Viant Buys Waymark for $20M to Bring Meta-Style Ad Automation to CTV

Viant is paying $20 million for Waymark, a generative AI video ad platform that has already produced more than a million ads in the past year for clients of media companies including Comcast, Fox, NBCU, Spectrum Reach and Gray Television. The acquisition, announced earlier this week, is Viant's latest move to let mid-market brands buy TV advertising without ever touching a human creative team.

"Ten years ago, no one would even let you touch the creative," Viant CEO Tim Vanderhook told AdExchanger. "Our bet is that's changing."

Waymark joins a string of Viant acquisitions over the past two years, including Iris.TV, which supplies content signals, and TVision, which tracks attention. Viant's pitch is a closed loop: Iris matches ads to content, TVision measures whether anyone watched, and Waymark generates fresh versions when the old ones wear out. If that sounds like Meta, that's because it is.

"Meta takes over all the media optimization and audience targeting, and then they just tell brands to produce as much creative as they possibly can," said Viant COO Chris Vanderhook. "That's a big part of their success, and it's something we're looking to replicate."

What does this change for advertisers?

The target buyers are mid-market and DTC brands currently spending, in Viant's words, tens of millions a month on Meta. Tim Vanderhook argues you can't staff salespeople and account managers for that segment on TV — you need self-service, and self-service means generating the spot for them. Waymark fills that gap.

The V anderhooks are candid about why: creative fatigue is real and largely unbudgeted. During diligence on TVision, they'd ask marketers what they do when an ad wears out. The answer was essentially, "we already spent that money and we don't have it in the budget to make new creative."

They point to hard numbers from TVision's attention data. A Morgan & Morgan spot — the biggest personal injury ad spender in the country, per Viant — has run for five years and earns 21% human attention. Its newest ad pulls 86%. Once viewers recognize an ad, their brain tunes out.

Frequency norms are equally uneven, Chris Vanderhook said. Healthcare ads can hit a frequency of 50 over time and keep driving engagement, while a Super Bowl ad falls off a cliff after one view. When CTV serves the same ad five times in a row, the publisher doesn't get blamed — the advertiser does.

What about AI slop and self-grading?

Tim Vanderhook claims the "six fingers" era is ending, though he concedes AI voices are still detectable. He argues backlash comes from two places: missing disclosure and AI-generated humans in ads. Product-only ads get more leeway. Because the tools improve on a hockey stick curve, he says, proper disclosure will matter more, not less.

On whether Viant is grading its own homework — it now owns buying, identity, content data, measurement and creative — his answer is that everything Viant does is auditable, while nothing the walled gardens do is. "Google, Amazon and Meta have reporting to maximize their share of wallet," he said. "We're trying to show who's actually driving sales." That's a claim advertisers will need to test independently.

The open web and Myspace

The open web is now 10% or less of Viant's business and not a growth driver, per Tim Vanderhook's Q3 earnings call this week. He blames Google's traffic monopoly, arguing the search giant must hoard traffic to compete with ChatGPT or its stock suffers. His take: "Facebook didn't kill MySpace. Google did."

As for relaunching Myspace, which Viant has owned since 2011: he gets three to five buyout offers a day, but a social product needs repeat usage above 30% to work — the first relaunch managed 13%. Delivery costs have since plummeted, so, in his words, never say never. Myspace Tom, meanwhile, remains uninterested in a comeback, splitting time between Southern California and Hawaii.