DoubleVerify Holdings, Inc. (DV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

We're ready to get going. I know everyone is moving from room to room, but in the interest of time, and I just want to make sure we're okay on the clock in the front of the room. There we go. Okay. All right, just to keep us on time. It's my pleasure to have the team from DoubleVerify here at the conference this year as we get started on our Internet for day 3. Mark Zagorski, CEO; and Nicola Allais, CFO. Mark, Nicola, thanks so much for being part of the conference this year.

Great being here.

All right. It's great to see you guys in person. Great to have you here. Mark, maybe start with you. For those that are less familiar with the business, why don't you take a few minutes and just talk a little bit about the evolution you've been on because the business is very different now than it was a few years ago. You've had an Investor Day in the last 18 months, and you've talked a lot about your vision for where the company is going. Maybe just set the table for us with that first.

Yes. Sure. So starting at the beginning, what DoubleVerify is? We are a software platform that helps protect digital advertising spend and also helps make it perform better. We do that by enabling advertisers to avoid brand safety violations to ensure that their ads are delivered in a viewable environment and that the transactions are fraud-free. So think of it as in our name, DoubleVerify, we help verify that, that spend is safe and secure, but are increasingly enabling it to perform better. And as you talked about kind of the evolution of the business, a big part of that evolution was moving -- or evolving our tool set from not just ensuring that the spend is safe, but ensuring that it works. And it's always been at the core of what we do. So if you think about it, if you're buying digital ads, if you can take the junk out of the system, stuff that can't be seen, fraud, brand -- environments that aren't brand safe, what's left? What an advertiser buys that's left is going to perform better. It just will. If you take garbage out, what's left is going to perform better. So we've always been in the performance business. But over the last several years, we've refined our tools to help drive that better performance. And a lot of that has come in the form of what we call prebid tools, tools that actually filter out bad impressions or keep -- enable advertisers to avoid delivering against unsafe environments before they do so. And that has driven our growth. I mean our prebid or what we call our activation tools are now over 50% of our revenue and growing in the fastest-growing parts of our business.

I want to stick with what you injected there in the conversation, which is this concept that you guys are exposed to a lot of secular, thematic tailwinds for the industry versus some of the cyclical dynamics we end up talking a lot about with advertising in general. Just go one layer lower for us on what you see as the most interesting or exciting secular growth trends in advertising, privacy, brand safety, things that you're exposed to and how you think about aligning investment against those themes.

Yes. So I'll start with the bad stuff that's happening that is good for us. And then I'll talk about the good stuff that's happening that's good for us. So bad stuff that's happening, and by that I mean it's kind of bad for advertisers, is there's obviously an increased proliferation of incendiary content. We've seen that across social networks. It's just the nature of the broader Internet. That's created a lot of issues around advertisers being concerned around brand safety, particularly around social networks, which we have increasing penetration across. So I think there are these trends around. The web has always been the Wild West, but now it's much wilder than it's ever been. I think that's one part of it. You also have a trend on the both good and bad side of AI. And we're 4 minutes in, so I had to mention AI at some point. I'm a little bit slower than I'm sure most people today. But AI is actually upending digital advertising, the digital advertising market, and it is a trend, and I don't think it's going away. And by AI, you have tools that are generating content at levels of which we've never seen before. There's a growing incidence of what -- it's called made-for-advertising content, content that is specifically generated to just attract advertising dollars. They've always been around. But they are proliferating at a level at which we've never seen before, whereas sites that used to be able to create 100 news articles a day are now creating 10,000. 10,000 being generated by generative AI content engines. What does that mean for us? It just means there's a larger scale of things that we need to tackle as a company to help advertisers kind of maneuver around. And I think that is a secular tailwind. And then there's other stuff in the industry, which you could say it's not good, but maybe more consumer centric. So the deprecation of cookies and individual tracking data. That is -- that continues to move ahead as we see more and more both countries and companies move away from using individual trackers. That's a good thing for DV because we don't traffic in the world of individual identifiers. So when we do things like deliver viewability metrics or brand suitability metrics, these are now proxies for performance that individuals used to take the place of, right? So there's lots going on in the digital space. And then there's the overall the fact that digital is just eating everything, right? Nondigital media has been and is continuing to wither a slow death. Everything is more or less digital today, and that just feeds the advertising machine. I'd say -- and on that front, there's one other part of it, too. You see more and more digital advertising, particularly in areas like connected television are being ad supported, right? So everything that's -- whether it's Netflix, they said they would never sell ads, or the traditional networks who have moved to digital CTV, those are all ad-supported. Those are all dollars that are coming from linear and nondigital sources that help us because we don't play in the nondigital world. So more volume coming in, more complexity in the space, more challenges for advertisers because of some of the not great activity that's happening there. All those things are happening at once, which drives demand for our business.

Understood. So that's the secular growth thematic side of the equation. Other than AI, which we will get to in more detail, macro is the other word that we can't get away from in the first 10 minutes of any of these conversations this week. You have been growing well above digital advertising, which speaks to those secular themes. But no one in advertising seems to be immune to the macro environment. So can you talk a little bit about the growth you're seeing relative to what you're seeing in the broader end demand environment and how macro and advertising might be interplaying with each other in the current market?

Yes. So we've said this before, the macro certainly isn't helping us right now. We don't have a tailwind because all of a sudden advertising is booming at 20%. I mean digital advertising growth is expected to be in the mid-single digits this year, maybe slightly higher. So there's not a huge digital advertising kind of macro environment going on. Our growth is being driven by the fact that even though we've been around for over a decade, we're still a relatively new value prop for a lot of companies and for a lot of parts of the world. So we've got significant global expansion that we have to go after. I mean of our measurement business, less than 25-or-so percent is coming from outside of the U.S., North America. So we've got significant global expansion that provides opportunity. I mentioned social networks earlier. We still have significant platform penetration to go after across social networks that provide opportunities for growth. And we've got new products that we're continuing to launch. So we've got all these different levers of growth that have nothing to do with the fact that the macro is not helping us. We've got new markets to go after. We've got new products that we're launching and we've got new sectors to cover. All of those provide great growth opportunities that have allowed us to grow significantly faster, multiples faster than the general ad industry.

Understood. So you've talked about AI and you recently made an acquisition. And with the full caveat that I know we're going to talk more about that next week because you've got an investor event next week around the Scibids acquisition. But instead of talking about it going forward, just help us understand the process of how that asset came to be known by you, why you thought that was the right acquisition to do and how it feeds into your broader AI strategy as a company?

Yes. So as Eric noted, we acquired a company called Scibids, or we announced that we were going to acquire a company called Scibids last month. And the impetus is this was not an overnight decision. We've been working with these guys over a year. And we were lucky enough to do the try before you buy process, right? So we launched a product with them this summer around -- called the Algorithmic Optimizer, which basically took some of our data, our attention data, and enable it to be applied in a prebid fashion for advertisers so that they could optimize their outcomes against attention metrics in a more fluid way. Basically, the idea of what Scibids does is an evolution of what we've been doing in the prebid business for almost a decade. We started off working with the DSPs, or demand-side platforms, with what we call static segments, the ability for an advertiser to say, "Don't bid on an impression if DV says it's not viewable." It's very binary. Don't bid on an impression if DV says it is fraud, right? So it was like, okay, DV, is this fraud or not fraud, good or not good, brand safe or not brand safe, don't bid, don't bit it. Very fixed. Then we moved to what was called -- what we call dynamic application of data. And that was with ABS. We have a product called ABS which allows advertisers to still make that binary decision but to do so on their specific criteria, their specific suitability criteria and adopt that over time. So we went from static filtering to dynamic filtering. The natural progression of that is algorithmic where we cannot just say binary, look at a binary decision of yes versus no and not just do it on an individual client basis, but have a more fluid look at -- well, don't just look at viewable or not viewable, let's look at the viewability rate versus something like the cost of the impression or versus our ultimate outcome. Let's make this a lever not a switch, right, that we can move up and down. And let's do it on every impression, not just every client, but do it on every impression. So looking at Scibids, we said, this is a natural evolution of what we're doing. And as I started, over 50% of our revenue is coming from prebid filtering. So it was a natural evolution of the fastest-growing part of our business, which is now the biggest part of our business, evolving to from static to dynamic to algorithmic, and this was a company that was focused just on doing that.

Got it. Super clear. If we broaden out the conversation about AI, one of the ways I wanted to engage with companies this week is to better understand how you think about AI and generative AI as both outward facing and how it will impact your business into the client base versus inward facing and how it might help processes and efficiencies over the medium to long term. I assumed it would be falling into this duality conversation with companies. How would you think about both aspects of that with respect to AI in the years ahead?

Yes. So there's a pretty clear delineation for us, that it's driving change in both. I started mentioning how AI is changing the business opportunities for us. There's a greater proliferation of fraud that we believe is AI generated. There's more made for advertising content that's AI generated. That all creates a demand for our solutions because advertisers have to navigate this increasingly complex and massively scaled world of AI-generated content. So externally, it's created lots of just angst, right, and challenges that we can take advantage of. Internally, I'm sure you're hearing a lot of the same stories, which is, a, if you're in the coding business and you're writing code, these tools can massively impact your productivity of your engineers. We've seen, in the initial test that we've run with some copilot tools, something as high as 80% of the code generated from these tools as being good out of the gate, right? That's an 80% productivity improvement that our guys are just now looking at the last 20% to tweak. That's massive. So just in the pipes -- it's making the pipes move, flow faster. But we're also looking at AI specifically for our business and things like classification. If you think about what we do, particularly around brand safety and brand suitability, we're just a giant classification engine, right? We look at content and we say good or bad, safe or not safe. The ability to do that across different types of content, so video, text, mobile applications across different languages, adds to the complexity. AI is helping us now move much faster in our ability to make those classification decisions. We've always used machine learning, but training those models take time. Now we can use AI to help train those models, always with a human counterpart because that's an important part. You don't want those models to start going in one direction, particularly when it comes to brand safety and suitability. But it's accelerating our ability to expand our classification capabilities to new languages, to new platforms. And we're already seeing the benefits of that and our ability to move to new languages faster, to leverage our ontologists and our semantic scientists in different ways rather than just the mundanity of looking at certain words and translating those words. So it's impacted our operations pretty significantly. We think it will then in the future as well.

Okay. Going a little bit deeper into the advertising business. One of the questions I typically get from investors is just what does the current state of your advertiser base look like? Is there exposures to verticals and geos and pockets of the advertising world that you are leaned in one way versus the other? And then the second part of the question typically goes, how is that going to change over time? What sort of advertiser acquisition initiatives are in place? How do you think about the living, breathing mix shifts that will happen in the advertiser base in the years ahead?

Yes, sure.

I'll take that one. So we've historically and currently, our advertiser base is mainly large brand advertisers, right? So the top -- the Fortune 1000 is kind of where we go because the types of products that we've had in the market really cater to the brands, the large brands. And that's evolving with time as we go deeper into other areas because we're very U.S. centric still as a business. As we go global, we're able to kind of move towards kind of smaller-sized advertisers. So first is we move from large, large brands advertising to sort of smaller brands as we go outside of the U.S. What's -- in terms of industries, we're fairly spread out. There's no single industry that's more than 25% of our business. CPG is a large player for us. In terms of performance within the industries, because we're kind of insulated into being across most industries, we don't really -- are hurt or helped really if one does better than the other. But what we've seen this year, in particular, CPG has done very well. Public, financials and telecom is maybe the areas that have not done as well, but CPG and auto have clearly done well in terms of industry performance. Where we're moving to is smaller business, right? And so the way we're moving to those areas is through a retail media network, which is an expansion of the business that we have. So these are brands that by themselves may not come and work with DV directly, right? They might not have a budget where it makes sense for them to engage with us directly. But through, say, a large retail media network such as Target or Walgreens, those brands do use those networks and we're able to reach them through the partnership that we have with those retail media networks. That is creating an opportunity for us to go deeper into the slot of advertisers. There's another opportunity that is opening up with Scibids, which is more towards performance marketers. So as Mark has explained, the Scibids acquisition, the product they have, rather than being very much yes, no decision around brand safety, for example, you now have a lever that an advertiser can decide, you know what, I'm okay playing on the brand safety lever if I think I'm going to get a performance for an ad at a lower CPM. And that's really where performance marketers come in. So we think that this is a product that's going to help us also expand the type of advertisers that are going to come to DV.

Okay. There's a couple of things in there I maybe just want to follow up on. So if we start with your existing advertiser base, one thing you guys talk about a fair bit is the idea of being able to cross-sell and upsell into the existing advertiser base. What's the most exciting opportunity you see in terms of garnering more budget from your existing advertisers before we get into some of the other planes of growth?

Yes. I think the -- it's important to note that most of our growth still comes from existing clients, right? So the upsell, cross-sell is something that's just there happening as we go deeper into their budget. So I'll give you a few examples. Authentic Brand Suitability, which is our flagship premium product, 80-plus percent of the growth last quarter came from existing advertisers. This is a 5-year product. It's a really strong growth still, 5 years in. What's happening is advertisers are starting to use it for more and more of their existing inventory. So we grow as more advertisers use more of our products for more of their inventory. And that can be, as I just described, for ABS, or it could also be as they expand geographically, and we're able to then see more of the inventory as they go into new markets, and we're able to verify for them the spend that they have in new markets. So upsell, cross-sell of our existing base is a very large continuing opportunity for us. We obviously need new, and that also allows us to gain market share and become sort of a currency in the market, but growth of our existing advertisers for more and more of their dollars is a large driver of our growth.

Okay. And then maybe just one other follow-up. When you talk about expanding into smaller and medium-sized businesses and new sets of advertisers as well as advertisers with a wider international scope, both in terms of dollars and locale, how should we be thinking about elements of what needs to be built to attract that opportunity versus things have already been built and it's about executing against that opportunity in the years ahead?

It's really execution. We spent -- we invested internationally a few years ago. And so now we kind of feel like we have the infrastructure. And now this is really about execution. And the beauty of it is now that we are in markets, we're able to actually be part of the RFPs because we're on the ground and we are present. And so really, this is all about execution at this point. It's opportunistic. Our investments in sales and marketing in particular now are going to be geared towards specific countries where we see growth opportunities by just having a presence on the ground. And that's, I think, how we're going to continue to grow there.

Okay. And just maybe one follow-up because you injected ABS into the conversation and Mark referenced it earlier in one of his answers. Just talk a little bit about where you are in the journey of what the size of that business is today and how you think about what it might turn into, because it's been an outsized source of growth for the company in the recent past and just understanding that as a lever of growth going forward and how far along that journey we are.

Yes. So I'll give the stats and then you can give the story. We're basically -- of our top 100, 98 of the top 100 use ABS. We thought originally when the product launched, that it being a premium-priced product, that would be the opportunity. Now we're looking at the top 500, where basically about half are using ABS. And the growth, as I said, 80% of our growth came from existing using ABS. So we've now expanded the opportunity and know that of our top 500, most people will use it. So that's kind of the opportunity in terms of continuing to grow.

Yes. Now we've been really pleased with the continued expansion towards, I wouldn't say, smaller clients, but less sophisticated clients. We looked at ABS as a pretty sophisticated tool that only the biggest brands would use, right, because it takes the management. It has to do with specific categorization of brand suitability categories across different types of platforms. So there's some knob twisting that needs to occur. But as Nicola noted, we've penetrated the top 100 of our brands pretty significantly, but we've now started looking at the top 500, and it's growing in those top 500. The representative stat is 80% of our growth is coming from current clients. So ABS, I think, is certainly not a -- I wouldn't call it a mature product. We still last quarter grew over 50%, and it's a 5-year-old product. So I think we've got a lot of legs there. I think particularly outside the U.S., it's growing in adoption. And it's now the lead part of our pitch. Like it used to be, hey, let's sell verification and let's sell some of the standard stuff first until the advertisers get used to it. Now it's we go in. And I think it's just part of the fact that just our advertiser base and digital advertisers are just becoming more sophisticated. They're catching up to the types of tools we had. So we still -- that product still has legs. We're going to still see continued growth on that for many quarters to come.

Okay. Taking one more step back and just thinking about the broader competitive landscape, so who you compete with for advertisers and to partner with platforms. How do you think about the broader competitive landscape? What's some of the differentiation you try to carve out in vis-a-vis other competitors for sort of clients and dollars?

Yes. I mean the competitive landscape is -- for us, I think it's interesting and it's not very broad. And by that, meaning there's only a handful of companies that can do what we do because of a, the scale that you have to be at to be in this space. I mean advertisers want a single metric, a single currency for verification they can use across display and mobile and connected television and social, all of those different places. So to be able to do that, you can't just be a point solution. So I think, a, the fact that we are broad and that we're managing literally trillions of transactions every year at scale means the competitive landscape is relatively tight. And it's -- right now, it's a 2-player. It's a 2-player game. There's us and another competitor that's out there that really are driving most of the growth and change in the space. You've got point solutions out there. And when they're worthy and interesting, we'll either acquire them or look to mimic what they're doing to go after their space. So ultimately, I think we've got a pretty open highway ahead of us when it comes to competitive challenges and competitive pressure. There's also this -- we always get a question around, "Well, okay, you guys are in a relatively limited space, there's a limited number of competitors. Why don't the big guys just do this? Why isn't Amazon or why isn't Meta just do what you're doing?" They can always have more engineers than we have. They can -- the scale issue is not an issue for them. And that's a big -- it's a big important part of the role we play in the industry, which is why we believe we are so sticky and why we have such a long-term growth trajectory is that we're independent. We are outside of the media transaction. We are trusted by others to verify what happens on Meta, to verify what happens on TikTok, to verify what happens across CTV networks like Netflix. And that's an important role we play. So the competitive universe of players out there is relatively limited to those who are independent, who can be trusted and who can build scale as fast as and to cover that we've done. And I think -- I just don't think there's anyone that can enter the space right now that could catch up.

Okay. I know it's early days and you're not yet through the process of complete budget planning for '24. But one of the questions we get asked a lot, because you guys do talk a lot about the interesting growth opportunities ahead of you, is to how to think about some of the building blocks for growth longer term. We talked about the advertiser side. We also get a lot of questions on the platform side, the growth of short-form video, the growth of connected TV, newer products that you're putting out there on your platform. How do you think about the building blocks or the algorithm of growth that investors should be keeping in mind as we look out to not only just '24, but sort of a multiyear view?

Yes. So I'll start to answer the -- the way we think about it is, we have had a track record of obviously outperforming the digital ad spend growth, right? Single digits, we're well above that. And so as we think as you're asking about '24, '25, the question for us is what's going to accelerate what we would do otherwise. And the accelerators that we see in the short term are going to be around Meta and the deployment of the brand suitability product on the Meta news feed. That is a large opportunity. And so just as a quick level set, TikTok provides brand suitability, fraud, invalid traffic and viewability as the full product. Meta so far does not allow for the brand suitability product. That is an opportunity that is going to unlock a lot of volume because that's really the product that advertisers are looking for. We're in the process. We've said this is probably something that's going to be -- something that launches in the fourth quarter of this year that's announced and then we kind of get into it as we get into 2024. That is a very large accelerator on what would be sort of our recurring growth rate because existing advertisers and new advertisers will look at it and say, "Okay, now I'm willing to buy your product for Meta." So that's one accelerator. Other accelerators are going to be the scaling of TikTok. I already mentioned it. TikTok is still a small platform. It's a fast-growing third player for us in our social networks, and it's a fast-growing third player. So that will be an accelerator on top of what we would otherwise see as recurring growth. Another accelerator will be the Scibids acquisition is going to provide us with an acceleration on the activation side of the business, for sure. And that's going to be new clients adopting Scibids as a product and then existing clients seeing the benefit of using Scibids for a way to use other data sets that we provide to them, right? So Authentic Attention is a product that we provide, algorithmically using that to bid on the activation side of the business, it's something that is going to, we believe, will create additional inventory for us. So they are accelerators to a base. Meta will be the biggest one, probably at some point, TikTok. Scibids for sure. And then CTV, at some point when show level data is available, that will create also an acceleration in CTV.

And if you think about it this way, I mean maybe this is another way to ask the question, but when you see industry shifts like this, I think what's always intriguing watching the company from the outside in is the media landscape goes towards retail media network or goes toward short-term video or goes towards connected TV. And then within 6, 9 months, you guys are talking about we can play in this space. We can pivot. We can move. Talk a little bit about the flexibility in the organization to be sort of above the fray of who wins on time spent and who -- and overall ad growth to be bringing it back to that secular growth theme we talked about before, which is a little bit somewhat divorced of the cyclicality of the industry necessarily. How do you think about that philosophically?

I think a core part of our philosophy is, we don't care where you spend. We don't care what it looks like. We are going to be there to ensure that it's safe, secure and performs, right? And so that means that we have to have a platform and a team that is incredibly flexible. So we talked a little bit about competitive. There are a lot of small point solutions out there that are very good at doing one thing, which is brand safety on user-generated content video, right? What happens when user-generated content video dies? Their business dies, right? So for us, it all starts with the core technology being flexible. And I'm going to dumb this down and my engineers would kill me about this, but all we are is just a big classification engine, and that engine needs to be able to ingest everything, video, text, images, audio. It needs to be able to look at all those things and make a decision on it, right, whether this is safe or not safe, whether the engagement is viewable or not viewable, whether this transaction is fraud-free. So the flexibility of our platform is key to our ability to continue to grow as consumer tastes change, as consumer engagement changes, as trends in the marketplace come. Who knew that short-form video like TikTok would basically eat all advertising, right? It is. It is driving growth in digital advertising. That's why all you heard about in Meta's Upfront a few months ago, 90% of that discussion was about Reels, right? Short-form video ate everything. Now if we were a company that was only focused on looking at text or only looking at a certain platform, we'd be in trouble because dollars are now running towards short-form video. So our flexibility is key in our ability to continue to grow, to continue to grow faster than the marketplace and to not worry about whether dollars are being spent on CTV today or mobile tomorrow or social the next day, because on advertising we're just covering everything and covering the spend.

Got it. Okay. A few minutes left, but I want to get to 2 quick topics. You talked about your margin structure between now and the end of the year and the way you guided. I want to give you an opportunity to refresh the market on what the messages were, what's being invested in between now and the end of the year. The second part of the question would be how should we be thinking about balancing all the avenues for growth you're interested in as a company versus the investment cadence on a longer-term view? That would be a sort of a 2-parter.

Yes. So the investments for this year are going to be in R&D. And the reason for that is we've achieved scale enough that G&A investments are sort of more recurring at this point. So they're not huge areas of investment. Sales and marketing, as I mentioned before, is more opportunistic. So if we see 1 or 2 countries where we can put people on the ground and grow, we will do that. But really, the majority of our investments are in R&D, and investments in R&D are AI, as we discussed a little bit, right, and that means sort of infrastructure investments to be able to ingest more data and be able to verify more data. So that kind of impacts our cloud investments. And then it's investment in people. And so the Scibids acquisition is sort of -- there's a component of Scibids which is a bit of acquiring talent, which is hard to find on the data science side of things. So that's kind of the general theme around the investment that we're going to make. We set our sight on a margin of 30%, basically, up or down a few points depending on what we see in the market. And that is because we believe we need to continue to invest to have the growth that we see on the revenue side, right? So we're not going to sacrifice revenue growth opportunities just because we want our margins to be higher than 30%. And I think that's going to be -- that is a short- to medium-term view that we have. Obviously, longer term, if we stopped investing, we could see our margins go up a whole lot more than that. But our view is that is a nice level to be at. It allows us to invest in the right areas at the right time to be able to continue to see the top line growth, which is really the most important one for us.

Okay. We've got one minute to go. Mark, bring us home. If you look out over the next 12 months and even beyond that, you've got investments you want to make for the long term. You've got decisions to make about allocating capital. You've got priorities from an execution standpoint. What will we be talking about in a year's time that were top of mind for you today looking out over the next year that we should know you're the most focused on for this business?

I think that we've already mentioned we're hyper focused on social and short-form video. I think that's going to be a core driver of growth. Particularly, and we cannot forget, we have a massive political year is coming up, right. And that is going to change digital ad spend. It's going to be driven by AI. And I think we're going to see a campaign season like we've never seen before. It is going to be a crazy world for advertisers to be able to negotiate, not because they're spending money on campaign -- on advertising for campaigns, because the content out there is going to be really, really challenging for them to be in. So particularly around social, and I think that's why social is both the biggest opportunity for us and the biggest growth driver for us in the short term.

Okay. Understood. Please join me in thanking the DoubleVerify team for being part of the conference this year.

Thank you. Thanks, Eric.