Viant Integration for Car Dealers

Household level buying across connected TV and streaming without cookies, and an honest position on where it sits with our gateway.

Viant is a demand side platform built around household identity rather than around the browser. Instead of following a cookie that expires, it resolves the devices, the televisions and the streaming accounts that belong to one home and treats them as a single addressable unit. Buying is concentrated in connected TV and streaming, with display and audio alongside.

For a car store the unit of purchase is genuinely the household, which is why the model fits. A vehicle is chosen by more than one person in most homes, the conversation runs for weeks, and the person who searches is often not the person who signs. A platform that can put the same message on the living room screen, the tablet and the phone belonging to that home, and count the frequency once, is describing the way the decision actually gets made.

That long consideration window is the argument. A shopper begins thinking about replacing a vehicle months before a test drive, and the channels that reach them at that stage are the ones described on connected TV advertising for dealers rather than the ones that catch a search at the end.

The case is reaching a household before it starts shopping, without paying to reach it four times through four different platforms that cannot see each other. Cookie based buying degrades further every year, and a graph built on more durable signals holds up better on a television, where there was never a cookie to begin with. For a store with a defined trade area and a brand it wants known before the search happens, that is a real advantage.

The honest objection is that household level resolution is a blunt instrument in a business that sells to individuals. The same home contains the person who wants a truck, the person who wants a hybrid and the teenager who wants neither, and a spot bought against the household reaches all three. Match rates and graph coverage also vary by market and by vendor, and the difference between the coverage in a claim and the coverage in your county is not something a dealership can independently audit.

The second objection is proof speed. Streaming inventory works upstream of the visit, so the honest measurement is a lift over a flight rather than a same day count. A store that needs this month's numbers to justify this month's spend will find that uncomfortable, and should say so before it buys rather than after.

Available on request, and that status carries a published test rather than a hint: nothing started, demand decides the order. There is no adapter file for this platform in the ad gateway, so there is no authorization URL, no checklist and no partial work to describe in a flattering way.

Access class is CERTIFIED, which describes the vendor's requirement and not ours. API access follows a contract, a certification or a spend commitment, so credentials come out of a commercial process. That is the gate we cannot clear by writing code, and it is a separate axis from status on purpose, because folding the two together would let a well written page hide which of the two is actually blocking.

The reason this directory separates them is worth one more sentence. A platform can be wide open and unbuilt, or contract gated and unbuilt, and the fix differs completely. This one is contract gated and unbuilt, and a request from a group that already holds the contract is a materially different project from a request that does not.

A design, written so it can be checked later. Nothing here is running.

The last row deserves emphasis on a platform whose whole premise is identity. The graph is the vendor's. Nothing from your database is contributed to it by us, and no matched file leaves our system in any direction.

Not started is a statement about one file. The system that file would plug into is finished.

LeadLocate holds one library defining what any advertising platform must be able to do: hand us an authorization URL, exchange the code for a token, list the accounts you own, deploy a campaign, pause or resume it, return spend and results, and prove on demand that the connection still works. Seven operations, one adapter per network, and every network answers the same seven. That uniformity is why adding a platform is scoped work rather than a research project, and why turning one on does not put the running one at risk.

Around it, the shared parts already exist. Credentials are encrypted before storage with AES-256-GCM. Every action taken against a network is written to an append only audit log carrying the company, the network, the user and the detail. Campaign objects record which credentials created them and re-resolve those same credentials afterwards, so disconnecting an account does not strand the campaigns built underneath it. When a request moves a platform up the queue, that is the foundation the work starts from rather than something that has to be invented for it.

Two ways to advertise through LeadLocate, and the store decides which.

The first is the webXintel Ads Network. It is included, our team builds and runs the campaigns from the selections you make in Leads Manager, and it arrives as one line rather than a stack of platform invoices. Nothing to contract for and no certification to clear.

The second is your own account. Connect the advertising account your store already holds and campaigns route through it instead, on your billing, in your name, with your spend history intact. Most vendors will not offer that option because it costs them the markup on your media. On a certified platform the option is real but conditional: somebody has to hold the agreement, and if that is a group rather than a rooftop then the request is a group conversation.

One limit stated plainly rather than left to be discovered: pushing, pausing and reading numbers from a network is done by our team today, not from your dashboard. That is a deliberate constraint while the connection layer is young, and it is on the list to open up.

The commercial steps come first and they are not ours. Reach an agreement with the vendor, since a certified platform issues keys against a contract or a commitment. Obtain credentials under it, and settle whose credentials they are. Then the engineering: the adapter file, the credential exchange, advertiser listing, campaign creation, status changes, reporting and verification.

Every one of those engineering steps has been done once already on the network that is live, which is what makes the estimate credible. None of that shortens the commercial half, and a vendor who tells a dealership otherwise is describing a demonstration rather than a deployment.

On proof, set the expectation before the first flight. Streaming and connected TV do not produce a clean same day read, and a household reached on Tuesday may search your store by name a week later with nothing linking the two events in any report. Judge it on lift across a flight and on whether inbound traffic to the store rose, keep it out of the same table as a fast reading search or social line, and work whatever it produces immediately, since speed of follow up is the one variable that stays under your control.

Identity platforms invite the exact claims we cannot make, so they are named individually.

We do not onboard your customer list to a household graph, and we export no hashed audience of any kind. Matching your owner base against the vendor's households is a genuine capability of this platform and there is no export in our product that produces the file it needs.

We do not run a server side conversions API and we do not upload offline conversions. Sold units and showroom visits are not returned to the platform by us to measure lift or train bidding, which is worth knowing because that feedback loop is how identity buying is normally proven.

We do not install or manage a tracking tag on your website.

We do not emit a vehicle catalog, so creative rendering your live inventory is not something we deliver here or anywhere in the gateway.

No campaign has ever been deployed to this platform from the CRM, because no adapter exists that could deploy one. If a vendor's integration page shows this logo without saying which of those five sentences is true of them, that is the question to ask them.

Ask for it and attach the store. Requests are recorded against the platform they name and counted, and the tally is the input to build order, because a dealership ready to spend on a channel is a better signal than an internal roadmap discussion.

Say two things while you are there. Whether a contract with this vendor already exists at your store or your group, since that decides whether the first half of the work is already done. And whether the outcome you want is household reach specifically or connected TV generally, because if it is the second, other routes to the same screens may be shorter, and comparing the entries in the directory against each other is exactly what it is published for.

The managed path runs today and none of this blocks it. Pricing for the platform is on the pricing page and does not change based on which networks you turn on.

Does LeadLocate integrate with Viant today?

No. There is no adapter file for this platform in the ad gateway, so nothing partial exists to describe. It sits at available on request, which means not started, with demand deciding the order.

Can I use my own Viant account?

Not through the CRM, because there is nothing to connect it to yet. If your group already holds an agreement with the vendor, say so when you request, since that is the half of the work we cannot do for you.

What happens if I request Viant?

It is recorded against this platform by name and counted, and the tally decides build order. A person answers with a range or a reason, including the honest one if the contract rather than the code is the blocker.

Can you match my owner base to households and target them?

No. We do not onboard a customer list to any identity graph and we produce no hashed audience file for any network. That is the most likely assumption on a page about household identity and it is not true of us.

How would I know a streaming flight worked?

By lift over a flight rather than by same day form fills. Inbound traffic, branded search and showroom visits move together and none of them arrive with a label. Anyone offering a clean next day figure for streaming is offering a report, not a result.

Is household targeting a problem when a home has several drivers?

It is a real limitation. One spot reaches everyone in the home, wanted or not, so the creative has to work for a household rather than for one shopper. That is a fair trade for reach on a television and it should be understood before the budget is set.

Requests are counted against the platform they name and the count decides what gets built next. Tell us whether a vendor agreement already exists and which screens you want first.