广告技术公司 Viant 以 2000 万美元现金收购 AI 视频广告制作平台 Waymark

Monday, November 9th, 2026 – 8:03 pm

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Viant had a pretty good third quarter. The open internet apparently had nothing to do with it, though.

On Monday evening, the company reported just over $110 million in revenue for Q3, up 29% year over year. CTV ad spend increased almost 40% over the same time period, representing more than half of the total ad spend through Viant’s platform.

Viant also used its earnings call to announce the close of its acquisition of AI video creative production platform Waymark for $20 million in cash, a deal designed to help advertisers make more CTV ads faster.

Despite the news, Viant’s stock was down around 7% in after-hours trading. It’s not immediately clear why, but spending could be a factor. Viant expects its costs to rise about 25% next quarter, partly because of acquisitions like TVision and Waymark that aren’t expected to bring in meaningful revenue yet.

But hey, maybe that’s just the price of going all in on CTV, and Viant isn’t hedging.

Tim Vanderhook, Viant’s CEO, hyped Waymark as the start of an “era of generative ad creative for CTV” and said it could attract thousands if not millions of new advertisers to connected TV.

Et tu, Vanderhooks?

But where does that leave the open web? In the corner with no Patrick Swayze to save it.

During the Q&A portion of the call, Laura Martin, an analyst at Needham & Company, asked how Viant plans to keep growing revenue when the open internet is starting to shrivel like a slug in salt and even its longstanding champions, like Reddit, are throwing in the towel.

In response, Tim Vanderhook said that the open internet is only “10% or less” of Viant’s business and is “certainly not driving the growth rates we’re seeing now.”

As far as Viant is concerned, every dollar leaving the open web is a dollar headed toward CTV.

Advertisers are shifting more of their budgets away from display and online video towards more addressable and “premium” environments, Vanderhook said, which he believes will “end up being a catalyst for us next year.”

Waymarks the spot

Still, just because budgets are moving to CTV, doesn’t mean every advertiser can afford to make a TV ad – and that’s where Waymark comes in.

Waymark’s software turns a brand’s inputs into a finished video ad in a matter of minutes, complete with a custom script, visuals and voiceover. Local media sellers, including Spectrum Reach, Comcast, NBCU and Fox already use it to produce linear and CTV spots for local advertisers.

In Viant’s view, Waymark addresses three problems: the high cost of producing TV-quality ads, creative fatigue and ads that aren’t tailored to the audience.

Production costs keep most small and midsize advertisers out of CTV, said Viant’s COO, Chris Vanderhook, and so “the down market opportunity is incredible.”

But big enterprise advertisers also need more creative. They run the same ads over and over again until people just tune them out, Tim Vanderhook said.

“It’s not that the creative is bad,” he said, “it’s that they do a big production shoot, they have that creative in market for three to six months and users are overfrequented.”

Viant’s TVision panel data suggests that when someone has seen an ad too many times, their attention plummets, but fresh creative can increase their attention by more than 80%.

The final part of the equation is targeting. Viant plans to pair Waymark with its Household ID, Iris Content ID and TVision’s attention data to tailor different creative versions to specific audiences and also to what they’re watching.

Take an online university that’s trying to reach prospective students. Instead of running a single ad for everyone, the advertiser could have one about athletics, another about academics, a third about campus life and so on.

Viant would use its Household ID to match an ad to the right audience (sports fans, say, or academically minded prospects). The content ID would contextually target the ad to whatever’s on the screen (the athletics ad during a sports game and the academic ad during an ad break in a documentary). And then TVision could measure attention.

Chris Vanderhook referred to this process as “the transformation of creative from a fixed asset into a dynamic asset.”

Even so, for now at least, Waymark is more of a bet than a business. Viant expects it to add little revenue this quarter or next year. But the deal does fit the pattern. Viant is going for those CTV dollars.

“The paradigm is shifting,” Tim Vanderhook said. “TV is no longer reserved only for the world’s largest brands.”