AdTech AI Files

ATTENTION drives Intention. Think about the last time you walked through a store. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of products sat on shelves within arm’s reach. You walked past most of them without even noticing. Not because they were bad products. Not because you had something against them. They simply never earned your Attention. Only the items that interrupt your autopilot, that visually stand out,...

In this episode of AdTech AI Files , we unpack the hottest topics from the past few months and explain why they all point to the same conclusion: outcomes matter more than ever, and most AI failures start with weak data foundations. We break down what it actually takes to make “chat with data” work in an enterprise environment. Spoiler: it’s not the model. Live data connectivity, a true semantic l...

Based solely on Viant’s Q1 2025 earnings transcript. Revenue YoY: 32% CxT: 25%

𝗟𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗦𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴’𝘀 𝗡𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝗕𝗶𝗴 𝗔𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗮 | Jon Schulz https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jon-schulz-4780ba4_upfronts-ctv-livesports-activity-7318655564027215873-qDIg?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAOMQksB5Fgbm_qk5Eeo-7X6VF7Vp2IJNg8 Bold #Upfronts Predictions from an #IndustryVeteran — With a Twist | Tom Wolfe https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tomhwolfe_upfronts-industryvet...

Pod dedicated to the one and only, Mikhail Berylant People, Process, and Tools For any company to be successful, it takes these three things. Rarely is there a person that embodies all 3, Mikhail Berlyant is one of the greats that does. I wanted to take a moment to honor Mikhail for the #contribution he has had in my professional career. It was through Mikhail creating Potens.io , a software that...

“What’s a Good Conversion Rate?” 🤔 The Benchmark Myth For as long as I can remember, marketers have asked me: “What’s a good conversion rate for my campaign?” And here’s the honest answer… it depends. Conversion rate benchmarks are tricky because different brands have different goals. A KPI could be downloading a coupon, signing up for an email, opening a bank account, or even buying a car, all o...

The Who, What, and How foot traffic measurement works.

Will Google’s Ad Empire Be Broken Up? When I first started in programmatic, 2nd price auctions ensured advertisers paid a fair market rate. You could bid confidently knowing you’d only pay a cent more than the next-highest bid. Then, about 8-9 years ago, Google led the shift to 1st price auctions (where you pay exactly what you bid) & enabling their publishers to create dynamic bid floors (to...

The Illusion of High Lift: Why Longer Lookback Windows Matter in Incrementality Testing Marketers love seeing high lift in incrementality studies, it feels like proof that campaigns are driving real impact. But if you’re only looking at short lookback windows (1-7 days), you might be chasing last-touch credit and overestimating effectiveness. The Problem: Short Lookback Windows Inflate Lift When w...

Relative vs. Incremental Lift: How you can Leverage Both Let’s say you own a pizza shop, and you’re running an ad campaign to get more people ordering your delicious pies. You set up a test: • Exposed Group: They see your ad and start craving pizza. • Control Group: No ad seen At the end of the campaign, let’s say your control group only sold 10 pizzas and the exposed group sold 25, for a total of...

Pod cast produced from my 8 year old son to kids of all ages. Enjoy!

In honor of International Women's Day, I wanted to recognize 2 women that have had a profound impact on my life. One of them personal, another professional. My mom, a lifelong nurse, specializing in end-of-life care (hospice) and mid-to-late-stage cancer care, always taught me that the most important thing anyone can do in their life is to CARE, whether for a person or a cause. With 8 billion peop...

Use it or Lose it: a Mobile Measurement Partner ofcourse Mobile in-app environments convert 3x more often than mobile web. Think about how often you buy Starbucks coffee through the app vs. opening Safari or Chrome to place an order. For most of us, it’s a night-and-day difference, in-app is faster, more convenient, and personalized. In cases like this, app conversion rates aren’t just higher, the...

Privacy vs. Blocking: The Real Story Behind Consumer Choice There’s a big difference between consumers opting out of tracking (which would be every consumers right) and Big Tech outright blocking measurement for their own gain. Yet, the lines keep getting blurred. Take Apple’s Private Relay, a feature that allows users to effectively be routed through a VPN while browsing in Safari, making you inv...

Linear TV vs. Connected TV: The Frequency Problem Marketers Can’t Ignore After running Linear TV vs. Digital measurement studies for the past decade, one pattern remains consistent: Dolllar for dollar, more times than not, Linear TV campaigns have 3x higher frequency than CTV. And here’s the issue, without frequency capping, that’s a lot of wasted impressions. Why This Happens: ✅ Linear can’t con...

The Death of Third-Party Pixels: Why First-Party Data is the Future If you launched your own website tomorrow, you’d own everything: your customer relationships, purchase history, and insights. That’s first-party data, it belongs to you, and no one can take it away. Your same business relies on pixels to understand performance, retarget your customers that have added your product to cart but yet t...

Why Cookie-Based Measurement Sucks in 2025 Remember when cookies were amazing? Back in the ‘90s and early 2000s, they revolutionized online tracking. But today, they only capture 9% of online conversions. Why? Because cookies simply don’t exist in most of the places where modern digital engagement happens: ​ Connected TV – No cookies in your streaming ads. ​ Most computer browsers – Safari, Firefo...

Based solely on Danilo Tauro (PhD) linked in post on 3/5/25 and the 110 commenters summariez using only AI. Article for reference: linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7303063345098620928/

Why Incremental Lift Shrinks Over Time: The Lookback Window Effect ⏳📉 When clients ask "I thought lift would be higher/lower, my 1st question back is what lookback window are you using?" One of the biggest factors in incremental lift measurement isn’t just the ad itself, it’s how long you wait to measure it. ✅ The shorter the lookback window, the higher the incremental lift. ✅ The longer the l...

Mark My Words: Contribution Will Be the Future of AdTech Measurement We’re wrapping up our beta offering , and the feedback has been phenomenal. It just makes sense . Take a look at the chart below—see how CTV is undervalued in traditional attribution models? Whether it’s Last Touch, First Touch, or Linear , they fail to capture the real impact of each channel. But Conversion Contribution ? It tel...

The Best Marketers Have a Strategy for Moving Their Customers Through Each Phase of the Purchase Cycle A long-time friend once shared an interesting insight about a global candy bar brand’s marketing strategy. Their mission wasn’t necessarily to get you to buy the candy bar at the cash register—but to get you to say no to it. Think about that for a second. Most of the products you walk by in a gro...

Viant often gets compared a lot to The Trade Desk. Yet the big things we're working on are so different... 🤔 The Trade Desk: 1. Scale 2. Prep for Google Exit 3. Promote & protect objectivity more 4. Leverage supply and demand imbalance 5. Make CTV most effective channel 6. Audio best year ever 7. Move 100% of clients to KoKai 8. Change the way industry manages Deals 9. AI 10. Simplify Retail...

Viant Technology 3/3/25 Q4 2024 Earnings call recap. Based solely based on the earnings transcript and suplemental earnings presentation available on Viant Technology's Investor Relations page.

Lift & Incrementality: Why Smaller Brands See Bigger Gains 🚀 We constantly get asked for "Lift Benchmarks". One of the biggest misconceptions in marketing is assuming incrementality and lift are the same for every brand. But the truth is, the more nuanced the brand, the greater the potential lift (the more you REALLY need marketing). Let's break it down: If I launched "Steve's T-Shirt" compan...

CTR is the Most Misleading & Overused Metric in Marketing 🚨 Just because someone clicked doesn't mean they were interested, and just because someone didn't click, it doesn't mean they weren't interested… for example: ✅ Mobile ads almost always have a higher CTR than desktop/laptop. Looking at the last ~5B ad impressions across the Viant DSP, Mobile smartphones yield 27% higher CTR than deskt...