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How Vizio Became a CTV Powerhouse | Travis Hockersmith on Ads, Streaming & Walmart Acquisition
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Good afternoon everybody. I'm Jeremy
Bloom. I'm here with Travis Hawkermith,
the group VP of platform at Vizio. >> Correct.
>> Correct.
>> Amazing. Amazing.
>> So Travis, you and I were talking over
in the corner a few minutes ago. You
have been at Vizio for a little over six
years and uh you have seen a lot take
place at Vizio when you started from
essentially a hardware company to a
software company. Can you explain just a
little bit of what your role is and your
trajectory over the past six years in 30
seconds or less?
>> I don't know if I can do it in 30
seconds, but about six years ago, a
small group of us came into Vizio to
help start the ads business. And at the
time, Vizio was a house brand. Everyone
knew Vizio TVs. And we made money
essentially by selling TVs. uh our
founder William Wang um had
the foresight to understand that the
better business is in making money every
time people turn on their TVs and the
ads business is going to be a big part
of that. So when we started um there was
already an inscape data business that's
been part of Vizio for for quite some
time and we built the ads business on
top of that by bringing great streaming
content onto the platform but then
finding ways to make that attractive to
advertisers and we uh we started as a
very small group with a very small
amount of revenue.
>> When you say small how big was your
group? So when we when we when the
initial wave of us came in, Mike
O'Donnell brought us in, there were
probably five or six of us. Wow.
>> Uh starting the ads business, doing
everything from from uh ad operations to
client services to sales. We were all
kind of doing a little bit of everything.
everything.
>> Yeah. You'd wear every single hat. You'd
get your hands dirty.
>> Yeah. Exactly.
>> Make happen.
>> Exactly. But fortunately, we had this
massive tailwind of interest from the
advertising community in moving as much
of their budget to streaming as made sense.
sense.
Let's even let's go a tiny take a tiny
step back just to understand a bit more
of uh you said the team was small,
revenue was small. Uh, and when you
think about TV to broadcast to cable to
streaming, the journey itself for Vizio,
can you hit a little bit more on that
specifically of just how the revenue and
the team has grown and ascended in those
six years?
>> I mean, it all started really with the
investment that was made before we
started the ads business, which was
building an operating system that would
pull viewer attention into the streaming
environment. uh historically you'd
connect a cable box or whatever to your
vio TV and uh we had to have some
mechanism to bring people into the
streaming environment and the massive
investment over the years that William
made and Smartcast really started to
bring people in. uh the emergence of
major apps like Netflix obviously got
got uh viewers attention and when we
were able to bring people into that
environment it gave us a lot of
opportunity to introduce them to other
content as well uh to the point where
now we see our viewers spending more
time in SmartCast than linear by far uh
because we've kind of replaced the the the
the
what linear used to to viewers within
the streaming environment. Um, so you
can find anything to watch at any time
without without switching to another device.
device.
>> Well, and the growth of of targeting and
audience fragmentation. Why don't you
talk a little bit more just about the uh
specifically within the programmatic
ecosystem just how much Vizio has has
blown up. My experiences we talked about
I was very early to mogul uh Adobe
advertising cloud. So just even as a
partner with Vizio years ago, just
seeing the growth and the expansion,
it's really cool and exciting now uh
being a little bit uh adjacent to it,
but still knowing what you guys are doing.
doing.
>> Yeah, when we came in, we took a lot of
feedback from the market on how buyers
wanted to buy a video on CTV. And one of
the things that we heard loud and clear
is that the other CTB platforms were
trying to establish what amounted to Wal
Gardens and the buying community wasn't
wasn't thrilled about that. So from day
one, we were always uh of the mentality
that we want to be able to be bought
however buyers want to buy our inventory.
inventory. >> Sure.
>> Sure.
>> And in the beginning, that was primarily
IO. I mean 6 years ago most of our video
business was IO based but there was
still a healthy amount of it that was
programmatic. Um at that time uh there
was already programmatic demand but it
was somewhat nent relative to where it
is today. Fast forward to today the
programmatic business is where all the
growth is in video. We still have an IO
based business buyers who want to
transact that way but we're seeing it
increasing acceleration to programmatic
buying and we've supported it from day
one and we have built a team that's
great at providing service to our buyers
who are buying through private deals. We
have a team that's great at making sure
that we have all the best relationships
with all the SSPs and DSPs in the space
so that we make it as easy to transact
on our platform as possible.
>> So by making it easy to trans to
transact on the platform, can you get a
little bit deeper on the data components
that come with Vizia? Yeah. So, we we we
pass in the bidstream all the data that
you would expect given kind of our peer
group of publishers. So, um we're 100%
transparent. You always know exactly
what app your ad is going to deliver in.
We pass signals like genre, like rating.
Um, we have never we've never tried to
create like a programmatic blackbox ad
network type of uh feel to our platform.
It's all been as transparent as we can
from from day one.
>> So, why don't we pivot a little bit to
the Walmart acquisition? what this means
for Vizio. The growth when you said when
we were joking earlier uh just the the
revenue that would typically come in in
a typical month back then uh is what you
guys see before noon today. Uh help us
understand just how it's been just with
the transition and the pivot and being having
having
a new parent. Yeah, it's it it's
actually been everything we could hope
for in that they're allowing us to
continue to operate the business the way
that we have at the same time bringing
additional resources that uh our first
priority from an ads perspective from a
platform perspective is to make our
inventory and our platform as attractive
to the Walmart connect buying base as we
can. Um, there was surprisingly little
overlap between our core buyers prior to
the acquisition and the Walmart Connect
uh client base.
>> So, in making our platform attractive,
>> I'm really surprised about that. That's
a really cool thing to hear actually
just from an outsider looking in.
>> Yeah, it was very surprising during due
diligence to uncover this and that some
of our biggest advertisers were autos
and insurance.
We certainly had a CPG business, but it
wasn't the core of our advertiser base.
Obviously, it, you know, the the
products that you can buy in a Walmart
store is the Walmart Connect buyer base
essentially. And uh, like I said,
surprisingly little overlap. So, the
real challenge is how do we make our
platform as attractive to them as
possible? And our belief in the
integration work we've done so far is
the way that we do that is to enable
Walmart connect targeting and
measurement on the platform. And right
now in market we have a beta offering
out right now where buyers are doing
exactly that. They are buying our
inventory coupled with Walmart connect
inventory and measurement. And uh we're
really excited about the the initial
campaigns that have launched in video.
And soon to come, we'll be doing the
same and extending that capability onto
the home screen, which has been a very
fast growing part of our platform as
well. Historically, the home screen we
only really sold to what we consider
endemic advertisers like Disney Plus or
anyone who has content on the platform.
It was a great placement for, but how do
we make that placement work for general
market advertiser for Walmart react advertising?
advertising?
>> Yeah, if you're a CPG that's based in uh
Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, how does it
become a lot more relevant? And I would
also think that the uh incrementality
that comes with what you're talking
about between having both teams,
different products coming together just
in terms of what you're able to measure
and show that actual ROI between Walmart
connect and uh the Vizio teams. Uh that
that's going to be truly exciting for
your partners and your advertisers.
>> Yeah, it will be. And it's a it's a it's
a fun challenge to be tackling right now
too because the the the real challenge
in CTV as as
>> there challenges in CTV.
>> Who would have thought? >> Wow.
>> Wow.
>> But the real challenge is is really the
fragmentation. So if you're advertiser,
how do you acrew a very large audience
the way that you could in linear TV? And
you can do that in streaming certainly,
but it takes more effort than maybe it
did in in in linear leading into the
streaming era, so to speak. But the home
screen is an environment where you can
you can reach the entire VO population
very rapidly. Everyone who turns on
their TV to SmartCast will see that
placement where in video it's it it it's
not that. It's not that way. You've got
to piece together a lot of different
types of viewership in order to reach a
very large audience. The home screen we
think is going to be a phenomenal
placement for advertisers who need broad reach.
reach.
>> Uh absolutely. It's the first thing you
look at. So that that makes sense from
an audience perspective and from an
advertiser perspective.
You had brought up the topic of
leadership and a lot of the themes of
the of today's conversations throughout
the innovation collab have been
leadership, career, mentorship,
ascending, uh, networking. help us
understand a little bit more just about
you as a leader as you are have a large
team and just as you are navigating
changes and evolution just some of the
bits of feedback or guidance or advice
that you would give to those in the
audience and those watching this.
>> We were very fortunate in the platform
business that we got to basically build
a team from scratch. So um the the the
early leadership on the platform plus
side uh people like Mike O'Donnell, Adam
Bergman, myself, we we were always very
focused on bringing in the right culture
who could move fast because we knew we
had to capture this opportunity
very quickly. And our belief was that we
could only do that if we built the right
culture from the beginning. And as a
result, we brought in a lot of people
onto all of our teams who had worked
together in the past at various
different companies who had already
built trust in working with each other.
And I think that that was like the best
decision that we made in the early days
is to
kind of bring in a culture that we
already knew worked. uh you can only do
that if you get the opportunity to build
a business from the ground up. But we we
had that opportunity and we really
capitalized on it. I think um my my
personal leaders >> please
>> please
>> my personal leadership approach is is to
bring in bring in the best people and
let them do their job. Uh I I I I feel
like if you bring in the right talent,
you give them the right tools, and you
just let them do their thing,
it'll work. Uh and again very fortunate
that in taking that approach we we uh we
I think kept a lot of people really
engaged in doing very very good work for
for years. >> You
>> You
created a hardware company that is now a
hardware and a software company that is
now integrated within a top 10 global
company. it uh that says something about
culture. That says something about the
grit that comes with it. So,
congratulations. This was a great chat.
>> Thank you very much.
>> Appreciate it. Thank you.
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