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spk03: Greetings. Welcome to Double Verify's first quarter 2022 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. In question and answer session, we'll follow the formal presentation. If anyone today should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. At this time, I'll now turn the conference over to Tejal Engman with Investor Relations. Tejal, you may now begin.
spk01: Good afternoon and welcome to Double Verify's first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. With us today are Mark Zagorski, CEO, and Nicola Elias, CFO. Today's press release and this call may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to inherent risks, uncertainties, and changes, and reflect our current expectations and information currently available to us, and our actual results could differ materially. For more information, please refer to the risk factors in our recent SEC filings, including our Form 10Q and the annual report of Form 10K. In addition, our discussion today will include references to certain supplemental non-GAAP financial measures and should be considered in addition to, and not as a substitute for, our GAAP results. Reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures are available in today's earnings press release, which is available on our Investor Relations website at ir.doubleverify.com. Also during the call today, we'll be referring to the slide deck posted on our website. With that, I'll turn it over to Mark.
spk09: Thanks, Bejel, and thank you all for joining us today. I'm excited to discuss our strong first quarter performance and optimistic outlook on the year ahead. But before I do, let me reiterate our support for all of those affected by the heartbreaking conflict in the Ukraine. We continue to support humanitarian relief efforts in Ukraine and have voluntarily discontinued services with Russia-based clients. With information wars raging across the World Wide Web, we remain deeply committed to promoting truth and transparency and defunding misinformation as we work toward making digital advertising stronger, safer, and more secure. Now, turning to our results, we had a strong start to 2022 with an outstanding first quarter. Building on the solid organic growth we achieved in the full year 2021, we delivered nearly $97 million of revenue in Q1 2022, representing 43% year-over-year growth and the biggest first quarter in the history of the company. What's even more exciting is that our revenue growth was broadly distributed, driven by strong product upsell and geographic expansion momentum from existing clients, as well as product activations by new clients. The resulting stronger-than-expected volume growth was the foundation for the outperformance relative to our revenue guidance. Activation revenue substantially outperformed our expectations, driven by the continued adoption of authentic brand suitability, with large advertisers such as Mondelez growing their use of this industry-leading product in an expanding number of international markets. Other programmatic solutions outside of brand safety and suitability also delivered strong revenue growth due to new advertisers activating and ramping DV solutions on their programmatic media buys. Profitability remained solid with nearly $25 million of adjusted EBITDA generated in the first quarter. We delivered 26% adjusted EBITDA margins even as we continue to meaningfully invest in expanding our solutions, growing our workforce and operational footprint and integrating two new businesses. In addition, DV continues to achieve positive net income and net income margins, a testament to the attractive economics of our high growth and high margin software solutions. Our business has demonstrated strong and sustained revenue growth momentum year to date. March delivered the highest year-over-year growth rate within the first quarter, and the second quarter is off to a good start. We have raised our internal expectations for second quarter performance which gives us the confidence to raise full year revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance beyond the first quarter beat. I'd like to highlight that DV continues to demonstrate sustained business performance in an environment of macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty. While our business isn't immune to the marketplace challenges that our clients operate in, there are numerous factors that set DV apart from our peers. Our fixed transaction fee business model insulates our revenue from CPM volatility that those in the media sales business face. Our products serve to protect brand equity and reduce media waste, making them essential to advertisers. Our Verify Everywhere product strategy diversifies our revenue across platforms, making DV largely agnostic to shifts in ad spend. And finally, we remain in the early stages of global market penetration, and have a vast, untapped TAM to sustain our long-term growth, as exemplified by the fact that nearly 70% of our Q1 wins were greenfields. Now I'd like to take a few minutes to discuss our revenue growth within the context of our three key differentiators, our rapidly growing market-leading scale, our focus on innovation, and the deep level of trust that we've built with our customers as an unbiased, independent partner. Beginning with scale, we're leveraging our extensive DSP coverage and wide-ranging programmatic solutions to drive further scale in our activation business. 75% of our first quarter advertiser revenue growth was driven by activation, which had 56% higher revenue year over year. Activation revenue now represents 61% of our advertiser revenue. Advertiser revenue growth continues to be volume-led and our first quarter out performance was driven by stronger than expected organic ad impression volumes generated across our diversified client base. We also drove incremental revenue growth through both the growth in premium product adoption and the implementation of enhanced pricing tiers across our programmatic integration. These tiers allow us to bifurcate our pricing for display and video impressions on DSPs ensuring that each tier is priced competitively. The tiered structure has resulted in higher fixed fees for video impressions, whose pricing is now in line with that of our competitors. In the long term, we believe there may be further opportunity to raise prices on higher CPM media, such as CTV. The enhanced pricing and more premium product mix in the quarter supported growth in our overall MTF, or media transaction fees, and in combination with stronger advertiser volumes, delivered an exceptional start to the year. Success in activation and measurement go hand in hand, as our measurement data fuels a virtuous cycle in which post-campaign insights inform continuous optimization opportunities that can be acted upon in pre-bid applications. When we engage a client, we immediately introduce them to the performance opportunities embedded in this process, expanding our relationship with them across new geographies and new solutions that feed the cycle. Advertisers are enthusiastically embracing the power of this combination. So far this year, we signed new logos including Best Buy, Subway, KFC, Norwegian Cruise Lines, Travelers, and OPPO, further fueling an average RFP win rate of nearly 80% since the first quarter of 2021. We also expanded across multiple additional geographies with Meta and Mondelez as we capitalized on the vast, untapped TAM for our solutions all around the world. In addition, we continue to lean into our Verify Everywhere strategy by developing an exciting new growth opportunity within our retail client base, the emerging category of retail networks for which we are building a unique competency and differentiated leadership positions. Retail media networks leverage the footprint and relationships of some of the world's biggest retailers to create entirely new advertising opportunities for leading manufacturers and affiliates and net new ad dollars for the industry. Bain estimates that advertisers spend on retail media to grow to $25 billion by 2023. And just as our solutions drive a return on investment for the retailer on its own brand advertising spend, Our platform capabilities drive a yield on retail media networks by pre-qualifying supply and ensuring a high-quality advertising environment that sustains optimal ad pricing. Today, DoubleVerify is the independent measurement partner for some of the largest retail media networks in the world, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, Macy's, and Kroger. These partnerships are expected to grow impression volumes and revenues, as well as expand the use of DV's solutions for an entirely new sector of affiliated advertisers that includes small and mid-sized businesses that we traditionally have not had access to. And today, we are announcing that DV has closed an enterprise deal with Best Buy, who will rely on DV's suite of measurement and performance solutions for its ad campaigns. In addition, DV will provide its services to Best Buy Ads, Best Buy's in-house media company. Turning to our second key differentiator, DV's market-leading innovation, our leading edge solutions continue to drive our growth momentum. Fully on-screen pre-bid targeting, our activation attention metric specific to CTV, continues to gain traction while our CTV measurement products have delivered 55% impression volume growth year over year. As highlighted last quarter, over 25% of our tag-based advertiser video impressions are now CTV, which over-indexes DV relative to CTV's share of the overall market. Although it's early days, we continue to see momentum for attention as an important metric in ad buying. A study released last week noted that over 50% of media buyers agree that their organizations will invest in media attention metrics within the next 12 months. Well, approximately 65% agree that attention will become a currency within three years. There is clearly a market appetite for alternative currencies that power performance on premium media, and DV is well positioned to take advantage of this trend. This summer, we'll be leveraging our pinnacle platform, which currently connects DV data to thousands of the world's top brands, to launch a free preview of authentic attention, delivering these unique, powerful analytics directly to DV's highly scaled customer base. Year-to-date, we've measured over 225 billion authentic ads, all of which have been benchmarked for attention, enabling our clients to contextualize their performance against specific industries, buying channels, regions, and markets, and to uncover performance drivers in the context of their specific industry vertical. We continue to believe that attention will be the next currency that advertisers rely on to drive outcomes and are excited to be the only leading verification company to have built and launched a comprehensive attention solution. Moving on to innovation and social, DD continues to have the most comprehensive and accredited suite of social solutions in the industry. On Meta, We are the only provider of both pre-screen brand safety and suitability protection and measurement for Facebook in-stream, instant articles, and Facebook audience network. On YouTube, we recently announced that we are the first and only company to have earned accreditation by the Media Ratings Council for its independent third-party calculation and reporting of YouTube video viewability for desktop and mobile. We remain excited about the opportunity to innovate new products on high-growth social platforms like TikTok and to extend our industry-leading brand safety and suitability verification solutions to Meta's feed, which remains one of the largest generators of ad impressions across social media. BV, along with OpenSlate, is proud to represent two of Meta's four badged business partners And we look forward to the opportunity to work with Meta on brand safety and suitability coverage on the feed following the alpha phase of their process. Let me wrap on innovation with authentic brand suitability, one of industry's most innovative media quality solutions, and an incredible growth driver for our business. ABS revenue grew 52% year over year, driven by impression volume growth with current clients, continued upsell momentum, and international adoptions. Nearly 100 more clients used ABS in the first quarter of 2022 compared with the prior year period. ABS's performance superiority in reducing media waste while safeguarding brand reputation in programmatic applications is rapidly evolving ABS into not only an upsell opportunity for DV, but to a competitive conquesting tool as well. Our final differentiator is trust. which underpins our relationships with advertiser and platform partners and is core to the value we deliver to the digital advertising ecosystem. We continue to be the only leading independent verification company that is not in the conflicted business of selling digital ads. We strongly believe that as a trusted, objective verification and measurement partner to advertisers, you can't be part of the media transactions. We expect independence to remain a key differentiator across all channels, and particularly in CTV, where unconflicted, accredited metrics are becoming more valuable. We are well positioned to capture the accelerating shift of linear TV ad budgets, especially with large new streaming companies such as Netflix potentially adopting ad-driven models. To conclude, we've had a strong start to the year and expect the strength to carry through to the second quarter. Consequently, we've raised our full year outlook and anticipate sustained business performance that outperforms digital advertising growth. Our business remains resilient. And as we lean into our three key differentiators, scale, innovation, and trust, we are excited about the opportunities that lie ahead for DV. With that, let me turn the call over to Nicola.
spk13: Thanks, Mark. And good afternoon, everyone. We are pleased to have delivered strong revenue growth and profitability in the first quarter. And while we continue to monitor and discuss with our clients this uncertain macroeconomic and geopolitical environment, our year-to-date business momentum and current visibility are enabling us to increase a full year 2022 outlook. Total revenue growth of 43% was primarily driven by activation revenue growth of 56%. Activation revenue was led by our premium price authentic brand suitability product with revenue growth of 52% and by a greater number of clients activating our other programmatic solutions. Our social activation solutions through OpenSlate performed in line with expectations. Finally, the programmatic display and video price bifurcation, which was implemented one quarter ahead of our initial plan, also contributed to first quarter activation revenue growth. Turning to measurement, revenue grew 23%, primarily driven by the ramping of new enterprise customers that were signed and highlighted last year, including Diageo, Grupo Bimbo, and Philip Morris. CTV and social measurement volumes grew 55% and 22% respectively. CTV volumes continue to grow due to the launch of our industry-leading products. With regards to social, DV's measurement volume growth was particularly strong in the first quarter of 2021, driven by two of the world's largest CPG advertisers activating and expanding their geographic usage of our social solution. Our long-term growth opportunities in social remain significant, with new avenues for product expansion and coverage on platforms such as TikTok, Meta, and others. International remained a solid contributor to revenue growth and grew 40% in the first quarter, now representing 27% of measurement revenue. As Mark mentioned, advertiser revenue growth continues to be volume-led. In Q1 2022, MTMs were up 27% year-over-year. MTFs grew 7% year-over-year, driven by improved premium product mix and by the impact of the programmatic display and video price bifurcation. Moreover, advertiser revenue continues to benefit from our industry diversification. In the first quarter, revenue from our top 100 clients grew across all sectors, with outside growth from industries benefiting from a return to pre-pandemic levels, including travel, restaurants, and media and entertainment. Supply-side revenue grew 61%, driven by the ramping of new platform clients that were signed last year, such as Yahoo Japan and Amazon, as well as new wins and expansion deals with publishers. Year-over-year growth also includes the impact of publisher and platform revenue from OpenSlate and from Metrix. Overall, the acquisition of OpenSlate is performing in line with expectations of generating between $15 and $18 million in revenue this year, with the seasonality similar to our overall business. Shifting to expenses, costs of revenue increased by $6.7 million, primarily due to an increase in costs from revenue sharing arrangements with programmatic partners, as activation revenue grew as a percentage of total revenue. In addition, the first quarter of 2022 captures a full quarter of higher cloud services costs. The increase in product development, sales and marketing, and G&A expenses is primarily due to higher people-related costs, as we added 160 employees year over year in the first quarter. G&A also includes a $1 million increase in bad debt reserves related to our advertising revenue exposure to Russia. Adjusted EBITDA of $24.7 million exceeded the top end of Q1 guidance. Q1 adjusted EBITDA margins of 26% was higher than anticipated due to higher revenues, as well as a faster reduction in duplicative overhead expenses related to the open-flate acquisition. Net operating cash flow was negative $2.2 million, primarily driven by normal course of business timing factors related to cash collections, as strong revenue growth led to an increase in trade receivables of $11 million, and cash related to employee payroll liabilities that was collected in Q4 21 and paid in Q1 22. We continue to have zero debt outstanding. We ended the quarter with $212 million in cash on hand and have a $150 million unused revolving credit facility. The strength of the balance sheet is an advantage for DV in a rising interest rate environment and provides the opportunity to accelerate long-term growth through strategic investments, including M&A, that will advance our product and technology roadmap, open up adjacencies such as gaming and audio, and continue to expand our global footprint. Now turning to guidance. We expect second quarter revenue in the range of $101 to $103 million, which implies year-over-year growth of 33% at the midpoint. We expect second quarter adjusted EBITDA in the range of $27 to $29 million, which implies a year-over-year increase of 32% and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 27% at the midpoint. For the second quarter, we expect stock-based compensation to range between $9 and $10 million, and weighted average diluted shares outstanding to range between 170 and 172 million shares. For full-year 2022 guidance, we expect revenue in the range of $439 to $445 million, which implies a year-over-year growth of 33% at the midpoint. We expect adjusted EBITDA in the range of $131 to $137 million, which implies a year-over-year increase of 22% and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 30% at the midpoint. We have raised our full-year revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance due to stronger-than-expected performance in the first quarter, which continues in the second quarter to date. Quarterly share of full year revenue is expected to reflect normal seasonality with second and third quarter revenue representing approximately 23 and 24% of full year revenue respectively. We expect full year margins to remain unchanged at 30% as we are accelerating investments in hiring engineering and sales talent, enhancing machine learning capabilities, and further building out the IT infrastructure to support our growth. On a sequential basis, we expect adjusted EBITDA margins to remain stable in the second and third quarters, and to return to more normalized levels in the fourth quarter, which typically contributes the largest share of full-year revenue. As previously disclosed, we expect capital expenditure to range between 25 to $35 million in 2022. including investments in office space around the world as we return to office, with a significantly larger employee base, which grew from 500 employees two years ago to over 800 employees today. We're consolidating our footprint in New York into a single global headquarters and are taking advantage of the opportunity to build a new approach to a collaborative hybrid environment. Our investments in people will enable DV to attract and retain the best talent anywhere in the world. Based on the timing of spending on office renovations and relocations, we expect to incur most of our full-year capital expenditures by the end of the third quarter. To close, we delivered a strong first quarter and are ahead of our initial full-year 2022 plan. We continue to monitor the impact of the macroeconomic and geopolitical environment on our clients at budget and to engage them in regular dialogue as we successfully execute our plan for the rest of the year. And with that, we will open the line for questions. Operator, please go ahead.
spk03: Thank you. We'll now be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question today, please press star 1 from your telephone keypad and the confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants who are using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Once again, that's star 1. Thank you. Thank you. Our first question is from the line of Argun Bhatia with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.
spk12: Perfect. Thank you so much, and congrats on a great Q&A, guys. It seems like the business is going well. The first thing I wanted to touch on was the pricing bifurcation. I thought that was a really interesting announcement. Mark, I'd be curious to hear if that's across all solutions, both on the premium side and the standard solutions, and then How do you think about rolling that out to other channels? I know you mentioned CTV. Right now, it seems like it's display and video. But what about social? Is that another area where you could potentially introduce another pricing lever in the model here, given the ROI of the solution?
spk09: Great. Thanks for the question, Arjun. And when we look at, just to be To be clear, when we look at the growth in our MTF or our overall fees that over-delivered in the quarter, a vast majority of that came from our product mix. We had a small uptake from the increase in prices, as you know, or the bifurcation of price. But we also have to note that we had a much stronger positive momentum around our premium product mix on the premium side. But specifically to the bifurcation, It currently is across two categories, display and video, and across our entire solution set, more or less, on the activation side. So it gives us the ability to align pricing on those two types of components across activation in our key platform partners. So it's It's relatively broad-based and, again, gives us some flexibility when it comes to different types of categorization of buyers. The question regarding further segmentation down the road, I think this does kind of exhibit an opportunity for us when we think the scale is there and the opportunity is there for us to create even further kind of bifurcation or it would be trifurcation at that point of pricing into specific media types down the road. So right now it's display video. We could see a point in the future where we would want to go display video and then potentially see TV. And I think that we are treading lightly here because we know that we want to continue to focus on volume as our key revenue driver. But as we've always said, where we think there's opportunities to become to become more market parity or take opportunities where we think there are pricing, you know, there's pricing flexibility, we're going to do so.
spk12: Very helpful. Thank you, Mark. And then one more, just on the broader macro environment, I know, you know, there's a lot of uncertainties out there with inflation and I was wondering if you could maybe put a finer point on the model and how that might play out if advertising spend does come under pressure. Is it a scenario where, given your transactional revenue model, where CPMs may go lower, which may drive transaction volume actually higher, how do you anticipate that this could play out for Double Verify?
spk09: Yeah, another good one and something we're monitoring very closely. When we look back to the pandemic and Q2 of 2020 as the best reference point for looking at supply-demand imbalances, in that case, we saw CPMs collapse, yet we saw volumes remain steady or increase. And because of our model, that allowed us to continue to grow at a time in which most of the macro market in advertising was shrinking by 10 to 20%, and we were growing at 20%, kind of showing a pretty big delta there between a 20% decrease and our 20% growth during that period. So I think, you know, A, when we look at that, it's a good representation of, you know, a volume-driven business versus a CPM or take rate-driven business, which is what we are. We've also noted in the script, you know, beyond the actual nature of the model itself, There's a couple other key aspects that keep us from being as pummeled by those headwinds as a lot of other companies. So, you know, the essential nature of our product, particularly around protecting brand safety and suitability, when we see things like elections coming up, continued conflicts around the world, those just make our solution that much more important to the folks that are leveraging it, as well as the fact that Even in the cases of individual advertiser volume being depressed or revenue being depressed, ad spend being depressed, you still have a significant amount of greenfield opportunities that we're chasing. And when you look at the deals that we closed, even in the first quarter, almost 70% of them were new customers. We're not relying on a basket of customers that we've already fully penetrated a market to drive spend. We've got lots of new customers to close to. So we look at the combination of all those things, not making our business entirely immune to macro challenges, but really having a strong position in the face of a lot of those issues that some other ad-based companies are facing.
spk12: Perfect. Very helpful. Thank you, Mark. Absolutely.
spk03: Our next question comes from the line of Yusuf Scully with Truist Securities. Please receive your questions.
spk02: Great. Thank you very much. Two questions for me. One, just stepping back to where we were 90 days ago when you guys gave guidance for Q1, can you maybe just double-click on one or two, and I think you covered a little bit of this in your prepared remarks, but maybe just flesh out the one or two areas or products specifically that contributed to the biggest upside, to the biggest surprise to you. And then on timing for the meta relationship with regards to the news feed, I was wondering if there was any update there. And lastly, last quarter you had talked about maybe rolling out on Twitter and the Reddit platforms. Maybe you can just provide an update on that as well. Thanks.
spk09: Yep. Sure. Thanks, Yusef. So, you know, the Q1, I think we mentioned that there's a couple of key drivers. The first is, you know, we've been really impressed with our sales team and I have to give them a ton of credit on their ability to cross-sell and out-sell our solutions even more quickly and better than we expected. We talked a bit I think when we did our investor day about the reorganization that we put together over the last several quarters of our sales team and how that would focus on bringing together people who are selling measurement and people who are selling our activation or programmatic solutions into one unit. We did that late last year, rolling into early this year, and we saw the benefits of it almost immediately. So in Q1, If you saw a lot of our growth came from activation that over-delivered, that was the product of really strong cross-selling and the ability for us to sell measurement and activation to new clients. And as we noted, we had 100 new clients, almost 100 new clients on ABS in Q1 of 2022 versus Q1 of 2021. So big jump there in our ability to upsell new solutions. And then the other part of it is the new solutions that were upselling were premium, right? So our product mix increased, which gave us a stronger MTF profile than we'd originally planned for. So I want to give credit where credit is due is our commercial team's ability to actually lean into the cross-sell upsell opportunities and then push more premium price products. Although we certainly benefited from increased volume, a lot of that volume came from new users of our solutions this quarter. And I think that wasn't a passive growth. It was an active growth. So I would look at those as being real drivers. Second and third questions on timing for meta. No real update there. I mean, they made their public announcement a few months ago. They are working on the alpha. with the, you know, the badged partners of which we mentioned we are two of Meta's, you know, official badged partners in this space. The work to be done with us, you know, sometime later this year, I think, is the framework they've given. They have not changed that position. And then finally, on Twitter slash Reddit, Twitter is ready to roll out this summer. I think, you know, probably... We'll be able to announce that sometime soon, and Reddit is still a work in progress.
spk02: Okay, that's awesome. Thanks, Mark, and congrats.
spk00: All right, thanks, Yusuf.
spk03: Our next question is coming from the line of Andrew Boone with JMP Securities. Please proceed with your questions.
spk07: Good afternoon, and thanks for taking my questions. Two, please. The first is, Mark, you've now mentioned this a couple times in your responses, is just the really strong new client ads that you guys experienced in the quarter. Can you just double-click on that in terms of sales execution, or is that just more resonance in the product, just given kind of the overall environment? Help us understand what's driving the new ads. And then secondly, can you talk about the expectations that you have kind of following the rollout of Authentic Attention? as we think beyond these initial tests, right? Lay out kind of what you think this could be in terms of an addition to the overall suite for DV. Thanks so much.
spk09: For sure, for sure. So on the new client ads, we've been really impressed, again, on how the team has focused on this virtuous cycle or this synergistic relationship between our post-campaign measurement solutions and our pre-campaign activation solutions. And I think the power of those is exhibited in ABS. ABS is unlike any other solution out there. It's unique in how it leverages our measurement data to create a higher performance and optimized by-side programmatic application. And I think it's just clicking. I mean, there's no other way to put it other than advertisers are buying into that combination of understanding what happens after an impression is purchased, using that data to fuel their targeting and filtering solutions on the programmatic side and looking at the return and the yield on those two tools together and buying them together. So, you know, as we've talked about in the past, We are a software implementation that in many cases, in most cases, is done with an RFP head-to-head competition. And the power of our programmatic solutions is winning those competitions. We noted in the script, you know, since Q1 of last year or so, I think, or we've had an 80% plus RFP win ratio that continues to move ahead. And that's based on the power of the product. So, I would love to say there's some magic out there. It's great salespeople and really, really good products that are beating the competition when they go head-to-head in an RFP. That's where we're seeing the pickup. We're beating folks out in the marketplace. And the nice part is we're beating them with not just measurement, but the measurement and activation tools working together. So that's where we see new client growth coming from. On expectations around authentic attention, we've always said we're still early days there, but we like a couple things that are going on around attention. The first is continued client uptake and continued client volume around the solutions themselves, around measurement. We've got some folks who are becoming big fans of this and that we know that with advertisers, there's very much a herd mentality. Once one sector or one category gets it, they're going to continue to push it and others will follow. So A, we like the uptake. B, we like the market sentiment around it. And this is probably the most important. If you look what's going on with alternative currencies, you know, Horizon Media, I think, did a press release a couple weeks ago that said they were going to do over 20% of their upfront buys on television using alternative currencies. Those currencies, you know, can be everything from, you know, ROI metrics to things like attentions. So we think that the marketplace is starting to really, you know, move into this and accept this concept of alternative currencies besides beyond region frequencies. So that's the second thing. And the third is the continued traction that we're getting by launching new tools, new attention tools, like fully on screen in the CTV space and the revenue and volume that we're getting across those. So if we look at current clients using this, marketplace adoption, and tool innovations, I think we feel good about attention. We've said before that we think our performance suite around attention and contextual could at some point rival the size of our basic programmatic solutions. And I think that's still the case. We've got a runway to get there. So it's not a quarter or two. It's multiple quarters. But at the end of the day, We are very bullish on attention. We believe it will be an alternative currency in the future. And the more types of tools that we launch across CTD, I think the more opportunities we'll have there.
spk07: Thank you.
spk03: The next question is coming from the line of Justin Patterson with KeyBank. Please proceed with your questions.
spk10: Great. Thank you very much. Do it if I can. Mark, could you talk about the steps to succeed in retail media? How does this compare to entering other channels and really what investments do you need to make to get this up and running? And then secondly, perhaps for Nicola, could you talk about just how we should think about the political environment impacting the second half? There's clearly some big dollars being thrown around this year. It Is this something that could be an opportunity for you in the second half with your product suite? Thank you.
spk09: Thanks, Justin. So we spent a little time talking about retail media and the prepared remarks, and it is a sector where we're really excited about the opportunity there. You're hearing more and more about it. I think multiple studies saying anywhere from $25 billion to upwards of $50 billion over the next several years in these retail media networks. I'd love to say that we had the foresight two or three years ago to predict the power of these things, but the reality of it is we built a very strong competency in the retail media measurement sector, so it's just retailers supporting their brands, and that strength in our support of those retail companies, so folks like Macy's and folks like Walmart and Target and really started to translate into them also approaching us to support their networks with tools. Now, we didn't have to do a ton of new development to support those retail media networks because of two reasons. The first is we've had a platform business in which we've sold, which we've supported sell-side platforms for a while, i.e. that 9% of our business or so that supports sellers of media. both publishers and SSPs, et cetera. So the types of tools that we work there have fared well, as well as the implementations we've done on the programmatic side, which allow us to filter out impressions or manage impressions for buyers across different types of networks. So the tools we had were more or less repurposed for retail media networks and retail media buyers across those networks, which is, I think, a testament to to the application of our data in so many different types of environments. That core brand safety, suitability, fraud protection, viewability data can be applied in lots of different ways for lots of different advertisers. And the last thing I'll say about retail media, the other thing that we love about this is it opens up an entirely new sector of advertisers to us. We would never go out and try to sell measurements to a small mom-and-pop retailer or direct seller of some type. They just don't have the scale to do so. But these retail media networks provide a channel for us to do so in the same way that programmatic platforms like the Trade Desk or DB360 give us a channel to distribute those same types of metrics to small to mid-sized programmatic buyers. So it has opened up a new market for us. We like it. It's growing very quickly. But the best part is it doesn't need to leverage any additional investment on our side for new tools, new types of development, et cetera, and shows the kind of flexibility of our data sets.
spk13: Yeah, Justin, I'll take the second question on the political environment. So, I mean, just to be clear, in prior cycles, we haven't worked directly with political campaigns. But obviously, you know, to the extent that political campaigns use our activation services, you know, we will benefit from that. And more broadly, thinking about your question around the opportunity for a product suite, that is where the opportunity is, right? So, you know, through any election cycle, if there is a creation of some sort of, you know, incendiary content type environment, that will lead advertisers to use our services more, the advertisers and the brand.
spk00: So,
spk13: It is obviously an opportunity for our products to shine. We have not, since we haven't had a history of benefiting from those campaigns, it is not factored in our forecast for the second half of the year.
spk10: Perfect. Thank you.
spk03: Our next question comes from the line of Remo Lenchow with Barclays. Please proceed with your question.
spk04: Hi, this is Frank Conforamo. Congrats on the quarter. I wanted to ask one on the meta-announcement. I know there's obviously still a lot to sort out here, but has this served to further validate the need for independent brand safety so far? I mean, have you seen any increased urgency or awareness from customers around adopting or going deeper with those offerings since the announcement?
spk09: It's a great question. I think, you know, the interesting part is the customers have always wanted this. So, if anything, it's validated their their demands for a while. Where it has kind of pushed others is the rest of the ecosystem who either was somewhat reluctant, the closed market ecosystem, the closed or walled garden ecosystem, who were somewhat reluctant to work with us or have said, hey, you know, if Facebook isn't going to need to do it or Meta's not going to need to do it, I'm not going to wait, too. And as I mentioned earlier, so folks like Twitter have leaned into it. We'll be launching brand suitability and safety solutions with them in feed over the next few months. We've mentioned our TikTok relationship and how that continues to grow. So I think who it's really kind of driven is everybody else in the space who've been somewhat sitting on the fence saying, you know, do I really need third-party validation? Um, and their embracing of it kind of said, yep, the whole market's going to do it. And, you know, from an advertiser perspective, they're, they're all in.
spk03: Great. Thank you very much.
spk09: Sure.
spk03: Our next question is from the line of Michael Graham with Canaccord. Yeah.
spk11: Thanks a lot. And awesome, awesome quarter guys. Um, just two, if I could one on, uh, you talked a lot about the pricing bifurcation. I was just wondering if you could give us an update on international pricing. You know, I know that's sort of structurally lower than U.S. pricing, but just wanted to kind of get an update on where we were in terms of the evolution there. And then, you know, I just wanted to also ask about how you're thinking about the model and, you know, sort of the balance between growth and profitability. You have this, you know, nice rule of 60 profile. It was more like rule of 70 this quarter, which is great. Just, you know, wondering how you're thinking about if revenue broke or stays, stays high, you know, do you have enough, you know, projects and initiatives to, to invest in, you know, and, and, and on the, on the converse of that, if you do start to decelerate, you know, how are you feeling about being able to modulate the business on the other, on the other side of that too? Thanks.
spk13: Yeah, Mike, I'll start with the first one. So pricing for international and MTF on the measurement side in particular, the patterns remain the same, which is there is a discount that is implied just because CPMs are lower outside of the U.S. versus the U.S. That driving factor has not changed. We haven't seen it change. If anything, as we... As we sign larger enterprise deals that also include activation with measurements, we're able to kind of come up with a broader solution across all of our services. But the assumption that there is a bit of a discount for the international expansion is still the same. In terms of growth versus profitability, I'll start, and I'm sure Mark will chime in. I would say what we announced today is that, as you can see, we are reinvesting into the business as we see the opportunity, especially with the strong first quarter results that we've shown. So when you mentioned, do we have enough projects? Yes. I would say it's still early days from our perspective. The revenue growth is still there for us to continue to invest against it.
spk09: Yeah. Now, just to reiterate that, we're doing great on revenue top line. We're doing great on growth. And I think this is the perfect time for us to lean into investments because we've got room to do so. And what we want is, we know there's macroeconomic factors out there that are hitting the industry a little bit. We've been largely immune to those, but what better time for us to start investing is when the market comes roaring back to becoming roaring back that much harder because we've got new solutions, because we've got great people in great places. because we've got Salesforce expansion in global markets. I think this is the time when smart companies invest, and that's what we're doing.
spk12: All right. Thanks a lot, guys. Congrats again. Got it.
spk03: Our next question is from the line of Dan Selman with BMO Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.
spk06: Hey, great. Good evening, everyone. I've got a couple questions, maybe a little bit more technical. And admittedly, it does not seem like these are showing up in your numbers. But the first issue, it seems like there's a little bit more noise in the ecosystem lately about how media quality companies create their products, such as, for example, a contextual targeting product and how you may be using publisher data for that, whether you have the rights to use that intellectual property. You know, Mark, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that issue as there's a few circular elements to it and any sort of legal elements to it that you think are important to highlight for your company and how you build your products. And then the second one, again, a little under the hood, but it's increasingly clear that most platforms are removing IP address from their ecosystems. largely in the push towards more privacy. And we know you don't tend to measure the who, but rather the what and the how. But could you remind us how you use IP address in your methodologies for your product and how removal of it from the ecosystem may or may not impact you? Thanks.
spk09: For sure, for sure. So good deep questions, Dan. Shows your understanding of the space, which is great. So on the publisher side, a couple things to note. I think we have a good relationship with the sales side of the business, the publisher side of the business, because of the fact that we actually provide them with tools that help to drive and optimize performance of their ads. So we've had a relationship with publishers for years, and we've seen really zero conflicts with them or based on the relationship that we have. With regard to how we build our products, we build them based on all publicly available data that we get both from the open Internet and from walled gardens, right, who allow us and actually work with us to pull data together. So our solutions are a combination of things that are available via the relationships that we have directly with social networks, CTV networks, et cetera, as well as what's available publicly on the Internet. So we don't see a conflict there. As a matter of fact, we believe that everything that we do around context, whether it's protecting advertisers' interests or helping direct them to premium sectors or premium contextual sites, actually help legitimate publishers, period. I think there is a synergistic positive relationship with publishers that we lean into. On the IP address side, we always talk about we don't look at the who, we look at the where, the how, the what. We're really only leverage IP for our fraud and invalid traffic solutions. And when we look at IPs being blocked, a lot of that's going to be done on iOS devices and issues around iOS devices, which have a relatively low penetration. Those are kind of around the edges. The big part of this, though, to really dive into is we've built solutions that IP address is just one factor of many, many criteria that we look at in deciding whether something is in ballot traffic and deciding the geography of where, you know, a user comes from and whether or not it's a bot. So IP is one part of a very, very rich and complex recipe that we put together to build our fraud solutions, and one which, you know, we can certainly, if we had to, live without.
spk06: Okay, that's great. Thank you, Mark. You got it.
spk03: Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Mark Kelly with Seafold. Pleased to see you with your questions.
spk05: Hey, great. Thanks very much for taking my questions. Two quick ones. First one's on the MetaFeed announcement. I guess, you know, given that it's a private competitor that's the initial partner, do you anticipate any incremental changes that you need to make to your solution as a result of that? That's the first question. And then the second one is on TikTok, I know you guys have a nice relationship there, and they've had a lot of recent announcements like Pulse, their contextual product that they're rolling out. Just curious if the broadening of their platform, even if they do have some homegrown solutions, does that mean that your opportunities also expand along with the broadening of their platform as well? Thank you. Sure.
spk09: So first off, on the MetaFeed question, the reality is we know that we've built an incredible relationship with them over the years with an extensive suite of solutions, and we've been plugged into that company for several years looking at data across numerous parts of Meta. And because of that, and because of the extensive nature of our platform and our solution set, you know, there always will be incremental work to do, but I don't think it will be incremental work based on the fact that a competitor has something that we don't. If anything, you know, the partner that they chose to start off with was much more limited in their purview of both social networks and you know the broader internet as a whole right so i think uh not to say that anyone who will work with you know meta on the feed is going to have to do some work but we're in a good position to leverage what we've already built out there and i don't see any you know distinct advantage of the partner that they chose to work with having anything special that we didn't have so i think from there i think we're in good shape um with regard to tiktok i mean we We continue to be really impressed with how quickly they are not only expanding their business and kind of meeting the needs of what advertisers are looking for, but how open they've been to third parties being part of that. They have certainly learned the lessons of how to appeal to advertisers, how to address concerns that they have, and how to ensure that they can build a long-term relationship productive relationship with advertisers. And a big part of that is ensuring advertisers can bring in their trusted third-party solutions into that ecosystem. So we feel like as they continue to expand, as they continue to grow their business globally, it just provides more and more opportunities for us to take part in that as well.
spk05: Perfect. Thank you very much, Mark. Got it.
spk03: Our next question is from the line of Mark Murphy from J.P. Morgan. Please proceed with your questions.
spk08: Yes, thank you very much. I'll add my congrats on a very solid top line in Q1. So, Mark, I had noticed that several of your enterprise wins are in pandemic-impacted industries. You had Best Buy and Norwegian Cruise Lines and Subway and KFC. Should we interpret that as kind of a return to health for those industries, or is it more of a sign of I'm not sure how many were competitive displacements, but is it more of a sign that they're seeing your independence as a differentiator and maybe causing some of them to switch over to double verify?
spk09: It's a great question, Mark. And, you know, it's funny, the way you've categorized them as pandemic kind of comebacks, I never really thought about it that way, but it's a good observation. I think, you know, One thing we keep leaning in on the fact is that we're pretty diversified when you look at our client base, right? We don't have a high reliance on automotive. We don't have a high reliance on a lot of the supply chain constricted companies out there. So there's certainly these guys have made a comeback. A chunk of them were competitive takeaways. I think that that was a... That was a key factor in them moving to us. And our independence is always part of that. I have to say that it's the power of the solutions that always wins. And independence is like the icing on the cake. If we've got a good recipe, they like the solutions. They're driving better returns based on filtering out more impressions. They're creating a more comfortable situation from a brand suitability and safety perspective. When you layer that, when you put on top of that the idea that we're independent, we're unconflicted, and there's a significant amount of trust because of the accreditations we have, I think that is the thing that in some cases kicks it over the wall. And I think we feel good about that. We're going to continue to lean into that as a part of our differentiated set of attributes, but really it comes down to the power of the tool sets.
spk08: Okay, got it. And I appreciate that, Mark. And then, Nicola, a quick one for you. Could you help us, I guess, regarding the bridge between 43% revenue growth, I think it's 14% EBITDA growth. And so when we look at that, and as you've said, it's a good time to invest, the margins are down, I think, something like 500 to 600 basis points year over year. Can you split it between what is a structural kind of margin pressure such as the programmatic revenue share or you mentioned the higher cloud services costs versus maybe how much is temporary, timing of hires or some of the M&A dilution and that type of effect?
spk13: Yeah, Mark, I'll go straight to the answer, which is this is temporary and temporary. You know, you can see that from the fact that we're guiding back to a 30% margin for the full year. And the temporary items are, as you mentioned, M&A. You know, the acquisition of OpenSlate is a smaller operation that was not operating at margin levels similar to ours. You know, we're actually ahead of where we thought we would be in terms of identifying and reducing the duplicative costs in GNA for that transaction, which is why actually in our Q1 margins, we were ahead of where we thought we would be in terms of guidance for the first quarter. So the integration is going very well, and it is temporary. And by the end of the year, we will be back to more normalized margins. That's really what's driving the way you mentioned on the margins.
spk08: Thank you.
spk03: Thank you. At this time, we've reached the end of our question and answer session. I'll now turn the call over to Mark Skorsky for closing remarks.
spk09: Thank you all for joining. We appreciate your time and attention today. I look forward to updating you on our successes in the quarters ahead.
spk03: Thank you. This will conclude today's conference. I may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.
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