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

All right. Thank you everyone for being here. My name is Matt Cost from Morgan Stanley U.S. Internet team. Very excited today to be joined by Mark Zagorski and Nicola Allais, CEO and CFO of DoubleVerify. Thanks for being here.

Matt, thanks for having us.

Of course. Before I get rolling, the disclosures. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your MS sales representative.

All right. And with that out of the way, maybe Mark, I'll start with you. Just from a high level, maybe for those in the audience that are newer to the DoubleVerify story. Give us a quick overview of the company, where you fit in the ad ecosystem and how the business has changed over the past few years?

Yes. So we occupied a really interesting spot in the ad ecosystem different than most layers that you probably are familiar with. Most folks are involved in the buying and selling of media. We sit outside of the transaction and actually do something called verification. We ensure that those ad transactions, being the buyer/seller are fraud-free, that the ad impressions are delivered in an environment that's brand safe or brand suitable that the ads are viewable by a real person, and generally are distributed in a geography that makes sense for that advertiser. That's what we've been doing for over a decade, starting off really focusing on fraud and expanding kind of the analysis that we do those transactions over time. Last year, we analyzed 9.5 trillion transactions. So we do this at scale. And how that business has evolved as it started as an open web business. and then it evolved into a programmatic business where we looked at ads both before they were bought and after they're bought and then morphed into now a social business. So we have integrations across Meta and TikTok and Snap and X and Pinterest, and eventually will become an AI business as well plugged into the chatbots that are -- and start selling ads. So our thesis has always been wherever an ad can be bought, however it will be bought, we will be there to inform that buy and ensure an ad is protected.

Great. A lot in there that I want to touch on, maybe let's talk about the ad market backdrop first. So what are you seeing broadly there? You mentioned on the call that you saw some retail softness in 4Q and some customer campaign spend pull back. Have you seen those trends continue into 2026? And if so, how are you adapting in response?

Yes. For the most part, 26 is starting off well. We're seeing no kind of sector-based or systematic kind of bumps in the road or issues, which this is a world where advertisers, I think, have become to use to disruption, right? Every year, I think at this time, we have something whether it's Ukraine war or tariffs or now the situation we have here. There's always something. I think advertisers have become very resilient. It doesn't mean there isn't sparks and kind of challenges in certain sectors. But we've done a really good job of focusing on diversifying the sectors that we're in. and kind of creating guardrails around any one sector kind of creating too much of a bump. We saw some softness in retail but other sectors like pharma and technology did really well for us in the quarter. So for us, it's about diversification and ensuring that we have enough other kind of arrows in the quiver to take care of any kind of sector-based issues and macro slowdowns.

Great. Nicola, maybe I'll go over to you. So you guided to a range of 10% revenue growth for the year, driven by social, streaming TV, some upsell across your enterprise clients and then new customer opportunities as well. So I guess, walk us through the put, some of which I just mentioned, and then it takes underlying the guidance.

Yes. So the building blocks of the guidance, the main building block of the guidance is the net revenue retention of 109% that we saw in 2025. And that's core products with our core customer, and that's the base that very much has been with us for over 9 years. If you look at our top 75 top 50, top 25 clients, it's a base that's growing with our top 100 customers spending 7% more in '25 than in '24 and more and more clients spending more than $200,000 with us every year. So that base had an NRR of 109%. We're guiding to 8% to 10%, the difference there being the all product-led growth. So new products that are now in market. They are already scaling. Mark already mentioned social activation grew 60% in Q4 off a small base. CTV impressions grew 33% last year, AI products and yet even in market. Those new products will have a ramp into 2026, which will contribute to growth that will be above the net revenue retention. We still have momentum on clients that we want from a moat exiting the space. This will now be the beginning of the third year with those clients, and we have very large brands that are continuing to upsell into our premium priced products and of course, new logos that we get every year. So that's the math between the 109% NRR and what we're guiding to. The speed at which those products ramp will ultimately result in growth that is within that range or even above.

Great. I want to go back to moat in a few minutes, but maybe I'll go back to you, Mark, on your Authentic AdVantage. So you saw meaningful acceleration of that product in the fourth quarter. I think it was up 60% year-on-year. And I think you mentioned even stronger so far in 2026. So talk about how much of a contributor Authentic AdVantage is to growth? How are you viewing it ramping through the rest of the year?

Yes. So we saw our entire kind of social activation category, which includes Authentic AdVantage, which is prebid on YouTube as well as our prebid on Meta, grew around 60% in Q4 and kind of rolling into the year at a strong basis. We look at social as being probably our largest opportunity for as a catalyst for growth across numerous products. So Meta Prebid,, Authentic AdVantage for YouTube. And I think we've laid out that Authentic AdVantage for YouTube, we think, is a $100 million opportunity at our Innovation Day last year. It's scaling very well with some of our largest customers. We're going to be expanding Authentic AdVantage into Meta, which we're testing as well as TikTok this year. So we've got platform expansion and customer expansion on YouTube as well. And then just in general prebid on social, we've launched a TikTok solution. Meta is scaling very nicely on the prebid side. So all of our social kind of prebid tools, both Authentic AdVantage and Meta Prebid prebid are scaling well, and I think will be large catalyst for growth for us in the future.

Great. And then maybe moving on to your bundled MAP product. I guess what are some early learnings there? How are customers reacting? And how are you incorporating their feedback into your vision for that in 2026?

Yes. So MAP is the structure in which we looked at taking verification, our core verification solutions, optimization, which is what Scibids does. And performance proof, which is a company called Rockerbox, which we just purchased and bringing them together into one kind of framework to sell customers. The first embodiment of that, as you mentioned, was Authentic AdVantage, which is combining verification measurements with -- and Prebid filtering with optimization from Scibids. So 2 of those the M&A of the math, right? And the launch has been great. So it's given us a catalyst for growth, but more importantly, it's created a differentiator in the marketplace. So when we look at the combination of optimization and measurement and prebid filtering, none of our competitors have a solution like that. When we look at the ability to bring Rockerbox data into optimization, no one else has a solution like that. And what that's meant is we mentioned recently in our earnings call in Q4 of all the wins we had, so think of all of our new wins. So we're not sitting across one of our competitors in a pitch. We're entering an entirely new segment where there's no one else that's incumbent or competing with us. That's really important because we've been able to actually build the relationships with customers on an entirely new front. It acts as an opportunity for growth in the future. And we've always had this land-and-expand motion where it's get a product in and then grow with that customer over time. And we've seen that in action over the years where our top 100 customers now averaged $4.5 million in fees with us, up from $4.2 million. We now added over 20 new million customers in the last year, so people have moved in to the $1 million tier. And that's all about upselling and MAP as part of that, which is bringing integrated solutions together that none of our competitors have.

Got it. From a channel perspective, I want to talk about CTV for a second. So obviously, a key element of the business on the measurement side, and I think some strong impression volume growth in the fourth quarter. Tell us more about the opportunity ahead for DoubleVerify in CTV. How are you limiting fraud in CTV, which has obviously been an issue for that channel at times in the past? And what are some early learnings there?

Yes. So the thing that we always start with when it comes to CTV is that there's a significant amount of fraud in like billions of dollars of fraud every year or dollars diverted to places where they should be on CTV where -- that aren't authentic CTV apps where ads aren't being delivered environments where the TV is actually on, where the set is off, for example. We recognize 4 million fraudulent devices a day. We saw over 100% uptick in Q1 of this year so far in CTV fraud schemes. So this is a real issue. And this leads to kind of like when we see our opportunity for growing in CTV, it's building more products that allow advertisers to avoid those problems, those issues. One that we launched last year was authentic streaming TV, which is a solution that allows advertisers to ensure that their ads only show up, for example, on a real full episode player of a legitimate CTV applications. So if I feel like I'm buying a Hulu ad, I know I'm buying a Hulu at that's showing up in the Hulu app or on someone's CTV screen. We can allow them to do that in a prebid implementation as well as post bid measurement. We've also automated something called Do Not Airl lists. These are things that linear TV is used for years, which is I don't want to be around these programs specifically. We've now created a tent-based interface that allow advertisers to build Do Not Air lists and then implement them through the Trade Desk through our ABS solution to allow them to avoid certain programs in CTV buys. So all of these are around 2 main drivers, creating greater transparency in CTV buys and avoiding fraud. We're implementing them at scale now on the buy side through DSPs on the sell through measurement on the sell side. And that will continue to grow. As you noted, we saw 33% growth in CTV impressions last year. And our drive is to continue to get our attach rate on CTV volumes to grow in this year so we can continue to see the online some there.

Great. Maybe I'll address this to both of you and let you kind of carve it up as you will. So going back, you had a number of client wins from moat last year, and I mentioned it may take a couple of years before you actually see the full scale of those customers on the platform. So TalkTalk to us about how you're viewing that upsell opportunity? And how is your go-to-market balancing the opportunity to upsell most clients alongside the existing enterprise?

So I'll start with when we acquired the Moat clients acquired the clients with a product that was equivalent to what they had on the Oracle platform, which was a what we would call a basic product. So we acquired the clients with a basic product at a commensurate price point. And since we've had the clients, we've been able to start to upsell them into the premium price solutions that they didn't have access to when they will with Moat. That motion is going as we expected. We said last year, even though they're very, very large clients, the contribution that they had to our total revenue in 2025 is not to the level that we think it's going to be once we are able to upsell them. In terms of the upsell motion for Moat clients versus other clients, it's not really very different, except that they are starting from a more basic product. So the upside in year 2 and 3 from the Moat clients is obviously quite substantial, and that's kind of what we're looking to see in 2026.

Great. Maybe going off of that, what products are you the most excited about in terms of upsell opportunity next year?

So I think we've been focused very heavily on social and CTV and the products within those 2 sectors, I think, are probably the biggest opportunities for us. We see Meta Prebid as a solution in which we went from 56 customers to in Q3 to 6% in Q4. We exited the year at $8 million run rate. And we think as we frame that, we do about $40 million in measurement revenue. This is a product on the prebid side that is priced twice what it is on the postpaid. So even if we get half the customers who use us for measurement to buy prebid, that's a $40 million opportunity. We're well on our way there, and we think that's a great growth driver for us in the future. So I would say, a, in social, it's Meta Prebid and Authentic AdVantage, which we talked about, which is our YouTube product. We've got one of our largest CPG customers now using it, and we've sold it through to another large CPG customer. That's a bit lumpier. So as like clients come in, they test it and then when it works, they spend a ton on it. So we've got $8 million in ACV booked in that business already coming out of last year. We think that's going to accelerate as well. So we're excited about that. We've talked about CTV solutions, both the authentic streaming solution, the ABS prebid those will be great catalysts for growth. And I think the one kind of big thing out there that we haven't talked about a lot, but I think it's a large opportunity, maybe not in '26, but down the road, is verification of chatbots. And obviously, their chat GPT is now in the ad business and they've embraced third parties in a way that is really exciting for us. They announced a relationship with Criteo this week. There was an article that just came out a few hours ago that they've been talking to Trade Desk, which means they want to bring third parties in to make that business real. We've seen this story in the past when we were brought in, in the early days of Netflix. We were partners with Reddit prior to their IPO. So I think the role of verification and in this case, dozens of our customers are testing out the ChatGPT ad business. have already told us that they expect the same level of measurement and transparency on ChatGPT that they get on Meta and TikTok and Snap and Netflix and red it. And that's a good sign for us. So our customers are behind us. ChatGPT is embracing the ecosystem in a real way. So I think that to us is kind of like it's not something we've baked into our '26 numbers, but I think it's an opportunity that's quite large for us down the road. And the last thing I'll say about that, which is really, really the cool thing for us is that's money that's expected to come out of search. And we play no role in search right now. So that's a $400 billion industry that we don't make any money from. If that starts moving into a platform, we do have access to, it's all incremental to us.

That's such an important point. I want to linger on it just for one second. From your perspective, what are the forces that have prevented your product from being adopted in search that are not at play in these LLMs?

Google. When you control 98% of the search market, there's no need to let third parties in and kind of engage you. So I think that's part of it. I think the other part of it is just the nature of the competitiveness of wanting to take ad dollars into a whole new realm. And to do that, to want to be part of an ecosystem, which we're seeing at parity with. It's just a different ballgame altogether for, I think, the folks coming into chat and the ad-supported chat universe. I mean, you already see other people like Copilot, which are starting to play around the fringes. Google with Gemini is going to eventually do advertising as well. So it will be much more even playing field for competitors than it ever was with search.

Great. I guess staying on the AI point, from an investment perspective, Nicola, you've highlighted that you plan to invest in AI capabilities throughout the year. to help maintain gross margins while also accelerating product development in the time to market. Can you share some specific areas of the business that you feel benefit the most from AI integrations and maybe what are some so far?

Yes. So the type of investment we're making is not the infrastructure type of investment that other companies have to do for AI, right? So what we're doing is we are using AI tools to enhance the proprietary models that we have to classify content. And what AI does is it allows us to do it much, much faster. And with fewer resources. So the investment that we're making is using the agents to help inform how we classify at a faster speed, which has the obvious which has the obvious result of just creating a more efficient process for us. What we said is we basically intend to be able to grow with fewer people because these tools will be able to kind of offset the resources that would have had to put into the business, which leads us to be able to even guide to an EBITDA margin that's 34% as opposed to 33% last year. Those are investments that are efficiencies that are coming out naturally in the way we do business. We're continuing to invest. Most of the investments initially will be around engineering time. And it's a natural way of expanding our margins because the tools are so much faster than humans.

And how should we think about the timing of that push and pull? Because obviously, there's investment now and payoff later?

Yes. We're in the thick of it now. I mean we've already baked in a significant amount of efficiencies this year. We'll have less people working for us at the end of the year than we will at the beginning of the year. And that's based purely on the fact that we can continue to innovate with less people, get code out faster. We're seeing -- our engineers, we've told them, you're no longer writing code. You are managers. By the end of the year, you will run a fleet of agents. Those agents will work for you. You will manage them and they will write the code. And I think that is a whole different perspective on the efficiencies that we have, and we're knee-deep in it. So we'll see value this year, and I think that value will grow going into '27.

Got it. So -- and this kind of relates back to the point about LLMs versus search and kind of how platforms behave. But I guess when you think about major platforms and walled gardens that are, in some cases, trying to build their own proprietary measurement and attribution tools. How are you articulating DoubleVerify's unique value proposition and competitiveness to advertisers in light of that?

Yes. It's a great question. And I think one that has a really simple answer is that we're not biased. Those free tools have always been out there. There's always been an opportunity for someone to use a tool within a platform. But the reality of it is, you can't trust someone to grade their own homework. And that's the case, built an $800 million-plus business on the fact that our advertisers trust us. We don't buy or sell media. We're not part of the transaction. We have an objective view on what's suitable on what's fraud, on what's viewable and that resonates with buyers, particularly in an era where transparency is getting less and less. There are a black box solutions on all the walled gardens, where those black boxes are give me your money, and I will give you an outcome. But what does that mean for an advertiser, where am I going to show up? What kind of content can be next to? Don't worry about it is not an answer that a CPG brand that has been around for 100 years is comfortable taking. So we've seen nothing but greater traction in social, greater traction in platforms that are large and closed due to the fact that advertisers want transparency, and I'll give you an inching data point. So Advantage+, which is Meta's optimization solution, which they use, which is relatively a black box across meta, we see our attach rate of our solutions on Advantage+ Plus campaigns 3x higher than non-Advantage+ campaign. So advertisers want the surety of a third party whose objective being able to give them objective information and greater transparency on what's happening in the walled gardens.

So I think would it be fair to assume then, or I guess can you provide any color? Have you ever seen an example where a certain particular type of campaign or certain particular type of advertiser has had enough success that they have replaced tools that you've offered with any of these? Or is that just not happen?

There's always advertisers who are willing to take a chance and risk it. And for us, it's a really simple equation, which is let's run a suitability measurement test with and without us being engaged. And let's see what the results are. And the results are always better when you have an objective referee out there playing it.

Yes. That makes sense. So I guess from a client base perspective. So you've talked in the past about having the impact of some large advertisers pulling back on spend. How have you been able to diversify the client base to help mitigate the impact of those one-off headwinds?

So the diversification happened on 2 levels. One is -- and we said this, that was kind of our goal, right, because we don't control media spend, but we can control the mix across industries. So as Mark already mentioned, in 2025, retail was soft, but CPG actually did very well. And technology and health care now grew into our top 3 in terms of categories. And that's not because we're going after those industries because we acquired clients, especially from Moat that have now scaled into our base. And so that creates a diversification around industries, which really helps. And then diversification around clients. We're very focused again on the top 100 and getting more dollars out of the top 100. That base is growing. We have 20-plus new customers that are spending $1 million or more. So for us, it's what do we control? It's diversification around industries, greater clients, larger enterprise wins that then allow us to kind of mitigate one-offs. And that's the part that we control, and that's what we're going after.

Great. From a product perspective, I want to talk for a second about Scibids. It's something that's come up a couple of times an acquisition you made, I think, almost 3 years ago now. At the Investor Day last year, the Innovation Day, I think you highlighted a $100 million revenue opportunity over the next 5 years. So talk to us about how you're tracking towards that target? And what are the key hurdles we should be watching as you move towards it?

So Scibids is on plan and what's changed since we acquired Scibids is we've now figured out how to make it the core of what we provide. So before Scibids, in this space, they were really verification companies, and we're one of them. Now we have a verification and optimization company, and now we've been a performance company with Rockerbox. So Scibids is not only an acquisition that had clients and integrations but also had the technology that we could incorporate into what we do and propose Authentic AdVantage and doing much more interesting product offerings well beyond what verification is. And there really isn't another company that's been able to do that. So not only is it a product that is integrated, that we're able to sell to our clients, but it's now the underpinning of what we can actually do across in terms of the map and in terms of a product that is not out there in the market. It's been very successful, and Rockerbox is the same theory. It's a company that was smaller, but already had clients already had integrations. Those 2 things really give us a jump starting in terms of how we can accelerate our own road map and create performance on top of optimization there.

Yes. The interesting thing about Scibids, as Nicola said, it's a tool that we can leverage by fueling it with our own data to deliver results, right? As a standalone, it does optimization. It optimizes against any KPI. But when we put together with our data, it allows us to do Authentic AdVantage, which is filter impressions right, find stuff that doesn't work, measure how the success of that is and then optimize in the middle of Scibids. So it's all intrinsically linked together. And so Scibids runs off our data our data in that and to drive a specific KPI, which in the Authentic AdVantage case is lowering costs of impressions, increasing suitability rates, which is our data set and driving greater reach. That, to me, it's like the holy grail of an advertiser, which is better quality, more reach, lower cost. So Scibids is inherently part of that. It's not a stand-alone business anymore. It's part of everything we do.

Got it. I guess in light of how core Scibids has become to your strategy going forward, how excited you are about the product. I guess how are you evaluating M&A opportunities out there? I mean, the ad tech space. There's a lot of assets on sale in the space right now. You've had 2 deals that I think you're very excited about right now. How are you evaluating future M&A opportunities going forward?

Yes. I mean the filters for M&A for us haven't really changed. The market has changed, and we can talk about that, but the filters have always been, can we expand geographically? Can we find an acquisition that can accelerate our own product road map or something that has a product that's an adjacent product that sort of creates a broader offering in terms of solutions that we have. That's still the filter that we're using. The market, yes, they have been deals, but there are 2 things that are happening. Some valuations are still pretty high. And then I think the introduction of AI into the equation creates a moment where you're kind of waiting to see if we might be able to do it ourselves. So we're still looking, but it feels like we have a lot to do internally. We have a lot of growth that's organic, especially with the AI platforms right around the corner us needing to scale social. So it is still part of the equation, but probably not as much as it was when we did those 2 acquisitions.

Got it. I want to close on 2 kind of big picture ones. Obviously, your business is much more than just open web. I mean, so much of your measurement is social, and there's lots of exciting stuff on activation. Of course, emerging opportunities like on the LLMs. But there's certainly a narrative out there in the market about the health of the open web ecosystem and how that might change, frankly, especially because of the AI developments that we're seeing. So I guess, what is your response to that? What do you think the market might be getting wrong there?

So I think I guess I can be selfish and make it specific to us and say, what they're getting wrong around DV is that we play in many places outside of the open web and those will be growing parts of our business, right? Social activation grew 60% last quarter. We have CTV growing at 33% volume year-over-year. So our growth catalysts have very little to do with the open web in the future. And even our open web exposure, 2/3 of that is mobile and mobile web. So it's not what people consider like a banner on a banner page. So I think from a selfish perspective, I think we have vast opportunities and our growth catalysts will come from non-open web opportunities. And that would have happened no matter if there is AI or not. 75% of digital ad spend ex-search is in walled gardens. So chasing the 25% and is not the most optimal growth strategy. So I think we've already focused the business on CTV on social. Those will be our growth catalysts moving forward. But regardless, the open web certainly has a lot of legs left in it. right? You see there's more content than there ever has been before. And some of that's AI generated. So we built tools like slap stopper to keep advertisers away from that. advertisers still don't want to spend every dollar in a walled garden at some point, they still want to reach other people who may not be there. So there's always going to be an open way of opportunity. And I think there's a great opportunity for us to still play there. No matter what -- the piece of the open web that has been monetized to date has always been very small. So there's an infinite amount of that inventory still to take advantage of their there's still going to be ad dollars going there. And for us, again, the way that inventory is bought and sold may change, but the fact that people need verification and trust in that layer is not going to change.

Then maybe finally, just closing on the topic of AI. You obviously have had an opportunity to talk to logs investors in the flow in the aftermath of earnings and at this event. In those discussions with investors, what do you feel is the most underappreciated AI opportunity for DoubleVerify? And then are there any underappreciated challenges that you're really focused on executing through?

I think we've hammered the opportunities pretty solidly with investors and even today, which is there's a massive opportunity to increase margins for us over time, which we're already starting to take advantage of this year with our increasing guide on EBITDA, to be more efficient to grow and launch more products faster. So from an operational perspective, AI is just accelerating the speed at which we do and letting us to do it more efficiently. And I think the other big opportunity is one we talked about, which is there's this huge search business that we've never played in that eventually, many of those dollars most analysts think are going to head towards chat environments in which I think creates a huge opportunity for DV for all the reasons we've talked about before, which is there needs to be verification on those platforms. And I think we have a huge opportunity there. So I think we look at AI as nothing but upside for us in both the short, mid and long term. or all those things. With regard to AI headwinds or things that we could be missing as a challenge. I think the only thing is from us from an operational perspective, how fast we can implement it. there are people still involved in this, right? AI doesn't exist without someone to champion it and someone to manage it. So getting a team of hundreds of engineers to think of themselves as managers, not as coders is like that's a real thing. And I think the ability for us to do that will actually play a huge role in our ability to take advantage of those margin upsides that we can get out of that. So nonetheless, again, we think AI is nothing but a catalyst and opportunity for us in a margin increase for us over time.

Excellent. Thank you both for being here. Thank you.

Awesome. Thank you.

Thank you.