Building What Comes Next in Advertising: Recognized by the BIG Innovation Awards

Innovation in advertising is rarely a single moment. More often, it’s the result of years spent building infrastructure, testing assumptions, and making deliberate bets on where the industry is headed—often well before the market is ready.

It requires steady execution, technical conviction, and the willingness to build new systems when the industry’s ambitions move faster than its tools.

This year, that mindset earned industry recognition for Viant—the Business Intelligence Group named CEO and Co-Founder Tim Vanderhook an Innovative Individual in the 2026 BIG Innovation Awards, AND recognized ViantAI as a winning product in the Internet and Technology category.

These two awards tell a single story: leadership that builds, and a product that proves it out in the market.

Leadership Grounded in Building

Tim Vanderhook has spent more than 25 years building businesses at the intersection of media and technology, with a career defined by identifying structural shifts in how advertising operates and building platforms to support them. He co-founded Viant alongside his brother, Chris Vanderhook, with a focus on building advertising infrastructure that could adapt as the industry changed. Today, Viant operates as a leading independent buy-side platform, helping advertisers reach audiences across channels with a clear focus on performance, accountability, and transparency across the open internet.

Over the course of his career, Tim has recognized moments of industry inflection early, and built the platforms that carried the market forward. He helped lay early programmatic foundations and later co-founded XUMO, alongside Chris before streaming and CTV began to reshape television, contributing to one of the earliest large-scale free, ad-supported platforms before FAST became the familiar acronym it is today. A product-driven CEO, he has also remained close to the technical side of the business; Tim holds multiple patents tied to household-based identification and programmatic marketplace design that continue to influence how addressability and measurement function today.

That mix of long-range thinking and hands-on execution shows up clearly in the roadmap of ViantAI. Rather than stepping back as the product took shape, Tim personally designed and coded the initial alpha, recognizing AI’s potential to reduce friction and drive more efficient campaign execution at scale. 

This award from the Business Intelligence Group underscores what sets Tim apart as a leader and visionary in AdTech: the instinct to see what’s coming, the technical fluency to build for it, and the discipline to turn ideas into systems marketers can rely on.

ViantAI in Market

Alongside Tim’s recognition, ViantAI was also named an Innovative Product in the Internet and Technology category by the Business Intelligence Group. Viant launched this AI suite to address a familiar challenge in digital advertising, where teams spend hours on manual work across planning, execution, and reporting while those functions live in separate, fragmented systems. The result is disconnected tools, constant data reconciliation, and insights that often arrive too late to meaningfully influence performance.

ViantAI transforms this process by bridging those workflows in a single, intuitive platform. With just four inputs, marketers can generate omnichannel media plans, activate them directly within the Demand-Side Platform and monitor performance through conversational measurement prompts. Optimization continues throughout the campaign, using Viant’s proprietary data and bid-stream intelligence to maximize efficiency.

Since launch, adoption has grown steadily, with ViantAI Bidding automating approximately 85% of all ad spend on the Viant platform. Customers report up to 50% lower media costs, 42% lower CPMs, transforming campaign planning, setup, trafficking, and optimization from days to hours.

ViantAI’s recognition by the Business Intelligence Group, alongside recent honors from Adweek and MarTech Breakthrough, reflects a platform that has already crossed an important threshold—AI is no longer an add-on, but embedded infrastructure shaping how campaigns are planned and optimized.

Introducing Outcomes

At CES 2026, Viant introduced the next phase of ViantAI with the launch of Outcomes, the industry’s first fully autonomous advertising product built for the open internet. Where ViantAI’s planning, optimization, and measurement tools act as a media co-pilot, Outcomes shifts these capabilities into autopilot, while the platform drives relentlessly toward a defined performance goal for advertisers. 

Outcomes is powered by Viant’s newly developed AI Lattice Brain, a decisioning architecture designed to run campaigns autonomously while remaining transparent. The system evaluates multiple proprietary signals in parallel, including Viant Household ID, contextual intelligence through IRIS_ID, supply quality, historical performance, and campaign delivery data to guide execution in real time.

With Outcomes, advertisers simply define the business result they want to achieve, such as customer acquisition or return on ad spend. ViantAI then manages campaign decisioning and optimization toward that outcome, while still giving teams visibility into where ads run and how performance is delivered—a level of transparency that walled simply cannot offer. That combination of autonomy and transparency is foundational to how Viant approaches AI-driven advertising on the open internet.

Outcomes is the natural next chapter for ViantAI. As the platform takes on more decisioning and optimization, its launch marks a clear shift in how advertising is managed, with more responsibility moving into the system and less friction left for marketers to navigate.

A Meaningful Marker

Moments of recognition like this tend to clarify what’s already in motion. Leadership and product don’t always move in lockstep, but when they do, it’s evident in the work.

Over the past year, ViantAI has moved beyond a point solution or roadmap concept, shaping how teams plan, activate, and optimize campaigns. The launch of Outcomes carries that work forward, signaling a platform that continues to evolve rather than pause at milestones.

Viant’s focus remains squarely on what comes next: continuing to build advertising technology that delivers meaningful, frictionless outcomes for marketers as the industry moves forward.

About the Business Intelligence Group’s Innovation Awards

The BIG Innovation Awards are a global recognition program honoring companies, products, and leaders who are transforming industries through applied innovation, intelligent platforms, and measurable real-world impact. Winners are selected by a panel of experienced business leaders and practitioners, with a focus on progress that goes beyond buzzwords and delivers tangible results.

As Russ Fordyce, Chief Recognition Officer at the Business Intelligence Group, noted:

“True innovation is no longer about chasing the latest buzzwords. It’s about building intelligent platforms, automating workflows with purpose, and making trust, privacy, and resilience the foundation of every breakthrough.”