New Podcast: Viant Earnings Brunch with Jon Schulz, CMO of Viant

Jon Schulz has spent half his career on the brand side — automotive, pharma, the advertiser's chair — and the other half building one of ad tech's longest-running buy-side platforms. On this episode of the State of Streaming podcast, recorded the day after Viant's best quarter ever (Tuesday) and released to you today (Thursday). Here's what we discussed...

The top 52% of advertisers have grown just 1% annually over the last 15 years. During that same period, total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew 2.4% over the same period. For comparison, during that same period, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla grew 550%.

The takeaway?

"The platforms getting the ad dollars are doing quite well. The advertisers are not."

The Conflict of Interest

Google has DV360. Amazon has Amazon DSP. Both are presented as neutral buying tools. But 80%+ of Google's revenue comes from YouTube, paid search, and its own network. Amazon's equivalent number traces back to listing ads and owned inventory. The buying interface is not a neutral platform — it's a gateway to their owned and operated supply.

Schulz isn't being critical. He calls it a good business model if you can pull it off. But emphasizes that advertisers using those tools to buy media should understand what they're actually buying into.

The 5% Problem

At any given moment, only 5% of potential customers are in market. It doesn't matter what you sell that's the rule. But digital advertising has spent the last decade optimizing ad dollars almost entirely against that 5% — chasing conversions from demand that already exists and ignoring the 95% of future customers who haven't raised their hand yet.

Television has always been the best format for closing that gap. Connected TV is now where that happens at scale, with targeting and measurement that linear never had. That's the thesis behind Viant's Outcomes product: measurable performance on the open internet, outside the walled gardens (Amazon, Google, Meta), built for demand generation versus only demand capture.

The Empty Room

Earlier this year Viant acquired TVision, adding the almighty attention signal to their CTV stack which has exposed an alarming truth advertisers absolutely want to know — 30% of CTV ads run to an empty room. Nobody's watching. The screen is on. The impression counts. The ad did nothing.

Case Study

The NBA Finals comeback has now become case study. When the Knicks were down 16 points in Game 5 the TV turned off or became that background noise. But then they started to chip away. Then the game got close again, and every eye in every room snapped back to the screen. CPMs went from near $0 to $120 — nearly double the Super Bowl. And because of TVision, advertisers can now bid up or down in real time based on that signal. The empty room costs you nothing and you pay what the moment is worth.

The Stack

Viant Household ID is mapped to 95% of US households and lives in 80% of programmatic bid requests. IRIS Content ID is on 50% of the CTV bid stream, targeting 70% by year end. Below 30% coverage? Signal as a proxy. Above 80% though? It's a currency.

Viant is at currency level — and Q2 2026 is the first peek at what that looks like in revenue.

Best quarter ever. 27 years in the making.

📺 Watch or 🎧 Listen to the full episode here: https://podcast.stateofstreaming.com/viant-earnings-brunch-jon-schulz-q2-2026

Read about the Viant CIA CTV Stack here next.