So I think Hero brings a wealth of expertise about the communities in which they advertise and work and the clients and customers with whom they work, as well as a publisher network that they have, where we’ll get unique access to inventory that we have not had in our network before. So we’re not shifting to be on the supply side. We’re clearly doubling down, tripling down on our demand-side capabilities and our ability to deliver value on the buy side, but we’re partnering with a partner in Hero that will allow us to fuel our data assets, our models, our audiences with unique data and to give us unique destinations for multicultural advertisements.
Laura Martin: Super. Okay. So you’re still a pure-play DSC.
Jim Lawson: Correct.
Laura Martin: Very helpful. My other question was on CTV, Jim. So you said that self-service CTV grew by 127%, but the total CTV grew by 1%. So is the implication of that that all we did is substitute managed service CTV for self-service and kill our take rate? Am I reading and interpreting that properly?
Jim Lawson: No. Laura, there’s a shift mix in self-service sell. With regard to CTV, you’re going to have a more self-service SKU, and I think that’s good. I think we knew that self-service and CTV we’re going to go very well together. So no, we’re encouraged by that. I mean, I think we’re going to see growth across both managed and self-service when it comes to CTV. But at this point in time, it’s the law of small numbers. I mean, we’re seeing that we’ve had much more growth in this particular quarter through self-service. I think there will be quarters where we’ll have a lot of growth across managed. But at the end of the day, the longer-term view is that we have a fantastic data-driven, machine learning-driven self-service offering, and being able to provide that to both self-service buyers and managed buyers is going to be a key to growth.
So I don’t view it as a 1-quarter story. I view it as the beginning of laying a foundation for driving growth across CTV. And self-service is going to be obviously a very big part of that.
Laura Martin: Okay. And then my last question is, look like Google is actually going to finally deprecating cookies in the first half of next year. Does that act as a catalyst to push more campaigns towards you? What’s your opinion on that?
Jim Lawson: Yes, 100%. We feel very good about where we sit relative to the post-cookie world. We’ve talked a lot in our prepared remarks and in our prior quarters about the audience, algorithmic audience capabilities that we’ve built. We talked about our contextual advancements in contextual advertising with keyword and natural language processing inputs to our data science models. And we’re also working with additional partners to create more one-to-one insights so that we have one-to-one data, as well. But at the end of the day, the cookie deprecation is coming. I also believe that there are other IDs that are things that need to be thought about. And when you look forward, being in a machine learning world, where we can score impressions and we can understand data using statistics, and we can have more than just an ID-based approach, gives us a significant advantage.
And there are a lot of platforms talking about their household graphs and those types of things. We have great household graphs. Many of them are tied back to IP addresses. We also are thinking beyond the IP address. We’re thinking beyond other data signals. So it’s not just about the cookie for us. We want to bring to the market a really future-proof solution for targeted advertising that leverages machine learning and goes beyond not just the cookie, but beyond a lot of these signals that are taken for granted right now. And I think we’re going to be in a very exciting place to share some of that information, and I look forward to doing that.
Laura Martin: Thanks very much. Thank you.
Jim Lawson: Thanks, Laura.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Boone with JMP Securities. Your line is now open.
Unknown Analyst: Great. Thank you. This is [Brianna] on the line for Andrew Boone. Thanks so much for taking my question. Two questions for me. On CTV, what have you learned through this year? What’s CTV trajectory looking like for 2024? And then, are there any impacts from the potential deprecation of IP addresses by Google? Thank you.
Jim Lawson: Yes. Thank you for your question. We feel good about the CTV growth. Again, we were we were talking about the fact that there’s a bit of a mix shift to self-service with CTV, and we think that’s a good thing. We think it’s actually going to drive a lot of adoption of our self-service platform. We’ve increased our inventory reach, our AVOD inventory with MAX, Discovery, Roku, Viacom. We’ve recently added live sports, live addressable, and we’re adding Hulu in the fourth quarter. We’re also continuing to make investments in understanding the content object metadata in the CTV world so that our machine learning algorithms can use CTV signals in the bid request so that we can score those impressions and drive performance and make CTV more of a performance-oriented engine.
So I think we feel really good about it. I think the growth rates are going to be there. Again, we’re early innings relative to other more established platforms on self-service. So as we scale self-service, I think we’re going to really see great numbers on CTV. It’s a big part of our strategy, going forward, and we feel very optimistic about that. Regarding the deprecation of the cookie, as I just mentioned to Laura, we feel really good about where AdTheorent is positioned. We are not an ID-focused company. We do not emphasize the one-to-one nature of targeting. We have a lot of different capabilities. We focus on signals and bid requests, understanding those signals using machine learning algorithms to predict the outcome of serving an ad to an impression with given data on it rather than just retargeting IDs, whether that’s a cookie ID or other IDs. So we have a number of strategies that we’re excited to share as we get a little further along in the year.
