Viant Pays $20 Million for Waymark as CTV Passes Half Its Ad Spend

Viant spent $20 million in cash to buy Waymark, an AI video production platform, and announced the closed deal on the same evening it reported just over $110 million in Q3 revenue, up 29% year over year. CTV ad spend on its platform grew almost 40% in the same period and now accounts for more than half of total ad spend flowing through Viant.

The market did not applaud. Viant's stock fell roughly 7% in after-hours trading Monday. The company expects costs to rise about 25% next quarter, partly because acquisitions such as TVision and Waymark are not expected to bring in meaningful revenue yet.

That last point is worth underlining: Viant itself projects the $20 million asset will add little revenue this quarter or next year. Waymark is, for now, a bet rather than a business.

What does Waymark actually do?

Waymark's software turns a brand's inputs into a finished video ad within 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.

Viant frames the acquisition as solving three problems: the high cost of producing TV-quality ads, creative fatigue, and ads that are not tailored to the audience.

Production costs keep most small and midsize advertisers out of CTV entirely, said COO Chris Vanderhook, and so "the down market opportunity is incredible." Large advertisers have the opposite problem. They run the same spot for months until viewers stop paying attention.

"It's not that the creative is bad," CEO 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."

What does the attention data show?

Viant's TVision panel data suggests that once a viewer has seen an ad too many times, attention plummets — but fresh creative can lift attention by more than 80%. That is the number Viant is building its creative strategy around.

The plan is to pair Waymark with Viant's Household ID, Iris Content ID and TVision's attention data to serve different creative versions to specific audiences and to match what is on screen. An online university, for example, could run one ad about athletics, another about academics and a third about campus life. Household ID matches the ad to the audience, Iris contextually targets whatever is playing, and TVision measures the attention result.

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

Where does the open internet fit?

Barely, by Viant's own account. During the Q&A, Needham & Company analyst Laura Martin asked how Viant plans to keep growing revenue as the open internet shrinks and even longtime champions like Reddit pull back.

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

He also 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.

Millions is a big word for a $20 million tool with no near-term revenue attached. "The paradigm is shifting," Tim Vanderhook said. "TV is no longer reserved only for the world's largest brands." The stock market's 7% verdict suggests investors want to see the numbers first.