Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
Ari Paparo
Tim and Chris Vanderhook on Viant’s Lattice Brain: How Autonomous Advertising Beats Human Traders
21 minutes Posted Jan 12, 2026 at 11:00 am.
CES check-in and episode setup
The AI-assisted song launch tangent
What “Lattice Brain” refers to
What Outcomes is meant to do
CPA/ROAS now, incrementality later
Why run an AI vs human comparison
Test setup, including excluding retargeting
What the results suggested and what they focused on
What automation changes reveal about typical workflows
Transparency vs manual overrides
Why open-web performance has been difficult historically
What they think needs to be true for better open-web performance
Hybrid buying and where automation fits
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Show notes
From CES, Ari Paparo talks with Co-founder and CEO Tim Vanderhook and Co-founder and COO Chris Vanderhook of Viant about what automation looks like in a DSP workflow, using Viant’s Lattice Brain and Outcomes as the framing. They cover how goal-based optimization is set up (CPA/ROAS), what they observed in tests comparing automated and human-managed campaigns, and why “decision latency” is a recurring issue in day-to-day programmatic execution. 
Takeaways
They describe Outcomes as a goal-based workflow where an advertiser provides key inputs and the system handles ongoing optimization decisions.
The guests share results from internal tests comparing automated vs human-managed campaigns, and discuss what signals they looked at beyond the final CPA.
A main theme is “decision latency”; humans operate on meeting and approval cycles, while automated systems can adjust continuously.
They distinguish between transparency and control: visibility into where spending goes, but limited ability to override optimization choices.
They expect a hybrid approach, with some budgets remaining hands-on and others shifting toward more automation.
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