Integral Ad Science Holding Corp. (IAS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

June 13, 2023

NASDAQ US Communication Services Media investor_day 220 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Jonathan Schaffer

executive
#1

Okay. Can everyone hear me? Great. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Jonathan Schaffer, Head of Investor Relations at IAS. I'd like to welcome all of you to the IAS 2023 Analyst and Investor Day here at the NASDAQ market site in New York City. It's great to see so many familiar faces gathered here in person. So thank you for joining us, and I'd like to also welcome everyone joining via webcast. Before we begin, please note that today's presentation contains forward-looking statements. We refer you to the company's filings with the SEC posted on our Investor Relations site for more details about important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations. We also refer to non-GAAP measures in today's presentation. A reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is included in today's presentation, which has been posted as a PDF to our Investor Relations site. So you can pull that up in PDF now. So today's agenda will run from 12:30 to 4, followed by a reception with management. In addition to speakers from the IAS senior leadership team, we're going to feature some product demonstrations as well as an industry panel to provide insights from an external perspective. We have 2 designated Q&A sessions during the program following the speakers, and then we'll also have one at the end with all of the -- with the entire team. So please hold your questions for those designated sessions. During the Q&A period, we'll be able to take questions from in-person attendees only. When you signal to us that you have a question, please wait for a microphone to be brought to you so that everyone joining virtually can hear your question clearly before management answers your question. We are going to take a short break after the first Q&A session of 15 minutes. And lastly, the WiFi information. If you don't have it already, it's on your agenda cards as well as on the screens on the pillars. So thank you again for joining us. We're excited to get going. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to our CEO, Lisa Utzschneider.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#2

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Lisa Utzschneider, and welcome to our first Analyst and Investor Day for IAS. It's a proud moment for the company, given that we took IAS public 2 years ago here at NASDAQ, and we are so looking forward to spending the afternoon with you and sharing both our strategic vision and our major milestones over the last 2 years. So I'll open with a story. And my story is about a few weeks ago, I was sitting in a roundtable with a group of global CMOs, and I was doing my favorite thing to do, listen to our customers. And these groups of marketers, they were sharing feedback about all the challenges that they're having with their data. They were asking questions like I don't know what to do with my data? How can I generate higher ROI, greater efficiency with my data? Or I remember a major global CMO said, "Our company is running on legacy systems. Help. I don't have the expertise in-house." And as I was listening to these marketers, I had a moment of deja vu, and it brought me back to my first day when I joined Amazon, who can guess how many years ago, I'm going to date myself. It was 2008. It was 15 years ago, to launch the digital ad business. I'm a builder at heart, and I was thrilled to join Amazon to help build the ad business. But 15 years ago, marketers as they were creating their e-commerce platforms, they were having similar data challenges then. And at Amazon, it was a major data unlock that unleashed for marketers to be able to build their e-commerce marketplaces, drive greater transparency, ROI and efficiency. And when I left Amazon, the advertising business, it was about $1 billion in revenue. Today, it's close to $40 billion. And at IAS, what makes us different is our mission. Our mission at IAS is to be the global benchmark for trust and transparency in digital media quality. For more than a decade, we have helped marketers with media quality, media wastage, driving greater efficiency, protecting marketers, brand equity. And I think it's safe to say that today's challenges for marketers, they're much more complex than they were 15 years ago. And that's where IAS comes in. IAS, we process massive amounts of data. We're sitting on a gold mine of data. The data, it is diverse, it's differentiated, and we process this data at high velocity every day. The potential of our data combined with our technology is the #1 reason that I joined IAS. Science is in the name of our company for a reason. And at IAS, we have the opportunity to unlock our data to help marketers drive greater efficiency and greater ROI. We now have the tech, the talent and the track record to make this happen for our customers. And you will hear shortly from our stellar leadership team about our data strategy and our value that we are driving for our customers. But first, let's take a look at the last 2 years. So we've been ahead of the curve since our IPO 2 years ago. I won't go through everything on this slide, but I do want to call out a couple of key highlights. First, we're leading with differentiated tech and product. We innovate on behalf of our customers, and we innovate in leading products like Context Control, like Total Media Quality, you'll hear and see a demo in a bit and our CTV product suite. Our strategic partnerships, we have partnerships with the major global tech platforms around the world. This is where I personally spend a lot of my time with Meta, TikTok, YouTube, list goes on and on, Amazon. And these partnerships, they enable us to leverage both emerging channels of growth and our core areas of growth when it comes to programmatic, social and CTV. Third major milestone are successful acquisitions. Since I joined IAS just over 4 years ago, we have made 4 acquisitions, 2 of them as a public company. Publica is the leading CTV platform. And I know you're all hungry to see the Publica demo and you'll hear shortly from our product team, more about Publica, and why it differentiates us in the CTV space. The second major acquisition is Context. In Context, think about AI, ML, fueling our Total Media Quality product as we classify the live feed of social platforms. And our strategic leadership team, over the last 2 years, we have both promoted and hired leaders who I like to call athletes. They have deep enterprise experience. They grew up in tech and they know how to drive profitable and scalable businesses. So let's talk a little bit about investments or as I like to say, the bets that we're making, they're paying off. We have an incredibly sticky loyal customer base. Average tenure of our customer in our top 100 accounts, we're averaging 8 years. Yannis Dosios, our Chief Commercial Officer, will take you through the major wins that our commercial sales team continues to put on the board. Iconic brands like Ford, Hershey, Kimberly-Clark, international expansion. International continues to be a major differentiator for IAS, both in terms of revenue, it represents 31% of our revenue in the last trailing 12 months. And also, we continue to invest in our core regions of EMEA and APAC and in emerging leading regions -- markets. And then also, we build product everything to scale. That's what our marketers and publishers want. And as you can see here, our Global Solutions scale many of them across 50 languages and over 100 countries. We're also doubling down on expanding our MRC accreditations. And recently, I was so proud of the fact that we announced we are the first to have received MRC accreditations for viewability in CTV, and we are just getting started when it comes to the MRC. Also, as I said, science is in the name of our company. At IAS, we have 41 patents. And innovation, again, is an area where we continue to invest to ensure that we are hiring the best-in-class engineers, best-in-class data scientists, and then generating profitable growth. We're up and to the right. We have delivered 11 straight quarters of double-digit revenue growth and also 5 consecutive quarters of income profitability. Let's spend one more minute on what I call up and to the right. Our track record of profitable growth, it was great to hear when I was greeting some of you coming in, the feedback was, "Keep going IAS. You are hitting your expectations." 24% CAGR in revenue since 2020. 39% CAGR in adjusted EBITDA. Also we are reiterating our Q2 guide and our full year guide. So it's great to see the up and to the right. So I'm sure you're seeing there saying, "Okay, Lisa, you're up and to the right. You're green. Everything is great. Well, what about our customers?" So our customers, they'll actually be here today. We can't wait to hear from our customers. We are customer-obsessed as a company. And we're so proud of the partnerships that we have developed with our customers. And you can see some of the iconic brands, agencies and publishers and platforms that we work with. But with that, at IAS, what are we solving for? So in terms of what we're solving for, it's media wastage. And with media wastage, it's hands down the biggest problem that marketers face every single day is for every dollar that they spend in digital advertising, $0.20 gets wasted. Research -- Juniper Research has estimated media wastage at $100 billion in revenue, it's by 2026. So media wastage continues to be a major problem that we are addressing as we help marketers with their ROI and efficiency. Okay. So at IAS, we aspire to be the global media measurement and optimization platform. And what I mean by that is the breadth and depth of our position within the digital ecosystem, it really matters, and I'll take you through it right now. So when you take a look at our position within advertisers and agencies, the buy side, we have over 2,100 advertising customers globally. Just think of the breadth of that customer base. We also have MSAs signed with all major holding companies. And then on the publisher side, we're also deep in the publisher business, especially with the acquisition of Publica. We have over 400 integrations and partnerships with premium publishers worldwide. We have integrations with all of the major DSPs, all of the SSPs and ad exchanges. So in terms of having that breadth and depth within the digital ecosystem, what it means is that we have access to massive amounts of data. You can see here, we capture 280 billion interactions each and every day, it's more than any other player in the industry in terms of how much data we process, how diverse and differentiated data is, especially in the CTV landscape, and you'll hear much more from the team about our data capabilities. Now if we go one click deeper within our Global Solution portfolio, we are actually introducing a refined nomenclature for our Global Solution portfolio. You can see it up here and a refresh of the IAS brand, I know it feels very green in this room. That refresh brand up and to the right, right, Laura? That refresh brand is here for a reason. It better aligns with the products that we provide and where we're headed as a company. So I'm just going to spend 30 seconds on this. So we have renamed, Advertiser Direct is now measurement, programmatic is now optimization and supply side is now publisher. And you'll be hearing shortly from Khurrum Malik, our CMO, about our brand reshifts and also our updated branding strategy. So just also want to call out what these various solutions are used for. Measurement solutions are used by advertisers to protect their brands, while they're verifying the impact of their digital media investments. We will provide to marketers the ability to measure campaign performance across all digital media formats and device types. In terms of optimization, that's for advertisers seeking solutions to maximize their ROI. We will give them the ability to optimize quality media investments across all channels. And publishers, what are publishers looking for at the end of the day, higher yield, higher optimization. We'll continue to provide differentiated solutions for our publishers. So let's talk for a minute about the TAM. There you go. So our TAM, when you take a look at the massive TAM when it comes to digital advertising, we are seeing, as an industry, explosive growth in digital advertising. Because as I like to say, marketers want to be where the users are. And users, especially over the last 2 years, they're spending their time in 2 places, in particular, social platforms and connected TV. And we continue to prioritize our product and tech investments in the largest growth channels that I mentioned before, including optimization, CTV and social. And when I look at our TAM, we have lots of runway. We have lots of greenfield and it's early innings in a long game. So let's spend a minute talking about our channels. These should look familiar to you. So there are several core channels, which you can see right up here that have been the tailwinds for our business. Optimization, we are well established in optimization, both in measurement and optimization solutions. We continue to invest in programmatic with differentiated products like Context Control. Everyone is familiar with Context Control, and total visibility, providing greater transparency to supply path optimization. Social, you'll see some demos in a bit. In social, we have long-standing enterprise partnerships with all of the social platforms. I can't wait for our customer panel in a bit and TikTok is in the house, and they will be sharing an update on IAS partnership and the progress that we've made to date. CTV, as I like to say, it is early innings, and we remain bullish about the CTV opportunity. We acquired Publica shortly after our IPO and the combination of the IAS data and Publica data is a winning formula for our customers. The other area of CTV where we're making nice progress is CTV measurement in our partnership with Netflix. We now offer viewability and invalid traffic detection with Netflix in all 12 markets where Netflix is offering their ad-supported tier. So in addition to those core markets, we are also doubling down on emerging markets. And with emerging markets, Yannis will spend some time there. But mid-market, we're bullish on mid-market. So that's north of the top 100 accounts, and he'll spend time talking about our mid-market strategy. Live feed. Again, you're going to see a demo by the product team. Tom Sharma will walk you through our product strategy. He's our Chief Product Officer, taking you through the incredible work and innovation we're doing both in social and in CTV. And retail media, explosive growth. IAS, we have 9 out of the top 10 retail media networks. We have integrations with them, including Amazon, Walgreens, CVS and Walmart. So with that, when you take a look at those emerging levers of growth, what it means for our data platform and how we will empower our customers everywhere. So as I mentioned in my opening, IAS, we are uniquely positioned to solve marketers' needs with actionable data. We are investing in a real-time data engine, which we are building for growth and scale. I am excited about our data platform and how it will enable our customers to unlock growth and to get better transparency when it comes to ROI and efficiency. We're excited about a future state that again, really captures the breadth and depth of our position right in the center of the digital ecosystem. As you can see here, and we talked about this before. Breadth, the measurement, optimization and publisher and the depth across the core channels and emerging channels. This by -- putting this on top of a unified real-time data platform, it will enable us to expand more advanced solutions infused by AI and ML including offerings like prediction, protection, decisioning and targeting for our customers. And I'm sure you're hearing a lot about AI and ML in the tech industry right now. And the reality is, at IAS, AI and ML, they're not buzzwords. They are in the DNA of our company. And as you'll hear shortly from our CTO, Thomas Joseph, we are deep in all things tech, all things AI, ML, data science, and we are leveraging cutting-edge technology that will enable us to unlock for our customers in the future. So with that, I am so excited to have the opportunity to share our strategic vision with all of you today. And I want to introduce our incredible team that will be taking you through in more detail how we will execute our strategy. Our team consists of star players, we play well together, and we know how to win. And with that, please give a warm welcome to Thomas Joseph or TJ, our CTO. Thank you.

Thomas Joseph

executive
#3

Good afternoon, everybody. Thomas Joseph, I lead technology here at IAS. I think I should get brownie points just for showing up, as Jonathan told me that only 25% of technology offices actually gets shown up to this event. So I'm super excited to be here. My goal here is to kind of give you an overview of our tech strategy, how it's evolving, what we have to adapt to, and kind of show you the learnings that I have experienced over the last few months. Before we dive in, a little bit of background about myself. 2-plus decades in engineering, 10 of those in Microsoft. I've worked in all kinds of industries, media, gaming, streaming, ads, music. I have a full stack developer background, whether it's a mobile app or a back in service, or operations, I've done it all. I thrive on leading high-performing teams. That's my goal with any team structure that I built. And the final thing is I focus on building everything at scale. So if you ask me the question, why did you join IAS? It's 3 things. We lead with tech, science is integral to our solution and we build everything at scale. So for me, it was a natural place to land and kind of bring my talent to the business. So let me walk you through what I'm going to talk to you about today. My journey here started about 9 months ago. So I'm going to just take you through what I've learned, like what works well, what needs to change, what needs to improve. I'm going to talk about the data architecture. You heard a lot about data, unlocking data. How is the data architecture set up today? And what do we need to change? What does that mean for our team and how we organize as a structure? How is AI and ML being -- playing a major role in our development? And what is the end goal in advertising platform that's powered by data science and that can really, really scale? And when I talk about scale, I'm talking about big, expansive scale. At IAS, we process 280 billion transactions on any given day. 3.1 trillion bid requests hit our systems every month. We process a human equivalent of 20 years of video in 1 day. That's the kind of scale we're talking about. And we are growing at a pace of approximately 30% year-over-year. I can say without a doubt that the sheer volume, the magnitude of the scale of data is just staggering. With this level of scale and growth, it was very important for me coming in to understand is the platform and the processes that we have ready to meet up and can handle this kind of scale. So I felt my first few weeks just understanding and asking myself a few questions. Do we have an architecture that actually scale? Can we leverage all this data that we have and innovate? Can we ensure that our data is not dark? Like we can light it up and use it to our benefit. My focus quickly turned and anchored on the fact that where is this puck going to go versus where the puck is at. So what does data at IAS look like? We've talked about the volume. We have a variety of sources of data and we have a lot of velocity of data, real-time, streaming, offline, bits, batch. Anything you can think about enters our system. But all these powers a very diverse set of use cases. We're talking about the AI/ML models we power, the dashboards we power, the third-party integrations we do, the security and privacy we have to handle. All this resembles the complexity and vastness of our data. The best analogy I can use is a bustling airport, where you have planes, people, information, all just coming at you, and you're supposed to handle that in a way that makes sense of it. So what does IAS do to manage this level of data? We use what 90% of the world uses today what we call a data lake. It's an architecture to manage large sets of data. What that means is it works in a concept of centralization. We have a big, massive central team that handles all the data that's coming in and all the data that's going out. So any consumer or producer of that data works through the centralized organization. As you can see, though, centralization drives one way of working, right? It's like a one-size-fits-all approach to data. We are trying to move to data as a product. The 2 big things of data as a product is agility, scale and innovation. So what does that mean? With the centralization model, things just start to slow down just a little bit. You start introducing bottlenecks, dependencies, the people who want to use your product are waiting in line, like group 7 when you're trying to board the plane, like there's no baggage in there, like there's no room. We've got to check it in. That's the problem with the centralized model. So we have to kind of break out of that and shift our architecture. So what does that shift look like? The shift moving from a centralized model called a data lake to a distributor model called a mesh. So what is really a mesh, right? A mesh is putting it really simple, decentralizes data management. What it does is it works on the principle that people who know the data best should own and manage that data. The platform team are just enablers. Their job is to abstract the complexity of privacy, security, access from the domain teams who use that data to generate value. Data sharing, discoverability, lineage, anything to do with data is just -- becomes extremely seamless in this new architecture. It's cutting-edge. Don't get me wrong. And it opens up new ways of working with large amounts of data with 0 compromises on security and privacy. This is -- why this is new? There are companies out there, Netflix, PayPal have shown that you can infuse the mesh in a very, very scaled environment and produce amazing results. And that's what we are doing in IAS. We're doubling down on the data mesh. So there's 2 sides to this coin. Like I said, I was looking at the platform and the processes, right? So now we decided to change the platform, we said, okay, but we as an engineering work, also have to change. What does that mean, right? When we move to the mesh, we have to find a new way of working. We have to adapt to something that we're not used to before. The shift primarily is focused on taking large centralized teams and becoming more lean and completely decentralized, right? In the meshy world, the org structure is built on the concept of Navy Seals, not an Army. At IAS, we have a name for our Navy Seals. We call them force multipliers, right? There are only 2 kinds of functions in this engineering org structure. Either you're building the product or you're enabling the building of the product. There are no gatekeepers, no bottlenecks, no waiting, no queues. Everything is multi-target and not serialized, right? So what does that mean for teams like programmatic gaming and data science? For data science, let's talk about data science. It automatically brings accountability on to that team. They have full autonomy to tap in the source of data, generate models, improve models, push new models, they can innovate at the speed that they want. The agility of the organization goes up, the innovation goes up. So we're a group like data science, when they get access to this kind of data, it changes the way we're working. It completely flips them and goes into a different world because all of a sudden, you have this power of this data opened up to you, and now you have to take advantage of how this data works. Our goal at IAS is to infuse AI and ML into all aspects of our product. And this architecture and this way of working enables us to do that at a rapid pace. As Lisa mentioned, we are focused on 4 big areas. There are plenty of other areas that we'll do, but these are the 4 big ones that we're using as use cases to build this model. AI for prediction, I believe to identify trends and threats and drive optimized results for our customers, threat detection to using protection, like understanding deepfakes like how do they generate -- generative content using AI. Like what's real, what's fake, all those things can be detected using our modeling. Targeting, building better segmentation map of our customers and audiences so we know we can increase our reach and our quality. Better decisioning, right? Science is in our name and in our gearing. We're going to say that over and over again. Our fraud and anomaly detection solution has been in the market for a very, very long time, right? Our -- the demo that you're going to see Craig do on our video classification is built on cutting-edge AI. All we're doing with this model and this way of working is supercharging our innovation, right? Building a pipeline that can scale and augment our future offerings. So what the road ahead, what does it look like? Our scale, as you've seen, is immense. We are transforming our platform to ensure we extract every ounce of value from our data to power our customer outcomes. At the core of our platform is our AI and ML engine, right? We're going to self-learn, self-improve, self-optimize the models using deep insights from our data. We are not competing on feature A versus feature B. That's not the game we play. It's all about what our customers want. What Kimberly-Clark wants, what Nestle wants, what Ford wants, all different and unique to their portfolio and their offerings. Our platform will provide scale, hyper-personalized dynamic solutions that is optimized to provide this value, whether it's conversions, safety, brand equity, brand suitability, doesn't really matter. We will personalize a solution that meets the goals of your business. At IAS, we have one mindset. We are not a service provider. We are not a vendor. We are a strategic partner to our customers, right? And that's what we're going to build on. Thank you for your time. I'm going to hand it off to Tom, who's going to talk to you about product overview.

Tom Sharma

executive
#4

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Tom Sharma, Chief Product Officer at IAS. So I have actually 20 years plus of experience in digital media and technology, and my path has been -- I've been in the product as well as engineering leadership roles. Prior to IAS, I started off on the sell side at NBC Universal. After that, I was the founding team member at Hulu in the early days of streaming. And prior to joining IAS, I was actually at the intersection, which is an Alphabet company on the buy side. I joined IAS almost 3 years ago. I've been partnering closely with Lisa on the evolution of our products. So we're going to talk about our data differentiation. I'm also going to talk about our product evolution, measurement, optimization and publisher products, which is our flagship, Lisa mentioned that. And then I'm most excited about our product demos. And so actionable data is the foundation of our products. Our data is reliable. And the reason I say reliable is, hey, we are not dependent on any third parties for those data signals. We are the eyes and ears of a brand when an ad is loading. We're there in real time in that moment, and we know exactly what's going on. And our data is unique. I say it's unique because we have to publish our data as well. We know the device. We know the content. And especially in CTV, given the Publica acquisition. And then the data is omnichannel. What that means is we measure across every platform, every device, every format, every content type. So Hulu, Netflix, web, mobile, CTV everywhere, if you may. So everything I just talked about in data and TJ touched on the architecture. So we can leverage that data and we can analyze it and near real time for inferences. And we can, of course, leverage that same data for predictable models. And then everything I just talked about is actually privacy-compliant. So what does this mean for our partners and our customers? Well, we make them smarter, we make them faster and we make them safer. All right. So let me go into the evolution. In early days of digital media, the #1 question was who is watching my app, right? And is anyone actually looking at my app? And we solved that. We solved that with viewability and we solved that with fraud. The next thing was, hey, brand safety and suitability. We saw that, of course, with Context Control, aligning that to IAB, aligning that to car. And where we stand now, it's about driving performance of media quality, does good quality get me performance, and we are investing in attention. Attention is about, does that ad registered in my customer's mind, right? Is there enough time? Is there enough focus that helps actually drive an outgo? And where we're going next is exciting. It's about incrementality. And what that means is can we get for our customers -- net new customers to sell their products. So it's about taking quality and actually marrying it to conversions and getting better outcomes for brands. All right. So this is the product flywheel, if you may. On the left side, if you see, it's all about grow measurement volume. We want to measure everywhere. Memory is at every platform, every device, every format. The point is measurement everywhere, and they give insights to our customers and what's going on there in terms of infractions, right? So, of course, and we have to do it in a consistent way. So a consistent set of metrics. What that means is, hey, viewability on CTV, viewability in mobile, it's got to be consistently measured, right? So once we give you measurement, if you look at the right side of this flywheel, it's time to upsell optimization. And what that means is we're going to give you those signals in real time before you buy, so you can minimize your waste, if you may. And that transition from the left side to the right side is on the back of our AI/ML of our product called Total Media Quality, TMQ. And TMQ is about what is in the video, and not what is just the title and description around the video, if you may. And I'm most excited about this because Craig Ziegler is actually going to show you this in action. So the strategy is you come in for measurement and you stay for optimization. All right. So I'm going to now walk you through our measurement and our optimization products. I'll talk about where we are today, and then we'll talk about where we're going tomorrow. So let me take an example here, hypothetical, let's say, Kimberly-Clark, right? They're a global brand. They've got 150-plus countries, 50-plus products. So of course, they want global dashboards. Of course, they want standardized metrics, right? Of course, they also want alerts and they want thresholds, custom that they could set up. But what we give them unique is custom dashboards. And what that means is, we can give them insights into how their products are performing at a local level. So what that means is, how is Kleenex performing in a local market Paris, and then be able to roll it up into France, the country, roll it up by Western Europe, roll it up by EMEA and then, of course, get a global view as well. And then let me talk about optimization. So we provide in this example, Kimberly-Clark, a brand quality profile. And what that means is they set up their profile once and they make sure they're protected everywhere globally. And of course, we do that with signals, we give them before they actually buy, right? So let me go into what's next, right? So I talked about alerts and thresholds. Well, when it comes to the new word where we're going next, it's going to be about -- now that a certain threshold is about to be breached, we can go in and mitigate that automatically, I call it auto healing. So viewability is going low. We figure that out. We can actually go and mitigate and no action has to be taken by the brand there. And what I'm really excited about is where we're going in optimization with AI and ML, right? So let me take an example here. Let's say, a bank, hypothetically, Citibank. They're running a campaign and they want to target audience that's buying -- that's actually consuming financial content, right? So in a cookie-less world, while the content is a proxy to the audience, and what's actually happening is, it's the audience that's consuming real estate content is actually converting. So with our AI and ML, we will be able to infer that in real time, and we would be able to go in and activate the right targeting segments. So that in this case, Citibank is getting better performance at a lower cost. Okay. So we have a very unique position in the publisher space, especially given our Publica acquisition, right? Publishers, content creators are -- number 1 thing they care about is maximizing their ad revenue from their inventory, right? So what we do for content creators, we give them an ad server where they can manage their inventory, they can forecast their inventory. The next thing is we allow them to go in and package it. So package it as quality even before it gets to the buyers. And then we help them maximize demand with the unified auction. And then we also help them with deduplication and competitive separation. I'm sure you've all seen repetitive ads in CTV, well that's where we come in because that's waste for brands, same ad over and over, right? And then if you watch in linear TV, you know there's competitive separation. You don't see Coke and Pepsi back-to-back. So with all that said, the final thing is gaining the advertisers' trust. And what that means is in linear TV today, brands, they know exactly what time their ads going to run, what is the show, what is the episode, what network. So we are bringing the same level of transparency and CTV. Now I'm most excited about is where we're going in CTV, right? Of course, brands care about what is the content about. But what they really care about is what is 2 minutes adjacent to my ad spot. They want to know, is that brand safe. And of course, they want to leverage it from a targeting perspective. So given of our assets on the Publica side of our relationships with publishers, our assets on the brand side and relationships there, we are prime to open up this whole ecosystem. So what does this all mean in terms of how do we stay ahead? Let me talk about programmatic. The goal here is real-time science to help with optimization. When we get into CTV, it's about making this ecosystem addressable with our contextual data. When it comes to social with TMQ, we have the precision to go in and open up net new inventory so that buyers can get to better reach at a lower cost. And then finally, in terms of reporting, I talked about alerts and thresholds, but we're going next is about auto optimization. It's before the threshold happens automatically go in and auto optimize. Right. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Craig Ziegler, who's going to show you a demo of Total Media Quality, TMQ, and then James Wilhite is going to actually show you a demo of Publica. Thank you.

Craig Ziegler

executive
#5

Hi, everyone. My name is Craig Ziegler. I'm an SVP of Product here at IAS. I've been with IAS for about 4 years. Today, I'm going to demo for you the technology that goes into our Total Media Quality product. Now Total Media Quality addresses the unique challenges of social and video platforms. What you'll see is highly scalable. We're integrated with large video platforms such as TikTok. And it's going to highlight our investments that TJ talked about in AI and ML technology. So first off, let's start with why are we making this investment? Why is it important for the industry? So as everyone here knows that content online continues to accelerate, consumers continue to shift their media consumption towards social and video platforms. The one thing that's common across these platforms is that content is all visual. It's all site sound and motion. And now this represents a pretty unique opportunity for marketers to reach their consumers in new and powerful ways. But there is a challenge to confidently invest in these platforms, marketers need to understand that their ad investments are showing up adjacent to suitable content. They need to understand what content is going to help them reach their campaign objectives. Brand suitability and contextual targeting addresses these challenges. As an industry, we've grown up using text-based classifiers to provide these services. Now tax works really well in the open web, right? You have a lot of structured data to work with. On social platforms and video platforms, it's much more difficult. On a social -- and using this example of a social platform, you might have a few phrases, you might have a couple of hash tags, maybe there's an emoji that's all you have to work with, whereas the consumer experience is rich with information. Therefore, when we classify content on these platforms, we focus on the consumer experience that surrounds the ad, right? So when we take a video, for example, we break a video down into frames, and we use computer vision models to identify the objects, the actions and the text within the video. We analyze audio. We use speech-to-text to understand what's being said in the video. And of course, we'll leverage metadata. We use the [indiscernible] description, but the key is, is we're not reliant only on metadata. Now let's take a look. So this is a review video from about a business class offering on a major airline. And you're going to see in a second about how we break the video down and identify objects within the video. We're going to start with logos. We see the Air France logo. We see an Avion logo. You can see the time stamps in which we identify those. We're able to identify a wine glass, for example. We're also able to identify a bottle of wine. We use what's called Advanced Scene Analysis to not just find single objects and single frames, but we stitch multiple frames together to identify actions in the video. So here you've got examples of air travel. You've got a scene, we've identified from an airport. We even identified someone drinking out of a mug. Now we also extract text from the video, and there's 2 ways to extract text from a video. One is around text that's printed on a screen like this one. The other one is through what is spoken in the video, so using speech-to-text. We support over 90 different languages, which makes this a global product for our marketers and our customers. So let's look at the metadata for this exact -- for this same example. So metadata, the title and description, if you had a reasonable text classifier, you say, you know what, that video is about travel, right? But what do we see? So the top row here is our Total Media Quality product. And now, of course, we labeled this as travel, we saw air travel. We saw scenes for an airport. But we're able to label also with food and drink based off of the logos, the scenes, the text. Now imagine if you're a marketer in the food and beverage industry, all of a sudden, this video is now contextually relevant, where you didn't know anything about it before. We identified alcohol in the video. I know this is very low risk. But if you are a family brand or an advertiser that's responsible for marketing a product geared towards children, this may not be the right place for your investment. Now this is one example. So multiply this hundreds of million times over and you have a really unique, powerful data asset for marketers that speaks to the scale that we've been talking about until now. So this technology isn't just good for helping marketers find new opportunities. It's also very good at identifying risky videos. Based off of data because we analyze the consumer experience, we're 3x more effective at identifying high-risk videos when you compare to metadata alone. And this makes sense because oftentimes, metadata doesn't have references to risky objects, metadata can be reported by the creator of the content. And this next example you see how we identify firearms. We identify flooding, which could be related to natural disasters. We identify a car crash. These are the types of things that marketers have shown sensitivities towards and we can identify them better than relying on metadata alone. Because we have a very deep understanding of video content, we can provide analyses within our signal UI like the one you see on the screen. This one is showing the allocation of media investment across levels of risk in various categories. Now let's go back to our food and drink example. That marketer can now see exactly how much of their investment is going towards low-risk content that contains alcohol references and decide that's now contextually relevant for me. I want to target and use that to help scale my campaigns. So we've seen that a focus on brand suitability and media quality does drive results for marketers. Movie Star has been a customer of IAS for a couple of years. They use our contextual understanding and media quality products within their programmatic buying. In this case study, they saw a 54% increase in ROI when leveraging those solutions. This led for them a sales lift of $875,000 incremental sales. So this demonstrates why a focus on brand suitability is so impactful for our customers and our marketers. The fact that consumers continue to shift their media consumption habits towards social and video platform illustrates why our investments in Total Media Quality are so important for the industry. So with that, we're going to bring James Wilhite, and he's going to demo the Publica platform.

Unknown Executive

executive
#6

Thank you, Craig. My name is James Wilhite. I'm the Vice President of Product at Publica, and I'm also responsible for all of the publisher related products across IAS. At Publica, we're focused on 2 main goals: maximizing revenue for our publishers and providing a very familiar ad break experience for CTV audiences. Each product decision that we make is centered around these 2 tenants. Since IAS' acquisition of public 2 years ago, it's accelerated our ability to offer this value to CTV publishers. What are the 5 things that a publisher has to think about before launching new CTV inventory? Driving yield, technical integrations, measuring audiences, access to logs and real-time data and alerting. The most adopted ad servers in the world focus on 2 or 3 of these. At Publica, we've addressed all 5, and we do them well. Let me show you how. Today, I'm going to give you a brief look into our platform. We're going to look at 4 of our most use features, our main dashboard, live data, bidders and CTV measurement. So first, this is our main dashboard. This is where our publishers land each day to get insights into how their inventory is performing. This experience was built from the ground up with CTV being the focus. With metrics like CPM per second, render rate and a concentration on monetizing potted breaks, we're ensuring that our publishers are maximizing yield by selling airtime just as they would on traditional linear television. I want to double down here. We've baked in the fact that our publishers like Samsung, Filo, Paramount and others are selling time, not individual ad units. And we're giving them the tools they need to run their business effectively. I want to note something here. You see it says demo site all the way down on the channels. All of the data that's being shared on the screen today is demo data, but I want to give you insight into the scale that T.J. was referencing a little bit earlier. So at Publica, we are seeing upwards of 700 billion open avails come into our platform from our publishers every month. And since our publishers all on average connect to 4 or 5 SSP partners, that translates to 3 trillion bid requests flowing out of our system that we then have to run auctions on. Now if you're like me, $3 trillion is a number that's kind of tough to wrap your head around. So as an example here, if you had $40 that you were spending every second of every day, how long do you think it would take you to run out of $3 trillion? 2,379 years. We're talking a massive amount of scale that's running through our platform. And with all of that scale and all of that data, our publishers need a place to land to look at their data to make sure that everything is running as expected, which brings us to live data. Here's real-time analytics that we provide to our publishers so that they can get instant access into their data as it transpires, up to the latest minute. They log in, they launch new inventory, it's right here. Instead of waiting hours or days, we've enabled our publishers to see their data as it transpires. This is provided for the revenue teams but it's also useful for the technical teams. As you can see here, there's bid errors, bid time outs. The technical teams can dive into this data to make sure everything is running as expected as they launch new inventory. This gives them peace of mind as they launch new campaigns or onboard new ad-supported channels. And it empowers them to access the data required to inform their yield strategies and improve their viewers streaming experiences. This is bidders. This is where -- this is an example of a one-to-one connection between Publica and one of our SSP partners. We spent years creating bespoked connections with over 50 of the top global SSPs, such as index exchange, unruly and triple lift. This foresight has removed all of the technical integration work away from our publishers so that they can work on what really matters, scaling their demand quickly and efficiently. Publishers have complete control over these connections, and they can make yield optimizations, run AB tests on the fly. And then they have access to see all of the data that they're sharing with their downstream partners. They can decide what they want to share and what they don't want to share. But sometimes, they're prevented from sharing some of this because of language in their contracts with things like content title and content series that buyers really want to have access to. And with that, Publica is in a unique position at the top of the funnel, where we can help them pass this contextual data in a postbid fashion to the advertisers so they can trust where their spend is being activated. As Tom pointed out earlier, this is a clear example of how we can add trust to CTV buys by providing transparency to advertisers. This is our measurement dashboard with data provided by IAS. There are many synergies between what IAS is doing in measurement and how we're working with CTV publishers on the Publica platform. One of the first things we did after the acquisition was we enabled our publishers to activate IES measurement directly from our platform. They're able to view their measurement data and drill all the way down to the campaign level to address issues with IVT and fraud. This enables them to optimize their CTV deals in real time. Giving this the publishers upfront, also allows them to be on the same page with IAS brand partners. Both sides were grading with the same rubric on their inventory. So they -- when they communicate with each other, they both know exactly what's going on. We're remaining focused around 2 key strategic initiatives: maximizing yield and perfecting the ad break experience for our CTV publishers users. After today's demo, you can see how our dashboard, live data, bidders and measurement tools, all in perfect alignment with the public emission. Moving forward, we're focused on extending our leadership as the #1 CTV ad server for programmatic first publishers. Throughout the year, we're developing innovative new products and building additional strategic partnerships. I hope that you all have a better understanding of why the biggest streaming services and TV OEMs trust Publica to power their ad break monetization. Now I'm going to hand it off to Jonathan as we transition over to Q&A.

Jonathan Schaffer

executive
#7

Okay. Let's open it up to the questions. Andrew.

Andrew Marok

analyst
#8

Andrew Marok with Raymond James. Thank you for the demo, especially on the total media quality, really interesting. I had a question on the tech behind it. How much of that TMQtech is unique to IAS or is patent protected?

Unknown Executive

executive
#9

The whole context platform that we used to analyze the AI engine in the ML completely patent-protected, and it's very unique to what we do and the scale at which we do it. Like I said, we scale at 20 years of video in a single day, that is like far ahead of what anybody else can actually do today. So for us, the constant implementation and innovation in that AI engine to make it more and more refined and faster at a superior cost structure is what's going to keep us ahead. But it's completely protected and unique to IAS.

Jason Helfstein

analyst
#10

Jason Helfstein from Oppenheimer. So a question for Lisa, but we can spread it out with the team. Among the products you have today, which have the most potential upside and then as you're looking at new product development and some of the things you talked about, AI, et cetera, which -- where do you see the most upside there?

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#11

Sure. Thanks, Jason. So I would say -- I mean, you know me, Jason, I live in the world of baseball analogy earlier innings, later innings. So the longest runway when you look at the size and the scope of the social platforms and we're just getting started with total media quality, you saw the demo that Craig gave today. Tiktok, it's live, YouTube, it's live. You might remember we accelerated our product road map in Q2, accelerating it from 4 languages the product to offering it in over 90 languages, YouTube our launch was in 30 languages with YouTube. Meta, well following Meta's lead, Twitter but social platforms, just given the massive reach and volume and how much data there is to process, there is a lot of opportunity. Secondly, connected TV, it's early days in connected TV. First inning, first thing to a long game, but you saw James Wilhites demo of the Publica platform and how powerful it is for CTV publishers and we're just getting started with CTV. And then third area is optimization, right? Context control continues to fuel our programmatic business being half of our revenue. Yes. Thanks, Jason.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#12

So Lisa, it seems like one area that might be a real growth area is generative AI is going to like triple the amount of content because it's so easy to make. Does that become the drive sort of brand safety upside in a new product. And then Tom, I'm very interested in the business model or whoever was doing the CTV, actually, the Publica guy. James. James sorry, -- is that a software kind of monthly fee? Are you taking like an SSP fee percent of ad revenue on -- like I'm interested in the business model around the stuff you showed us on the ad serve.

Unknown Executive

executive
#13

Lisa, do you want to answer first?

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#14

Yes. Let me answer. Thanks, Laura. So 2-part question. I'll answer it at a high level, then T.J. feel free to add. So as we were saying in our presentations, everything we do is backed by AIML. They're not buzzwords, their core to our DNA, core to our technology. And the way we look at generative AI open AI, like that example I just gave of being ahead of our Q2 product road map with total media quality. And basically, overnight, being able to go from 4 languages to over 90 languages. That was because we leveraged OpenAI. And the way we look at OpenAI is how can it be additive to our current technology how can it accelerate our speed to market and our product road map deliverables. Is there anything you'd like to add?

Unknown Executive

executive
#15

Yes. So I think you nailed it, right? I think generative AI is going to fundamentally change how the landscape is going to look. So the way we are investing in generative AI in a lab today, I can create deep fix, we can create Drake songs Right? With 16 -- within 20 minutes we can create Drake songs.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#16

This is what our data scientists do. They create Drakes songs.

Unknown Executive

executive
#17

Right. So we have we are constantly analyzing because we totally believe that's going to be an edge for us because if we can identify real content from fake using generative AI, that changes the game on safety.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#18

Okay. And then in terms of pricing, I actually think it makes more sense for Tania Secor to answer that question.

Tania Secor

executive
#19

Sure. So our pricing model on the publisher side, especially for Publica is very simple. It's just a cost per thousand of impressions multiplied by the number of impressions during the period.

Mark Stephen Mahaney

analyst
#20

It's Mark Mahaney with Evercore. Can you already detect whether -- how easily can you detect whether something is deep fake or not? I could see this being a huge opportunity for you. But can you already do it? Or are you trying to figure it out?

Unknown Executive

executive
#21

No. No. We've already do it. The problem is the tech to generate deep fix is getting better as we figure out how they figured out the last one. So we actually have doubled down on our Threat lab. So we are generating fakes now using tools out there. So that we can constantly train our model on what it is. So it's going to be a never-ending cycle. We always will be play rack a ball but at the same time, we're caught up and we are pretty good at degenerating -- capturing some of the deep fakes today, but it's a constant battle.

Mark Stephen Mahaney

analyst
#22

And then it will be a black hat white hat thing for the ages, I assume. And then from a customer perspective, is there a certain technology innovation that customers are asking for you from you now that you're not yet able to provide, and that's what you're working on.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#23

I would say it's a great question, Mark. I would say that our customers -- we're in this together, and it's an evolving digital landscape AI and ML and generative AI is so new. And so they just want the assurance that our technology is cutting edge, we're staying ahead of the curve and they deeply care about total media quality and we get it right. So total media quality, and you'll hear from TikTok will be in the house today, in terms of they just want to rest assured as they move billions and billions of their digital advertising dollars in the social platforms that IAS is embedded in the live feed and we are detecting anything and everything that is inappropriate for their brand. And the fact you saw it in Craig's demo that we can classify frame by frame like it is incredibly sophisticated technology, and it gets smarter over time.

Raimo Lenschow

analyst
#24

Raimo Lenschow from Barclays. A question for T.J. As we go into this new world of generative AI, if you think about the scale and the compute that you highlighted, that's going to explode even further from here. Like -- and where are you on your platform in terms of where it sits? Do you kind of need to replatform to a hyperscaler? Like just at the moment, like can you help us to understand a little bit how you do it and how you will handle the increased scale there because the problem is going to get bigger in terms of compute, et cetera.

Unknown Executive

executive
#25

Totally. For example, for our -- on the Tiktok language support, we were able to use open source AI tech to get us to 90 languages. But when we integrate it into our system, the cost was just out of completely out of whack. So we had to spend a good amount of 4 to 6 weeks just optimizing the cost. So with any of these models, one of the big pillar we have is cost control. Because like you said, compute is heavy, imagine processing 20 years of video in a day. Our bills are like up there. But every single day, we're just chipping away at that line and making sure that our costs stay in run. And then the platforms are getting much better, right? Both GCP and AWS offer us better GPUs today that can do 3x, 4x the processing. So that naturally, there's that hardware curve that helps us. So if you keep those 2 things in line, the cost will be contained.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#26

Lauren, let's take Fitz in the back and then Justin.

Brian Fitzgerald

analyst
#27

Brian Fitzgerald from Wells Fargo. A couple of questions. On PMQ, just wondering if you could talk to the pace at which you can ingest video currently and how that compares to how much data these social networks are getting uploaded on a daily basis. So if there's a differential there. And then I also wanted to talk or ask about the data mesh transition anything you tell us about the financial efficiency of that approach and -- or versus the centralization of a data lake model.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#28

So Craig will take the first question on TMQ and then...

Unknown Executive

executive
#29

I'll do the data.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#30

You'll do the data.

Unknown Executive

executive
#31

Good question. So, the metric T.J. mentioned in his presentation, the 20 years of video every day, that's representative of the speed in which we can process, right, video content. And today, we're processing content that is adjacent to our advertisers' campaigns, right? So the challenge isn't to process every single piece of content that comes on these platforms, but rather the ones that they are themselves looking to monetize, right? So that helps contain the challenge a bit. But the number I mentioned earlier, that really gives you some what sense of the speed in which we're able to classify data.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#32

Got it. And so on the data lake to data mesh huge, huge improvement. I would say the first thing is operational complexity. I can tell you for a fact that my data platform team is half the size it was 9 months ago, just because you have decentralized the data, you don't need this huge operational governance in the center and managing that data. The platform we use allows us to take a lot of the things that we put on AWS today which is what we do with Data Lake and offload it onto the platform. So we have a huge cost reduction from that perspective. We have a lot of things that we used to do on the data lake in a central warehouse is now contained within the mesh architecture. So we have seen a reduction in technology cost as well because of move to this model. And just one correction. As of this morning, we are processing 22 years of the year, not 20 years. So our scale is just going a higher...

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#33

We just added 2 more years.

Unknown Executive

executive
#34

We just had 2 more years. Since the presentation was done last week. So it's scaling crazy right now.

Justin Patterson

analyst
#35

Justin Patterson from KeyBanc. Just following up on the data lake. You talked about some of the operational benefits, but I would love to hear about some of the outputs. How has the pace of product velocity changed under this new structure? And then stepping back, just considering the TAM as a whole. If I add up you and some of your competitors, it's still a very small amount of revenue versus the overall TAM. So how do you change that with product going forward, extracting the value from the measurements that you are doing.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#36

You take the first one.

Unknown Executive

executive
#37

Okay. So for us, the way we handle the data, it's -- the best way to say it is that we have optimized the model in such a way that it allows us to manage the data in a very effective way. Like we don't need to constantly share data between teams. So what used to take -- I actually have a use case. We had to generate a report for a customer. It took us 4 weeks in the previous data lake structure. It took us exactly one day. And the report was not even generated by an engineer, it was generated by a product person. So you basically push this kind of access to people that don't have -- don't need to have deep engineering knowledge. Anybody can go understand the data and build a dashboard, show insights to their customers. So it completely changes -- engineers are focused on building and everybody else can build learn from it and understand it and share that technology. So just a different way of working, that's all.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#38

And then, Justin, to answer your second question about what will it take to accelerate the data than the revenue unlock? A couple of key areas, continue to invest in automation. That's very important. To continue to invest in end-to-end sinking across the major platforms across the major DSPs. But the third area, and this is everything that T.J. talked about today is when you take a look at the future, when our unified real-time data platform is really humming, we will be able to process massive amounts of measurement, postpaid data and drive predictive analytics for our marketers, be able to help the Nestles and Cokes of the world identify before they bid higher quality media that would lead to higher ROI. And I think that unlock will absolutely just accelerate the growth of our business.

Matthew Cost

analyst
#39

Matt Cost from Morgan Stanley. So I think that the presentation, you told a very clear story about Publica and how it's integrated into the platform, how that increases your capabilities and you can do more in new and more effective ways. Does having an ad server and running a unified auction as part of the IAS platform create any tension though, with some of your partners in the industry and then as you think about other packs that IAS could wear over time that could empower the platform and add new capabilities. Is that something that could be net beneficial.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#40

Yes. Great question. I'm happy to answer that. So -- what's interesting about that question, can IAS remain an independent trusted third-party verification company with the acquisition of Publica, where we have an ad server and what's interesting about that is when we announced the acquisition of Publica 2 years ago after our IPO, it was literally one player in the industry complaining and it was a competitor. So I think that we're so deeply trusted, I mean you saw those numbers about 8-year tenure rate. And our customers, both marketers and publishers are confident that we will do the right thing. And then the second thing to add about Publica is we don't bundle up all of the offerings and force publishers to buy the entire bundle. And having that flexibility in terms of product offerings, especially with Publica, really resonates with our publishers.

Unknown Executive

executive
#41

And I'll just add to it, the transparency piece is very important, right? Because in linear TV, if you look at it, there's an upfront and you're talking directly to the publishers. We are hearing that from brands and publishers. That's what we can bring to the table. Like third party totally verified and transferred.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#42

I think we have time for one more.

Mark Kelley

analyst
#43

Mark Kelley from Stifel. I wanted to ask you about Publica.You talked about addressing kind of the 5 different categories. If a publisher were to kind of piecemeal their tech providers to accomplish the same thing that you all do in one suite. Is there a cost benefit as well other than the integration impact from working with multiple partners?

Unknown Executive

executive
#44

So you're talking about piecemealing those 5 things?

Mark Kelley

analyst
#45

Yes, exactly.

Unknown Executive

executive
#46

Yes. So there isn't a piecemeal that you could put together to do that. So the -- there's other major ad servers out there and you can you can add in perhaps measurement or something like that, but optimizing on CPM per second, running everything through a programmatic first auction, you can't just add those in. So especially when it comes to CTV, one of the biggest problems, I'm sure all of you have seen this. When you watch television on a connected device, generally, you see a -- the same ad several times, right? I think all of you have that ad that you hate to see. And when we go to the top level and we're the ones managing that auction, that programmatic auction, that stops happening. Right? Things like that are really important. We're handling the deduplication on our side, making sure that the user experience is great. We're also maximizing everything on CPM per second. And I mentioned that, I just want to let you -- everybody know what that is, just to be clear, so generally, in display, you have a CPM, right, like $10 cost per meal, cost per thousand impressions. In CTV, we do CPM per second. So we're looking at the CPM divided by the total duration of the ad. So that we can make sure that the publishers are making them the most amount of money they can every second that the ad is playing because the $15 15-second ad is not the same value as a $15 30 second add. So there's no piecemeal that you can put together to build all of the stuff that we've built and come up with the same solution.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#47

I'm sorry, I think there was 1 more question you wanted to take on that side. Okay. We're going to take a quick 15-minute break, and then we'll reconvene from there. Thank you. [Break]

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#48

Yannis, I'll turn it over to you.

Yannis Dosios

executive
#49

Thank you. Hi, everybody. My name is Yannis Dosios, I'm the Chief Commercial Officer here at IAS I'm very excited to be here with you and to share with you our commercial strategy. Now I joined IAS just over one year ago. So I just wanted to start by taking a few moments to introduce myself. I am deeply motivated by driving rapid and durable growth. And I've done so with a track record over the course of the last 20 years with exceptional teams across both start-up companies and established companies. In the tech advertising, publishing, mobile programmatic space. On the startup side, I launched the publisher business for flurry, a leading mobile analytics and advertising company, growing that business to $100 million in revenue in 3 years. On the established company side, I led the programmatic business at Yahoo, including Yahoo's DSP and Exchange, doubling that business to $1 billion over 2 years. Now I am -- I see major opportunity to drive this rapid and durable growth for IAS, and I joined IAS to help deliver that growth with IAS's exceptional team. So today, I will share with you how we will deliver that durable and rapid growth through our commercial strategy, which has 3 pillars: accelerating our cross-sell to our existing customers, acquiring new global advertiser and publisher customers with speed and scaling growth further with new growth vectors. So let's jump into it. So our commercial strategy overall -- the foundation of it is our customers and us delivering superior value to them. So I want to start by sharing a bit more about who our customers are and why do they choose IAS. We have a large global customer base of more than 2,100 customers. We have 2 main sets of customers, advertisers and the agencies that work with them and publishers. On the advertiser side, we work with many of the world's global top 100 advertisers. Companies like Coca-Cola, Kimberly Clark, Microsoft, Disney, also all the top agencies that work with those brands. And then on the publisher side, we work with more than 400 direct integrations with leading web and CTV publishers across both the web and CTV space, companies such as Bloomberg, The Guardian, Samsung and Warner Bros discovery. Now I am proud of the fact that customer obsession is a core company value here at IAS. And we're bringing the voice of the customer into everything that we do. For example, through our advisory council with leading brands and agencies, where we share with them our innovation road map. We hear from them their needs, and we integrate those needs into our products. So why do customers -- all these customers choose IAS? Three main reasons: our technology strength our global service and support and our superior results. Let me share more about each. Technology strength. We regularly beat competition in head-to-head tests. Because our technology, like the total media quality demo that you saw from Craig consistently delivers more actionable and accurate classification of content. For example, leading to lower over blocking of high-quality impressions and lower under blocking of brand and safe impressions. Global service and support. Many of our customers are global. So they require consistency in service across all the geos that they operate. We have an advantage here at IAS, with a global team in 16 different cities and our customer obsession mindset. For example, Kimberly Clark, recently activated in 19 global markets in just 100 days, thanks to our global activation playbook. And then superior results. For advertisers, these mean improving the return on ad spend, protecting the brand increasing efficiencies. An example of improving return of ad spend. Major advertiser ran a video campaign on 36 different supply-side platforms or SSPs. They did not have sufficient visibility on which of those supply sources was delivering the best quality. So using our total visibility offering at IAS, they were able to marry both a cost saver of impression with the quality and the conversions of that impression, which in the end resulted in a 22% increase in cost efficiency. Protecting the brand, Clinique, a major makeup company launched the campaign on TikTok, major campaign and secured an almost 98% brand safety rate, thanks to our total media quality offering. Increasing efficiencies, a major agency delivered 80% savings in time of setting up and tagging a campaign using our automated tax solution with Google. Now for publishers, superior results means different things. It means maximizing the yield of revenue, increasing their control, improving the user and the advertiser experience on CTV. Here, a major sports publisher saw a 10x increase in their [ FED ] rates and a 3x increase in the revenue using Publica, the leading ad serving platform that James demoed for you earlier today. So at the end of the day, why do customers choose IAS? Because we consistently deliver superior results for them powered by the strength of our technology, our global service and support and the world's most actionable data. Okay? Now, let's talk about our customer journey. Typical advertiser customer journey using Sanofi, a large global advertiser that's been with us since 2020, a great partner of ours. Sanofi started their journey with IAS over here on the left with measurement. Which is pretty typical of many of the advertisers that work with us. They measure things like invalid traffic and brand safety and viewability. They then expanded to 37 countries, which they activated in just 3 months utilizing our global activation playbook. We were very excited to see them test condos control. They started with a test and a case study in Italy, it was successful, and they adopted it in multiple markets rapidly. They moved over to optimization to the right, as Tom mentioned to you. And they use our savings calculator to see the real financial impact of using our programmatic offerings, which they started adopting. They expanded rapidly into all the major social platforms. YouTube, TikTok, Meta. They're actually very actively testing with us right now on TikTok, multiple markets with TikTok for total media quality. And they're innovating with us, which I love about this partner. They're in emerging channels with us as a beta partner for a good loop partnership for sustainability as well as our new quality attention offering. Now advertisers can enter the circle at any point and then they can start growing and using more and more of those services. But this here is also a major flywheel effect because the more services our customers use, the better, more actionable, more effective, our data and technology become and that leads to better results for our customers and more rapid growth for IAS. So speaking of more rapid revenue growth, let's look at the future. Let's look to our commercial strategy for delivering rapid durable growth. We are executing with both focus, rigor and urgency on a 3-pillared commercial strategy. The first pillar is accelerating the cross-sell of our existing products to our customer base through our best-in-class turbocharged go-to-market engine. The second pillar is acquiring even more new global advertiser and publisher customers. Thanks to our better technology, thanks to our global service and support and our actionable data. And the third is to scale across new growth drivers, things like new customer segments, especially mid-market, more geographies as well as channels and formats. So I'm going to take a few moments to share with you a bit more about each of those strategies. Start with the first one. We are laser-focused on driving increased product adoption amongst our customer base for these 3 key product offerings. Optimization, social and connected television. So on the optimization side, we're demonstrating very clear return on ad spend value to our customers with better measurement, but also through our total visibility offering that I talked about before. We're automating the setup and optimization of campaigns. For example, with an offering called Quality Sync which automatically syncs the optimization with the measurement settings of any campaign. And we're innovating by launching exciting new products such as quality attention. On the social side, we're driving global penetration of our total media quality solution across TikTok, YouTube and beyond. On the CTV side, we're driving measurement in both in value traffic and viewability for Netflix in 12 markets, and we're also providing invalid traffic and viewability on an optimization basis, for example, ensuring that advertisers do not run ads when the TV is off. And we're innovating and leading the charts here by providing show-level transparency to CTV advertisers, leveraging our Publica technology and relationship. Now what is enabling us to deliver this turbocharged or this improved cross-sell into our customer base. That is a significantly improved turbocharge go-to-market engine. Now this is an area that I'm deeply passionate about and that I have a lot of experience in. What does it include? It includes strong cross-functional alignment between our products, engineering, commercial and finance teams to make our products easier to use and easier to scale. It also includes stronger sales enablement of our sales teams. Providing them a very clear narrative, very strong evidence of how our products are delivering real value for our customers and also more effective training. And it includes a very rapid feedback loop between our customers using our products, our product team and our commercial teams so that we can constantly improve our offerings and our go-to-market strategy, all right? So that was our first pillar. Let's talk about our second pillar of growth, which is accelerating, winning new global advertisers and publishers. We're making really good progress here over the course of the last few months, making big global advertiser publisher wins and expansions. On the advertiser side, wins such as Ford, Kimberly-Clark, Hershey's, Caring, Marius Telecom, Bell, Panasonic and Singapore Airlines. On the publisher side, companies like Samsung, Fox, MOB, EW Scripts and Fila. so what is driving this accelerated winning of those accounts? Well, there's a few things. One is we have an enterprise playbook for winning global accounts. We have a clear single owner for every large global deal, and we're building enterprise-level relationships with senior key decision makers. Our teams are very knowledgeable about the strategy and about the values of our customers and their pitches are fully aligned with our strategy and with those values. At the end of the day, as T.J. said, we're seen as a strategic trusted partner, not just a vendor. We're in there to win with them. We're offering new revenue streams. For example, on the publisher side, we're enabling inventory swapping between Publica publishers in case they have additional demand that they need to fulfill, or we're things like server side ad insertion. We're literally Publica stitches the ad inside the CTV content stream of a publisher, which leads to a better user and advertiser experience. And we do a best-in-class global activation. On the advertiser side, we have the global activation playbook I talked about. On the publisher side, we're accelerating the integration of our publishers and going live. And then our third pillar of growth is scaling with those incremental growth drivers that Lisa mentioned earlier in the day today. So for example, leveraging our global advantage to accelerate our penetration of high growth in global markets, especially in EMEA, in APAC and in Lat Am, expanding our customer relationships to go into more channels and more formats as we launch them. Social live feed, retail media, emerging channels like audio and gaming and increasing our market share penetration of new customer segments, especially the mid-market segment. We're making big progress here, and we're doubling down our sales team's focus in this area as well as investing in making our systems and processes better suited to serve this segment at scale. So let's bring it all together. We're driving accelerated rapid and durable growth for IAS with our exceptional global team by nailing and by scaling growth, as I like to say. We're nailing growth by accelerating the cross-sell to our existing customers through our turbocharged go-to-market engine, and we're scaling growth by acquiring new global customers with our data at service and results and by scaling further across new growth vectors, new customer segments, new channels and new geos. And with that, I'm delighted to introduce you Khurrum Malik, our Chief Marketing Officer.

Khurrum Malik

executive
#50

Thank you. Hi, everybody. My name is Khurrum Malik. You can relax. It's the marketing time. It's going to be fun. And I'm excited to be here. Welcome. Thank you, Yannis. What I'd like to do is spend 8 to 10 minutes taking you through our global of marketing strategy and how we're driving demand for IAS's products and services all over the world. It was hard for me to find a company like IAS that has so much talent and data. It's rare. And I'm just so excited to be here. I have the honor of leading the marketing team for the past 6 months, and I'm going to share a little bit about what we've been up to. Just a little bit background on me. Hopefully, there's not too much spike coming off my head here. But I've been a full-stack marketing leader for 20 years, primarily in the tech space. I've done both brand and performance marketing campaigns. I want to call out a couple of highlights on my career that will give you some context on who's speaking up here. I've been a product manager at Microsofts Exchange business, which is a $1 billion business. There I learned how to ship product with engineering teams and scale product. Two, led North America product marketing teams for Facebook's direct response solution portfolio, when I left it was a multibillion dollar business, learned how to drive adoption at scale. And then most recently led global business marketing at Spotify. And Spotify's advertising business, which is another $1 billion business. And about a year ago, we won our first B2B Canne line award for creativity. I have deep expertise in product marketing, go-to-market, thought leadership, brand and creative, and I'm excited to bring that here. And I'm just as excited as growing businesses as I am teams. And so that's what you're going to see and hear from me today and going forward. So let's get into it. I'm going to cover 3 things with you. One is our updated value proposition. How we needed to evolve our value proposition to meet our growth ambitions. Two, the refresh brand. You can look around. It's a different IAS. I'm excited to talk to you about what went into that. There's a lot of symbolism in there. [ Hangten ] up and to the right. And three, I'm going to talk a little bit about our sneak peak in our global marketing strategy for advertisers and publishers to drive demand for our products and services around the world. So let's get into it. When I first joined, one of the most important things for me and the leadership team was to before we refreshed our value prop, listen to our customers. What are they telling us? I want to highlight a couple of things our advertiser and publisher customers have told us -- the digital media market continues to get more complex, more formats, more data, more tools, more platforms than ever before. Although exciting, there's a fair amount of complexity and our advertising partners are looking to partners like us to answer 2 fundamental questions: one, what's working? And the second 1 is what do I do with it? What's working? And what do I do about it, right? And so we're excited because we can help our advertising partners with that. And the reason advertisers care about that is they want to protect their brand. They want to protect their brand equity and they want to stay away from ineffective ad spend. So with that as inspiration, we refreshed our value proposition to both meet our advertiser needs, but also match our growth ambitions. Okay. This is a build slide. So there's going to be 3 parts to it, right? I'm going to take you through why IAS? How our data is different? And then what are the products and services that are powered by that data? All on one slide. Are you ready? Here we go. So why IAS? We exist to serve global advertisers and publishers. We're a global media measurement and optimization platform provides the most actionable data to drive superior results. The most actionable data to drive superior results. We're in the business of driving results for our customers. That's why we exist. Now -- you get the question of like my 18-year-old who's about to graduate from high school on Wednesday asked, Dad, what is actionable data. Other people ask that as well, right? So let's break that apart a bit. Actionable data to us is composed of 3 key items: data breadth, depth and speed. We have comprehensive data footprint in collection. We capture up to 280 billion digital interactions every day across both demand and supply sides. We then enrich that data with our software AI and ML, which you saw with total media quality. This also helps us get up to 600 contextual segments. And we process that data in real time. So we're capturing that data, enriching it, processing it in real time so we can get it out to our customers faster and faster. This is especially important for global clients that need a global pulse. We don't just work with regional clients, but global clients, and it's so critical for them to get data access faster and faster. So we're excited about that. Now our actionable data also fuels our key solution areas, and there's 3 of them. Measurement solutions, optimization solutions and publisher solutions. Measurement solutions answer the question. Is it working right? Are my ads viewable? Are they in a brand-safe environment? Our flagship product, there is total media quality. You saw that and heard from the team about that. Optimization solutions. These are the solutions that drive campaign ROI. Customers use our optimization solutions, for example, to lean into the content they should be investing advertising in or avoiding context control is our flagship product there. And of course, publisher solutions. You saw James talk about Publica, Publisher solutions exist to drive yield and revenue for our publisher partners and Publica is the flagship product there. So now covered why IAS how our data is different and what are the solutions that our data fuels. I want to jump a little bit into the brand. Now we didn't go out to refresh the brand for the sake of it. It had to be at the service of our core message refinement and our growth ambitions. So I'll start with the top left. You'll see a new typography that's sharp, precise. And you'll see that green little box. That little box is a pixel. We know all digital screens are composed of pixels. We also know pixels are really important to measurement. And you can see that, that pixel expands up into the right. Why is it expanding up to the right? Because we want to drive superior results for our customers, it's because we want to grow as a business as well. And we intentionally picked the green coloring. Green means action. It means sustainability. It means progress, it means growth. We're excited to bring that to bear with our mark. You'll also see a new typography, precise, accurate, and you'll also see a new color palette on the top right with the bright green signaling action and darker tone signaling trust. If you go to our website today, you'll see a refreshed website on the bottom left, you'll see that -- and on the bottom right, you'll see our product experiences that are going to over the next couple of quarters evolve to meet our brand strategy. I'm incredibly excited about this. We partnered with a large group of folks internally and externally to bring this brand evolution to market. Okay. Let's now get a sneak peek into how we're driving global demand for advertisers and for publishers. So global advertisers really want to both be educated and inspired by partners like us. When I think about education, they want to know, hey, help me understand a new ecosystem. From an inspiration perspective, do something different for me, right? You don't want to just get white papers, and we want to balance both of that. And the way we're doing education and inspiration is in a very, very curated way. Our target audience or global CMOs in their direct reports, increasingly mid-market customers and their media agencies. And I want to call out a couple of things that are driving demand for these customers, so they are aware of our products and are considering us for RFPs. On the left side, under education, which I think about education as broccoli, it's healthy for you. You want to have it you got to balance it with inspiration, which is chocolate, right? So let's talk about the broccoli and education for a minute. Insights as a service. We have a team of data scientists that are dedicated to do curated analysis for our top customers. Where customers can now see incremental insights that they get from our data. On the bottom left, you'll see our adoption tiger teams, a best practice from my time at Meta. Deploying toolkits to our sales teams, our service teams and our customers to encourage product adoption and product retention, which I'm incredibly excited about. On the top right, you'll see our investment in targeted demand generation campaigns. We're building custom landing pages for customers that we're looking to acquire. So while our sales teams have conversations with those customers, they have custom landing pages that they can go reference and see how IAS can drive superior results for them. And on the bottom right, I just want to call out responsible media. That's another area where we're investing in thought leadership. What does responsible media mean? How can we, as an ecosystem, work with advertisers, for advertisers to invest in brand-safe environments, how can publishers fund quality media with that investment? And how does that drive a healthy media ecosystem. Increasingly, advertising partners are looking to companies like us to lead the way in havering and fostering this discussion to bend the Internet in the right direction. So I'm incredibly excited about that. We're using a very similar strategy for publishers, but it's much more focused. We want every CTV publisher in the world to use Publica. And we want every digital publisher in the world to use our publisher media quality solutions. And we're taking a similar 1, 2 punch for education and inspiration. On the education side, I'm going to call it a couple of things. We're leading CTV publisher roundtables in key markets in London and New York, where players across the ecosystem can discuss what should be, not just what is. We're also leaning into a YouTube education hub where we have videos that explain what the CTV ecosystem is, where it's going, what are the mechanics of it, why -- it benefits the CTV ecosystem. It also benefits us, and we're excited to do that. On the inspiration side, we're refining our creative and messaging between Publica and IAS and then we're leaning into executive bylines and very specific conversations in key trade pubs like ad week and in the drum. So again, that 1-2 punch is helping us to stimulate demand and adoption of our products and services all over the world, both on the buy side and the sell side. Now I've covered our updated value proposition, I've covered our rebrand and I've also given you a sneak peek into our global marketing strategy for advertisers and publishers, which is great. But who better to hear more from than current customers and partners about where the industry is going the role that I ask and play. I'm incredibly excited to turn it over to the panel with Lisa, you to make that happen. Thank you.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#51

Okay. So good afternoon. I am thrilled and honored to introduce you an incredible panel of customers and partners of IAS. I mean it is a true honor to be up here with the group, I'm going to do quick introductions, and then we'll open it up to some Q&A, and then we'll open it up. I'll ask you questions, and then we'll open it up to the larger group. So to my left is Meredith Herman. She is the VP of Global Marketing Services and Consumer Experience at Haleon, formerly known as GlaxoSmithKline, the largest consumer health company focused on everyday brands such as Sensodyne, Advil, show of hand, tell me if you have Advil at home, or took Advil this morning. You have it right now. That too. Before working at Haleon, Meredith spent 15 years at creative agencies. She is an institute for real growth, 100 CMO and Adweek Brand Genius. That's incredible, Meredith. Please welcome Meredith. All right. Amanda Richman was most recently North America CEO of Mindshare, where she led the strategy and activation of Mindshares good growth vision. Prior to Mindshare, she held roles as the U.S. CEO of Wavemaker, President of Investment at Starcom. Now that's a big budget. She's won several awards, including campaigns, Female Frontier award, which celebrates female leadership. Please welcome Amanda. All right. And last but not least, Jorge Ruiz is the Global Head of Marketing Science at TikTok, where he leads a talented organization, whose mission is to build advertiser value through good measurement and research that can drive behavioral change. In addition, Jorge serves on the Board of Trustees at the Advertising Research Foundation or ARF. Please welcome, Jorge. Okay. So let's do some table setting, as I like to call it. Let's start with if each of you could just go through, how do you engage with IAS or previous customers engaged with IAS and how do you use our products to amplify your brands, protect your brands? And what stands out about IAS' approach and why do you choose to work with us. I know there's a lot packed in there. Meredith -- sure.

Meredith Herman

attendee
#52

Well, first of all, thanks for having me. It's pleasure to be here.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#53

Thanks for coming.

Meredith Herman

attendee
#54

So we started working with IAS about 5 years ago. We were working on our digital transformation. And more and more, we are investing more money into digital advertising. And really, we had 4 different services globally, and we really didn't have a handle on kind of the basics of where the quality of that media. So we, at the time, we're going through the advertising agency, our media agency for the contract, and we actually wanted to make sure as we were putting so much money into digital advertising, we had a better handle on it, more transparency ourselves. So we moved the contract directly with IAS, so GSK at the time to get that transparency. And so we did a pretty thorough review to make sure we kind of understood what was important to us. And we're in over 92 markets, and we have over 100 brands, believe it or not. So it's a really big portfolio to manage. So it's really important to us that we could run one analysis across all of those markets and really understand brand safety. So as a health care company, the safety that we're giving to consumers and are putting our brands in that environment. And trust is absolutely paramount. We can't have a risk on that whatsoever. Viewable, we really had doubts how much of our ad is viewable. And then we're people viewing them or bots fraudulent ad serving. So that was -- the global scale is #1. The technology had to be best-in-class and then the service. We were trying to go direct on this relationship. It wasn't something we had enormous amount of capability, and we would need to help to roll that out and to make sure that we were maintaining that. So that was really the moment in time what we were going through and to take 4 providers, and we've got into one, it was a simplification, and we definitely needed some handholding through that process.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#55

Right. So simplification, consolidation at the global level. And we'll get back to GlaxoSmithKline is one of the most sophisticated marketers when it comes to digital media quality. I know we talked about this earlier, and we'll get back to some of the metrics for success because I think the audience would love to hear that. How about you, Amanda?

Amanda Richman

attendee
#56

From an agency perspective, we've engaged with IAS actually at all the agencies you mentioned, right? So its journey between Starcom, Wavemaker, Mindshare for myself, different holding companies as well. And I think the journey actually means a lot of what Yannis put on the slide as far as the customer journey. Measurement was key. It was that era, I'd say, 2014, 2015, when there was a lot of swirl in the marketplace maybe post Cambridge Analytica, but then moving forward into brand safety and real concerns about what that is and where there is a human that's actually viewing impressions. And as agencies, IAS became a great partner in helping to understand just the risk in that space. We then continue to evolve to really think about the context of advertising and human safety as well, not just brand safety and brand suitability. And so they started to broaden that spectrum of conversations. And which I think has been helpful is that similar to your situation, right, with a number of clients that want to take that contract directly and those direct relationships that IAS had with Nuvera's clients, there's always been the flexibility of how do you bring agencies to the table as well and how do you solve the problems together. And I think that's been unique because of that ability to look at the bigger picture and bring all the players together and still trying to get to what is a single source of truth but recognizing that you need to have alliances across everyone in the ecosystem to make that happen.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#57

Great. Okay. Thanks, Amanda. How about you, Jorge?

Jorge Ruiz

attendee
#58

Well, building on Amanda's point about a journey. So let's take the clock back about 3.5 years, and I was very fortunate to really be able to build both the management and research work at TikTok. And if you put yourself in my shoes, you have 3 -- well, 2 really fundamental questions that you have to answer. One is, do the ads work and how do they work? And so my team, we've been looking to build this for the last 3.5 years. But as you can imagine, to answer the question of do the ads work. As part of the journey with clients and agencies, one of the fundamental things that you want to discover in that learning journey is around ads around things around like viewability and brand safety. There has to be foundations to kind of continue to build trust. And yes, my team is very much focused on -- as a researcher, the thing that I love is around ad effectiveness, things around attention, things around cross media, but those are things that come much later in the journey. The first thing that you want to do to help to understand to set the table is the foundation. Things like the viewability, things like brand safety. And then you iterate from those, but I'm very proud that the team has been able to work on this, and I'm very proud that the client success to me is what's most paramount as part of the way that we can actually to get us an industry and drive the utilization of dissolution.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#59

Right. Great. Thank you. So we spent most of this afternoon talking a lot about IAS' strategy, data strategy and how we are so focused on helping marketers find higher quality media to drive higher returns, greater efficiency and higher ROI. So let's start with you, Jorge. What role does media quality play in driving outcomes and also does optimizing media quality lead to better results?

Jorge Ruiz

attendee
#60

I think this is the part to where -- what I love is about -- there's 2 components. I think there's the choice because it's necessary for clients to embark on their own learning agendas. So it's kind of similar to when the topic of attention. It's been around for quite a while. But what it is important is to have the instrumentation to allow the teams or to the clients that are on the agency side to embark on those journeys. So there are some examples where I've seen clients really have superior methodologies, some not so superior. The point is, as part of understanding that media quality, they need to embark in understanding what works for their businesses, but also to understand how they're going to make utilization on this. Sometimes it could be towards media, sometimes it could be towards a creative. But the utilization and the choice to have those features, it is important not just for the core researchers, but also those in the front lines to then to be able to understand how these things are relating to each other because it is super critical that in today's marketplace, you and the team in the frontline should be able to understand these concepts and guide them along in that journey.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#61

Right. Great. Thank you. And Meredith and Amanda, I'd love to hear a bit more about why is digital media quality important for marketers, if you're willing to share Meredith, what are some of the challenges Pallion, GSK or other brands that you've worked with around viewability, fraud detection, brand safety. And then also it would be great if you can share what you're comfortable with in terms of GSK's metrics for success. I mean, GSK literally builds out a scorecard that is reviewed at the CEO level when it comes to brand safety and brand suitability. And it's a best practice that the company has had for many years. We were talking about that. I remember that before the pandemic hearing about it. So would you like to start first and then Amanda, does that sound good?

Meredith Herman

attendee
#62

Sure. Okay. So first of all, the -- like I mentioned before, the partnership, we run every brand, every market, every channel and replacement through IAS. So we really have an end-to-end view across what we're buying, I can look at a market level and diagnose and you can imagine, we're optimizing median changing placements and all those things very dynamically, so we can kind of see dips in viewability or dip certain here and reach out the respective market and kind of understand what's happening, what decisions are being made, what are those placements? What are those publishers and have a better understanding of kind of repeat issues that we could say maybe we're going to steer away from those things. And it just gives us that lens of first that I would call that an established foundation. And then on top of that, you can then start to think about with the broad portfolio, the context you're placing your ads within. So like I mentioned, we have Sensodyne toothpaste, very science-based, very conservative brand. So we take a slightly different approach from a suitability standpoint, about context, and we're a bit more conservative than Preparation H, which is hemorrhoid medicine and the brand personality is quite cheeky and choky and we're a little bit more lenient on the types of adjacencies we place that brand into. So you see it's not a one-size-fits-all. You're not just running this vanilla. You're really looking to dial up certain aspects of the placement to help build trust, build character into the brand. So this is a really important part of what we communicate to the agency about how we use some of the technology to make sure we're screening for those types of things. And as you can imagine, playing around with it a little bit because what you're including and what you're excluding in the world today dynamically changes. So you can see it's very sophisticated on how we have to manage the portfolio. I'm thinking about that context. And then I think your third question was really around how we think about measurement overall. Yes. So I mean the basics from a safety are kind of what is rolled up to the CEO level because we went from GSK Consumer Healthcare to Haleon a year ago, 11 months ago actually. And for him to go on our Capital Markets Day and feel really comfortable that we have our largest spend inside the company, which is media and our largest assets, our brands under control, which our new territories brands are going into, right? And we're trying to be on the cutting edge of where consumers are and where we're moving those advertising buys into that we also have a handle on it, right? That we're also doing it responsibly. So that scorecard becomes very a confidence builder within an organization that you're looking at the levers correctly and you have some control over that.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#63

Right. I also think, though, it reflects -- I don't want to speak on behalf of your company. But GSK's ongoing commitment to brand safety, brand suitability, even Amanda is saying.

Amanda Richman

attendee
#64

Yes, like wow. I've not heard of that level of CEO engagement on its scorecard.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#65

At the CEO levels on the scorecard reviewed by the senior leadership team. It is remarkable. And I remember when GSK was doing that it was pre-pandemic. And I met with your team in London, and they were talking about that scorecard.

Meredith Herman

attendee
#66

Yes. It's been a long standing. Yes. I think it gives confidence to move into other areas of more advanced measurement, right? And as you try and advance the conversation, one is the foundation and then it's the other more advanced techniques that we're looking to bring on to make sure we're driving performance.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#67

That's great. Great example. Thank you for sharing. Amanda, how about you in terms of -- I mean you've worked with some of the most iconic Fortune 500 brands in the world. So any insight you want to share on the importance of digital media quality and optimization tied to media quality.

Amanda Richman

attendee
#68

Well, first, I'd love to see more CEOs that engaged in that level of scorecard and understand not delegating this responsibility down to a media director within the team or up to the CMO. It's a testament to really recognizing media is not only critical from a spend perspective but is the relationship that you can develop with your customer comes off and through that media interaction and how do you manage that level of engagement. What does that look like? And how you earn and keep their trust through advertising through being in like context to being brand safe and more that can be a dashboard or a way to visibly bring that to life in the scorecard is fantastic. And we've seen this shift, too, from just talking about measurement to really thinking more about the context and then into innovation. And when you're engaged at that level at the C-suite too, it just unlocks a different level of partnership of how do you drive those results and having those conversations versus just how do you tamp down the risk. But you have to kind of go through that journey from measurement into context into innovation over time.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#69

That's great. Thanks.

Amanda Richman

attendee
#70

I just want to say, too, this is interesting. There's a premium, which comes up a lot as well, too. And premium used to be something we thought of just with a large price tag and it's shipped certainly in the last 10 years with social to premium is really in the eye of the beholder. And so how do you understand that right trade-off of what's premium from the viewer, the audience and what's the right price to pay for that. And so to be able to optimize across the portfolio, it gives you some of that insight and leverage to pull. You're living that world. pretty much, right?

Jorge Ruiz

attendee
#71

Yes. Pretty much. So let me give you more about practitioners point of -- practitioners view on this. So if each one of us has different areas to cover on managing and building a campaign. Obviously, strategically, we want to understand ad effectiveness and be able to understand how it's driving business outcomes and strategically at a financial level. I think what's important is how do we empower our teams both at the macro and at the micro to be able to get what they needed to make the right decisions. So if you're implementing and launching campaigns trust and reproducibility things around viewability and brand safety are important components. But you also want to have some -- you want to have some guidance to help to understand when am I looking to understand impacts on things like brand lift across media impact. When am I looking to the incrementality, or understanding it is causal experiments to know if there's actually -- if this thing is really working. How do I understand comparability to understand that a given media or platform or whatever has a response based on the investment. So I think what's important is not just to say, I have really awesome pieces in my measurement framework toolkit. So that's what you as a marketer and the client have the competitive advantage to put that piece -- those pieces together. What's also important is to then tell your teams who is appointed to which pieces, how are they going to be interacting with each other? And how are they going to orchestrate to understand on the daily, what the responsibilities for what they need to go towards and also maintaining on the macro. Because that is what happens on a regular basis for all practitioners. But when we supervise and we guide and we coach with that method, that's where you can build strong teams. And that's why I see the value imperative of measurement and our responsibility as leaders on guiding teams with that notion of measurement as a team sport.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#72

So to that point, Jorge, thank you for sharing that. So -- and we've talked about this, that you described measurement as a team sport. So can you go a little bit deeper, why you describe it as a team sport and then I'd love to hear your feedback on what I ask, how can we be a better partner with TikTok. Jorge, that was a long sigh.

Jorge Ruiz

attendee
#73

Well, because immediately...

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#74

We are great partners.

Jorge Ruiz

attendee
#75

Because I just immediately remember like when I had lots of hair and I was working at [indiscernible] and starting to answer this question. I was like what happened? So many years. So here's -- there's a couple of reasons why I care a lot about this. One is on as practitioners. We -- measurement is just getting harder in the industry. But it's not that it's impossible, it's just you have to think about it more consciously. And one of the things we often forget about is that many of us that grew up in our respective careers. We grew up with a lot of very strong teachers that tell us a fundamentals of advertising. I was very fortunate that one of my teachers -- her mento was less to wonder me, So I got drill on the basis of the direct response marketing and I did not get a pass on learning that correctly. So I was like, you got to work. And so it's important that as we -- like imagine if any one of us is working with teams that are asking about these tools across measurement, it's -- regardless of what it is. Helping them to understand the fundamentals of how advertising work and those things that were often as digital practitioners that you have to understand television fundamentals, digital fundamentals, search fundamentals. But there's a notion of measurement as a team sport on the tooling, the -- how those tools perform, how they behave, but also what are the dynamics? So sometimes there's things that academics are at the forefront on how advertising works. But this notion of how do we invest in the people that are practitioners on the front lines, not just in the here, please come back and tell us what this report does what it means and what they recommend. But how are we teaching the very next generation for how they're going to need to build as they go into that measurement journey? Because imagine that people that are today using things, brand safety and viewability, they should know things like brand like additional things that they are going to measure model. Whatever comes in the future but it's our responsibility to kind of help coach and guys in the industry because they're the ones that are going to help us to continue to really driving those results. And that's to me it's like it's a big responsibility.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#76

And then thank you for sharing that. And then what about IAS as a partner.

Jorge Ruiz

attendee
#77

I love it. I think as partners, it's been amazing.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#78

I didn't ask him to say that. I'm serious. I did not. Go ahead. No, in our trip in the hall, I said no infomercial here, right? Go ahead.

Jorge Ruiz

attendee
#79

As practitioners. Key thing is the teams on the front lines to be able to actually have a learning culture in term of how it works. So we whether it's viewability, whether it's brand safety, whether it's media quality, it is important that teams as they get comfortable and familiar with these tools and these features. The ability of how we get the utilization across the industry to help what's client or agency or even within my teams. It's just how to make decisions out of the solutions is crucially important. It's one thing that I really love about the relationship is that commitment and investment for education.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#80

Great. All right. We're going to have one more question about media quality and then I'm going to bring it up more to macro. Okay. So that sounds good. So Jorge, why don't we start with you in terms of how does TikTok measure the success of a campaign? And what metrics do you use to measure ROI?

Jorge Ruiz

attendee
#81

If each one of you was a different client, we would have completely different objectives. So we need to make sure to follow based on each of the client's business objectives and the goals in mind. So certainly, there's constructive measurement of looking at outcomes, performance outcomes, financial outcomes. But my view and the way that my team has been helping to build, it has to be very much grounded on following each of the clients business outcomes. And so that's what we do provide a lot of first and third-party solutions to provide that choice. But it's something to wear -- I'll give you an example. So with some of our largest global clients, we do have a lot of learning agendas to where we look at brand safety and viewability as a start. We also look at things like brand impact outcomes when they want to understand experiments and they want to understand whether it's first a third party, but they want to understand how their brands are performing? Are they driving ad recall, ad awareness. And then as the relationship deepens, you want to be able to understand how is that driving off-line sales. So we have partnerships with NCS in North America. With LiveRamp in the U.K. and France and driving off-line sales lift. And then, for example, with Nielsen globally, we have partnerships where we also have like media mix modeling across multiple partners as well. But again, it's like it is an evolution of the measurement journey. You have to start small, you have to build trust, then you understand impact and you want to build advantage. And do you know what's at the end here? Creative. Everything always goes back to creative quality. So it's thinking of the journey, it's about trust, it's about impact, about advantage, and in this connected layer is about creative quality. So that's what keeps all of us busy.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#82

All right. Great. Thank you. Anyone else would like to add in terms of success metrics for effective campaigns?

Meredith Herman

attendee
#83

So we look at consistently our brand health. So we're looking to make sure that the work we're doing continues to build strong brands, first and foremost. And then we use the media mix modeling to kind of look at what's driving sales and contributing to sales. We are working to bring that instead of a rearview mirror, which we look at the end of the year into more of a quarterly always-on MMM type model. And then underneath that, the various campaigns, as Jorge mentioned, if it's an awareness campaign, we're measuring awareness type objectives like effective reach or consideration or conversion. So it really depends on what we call the job to be done within that campaign that we're looking to drive. But on a macro level, brand health, then what's contributing and then are we hitting the campaign effectiveness that we're trying to drive specifically with that effort.

Amanda Richman

attendee
#84

From an agency view, you've similar, right? Measurement frameworks are key, helping clients understand that's a range, and you need to make sure you're aligning the KPIs and the measurement partner with what you're trying to achieve from an injector perspective. And what we're seeing certainly is moving up and down that frame of more brand marketers looking at performance metrics and trying to push to understand online sales and vice versa, performance marketers trying to understand brand awareness and how they can build those relationships. So it's collapsed that a bit.

Meredith Herman

attendee
#85

Yes. Hopefully.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#86

Okay. Good. So let's shift gears. So we spent a lot of time this afternoon talking about how IAS' products are backed by AI/ML, the fact that AI/ML are buzzwords, but they're really core to our DNA as a company. Would any of you like to share how you're leveraging AI/ML for your marketing strategies?

Amanda Richman

attendee
#87

I'll jump in a quick one. It's certainly at an agency holding company level. It felt like most of that work is really being done right now on the trading desks and the media optimization side of the business. And I hear the creative brethren also looking at AI/ML from better understanding what they can do with their process to perhaps inspire some human creativity as well. And so some of it today is really more on efficiency perspective and an optimization perspective, but it's a potential to really unlock insights and help our clients have more value for their first-party data and really drive more thoughtful segmentation, deeper insights on all the multi-dimensions of their customers is where we're all heading to. Probably getting there faster with partners like yourself, then we would doing it homegrown within the agency or holding company level.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#88

Great example. So trading, traders and then creative. Meredith or Jorge?

Meredith Herman

attendee
#89

Yes, I can jump in. So I really like this framework that Google uses around embedded versus applied. So if you think of AI being embedded in a tool, I love that. IAS has that, Google tools have that. So I love that using partners that are constantly improving with embedded AI because I know we're going to get smarter by letting the computers do the work a little bit and learn together. So we definitely try and lean into that, play with that, challenge our agencies to make sure they're using that and exploiting that and getting smarter with a lot of test and learn in that embedded AI space. And then from an applied, if you think of a data set, so we store all of our content in an asset repository. I think of the thousands of banners and ads and then we can apply AI over that data set and understand what are the elements within that creative that are actually working for us and create themes around that. So we partner with Google around with an advanced analytics tool called CreativeX which is a third party that scans those assets, we can then form what are the best practices specific to Haleon within our ads. And then we can actually scorecard our teams, our brand teams, how well they're doing that. So we can look at those assets and saying, you aren't hitting 8 out of 10 of those best practices. Should we be running that creative? So it's really applying AI into a data set, which I find extremely exciting. And I think, like Amanda mentioned, bringing that audience data into one place and looking and applying AI to that around segmentation and other business opportunities, I think, is where the whole industry is going. And I find fascinating. We're kind of early on in that journey. But it's just amazing to see the creativity across an organization around the applied area, and I think we are not even scratching the surface, but it's a really exciting space to be and everybody is talking about it. So we're constantly getting those questions or are we doing enough of it, and I think you can't play around enough.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#90

Love that example. How about you, Jorge, do you want to share?

Jorge Ruiz

attendee
#91

Yes. So I think building on your point around CreativeX. So we also partner with CreativeX, and we also partner with Kantar, with some of the creative analysis features. So for me -- to me, I'm really excited when partner's also building into it. But again, the point I made earlier on creative is the undercurrent like creative is the most important variable for advertising effectiveness, many, many years of research have continued to prove it. But I really love how some of the partners are also thinking about the creative equation. And there are partners where they're helping to understand like what is actually going on in the creative, whether it's like creative recipes, creative labels, create descriptions. So things like that where there's so much work happening in the industry, but I do think that any sort of iteration and evolution in that world is to help to say -- when you run out effectiveness, you always going to be asking 2 questions. There's a media component and there's a creative component. If you can combine those 2 things into one, you've struck gold. But I do think compartment lesson to really understand what's going on in each is super critical. So those kind of partners. I think it's like all of us are trying to tackle the same things.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#92

Okay. Good. All right. One more, more on the macro side question, then we'll open it up for Q&A. Third-party cookie deprecation, love the topic. So how has third -- we should bring in the cookies. Third-party cookie deprecation, how has that impacted your marketing strategies?

Meredith Herman

attendee
#93

I can start, I guess, from a brand standpoint. So many of our brands are household names. You've heard of Tom's hopefully and Sensodyne, but actually, the number of people who have sensitivity versus using Sensodyne, we have a lot of headroom bring more of you into use Sensodyne. And eventually, all of you will have sensitivity as we get older and continue to hopefully brush our teeth. So there's a lot of opportunity, but the business model has always been around penetration, just bringing more people in. And honestly, with first-party data on the cookies crumbling, we realize we actually need to create more relationship with our consumer to really understand who is using Sensodyne? How often you're using Sensodyne? Are you also using one of our other competitors that you've seen in the aisle. And by using first-party data and capturing that first-party data, we can get much smarter about the relationship we have and actually build a relationship with you. So I think it's definitely from a business model, one of the hugest change in CPG, because we've all been about penetration and now it's about relationship. And that's a fundamental shift to make within a company to change a business model that's decades old. I think the second shift really -- that's a very positive one, is it's forcing us to really be -- we all say we're consumer first. But from a privacy standpoint, we're not just trailing you across the web. We're trying to actually engage with the value exchange and having a meaningful connection. So I think from an industry standpoint, it's enormously positive because we should be doing the right thing. And then I think it really drives our teams to test and learn. Nobody has this cracked. We don't know cohorts and all of the new lingo that's out there and are we using them properly. So I think it's really put in a huge boost to make sure we're trying new things and try and mitigate the risk to make sure we truly understand how to market where we push more into where we were 10 days ago into context and other things that we know are going to be more a reality in the future.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#94

That's great.

Amanda Richman

attendee
#95

Similar experience, right? That third-party cookie deprecation became just a wake-up call for marketers. A massive push to shift gears and think about how do you start to acquire more first-party data, especially in the CPG space and how that was really the power of understanding and building a relationship with your customers. So for agencies, that then became a great pivot and opportunity to say, how can we build more consulting services around that? How to make sure the data and tech people are in the room, not getting a filter discussion from the client we even start to restructure our organization around that, too, to really be at the table and talk about how to create value from that, which then can shift the conversation with media partners, too, to how can you then enhance the first-party data of clients so they can have scale and reach. And so it kind of connects all together to really get to that future of one-on-one marketing that we're all talking about. We just became that push to make it happen.

Jorge Ruiz

attendee
#96

It's certainly -- it's a fascinating topic because all of us are thinking about this. For me, I think part of it is like thinking about how you build for them now and for the future. But I do feel very confident that across -- when you get this right, and when you work on measurement, you can find different ways of approaching this, if you really are really focused. Because again, it's like advertising effectiveness has been around for a very long time and will continue. It's how you come about to execute the instrumentation. And I'll give you an example in the industry that I think is pretty cool. So some of the work that the WFA, the World Federation of Advertisers, they're working on something -- they've been working on it on a cross-media measurement. They try to define open source privacy standards for how to do like others. Very fancy advance technical work, but they're trying to do it in a very thoughtful, very technical ways that it can be interoperable to help across the industry. Still very in the early days. My team, and we're very much -- we are active contributors. The nerdy me loves it because it's something that's like -- it's something that if you want to maximize for privacy, that is something that the industry is working. But what I love about that construct is that it's actually global clients that are forefront in the steering committees. They are trying to think about this notion of how to solve for privacy, how to get everybody to play well together, but also how to do in a way that you can actually think about this in the long term. It's one of many examples that the industry is doing, some of them are highly visible, some less visible, but all of us in this space are trying to tackle these approaches, which you need to figure out what the teams are asking is, are you trying to solve for the now or are you trying to solve for the future? And how are you going to be able to build this together. I'm very comfortable for the next 5 to 10 years, which means a lot of work.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#97

Okay. Great. Well, thank you. So now we'll open it up for Q&A. We have several folks running around with mics, but why don't we first start with Laura, and then we'll go to Mark.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#98

Great. So I feel like what's happening is you guys have all run full funnel advertising, but the choices of platforms have been segmented Facebook or Search and they work for a funnel. And I feel like what's changing now in IAS plays into this is CTV is coming over from linear, which is top of funnel, but with data like Trade Desk, they're driving down the funnel and retail media. So I feel like the open Internet and the IAS aids this is going to make the open Internet more full funnel, which is a better choice than a lot of you've had for a decade. I'm wrong, I'm right, please give us real expert data as opposed to theory.

Amanda Richman

attendee
#99

Spot on, right? Connected TV brings us decision to what was a brand channel. And you're starting to see agencies and clients structure their organizations differently as well so that their budgets aren't siloed. Particularly when it comes to retail media, too, which is the other wave addition to CTV that is changing this whole dynamic and starting to bring branded performance expertise together. So working with partners like IAS that actually gives you the confidence in optimizing against different objectives at different channels, different weights, different definitions of premiums makes for a really powerful way to manage a portfolio in ways that hadn't happened before when you may have teams competing for budgets and really not having a single view of what is performing well.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#100

Okay. Meredith or Jorge, do you want to add to that? Or you good?

Jorge Ruiz

attendee
#101

I think there's -- like in the next 5 to 10 years, I do think more and more work on -- like in many ways, some of the -- the way that we plan for cross-media 10 years ago is going to keep coming back to where quality of creative. These things will sort themselves out. I do think that it's like the value and the intent and planning will kind of come back even more. So I'll give you a very simple example. So we did some research on understanding like -- so some things around TikTok and TV, just some things around creative. What do television had work on TikTok or vice versa. So we have some questions from clients around like what is the value of running TV ads or should we be running at more TikTok ads. And surprisingly -- well, unsurprisingly, is that the platform -- like if you build a at-or-each platform, you're going to get even more ad effectiveness. But you have to plan it together to what if you're running multiple integrated campaigns, yes, we get effectiveness. But it's a quality of the credit that really makes all the difference. So I get back to this notion of like media is important, but also the way that you do planning for creative, those 2 things -- it's not just about the data, but it's about the planning of what you do with that media mix that becomes even more important upfront.

Amanda Richman

attendee
#102

And that credit piece had been broken before. And it was like bringing it together. That is that last mile. You talked about the effectiveness studies, 70% of effectiveness is creative, only 30% is media. We've been optimizing the hell out of media. It's about time we optimize creative, too. There's still hope for that.

Meredith Herman

attendee
#103

Yes. I would say just on the creative to experience is also that CTV mindset because we all were -- 10 years ago, we've all come up through many of us working at creative or media and it's converged and so is the experiences. So you can't just plug the ad in the TV spot cross channel. Then we went into customizing the ad for TikTok or Meta, et cetera. Now you actually have to go experience first because they're going to see the ad, then they're going to see an opportunity to buy, then they're going to be taken to an interactive experience. You actually have to start experience back. And I think that's what's happening is that converging of, to your point, brand awareness, all the way to conversion, but they're happening in the same experience. So if you aren't actually looking at what the consumer is seeing, you're going to give somebody a very fragmented moment, and they aren't going to know what to do.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#104

So it's like moving up the funnel.

Meredith Herman

attendee
#105

It's really the whole thing has to be looked at from a consumer point of view of where you ask them up to click, what's the next action you want them to take. But those things as far as the funnel and how we used to think about the funnel and creating discrete ads that we're only going to see an awareness, they're able to take these actions right then and there now. So we really need to think and plan for that from a creative standpoint, which, for a brand is a huge challenge because a lot of times you're planning on a flow chart and you're looking at these things in isolation, instead of what is going to happen at the moment of truth your consumer. So I hope the creative couldn't be more important, but really looking at it where they're interacting and not just at the buy, but what is actually happening at that moment.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#106

Okay. Great. Mark, do you have a question?

Mark Stephen Mahaney

analyst
#107

Yes. Two-part question. Amanda and Meredith, you both talked about trying to get more first-party data when the cookie crumbles. How do you get that? And what about all of the small brands that are out there, how can they possibly get enough first-party data, which then leads to the second part of the question, as we move beyond privacy -- personally identified information either in the form of cookies or with the IDFA, do you think that this kind of probabilistic models can be as effective as the deterministic models were in the past. So for the people who don't get enough first-party data, they have to rely on third-party data, you think the targeting can be as effective as it was in the past.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#108

Great question.

Amanda Richman

attendee
#109

Possibly. I think all of this is leading to a mindset of more test and learn and hypothesis versus choosing one lane and sticking with it. So the fact that we can now, in real time, have more visibility to test out different approaches or test out different data sets helps us get there. And certainly, when -- your -- first part of your question -- sorry, refresh on that.

Mark Stephen Mahaney

analyst
#110

How do you get more first-party data?

Amanda Richman

attendee
#111

First party data is like a small brand, right? So a number of different tactics. Sometimes it's the old fashion like how do you get people to sign up on your website that they visited for sweepstakes, an opportunity to get the download white paper, it's B2B advertiser. Other ways to do that, to just start even with your CRM organization, which was so often a distinct group not connected truly to the marketing team or connected to media and think about new media as a vehicle for acquisition of more data. So bring people to the table to think about that and see what are the different touch points where we could extract more and give more value to customers for an exchange for rounding out that profile and then finding other partners, too, that can help enhance that profile.

Meredith Herman

attendee
#112

Yes. The first-party data collection is a real challenge. I won't kid you. But the -- because, again, we sell toothpaste, do you want to give your personal information to a toothpaste provider? And what are you going to get back? What's that value exchange? So we really have to create moments where there's an interest to wanting to sign up for something or visit our website. So when I first started this journey around first-party data, we thought about it being the full identity, meaning you're giving me an e-mail address. Now we're really thinking that actually they're giving us data if they visit the website even if I don't have their full identity -- so by tagging those pages, so use GA4, Google Analytics version 5.0 or so. We capture who's visiting those pages. We aggregate all of that information, so we have some knowledge of the type of people who are visiting and then we can at least go back out and remarket to them or resegment based on all of those visits. An understanding of who might be more attractive to us or propensity to want to talk to us about Sensodyne. It's not always fully first-party data. Sometimes it's really kind of just a simple visit, not a full identity. But we're never going to have what Amazon has. We're never going to have what Google has as far as data. So we take that knowledge, we bring that into the cloud and we look at merging those data sets to build out additional audiences piggybacking on what they have. So I think it's all about starting, start by starting and starting collecting what you have, making sense of it. And then you get smarter around who you're going out to spend your money on and speaking to and reaching. So I think for me, the flip was identity versus really kind of data on visits and those types of things and aggregating that is all valuable.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#113

Justin.

Justin Patterson

analyst
#114

Great. I guess there's a lot of talk about attention as a new metric in the industry. I know it's very early innings today. But when you see new metrics like attention emerge, what really causes you to go from, say, experimental budgets to actually using that as a currency to make advertising decisions.

Meredith Herman

attendee
#115

I'm sure you see this on a more macro scale. From our standpoint, we're in a test and learn phase with it. But super excited on what we do see as far as validating. And we have a lot of questions. We had a lot of questions with brands, if we're putting an ad on Facebook, and they're only seeing it for 2 seconds, how valuable is that, that really kind of the depth of experience and are the eyeballs really even seeing it. And using the IAS tools, we're able to kind of correlate what we thought from a value standpoint, viewability, brand safety, and we are seeing a lot of correlation, and we are able to start optimizing based on some of those signals, but it is still very early, and we aren't making dramatic decisions with it. We're still in a very much a test and learn. And I think it's very new to the industry. We're not doing our upfront based on attention yet or anything. We're just starting to play.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#116

I'm just going to say, I think that's a good invention, right? It's like the upfront stock all the oxygen out of the room on this measurement conversation. It all becomes about video measurement and what in currency and more but hopefully, there will be more attention to attention as you come out of this.

Jorge Ruiz

attendee
#117

My -- we just -- with my team, we just presented at the RF a whole day on -- with research experts on attention and I think there's couple of components. I think like Meredith pointed like on, yes, you do want to have the teams run correlations. You want process and structure. What I found super fascinating is on clients that were regardless of the quality of the methodology, if you put a process behind it to help understand the creative like just fine-tuning creative, that in itself is valuable. But you need -- as managers seem to have really good process to guide the teams because that itself can get you really good outcomes. Now when you start thinking about what is it right -- how do you define attention, how do you build that attention? There's still a lot of -- like there's no universal definition on attention just yet in the industry, even within as an industry. But there's a lot of things happening. And I think what I will say, as I highlight is, number one is choice test, find what have the teams come back to you. But second is, think about the bigger picture of what you're doing with attention. The most important thing is creative. Anything you can do to help to prune and improve creative, that helps out. And then I also think with the teams, think about trade-offs because it's on a single dimensional thing. It's like you need to think about trade-offs as to what about the trade between duration and reach? What about quality? What about when the brand is brand new or when it's mature. So it's a super useful metric. And it's not a does it or doesn't correlate, but how you're putting it in the mix. At what stage is it technical or strategic? But absolutely, the work that's been happening. I'd love to see more of it, and I love that you're asking the question because it's definitely an industry where we're headed.

Mark Kelley

analyst
#118

Jorge, I had a question for you. Can you maybe walk us through contextual on TikTok today? You obviously work with. Yes, you got your Pulse product, I guess, give us the lay of the land today. Where does that go? And does cookie deprecation accelerate that? Or do you think a lot of people are adopting that already?

Jorge Ruiz

attendee
#119

Well, for me, I'm just I'm the measurement guy, not the product guy. So I'm just like helping to say whatever is available, what whatever can be done, how are we going to be able to measure it. And so there -- for example, we have some very cool products have been on very useful, so things like Pulse, for things that are taken really helping to look at how you look at the top 4% of creators and really capture that and to have adjacency next it. There are products and features that will continue to be iterated. When it comes to my world, I think it's about how do we start measuring them? And then the good news is that once you get to my world, whether it's audience-based or contextual base, the measurement construct becomes very similar. But to me, the way I look at it is that I feel very fortunate that my teams and also like my peers on the product side. I have never worked at a place where there's so much relentless focus on continuing to listen to the market and build products around the voice of customers. And something to where in the last 3 years I think we've been able to accomplish things that initially thought it would take 8 years. So it's something that we're like as soon as we see client success, we'll keep investing in them, and we got great partners. We'll keep measuring them.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#120

It's Alex Levin on behalf of Mark Zgutowicz from Benchmark. Perhaps this is a question for Jorge. First social advertiser concerned about brand safety, how important is the vertical relative to visual content? And how difficult is the actual assessment of the verbal queues, something like lip reading?

Jorge Ruiz

attendee
#121

It's an interesting question. I'm not -- candidly, I'm not sure if I'm the best person to give you -- to give you an exact answer to that. So again, I'm on the measurement side. I think a high level, what I would say is, the way I've helped my teams guy through some of this is -- I used to tell my team this like 2, 3 years ago, measurement can't own the room if brand safety hasn't covered the room. The most important thing is making sure that we have -- for client we're working with and say, "Hey, like what are you looking at your measurement framework? If you're using IAS for variability for brand safety, how are you doing a pre-bid, post-bid, we need to make sure that we kind of find ways to integrate and to work with building for the present regardless of feature that we have without the placement, but we want to be able to say how are you looking to build trust. Once you have a trust then you can go deeper to understand further notions about effectiveness. So as a guiding principle, that's kind of the way how we are approaching it.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#122

Yes. Go ahead, Jason.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#123

Everyone on this panel is pretty forward leaning with the topic. And just given the size of the industry, like how do you think about when you made the crossover from looking at the data as avoidance, right? nonhuman traffic, inappropriate content to using it from a positive targeting lean in more because I think you're doing that, but the most of the industry is not doing that with respect to IAS' customer base. So like when was the crossover point?

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#124

So I would say that strategically, we had a shift where first of all, GSK merged with Novartis, then Pfizer brands, then we spun off to Haleon. So mentality of cost savings and consolidation and the mentality of shift to growth. So I think as you're looking to be conservative and save money and avoid necessary spend, you're in one mentality, which could be, take a more conservative view, be more brand safe. As we're looking to grow to make that pivot, we're thinking of where the growth audience is. A big market growth opportunity for us being that health care is universal, but not universally distributed, right? So there's underserved communities that aren't receiving the same health care even obviously in the U.S. and around the world. So we're really trying to make sure that from a DEI standpoint, we're reaching those underserved communities and bringing them every day over-the-counter health care, so by using that and trying to understand who -- where are those communities, what publishers should we be trusting with our ads. What is a great premium experience and moment. And then to the earlier points aligning amazing creative to that moment. Now we're looking opportunistically at where we could grow that maybe other companies aren't talking to them the same way we have the potential to speak to them. So I think it's a mindset shift that happens that can be very tied to the company and how the company is evolving and looking to grow and really embedding it into the growth strategy, instead of it being a separate strategy, you're really looking at what is our growth strategy and embedding it into it and saying how is this giving me a leapfrog opportunity on the information that's at my fingertips. Does that help, so it really drives the growth strategy, drives how you use the tool and how you try to take advantage to exploit the audiences to grow your business.

Unknown Executive

executive
#125

Yes, I would agree. It's interesting. It's that pivot, right? Because if Brand Safety 1.0 might have been the headlines on something that happened on Facebook and then everyone galvanized around brand safety, it's at a client marketer level, how progressive that CEO, CMO is what their growth unlock strategy is. And are you pivoting from thinking about channels to audiences and when they do, they see this as kind of more of unlock, I'd say.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#126

Okay. My question is for both Amanda and Lisa, actually. So when you have customers that come in through agencies, just curious on how like Mindshare and IAS work together expand services and cross-sell additional solutions.

Amanda Teo

analyst
#127

That's great. So my experience has been we can have conversations where IAS has a direct relationship with the client, they want the contract there, there's progress and what they do an amazing job of is reaching out to the agents to say, here's what we're observing. Here's where we see the client on this journey. Here's where we think the opportunity is to unlock growth, to find efficiencies, effectiveness, et cetera, and bring that into the table. I think we've had some of those conversations even in can obviously and be able to work with the clients that way. And that is the best way to have a partnership to be very transparent on what we're seeing and then bring different perspective and insight. Sometimes that's the agency saying, "Hey, here's we are seeing some struggles, maybe it's within the structure of the client or the structure of the agency or here's some blockers that we see and have conversations around what might unlock that, sometimes it's technology, sometimes it's still the human interference that you have to run.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#128

Right. And just to add to what Amanda said, I won't need names, but a few of those global wins you saw on the Board today, came through Mindshare with the partnership with Mindshare over the last 10 months or so. And I think what is so important is maintaining deep strategic relationships both with the advertiser directly and also with the agency. It's a partnership. It's like a 3-way partnership. And also, I mean, I remember meeting with Amanda last year, it can and just making sure we're parallel pathing the education, the visibility into our product and tech road map, hearing directly from the agency, what are you hearing from the advertiser or some of the meetings could be 3-way, some could be directly with the agency just to make sure that there is total clarity on the advertisers' goals on the problems that we could help solve for them and then total clarity on how we're innovating on behalf of those advertisers.

Jonathan Schaffer

executive
#129

We'll take one last question.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#130

We could do 2 fast ones. We have 2 hands raised.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#131

This is just one. So Meredith in the intro, you talked about moving from 4 providers down to 1. So the question behind the question is, structurally, should the expectation as we think about brands using partners like IAS; one, why did you go 4 to 1? And structurally, what's better about using one partner?

Meredith (Meer) Haley

executive
#132

Okay. So one is just the consistency of the data. So if you're trying to make decisions and you've got 4 different providers that are looking at it for different ways, then it becomes really hard to make a decision just to normalize the data. And at Haleon, we have a global model, so have all been global team trying to manage this. And also, as I mentioned, we were looking to gain more through the line transparency in our ad tech and then the services we were adding on to that ad tech to make sure we're making the right decisions. So small team looking to -- we've won global media agency. So I think we're all about simplification and driving better decisions and speed with that. And I think as you try and innovate in the space, going deep with partners to making sure that as long as they're staying up the speed like that they expanded with Amazon, they're expanding with TikTok, if they weren't keeping up with that in the spaces we want to go, that would be a problem. But as long as they're keeping up with that of where we want to meet our consumer then it's all about consistency, so we can make better decisions.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#133

Great question. And Fitz, I think.

Brian Fitzgerald

analyst
#134

Yes. Brian Fitzgerald from Wells Fargo. Amanda, you mentioned earlier, creating profiles with your partners and when you look at seller-defined audiences or look alike audience commerce audiences and so on, could you talk about the level of trust you have that, that audience is what your media or tech partner says it is or whether you'd like to see verification around audience products?

Unknown Executive

executive
#135

Yes. That has been one of the conundrums in the industry, right? Everyone's different definitions across publishers of what's an [ auto and tender ] or mover, et cetera. And so you'll see certainly at an industry level, some of the different initiatives, even like open a key back in the day with different television markers or television networks to kind of figure out what a common definition is. I think this space is interesting because you just get more opportunities to have a hypothesis and test that and prove it right or wrong by the performance. And so we don't have to sit in these rooms and consortiums and debate all the different ways of defining that audience or segment, get in market, test it, optimize it and prove it out. That's what this allows.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#136

Okay. Great. So with that, I want to thank again Meredith, Amanda and George, for your time today. I hope all of you are walking away with a much richer understanding of how the digital ecosystem is evolving and how we partner closely with all of your companies. So with that, thank you.

Tania Secor

executive
#137

Good afternoon, everyone. It's great to see you all here. I'm Tania Secor, the CFO of IAS. I joined the company 6 months ago, and I'd bring a deep financial background to IAS. I've been CFO of a half a dozen media and technology companies over the past 15 years in my career. Most recently, I was CFO of one of the divisions of IPG in our public group. I oversaw financials for their digital media division. Prior to that, the first decade of my career, I was an investment banker, and I was also a principal investor. I spent a lot of time with nearly all of you over the past 6 months, and it's so great for you to be here in person. So great to see the strong turnout so that you could hear directly from our leadership team. In my career, I've seen companies with very compelling customer-value propositions. I've worked with businesses who also had very large and multiple TAMs. And I've also seen companies that have A+ very strong leadership team, but I've never seen all 3 combined. And that is why I joined IAS 6 months ago. So I'm delighted to bring it all together for you at the end of the day, so you can see how this unique position of ours translates into our financials and drive shareholder value. I hope you'll come away from today with a better understanding of our revenue model, our future and our historic track record. I'm also going to share a few insights and details that you haven't seen before. IAS has a proven track record of profitable growth. Our revenue growth on a compounded annual growth rate of the past 4 years was 24%. And on an EBITDA basis, 39% even faster in terms of our EBITDA growth. We are also pleased today to be reiterating our guidance for the quarter and for the full year. 1/3 of our revenue comes from outside the Americas, and our international revenue grew at a 13% CAGR over these couple of years. So you've heard from Lisa already that we've renamed our key segments of revenue. Programmatic has now become Optimization, Ad Direct has become Measurement and Supply Side has now become Publisher, but I want to make sure everyone understands there's no change to our financial reporting due to this new nomenclature. So you can see, the 48% compounded annual growth rate of our Optimization revenue, which is the bright green bars has been a big fuel of our growth over the past few years and that's driven by the shift in incremental programmatic buying in the industry. Our Measurement business was $155 million at the end of 2022, and our Publisher business, which includes Publica was $63 million. So let's drill down for a minute into Optimization. What's fueling the growth of our optimization business is the strong customer adoption of Context Control. We launched Context Control 3 years ago and at the end of the first quarter of 2023, Context Control was nearly 50% of our revenue. Our Non-Contextual businesses have also grown nicely at a 16% CAGR during this time. So now let's pause for a minute and talk about our Measurement business. And what I want to highlight for you is the growth in both social and video. Our social -- revenue from our social offering has grown faster than the open web and if you go back all the way to the first quarter of 2020 compared to where we are today, Social has grown at a 29% CAGR. Video is also growing faster than display, a trend we've talked about recently as well and it's grown at a 23% CAGR. We expect these trends to continue, and that's primarily driven by the end user demand for these formats. Our expansive global footprint is also a key differentiator for IAS. 31% of our revenue comes from Europe and Asia combined, and this is as of the trailing 12-month period in the first quarter. We have a local presence in 16 cities across the world and 12 -- we had a 12% revenue CAGR for our revenue outside of the Americas ending in the first quarter. We've prioritized our investments going back some time in our global footprint. And as you could hear today, this is a key first-mover advantage for IAS because as you heard today from Meredith and Amanda, marketers are increasingly consolidating their spend with one verification provider. Another area that many of you have asked, Lisa and I in our one-on-ones over the past 6 months is what is our revenue by industry. So I wanted to provide this to you today on a onetime basis, so you could see how diversified our revenue is. Consumer packaged goods is 16% of our revenue, T&E is 15%, finance 13% and so on. Across these 7 sectors, our revenue by industry is very distributed. This diversity serves us very well as certain industries grow or contract with economic cycles. The other element you'll see of diversity is that no one customer represents more than 5% of our revenue. We had 199 large customers at the end of 2022 that generated $290 million of advertising revenue, which was 84% of our advertising revenue. And just to remind everyone, the way we define large customers is any customer who spends more than $200,000 in any one period. This is a new metric we started disclosing in Q1, and we plan to keep disclosing the amount of ad revenue from our large customers going forward. And so you can see in terms of average revenue from each of these large customers, we are growing wallet share with our clients. We generated $1.5 million of revenue for each -- on average for each large advertiser, which was up 50% from 2020. As you heard, other -- several times today, we have very strong net revenue retention of 118%, and that's on average across all of our clients, and the average tenure for our top 100 advertisers is approaching 8 years (sic) [ 7.8 YEARS ]. Our differentiated technology, our product innovation and our best-in-class customer service drives customer loyalty, and we have very low churn. So let's spend a couple of minutes on pricing. I know many of you are also very interested to hear about how our pricing works because we've had a lot of questions on this in some of our one-on-ones. So I wanted to put together just a very simple explanation of how hard pricing works because it is actually quite simple. In terms of Measurement, Optimization and Publisher, we charge a fixed cost per thousand of impressions multiplied by the number of impressions. The CPMs are fixed. We negotiate those CPMs either with the agency, the advertiser or the publisher. And our volume is variable based on industry trends and economic conditions. This approach provides us with stability and visibility into our rates, and we do not have volatility based on the media rates. Another slide on pricing. The bars in this chart represent our CPM for some of our most popular offerings. The customer journey starts with measurement. It expands to optimization and you can see because of the strong customer value proposition that our tech provides, we have a much higher CPM for our optimization business than we do for our measurement business. As a result, the total cart value or the cumulative CPM of our offerings can be as high as 6x our Measurement CPM. Now I know you've seen this slide, both Yannis and Lisa presented it today, but I wanted to bring it up again because it's a very good framework of how to think about what's driven our revenue growth historically and what will continue to drive our revenue going forward. Another point I'd like to make is that we have sticky and deep integrations with our platform partners, the nature of our revenue is reoccurring. And while the economic environment is a factor that influences impressions, we are well diversified across a variety of industries, and we have stability from our fixed CPMs. We have a very strong balance sheet with debt net of cash of $121 million. Our cash balance of $94 million continues to grow, and that is because of our very strong free cash flow conversion from EBITDA. In fact, we generated over $50 million of free cash flow in both 2021 and 2022. That free cash flow will continue to increase our cash balance, so we do plan to continue to pay down debt, but given our strong free cash flow and our low leverage, which is less than 1x 2023 adjusted EBITDA guidance, we can continue to invest in the business and pursue strategic acquisitions. We're pleased today to reiterate our second quarter and full year revenue and EBITDA guidance based on quarters -- trends that we've seen so far in the quarter and our modeling for the rest of the year, our guidance is consistent with what we disclosed at the end of Q1. And of course, we'll update our guidance again when we report second quarter earnings in August. Revenue has grown at 12% -- revenue is expected to grow at 12% in the quarter and 13% on a full year basis. This is using the midpoint of our guidance and adjusted EBITDA, the second quarter is expected to grow at 14% and 18% on a full year basis. And that accelerated growth and EBITDA versus revenue is because of our continued focus on driving productivities and efficiencies that enables us to reinvest in our growth of the business given how large our TAMs are. So this graph represents where IAS stands compared to the Barclays software universe. What we've plotted is the revenue growth on the Y axis and the EBITDA margin on the X axis for the approximately 50 companies in the Barclays software universe, and you can -- and by the way, the axis represent the median for the universe. And you can see that we rank up extremely well with at the midpoint of our guide, 13% revenue growth and 33% EBITDA margin. So we're at 46%, and we are in the what's known as the magic project. To conclude, we have a very attractive and sustainable financial profile, and we will continue to pursue this balance of both revenue growth and profitability. You've heard today about the multiple drivers of growth for our business and how we are very well positioned to continue to benefit from these trends. So going forward, we will focus on maintaining double-digit revenue growth and 30-plus percent EBITDA margins for the foreseeable future. And finally, we expect to continue to generate very strong free cash flow to continue to enhance our already strong balance sheet. So with that, I will turn it over to Lisa and then we'll be back on stage to answer your questions.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#138

Thank you, Tania. All right. So why don't I get some notes, please. So we are in the home stretch. And we're going to go back to the story I opened with this morning, and then we'll get into Q&A with the leadership team. So I'm a builder at heart, as is our stellar IAS leadership team. And remember the story I opened with about the CMO roundtable and it was a few weeks ago, listening intently to CMOs challenges with data that they don't know what to do with their data. You even heard it up on the panel. I'm confident with IAS' solutions in the future, let's say, 3 to 5 years ago, we were sitting in the same roundtable again. Those questions about data challenges would actually shift into data opportunities. We would hear questions from our marketers like how can IAS further leverage generative AI products to drive better outcomes for my brands. Who can I trust in my data journey in an evolving digital landscape. We at IAS, we will unlock massive amounts of data and infuse the power of AI and ML in all of our products in the future. We will help marketers find higher-quality media that drives higher ROI. Science is in the name of our company, and it is our competitive advantage. Customers, and you've heard from our panelists today, they choose IAS for this reason. Our customers, they deeply trust IAS and they trust our ability to navigate this increasingly complex digital landscape with them. We have the tech, the team and the track record to make this happen. And with that, I'd like to thank our entire IAS leadership team today and our panelists for both sharing strategic vision. I hope you're walking away with a better understanding of the progress that we've made today. And then also hearing from our panelists what's top of mind for marketers, for global platform like TikTok and a leading agency like Mindshare. I'd also like to thank all of you for your support of IAS as a public company. We are deeply grateful for your support, and we look forward to continuing this journey with all of you. So with that, I'd like to welcome up the IAS leadership team, and we'll do one more round of Q&A, and then we'll have some drinks. That's a good motivator, right? All right. So chairs aren't coming in. We can just stand and do our Q&A. Here they come. Thank you. All right.

Unknown Executive

executive
#139

They're getting seated. First question from anyone? That's good, coming to you, Mark.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#140

All right. Thank you for the presentations today, very informative. I was hoping you guys could dive into the mid-market just a little bit more in terms of going to market. What kind of needs does that segment need than maybe your larger advertisers do need, like you have to strip down the product a little bit more? And then in terms of retail media as a channel to acquire some of those customers. What else should we be thinking about from that standpoint?

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#141

Sure. Thank you, Mark, for the question. I'm happy to take a high-level crack by market and then Yannis , if you'd like to take it and then I can answer the retail media network question. So mid-market, we see a lot of runway, greenfield with mid-market. We're seeing very good traction, particularly in the U.S. Just want to remind everyone, we define mid-market north of our top 100 accounts. A couple of key areas in terms of accelerating the growth of mid-market. The first is investment in automation, especially with these smaller advertisers who aren't necessarily Fortune 500 brands, they need to have the tools in place so that they can do more self-service in terms of investing in our solutions, driving adoption with our solutions and also being able to educate them at scale in terms of what's available for them within our portfolio. Yannis , would you like to add to that?

Yannis Dosios

executive
#142

I would say that major turn in mid-market, they do have similar needs across that journey that I described around the Measurement and Optimization journey. I would say, areas of optimization could be even more important to drive results and return on ad spend for them. But as Lisa was saying, some of the key areas where we're investing is in the automation of the tools to help themselves, but also to help our teams service those customers in a more scalable way through more effective reporting, for example, and identifying growth opportunities for them. And there's also -- this is a very global opportunity for us. So there's a big opportunity for us to accelerate across both Americas, EMEA and APAC on the mid-market side.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#143

Okay. Great. And then to the second question around Retail Media network. So massive opportunity in the retail media network space. As I mentioned in my talk, we have 9 out of the top 10 Retail Media networks. We have integrations with them. We see it as a two-pronged opportunity within Retail Media. The first is think of the retail media networks as the marketer, so we are double down like signing up the Walmarts of the world as they market their Walmart capabilities that we are the verification provider and then the other side of the coin is making sure that we're integrated within the Retail Media networks so that we are providing our verification solutions as those platforms try -- continue to monetize with advertisers within the network. The third area, and this is more forward-looking when it comes to Retail Media networks is in the data. And I think that -- I mean, you've heard us talk about data for the last 4 hours, but I think that there is opportunity to leverage our differentiated data and marry it up with the retail media networks to help the brands that are selling product on those networks, find higher quality media and drive higher ROI. So stay tuned for more of that data strategy and retail media networks. Great question. Thank you, Mark.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#144

Maybe a question for Tania. As we think about next year, and kind of the dynamics of the ad market. So this year, basically, as the ad markets slowed like CPMs came down, right? And so it basically allowed you, you're outperforming the digital advertising this year because you're less exposed to CPM. As CPM comes back next year, -- like how do you offset that? So is it negotiating kind of the next year's contracts just because in an ad recovery, right, CPM is more of a driver than volume for the broad industry.

Tania Secor

executive
#145

Yes. I mean I would say that we -- with the fixed CPMs that we have across our offerings, we do benefit when we see big spikes in volume like we did in the first quarter, our measurement volume was up 29%. At the same time, especially given all of the different offerings we have across the different markets. We also have a very strong pricing function, and we always look for opportunity to look at where there could be opportunity, especially given the value that our tech provides and the customer value proposition for the customer.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#146

Right. I completely agree with you. And just to add on to what Tania said is as we invest more in differentiated products like total media quality. You saw Craig's demo, the 3x that we're seeing out of that product, highly sophisticated, proving out the value to marketers, we are able to increase the CPM and charge an incremental CPM. That's the first thing. And then the second thing is, as the world continues to shift to video, everyone knows, video, CTV, demand are higher eCPM. And I think that will also balance out any pricing fluctuations in the ecosystem, not with us, we have been able to maintain price.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#147

Can I stay on that subject? If you think about the industry, so the players that offer your servers it's getting consolidated down quite a bit. the service that you offer to your clients is getting more and more sophisticated given all the trends that you've been talking about, how are customer conversations going around price elasticity or like elasticity because you keep adding more and more value to them. And so how are they thinking about the price as part of this whole equation?

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#148

Yes, good question. I wouldn't say that if you think about I mean having Meredith on stage today, GlaxoSmithKline, and she rattled off, how many markets, how many brands and the fact that the CEO is reviewing on a regular basis, brand safety and brand suitability. So in the constantly evolving digital ecosystem, the unpredictable nature of social media and social platforms, protecting brand equity and brand reputation is at an all-time high. And I think Fortune 500 marketers, they're putting tremendous value on that. They know they need to be where the users are and where the users are or in these live feeds of social platforms. So what's interesting about many of the global wins that Yannis highlighted over the last few quarters, and I've talked about this before, price is not the #1 criteria from these marketers, it is not. It is the accuracy of our product -- our product capabilities, how much we are innovating in our product and tech, the differentiation of our road map, and I have to say our differentiation with CTV in public. Yes, go ahead.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#149

This is [indiscernible] with [ Truist ] Securities. So 2 questions, really more of a follow-up to the pricing question, not to be the dead overs but , your immediate peer in the last 12 months has raised prices. I was wondering how do you guys compare on that basis? When was the last time you guys have actually increased your prices? And how do you just think generally about the value you create for the advertiser relative to the value extract? And then somewhat related to that, as I look at your guide for Q2 for the rest of the year, I was wondering if there -- is there anything structural that would explain the growth disparity between you guys and the immediate peer at least for this year.

Tania Secor

executive
#150

Do you want me to take the first question, you take the second. Yes, I'll do pricing.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#151

Okay. Good. So a little teaming up here. So on the pricing front, so we're a culture of test and learn, we're culture of test and learn, measure and learn. So a good example, I know I keep referring to these demos, but we are proving out the value of differentiated products that we're launching, Total Media quality, perfect example, TikTok, YouTube, [indiscernible], right? And by able to quantify and measure the value that we're providing to marketers, it could be we are providing higher-quality media. This is how we're proving it out. We are helping you drive greater efficiency, reduce media wastage, drive higher ROI. With that, we are able to also justify if we're increasing the price because of backing it up with data. So we feel really bullish about our product and tech road map, and we are demonstrating both with the stickiness of our customer base and how loyal they are and the fact that we've been able to hold price and maintain price and be able to increase price for these differentiated products.

Tania Secor

executive
#152

In terms of your second question, we were really pleased in the first quarter, as many of you know, with our overall performance and exceeding our guidance. It was driven by various things, including very strong spending, particularly on seasonal campaigns. In the second quarter, we're reiterating the guidance that we gave in the first quarter is consistent with the trends we're seeing the quarter, and we're pleased to reiterate that guidance. And on a full year basis, we are -- we have some visibility because of our fixed CPMs as I talked about, our revenue base is very stable across a variety of industries. And in terms of our full year guidance, As you could see the revenue growth per our guidance, you see even stronger growth of our EBITDA because of some of the investments that we're making offset by productivity.

Andrew Marok

analyst
#153

Andrew Marok from Raymond James. As your products and your coming products get more sophisticated, how is the sophistication of the clients keeping pace? I guess, how does that play into the go-to-market strategy in terms of education versus inspiration, sales cycles for new products and pace of uptake, revenue impact, et cetera.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#154

Yannis , do you want to answer that and then I can add on.

Yannis Dosios

executive
#155

I can start, and then Lisa can add on and also quorum , you're welcome to do the same thing. You're right. Our customer sophistication is actually increasing with the market because the complexity of the industry is growing. One of the things that we're seeing is there's a lot of education, increasing amount of education that we're doing for our customers and with our customers across both brands, advertisers and agencies. So that's an area that we're investing more heavily in at all the levels, of the C level of the direct reports and at the teams with hands on keyboard, if you will, and also at all levels at the agency side. So there's a lot of education that we're driving. The other thing that we're doing that is really impactful is we have this -- we call it Insights as a service team, so we have a team within the marketing organization within a quorum's team that provides very detailed analysis and insights to our customers, effectively almost being part of the marketing team that's helping them understand how to interpret the data from IAS and what does that mean with regards to Context Control, which segments, for example, they need to avoid or target? How they should think about attention? How they should think about Measurement on CTV and Optimization on CTV, so we're finding that through that service that we'll provide to customers, we're both increasing their level of education, and we're also making it a lot easier for them to navigate the complex landscape that we're in.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#156

And the one thing I'd add to what Yannis said, on the panel, George was talking about measurement is a team sport. What we're finding with an effective go-to-market strategy is if we're partnering with a platform like a TikTok or like a Netflix, make sure that we're arming that platform sales team that we're educating them that we're arming them with talking points about IAS' capabilities about why launching this product on that social platform and drives value for the marketers. It's almost this flywheel effect that can scale the go-to-market and accelerate it. Yes.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#157

Just with respect to pricing, what is the trajectory for fixed optimization average CPMs over the next 12 months? And I guess, more simply, how should we be thinking about mid-market growth impacting average CPMs?

Tania Secor

executive
#158

Your question is around what do you mean by fixed optimization?

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#159

So the optimization piece for CPMs, just thinking about how mid-market growth could perhaps impact that?

Tania Secor

executive
#160

How would market growth impact that. So on the optimization front, we don't have -- our rate card does not have a different CPM for large clients versus mid-market clients. So based on our rate card, there should be no benefit or no degradation because of that and what was your -- could you repeat your second question on pricing?

Jonathan Schaffer

executive
#161

Let's just take a couple more here, and then we'll close out for the day.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#162

Okay. So CTV I've suddenly realized I'm confused when I reviewed my note on publica. You're charging a fixed rate. So [indiscernible] does that about 32% and it competes with Good-Loop . then on the other side, you have spring serve charging 2% and they are free wheel also charging 2%. So I would have guessed you guys have so many capabilities of Publica. They're actually competing with the CTV of free wheel and spring serve, but then I want to know why you're charging a flat fee like the infrastructure guys like [indiscernible] , please, like what do I have wrong here that doesn't fit? How do you compete with publica?

Unknown Executive

executive
#163

Well, so I mean, if you look at Publica, right, I mean the competition from a first-party ad server is, of course, free wheel and it's can, right? When you look at the entire ecosystem, there's that first piece, which is the ad serving. Right? That's one piece. The second piece is what we talked about, if we can get the context of the content, right? What is happening in that 2 minutes before the ad comes in. And then on the other side, it's about the transparency. So on the public end, it's like a fixed fee. We talked about that before, right? And on the other side, it's basically measurement and transparency exactly what we do today with over other...

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#164

If you compete with Spring serve and free wheel, it's just you're charging a lot less to do. Is that what your answer is?

Unknown Executive

executive
#165

Well, so I know for a fact that we actually do more than free wheel and again because all we're doing is ad serving. We're doing ad serving, right, plus prepackaging the content for quality, also getting most demand to the auction and then bringing transparency to the buyer, right? So there's a lot more than just ad serving going on here.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#166

Yes. And [indiscernible], we brought up.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#167

I understand why you're undercharging for these awesome services. Please explain.

Unknown Executive

executive
#168

Yes, sure. So we create a lot of value for the CPM fee that we charge, but we also don't want to be, I mentioned earlier, we've connected with over 50 of the top global SSPs. We don't want to compete with them. We don't want to charge a percentage of media. We are a tech service, and we do it really well, and we want to stay in that lane.

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#169

Fantastic. And then, Tom, I had one for you. You said you're going to do -- one of the things on your slide was you want to do more of this. Okay, Tom. So the question is, a lot of slides that we do everything at scale. You give up and you said everything at scale. That's why I came here. The spoke sounds like the opposite of scale, right? The spoke means you're going to do custom. So is that a shift in strategy away from scaling?

Thomas Joseph

executive
#170

No, I mean it's basically doing custom insights, right, analyzing that data and doing it at scale. But hey, you know what, a CPG brand versus another brand, right? They're the customizations we give them, right, are different because, hey, one is about brand awareness, another campaign could be about conversion. So again, it's at scale, but bespoke in the sense like what is the customer's campaign goals.

Jonathan Schaffer

executive
#171

So I think the best way to look at it is us a tech solution is uniform across all. We don't differentiate that way. But the data that feeds into the tech gives us insights that are very unique for one customer versus the other. So what's the conversion of a Ford is not a conversion for Nestle. That allows us to build a hyperpersonalized solution, which is very bespoke to that brand. But a tech is still driving through the same data. So we scale our way, but we are allowed to provide these customer solutions because of the way we build the solution.

Unknown Executive

executive
#172

We're going to take 2 more questions Jason and then Fitz.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#173

Thank you. Yannis, you gave the Sanofi example earlier. So curious, just what is the magnitude of the opportunity there as you add additional services to customers? Or maybe if you look at your existing customer base today, what is the penetration rate relative to the opportunity?

Unknown Executive

executive
#174

Great question. Glad you asked. The opportunity is major, and you can see throughout the entire journey that I'll walk you through on that slide. And I think you can also see a dimension of that through the CPM slides that Tania mentioned. So as I start on the left, you started with Measurement, right? Measurement has a certain amount of CPM. You can scale that across all the different platforms, all the Measurement solutions. So that's one area of growth there. As you move over to the right to get into Optimization, then you get into a significant amount of, first of all, higher value to the customer or savings more incremental revenue, and it comes also to higher CPM and that opens up an entirely new set of volume for those campaigns, so there's both a volume growth and the CPM growth there. And then you have the opportunity to expand into additional channels. So as we add capabilities, for example, on audio or gaming or on retail, you start with the same customer, augmenting the revenue that gets generated. So I don't have a specific number to give you, but all I can say is that when I mentioned that flywheel effect, there is very significant growth opportunity for each customer that we get full penetration of and the more we get of our services to be used by our customers, the more data we get and the more effective our solutions are for the customers.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#175

I wanted to -- my question maybe relates to Andrew's question on that vision for conversion longer term, what do you think you need to do to realize that vision? You mentioned consumers, your customers are getting more sophisticated. Do you need to integrate deeper with their CDPs, their CRMs, their retail systems or, to your point, is it coming both ways. They're getting more sophisticated. We're getting more deeper and it's a team sport. And then a follow-on to that is how do you then productize that vision? How do you integrate more deeply with your DSP partners with their AI solutions?

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#176

Yes. I'll take a crack at it, and then Tom or T.J. feel free to add. So with the data vision, so we have -- we talked about our massive amounts of differentiated data. I think it will require a few things, partnering with other third-party data providers who have data that is additive to our own. I won't name names that's the first. The second is layering up our data with marketers data. It could be a push out. It could be an ingest, a little bit of both and then also getting back to what are the marketers' goals. So for example, we have marketers who have very rich audience targeting data. You heard Meredith's examples today, layering on our verification data on top of a marketer's audience data to help them find higher ROI is incredibly powerful. Tom or T.J., do you want to add.

Thomas Joseph

executive
#177

Yes. I think we're seeing that there's a lot of the cohesion like both sides where we're integrating in terms of like first party data on the buy side. And of course, that makes us a lot more intelligent. And we see the buyers are more comfortable with us is we're like a third party, right? I mean they're not sharing their data with someone that it kind of is going to become there on like custom, so yes, we do see that happening a lot.

Lisa Utzschneider

executive
#178

Okay, great. Thank you.

Jonathan Schaffer

executive
#179

Thank you all for joining us, both in person and virtually. That concludes the program.

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