3 Messaging Best Practices from Viant’s Earnings Call

Viant (a Sharp Pen client) reported earnings Monday and is up 20% as of the writing of this essay. Viant’s co-founders, Tim and Chris Vanderhook, are some of the adtech industry’s best storytellers and provocateurs.

Here are three messaging best practices from the earnings call that others can emulate.

Enumerate 1-3 Clear Differentiators

Tim and Chris articulated three differentiators / reasons to believe: neutrality (they don't own or preference any particular supply), AI investments, and addressability (rooted in the Household and Iris IDs).

Neutrality: “We are an independent and objective partner, free of the conflicts of interest that exist with our competitors. Remember, many of our peers either sell owned and operated inventory, or they monetize certain supply paths, putting their interest at odds with their advertiser clients. Google direct spend to YouTube, Amazon direct spend to Prime Video, and the Trade Desk direct spend through OpenPath, all to extract more margin for themselves and ultimately to the detriment of the advertiser.” Lesson: Don’t be afraid to call out your competitors if you’re a challenger. If you do call them out, focus on a salient, easily comprehensible difference, not an abstract or complex argument that needs to be explained.

AI: “Our autonomous advertising platform will compete with Google's PMax and demand gen solutions as well as Meta's Advantage+ solution, but will direct spend to demand generation channels like CTV and streaming audio, that drive incremental lift, as opposed to demand capture channels like search and social, where ad spend is directed to audiences that often would have converted anyway.” Lesson: Don’t just say “AI” 100 times. Put it in the industry context — and use it as an opportunity to drive a wedge between yourself and your competitors.

Addressability: “At the core of our autonomous ad platform is an intelligence layer that is giving our customers the ability to drive higher returns in open Internet advertising. Viant is the only platform where advertisers can leverage AI to harness what we believe to be the industry's most powerful audience identifier, Household ID, and the industry's most powerful content identifier, IRIS_ID, to cut through the noise and deploy precise hyper-targeted campaigns at scale through the most efficient supply paths.” Lesson: Tie differentiation claims to easily understandable and recognizable products to boost credibility.

But more important than the arguments about any one particular differentiator is that Viant has three clear differentiators they’re doubling down on. Most companies trade in platitudes or laundry lists of victories and features. As a result, no one, not even their employees or customers, can remember what’s supposed to be unique about them.

To tell a memorable story that will actually generate pipeline and accelerate deals, you need to repeat the same 1-3 differentiators over and over. The Vanderhooks did that very effectively in this week’s earnings call.

Ground Your Narrative in Customer Wins

Viant told the story of their current trajectory through a huge recent business win: Molson Coors.

The most valuable asset you can have for PR/communications is referenceable clients. If you say something great about yourself, it’s easy to discount. If a brand-name client says it, it’s immediately credible. Journalists, influencers, customers, and employees will believe it if it’s backed up by a customer.

The customer is the hero of the story — you’re propelling them to success.

Tell a Story About the Future of the Industry

One of the most common messaging flaws I see in prospective clients is that they’re telling a story that seems to an exist in a silo — they’re not engaging within the state of the industry or its future. As a result, clients don’t have context for them. They might think, “This company is useful.” But they can’t see how the company fits into the core of their future approach to (in our industry’s case) advertising.

The Vanderhooks repeated over and over their desired new positioning: "With multiple wins in place, the broader market is increasingly recognizing Viant as the autonomous advertising platform for the open Internet." Translation: We want to own the next generation of AI-driven adtech. We’re not just putting together a few different AI modules. We’re building a new kind of platform, the next generation of DSPs, that will define adtech in this incipient AI era.

The best stories don’t just underscore differentiators; they tell a story about the future of the industry that positions the storyteller as central to it. That’s what Viant is doing here: endeavoring to invent the future of adtech in real-time. As a result, if they succeed, their customers won’t just view them as a quality partner; they’ll view them as the future of media buying technology.

3 Guidelines for Messaging

3 lessons others can follow:

1) repeat 3 key differentiators

2) ground your story in customer wins

3) align your innovations with the future of your industry

Take a look at your last earnings call or your website and tweak it with these guidelines in mind. Or, I don’t know, ask me to do it.