Boosting Performance with Viant’s AI-Powered Bid Optimizer

Talk of how artificial intelligence (AI) will revolutionize digital advertising has been a hot industry topic over the past few years. However, many of the promised solutions have yet to come to fruition. 

Now, Viant’s AI-powered tools are available — and are already helping advertisers solve some of their everyday challenges. 

To discuss how Viant’s AI-powered Bid Optimizer recently drove success for a casino & online gambling client, we sat down with Senior Account Executive Kort Koppmann. 

Q: Kort, before we dive into the Bid Optimizer and how it helped drive success for our casino & online gambling brand client, can you tell us a little about the Bid Optimizer and how it works? 

At Viant, we believe programmatic advertising will be transformed by artificial intelligence (AI). That belief is what powers many aspects of our platform; including Bid Optimizer. Leveraging our patented Bidder technology, Bid Optimizer analyzes a bid request from a publisher in a fraction of a second in order to respond with an ad and a bid price. In utilizing a combination of machine learning models, Bid Optimizer analyzes the most granular data available from historical bid opportunities to determine the most effective and efficient bid price without sacrificing quality. The machine learning models look into areas such as the bid location, the site type, ad type and size, device type, historical performance of similar ad opportunities and much more.

Q: OK, let’s get into the casino & online gambling brand case study. Can you tell us what the brand wanted to achieve and why they looked to Viant?

This brand has been a long-standing partner of ours, and over time we have developed a rather successful strategy across their full programmatic media plan aimed at new customer acquisition. At the start, we initially helped them to refine their traditional display and video media buying into our omnichannel DSP, which enabled them to view how the channels performed alongside each other. Over time, more channels were consolidated into our DSP, including streaming audio, digital out-of-home (DOOH) and connected TV (CTV) — which was heavily influenced by dwindling linear TV performance given the lack of measurability with that medium.

Q. Can you share how the Bid Optimizer helped them?

Over the past few years we continually refined tactics, from channels to publishers to data they’re using, to provide them with the most effective and efficient strategy for new customer acquisition. When Viant released Bid Optimizer it was a no-brainer to incorporate that into their campaigns. Because the tool helps to reduce media cost even further, this results in more impressions delivered without the need for increasing budgets. Those incremental impressions led to greater reach; and with greater reach comes a higher likelihood of connecting with a potential new customer, leading to an increase in conversions.

To put this in perspective, using Bid Optimizer provided them with a 21% uptick in incremental impressions and a cut their total CPM by 16% across their strategy. This led to more conversions and thus a reduction in their cost per new customer acquisition.

Q. Another solution that made an impact was the Viant Data Platform (VDP). Can you share more about the VDP and how it helped the brand?

The VDP has been instrumental in this brand’s ability to maintain a cohesive line of sight into their performance. From their use of the platform’s data automation and reporting portability to advanced analytics, the brand has set up a continuous feed of their new customer acquisition measurement to members of their team to review on a regular cadence. The brand also utilizes the VDP’s audience segmentation capabilities to automatically build prospecting audiences based on a combination of new customer conversions and first-party data, proactively creating a net-new pool of potential customers to reach.

Q. Lastly, can you share how the Bid Optimizer (and Viant’s other AI-powered solutions) can help other advertisers, whether in the casino & online gambling vertical or outside of it, achieve success?

Generally speaking, every brand activating in the Viant DSP should be using Bid Optimizer. This simple tool provides an incredible amount of value across media performance — more data leads to smarter buying decisions, which leads to more efficient CPMs, which leads to more reach to your target audience, which results in an increased likelihood for achieving (or even improving) KPI metrics, like new customers, app downloads, etc. 

The other AI-powered solutions from Viant, such as AI Recommendations for campaign optimization, or Chat With Data — which allows marketers to engage with their first-party data, assess campaign performance, conduct custom analyses and schedule automated tasks all through simple ChatGPT-style conversation — will be critical for marketers looking to get the most out of their tech stack. 

Viant’s resilience in identity-based reach combined with the fastest bidder in the industry and best-in-class AI-powered solutions, makes for a lethal combination to execute any marketer’s programmatic strategy. 

Learn more about Viant’s AI-powered tools in our latest cheat sheet ‘How AI is Transforming Programmatic Advertising’, or get started with Viant today.