Viant Buys Waymark for $20 Million to Fuel CTV Ad Creation

Viant reported just over $110 million in Q3 revenue on Monday evening, up 29% year over year, and used the same earnings call to close a $20 million cash acquisition of AI video creative platform Waymark. The deal is a bet that connected TV needs more ads — and faster ways to make them.

CTV ad spend through Viant's platform grew almost 40% year over year in the quarter and now represents more than half of total ad spend on the platform. Despite the numbers, Viant's stock fell roughly 7% in after-hours trading. The likely culprit is spending: Viant expects costs to rise about 25% next quarter, partly because recent acquisitions like TVision and Waymark aren't expected to bring in meaningful revenue yet.

Tim Vanderhook, Viant's CEO, pitched 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.

Where does that leave the open web?

Nowhere important, by Viant's own accounting. During the Q&A, Needham & Company analyst Laura Martin asked how Viant plans to keep growing revenue when the open internet is shrinking and even longtime champions like Reddit are pulling back.

Tim Vanderhook said the open internet accounts for only "10% or less" of Viant's business and is "certainly not driving the growth rates we're seeing now." Advertisers are shifting budgets away from display and online video toward more addressable and "premium" environments, he said, which he believes will "end up being a catalyst for us next year."

In short: every dollar leaving the open web is, in Viant's view, a dollar headed toward CTV.

What does Waymark actually do?

Waymark's software turns a brand's inputs into a finished video ad in minutes — script, visuals and voiceover included. 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 framing, Waymark solves three problems:

• The high cost of producing TV-quality ads, which keeps most small and midsize advertisers out of CTV
• Creative fatigue, as enterprise advertisers run the same spots for months
• Ads that aren't tailored to the audience or the content around them

Chris Vanderhook, Viant's COO, said the "down market opportunity is incredible" because production costs have locked smaller advertisers out of television.

Big advertisers need fresh creative too. "It's not that the creative is bad," Tim Vanderhook 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 backs him up: when someone sees an ad too many times, attention plummets, but fresh creative can increase attention by more than 80%.

How the pieces fit together

Viant plans to pair Waymark with its Household ID, Iris Content ID and TVision's attention data. An online university, for example, could produce separate ads about athletics, academics and campus life — Household ID matches the ad to the audience, Iris contextually targets it to what's on screen, and TVision measures the attention result.

Chris Vanderhook called this "the transformation of creative from a fixed asset into a dynamic asset."

For now, though, Waymark is more bet than business. Viant expects it to add little revenue this quarter or next year. But the pattern is clear, and Tim Vanderhook framed the stakes plainly: "The paradigm is shifting. TV is no longer reserved only for the world's largest brands."