Send us Fan Mail In this week’s episode of the Digital and Dirt podcast, Ian sits down with Todd Johnson to discuss the evolution of programmatic advertising, the growing role of AI and attention measurement in media buying, and why storytelling still matters in an increasingly automated industry. Podcast Breakdown 00:00 - 04:50 Introduction, career beginnings &amp; action movie fandom 04:51 - 13:55 Generalist vs. specialist &amp; building a career path 13:56 - 22:14 Inside Viant &amp; the programmatic advertising ecosystem 22:15 - 26:51 Storytelling, brand strategy &amp; connecting with consumers 26:52 - 30:33 Attention, creativity &amp; campaign effectiveness 30:34 - 36:11 Data-driven media buying &amp; optimizing performance 36:12 - 43:29 AI, adaptability &amp; navigating industry change 43:30 - 44:45 Future trends, consumer behavior &amp; what&#x27;s next for advertising

Todd Johnson - Head of Industry, Dining at Viant

Digital & Dirt

I'm Ian Delamore, and this is Digital & Dirt. Alright, welcome back guys. My next guest, he started his career in the mailroom of McCann Erickson in San Francisco after majoring in history at UC Berkeley. He took a three month work gap to travel across parts of South America with his partner now wife.

And he has a passion for action movies and started a tracker which we're going to go straight into. Head of Industry, Dining at Viant, Todd Johnson. Good to see you my friend. Great to see you Ian. I'm doing well. I'm excited that you're excited about the action movies. I'm very excited. I know that's, we're going to deviate off here, but this typically happens with people's fun facts. But so I know you've rewatched, what was it, 235 movies that you've already escorted across eight categories? Yeah.

As my wife would say, like, sounds like you got a lot of time on your hand. And I know you've done that while you traveled, but give me the, give me the algorithm that you've produced and a sidebar. You should probably sell this on the podcast and give you some side revenue. Well, you know, it's like any good passion. It's a product of time and energy. I started, gosh, back in my UMI days, we were, it was the early days of connected TV.

And I had a role there where it was a bit of a futurist role. And I would go around the country working with the sales team, talking about trends in linear TV and CTV. So I was going all over the country. We're going to Kansas City, we're Chicago, New York, Miami, LA, all over the place.

Todd Johnson - Head of Industry, Dining at Viant

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

Todd Johnson - Head of Industry, Dining at Viant

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.