heard about that, but the how does the T vision tech detect, you know, presence, people presence in a room?
Richie (35:29.164)
Yeah. In in a hope to not completely butcher their pitch and and get a call right after this. yeah, yeah, it it yeah, it it's yeah, I mean it it it's like a panel based measurement solution. It it it has an opt in, you know, based panel of of panelists. in each of the homes, we have a camera mounted on the TV and that camera, you know, in conjunction with an app that the that the homeowner can can run.
Brett House (35:33.202)
Yeah. That's not how it works. You just made that up, Richie.
Yeah.
Brett House (35:46.695)
Yep.
Richie (35:56.714)
helps us understand when when an ad is is running. firstly with someone in the room, so presence in room. then we look at code viewing. So if someone is, how many someone's one, two, three?
Brett House (36:02.437)
Yeah.
Brett House (36:06.554)
Yep. And I'm assuming because it's a panel that people are self-identifying in the in the in the acquisition process. This is exactly how hypometrics, Joanna drew at hypometrics works. Yeah. Yeah, they they get it's kind of like the yeah, it's the Nielsen TV where you're sort of but but better, right? Where you actually get you get it, you you select everybody who that's in the household, their their persistent IDs, maybe even their devices.
Richie (36:10.746)
Yep. Yep. Yep.
Rio (36:14.414)
Yeah, so this is not like surveillance. It's not surveillance capitalism is, guess, what you're getting.
Richie (36:15.599)
Yeah.
Keith Petri (36:17.325)
N no, and and even beyond that, yeah.
Richie (36:18.178)
No, all I'll opt in.
Richie (36:22.949)
Yeah.
Keith Petri (36:23.002)
Yeah, it it's
Richie (36:27.012)
Yep. Yeah, and and there's a lot of other like embedded AI. So, you know, we can look at presence in room, number of people, so co viewing, and then attention. So if there was someone in the room, were they looking at their phone or were they looking up at the screen? Those are kind of the three main metrics that that we look at, which obviously are like basic fundamental things that we should know if we're gonna serve an ad and determine if it was if it generated a result. It's not shocking that an ad didn't
generate any results if no one was in the room, obviously. So we're trying to have those things like factor into the performance of buying the media. And what we're generally seeing, and this is why it does help publishers, and we are seeing an increase in the CPMs, not the opposite, is that if we serve ads to humans, and perhaps there's two of them in the room, well, the $30 deal that we had, the $30 base CPM price with two people in the room,
Brett House (36:57.658)
Mm.
Rio (36:58.766)
Yeah.
Brett House (37:04.037)
Yeah.
Richie (37:24.962)
Isn't thirty dollars, it's fifteen dollars. So now it's like all right.
Brett House (37:26.202)
It's six yeah, yeah.
Rio (37:27.49)
Yeah, so this maybe is one for Keith here. there's been a lot of like with looking within online video, which is a really broad category, right? You have CTV and then you have like in-stream versus out-stream and a huge distinction in price, but also quality, right? I mean, high quality in-stream. Like let's say like an example could be like Amazon Prime Video where everyone's authenticated, right? They're all logged in. It's within the stream, within the actual video it's watching.
versus, you Outstream, which may be, you know, on a mobile device, right? It doesn't even necessarily need to be on an actual television set, right? And that could be $2 CPM, right? As opposed to like, you know, I think 40, 50, you know, for live sports, could be more than that. Right. So I think looking at that, there have been some people arguing that because of like the big discrepancy, because of some of these fraud issues, like
Brett House (37:59.921)
Yeah.
Rio (38:16.842)
Go to the platformers, buy direct. There's been some people making it, what would be the advantage of working with it, working with a DSP to make these scaled buys of let's say video inventory? What would be the advantage of working with a Viant in this situation from an advertiser perspective?
Keith Petri (38:33.393)
I mean, it's a it's it's the same reason that you know, your company employs you to understand media mix and the outcomes that it generates. We are an orchestration layer. We help you determine where to do where to allocate your budget and in what capacity and how that will impact the consumer at what point in the decision making process and funnel that they are. And for you, you are doing that as a guiding layer.
Richie (38:44.43)
It's
Richie (39:01.808)
Mm-hmm.
Keith Petri (39:03.139)
A platform can do that with a centralized ad server and measurement to determine how to reallocate that budget and push somebody further down the funnel.
Brett House (39:13.178)
Yeah. Well let me ask you this is is like with supply IQ and that threshold, the the media the quality, media quality threshold we were talking about, does that calculate things like in stream and outstream so that you can actually differentiate between better advertising versus worse placement? Richie?
Richie (39:23.822)
I think there is a function verified.
Richie (39:29.981)
Yeah, yeah, I mean it absolutely does. I mean like again, like all all all the signals that come through i i in a basic open RTB request are used to determine what we believe is a quality it is quality inventory and something that we should bid on. And the more signal we get and the cleaner the signal is, the better the bidder makes the decisions, the higher the bid price will go. Like th those are
Brett House (39:32.219)
Yeah.
Brett House (39:53.851)
Yeah. So so let me let me follow that up. And I think this is the sort of permittive conversation that we had that I'll I'll go back to. Is is when when it comes to signal quality, I get it, but you probably have to limit the amount of signal that you can capture, considering the amount of compute and and bandwidth that it takes, which adds cost to your underlying business model, right? Which makes it untenable to pull in all of that publisher signal, which is just too much. How do you guys manage that process, right? Because publishers have a ton of signal.
It's not being leveraged the way it should be in the in the Bitstream, in the in the digital ecosystem. How do you guys think about that?
Keith Petri (40:27.131)
So so I I'd argue that publishers have a certain amount of signal that is valuable. And that's certainly what we're looking to ensure gets passed in a clean manner from the publisher to our buying decisioning mechanism, our bidder. In between there, you have a number of different players that have matured and hopefully are continuing to morph today. And
Brett House (40:42.096)
Yeah.
Keith Petri (40:52.431)
What they've tried to do is exactly address that issue. And you've had a few guests on your podcast that touch on it. But what I'm more or less talking to is curation. And the concept of removing attributes and streamlining inventory into buckets by various supply side intermediaries is actually a disservice to the advertiser because at the end of the day, you want all of those attributes to come in.
Brett House (41:02.002)
Yeah.
Keith Petri (41:18.435)
In a single decision-making point across all potential inventory that you could buy for your campaign, to weight your bid appropriately and determine if it is if it even does make sense for your audience. Because what happens is curation basically generates a mortgage-backed security or a cable bundle or something of the sort. My my father who listens to all my podcasts hates it though, because he was in mortgage-backed securities. So
Rio (41:38.326)
I love that analogy by the way, Keith. That's great.
Richie (41:46.458)
Ha ha ha.
Keith Petri (41:46.487)
It basically enables them to bucket lower valuable lower value inventory with less opportunity for it to generate an outcome and package it in with a few premium opportunities and label it as data, create a ridiculous margin that they take out of the publisher's pocket and charge the advertiser when a company like Viant and others can take all of those attributes at the moment of bid and decide if it makes sense for any of their current live campaigns.
That is a completely different story than sending a deal ID through and removes a few of the attributes that you might use to decide if you're going to bid on that impression or not.
Rio (42:17.41)
Yeah, that.
Rio (42:26.232)
Yeah, I think there's been a broad agreement that curation in his latest incarnation has not been super helpful for anybody, especially publishers. Yeah. Yeah, it's been bundling.
Richie (42:32.185)
Yeah.
Brett House (42:33.126)
Yeah, it's it's premium masked as it's not truly premium.
Keith Petri (42:36.077)
If if that is a broad perspective, I'm glad to hear it. I continue to beat this drum. So I'm glad that ties are changing.
Richie (42:41.776)
Well it's it is it is as a it's funny, as a as a former curator, right? Like there there's there's pros and cons, but they're they're grounded in the same core problem, right? So like I'll use Iris Iris as an example. We had a content identifier. That content identifier had, let's say, a bunch of contextual segments tied to it. What did we really want to do when we when we started that offering?
Rio (42:43.566)
What?
Richie (43:09.284)
The first data company that we sat down with was GrapeShot. And, you know, 'cause we were in the recommendations business, ad tech wasn't, you know, what we'd spent all of our careers in. And so I I I asked the GrapeShot team, you know, Andrew Smith and a whole bunch of other great team members over there, and I said, How how does the tech work in display? And they said, Every time a page URL gets sent to a DSP, which is on every bid request obviously in display, the page URL gets sent to an endpoint we have, you know.
Called a pre-bit integration. We take the page URL, we look it up. It's publicly available, of course, because what how would we read the article? We scrape all the text on the web page and we respond back in a short period of time with a classification. You know, this is what that that that article's about. And then they cache the response for some period of time until we determine that maybe we should change the opinion of what that article is. And that concept was totally missing in these other formats, right? And so
What we figured is was like, all right, well, if we need to get this identifier, we need to get it through the supply chain to the other end. The more hops that we put in, the less IDs got to the DSP. So we had this like North Star, I think, for the first year. It was like, man, if we just get into pre-bid, we're done. It's that easy. Not that easy at all. And so after years of trying to get this ID through to you know, one, two, twenty different DSPs, we're like, man, getting a signal through on
Rio (44:26.092)
Not really, yeah.
Brett House (44:27.109)
Yeah.
Richie (44:35.928)
some composition of the supply to the DSP where we don't understand the QPS algorithms that shape the traffic, like this is hopeless. I I wish there was another way. And at the at that exact moment, Xander Curate was born. We were one of the first curators, you know, after Audigent and the team, I think coined curation. And it was such a a blessing for a company like us and many other data companies that struggle to get their signal through to the DSP.
And it created a vehicle for us to to to pick up the IDs, right? SSPs inherently almost see all the supply from their publishers. They only have to see it one time, so they don't have a cost, you know, issue. As a DSP, we can't consume a hundred percent of every exchange's QPS. That would be financially, you know, irresponsible. And so it created this
Brett House (45:17.553)
Yeah.
Brett House (45:23.889)
Yeah.
Rio (45:24.14)
Yeah, no, wouldn't work. Your cost would be astronomical if you tried that. It's totally unpractical.
Richie (45:27.556)
Yeah. But a creative like look, I'll give it the value that it that it does that it has for certain platforms. It it does give you a way to pre-curate that inventory. Now what happens in this space when you can do that? A bunch of bad stuff can happen. You mark up fees, you strip other inventory out. And so but we we do believe in the concept of how do you get these great signals to places that you can use them. So our our approach is like, all right, well, if we want to get it through to the other side, let's minimize the number of middlemen.
And let's actually help get these quality signals to the place that if you ask most of these data curators they want it, they want them in the buying platform. That's the North Star.
Rio (46:05.466)
Or richie for sure, as you add hops, mean, like signal gets signal gets diluted or taken out each time for sure. And like, you know, we even covered this in previous episodes where it gets to the point where it's easy to obfuscate bad behavior. But then even looking at like how DSPs operate, right? Like prioritizing, there's so many bids coming through. You're going to prioritize the ones with with IDs. mean, it makes sense. Plus, I mean, even looking at things as as practical as frequency caps. mean, if you're you're
I mean, don't think many people don't realize that you're from the supply side. know, the DSPs, people are transacting and buying ads across, bidding on inventory across hundreds, maybe thousands, right? Publishers being able to do that at scale, be able to give people a good experience. Tell the advertiser we're going to limit ad exposures to certain number. You can only do that if you're part-tasking ID. So I think that's just been a standard practice. But what I liked about some of the things you've been rolling out of Vine is you're including, Keith, as you mentioned, some of these, like instead of just saying we're going to
Go use a curation route and just focus on deal IDs. We're going to actually add additional signal, contextual signal. Um, you know, one of them being the, you know, you mentioned this household ID, there's, there's all the other, like, there's all the, the Iris ID that embed that rich signal in there. I think that's a very interesting way to do it. And, and so I can see why that would benefit, benefit publishers too.
Keith Petri (47:23.121)
Yeah, and I think to further opine on that, we are addressing this opportunity by focusing on signal and a byproduct is the efficiency and the media dollars can go further. To go to Brett's point earlier of how do you ensure you get all of that signal and inventory from the supply side to the demand side without ballooning infrastructure costs? We are also working with these web publishers in particular with local.
Brett House (47:23.366)
Yeah. And
Richie (47:33.452)
And I do think like they don't actually intend directly.
Richie (47:40.784)
They don't get bombed on it, so they're like banging down the board on team. I think onboarding that is a good job, they just have to
Keith Petri (47:51.633)
Client side JavaScript that they can enable and they can control what mechanisms are turned on and off, server side, within Viant Publisher Solutions. And so they can turn on the Viant household ID if they'd like to ensure that they get the appropriate wallet spend from us. They can turn on our proprietary supply quality model, which will allow us to determine and prioritize which of their inventory we look at first, minimizing the infrastructure costs.
Richie (47:57.048)
I do think there.
Richie (48:03.184)
Yeah.
Keith Petri (48:19.053)
and getting rid of any other traffic, which might be an AI bot crawling the website. and so there's a lot of mechanisms in here that we are heavily leaning on that is true tech and not just a path to minimize attacks.
Brett House (48:35.28)
Yeah. Well and and to Rio's point, do you do you guys have a s I mean, does your does your solution enable frequency management effectively across you know, these multiple hops? because
Keith Petri (48:45.839)
Yeah, across everything and a and across channels. I mean, the one of the benefits of a DSP versus doing individual buys on individual publishers is that we can look at all of your impressions and understand do you want a frequency cap at a household level, at an individual level, at a device level, at a browser level? How do you want to push somebody through sequential messaging? I mean, obviously the largest screen in the room is where you want to have the biggest impression, but you also want to make sure that you subsequently target my wife to push her over the edge and buy that Father's Day gift that's coming up.
Brett House (49:00.443)
Yeah.
Richie (49:03.232)
Sure.
Brett House (49:09.265)
Yeah.
Brett House (49:16.72)
Yep.
Rio (49:17.442)
That's important. So looking at like AI and agentic AI, so VIA had a lot of announcements recently, some related to the publisher solutions, but some just generally I thought were quite interesting. so the company's been pretty aggressive in touting these new features, promoting them. Like how does, like for what you're saying, how is AI changing the relationships between buy side and sell side? Like what are some things that you've noticed?
Richie (49:44.08)
Well I think it's I think it's a I think it's enabling us to do a lot of things and to do them a lot faster than we ever could have. and so the ability to to analyze data, to determine you know, what's working, what's not, to do that on an automated basis and to let the buying platforms be more efficient, which in in our opinion will help buyer and seller, has has sped up innovation, I think, across the board.
And again, I don't think that's gonna slow down. I don't think that's gonna change. I think it's only gonna speed up. And yeah, I I I think the agentic stuff is is really interesting. I think in practice it makes a lot of sense. You know, we should have, you know, orders on one side that say, Hey, I wanna buy these things. And why do we need a human necessarily in the middle to communicate what that deal ID could or should be? Like, you know, there's definitely efficiencies in the middle, but you're still gonna need
the unified buying platform to deploy the dollars at the end of the day. And in our opinion, you know, we we get the question from buyers, there's really only two questions you ever get asked. What unique supply do you have? Or what unique data do you have? Everything else is kind of a commodity. And so we you know
Brett House (50:49.873)
Yeah.
Yeah. I want incremental reach. I want incremental ways to reach new audiences that I can't reach anywhere else. Right. Yeah.
Richie (50:56.974)
Yeah. So we we clearly don't answer that question with here's the unique supply we have. And we don't want to answer it with that way. So that that's fine. We're reaching open and available open web inventory, you know, cross format. But we we are obviously centrally focused on what data, you know, what unique data, what unique signals, how rich is the coverage of those signals. So that whether you do an agentic buy and you put the dollars in or you do a traditional self-serve buy or you do an outcomes campaign, like there are just different ways to
to run the dollars, but the the platforms to spend the dollar at the end of the day aren't going to disappear, in our opinion. It's just about how do we ease the friction on deploying said dollars.
Brett House (51:38.374)
Yeah, yeah. And it
Keith Petri (51:38.417)
Yeah, I to
Rio (51:38.766)
If I go completely headless, is that the end goal? I don't know what you're able to disclose or not. If media is going to be rewritten, you're going to have buyer and seller agents, or indifferent agents, agents, executing, let's say, a lot of the media buying process today, whether it's planning, buying, trafficking, all that stuff.
Keith Petri (51:59.715)
I I would I would to to address that and to take it a step further, I would stipulate that Vyan already supports API access into our platform and whatever the industry what whatever the industry matures into is completely content with us. and there might be some opportunities where we can lean in and shift where the market might be heading. I think that more important than that is honing in on what Richie was alluding to with proprietary data.
Rio (52:09.326)
So you have gone headless basically.
Keith Petri (52:29.007)
The T-Vision acquisition unlocks thousands of households and tens of thousands of individuals where we see all of their browser behavior data, their media consumption habits, and then their purchase history as well. and that is fully opted in. And we can also connect that data to other transactional data across a number of verticals that Viant excels at in terms of travel, retail, CPG, automotive, QSR.
Richie (52:45.466)
Here we go, then you call him.
Keith Petri (52:56.953)
and we can take that and we can understand a propensity of an individual who pays attention to certain media content and how they may or may not act as they mature in a decision making process that one of our advertisers cares about. And so understanding no good Brett, you run with it.
Richie (52:58.864)
There is not to be able to report the CS that we would have. I personally think for extra we should reevaluate don't think E DX and CSU should be together. I think it creates a lot of different challenges. But I think like Paul and Albert can talk about that today, but how do we make sure for the
Brett House (53:12.538)
Yeah, and and with and and with yeah, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, and with it and with any sort of panel solution is it you can extrapolate out if you've got a statistically significant sample of data, right, that's super rich, super deterministic, right? It's self-reported and opt-in. You can use that to validate your larger data pools, right? To ensure that they're at a level of accuracy. And if you talk to any data science or or analytics person, they'll tell you how important, even though panels are limited in size and scope, it's not necessarily census.
Richie (53:27.396)
That can be shanned out.
Richie (53:42.128)
But that made it like starting.
Brett House (53:42.182)
They're critically important for validation and sort of quality control across your larger data set.
Keith Petri (53:46.553)
Yeah, you'd be shocked at how much you can do extrapolation with a clean identity spine with a smaller data set. However, if you look at, you know, incumbent data sets compared to the size of the T vision panel, I won't be naming any, but there's not a significant difference. And it is certainly something that we're going to be investing in. To take it a another step, any buy-side platform that continues to lean in on taking an aggregate.
Brett House (53:51.878)
Yeah.
Keith Petri (54:15.093)
number of identifiers and that meet a certain criteria, auto intenders from a third party audience pool and targeting those in a DSP, that platform cannot call itself AI enabled because the true benefit of artificial intelligence is feeding a raw array of data, everything that Keith Petrie does and associating it with my profile. And when you do that, the AI can actually make an informed decision based on the time.
Brett House (54:20.774)
Yeah.
Keith Petri (54:44.079)
the individual, the context of that individual, and all of his or her prior behaviors. And that is how you need to feed a truly AI mechanism.
Brett House (54:53.882)
Yeah, that's a good point. It's a it's it's a much richer source of sort of predictive analytics than your typical the old days of of of Exolate back in the day when we collected cookies and and associated with them with with particular segments that
Keith Petri (55:06.307)
I I've made this metaphor before, but you don't go to a Michelin star restaurant and get served a Snickers bar at dessert. That is a prepackaged audience segment and you don't know what went into it. You get raw ingredients and that Michelin chef produces their take on a Snickers bar with seven layers of different chocolate or whatever.
Brett House (55:15.056)
Yeah, yeah.
Brett House (55:24.816)
Yeah. And that's always optimizing, right? Because you've got a constant stream of data that's that's just adding signal onto these profiles.
Keith Petri (55:31.515)
Brett, I love going back to good meals. I know you joined me at Rosholi in New York. We can go back. I bet you their chef has already done a different twist on an amazing pasta we can try.
Brett House (55:40.914)
There we go. There we go. So so Rio, we're late for a for another meeting, but should we do quick hits? This has been a great conversation and we could certainly follow this up with that other conversation. so so I'll I'll I'll start. Is is supply path optimization helping publishers or hurting them?
Rio (55:48.622)
Yeah, it's two quick hits, yeah.
Richie (55:58.18)
Helping them. Yeah. yeah, it it's help it's helping it's helping take out taxes in the middle that remove dollars that can end up in the publisher's pocket. and it's also helping them improve signal quality to increase their their bid density.
Brett House (56:00.517)
Why? I mean
Rio (56:15.862)
Is identity the new currency of digital advertising? Or is it more complex than that?
Keith Petri (56:21.007)
I wouldn't say it's a new currency. I think that it's an established currency and it's the backbone of a lot of the efficacy in our space. And I'd say that the most important aspect of identity is being able to find and rediscover it, not just have it in a graph in an ecosystem, but actually be able to see it in a bid stream, to have a biddable impression on that individual.
Brett House (56:41.18)
Yeah.
Brett House (56:46.416)
Yeah. The how about the on the topic of sort of the walled garnification, I'm gonna make up a word, of of the ecosystem. And you can see it within the the agency hold codes, with the publicis live ramp acquisition, you can see it obviously in the Metas, the Googles, the AWSs.
Rio (57:01.326)
Yeah, they are building a rolled walled garden.
Brett House (57:02.5)
Yeah, y even the premium publishers that are building sort of closed data ecosystems and and obviously the all the social media vendors, what do you guys see as the as the as the future of the open web? I think is the is is my fundamental question. And does it have a chance and how can it develop a data advantage?
Richie (57:16.356)
Yeah.
Richie (57:19.704)
Yeah, I I it certainly has a chance. I I think we're probably it it's losing the battle right now. I think the percentage of dollars going to the walled gardens versus the open web is a pretty clear representation for that. and I think that's why, you know, these things around, you know, optimized pods and signal quality that that's why it matters so much. Like we have to clean up the open web so that we can make it performant. When we're competing with a walled garden that has
They control the content, they control the sell side ad server, they control the auction, they control the buy side. Like it's a complete perfect feedback loop. And we need to figure out a create that same feedback loop so that we can generate the same return on ad spend and and hopefully not rig it to say that we generated all the all the return. But there's some fundamental gaps that we need to solve to actually be able to make that a reality.
Brett House (57:54.808)
And yep.
Brett House (58:06.502)
Yeah, yeah.
Rio (58:11.502)
Yeah. In fact, can see it's interesting to old garden discussion. can see like hold co is building out their own like version of that. And I think what would probably happen in this is you'd see a hold co acquire a DSP. I'm guessing my prediction is that happens within the next six, six to 12 months.
Brett House (58:11.634)
Yeah.
Brett House (58:28.772)
You heard it here on signal noise.
Keith Petri (58:29.143)
A few of them already have, but yeah.
Rio (58:32.0)
Yeah, yeah, try, try again and do it successfully. Correct. Yeah. And one of the major ones. Yeah.
Richie (58:32.154)
They can try again.
Brett House (58:37.126)
Yeah. So sh so we'll end with this. Will AI make publishers stronger or weaker?
Keith Petri (58:43.875)
It's a mixed bag. I do think that premium publishers will always survive because the economy and civilization, if we want to end on a high note, requires continued production of high quality content. The most important piece will be if they can continue to keep their premium signals not only for ad tech, but also even for AI geodiscovery as well.
Rio (59:11.726)
Okay, maybe one final one. So open web, does it survive or does it become less than rest relevant?
Richie (59:19.204)
it it'll survive. at the end of the day, like co h hopefully content's king and us as consumers, like we we like our options, we like our selections and you know I don't see that going in the direction that there's only two media companies in the world that all the content gets produced with. And so but in order for it to succeed, we've gotta figure out how to monetize it at at a at a high ROI to the to the way in which these walled gardens are driving
significant return on ad spend. So yeah, I think we gotta clean up the space and we gotta get get things humming in order for us to to really maximize the value.
Rio (59:58.35)
fact, Rich and Keith, my prediction, think within the next two to three years, programmatic gets rewired to a large extent and I think publishers are one of the main beneficiaries of it. I think it is a new age for publishers.
Brett House (01:00:07.91)
Yep. Yep, for sure. Well I that a great note to end on. Thank you guys for joining us. Sorry to cut to cut it short. We'll have you back to do kind of a Joe Rogan style late Friday afternoon conversation. it we just exhaust ourselves intellectually, but that's that's the fun part of this. so everybody that's made it this far, check us out at dev dot signal and noise.ai. you can find us on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
Richie (01:00:10.138)
Totally agree.
Rio (01:00:19.565)
Yeah, we'd love it.
Brett House (01:00:32.842)
And we will be at Can Lions having a ton of fun and interviewing a lot of really interesting people. So stay tuned for more content from Signal Noise. Thanks, everybody, and thanks, guys.
Rio (01:00:41.954)
Yeah, thanks Keith Richie and the Vian team for making this happen. Appreciate the opportunity. This is fun. We'll have to do it again, like Brett said.
Keith Petri (01:00:47.057)
Appreciate it, guys.
Brett House (01:00:47.078)
Yep. Awesome guys. Bye.
Richie (01:00:48.056)
Yeah. Thanks for having us.
Comments