Viant Bets $20 Million That AI-Made CTV Ads Beat Creative Fatigue

Viant has paid $20 million for Waymark, a generative AI video ad platform whose customers — including Comcast, Fox, NBCU, Spectrum Reach and Gray Television — have produced more than a million ads over the past year for local advertisers.

Viant CEO Tim Vanderhook frames the deal as a turning point for who gets to touch the creative. "Ten years ago, no one would even let you touch the creative," he told AdExchanger. "Our bet is that's changing."

Waymark is the third acquisition in Viant's two-year buying spree, alongside Iris.TV, which supplies content signals, and TVision, which tracks attention. Together they form what Viant pitches as a closed loop: Iris matches ads to content, TVision measures whether anyone watches, and Waymark replaces spots that wear out.

Viant is open about whose playbook it copied. "Meta takes over all the media optimization and audience targeting, and then they just tell brands to produce as much creative as they possibly can," said COO Chris Vanderhook. "That's a big part of their success, and it's something we're looking to replicate."

Why buy a creative tool now?

Tim Vanderhook said the mid-market and DTC brands Viant wants spend tens of millions a month on Meta, which wins because self-service scales where salespeople can't. "To do the same for TV, you've got to generate the spot for them," he said. "We couldn't do that before Waymark."

His brother pointed to the budget gap the deal exploits: when creative fatigues, marketers told Viant during TVision diligence, "Well, we already spent that money and we don't have it in the budget to make new creative, so…"

Big brands may not be first movers on generative creative, Chris Vanderhook noted, but many already use AI for editing, and he expects adoption to accelerate.

Does attention data justify more versions?

Tim Vanderhook anchored the argument with numbers. Morgan & Morgan, the country's biggest personal injury ad spender, runs one spot that has aired for five years and draws 21% human attention; its newest ad scores 86%.

"Once people recognize an ad, their brain almost subconsciously tunes out," he said. Frequency norms vary wildly, per TVision data: healthcare ads can hit a frequency of 50 and keep driving engagement, while a Super Bowl ad "falls off a cliff after one view." When CTV serves the same ad five times in a row, Chris Vanderhook added, the advertiser gets blamed — not the publisher.

On AI-quality fears, Tim Vanderhook said the industry is "moving past that time when every hand had six fingers," but flagged disclosure and AI-generated humans as the two flashpoints, predicting tools are improving "at a hockey stick curve."

What about the open web and Myspace?

On this week's Q3 earnings call, Tim Vanderhook said the open web is 10% or less of Viant's business and not a growth driver. Display still has a role: a banner gets about 2% ad recall, a TV ad 32%, and TV followed by display 38%. He blamed shrinking web traffic on Google, claiming "Facebook didn't kill MySpace. Google did."

As for relaunching Myspace, which Viant has owned since 2011: the first relaunch hit a 13% repeat usage rate against the 30% threshold a social product needs. Costs to run it have since "drastically plummeted," he said, and he fields three to five purchase offers a day. "Never say never."

The bet, in short: Viant now owns buying, identity, content data, measurement and creative — and it's wagering $20 million that advertisers will want the whole loop under one auditable roof.