Viant Technology - Earnings Call - Q4 2020

Transcript

Speaker 0

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Viant's Fourth Quarter Full Year twenty twenty Earnings Call. My name is Kara, and I will be your call operator. Before I hand the call over to the Viant team, I'd like to go over a few housekeeping notes. As a reminder, the webinar is being recorded. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a Q and A session.

If you plan to ask a question, please ensure you set your Zoom name to spell your full name and firm. If you would like to ask a question during this time, please use the raise hand function located at the bottom of your screen. Thank you for your attendance today. I will now turn the call over to Miley Bergerman with the Blue Shirt Group.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Kara. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. 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 statements 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 we issued on March 20 as well as the risks and uncertainties described in our registration statement on Form S-one related to our initial public offering and other filings with the SEC.

During today's call, we will also present 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 the press release we issued today and our filings with the SEC. I would now like to turn the call over to Tim Vanderhoek, Chief Executive Officer of Zion. Tim?

Speaker 2

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm joined today by our Chief Operating Officer, Chris Vanderhoek and our Chief Financial Officer, Larry Madden. We are pleased to welcome you to our first earnings call as a public company. Before we begin, I would like to thank all of our employees, partners, customers and new investors for being a part of our journey in helping us complete exciting IPO process. You have all been instrumental in our success, and we are excited to be here today.

Given this is our first call as a public company, I'll spend a few minutes giving you an overview of our business in addition to discussing the highlights from our fourth quarter. Before I get into the numbers, I think it would be helpful to offer some background on what we do at Vient and how we fit into the broader digital advertising industry. Buying ads across channels like digital billboards in Times Square, a streaming TV ad, ads on laptops and smartphones is inherently very complex, and our software solves that problem by making it simple. We are early pioneers of people based advertising, an approach of using real individuals and households rather than cookies to target and measure digital advertising. Our self-service software, Adelphic, utilizes a combination of people based identity resolution, omnichannel advertising integrations, and advanced reporting capabilities that empower our customers with a whole new level of audience segmentation and return on ad spend measurability.

We believe that over time, the entire advertising industry in The U. S. Will be transacted through software like ours, and this presents a tremendous long term opportunity for Vient. There were a lot of drivers of change and disruption in 2020. However, one of the few silver linings to emerge from the pandemic has been the widespread consumer adoption of connected television and marketers adjusting their focus on gaining a better understanding of their advertising return on investment.

We believe with our people based advertising software at Delphic, we are uniquely positioned to help advertisers understand the ROI of their marketing dollars. Turning now to the numbers. We are pleased with our fourth quarter results, ending the year on a strong note after navigating various challenges amid an unstable macro environment. In Q4, we delivered revenue of $56,500,000 an increase of 9% year over year and 40% sequentially compared to the third quarter. Revenue ex TAC grew 19% year over year to $39,100,000 and adjusted EBITDA grew 66% to $15,600,000 representing a 40% margin as a percentage of revenue ex TAC.

While some of the challenges we faced over the course of the year persisted in the fourth quarter, specifically lighter ad spending in certain verticals, we are seeing a number of promising trends materializing into sustainable tailwinds for Viame. From a vertical standpoint in the fourth quarter, we saw strong demand in entertainment, consumer packaged goods and health care categories. We continue to see softness in retail, automotive and travel verticals. These industries historically have been very important categories for us, and there has been a universal pullback in ad spending by these advertisers amid the pandemic. This impacted us throughout 2020, including in the fourth quarter.

On the flip side, we have continued to see accelerating growth in Connected TV related advertising. CTV now represents our fastest growing channel, with growth in platform spend of 70% in 2020. Our expertise in intellectual property and Connected TV is a big differentiator from our competitors and is making us a go to software platform for Connected TV advertising. We believe the accelerating growth of CTV will continue into 2021, and I feel strongly that this is an area where we are uniquely positioned to excel at in the long term. More on that exact point later.

But first, I want to talk a bit about what makes Viant fundamentally unique in the marketplace, and that is our people based approach to advertising. During our roadshow, we talked at length about the fact that cookies and other third party device trackers, which are controlled by big tech, are going away. This change is something we anticipated and have invested in for over six years, and it is one reason why we have been evangelizing our people based framework as an answer to the death of the cookie. Now that support for cookies is coming to an end, the people based era has finally begun. Our strong intellectual property and patents around our household ID give us the ability to be a natural partner to marketers and their agencies who want to continue to reach their consumers and measure what they get for their advertising investment.

Most other platforms did not anticipate or simply prepare for the death of the cookie, so our Adelphic platform is well positioned to take advantage of this large and growing opportunity in the market. The recent Google announcement about disallowing all individual tracking via their browser and ad buying tools, like DB three sixty, simply follows Apple and others that have already made these changes. We understood this years ago that the cookie was a short term solution, and the future would be in charting our own course around people based and the importance of the household. In 2013, we filed our original patent around Internet connected household identification and have expanded the scope with additional filings since. We have strong intellectual property protection around our technology and processes that will allow for buying to be a market leader in reaching audiences in cookie less environments.

Some of our competitors recognize our position and our intellectual property protection around our ability to identify an Internet connected household. Over the years, they have touted that their one to one tracking capabilities were superior to our focus on the household. We have always reminded our clients that most vertical categories of advertising are, in fact, household purchase decisions, whether they be consumer packaged goods, automotive, retail, entertainment, or travel, to name a few. That is why a household approach is more practical than a one to one cookie based approach. In addition to these categories being household level purchase decisions, some of the most exciting new channels of advertising, like Connected TV, involve a shared device in the home and require a household approach because cookies do not exist on Connected TV.

Most other DSPs are built on cookie based technology, making our people based technology a key differentiator for us in the large and growing channels that are cookie less environments like CTV. Perhaps the biggest advantage of people based approach is the superior measurement capabilities for marketers. Marketers today have a strong interest in measuring the effectiveness of their advertising investments. Our people based DSP, Adelphic, enables marketers to measure both e commerce and in store sales, which gives them the three sixty degree view of their return on ad spend across all of the channels in which they advertise. This holistic view is what modern marketers are requiring to validate their advertising investments.

As we look forward, it is clear through the recent Google announcements and pending changes to their ad buying platforms that they are no longer going to allow marketers to use audience based ad targeting across the open web. Marketers will be looking for new DSP partners that can help them connect with their audiences across the open web. We believe our Adelphiq software is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this opportunity. We see both the migration away from cookies and the rapid growth in connected television as tailwinds for our business in 2021 and beyond. Our view is that the time line of the migration to a world without cookies happens in 2022.

We are now at the inflection point of marketers adopting people based software as their primary DSP to electronically buy and measure their advertising. Other efforts in our industry to replace the ubiquitous cookie by forcing consumers to log into every website on the Internet with their email address has many, many challenges. The greatest of those challenges is scale universally. We believe that the potential over time for this approach is up to 20% of all available ad impressions on the Internet, which is a far cry from the ubiquitous and universal nature of the cookie. There will certainly be some publishers who will be able to get users to log into their sites and apps in order to view their content, but the vastness of the open Internet will require a different approach.

Contrast the approach of the logged in web with our household approach. In the fourth quarter, our household ID was available on more than 75% of all available ad impressions received by our software. The ubiquity of our household identification is the basis for why marketers are turning to the Adelphiq software to enable them to reach consumers in cookie less environments. I hope that overview highlights the opportunities ahead for Viant. With that, I'll hand over the call to Larry Madden, our CFO, to provide more detail on our financial performance.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Tim, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. Before I get into our fourth quarter results, I'd like to spend a few minutes briefly reminding investors of some of the key operating metrics that management focuses on and that we will be discussing today. I will also be discussing certain non GAAP financial measures. Our GAAP financial results, along with a reconciliation between GAAP and non GAAP results, can be found in our earnings release. As many of you know, we offer three different pricing options for our customers: fixed price, percentage of spend and subscription.

As a result of transacting in multiple ways with our customers, we have different revenue accounting treatment depending on which pricing option our customers choose. As a result, and in order to normalize the different revenue accounting treatment across the three pricing options, we focus on the key non GAAP metric that we call revenue ex TAC. Revenue ex TAC reflects all revenue net of direct pass through costs or traffic acquisition costs. Simple terms, revenue ex TAC represents what we keep. Another important metric that we will be discussing is growth in platform spend.

This metric is a measure of customer engagement on our platform, representing the growth in aggregate gross spend on our platform across the three different pricing options. We believe growth in platform spend is a helpful metric, engaging the overall momentum of our business as platform spend ultimately drives our revenue performance. With that, I'll now turn to the financials. As Tim discussed, we saw great momentum in the fourth quarter with the results that demonstrated significant growth in platform spend as well as revenue ex TAC. We were pleased to close out the year on a high note with growth rates accelerating compared to Q3.

Total platform spend in the fourth quarter grew 36% year over year, an acceleration from the 22% increase we saw in the third quarter. This growth was primarily driven by continued momentum in Connected TV spend, which was up 71% in Q4 and represented approximately one third of total spending on the platform in the quarter. Video related spending on the platform, which includes CTV, represented over 61% of total spend on the platform in Q4. That being said, our overall performance continued to be negatively impacted by macroeconomic conditions related to the COVID pandemic during Q4. The customer verticals most impacted by COVID, namely retail, automotive and travel, continued to be weak in Q4, with total spend across these verticals declining 1% on a year over year basis.

These three important customer verticals represented over 43% of our total platform spend in 2019 pre COVID. During 2020, as customers adjusted to the pandemic, there was a significant pullback across these three customer verticals that extended through the end of the year. As a result, for the full year 2020, platform spend across these three COVID impacted verticals declined over 20%. Across all other customer verticals, including CPG, healthcare and entertainment, total spend on the platform increased 60% in Q4, which demonstrates the strength and momentum across the platform. Similarly, total spend across these other verticals increased over 45% for the full year 2020.

While we expect our retail automotive and travel customer verticals to remain weak in the near term, we do expect the normalization across these verticals as we move through 2020, further driving the momentum across the platform. Now moving to our revenue performance. GAAP revenue for the fourth quarter was $56,500,000 an increase of 9% compared to Q4 of twenty nineteen. Revenue ex TAC, the key metric we focus on in evaluating revenue performance, was $39,100,000 for the fourth quarter, an increase of 19% year over year. I would point out that given our different pricing options with different revenue accounting treatment, the relationship between platform spend and revenue varies depending on pricing options.

Revenue from our fixed pricing option more closely mirrors platform spend as GAAP revenue is reported gross before deducting pass through costs. With our percentage of spend in subscription pricing options, GAAP revenue is reported net of these costs. Therefore, as platform spend across percentage of spend in subscription customers accelerates relative to fixed price customers as it did in Q4 and full year 2020, the growth rates in GAAP revenue and Revenue ex TAC will trend lower than the growth rates in platform spend as a result of this change in mix. In Q4, our growth in both GAAP revenue and Revenue ex TAC was largely driven by a significant increase in CTV related spend as well as the continued momentum across the customer verticals I mentioned that were less impacted by COVID during the quarter. One thing of note is that during Q4, less than 1% of our total spend on the platform was related to political advertising.

Lastly, during the quarter, we had a significant increase in spend with our percentage of spend customers. This is a positive within the business as percentage of spend customers have very high retention rates and typically increase their spend over time as they consolidate budgets on the platform. Another set of metrics that we focus on are the number of active customers and the average revenue ex TAC per active customer. Customer additions and increased revenue ex TAC within our existing customer base are key metrics that we track to assess the momentum in the business. We define an active customer as any customer generating a minimum of $5,000 of revenue ex TAC over the prior twelve month period.

As of the end of Q4, we had two sixty four active customers compared to two seventy seven at the end of twenty nineteen. This modest decline was primarily due to a pullback in spending throughout the year across our retail, automotive and travel customers, which temporarily lowered the active customer count. We also saw a pullback in platform testing during the spring and summer months directly related to COVID. Conversely, in 2020, we saw increased spend across our existing customer base as average revenue ex TAC per active customer increased 11% to $419,000 Our focus moving forward is to increase the number of active customers using our software, while continuing to increase the Revenue ex TAC generated per active customer. As I mentioned earlier, typically once a customer starts using our software, they increase spend over time as they become more comfortable with the benefits of the platform.

Given the fact that we have onboarded many new customers in the last few years, we expect revenue ex TAC for active customer to continue to grow as these newer customers mature on the platform. We also believe that we have a significant opportunity for growth in terms of the potential number of active customers we can attract and convert. During 2021, we intend to increase our investment in sales and marketing to capitalize on these opportunities and significantly scale our customer base in the coming years. Turning now to operating expenses. Total operating expenses in Q4 were $43,300,000 representing a year over year decline of $2,900,000 or 6%.

Traffic acquisition costs associated with our fixed pricing option, which are included in platform operations expense declined $1,800,000 in Q4 compared to 2019. Net other savings of $1,100,000 in the quarter were achieved despite a 13% increase in headcount as of the 2020 versus 2019. COVID related savings in areas such as travel and entertainment, coupled with cloud related efficiencies driven by our mediator product, have enabled us to grow the top line in Q4 without a commensurate increase in total OpEx. Our mediator product enabled us to achieve a 3x efficiency in terms of our queries per second or QPS costs in Q4, meaning we can process 3x the QPS for the same cost compared to a year ago. We expect this efficiency to further scale in the coming periods.

Adjusted EBITDA in the quarter was $15,600,000 compared to $9,400,000 in Q4 twenty nineteen, representing a year over year increase of 66%. Our adjusted EBITDA margins as a percentage of revenue ex TAC were 40% in the quarter compared to 29% in the same period. Our growth in adjusted EBITDA is a reflection of our focus on both top line growth and bottom line profitability. While we intend to make investment in 2021, we believe from a mid- to long term perspective, we can achieve adjusted EBITDA margins as a percentage of revenue ex TAC of 35. From a cash flow perspective, we generated $18,900,000 of net cash from operating activities for the full year 2020 compared to $13,000,000 in 2019.

Total CapEx for the year was $7,800,000 essentially unchanged from 2019. Our ability to generate cash flow coupled with the $232,000,000 in debt proceeds from our recently completed IPO positions us extremely well to further invest in technology and sales and marketing to take advantage of the rapidly growing market opportunity. In terms of headcount, we ended the year at two eighty nine employees, which as I previously mentioned, represents growth of 13% from the prior year end. This growth demonstrates the continued investments we are making in headcount as we continue to scale our business. We expect total headcount to increase approximately 30% to 35 in 2021, with a particular focus in sales and marketing as we continue to invest in the growth opportunity in front of us.

And finally, turning now to guidance. As Tim discussed, we feel great about our positioning in the market, and we're in the very early stages of capitalizing on the market opportunity for programmatic advertising in a cookie less world. As we think about guidance, we recognize that we are still early in the year and there's a fair amount of uncertainty around advertising demand in some of our key end markets, including our travel, retail and automotive customer segments. Travel, in particular, is typically a very strong performer in the first half of each year for us, and we did not see a recovery in Q1 twenty twenty one with our travel customers. While we do expect a full recovery over time in these key areas, we also believe we will be continued to be impacted in the 2021 in these key customer verticals.

Our guidance reflects our best judgment as of today relative to how our business will continue to normalize in a post COVID world. With that background, for the first quarter of twenty twenty one, we expect GAAP revenue in the range of 38,000,000 to $38,500,000 which represents a year over year change of 0% to 1% revenue ex TAC in the range of twenty six million dollars to $26,500,000 which represents year over year growth of approximately 11% to 14% and adjusted EBITDA in the range of 2,500,000.0 to $3,500,000 or a margin as a percentage of revenue ex TAC of 10% to 13%. And for the full year 2021, we expect GAAP revenue in the range of 194,000,000 to 200,000,000 which represents year over year growth of approximately 17% to 21%, revenue ex TAC in the range of 131,000,000 to $136,000,000 which represents year over year growth of approximately 19% to 23%, and adjusted EBITDA in the range of $22,000,000 to $25,000,000 or a margin as a percentage of revenue ex TAC of 17% to 18%. Before turning the call back to Tim for closing remarks, I would like to briefly touch on a few housekeeping items relative to 2021.

First, as indicated in our S-one, we have converted our pre IPO employee equity incentive plan into a new long term incentive plan. Specifically, we converted the pre IPO employee incentive units into RSUs at the time of the IPO. As a result, our 2021 results will include approximately $83,000,000 of stock based compensation associated with these RSUs, of which approximately $14,000,000 will be capitalized as software development costs. We will also incur payroll taxes, employer payroll taxes and increased depreciation and amortization expense in connection with these brands. The second item I want to point out is that as a result of the sizable stock based compensation expense in 2021, we now expect to generate a tax benefit as a public entity in 2021, the size of which will be determined in part based on the value of the RSUs as they vest.

If you recall, we used an up sea structure as part of our IPO such that the public entity will be allocated approximately 20% of taxable income or loss based on the current share count. So taxes apply to 20% of taxable income with 80% of taxable income being passed through to the members of the LLC. Our 2020 results will also be impacted by increased overhead associated with being a public company. Connection with this, we expect to incur an incremental $5,000,000 to $6,000,000 of costs in 2021, with D and O insurance representing the most significant component of such incremental expense. With that, I will now turn the call back over to Tim.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Larry. Just want to comment on closing. Our focus moving forward is to increase the number of active customers using our software while continuing to increase Revenue ex TAC generated per active customer. We intend to increase our investment in sales and marketing in 2021 to drive our growth. As you've seen from our guidance, we expect to accelerate growth in 2021 over 2020 levels while continuing to generate solid adjusted EBITDA.

While our company is well established, we believe that we have significant opportunity for continued growth. We have significant technology, architectural and intellectual property advantages that create a strong competitive moat and the very significant trends towards a people based approach and the continued rise of connected television present material growth opportunities for Bryant. We intend to be very active with regard to investor and analyst interaction and look forward to keeping you updated on our progress. In closing, we are very pleased with our results in the fourth quarter and look forward to building on this momentum in our first year as a public company. I'll now turn the call back over to the moderator to begin Q and A.

Speaker 0

The first question comes from the line of Maria Ripp at Canaccord. Maria, you're on the line. Sorry, mute button. Thanks so much for taking my questions, and congrats on strong results. So first, your revenue guidance implies really healthy acceleration through the year, which is great to see.

I don't get to some of that in easier comps. To what extent do you expect sales force expansion sort of to contribute to revenue strength in the first half versus the second half of the year? And can you maybe update us on your progress in terms of the sales cost expansion so far? And then I have a quick follow-up.

Speaker 2

Great. Larry, do you want to handle that?

Speaker 3

Yes. We certainly do. I mean we are looking to increase the total sales team by approximately 50% in 2021, which is a pretty sizable investment. To date, we've probably achieved about 40% of that. So we've been very active in recruiting and have had success so far.

I think generally speaking, it takes a new seller approximately six months to truly be at ramp in terms of them being able to truly drive revenue. So I think we definitely will see some benefit really beginning in Q3 and then perhaps more accelerating a bit more in Q4. But we will not see the full benefit, obviously, of the full Salesforce division in 2021. But we will see we will begin to see it in the second half, for sure.

Speaker 0

Great. Thank you, Larry. And just as a quick follow-up, I just wanted to ask about your supply chain. And you talked about expanding into Amazon Connected TV marketplace. Can you maybe talk about where you are in that process?

How lengthy is it, and what are some key milestones as you're working through it?

Speaker 2

For us, as a DSP who works on behalf of a marketer, we want to integrate wherever the marketer wants to spend their advertising so we can electronically buy and measure it. And Amazon Fire TV is obviously a large and growing platform out there. We do not have a direct integration with Amazon Fire TV today, but we do integrate with content owners who are distributing their content over Fire TV or over Roku both. So a lot of times, there's different entry points for that inventory. So today, we would be interested, but we are not integrated in Amazon Fire TV today.

Speaker 0

Great. Thank you so much. And your next question comes from Eric Sheridan at UBS. Eric, you're on the line.

Speaker 4

Thanks for taking the question, guys. Maybe two, if I can. Moving on from just the Salesforce, I do want to wrap that into the broader question. What do you see as sort of the critical investments you need to make in 'twenty one and 'twenty two against the broader goals you're trying to sort of solve for the platform over the medium to long term, just to maybe reframe that for investors so they have a better understanding of what you're sort of scaling after and how it's going to show up on the investment side? And then more granular with Q4, can you give us any sense of the new advertiser or new client growth in the quarter and how we should think about the industry breakdown or maybe the product breakdown or some of that growth you saw in the most recent period?

Got

Speaker 2

it. Thanks, Eric. I'll take the first part of that question. Our sales and marketing investment really is just about putting more feet on the street. We believe sales is a contact sport.

We're in front of more and more clients, educating them around our solution, around PeopleBased. We know that our close rates are increasing, so we wanna continue to have more and more of those conversations. This year is definitely, continuing to educate, So putting more investment in the sales and marketing side across the country is gonna help us educate more clients. And like I said, our our our close rates have been increasing, so we're excited to do that. I would say our sales and marketing investment largely is aimed at adding that really in the first half of the year, which we're well on our way to do that.

Speaker 3

I would address the part of the second part of your question in terms of client growth. We did see a nice uptick in Q4. As we said, we ended the year with two sixty four active customers. That was up from Q4 where from Q3, I think we were at two fifty eight. And what we've seen of late is two things.

One, we're seeing increased level of testing, which we did have a bit of a lull during spring and summer with. And we're also seeing the conversion from the fixed price customers into the percentage of spend customers, and we saw quite a bit of that in Q4.

Speaker 4

Thank you.

Speaker 0

Your next question comes from Laura Martin at Needham. Laura, you're on the line. Can you hear me okay?

Speaker 2

There you go. Yep.

Speaker 0

So my first one, I'm curious as to what you would say to investors that say, look, their competitive advantage is having a faster replacement to cookies. But the pushback would be, look, if you're moving towards CTV at speed of light because you're doing 70% growth in CTV versus 9% reported growth, does that matter since actually CTV is a cookie less environment? So aren't you moving away from your competitive advantage as CTV becomes a bigger part of your total revenue? How do you Well,

Speaker 2

I would say what marketers are invested in or focused on in CTV is they still want to do targeting and measurement of CTV. So and not just CTV, across all of their investments. They're really we're bringing them a more holistic offering. So it's a longer sales cycle to help them understand every channel they can buy in, every channel they can target in and how the measurement works across both. So I guess, certainly, CTV growth, it's happening.

It's there. It's why we're a natural choice because of our intellectual property there. And we will we've been growing above market rates in CTV for quite some time. But I think there is backwards compatibility. They still want to understand website visitors.

They still want to understand how do I retarget and do targeting across mobile and desktop on Apple devices that are cookie less today. So a lot of education in the market going on, on how our solution works in each channel, and I think that's the slow education process. Even just within mobile, it's a different ID in the in app ecosystem versus Safari, and so getting marketers to understand all of that. But it's the same story over and over. Our household ID has huge penetration.

In Q4, it worked on 75% of all ad requests, whether it was CTV, in app, Safari or Chrome, where the cookie exists today. It's a consistent scaled solution, and that's what I think we're trying to educate the marketers. We don't want to be a one channel DSP. We want to actually serve the marketers' entire ad spend, be their dashboard for them to target and measure what they're getting for their money. And I'll just add one little piece on that, Laura.

As cookie less environments grow, that's a tailwind for us. So CTV is a natural place to use cookie less. Competitive platforms really are a cookie they use cookie based approaches. So they're looking for an ID, that many times is not there. There are no cookies in that space.

So the cookie less environments is really where we're able to show the massive differentiation that we have, both in platform and overall from a people based, framework perspective. So as as these cookie cookie less environments continue to grow, that's right in our wheelhouse.

Speaker 0

Super helpful, you guys. My second one would be about the margins were quite a bit better. Your TAP was quite a bit lower than we thought, you had really robust margins. My question is, did that come because, like, what Larry was just saying about the transferred faster in the percent of spend, which does have higher margins than, because it doesn't have tax, it's reported net? Or is that because you're getting more of these that third revenue stream, that subscription revenue, like when you have the Activision Direct revenue stream, are we seeing sort of outsized growth of that one?

Or all of the did all of the extra upside come from percent of spend customers mix? Yes.

Speaker 3

I can take that one, Laura. I apologize. Hopefully, you can hear me. I lost my video. But in any case, yes, the margin is almost entirely driven by the significant growth in the percentage of spend on the percentage of spend side.

That's really what contributed to that healthy EBITDA margin.

Speaker 2

Would also just want to add one thing is on our mediator product, which is helping us lower our QPS costs or the servers to handle all of this, Our engineering team has had huge breakthroughs, and we've seen 3x efficiency that we've talked about compared from the year over year period, and we expect that to further scale. QPS is the significant cost for all programmatic players. We've had substantial breakthroughs that are actually lowering our costs while our QPS is rising. And so we see that continuing to play out this year.

Speaker 0

Thank you very much. Great quarter, you guys. Congratulations.

Speaker 2

Thank you.

Speaker 0

Your next question comes from Ron Josey at JMP. Ron, you are on the line.

Speaker 5

Great. Thanks for taking the question and appreciate it. Great to see the results here. I wanted to ask a little bit more, Tim, on the verticals. You just mentioned continued headwinds in autos, retail travel, but you're seeing some benefits, I think, some of that coming back in the first quarter.

So can you just talk a little bit more about when you might expect to see this rebound here? How you're thinking about that just on the newer verticals? And then sort of following up on a question earlier, Larry, you mentioned just the ramp in percentage of spend in the quarter and the benefits via high retention rates. So now you've got two sixty four clients on the platform. Maybe talk about just the length of those clients on the platform, just because I think from a just a lifetime of usage on Vient, right, the longer you're on, maybe you go more percentage of spend and how that might impact your thoughts and guidance going forward?

You.

Speaker 2

Right, Ron. I'll take the first part of that question. So as far as the verticals and timing of them coming back, we're really seeing, I would say, travel we are in discussion with our travel customers. I would say there's not heavy buying signals. And really, I think it's largely dependent.

Everyone's kind of singing really the same song there, which is dependent on the vaccine rollout. Just to be clear, travel typically does a lot of their spending in the first half of the year, q one and q two. They're trying to capture, that summer travel. I do expect that, really, we're looking really that I think that there will be more normalizing on spend levels in the back half of the year, but we do expect them to start to spend some in the first half. On retail, I'd say that's a similar thing.

As economies open back up, stay at home orders are released, we think that retail comes back, specifically around, I would say, retail and restaurants and things like that. And the last one around automotive, really, we're really seeing some of it around the production side right now. A lot of the, plants really aren't able, to get certain components. I believe that most recently, the microchips and the shortage thereof for them. When they don't have production, they can't put those on the lots.

Therefore, the ad spending typically will lag. But I expect that we're hopeful that, that returns to normal levels in the back half as well. Larry, do you want to take the second question on the left side?

Speaker 3

Sure. In terms of the percentage of spend customers, yes, we are seeing that increasing even in Q4 in terms of the number of customers using the percentage of spend platform. As we've talked about before, I mean, typically what happens in the first year, they're spending modest budgets, getting used to the platform, getting used to its capabilities and reporting. And then as they move forward into year two, that budget typically increases pretty significantly, increases further into the third year. So many of our customers really have been on the platform since 2019.

We definitely have added a bunch in 2020 on the percentage of spend side. So we definitely look forward to an uplift in terms of over time uplift in terms of the average revenue ex TAC per active customer, and that definitely will come from these percentage of spend clients, which are definitely stickier in terms of once they're on the platform and they get comfortable with it, they continue to consolidate budgets as they move forward. So we expect that trend to continue.

Speaker 5

Got it. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

Speaker 0

Your next question comes from Matt Schindler at BofA. Matt, you're on the line.

Speaker 6

Great. Thank you. So going back to the discussion that you had about Google, it it sounds like Google made it very clear their distaste for and their belief that regulators will not allow in the future individualized targeting. They'll allow personalization, and obviously for Google's is pushing it their own concept with Flock, but they won't allow individualization. And that was clearly a dig at Unified ID two point o and digital fingerprinting and other concepts that are out there that you are not doing, but are related to how you get to the single person this ad is for that person.

How do you think longer term they will look at household data and household analysis and more regulators themselves? Is there a way they could affect what you're doing? And could Google go against what you're doing right, as well?

Speaker 2

Yeah. Thanks for the question. I'll take the first part. I think, you know, Google Google, for the most part, highlighted around the kind of, you know, the alternate IDs around around getting email for logged in. I think the the first thing that they, and most notably, said that this that they believe will lack scale.

So I think that's you know, for us, that's probably the largest challenge that our view is is as well. I would say that, look, marketers aren't looking to track individual consumers. They just wanna measure what they're getting for their advertising investment. I think that that email inherently has other challenges in terms of of measurement as well. But specifically around regulation, you know, look, our view is is that does regulation continue?

I think that we saw it with CTPA in California. There's a new one on the ballot this year that was CPRA. This is something that all platforms will have to contend with. I believe that more disclosure, we believe more disclosure is better to the consumer. A more informed consumer is going to be better for everyone.

So we're not really worried about it from a deregulation standpoint because more disclosure to the consumer is the trend that we've been seeing. So we expect that to continue. As far as our approach around the household, we think it's better. We think it's better for consumers. We're not doing individual tracking of consumers.

If you think about it, it it is it's somewhat in line with what Google is talking about around these cohorts. They're not doing individuals, but they're backing it up a level. That's the same exact, similar concept with our household. I would say the difference is is that we are still enabling marketers to use their own their own first party data. We're still enabling, really the targeting, of certain households that are in market or or matched to a data segment that they're interested in.

But, ultimately, we're allowing them to measure the effectiveness of their advertising on our platform. That's what marketers want, and that's what they care about. People based platform like ours really enables them to do that. It's not black box, and it's not walled off. But I, just to add to that too, I do expect data regulation to continue, around this side where you're seeing individual states come up with their own approach.

And so I do think in the long term, there will be some unified national approach to this. But more and more, if you look at Apple as the leader in this space, what is Apple saying? They said that any consumer who who will allow you or opt into personalized advertising, you can do whatever, you know, you want as long as the consumer says allow. So it's more disclosure, and then you have the consumer saying allow. And that's for the in app ecosystem across Apple.

So I would say that that's probably the farthest, most aggressive approach, which is an opt in from a consumer on their platform. So more and more, I think these are good for consumers. They get made more aware of what data is available, how it actually works. But as Chris mentioned, we think our household approach is similar to Google's flock approach, where it's a cohort of users, but we're not tying it to keywords or interest categories. We're making it around households themselves, more like direct mail, is used.

Speaker 6

And one more follow-up on this. Just do you think this announcement they have made about their distaste for certain other formats that are coming out and being used, does that make them more or less likely to ever open up their walled garden of YouTube properties and the like? And how do you think those will be addressed on a longer term basis, both by Google and by regulators?

Speaker 2

Yep. Yeah. I'll I'll take the the first part of that. We don't expect that the, you know, YouTube's been walled off for quite some time. Google Search, you know, very similar.

We don't expect that to reverse course, really by any means. I don't I think that's going to remain unchanged.

Speaker 6

Okay, great. Thank you.

Speaker 0

Your last question comes from Aaron Kessler at Raymond James. Aaron, you're on the line.

Speaker 7

Great. Had to unmute there as well. Thank you. A couple of questions. Maybe just first, any sense for the advertiser reaction since kind of Google has made their announcement that they're not going to be supporting kind of alternative IDs?

Are you seeing kind of increased interest from advertisers around kind of your people based approach? Then it'd be good to get your thoughts on kind of maybe CTV growth outlook for 2021, thoughts on maybe inventory levels expanding. I think historically, we've been a little supply constrained, but then we also maybe have some headwinds from less stay at home throughout 2021. Just overall, I'd get your thoughts on CTV growth rates, how we should be thinking about that for 2021. Sorry,

Speaker 2

Aaron, I was writing too much. What was your first question again? I'll take that. Yes.

Speaker 0

The first question is kind

Speaker 7

of are you seeing increased conversations since kind of Google repeat cookie announcement that they're not supporting alternative IDs?

Speaker 2

What I'll definitely say is it's been a huge positive for us. So we've been we've been out evangelizing PeopleBased for years and the fact that the cookie is going away. This was probably for us, this is one of the biggest announcements, I would say, in our history in this space. I I believe it is opening up a tremendous amount of opportunity for us. I will also just you know?

So from that aspect, we definitely got a lot of clients, that we've been speaking to, a new outreach that are that validated our our top track around people base, our focus on the household. That building a foundation on cookies, really wasn't going to be a recipe for the future. However, what I'll also say is is that a lot of people trying to code what Google said, what Google didn't say, We haven't been really that caught up in that because we've been we've been I don't wanna say predicting. We've been talking about the fact that cookies coming to an end means a certain that means certain things. So, for instance, if you're doing cookie based, use cases, if you're a marketer, retargeting an individual consumer's laptop or phone, that will go away.

That's significant dollars in the marketplace, both on d v three sixty and competitive platforms. We believe those dollars end up, needing to go somewhere else. So we think that this increases competition. We think it's a good thing. We think we're gonna be a beneficiary of those dollars.

So I would say it's been a it's been quite a bit of a positive. The last piece is, marketers, really, our clients, they need the the education level, for, you know, exactly what this means, what activities will they not be able to do going forward, and what solutions are gonna be right for them on a go forward basis. It's something we talk to our team about every day. We believe that that our clients need to hear from us, and they need that perspective. But we expect this to be a big tailwind for us this year.

Larry, do you want to take the CTV growth for 2021 question?

Speaker 3

Yes. Mean, we're not giving specifics around it, but certainly going into Q1, we're now most of the way through. The growth rates that we had in Q4 in 2020 continued. It's still a big, big driver, and we expect that to continue throughout the year. I think that will be a big part of our growth in 2021.

Speaker 7

Yes. Maurice, quickly, your thoughts on the industry growth for CTV as well. I guess

Speaker 0

that was one of the questions. Your thoughts on CTV growth in 2021 for the industry?

Speaker 2

For the industry, I mean, I think I don't remember estimates, but I think that it's gonna continue to grow at industry rates. I think we're gaining market share in connected television because our competitors have blind spots due to the cookie less environment. And I think the big use case is I show an ad on connected television. Someone pulls out their smartphone or laptop and visits the marketer's website. It's our ability to measure that interaction that's really key for, our growth being above the market.

But I think the market's, no doubt, advertisers are excited about connected television. Consumers are excited about connected television. So now that all the content is kind of on these direct to consumer streaming platforms, I would expect more of the same. But I think that market feels, you know, just as someone who's in it and has been a founder of the Zumo business on the other side this market feels like it's unbound and exploding, kind of on every angle. The content, the consumers and the marketers are all really, coming to this new Internet connected device.

It feels very similar to the mobile smartphone revolution when Apple first introduced the smartphone and Android came, really where it felt limitless in the explosion of that. The connected TV, would expect to be more of the same, similar to the smartphone. I would just wanna add one point on there to add color that I think is unique in the back half of '20 and moving into '21, which is around content. As Tim was mentioning, you know, when we first started Zumo, the big limiter for us was getting content typically, you know, really out of the studios. If you think of the windows that they that large studio monetized content, ad supported or streaming was was either not in their thought process or at the very tail end of those windows.

Now you're seeing, you know, companies like Disney going direct to streaming. You're seeing WarnerMedia going direct to streaming. You're seeing that with NBC Comcast as well. So the fact that they are taking, you know, the straight out of the studio, and they're putting them into these streaming platforms, I think, is huge for consumers, and it's really going to continue to increase streaming. And really, the dollars are really going to follow there.

Speaker 7

Great. That's helpful. Thanks, guys, and congrats on the quarter.

Speaker 2

Thank you. Thank you. All right. I believe that was our last question. I just at this time, want to thank our employees again for all of their dedication and hard work.

We're here today because of their efforts and contribution. So thank you to all of our team members at Viant and new investors and analysts. We look forward to interacting with you more in the future. Thank you very much. Have a great day.