Hello, everyone and welcome to Viant's Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. My name is Kelsey, and I will be your operator today. Before I hand the call over to the Viant team, I would like to go over just a few housekeeping notes for the program. As a reminder, this webinar is being recorded. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] We thank you for your attendance today, and I will now turn things over to Nicole Borsje. Please, go ahead, Nicole.

Great. Thank you, Kelsey. Good afternoon and welcome to the Viant Technology's second quarter 2021 financial results conference call. On the call today are Tim Vanderhook, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer; Chris Vanderhook, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer; and Larry Madden, Viant's Chief Financial Officer. I'd like to remind you that we will make forward-looking statements on our call today that are based on assumptions and subject to future events, risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. We undertake no obligation to update these results except as required by law. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements and our entire Safe Harbor statement, please refer to the press release issued today as well as the risk and uncertainties described in our annual report on Form 10-K and other filings with the SEC. During today's call, we will also present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures including a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures are included in our earnings press release issued today, and in our filings with the SEC. I would also like to point out that we posted a presentation to our Investor Relations website to provide supplemental financial highlight on the quarter. I would now like to turn the call over to Tim Vanderhook, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Viant. Tim?

Thank you, Nicole, and thank you everyone for joining today's call. I am pleased to report that Viant delivered a strong second quarter. Our growth was driven by advertisers and agencies continuing to adopt our differentiated technology and software to execute their advertising campaigns. Consumers, content owners and advertisers continue to grow their interest in and use of the connected TV channel, and we expect to continue to benefit from the secular growth over the long-term. We had strong performance across a number of key metrics starting with connected TV, which grew 105% in the quarter, representing 41% of Contribution ex-TAC. CTV is not only our fastest-growing channel, but also our largest channel by any metric, as we continue to build on our decade of experience in this area. On the customer front, we had a great quarter. We continue to expand our reach adding 22 active customers to bring our total to 288 at the end of Q2, 2021. You may recall during our last earnings call that we announced a large software release called WWC, or World Without Cookies. I am very encouraged by the early signs of success. It is driving a better user experience for our customers and substantial advertising performance improvements across many key advertiser metrics. Chris will provide more details on our progress here later in the call. We exceeded the high-end of our guidance for revenue, Contribution ex-TAC and adjusted EBITDA. We are excited to see our momentum building and are raising our guidance for the year. With that, I'll hand the call over to Larry, for more financial detail.

Thanks, Tim. Thank you everyone for joining us today. We are certainly encouraged by our strong performance in Q2, which I believe is a testament to the traction our software is gaining in the market today. This afternoon, I'll be discussing some of the highlights of our Q2 performance, as well as some of the key financial and operational drivers during the quarter. And I also will be reviewing our current expectations for Q3 and the full year 2021. Before I get into the numbers, I'd like to briefly cover a few housekeeping items. As Nicole mentioned, and in an effort to provide additional details around our performance, we have posted supplemental financial slides to our Investor Relations website to accompany today's presentation. Additionally, in order to comply with SEC disclosure requirements, what was previously referred to as revenue ex-TAC will now be referred to as Contribution ex-TAC. There has been no change in how this is calculated. It is purely a name change. And finally, we have adjusted how we will be reporting on certain key metrics mainly around customer verticals, channels and formats. Previously, we reported on these metrics based on platform spend. However, given that we did not disclose total platform spend, and in an effort to provide a more meaningful disclosure, we will now report on these metrics in terms of Contribution ex-TAC. This change in approach does not materially change the trends versus the prior methodology. So with that, let me discuss some key financial and operational highlights for the quarter. In Q2, we delivered results above the high-end of our previously issued guidance across all key metrics. At a high level, we more than doubled our CTV business in the quarter, and had a solid recovery across our travel and retail customer verticals. Our…

Thanks, Larry. Our approach to building the business has not changed. We remain focused on revenue growth and we will continue to invest aggressively in our technology and Viant's go-to-market plan given the enormous opportunity we see ahead of us. This brings me to our significant software release called WWC, or World Without Cookies. Let me first provide some context. Advertisers and agencies are continuing to have a difficult time forecasting, buying and measuring their advertising and channels like Connected TV, streaming audio and mobile phones where cookies don't exist, or only exist a small percentage of the time. We believe our World Without Cookies really solves for these important and emerging trends. We announced our private beta testing program to customers in June, which provided early access to our new digital experience across our Adelphic DSP. WWC enables advertisers to pull the plug on third-party cookies completely, and provides a number of substantial advantages to the customers using it right now. I'd like to take the time to highlight some of those advantages. Number one, onboarding, with this release we've grown our leadership position and onboarding customer first-party data. WWC provides customers with even more ways to utilize the first-party data including onboarding physical addresses directly into the DSP. This is in addition to the already available options of onboarding customer email addresses, or other digital identifiers that we've had enabled for years. Number two, user experience, we've unified our household ID throughout our software, from onboarding to audience planning, inventory forecasting, frequency capping, reporting and attribution. We've received a lot of positive feedback from our clients on the new user experience, and have also received valuable feedback on areas to drive further enhancements. I do want to just take this moment to thank our customers who participated in…

Thank you very much, Chris.

The digital ad market is booming. Viant is winning in connected television and we're executing ahead of our plan. And we expect a strong second-half of the year. I want to thank you for your attention today and your interest in Viant.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question will come from Maria Ripps with Canaccord.

Alright, thank you so much for taking my questions. I just wanted to ask you about your customer additions this quarter, it seems like you added way more customers than we expected at list. Can you just talk about what type of customers you added? Are those customers from larger agencies, mid-market agencies, client direct, et cetera? And then I have a quick follow-up.

Just a little bit on that, we had a great quarter and customer additions no doubt. If I had to characterize where they came from, predominantly agencies. We did have some client direct ones in there who don't use agencies, but predominantly those were agencies. And most of those were net new customers that haven't been on the platform.

Got it. And is there anything to highlight in terms of specific verticals for this new cohort of clients? And then secondly, do you expect the average spend per customer for this cohort to be maybe on par with your prior cohorts over time?

Just on the second part, I'll say we do expect them to trend similarly. The longer they're on platform, we expect their Contribution ex-TAC to look similar to clients who've been on for a longer period of time. So we expect them to trend in that same direction. What was the first part of your question again, Maria?

Verticals of new customers.

Larry, do you have any data on that?

No.

Yeah, let me just add, in general, just most of those being their agencies, I would expect that they follow the similar trends that we highlighted earlier, in terms of the way the customers broke out in terms of their percentage of Contribution ex-TAC.

Alright, thank you so much. I'll get back in the queue.

[Operator Instructions] We'll now move on to Laura Martin with Needham.

Okay. Hey, great numbers you guys. Another beat and race quarter. So congratulation. So, I'm going to ask Larry a hard one. But I'm going to start with on the CTV, do you find that the customers you're adding are coming to you because of CTV, because your CTV growth is like nearly three times your non-CTV growth? Is that the kind of customer you're attracting? Or, is it you're seeing existing customers adding more CTV in their waiting of revenue for you guys?

I'll start and if anyone else wants to add. I think customers come to us for cookieless environments. CTV happens to be the most exciting cookieless environment. Certainly, where there's competitive DSPs on that advertisers vendor list, we see them sticking with that cookie-based DSP in the mobile and desktop channel, and they're testing the cookie list solutions in the Connected TV channel. We continue to benefit from that in attracting new customers. And I'll leave the rest for Larry.

Okay. My second question on for Larry is - okay, I don't get it. So I have 40% of the revenue growing at 100% and 60% of the revenue growing at 40%. And yet your guidance for next quarter is 20%. So what is it that's slowing down at the speed of light right now four weeks into this current quarter that the momentum is stopping?

Good question, Laura. Thank you. So, we certainly are encouraged by what we saw in Q2, especially with our retail and travel customers coming back. As I mentioned, automotive is still being impacted pretty heavily. That being said, we're certainly keeping a close eye on what is happening today in the U.S. as the Delta variant continues to surge. I would say that's our guidance takes into consideration what we know today. While we've increased guidance, we have taken a somewhat conservative view due to the uncertainty caused by the rising COVID cases. It's not. The other thing I would point out is certainly Q2 of this year in terms of growth rates had an easy comp relative to Q2 of last year. But we feel really good about the second-half. We are being cautious relative to what's going on with COVID right now. And certainly, we'll do our best to beat these numbers. But in terms of what we're comfortable with putting out today, you saw the percentages.

Thanks very much. Great results you guys.

Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] We'll move on to Andrew Boone with JMP.

Hi, guys, thanks for taking the question. Just given the strength in CTV, can you talk about moving customers on to other ad formats? Like, it seems to me like that's the tip of the spear in terms of bringing customers on and very differentiated. But how do you guys get spend more broadly across more budgets? Is that the right way to think about that?

Absolutely. The business model, in a sense is you need to increase the investment by the client. And the way you do that is by getting more and more channels on board. We've obviously invested and we believe we have more channels than any of the competitive platforms. But our easy area right now is to hit a CTV, and we're definitely hitting in that area, as you can see. I think we started to have a bit of a rebalancing in terms of getting more clients into multiple channels. And I think you saw that with the bounce back in mobile and desktop. I think that'll continue. I also think that digital out of homes, another exciting area audio is as well and I think that those are going to continue to grow. So the other piece I'll say is measurement drives a lot of this. We're driving great results right now for our clients, or I should say they're seeing great results by way of our measurement solutions in CTV and other cookieless areas. So I think it's just naturally they're going to diversify their spending into more and more of these channels.

I would just add to that, Andrew I think it's customer comfort with the platform. There's lots of dollars at stake and customer acquisition strategies that they're running through cookie-based DSPs. And I think it's just getting to that comfort level that they can operate in these cookieless environments in the same way with the same precision and measurement capabilities they have before.

That makes total sense. And then just with WWC now out and kind of customers testing it live, can you just talk about the competitive set in terms of just the differentiation between you and other DSPs on the market? How far apart do you feel like that is from a product set?

Well, I think a lot of the industry participants have moved to closer to where Viant is today, what we invented in 2015, and brought to market was people-based. Not everyone calls it that. But if you look at the identifiers they're using, almost all of the industry is coalesce, that these people-based identifiers are the way forward. I think we have a wide gap, our competitors are launching onboarding for the first time in their platform. We've expanded and grown our moat and onboarding from one type of identifier to many. So we added physical address onboarding, all through a self-service user interface for our customers. So I think at this point, where our competitors are trying to fix problems that they have in their software, we're trying to expand our lead on the features and functionalities, we're bringing those same marketers.

And also just one other point, Andrew is around measurement. I think we do extremely well with clients that are attracted our platform, because of the measurement capabilities that we've long offered. Things like in-store sales, as opposed to just e-commerce sales. Being able to link that to ad exposure is huge. It's something we've done for many years. Our integration is in that area, in terms of the amount of companies we're integrated with, to enable brands to be able to bring those sales receipts in. That also creates another big moat. So, we feel great. We've always felt great about our positioning, but we know we have a long product cycle lead there.

Great. Thank you.

And there are no further questions. Tim, Chris or Larry, do you have any closing comments?

No, I just do want to thank the Viant team for a great quarter of execution for all of you. We appreciate you so much. And thank you to our customers who continue to work with us and challenge us in bringing forward new solutions to their problems. Thanks very much, and we'll see you next quarter.

And again, that does conclude today's earnings call. You may now disconnect.