Maria Ripps: Got it. That’s very helpful. And maybe one more, if I could. It seems like you’re having a lot of success sort of moving upstream with a mid market segment. So as more SMB sort of adopt January vi sort of supported creative tools and sort of more fully embraced digital advertising, can you maybe just talk about how at this point you’ve used sort of engaging with the long tail of smaller advertisers that will still meet your minimum spend thresholds?
Tim Vanderhook: Yes, we’re not really focused on the SMB segment. I think that when we think about creative and AI, we think that’s very, very, very early stages just in the industry. We do think there’s incredible promise for it. And we think it, there’s going to be a lot of innovation in that space. And it’s going to be big for small businesses, because that’s kind of, I think, that’s for small businesses to buy across the open web. And when you think about video, that’s something that they don’t have readily accessible. They can easily create a search ad, or they can easily create social ad. So I think as an industry, that is something that’s still on deck. As far as our customers and really moving up market within the mid market, we’re really just — it’s the results and us being in market for as long as we have and gaining more and more trust from our clients.
They’re just continuing to increase spend, and then word of mouth spreads, that the Viant platform is getting great results. So that’s getting us more and more new customers.
Maria Ripps: Thank you so much for the color.
Tim Vanderhook: Thank you.
Operator: We will now hear from Craig-Hallum’s Jason Kreyer. Jason, please go ahead.
Jason Kreyer: Hey, guys. So just on two questions on CTV. So just curious if you can kind of define what’s driving the inflection and the share gains that you’re seeing there. And then also, when you’re onboarding Direct Access customers, are you bringing CTV advertisers directly to Direct Access? Or is that the more mature CTV advertisers adopting Direct Access?
Chris Vanderhook: It’s really — with the most recent stats in the quarter that over 50% of our total — of our customers CTV spend is going towards Direct Access partners. That really is — that’s widespread and so it’s across the board. And really what’s driving that, they all want if you think about there isn’t — I shouldn’t — there’s not the same type of long tail and CTV apps, like there isn’t websites, I don’t know, 25 million websites. They’re much smaller, I think it’s 50,000 CTV apps. So it is — a lot of the viewership is going to be aimed at the premium end of the market. And that is really if you ask customers, where do they want to be, that’s where they want to be. Number one, I think we make it a lot more palatable for them, because we’re connecting directly with those content owners.
And they’re seeing lower CPMs as a result, and they’re also winning at auctions at a higher rate. So, net-net, those content owners are getting higher CPMs, even though previously where customers had been through other platforms through intermediaries, they were spending more. So I think that’s number one. The CPM savings is big. Number two, over the top of that is our Household ID. Across other platforms, this isn’t widely understood. There is not a standard identifier, like a Cookie and CTV. So marketers are buying in other platforms typically end up experiencing over frequency and not reaching as many people, therefore the results aren’t good. And so in the U.S Household ID, and it’s available in excess of 90% of the time and CTV and our platform, they’re controlling frequency near perfectly, that means they’re reaching the intended amount of households that they really just maxing out there.
And it’s driving better results. It’s pretty simple. So if I can get you a better price that’s direct to large content owners, and then your controlling reach and frequency, and that’s advertising.
Tim Vanderhook: I mean, just getting to defining the growth and connected television and what’s driving it, it’s more simple than you would think. I mean, we say this over and over. But we have walled garden level addressability, but not on user generated content like social, it’s on the world’s most premium content. And I think that overarching the combination of the two things is what’s fueling the growth of connected television, the targeting the measurement and the sight sound and motion of that big shared device in the room really moves consumer behavior. So, for CTV growth, we really don’t see that slowing down. We feel very good about it. Now that addressability is brought to television, I think you’re just going to see the budgets continue to flow.
Jason Kreyer: Thanks, guys.
Tim Vanderhook: Thank you.
Operator: And our last question will come from Chris Kuntarich with UBS.
Chris Kuntarich: Great. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe just going back to Direct Access and your ability to expand beyond Disney and Paramount, could you maybe just help us think about timeline there? How those conversations are going and maybe how that could potentially factor into the back half of the year? And then the second question would be just around cash expenses. 2Q [ph] guide was a little bit ahead of our expectations. Can you just talk a little bit about what’s driving the sequential growth in 2Q and maybe how we should be thinking about the second half of the year expenses, not sure if the work that you guys have done to pull forward the timeline on the AI Bid Optimizer has maybe pulled forward some expenses? Thanks.
Tim Vanderhook: I’ll take the first one, just on Direct Access and that program and the growth of that. Disney and Paramount were early ones in there, but there’s many more in there. It’s just I didn’t want it to sound like it was just we have two partners that are driving that. We are focused on all the premium end of CTV. And I do see that there’ll be more and more partners that are continuing to be added to that every single quarter. And one of the things is that what those partners have, yes, they have incredible content, but they also have subscribers that are logged in. And today’s ecosystem with DSPs, they have no ability to — many of them have no ability to bid and buy off of. In the case of Disney, they have something called a Nebula [ph] ID.
Most platforms have — they don’t know what to do with that. So when those partners integrate with our Household ID, that’s really essentially you’re matching on subscriber data. So when we say walled garden level addressability, we’re actually one of the few DSPs out there that can actually bid on that. And actually these content owners are getting higher CPMs as a result, and it’s because marketers are seeing better returns, so they’re bidding more on those. So it’s really, it’s a self fulfilling prophecy here, more and more of these large content owners are coming at us. I expect that to continue to gain even more steam throughout the year. We’re remaining focused in CTV for now. But there’s no reason why this wouldn’t happen across other channels as well.
