Dive Brief:

• Programmatic ad company Viant Technology has acquired connected TV content data platform IRIS.TV, the companies announced. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
• The acquisition is intended to give Viant an advantage when it comes to transparency in CTV inventory. IRIS.TV uses an artificial intelligence-enhanced proprietary content identifier that provides agencies and advertisers access to contextual, emotional and brand-suitability data.
• The deal will also give IRIS.TV the ability to expand its content identification across more premium publishers. The firm has already integrated with more than 1,400 video content owners, platforms and content management systems. It has also indexed more than 60 million streaming video files.

Dive Insight:

The IRIS.TV platform was designed to address the lack of standardization in video content classification across the CTV space. As CTV advertising spend continues to grow, ad tech firms like Viant want to ease advertisers’ fears around transparency, measurement and that their ads will run next to objectionable content, a problem that has dogged digital advertising for years and something that the IRIS.TV deal could help Viant address.

CTV spending was up nearly 50% year-over-year during Viant’s third quarter, with Co-Founder and CEO Tim Vanderhook saying the channel is becoming “increasingly critical” for advertisers, during an earnings call. The IRIS.TV acquisition reflects Viant’s ambitions to be a trusted programmatic partner in the space.

“[IRIS.TV’s] added layer of context provides advertisers with a richer understanding of the videos accompanying their ads, empowering safer, smarter, and more impactful CTV ad campaigns,” he continued.

Though connected TV has been around for years, the more recent development of major platforms like Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime moving to ad-supported programming is a significant shift that agencies and advertisers are still figuring out.

“Marketers are still in the very early stages of CTV buying,” said Chris Vanderhook, Viant co-founder and COO, on the earnings call. “Most CTV buying is done by just targeting the app name. The problem with this is that marketers are not able to easily target specific types of content and they can't measure which types of content drives the best results.”

Viant executives during the call cited IRIS.TV’s recent success with a CTV campaign for Carl’s Jr., which used contextual data to engage young men interested in topics such as anime, gaming and sports. Using the data and IRIS.TV’s proprietary identifier, the fast-food chain realized a 35% lift in incremental visits, a 152% increase in incremental sales and a 2.2 times return on ad spend.