Integral Ad Science Holding Corp. (NASDAQ:IAS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Justin Patterson: Great. Thanks very much. Two, if I can. First, I just wanted to go back to kind of the demand environment for brand safety products. I realize that you can’t completely correlate it with geopolitical risk. But if I step back, it does seem like there’s a lot more scrutiny on user-generated content. You certainly have a lot more channel exposure there across short-form video these days. So curious just how you’re thinking about the demand for products like context control and the rest as we head through Q4 and into 2024, which will also likely have a pretty heated political cycle. And then also stepping back, you now have several large marketplace clients in there like Uber and Instacart. Curious just what your initial learnings are, at least more so on the Uber side in there, and how you think that can be more of a contributor over the next few years. Thank you.

Lisa Utzschneider: Okay. Justin, happy to take both. The first is around the increasing demand that we’re seeing from advertisers for our brand safety and suitability solutions. And a big reason why we’re seeing this uptick in demand, and we’re seeing the increase in our measurement revenue in third quarter, is because brands want to be where the users are. And the users are spending more and more time of their time in social platforms. Even when you think about the 2 major platforms and their earnings from last week, Meta. Meta Reels, Meta on their earnings call cited that Reels has driven more than 40% increase in time spent on Instagram since launch. And Google, their YouTube Shorts now average over 70 billion daily views and are watched by over 2 billion signed in users every month.

And exactly to your point, Justin, that these social platforms, it’s user-generated content, highly dynamic, highly unpredictable. So brands, they want to connect with consumers while they’re on the social platforms. They just want to rest assured that their brands run adjacent to brand safe and brand suitable content. And our AI-backed TMQ products, the brands, they’re leaning in, and that’s why we’re seeing such a strong both impression growth and adoption of the product, which is great to see. And then in terms of your second question was related to Retail Media Networks, is that right?

Justin Patterson: Yes, that’s right.

Lisa Utzschneider: And the Ubers of the world, yes. With Retail Media, that’s another marketplace that’s just growing and accelerated growth. And when we take a look at retail media networks, we’re also seeing significant growth in that channel. Year-to-date, our revenue from retail media networks, it’s grown nearly 150%, and we were thrilled. I know last quarter we announced our partnership with Uber. This quarter, we launched a partnership with Instacart, where we’re bringing a new level of transparency to Instacart Ads and offering viewability and invalid traffic. And then the other partner I should call out is Criteo. We announced in third quarter our first-to-market partnership with Criteo’s Commerce Media Platform where we are on Criteo enabling brands and agencies to measure viewability and invalid traffic on retailers’ sites across Criteo’s network of 210 retail partners.

So we’ll continue to invest in the retail media space. We’re thrilled with the partnerships that we’ve launched, and also, the partnerships that we’re strengthening. And again, it’s been a tailwind for our business.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Jason Kreyer of Craig-Hallum. Your line is open.

Cal Bartyzal: Thank you. This is Cal Bartyzal on for Jason. First one from me, it sounds like you guys are having a lot of success in your go-to-market strategy. I know that was a big point of emphasis at the Investor Day. Just curious, anything you would highlight there? Maybe any efficiencies you’ve seen as AI becomes a broader part of your strategy and go-to-market priorities as we go towards 2024?

Lisa Utzschneider: Yes. Great question. Thanks, Cal. With the go-to-market strategy in AI, I mean AI and ML is core to everything that we do at IAS. It fuels our differentiated technology. One new example I can share is related to our TMQ product, and especially with this accelerated option that we’re seeing across the social platforms with TMQ. This is hot off the press scale, but we currently classify 40 years of video content across all the media platforms, social media platforms every day. IAS, we evaluate every pixel and every second for true in-content classification in more than 90 languages across all the major social platforms. And again, this is because of our highly sophisticated TMQ product backed by ML, AI, and we’re very proud of the products’ capability. It’s getting smarter over time and the rapid adoption rate that we’re seeing, and we’re really looking forward in particular to launching our beta with Meta later in the fourth quarter with TMQ.

Cal Bartyzal: Awesome, thank you. Just last one for me real quick, just want to circle back to some of the stuff with the TV OEMs. Pleased to see the Samsung expansion and now you guys are integrating with Vizio. So maybe as you guys kind of build out these OEM relationships, I mean how much do you see this public differentiator growing and being able to be applied to generate wins across other segments of the business? Thank you.

Lisa Utzschneider: Yes. Great question. When we take a look at CTV, there’s a lot of runway. With CTV, it’s cited as a $25 billion market in 2023. We’ve consistently said that CTV is a long game and we are building a robust pipeline with the OEM providers. This quarter we announced our partnership with Vizio as well as last quarter announcing that we renewed our exclusive partnership with Samsung. And these larger OEM deals, they typically do have a larger, a longer sales cycle. But our team, they’re heads-down focused on closing these deals, integrating the deals, and continuing to launch innovative products. So the way to think about it is big $25 billion marketplace, but long runway, longer sales cycle, especially with the OEMs, but lots of upside.