Tim Vanderhook, the CEO of digital ad software company Viant Technology Inc., has offered some insights into a potential acquisition that was later abandoned, as the Irvine-based company released earnings that made the share price surge.
Vanderhook confirmed that Viant (Nasdaq: DSP) had been looking to buy New York-based rival ad firm MediaMath, which has since gone bankrupt. A potential deal between the two had been speculated in industry trade publications for a few months.
Vanderhook said in the end “we offer a superior product and that was just capitalism playing out,” in a transcript of his remarks to financial analysts provided by Yahoo.
“We saw benefits the day of MediaMath’s bankruptcy filing. We had many shared customers and we saw budgets flowing out of MediaMath and into our platform,” he said after the second-quarter results were released on Aug. 7.
He added: “Ultimately, we felt like our product was going to beat them competitively and organically and so we decided not to deploy capital there, which I think proved to be a good decision. We gained many more ad dollars, not necessarily new customers, but more ad dollars in the platform the day they did file bankruptcy.”
Beating Estimate
Viant’s self-service Demand Side Platform (DSP), Adelphic, is an enterprise software platform enabling marketers to execute programmatic advertising campaigns across connected TV, linear TV, mobile, desktop, audio and digital out-of-home channels.
As online trade magazine Digiday summed things up a while back: “It’s using machines to buy ads, basically.”
Viant said earlier this month that adjusted earnings per share were 6 cents in the second quarter, beating Zacks Consensus Estimate of 1 cent per share.
Quarterly revenue was $57.2 million, almost 2% above the Zacks estimate.
Shares in Viant increased 29% after the company reported second-quarter earnings that beat analysts’ estimates. It counted a market value around $380 million as of last week.
