All right. Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Tejal Engman, and I am the SVP of Investor Relations at DoubleVerify. It's great to have you all here. I so appreciate the in-person audience who made it here to be here with us, and everyone who's watching this online, thank you for your time. I'm sure a lot of you are happy to hear that we'll be making several forward-looking statements today, so let me just get a housekeeping item off the list. These forward-looking statements are subject to inherent risks, uncertainties and changes, and they 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 S-1 registration statement.
In addition, our discussion today will include references to certain supplemental non-GAAP financial measures that 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 presentation materials, which are available on our investor relations website at ir.doubleverify.com. With that, let me turn the floor over to Mark.
All right. Thank you, Tejal. Good morning, everyone. As Tejal noted, I'm Mark Zagorski, I'm CEO of DoubleVerify. Thank you for joining us today. As Tejal noted, it's our first Investor Day, and man, we timed this thing perfectly. You know, potential bear markets, global security crisis, and to top it off, you know, just a little late February snowstorm here in New York City. I'm so excited to have all of you here in person. It's pretty amazing. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. It's great seeing human beings. It's great to know people still wear pants and having your hair is a really nice thing. But despite the macro environment, we've never been more excited about the company's future, and I think you're gonna sense a little bit of that from the team today.
You'll have tons of enthusiasm here. Let's call this first row kinda like the splash row. I get so excited, I may start spitting a little bit, you know, just word to the wise. It's kinda like SeaWorld. We'll provide one of those little, those little sheets later. We've got a series of presentations today, and we hope you're gonna find them informative and pretty inspirational as well. You know, the nice part about today is usually we talk to most of you only for about 90 minutes a quarter, right? It's always in the context of what we're doing that quarter and, you know, what's happening in that time of the year.
Today, it's all about taking a longer-term view on the business, digging in on specific areas that we think are competitive differentiators and make DV such a special company to be part of. Today we're gonna cover four different themes. To begin with, I'm gonna talk about our vision, about where we are today and where we're going, and why we believe we're set up to win in the digital media landscape that's been disrupted by so many different factors over the last few years. Next, our Chief Product Officer, Jack Smith, who unfortunately couldn't be with us in person today, will be joining us via the power of satellite, to talk about how we're executing against our vision. He's gonna cover some key strategy and product differentiators. Dan Slivjanovski, our Chief Marketing Officer, is gonna really bring some cool stuff here.
We're gonna do some demos, and we're gonna show you how our products work and how they're leading in the marketplace, give you a real hands-on sense of what's going on. After that, we'll have a quick 15-minute break, which I'm sure you will all need. At that point, we're gonna get into the fun stuff. The fun stuff is always for you folks, numbers, right? Nicola Allais released some flash numbers earlier this morning, and we'll go into depth on those and walk through the performance of the business based on those numbers. Then after that, bringing it home will be Julie Eddleman, who's our Chief Commercial Officer. She's gonna discuss our customer wins, and then more importantly, bring out some of our core customer partners.
The chief will include Helen Lin, the Chief Digital Officer for Publicis, and Jonathan Halvorson, who is the SVP of Consumer Experience and Digital Commerce at Mondelez, obviously one of the most important CPG companies on the planet, who's also a great partner of ours. Finally, I'll wrap up with a quick end game talk about a quick end game. Just to let everyone know, we've allocated some time for Q&A after Nicola's session, and if we have time at the end, we'll leave some time then for Q&A as well. If you have questions, please hold them a bit. I'm sure you'll have tons of them, so we'll try to make as much time as we can.
For those of you who are joining us virtually, you'll be able to see a little hand icon at the bottom of your screen that will allow you to submit a question. All right, let's get started and jump right in. I wanna start with our vision, and it's been pretty straightforward since the day we started 10 years ago. Our vision is to make the digital advertising ecosystem stronger, safer, and more secure. We believe that by ensuring digital media transactions are safe and transparent, we drive trust in the ad ecosystem, supporting confidence needed between buyers and sellers to allow for continued exponential digital ad growth. What does that mean? It means without trust in digital ad ecosystem, buyers and sellers can't transact. We help drive that trust.
To achieve that vision, our team is laser-focused on executing on our mission, and that mission is to deliver independent media quality and performance solutions that drive better outcomes for advertisers. This mission not only supports a stronger ecosystem, which is better for the industry, it creates better returns for our customers who use our solutions. The bottom line here is if we're successful in our mission, our clients are successful as well. One thing to note throughout the day, you're gonna hear some concepts over and over again, ideas of independence, quality, performance. These are integral to how we operate our business, and they ultimately become a competitive advantage for us. Why this mission is so important is because advertisers are continually feeling the drumbeat of market disruptions that make driving and measuring digital outcomes increasingly difficult.
You'll hear us talk about this idea of, well, it's outcomes throughout the day. What is outcome? Outcome. We'll say outcome a lot. You'll hear it. Jack will talk about it. Julie will talk about it with our clients. Well, fundamentally, think about an outcome is why an advertiser spends money. Why do brands spend money? They want to sell a product, garner a new fan, change minds. Connecting to an outcome via metrics has always been challenging, what we call the single media measurement universe. Those companies have continued to struggle in the digital era. You've seen the headlines, right? Whether it's companies like Nielsen losing accreditation or other companies who have been grading their own homework, the ability or for metrics to connect to outcomes has been challenged, particularly for traditional single media currencies. It's always been that way, though. Think about it.
The focus on audience reach and single media measurement has been challenged in the past by things like time-shifted viewing, nonlinear engagement, panel inaccuracies, right? They've always been poor outcomes for proxies due to the noise in the ecosystem. That noise has only gotten worse, right? Things like multimedia exposure, nonlinear exposure, driven by fragmentation, GDPR and attribution challenges, browser identification issues with cookies that really have to do with identity tracking cross-platform. The growing issues around fraud, accreditation, brand reputation, all of those has made the distance between a single media metric and driving an outcome that much further apart. If you wanna sum up those disruptions, these three disruptive forces really focus on three areas, fragmentation, identity, and trust.
Legacy companies have been poorly adapted to adapt to these, and even emerging point solution measurement companies have limited media purviews that continue to struggle to provide real solutions fit to drive outcomes. To truly tackle these challenges, no single metric will be able to do that on its own. It takes a combination of key solutions employed across the campaign to create a clear path to an outcome. It all starts, we believe, with the ability to ferret out fraud and ensure that there's brand safety. That eliminates waste and protects ad spend from dollar one and starts to break that wall down between an advertiser and an outcome. Quality is additive. It provides greater clarity and greater confidence that the engagement is real and with a real person. Performance and audience are next.
They build upon the base necessary to deliver a clear path to outcomes. Only through this combination of brand safety, brand suitability, performance-based solutions, can even applications like Audience truly start to drive outcomes. We believe that the combination of these factors are essential in connecting an advertiser to an outcome, and they continue to evolve. Since our inception, we've always deliberately innovated the solutions and datasets that are additive to each other, and we believe they're a step function to, in campaigns. The nice part about this is when you start with a foundation like brand safety, you accelerate it through suitability and viewability, you evolve into performance, the ability to not only drive better outcomes, but to incrementally increase our connection with our clients and the revenue we generate for those clients gets greater.
The nice part is from where we start, for every impression across multiple media, our advertisers use our solutions to ensure that safety and quality are in place, and they leverage and by leveraging our core data, we extend into these different areas as well. Our further expansion into audience solutions provides an additive opportunity for DV and our customers to create a series of building blocks that create an unmatched connection between ad spend and outcomes. In every part of the media transaction, from pre to post, from quality to audience, DV data has the unique ability to drive these outcomes. It has unique benefits for DoubleVerify as well. It ensures that our solutions are aligned with the primary goal of advertising to drive a meaningful outcome.
Our evolution from safety and quality to audience allows us to tap into additional budgets and spend categories. You've seen this as we've launched new products over the last year or so, and we'll continue to move into those additional categories. Speaking of audience, which I mentioned earlier, we now have an exciting announcement which we made yesterday, we'll talk about a little bit further today, is that we've announced that we've partnered with Comscore to bring the first ever first of its kind verified audience measurement solution to the marketplace. Through our partnership, we'll ensure that audience measurement accurately represents a safe and qualified audience, providing a stronger rationale for advertisers who seek to connect to measurement to outcomes. We're super excited about this.
The ability to bring quality and safety data together with audience data is a first, and the ability to have a cross-platform audience and verification solution together is pretty remarkable. Think about it this way: How can you trust audience data if the audience on the other side of that isn't a human? How do you trust audience data for CTV if that CTV is not reaching someone because it's not on? How do you trust audience data if there's fraud on the other end of the spectrum? The ability to bring great audience data that focuses on reach and demographics combined with quality of that data, which should be an unmatchable combination when it comes to actually driving down challenges.
Let me go back to those challenges for a second, and we'll talk about Comscore later, and we'll certainly take some Q&A on that as well. When we think about those measurement challenges, no one is better equipped than DV. Yes, we've got this stack of great solutions, but what makes those solutions so powerful? Well, going back to what those challenges are, fragmentation, identity, and trust, the way we tackle them is through scale, innovation, and trust. Scale. Let me dig into each one of those for a second. When we talk about cross-platform scale, we've got this mantra of verify everywhere. You'll hear that a lot. That challenge continues to be tested as the market gets more fragmented, and there becomes more volume. Last year, we measured 4.5 trillion transactions. That's a 41% increase over 2021.
This relates to over 215 billion transactions a day that we're measuring. Now, let me kind of put this in perspective a bit for you as well. On each one of those transactions, we have the ability to append 1,000 data points on that. So we're not just saying good or bad, we're looking at 1,000 different data points that we're measuring whether good or bad. Across that, as we layer on additional products like ABS, which is a boomer product on the pre-campaign side for us, we're actually evaluating across hundreds of thousands of keywords to determine the presence of those keywords on individual transactions. All of this is done in milliseconds, and it's supported by innovative computing horsepower and a massively scaled infrastructure that is directly integrated into the ecosystem. Just think about this.
This is not something you build overnight. This is a massively scaled system that works in virtually real-time to support integrations all throughout the ecosystem. Let me give you a sense of scale. I know sometimes these numbers, they don't seem real, so you're like, "Okay, billions, trillions, what does this actually mean?" Let me give you a sense of what this means. So 215 billion transactions a day that we measure. If you look at some comparisons, there's 300,000 Bitcoin transactions a day. There's 1 billion credit card transactions across all of the major credit card companies. In this building right here, there are 6 billion trading transactions that happen every day. Even WhatsApp messages, there's 100 billion WhatsApp messages a day. We're double that. That's how many things we're seeing.
This is not an easy challenge to tackle, and we're doing it at scale, and we continue to scale that around the world. That's the first way we're addressing those disruptive challenges through our scale, which continues to grow and continues to be a significant differentiator for us. Let's talk about identity. We hear this a lot, and I know a lot of you in the room and a lot of you online have asked us these questions. What about IDs? What about cookies? What does that mean to you? Well, these. There's constantly shifting privacy standards, right? It's a constant challenge to people in the advertising space, right? It continues to vex the industry over and over again.
We've been largely insulated from that due to the fact that our solutions were built on being identifier independent from the start and not reliant on cookies. We have context at our core, and we've not only been able to avoid the headwinds that have faced the industry, we've been able to turn those into tailwinds based on the fact that we've been able to develop solutions based on context, like Custom Contextual, and those based on engagement, like Authentic Attention. I will steal a line from a fellow person in the industry. One person's headwind is another person's tailwind, and that's what it is for us. We also look at when it comes to privacy, it's not just us saying we're privacy safe or cookie safe. We stand alone in the sector when it comes to third-party privacy certifications.
We always talk about this. Who judges the judges? Who says we're privacy safe? Well, other people do. We are the only company who are TRUSTe certified in multiple parts of the world, who are the only company in our sector that have the Neutronian seals for being cookie-free. This gives us a unique position to thrive in the face of continued ID and privacy challenges facing much of the ad tech industry. Finally, let's talk about trust. Trust is a big deal. We talked about the whole reason we exist is to drive trust between buyers and sellers in the marketplace. We're a leader when it comes to accreditations when other people look at us to be a trusted partner. We have over 250 accredited metrics across multiple environments.
I would challenge anyone in this room or any of our competitors to match their level of accreditations that we have. Finally, our independence. We are the only large-scale ad verification company with complete independence with no bias and conflicts of interest. I'm gonna take a pause here for a second because I know this may just seem like a little bit of rhetoric, but this is incredibly important for us. This is a core part of who we are as a company. If trust is at our core, and trust is why people work with us, we strongly believe that a trusted objective verification and measurement partner to advertisers, you can't be part of the media transaction. We've seen this before.
No matter how adamant the defense is, grading your own homework or making money off what you are supposed to be measuring just won't fly with advertisers. It's bad governance. When you sell media, and you have skin in the game, you're in ad sales. The idea of safety and objectivity becomes murky. It's much easier to look the other way at fraud or delivery issues when you have the ability to benefit from it. DV will never sell ads, period. Our customers won't accept that and shouldn't accept that, and it is a strong differentiator between us and the rest of the marketplace. Hopefully, I made my point there. We feel strongly about that. It's a reason why people work with us.
It's a reason why our team comes to be with us, and it's a reason why we acquire the kinds of companies that we do because they share our vision and they share our purity. We put these things together, and we look at the challenges of cross-platform scale, privacy-friendly ID innovation, and accreditations and independence. We really stand alone there in being the only company that can address all of these disruptors. No other point solution, no other direct competitor, or no other measurement company is better positioned to address the challenges that are facing measurement today. Because of that, we've been able to become key partners to all of our advertisers. We've taken these abilities and now supercharge them with pre-campaign activation solutions.
When you look at our business today, and Nicola will talk about this, and when we talk to the financials, we really have two buckets of revenue, two main buckets of revenue. Pre-campaign activation solutions and post-campaign measurement solutions. The business has started as a post-campaign metrics business. We've determined what happened after a campaign was purchased, we allowed advertisers to block ads before they were delivered, and that gave us fuel and metrics and data, right? We've evolved our business over time, so DV 1.0 was really focused on brand safety and fraud and viewability and reporting back to advertisers where their spend was misspent and where their spend was accurately spent and blocked ads in the process.
Over time, we knew that we could take that same dataset and leverage it, what we call leverage innovation, into pre-campaign solutions, right? Allowing us to use it for planning, pre-bid targeting, and avoidance. That took a pretty decent amount of time. From when we launched the business in 2010 to launching our pre-campaign solutions was about 8 years. We've been able to compress that timeframe for launching metrics and then launching the pre-campaign tools around those metrics pretty aggressively. We launched performance and attention solutions about mid last year in our trial phase, and Jack Smith, our CPO, will talk about that a little bit. We were able to launch performance tools based on that same context less than a year later, which is pretty amazing.
We'll be able to compress the metrics in the post-measurement world to the metrics that we use for pre-campaign activation, and we continue to see opportunities for this down the road. You'll hear a lot about the connection between the pre and post cycle. It's enabled us to drive optimization and become that much essential to our partners, and we'll see that grow over time as we start moving into things like audience reach and verification demos and start pulling data in like media investment in as well.
What that means for our clients when we look at driving optimization, for example, in the open web, it's the ability to take the metrics that we're pulling from post-campaign measurement, build tools like the Authentic Ad, learn and optimize against those results, and then push them through to pre-bid through tools like standard verification, ABS, and Custom Contextual that allow for an optimization cycle in the pre-campaign side. This virtuous cycle means that we're not only connected to the advertisers throughout the cycle, but we're optimizing and learning throughout the entire process. Pre and post go perfectly together. Metric and the filter, we learn and get smarter, our advertisers get smarter, and the beautiful thing about this is this is done across every platform and every media. This is not subject to just a DSP or a single platform of buying.
This learning occurs across all different types of media in the open web. The beautiful part is, we talked about compressing this development cycle. What's the fastest way to compress the development cycle? Well, you don't build it. You buy it. Last year, we bought OpenSlate, which has turned out to be a really exceptionally exciting buy for us. We've gotten so much positive feedback from our clients because it's put this cycle back into hyper speed, which is, okay, you're able to do this pre and post in the programmatic world, in the open Internet. How do you do this in the walled gardens in the social platforms? Well, that's what OpenSlate allows us to do.
It's the same concept of taking post-campaign measurement data, which DV has always had across these platforms, pushing them into our system, learning and optimizing, and then managing media planning and activation across those walled gardens through OpenSlate. Again, it's this cycle of pre and post that allows us to create a connective tissue throughout the media buying cycle, right? It becomes an essential part of an advertiser's toolkit. Ultimately, DV becomes essential in driving outcomes for advertisers, and that's exactly where you want to be. You want to be seen as an essential partner to our clients.
Now, we used to use the word utility, and Nicola, rightly so, who worries about numbers all the time, says, "Everyone hates utilities because they charge too much, and they have no control over their pricing." We're like a utility, but we have control over our pricing, and people like working with us. We'll say we're essential, but at the end of the day, most of our clients use us on most of the impressions they do, on most of the buys they do across everything, and we've become truly essential. As a result of being an essential partner, we've grown faster. This is like the fun part for me when I just get to tell you all these great numbers. We've grown faster than the market. We've grown faster than sectors, the fastest-growing sectors in the market, and we've grown faster than our peers.
If you look at digital ad spend over the last year, DV grew 36%, global digital advertising grew 30%. The even more powerful impact note on this is if you look at in 2019 to 2020, we grew 34%. The market grew 13%. We had harder comps, significantly harder comps to go against. What about the fastest-growing sectors? Last year, and these are all new numbers for you folks, in total, we grew 45%. Our programmatic business grew 45% last year, off growing 39% the year before. The market programmatically grew 15% in 2020 and 23% in 2021. Again, we grew faster off harder comps the year before. In social. Social, we grew 47% last year versus global ad spend. Social global ad spend of 35%.
2020, the global social spend was 20%. Again, we grew 34%. Tougher comps, bigger growth. Finally, CTV, what so much buzz is about today, and it's near and dear to my heart based on my experience working in the CTV space. Last year, our impressions grew 57% for DV. Global CTV revenue grew 29%. Over the same period in 2020, we grew 76% in our impressions, and the market grew 18%. We're growing faster than the market, we're growing faster than the most important segments in the market, and we're doing it off larger growth comps from the year before. Finally, we're growing faster than our peers. You know, a lot of these peers, you could always select your favorite folks out of here.
When you look at software and ad tech peers, and we didn't even include measurement guys because they're so far lower on this chart that we can't even put them on the chart. It's not even fair to have them on here. The reality of it is, with the exception of The Trade Desk, who's obviously the standard bearer in the space, we've had some pretty exceptional growth across the marketplace. It's not just revenue growth, it's profitability as well. As Nicola will share in a second, we've had incredible profitability growth as well. We're growing. All of this growing. I'm exhausted about talking about this growing. I'm sure you're exhausted about hearing this growing too. What we're not exhausted. We've built a series of additive growth drivers that give us a runway for growth in the future. Let's talk about these.
You've heard us say this before. We've got multiple factors that allow us to create cumulative growth over time, starting with new product introduction and evolution, going to channel expansion, adding new clients, new client growth, looking at global expansion, and finally, inorganic growth through M&A. The nice part about all of these is they are not only additive, but they're complementary as well. One doesn't keep one out of the other. One actually supplants one or the other. We can go in at any place on this chart, right? You know, we can expand internationally while we also include new products growth through M&A, or we can come in with new to product growths after we've expanded international. There's no order that we need to do, but the nice part is they all grow together, and I'm gonna talk about each one of these.
I love this chart. If there's one chart that you take away today, this is my favorite, all right? We'll talk about product. This is product first. If you think about our additive nature of our products and what we're able to sell to our customers, if you start with our basic post-campaign measurement, where the business started, you still give that a 1x, so we make $1 from that. When you add the ability to buy social on top of that, when you sell a client core programmatic activation and then Authentic Brand Suitability, and then we're able to sell Authentic Attention to Custom Contextual, we are able to sell a client. Our revenue multiplier is 10x as we're able to sell products up the stream. This is pretty amazing because if you think about it, to the same customer, and I know.
Hopefully, there's no customers in here right now, but we know we're able to make 10x our original investment against that customer by upselling new products. It's extraordinary. The nice part about this is for us, less than 40% of our clients currently use four or more products. You've got a lot of white space and ample room to upsell opportunities. That's the product growth trajectory. Think about our social and our channel and international growth opportunity. About 60% of digital advertising spend was social last year, right? Only about 14% of DV revenue is social. Obviously, lots of opportunity to grow there compared to the marketplace, and it has to do with two key things.
It has to do with coverage, as we continue to expand coverage around social, and product adoption, as we continue to enhance and grow our product adoption. There are lots of places in social we still don't cover, so lots of additional white space to invest in. CTV, it's about 8% of digital ad spend last year. It's only about 3% of our direct impressions, so lots of growth opportunity there, and we see both of those numbers rising over time. Then finally, international, which we talk about quite a bit, only about 20% of our direct revenue. But if you look at it, digital advertising spend less search, it's about 52% of global spend. Even if you look at competitors in our space, a much larger share, almost double the amount of share of their revenue comes from the international than ours.
We've talked about this in our earnings calls before. We just started getting into the global space about 2-3 years ago in a real way. Last year, we made significant investments. Over 50% of our headcount last year was hired outside of North America. We know that there are ample opportunities for us to continue to grow in places where we had been underinvested for years. Channel and international growth on top of product growth, they both work together. When we talk about customers, well, how much real white space do you guys have just looking at the top global advertisers? Well, of the 700 largest advertisers around the world, we work with 42% of them at some level, which is, I think, good. That's a good initial penetration amount.
When you look at those 42%, 61% have less than 4 products from ours, and only 39% use more than 4 products. We not only have growth in getting new clients, we have growth in new clients getting outside the U.S., we have growth with our current clients in upselling the new products. As we showed in that chart before, it's an additive product revenue driver for each client. We've got new customers to get, and we'll talk a little bit, and Julie will talk a little bit about how important the longevity is with our current clients, but also the number of wins that we have over the last year. Then finally, that last non-organic bucket, which you never wanna lean on for growth, but we look at as an accelerator for growth is M&A.
I would challenge you to find a company in our position, in our space that is better armed to drive expansions through acquisitions or to expansion via acquisitions. Last year, we generated $73 million of net cash from operating activities, less CapEx. Our cash balance was over $200 million, and we have $0 in long-term debt. Yet we still did two acquisitions last year. Both will help accelerate our growth. Our strategy remains pretty straightforward. International expansion, and this all ties very nicely into our growth trajectory, international expansion, product and technology extension, so getting us into new sectors, allowing us to rev up that roadmap, and then product and technology adjacencies.
Our two acquisitions last year, so Meetrics was an international expansion investment, and OpenSlate was a product and technology adjacency that moved us into a new sector that allows us to do pre- and post afterwards. This thesis will continue to drive our business moving forward as we look for opportunities to move into new adjacencies, extend our solutions, and move into new global markets. It fits, again, perfectly with that growth trajectory. We launch a new product like OpenSlate, we can now sell that product to our current customer base and a whole new customer base. It goes additive. We launch into a new market. It allows us to get new clients and sell all of those products to those new clients. That is our driver because we know there's lots of opportunity out there that we still need to fill in.
The cumulative value of all these growth vectors really puts us into this beautiful cycle of creating stakeholder value. When you look at product growth, channel growth, client growth, international growth, and M&A, it creates revenue, right? Revenue drives EBITDA. EBITDA gives us lots of free cash flow that we can reinvest in the business, and it spins out. It creates wonderful stakeholder value creation, which puts us in a very strong position to continue to grow over time. Wrapping up our vision in the first part of the day, and we've got lots more to go through. We solve measurement challenges, we maximize advertiser outcomes, and that drives exceptional growth for our company and results in strong stakeholder value.
We believe that we're in a position to not only provide incredible stakeholder value that others can't match, but we can provide outcomes that others aspire to, growth that others covet, and drive stakeholder value that others can't match, which I just said 'cause I repeated 'cause I was reading off that back slide there. That was vested by strong CapEx. Look, we are excited about the position that we're in. We're excited about the opportunities. We've got incredible growth ahead of us. We've got strong differentiators that'll be able to differentiate the business. Now we're gonna jump into talking about showing the real stuff here. You're done with the CEO BS for now. Now you get to see the real stuff.
You get to see under the hood, you get to see what our product looks like, and you get to talk to our customers to see if I'm telling the truth or not. I know I am. Next up, we'll talk. Jack Smith is gonna talk about execution and execution from our product roadmap. Jack is joining us from lovely Westchester, New York today. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Jack Smith, DoubleVerify's Chief Product Officer.
Thanks, Mark. Mark talked about the challenges that disruptions create for advertisers who are really looking for better ways to maximize outcomes. Given that backdrop, what does it take for a software solution company like ours to execute and deliver results? We believe that you have to do three things, scale, innovation, and trust. If you wanna advance the slides a couple. Yeah, just go ahead and go to the next one. If you look at all three of these things, they all work together to drive results for both our customers and for us. Today I'm gonna walk you through DoubleVerify scale, how we innovate, how we build and maintain trust, and how those three pillars drive our results.
Now, scale means that we verify everywhere and we repeat these things to each other constantly. Every impression, every platform, any media across any geography where our customers are buying and executing advertising. Innovation means that we leverage our existing data and solutions and our technology to create unique solutions that new market entrants or our competitors can't. Trust means that we're independent. We talk about this a lot as well. We're not a party to the media transaction. We have no conflicts of interest. We also have the widest and most comprehensive verifications, which make our solutions trusted across the industry. Let's take a deep dive in each one of these foundational pillars and let's start with scale. Scale is embodied in our mission to verify everywhere, and for us, there's no way to avoid it.
Our products and technology have to be scalable, but they also have to be robust and extensible at that scale. DV's solution include every impression everywhere around the world, and that means that we provide services on the open web, inside closed social platforms. We also cover direct buys, programmatic bidding, pre-bid and post-bid, so all formats. We measure display, video, desktop, mobile, connected TV, all devices. We also have to measure all types of content. Now, I realize this diagram is a lot of detail, and it looks complex because it is. Like, reducing that complexity is just one of the reasons why what we do matters to agencies and advertisers.
When we combine our measures of media that is viewable, brand safe, and suitable in the right geography and fraud-free, we do it with the Authentic Ad, and each customer has the ability to define their version of the Authentic Ad. Brand Suitability is unique for each one of our customers. Even customers that have a portfolio of brands might choose to create a different definition for one brand versus another. We do this at internet scale, and that kind of mass scale customization is unprecedented among our peer set. It also provides a single thread of communication across all the teams where, within the marketing departments and the, you know, whether it's the marketing department or agencies of our customers, no matter where they're advertising.
You're seeing a screenshot here of our platform, Pinnacle. Pinnacle simplifies digital media complexity by being the single system of record for advertiser quality. When you look at Pinnacle, there are really two things that customers really want to do by using Pinnacle. They want to understand how to reduce wasted ad spend across the media plan. They also wanna figure out how to optimize to make their campaigns work better. We're gonna show you a lot more detail. You'll see some demos of platform, and we'll show you how Pinnacle takes the scale and packages it into simple and actionable insights that really help advertisers and agencies understand outcome. Now scale drives scale, and verify everywhere really creates this self-reinforcing growth.
When we verify everywhere, we collect an enormous amount of data. For example, when customers use our API, we evaluate up to 1 million keywords. On every transaction, we average a few hundred thousand per transaction. That volume of data continually enhances our machine learning. It improves our core IP. It enriches our datasets and it is in a few different ways. Content classification, fraud identifiers, so how we eliminate fraud, and also our custom contextual segments. Now that leads to improved semantic science, improved fraud detection, post-bid blocking, monitoring, post-bid, pre-bid filtration, and all of those things work together to improve the results for our customers. Then better results drive increased usage from customers.
That helps us win new customers because we perform better than our competitors in head-to-head RFP tests, and you'll see some stats around that later on in the presentation. Interestingly, it means that the large-scale platforms who can't do integrations with everyone have a greater incentive to integrate with us, whether they're programmatic, social, CTV, and that expands verify everywhere, and that reinforces this virtuous growth cycle, and it all starts again. Now we think a lot about managing complexity and, you know, because the media ecosystem is really complex, and it's not getting simpler on its own. The strategies that each of our customers employ differ dramatically. Some advertisers wanna focus only on CTV or another channel. Some focus on a combination of buying channels with equal weight across all. Some might be focused on a global footprint.
Others might be focused on a single market. Because we verify everywhere in this complex ecosystem, our systems need to be flexible to different investment strategies and to new environments as they appear, which means also that they're flexible to different kinds of outcomes that our advertisers and agency partners wanna drive. We recognize that our data exists alongside other customers' business data. While we might originate this data, we also have to facilitate that data to be exported out and combined with other datasets, as in customer systems, so other business data that they might have. Mark talked about the Comscore partnership.
There are many other examples of these kinds of integrations that we do with third parties, but data interoperability is key to driving new kinds of utility for our product set and also new services that we create and can charge for. What's the scale of our scale? You know, Mark talked a little bit about this. In 2021, we processed 200 billion data transactions daily. We measured these 4.5 trillion media transactions this full year. That 4.5 is the number of transactions measured that we were paid for. Hopefully that'll give you a sense of how we see this volume internally. There's also another way to look at scale.
DNS or domain name system, it's like the phone book of the internet, so it contains the addresses of all major sites and service providers on the internet. When you try and visit a website, that address needs to be looked up. What you're looking at here is a report from domain.glass from December 2021. If DNS is the phone book, domain.glass is really measuring the switchboard traffic to each of these phone numbers. In December of last year, we were ranked 15th most popular DNS host globally. Our tags are everywhere, and that's driving this kind of scale that we're talking about. Now we've covered scale and why it's a core asset for DoubleVerify. As more money flows into digital advertising, the volume continues to increase.
Advertisers and agencies need a single metric to drive better understanding and better communication across their team and remove this friction that's caused by having multiple definitions of quality. We use these core assets to create new solutions. It gives us a lot of product leverage by allowing us to create new services on the back of our existing data set, and it powers that virtuous cycle that we talked about earlier. We're able to leverage our scale, which includes our ubiquitous coverage, our customer relationships, long-standing relationships that Jules is gonna talk about later, reinforcing our AI and our semantic science technology, as well as our existing measurement of all of our existing measures of media quality, which uses measurement tags to really bridge from media quality to media outcomes.
Our two performance products, Custom Contextual and Authentic Attention, were created by combining our existing coverage, our semantic science, and the Authentic Ad. It's the data that we're already collecting, and it's data science that's proven to work. Now if 2015 was the year of viewability, 2022, we think, is the year of attention. DV Authentic Attention builds on that baseline quality of Authentic Ad. Just to describe a little bit about how we think about this. So any impression that fails to meet an advertiser's custom quality definition is given an attention of effectively zero, either because the ad didn't have the opportunity to influence consumer behavior, or because it was just wasteful or placed in an environment that was harmful to the brand equity of our customer.
Now, those impressions that do meet the Authentic Ad standard, attention measurement provides a real-time impression-level view of performance that enables our advertisers to optimize media according to what's resonating most with audiences. Whether that's, you know, exposure to the ad, as you see here, or engagement with the ad creative, Jon's gonna show you how this works in detail later. The really important thing is this. It's a paradigm expansion for verification. Building on quality measurement and moving that to predictive media performance, so connecting every impression to business outcome. We believe that this has been incredibly successful. You know, we've got 40 total customers either using the product across their campaigns or are deep in testing. That's across around 75 lines of business.
We're benchmarking using 49 billion impressions to benchmark, and customers can not only compare this to all of DV's impression volume, they can also look at how they compare it to their own vertical or other verticals. Now, what's interesting about all of this is that if you wanna go to the next slide. This kind of product leverage doesn't end at the creation of the product. You know, before we talked about how we create products and the kind of leverage we're getting there, but it also extends in how we go to market. As an example, we used our existing customer relationships and footprint to drive 89% adoption of Authentic Brand Suitability with our top 100 customers, and we believe that attention is the next currency.
As existing measures lose their efficacy due to privacy regulation, technology changes, advertisers and agencies will need more sustainable privacy-friendly measures. They've been telling us that for the last two years, and that's part of the reason why we created the Authentic Attention to do that. Now, the adoption curve is really a three-step process. You test, you work with your customers to develop, you make it generally available, and then you try and drive ubiquity, but you're always looking for ways to accelerate that.
We believe we're really early in the product life cycle of attention, but we want every client to experience Authentic Attention because we believe it's important for the industry long term to have a definition of what attention means and for each customer to be able to customize that and contextualize it for how they do business. It's a lot like the early days of viewability. The difference is that we don't have to build a market while building our customer base. We have a built-in customer base. I'm happy to announce that in Q2, we're going to provide a preview of attention metrics for all customers in order to accelerate this adoption curve.
Now if we look at last year, and we did a lot of things, I'm not gonna go through this in detail, I think there are a couple threads to highlight. First, what you'll see going through this is our commitment to Verify Everywhere. We're continuing to expand Authentic Brand Suitability to even more places, also adding new some, also we've added new social functionality. We're continuing to push the market in CTV. We launched and got accredited Fully On-Screen. Just a moment to talk about that. Standard viewability measures don't exist in CTV. What we're able to do with Fully On-Screen is have a proxy for this viewability to understand and also understand whether the TV is on or off.
That further helps identify and reduce waste in CTV, which is high CPM inventory. Now finally, we were the first to align with GARM, which is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media. It's an industry body that works to really drive the industry forward in their thinking about safety and suitability. We tiered our brand suitability solutions. Now what that means is that we can now allow our customers to have a much more nuanced view to brand suitability. They can access different tiers. If you're a very conservative advertiser versus a much more aggressive advertiser, there's a lot more nuance that you can use inside that. We were first to align with GARM. We also think about how our products meaningfully lead the industry.
It's important for us that innovation does not exist in a lab. When we say meaningfully, what we really mean by that is it's not just getting there first. It's really about getting there first in production with a product running live on customer campaigns at internet scale. We believe that the most effective way to predict the future is to create it. We pioneered verification by becoming the first verification provider. We were also the first to be accredited by the MRC. Mark talked about the compression of our timelines, and we're always looking for ways to compress timelines on our entire product set. That also includes our accreditations. If you look at our accreditations, we have a comprehensive suite of accreditations, and this really...
You start to see what getting there first means from a practical standpoint. Now, I think what stands out here is our focus on CTV and brand safety, fraud and getting independent accreditation, having third parties validate that we're delivering what we say we're delivering. We've really created the standard for measurement in CTV, just as we've done in other channels. Now, our strategy hasn't changed. It's going to continue to be all about scale, innovation and trust, because we believe that these things work together in a way that gives us a unique advantage in the creation and the rollout and the adoption of our products. Now, if we think about 2022, you know, we're gonna continue to focus on areas that are driving value for our customers, growth of our business.
You've heard about where we are today. I'll talk about some shifts from where we are now to where we're going, and there are a few things that we're really excited about. We're going to continue to cover more of the media plan. The acquisition of OpenSlate is an example of that. We're very happy with how that integration is going. We're on schedule in getting OpenSlate fully integrated. We're continuing our expansion of social with TikTok, Twitter, and others we will announce shortly. We're also expanding sector coverage with more gaming and audio. Innovation doesn't stop. We've already moved from just measuring Fully On-Screen to allowing customers to target away from ads that aren't Fully On-Screen or the TV is off.
We'll also continue to expand coverage with other kinds of CTV releases. Because we have the only highly scaled attention product in the market, we believe that we have the opportunity to help our customers define what attention means to them and what it means in the market. This is a greenfield market opportunity. We're expanding the feature set of attention and getting that data in the hands of more of our customers. Finally, trust, it remains important. It's going to remain important for us. We're not media sellers. We're an independent, unbiased company that's helping our customers drive better media outcomes, and we will continue to work with third parties to prove it. You know, we're working on another step change in accreditation that hopefully we'll talk to you about shortly.
I hope all of this gives you a little bit of a sense of how scale, innovation, and trust drive our product and our business. Now I'm gonna hand it over to Dan. Dan's gonna talk about our platform and product architecture. You're also gonna get to see some of our products that are really driving our growth. Thank you. It's been great to be here.
Showing you some of our solutions in action, which I think is gonna be the highlight of the presentation, so buckle up. Real quick, our product architecture spans the media transaction for advertisers. On the left, you can see we cover programmatic pre-campaign activation all the way through to post-campaign measurement. It also addresses the supply-side needs of platforms and publishers. Today, we're gonna demo three unique product areas: DV Authentic Attention, OpenSlate, and DV Programmatic Analytics. A big part of the demonstration is gonna be a focus on use cases for the customers that use these solutions and the core benefits to those constituents. Authentic Attention. Again, core verification speaks to media quality, and in our case, this is the Authentic Ad. Quality is a measure of an ad's potential to perform.
If you think about it, we're cutting out fraud, we're ensuring that it's in view, that it's suitable for the brand, et cetera, and it sets a baseline for any impressions or any ad opportunities that qualify for purchase. Actual ad performance is a function of other variables on top of quality, and those include ad creative and relevancy, how good the page or the app environment is at maximizing the impact of the ad and encouraging user engagement, et cetera, et cetera. Because all of that drives brand awareness, brand favorability, and conversion events. These are the outcomes that advertisers are investing in. As Jack noted, we're leading the industry. We're shifting the paradigm of what verification means from media quality to predictive media performance. This is a big deal for the company.
It sets a new yardstick for the verification category, it increases our competitive lead, and it lets us deliver value that is perfectly aligned with why brands advertise in the first place. We call it Authentic Attention. Authentic Attention is a data overlay to Authentic Ad, so it's a performance overlay to anything that meets that quality baseline. It applies two additional measures to any of that inventory which qualifies as an Authentic Ad. These measures are exposure and engagement. In this segment, my colleague, Gian LaVecchia, who's our SVP of Branded Advertiser Partnerships, will walk you through a demo of the solution, highlighting key use cases for how attention can be used to maximize campaign outcomes. With that, we'll roll. Whoops.
Hello, my name is Gian LaVecchia, and I'm the Managing Director of the Americas at DoubleVerify, and I'm thrilled to be able to share with you today one of DV's most exciting product propositions, DV Authentic Attention. As noted, the DV Authentic Ad sits at the cornerstone of DV's market-leading proposition as the singular and definitive measure of media quality, ensuring each and every impression is viewable, brand safe, fraud free, and delivered in the geography intended. I often refer to the DV Authentic Ad as our atomic unit, and it's been catalytic to our growth over the last several years. Now that we've established the highest caliber of media quality as the baseline, we're uniquely positioned to extend into new performance realms to truly understand what are the specific drivers of campaign performance. That is the foundation of authentic attention. How do we measure the impact of attention?
First, we start with the attention index, which is based on 50+ data signals calculated in real time across the entirety of the digital and video media mix. The attention index is powered by two specific performance indices. First, the exposure index, which is focused on measuring both the prominence and intensity of the ad experience, including measures such as viewable time, video presentation, as well as understanding what the share of screen is. On the other side of the spectrum, we've got the engagement index, which is primarily focused on answering two specific questions. Number one, establishing user presence, and two, understanding the depth and scope of user interaction with the ad.
As you can already see, the DV Authentic Attention solution extends well beyond the traditional scope of viewability, as we first confirm the user is present at the device when the ad is viewable, and from there, we capture any and all ad interactions. Those signals extend across ad, device, browser, et cetera. For example, would include things such as on a mobile device, understanding swipe and scroll behaviors, manipulating your mobile device from landscape to portrait, starting or stopping a video, turning audio on or off. This level of insight equips marketers with significant intelligence to extract the full potential out of their creative and digital marketing investments. Today we're gonna look at two specific use cases in action. First, one focused on campaign optimization, and the next on post-campaign analytics.
As the quadrant is pulled up here, we see the engagement index identified on the x-axis, the exposure index on the y-axis. As a quick reminder, engagement again is focused on establishing user presence and understanding the depth of ad interaction. Exposure, again, is focused on both measuring prominence and intensity of the ad experience. As we look towards the top of the chart here, we're seeing our indices laid out from attention index, exposure, and engagement. Of course, anything delivered above 100 indicates media, sites, or placements that have exceeded average performance. That comparison can be across all measured impressions or category-specific views to equip marketers with the ability to understand how they're performing against their competitive set. Of course, anything delivered below 100 indicates media, sites, or placements that are delivering below expectations or below average.
Let's see how this works. Here's an example of a campaign that from an overarching diagnostic perspective appears to be performing quite well, with an authentic viewable rate of 68%, an attention index score of 102, engagement index of 108. There's certainly an opportunity to improve performance against exposure measures. Let's see if we can understand what's driving this. As we see here, we're honing in on sites and specific apps, and as we look towards the lower left quadrant, we see low engagement and low exposure being attached to the site with the largest volume of impression delivery, driving the lowest score within this particular campaign. Now as we look to the top right quadrant, we're also seeing a number of sites that have smaller volumes but are consistently driving both high exposure and high engagement scores.
Two optimizations that would emerge from this analysis, of course, would be to shift media spend from those lower-performing properties to the strongest. Another insight would be to leverage this intel to establish private marketplaces or direct buys specifically with those strongest-performing partners. Again, the idea is to extract the full potential out of the intelligence that you're being equipped with to drive maximum impact in market. When we look at video, the analysis is a little bit different. Again, the focus is to understand what actionable insights can be gleaned to help maximize performance. As we look at the top-line measures, you're seeing quite strong performance. Left to right, an attention index of 228, an exposure index of 178, and an engagement index of 230. While this is quite strong, there's always an opportunity for improvement. Let's dig in.
Here we'll first start with cross-device delivery, all types. Again, when we look at that macro view, again, strong performance across the board. 228 attention index, 230 engagement index, and a 178 exposure index score. When we dig in a little bit more specifically, you're seeing completion rates that are strong throughout each and every one of the 4 quartiles, beginning with a 97% in the first quartile and completing at 87% completion at the fourth quartile. Further, when we're looking at viewability and audibility scores, those both sustain strong levels throughout the 4 quartiles. Now let's take a deeper look, and why don't we shift the delivery type to focus on smartphone web? When we do so, the performance narrative evolves a little bit.
As you can see here, we're seeing a significant drop in performance as it related to the index of attention, exposure, and engagement. Let's take a closer look. Again, on smartphone web, we're seeing completion and viewability rates that were both sustained and strong from first quartile to the last, beginning with 95% completion rate and concluding with an 81%. Viewability beginning with 96% in the first quartile, ending with 76% in the fourth quartile. This is where the story changes a little bit. When we hone in on audibility, you're seeing low scores from start to finish. Some easy optimization recommendations that would come out of this is leverage this insight and intel to inform creative strategy and development efforts. Since the majority of this is focused on mobile web, we have to recognize what the consumer experience is.
Again, think about the role of audio. Think about the role of text. Think about how you're optimizing creative for the screen it's being consumed on. At the end of the day, Authentic Attention is a market-leading proposition that is fully differentiated from DV's competitive set in the brand safety, suitability, and verification set, empowering marketers with the greatest level of intelligence to maximize the true impact of their media efforts. Informing them with insights such as which sites are driving the greatest level of impact for their business, leveraging that site intel to develop the private marketplace deals with some of the top marketers and publishers in the industry. Understanding how you can optimize the creative experience and understand what headline, call to action, and imagery is really driving the greatest impact for your business. As you saw, we went through a device delivery analysis.
Having that level of rigor and focus helps you understand what components of the media mix are driving the greatest level of impact, and then understanding how to maximize cost with the development of PMP deals to understand how you're actually getting the most out of your dollars. Again, differentiated, market leading, and at the forefront of where this industry is headed. Thank you so much for the time. Have a wonderful day. Let's build a better industry.
Thank you for that, Gian. We consider this an audience 2.0 solution that is privacy-friendly, does not rely on cookies or personal identifiers, and is absolutely on the right side of history in terms of power and performance. Next up, I wanna talk a little bit about OpenSlate. Content consumption is evolving from binge-watching the latest season of Ozark to live streaming sports or learning the latest dance moves with your kids. Nowhere is this more apparent than on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch, just to name a few. Advertisers are keen to adapt their online promotion to these new and growing arenas. That's why we recently combined with OpenSlate, a pre-campaign contextual targeting platform that lets brands align their advertising with suitable or contextually relevant content across the top social video and CTV environments.
OpenSlate solution provide insight into the nature and quality of ad-supported content on large video-driven social platforms. OpenSlate evaluates video for brand safety, for suitability and context, and offers customers proven pre-campaign activation controls to ensure that they can effectively target the most appropriate and impactful content. In the segment we're about to see, Mike Henry, our SVP of Commercial Ops and former CEO of OpenSlate, is gonna provide an overview of their solutions, and he'll walk you through a demo of the platform, demonstrating how these solutions complement DV's offerings, ultimately helping us deliver on our objective to verify everywhere.
Hi, I'm Mike Henry, Founder and CEO of OpenSlate. As ad spend continues to shift towards platforms, marketers are grappling with an increasingly complex content environment. The stakes are especially high for video ad spend, as large media budgets move from highly curated linear environments to massively complex ones on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and myriad CTV players. Compared to linear TV, controlling the context in which ads are delivered on digital platforms is much more complicated. YouTube alone has over 4 million ad-supported channels, and 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute. Choosing the right content and avoiding the wrong content is complex and increasingly important in a privacy-constrained ecosystem. Importantly, more than half of an advertiser's media spend goes to creators, and the long tail of monetized content is growing.
With the rising focus on responsible media buying, it's more important than ever for advertisers to ensure they're supporting reputable content and creators. OpenSlate addresses these challenges by providing marketers with comprehensive contextual analytics and reliable targeting tools that ensure they achieve their desired outcomes on these fast-growing platforms. Our products offer three main benefits for advertisers. The first is brand protection. Our customized pre-campaign targeting models give clients discrete preemptive control over where their ads run and ensure that advertising messages won't be adjacent to subject matter that's harmful to their brand image. Second, OpenSlate's full-featured contextual advertising platform, which I'll demo in a minute, enables clients to maximize message alignment. Our products empower advertisers to balance suitability, relevance, and scale with confidence across platforms. More than just brand safety, content matters to performance, and OpenSlate delivers more than $7 in savings for every $1 of data cost.
Third is consistency. OpenSlate's content rating system lets advertisers streamline activation across disparate content sets, which saves them time and enables them to make more informed contextual decisions across media platforms. Our solution is powered by cookie-free contextual analytics and a rating system that first launched in 2013. There are three core components to our platform. First, OpenSlate has unparalleled access to data through digital content platform integrations, including with YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, and more on the way in 2022. Each day, we ingest and analyze over a billion ad-supported videos. Next, we've developed a purpose-built data science platform that normalizes contextual analytics to consistently describe the nature and quality of content and creators. This allows us to provide differentiated but standard metrics between media buyers and sellers, including creator-level categorization and the Slate Score, which is our proprietary quality metric.
Third, we've built trusted relationships with some of the world's largest advertisers and integrations within platform advertising delivery systems that make it easy for our clients to activate data sets across campaigns and across different platforms. So far, since 2018, OpenSlate has powered more than $3 billion in media spend. With the development of Content OS, we set out to bring transparency to social media content and develop tools to control and optimize contextual adjacency. Our software suite, Content OS, has 4 points of entry, ranging from pre-campaign contextual analytics and content model development to live campaign monitoring and post-campaign reporting. Today, we'll look at ratings and engagements. This is OpenSlate Ratings. We're looking at content from YouTube, where today we're measuring almost 4 million ad-supported channels and almost 1 million videos.
It's a lot of content, and it's the kind of content that you need data to help unpack and understand from an advertising perspective. From a content perspective, oftentimes advertisers want to dig a little deeper into the nature and quality of that content to understand what's good and what's potentially not good for their brand, which is why we invented this lens into the software. Ratings has a lot of search and browsing and filtering features that can let advertisers narrow millions of channels down to a very few very quickly. Inside this tool, you'll see our most well-known proprietary metric, the Slate Score. The Slate Score is on a scale of one to 50 and measures channels on things like engagement and consistency and influence. It's a good starting point for most brands, as is our suitability ratings.
We have some generalized suitability ratings that help advertisers narrow the content set further. Really where we spend most of our time on safety and suitability is in developing algorithms that describe more discreetly the kind of content that some advertisers want to avoid. It's different on a brand-by-brand basis. What this is actually a model development software. By researching this content, we can work with advertisers to put a pin in exactly the kind of content that they want to avoid, but also the kind of content that they want to find. There's enough of both on YouTube to make it interesting. We can narrow by language or country, and we can narrow by size.
What's really fun about this tool is when you use it to search, and since barbecue season is coming up, we'll search for barbecue. Now from an already very curated subset of content, we're looking at an even shorter list of channels that are high quality, brand safe, and touch on barbecue content. I'll just click on one of these so you can see what a profile looks like here. Again, this is an individual profile for an individual channel on YouTube called Guga Foods. The idea is you don't know these channels because there's so many of them, but at a glance, you can quickly understand did I run my ad or should I run my ad against a particular type of content. Is this appropriate for what I'm trying to achieve in my campaign?
You'll see that this channel, Guga, has a Slate Score of 49.2. It's on a scale of 1 to 50. It's a very high-quality channel based on metrics like consistency and engagement. Generally suitable, which means there's no flags for anything that an advertiser might find offensive. You can see general metrics from directly out of YouTube, as well as links to the most recent most watched videos. You can actually watch them inside of our software along with our analysis of the video. We can also see this channel in comparison to other channels in the category, and in this case, they're obviously doing very well. That's just one channel inside of OpenSlate Ratings. Back on the main page of Ratings here, you can start to get a sense of how this becomes a pre-campaign contextual targeting tool.
The data inside of Ratings is updated every day. The models that we build here are also updated every day, and so effectively, the videos and the channels against which a campaign may be running changes every day. But as a model development tool, you can see that all of these different filters can be set up in perpetuity for both positive and negative targeting, right? Whether it's Slate Score, suitability, certain elements of suitability, any kind of content that you want to target, or focus on size, language, we can program all that in here. Once that model is set, that model runs every day, and it's there, then connected to the media buying platforms. That's where the magic happens, and that's where OpenSlate Engagements picks up on the action.
This is OpenSlate Engagements, and this is where the data that we take out of the ad buying system connects with our model data. A campaign's been created. It's running inside of YouTube. We get live data from YouTube, in this case, on where the ad is delivering and how it's pacing. That's important because we're making contextual optimizations to the campaign all the time. We use this data to make sure that the optimizations are creating increases in delivery and enhancements in performance. You can see CTV, the pacing of the campaign, the daily spend target, the overall media budget here, $650,000. You know, our team can see how changes that we make to the media plan result in different delivery characteristics.
With OpenSlate, DoubleVerify has the ability to expand coverage and accelerate revenue growth in social, CTV and beyond, helping to support the vision of verification everywhere. We've already done preliminary research which demonstrates that when OpenSlate's pre-bid targeting solutions are paired with DV's post-bid measurement products, we can deliver improved outcomes for our customers. On YouTube, we saw that when OpenSlate targeting models are applied to campaigns, brand suitability incidents can be reduced by half. We expect to be able to drive even better advertising outcomes for customers as the operational integration progresses. OpenSlate's platform and data extends DV's coverage of social video and CTV. By combining our approach to measuring content, we'll extend continuity for clients and advance DV's ability to drive campaign efficacy through attention-driven measurement. The integration is already underway, and we're actively working to capitalize on both immediate and long-term revenue opportunities.
DV's powerful commercial organization and global coverage will quickly connect the OpenSlate solution to hundreds of new customers. That's just the tip of the iceberg. There's no question that together we have the best-in-class solution for contextual measurement and targeting and a clear path towards strong revenue growth.
Thank you, Mike. With OpenSlate, we have a pre and post solution in all environments that is truly without peer. Last but not least, I wanna talk a little bit about Programmatic Analytics. According to eMarketer, this year in the U.S., programmatic display ad spend is predicted to be 90% of total digital display ad spend. Programmatic has emerged as the dominant buying modality, full stop. For those pulling the levers on programmatic buys, supply chain transparency is essential and sometimes hard to come by, given the range and diversity of inventory sources available within the programmatic bid stream. To address this requirement, DoubleVerify launched its Programmatic Analytics capability, which lets advertisers maximize their media investments by giving them supply path insights and quality monitoring.
Through programmatic analytics, brands can identify issues like domain mismatch, which basically means is the property you think you're buying, which is represented in the bid stream, actually that property or is it something else that's been spoofed as a spoof domain? This feedback loop empowers traders to improve campaign effectiveness through pre-bid optimizations on the front foot. This dashboard and the insights it provides is a big differentiator for DV. In this segment, my colleague, Steve Mougis, who is our Chief Revenue Officer, will demo the product, demonstrate how it works, and talk about how it benefits DV's customers. Let's roll the demo.
Hi, I'm Steve Mougis. I'm the Global Chief Revenue Officer at DV. I've been working at DoubleVerify since 2012, and as CRO, I lead our sales and account management teams globally. Before becoming CRO, I ran DV's programmatic sales team for 6 years. I'm excited to speak to you about a really important solution in the DV product suite called Programmatic Analytics. Programmatic Analytics is an advanced reporting platform that uniquely provides advertisers an end-to-end view of their programmatic investments. As many of you know, Pinnacle has been the foundation of our business for many years. It provides advertisers with visibility into their campaign's overall media quality and performance. Programmatic Analytics is different, though. It powers the next level of transparency by linking DV data directly to the DSP.
At a high level, Pinnacle can show an advertiser everything they need to know about what happened with their ads, specifically from a brand safety, fraud, viewability, and attention perspective, but only programmatic analytics can look into the DSP ecosystem and tell them exactly how their ad was purchased and identify specific inefficiencies across the supply chain. Let's look further at how programmatic analytics differentiates itself from reporting that a buyer would get natively in a DSP or from another traditional verification reporting company. A DSP can only tell a buyer what site they actually purchased from the exchange and who sold them the inventory. They can't tell them where the ad actually ran because they don't have a tag on the page, which means they only see the auction domain. Again, the domain that was passed to them by the exchange.
Now on the flip side, traditional verification reporting companies can tell a buyer where the ad ran because it has the tag on the page, but it can't tell them what the auction domain was, which makes it impossible for them to identify when they're experiencing domain mismatch or domain spoofing, which is the common type of fraud that we see in the programmatic environment. Only programmatic analytics can answer all of the critical questions and provide transparency into what site did an advertiser purchase, who sold it to them, where did it actually run, and how did it perform? Buyers use this information to gain total supply path transparency with the trust of an independent third party. They drive media quality and performance across their campaigns, and they reduce waste by executing easy-to-implement optimizations with pre-bid.
Let's jump into the platform and do a quick demonstration. As I mentioned before, one of the most valuable benefits of Programmatic Analytics is the ability to understand the relationship between what an advertiser purchased, the auction domain, and where the ad actually ran, the delivery domain. Any discrepancy between the two is considered domain mismatch or domain spoofing. It's important to understand that not all domain mismatch is nefarious, but it is a very common type of fraud that we see in the programmatic environment. In this example, you can see that the advertiser is purchasing auction domain 215, okay? However, their ad is running on delivery domain 350. It's not surprising that we're seeing elevated levels of blocking across this domain scenario, and we can see that many of the blocks are coming from brand suitability.
Now if you were to remove Programmatic Analytics from the equation, an advertiser would have no understanding of how to prevent their ads from running on delivery domain 350. They would likely attempt to place it on an exclusion list. Remember, this will not prevent their ad from showing up here because they're actually buying auction domain 215 from the exchange. Only Programmatic Analytics connects all of the dots and surfaces the insight that both domains should be placed on the exclusion list. Let me jump over to a case study and show you how this drives ROI for a brand. This is a real client case study, but I swapped out the domains to reference the demo that you just saw. This shows how a client used Programmatic Analytics and ABS together to optimize their campaigns.
This client had a 15% block rate on delivery domain 350. They went into Programmatic Analytics and found that the auction domain was different, so this was a case of domain mismatch. What they actually needed to do was not only place the delivery domain on the exclusion list, but also add the auction domain to the exclusion list as well. This optimization immediately decreased blocking by 80%. The campaign stabilized, and they had a 3% block rate moving forward. This drove significant savings for the client. Let's model this out and look at a ROI calculator to show you how much this can actually impact a client's bottom line. In this client scenario, let's say the advertiser purchased 1 billion impressions at a $5 media CPM.
The cost of the campaign would be $5 million. Now, with the 15% block rate, the advertiser would have blocked 150 million impressions and only had the opportunity to serve 850 million. The cost associated with the 150 million blocked impressions would be $750,000, which is media waste. The actualized ECPM for this campaign is $5.88. Now, after the programmatic analytics optimization, which brought the block rate down to 3%, the advertiser would have been able to serve 970 million impressions, which is an incremental 120 million impressions. The cost associated with the incremental 120 million impressions is $600,000, which is a gross value increase on the campaign. The actualized media CPM is $5.15.
The value of this optimization to the client is $600,000, which would absolutely go a long way to driving campaign performance. Thanks for letting me walk you through programmatic analytics. We definitely share the same enthusiasm that all of our clients have for the platform, and we continue to invest in the platform moving forward. We're really excited about some of the innovations that we're gonna be bringing to the market in the next couple of years, and we know that programmatic analytics will continue to differentiate DoubleVerify from the competition. Thanks again.
Thank you so much, Steve. All right, in closing, you know, we've shown a track record of continuous innovation as Jack walked us through, that perfectly aligns with our customers' current and emerging requirements. It's why we consistently win in head-to-head tests with our competitors, and why we were awarded 80% of tenders that we participated in last year. With that, I'm gonna take a pause. We're gonna take approximately a 20-minute break. We ask that you guys are back in your seats at around 10:55, at which point my colleague, Nicola Allais, our CFO, will walk you through some financials. Thanks.
Thanks. I have a short period of time today. We are talking again on March 8 on the actual results for 2021, and we'll go through much greater detail. Today what I'm gonna do is after you heard the vision, the execution, the product demos, I'm just gonna show you how this translates into our financial results. I'll go through Q4 and fiscal year 2021 results, dive a little bit into the business drivers and KPIs. There are some KPIs here that, you know, we told you we'd give you on a yearly basis. This is when we will present them to you. We'll go into the guidance for fiscal year and Q1 2022, and then a little bit on the revenue model definition. It's just clarifications more than a really big change.
At the end of my session, Mark will join me for Q&A, which sounds like the appropriate time to do that Q&A. By the way, you'll see slides here that Mark actually took and put in his presentation. This was supposed to be a lot of highlights, but he's already stole some of them. That's okay. We had a very strong fourth quarter. We had revenue growth of 34%, EBITDA margin of 38%. We generated $106 million of revenue, $40 million of EBITDA. This is ahead of the expectations that we had discussed at the beginning at the end of the third quarter.
Let me just briefly explain how, you know, where we ended up, which is a very good result. On the revenue side, we had talked about supply chain disruptions. They did not have a material impact on our results. We are very diversified across several of the sectors, and that really helped mitigate what could have been a bigger impact on our business. Just a note on OpenSlate. We did close it in the quarter, late in the quarter. It did not have a material impact on our revenue.
What really happened in the quarter is a continued acceleration of ABS upsell, strong end of the quarter on core programmatic as a whole, as Mark already mentioned. This section grew 45% for the year, and at the end of the fourth quarter was really good. On the profitability side, 38% margin, obviously higher than where we were trending for the first three quarters and where we ended for the year. That's not a surprise. It's very much in line with how we show every year, the fourth quarter being a higher percent margin than the rest of the prior three quarters. Really strong fourth quarter, which translates into a very strong 2021 results. It's 36% revenue growth. It's a 33% margin for the business.
The 36 compares to 34 in 2020, sorry, and the 33% margin compares to 30% margin. We continue to scale at a higher profitability rate. We grew faster than the industry, which is kind of the underpinning of our strategy, right? Digital advertising grew at about 30%, as Mark mentioned before. We grew at 36%. Really, really strong. What drove these results? This will be familiar to you who follow the company. Vast majority of our business is measured media transaction fees. This is for about 90% of our business on the advertiser side. Some new stats here. Mark already mentioned the 4.5 trillion transactions that we measured in 2021, versus 3.2 in 2020.
We're volume-led. That's our strategy. It's by design, right? We're going after as many impressions we can measure as possible. The media transaction fee is relatively stable. It's a 2% CAGR over this period. It went down a little bit in 2021 versus 2020. If you do the math, this is by design, and it's working for us. We're willing to take the MTF impact of the aggressive growth internationally, which is really why this MTF is slightly down in 2021 to offset the huge volume growth that we have on MTM. This is really MTM-driven with an MTF that's relatively stable. We do anticipate this to keep going up or down based on either continued expansion internationally, which would bring MTF down, and upsell of premium products, which would bring MTF up.
That's the story for what drove the 2021 performance. We'll go deeper into it again when we have our earnings call. I think this is important to put it in the context of the last three years. If you look at the trajectory over the last three years, I'm gonna move over so you can see it. Strong growth over the whole period. One number that you know we feel really strongly about that kind of shows the scale that we've achieved very fast is that Q4 revenue will be bigger than all of 2018 revenue. Rapid scale, really fast in one quarter. Last quarter, we're as big as we were in all of 2018. What are the basis for this?
This is a very attractive core unit economics, right? Net revenue retention ended up at 126 in 2021, up from 123, consistently best in class. On the gross revenue retention side, we're basically flat at a very high level at 98% versus 97%. This is the model that we have. Once we have a client, we grow with them, they stay with us, and we're able to upsell them to additional products, which is why this stat is really the one that's the underpinning of how well we're doing. Very good metrics. I know we told you we would give you these on an annual basis, and I think you can see that it's all going in the right direction.
Now in addition to strong revenue growth, we have strong profitability. Same idea here. If you put the EBITDA in the context of the last three years, we have very strong margins, right? You have that 38%, 30%, 33%. In terms of how rapidly we've grown, Q4 2021 EBITDA of $40 million is well above where we were in all of 2018 at $27 million. These margins are very high. That is not because we are not investing in the business. We've continued to invest in the growth of the business. We are over 800 employees today. We're only 300 employees at the end of 2018. That cost, right, is what's it's an investment that's driving the growth and the profitability of the business.
The reason we're able to still achieve the level of EBITDA that we have is because the non-GAAP OpEx number is still fairly low, right? We ended up at 51% of revenue on the non-GAAP OpEx number and 16% of revenue on the cost of sales. Cost of sales is up a little bit between 2021 and 2022 for two reasons. One is more revenue is now on the programmatic side where we have a revenue share with our DSP partners. Also, just to make a point here, we do consider cost of sales an investment area. We're investing in cloud computing and ability for us to mix and match a little bit of data center hosted versus cloud hosted.
That is not a purely variable number based on revenue. We are investing through cost of sales. We're continuing to invest. We're still at over a 30% margin, a very profitable business. Strong cash flow generation. In addition to being very profitable, lots of cash being generated. We generate $83 million from operating activities in 2021. That's four times what we did in 2020. If you look on the other side of the slide, if you add CapEx, it's fairly minimal. It's $10 million each year. This is not a very capital-intensive business.
Even after CapEx, you're looking at $73 million of cash generated in 2021. We clearly are generating enough cash to fund our own operations, which if you combine with the cash balance that we have at the end of 2021, which was $222 million, and no long-term debt. This is the slide that Mark stole from me, but it's worth redoing. $73 million generated on our operations, $222 million of cash, and zero long-term debt. Obviously, the acquisition strategy here is well-defined on the prior sections with Mark, and this gives us a lot of opportunities to use M&A as an accelerator of our core strategy. Really strong.
I mean, we're exiting 2021 feeling really good, like we kind of delivered what we thought we would deliver. A lot of these slides kind of look the same, but, you know, tacking on 30% and 30% every year when you started at $100 million and you're now, well over $300 million, you know, it's not a small feat. I think it's based on the fact that our model is recurring, very predictable. Once we have a customer, we don't lose them, and you can see the benefit of that in the scale that we've achieved. Quick on 2021. 2022 guidance. We're gonna guide to a revenue range of $429-$437 million and EBITDA of $126-$134 million.
I think the numbers that obviously are important to look at is year-over-year growth of 30% at the midpoint and an EBITDA margin of 30%. That will be the fourth year with this guidance where we're able to achieve those two metrics. As I said, it's on a growing scale. It becomes, you know, it's more challenging to be able to maintain those, but we feel very good that, based on the economics that, I just described on the unit side, that, you know, we will be able to achieve this. It's another guidance, another year where we anticipate a 30-30 for revenue growth and margin. Q1, we are guiding to a revenue between $89 million and $91 million and EBITDA between $21 million and $23 million.
Let me just pause a second because the two percentages there are different than what we have for the full year. 33% growth versus 30% for the year. Q1 2021, obviously tougher comps over there because of the impact of COVID, which was, as I'll remind you, pretty minor on our business, but still, the advertisers were not spending at full speed. You have a higher revenue growth rate in Q1 than you have for the full year for that reason. 24% margin versus 30% for the year. We talked about this when we had the Q3 earnings call. The OpenSlate acquisition is coming at a lower margin than our overall business. It was a smaller business.
We obviously like it a lot, and you've seen the product demo, but it does start at a lower margin, basically just around break even at this point. We are going to take our time to absorb those operations into our broader scale operations. It will depress our margins a little bit at the beginning of the year, but we are guiding to 30% for the full year. We anticipate to be able to integrate those operations and get back to a 30% margin for the full year. That's the reason why these two guidance numbers here in Q1 would be different than the full year. In terms of growth drivers, this again will not be a surprise. We're not changing strategy. It's working very well for us. This is gonna be volume-led growth.
What will drive MTMs up? Additional social CTV volumes, additional global expansion. The key ones would be those. There's obviously a lot more, but those are the ones that are gonna continue to be a strong driver of MTM growth. On the MTM fees, again, relatively stable over the last three years. It goes up a little bit, goes down a little bit. What will help increase MTF is premium price products that we're able to tack on to the core suite of products that we have. Mark talked about the fact that, you know, it's about 40% that are only using 4 or more products. There's a lot of upside there where we're able to kind of continue up that slope that Mark showed from one-time multiplier to 10 times multiplier.
The other way is global expansion, which is by design again. You know, outside of the U.S., CPMs are lower, which leads to a lower MTF. As we've seen this year, we had very strong results allowing MTM to grow very fast and allowing MTF to kind of just remain fairly stable, and that's the idea for 2022 as well. That's the expectation that we have for 2022. Revenue model. So this, I just wanna spend a moment on this. Not a big change, not a wholesale change, but based on everything that you heard from Mark, we're going to change the nomenclature a little bit when we get into the 2022 reporting cycle. So starting with Q1 2022. This will be very familiar to you, right?
91% of our revenue comes from advertiser, 9% from platform and publishers. We're going to focus on this row here. We are moving to talk about activation and measurement, right? From a terminology perspective, that's what we're going to be discussing. The measurement part is our post-campaign activation, our post-campaign activity. This is where the integrations are on the direct side and the social and CTV side. That is what's currently called direct, right? This will become a measurement category still with direct integration and with the walled gardens. On the activation side, this is the pre-campaign. This is where programmatic is. This is what we were calling programmatic up until now. What's gonna change in 2022 is that we have, with the acquisition of OpenSlate, kind of launched this pre-campaign planning activity for social and CTV.
OpenSlate will go into this bucket, we're gonna rename them, but frankly this is, you know, to keep an eye on where things were in the past, this is where you should look. It's direct on that side and programmatic on this side. This is not going to lead to a restatement. We do not anticipate any of this because this is brand new. The numbers will remain what they are. As of 2022 in Q1, this is how we're going to speak to our business. It reflects much more the vision and the product roadmap that we talked about earlier today. This will still be MTF of course, and times MTM, and then the publisher and platform side, there won't be any changes. I obviously went extremely fast.
I wanna give you the takeaway slide, right? 'Cause the numbers are very good. You know, 2021 rapid growth at scale, $333 million of revenue, 36% growth. Excellent customer retention. Julie will have a few slides on customer profile and how that's growing and scaling over time. The attractive core economics, I mean, that's a big number for us, right? It actually went up since last year, 126. That's really what's driving the recurrent part of our business. Highly profitable, 33% margin, and a strong balance sheet. Again, the 36 and 33 is in line with the guidance that we're giving now, it's 4 years in a row that we're gonna be able to show those two numbers and, you know, it's because the recurring nature of the business is really, really strong.
With that, I'm gonna have Mark join me as well. We can take Q&A right now. We're gonna take chairs.
We are gonna sit down.
We're gonna sit down and be ready.
We have to be prepared.
We have to be prepared. That's right. Do we need Tejal?
Tejal, can you join us up here? Tejal's gonna moderate the questions 'cause she has-
She's also taking questions.
We'll take questions.
From the virtual crowd.
From the virtual crowd and from the folks in the room.
Go ahead.
So...
Sure.
I'll ask. I'll just ask two first up. The first one is, one of the things that, COVID accelerated was moving to screens and e-commerce, buying everything online. One of the ways people are solving or also solving, I think, as sort of drive to get rid of the proxy and just go drive to commerce, is we're gonna see this convergence of advertising commerce. My question is, does that shrink your TAM? 'Cause as e-commerce is the endpoint of the ad, that gets even a better idea than modeling and accuracy, which is what you're trying to do at the brand level. Could you talk about your total addressable market at this point in the advertising world, even if it's-
Yeah. No, it's a very interesting perspective. I think that. Well, two things to think about. The first is a vast amount of commerce still happens outside of the e-commerce world, right? The connection between the ad and driving that, whether it's buying a car or buying a refrigerator, has always been challenged. We think that TAM continues to be ripe for our growth. The second is that even within those e-commerce suites, i.e., you know, it's Amazon, right? The ability for Amazon to really play that. We serve a role, right? We have an increasing number of customers that are considered, I don't know, there's a name for the, you know, the retail advertising units.
Folks like Target and others who are building both advertising businesses and have strong commerce businesses. We work with those folks as well because although there's a direct connection between the ad and the outcome, there's still filtering that they wanna do. There's still sensitivity around, believe it or not, some types of commerce content that they don't wanna be around as well. We play a role in that universe as well. We actually like the fact that the outcome is right there as well because it creates an even direct connection with our product if we're in that cycle. We work with Amazon, we work with Target, we work with lots of large retailers who are building retail advertising networks as well who employ our products. I think we're part of that.
When we talk about TAM, and we get a lot of questions about TAM, you know, a couple of the announcements today we believe actually expand our TAM. The first is, as we look at what we're doing with Comscore, moving into the audience business, right? By looking at audience verification, gives us a whole new opportunity to be part of the reach and frequency world, right? That gives us an additional growth. As we look at attention, which you've heard a lot about today, which we couldn't be more excited, that's an entirely new categorization of data. Now, does it increase the TAM? Good question, whether a new metric increases the TAM.
What does increase the TAM, and you know this very well 'cause you live it and you love it, is the fact that all of that linear measurement that's gone on TV will eventually go away when linear, for the most part, goes away and becomes more digital. That makes the addressable market for digital metrics even larger. Like, we never played in that. We never played in linear television, right? And as that goes away and those dollars move to digital, it makes the TAM even bigger. I think what that means is, it's actually accelerated the growth of our TAM that we saw growing this beast. CTV is growing so much faster, it throws more dollars into the TAM period.
I think when we talk about the TAM question, we've got, you know, new products in the audience and attention space that help grow it. I think with regard to the really insightful take on e-commerce, we're playing a role in that right now, and I think it connects us close to the outcome too.
Okay. Should I just leave it there, Tejal? I had another one, but maybe not.
Ask another one. Come on.
The other one was social, CTV. Those were the two categories. Very interested in the fact that you're 42% penetration of the largest advertisers, and you didn't call out a core growth driver, the other 60% you don't have, and your product feels so world-class. Like, why aren't we at 80% penetration? Why isn't that a growth driver that you listed? Just curious.
I think why didn't we list it as a growth driver? I think the growth drivers that we listed were more sector-based rather than the product penetrations. I think the product penetration is obviously going to happen. I think it's happening you know as we continue to sell. I think we probably should have listed it. It was probably a mistake not to have it there. We were just mainly focused on the sectors because that's really where the work is where the OpenSlate acquisition is gonna get us there. The upsell is obviously a big deal. I mean in 2021 ABS was a very large part of our growth right? So what drove the growth in 2021 was also ABS.
I think the other product suites will continue to do the same kind of contribution to the overall MTM growth.
Yeah. I mean, look, we've you know, Dan shared the stat there. We won 80% of the competitive RFPs last year that we're involved in. I think that there are still you know. We know if we get out there and spend money getting out there, that we can continue to grow, right? Continue to grow particularly on the global front. It is a key driver. Adding new clients will grow. It is you know, the nice part about it is if the client is the beginning of everything.
Right.
Right? You know, Julie will share, you know, how we land and expand with these folks, because the growth factors that Nicola noted, as we add new sectors, as we add new products, those just pile on top of that client over time and create the accelerated growth. For sure, it's a core part of what we're doing. The lowest friction introduction is upselling our current clients, and we know we've got lots of room there too.
Yep.
We've got a roving mic. If you wanna ask a question, raise your hand, one of us will bring it to you. Otherwise.
Oh, all right.
Michael Graham from Canaccord Genuity. Thanks so much. Great presentation and a lot of great information. I had two questions. The first is just on CTV. It was one of your lower penetrated sort of opportunities. Could you just talk about some of the things that you need to do, some of the obstacles you need to overcome to kinda get that penetration higher? The second one is, you know, I think your rule of sixty financial profile is super attractive to a lot of folks. Just wondering, you know, the growth right now is so impressive as we get into, you know, the out years, and that growth rate inevitably comes down. Do you feel like the business model is geared to make up for some of that lost growth in margin expansion?
Mm-hmm. Wanna take that first?
Yeah, I'll take the first part. So, you know, we look at all under penetration as being an opportunity, and CTV is one of them. I think the progression of CTV and how it's bought is playing very nicely into our products and our product evolution. So if you think about CTV when it first came out, it was bought a lot like television, right? There was a lot of direct buying going on. When there's a direct buy between a buyer and a seller, you know, realistically, there's not a huge amount of demand for our solutions because you know what you're buying, you're buying it directly on that product. You know, when people bought TV, they didn't need brand safety for the most part, you know, unless someone swore during a live program, right?
You were okay. You know, as we've seen, more and more CTV inventory is starting to be bought programmatically. What that means is when something's bought and sold programmatically, there's a lot less transparency between the buyer and the seller, hence the application of our solutions, right? We see as more, a larger percentage of CTV gets bought and sold programmatically, even if it's bought via PMPs, there's an opportunity for us to insert our solutions in there like we do across all other media that's bought programmatically, video and display, et cetera. I think that's the first thing that will help drive and accelerate that percentage take on CTV. I think the second is just evolving metrics.
One thing that is clear, you know, as we look to verify everywhere and create consistent standards, what those standards are, and I think Jack even alluded to that, are different from screen to screen. Viewability is different on a CTV environment than it is in a mobile environment, than it is in a desktop. As we, you know, as we roll into these new media, we have to adopt and adapt our metrics accordingly. What's become really interesting for us and one that's started to really gain traction, if you saw a release we did about a month ago, is viewability in CTV was never really questioned very much because people said, "Hey, it's on a screen in someone's living room, right? That's viewability." Well, there were two things that we looked at that actually changed the metric and has helped accelerating our move into CTV.
The first is, the ad may have been delivered, but did it fully render, right? Did it run for the full quartile, or did someone change the channel? That was the first thing that we looked at, and people were like, "Yeah, okay, that's true. It may not have run the full gamut of the full extent." The second metric evolution that's helped us, you know, continue to accelerate our growth into CTV is really around what we call Fully On-Screen, right? What that is is was it running while the screen was on? This is something that we've found.
If you can go back to the old TV days, the cable box days, this was an issue with the first cable boxes, which you know, Nielsen dealt with this issue, lots of people dealt with this issue. Ads were running while cable boxes were on, but the TV set wasn't on, right? So it was a total screw up to the metrics. We're seeing the same thing with CTV now. Those are things that people didn't think about. Even when we launched into CTV a few years ago, we were still developing the metrics around. We see this now, and in some cases, you know, we were seeing as much as 25% of CTV impressions were not actually being delivered to a screen that was on, right?
It's a really long answer to the development of CTV. I think it is paralleling the development we've seen of other types of platforms and other types of media, right? We develop a metric, that metric evolves over time, and it's specific for that unit, and then that metric gets picked up and adopted by other folks in the industry. We look at that white space to fill on the CTV front as being one where we've got some of the right metrics now. People are really starting to understand what's happening. As the trend towards more programmatic buys there, it just leans into what we produce as well.
I think your second question on, you know, the drivers of the growth by volume versus fees, you know, we charge a fixed fee because that helps us get the volume, right? It's a seamless transaction, seamless decision for the advertiser. The volume growth that we're seeing and the under-penetration of our services tell us that we still have a lot to go there. It doesn't mean that the opportunity is not there, especially as we go into new sectors where the CPM is actually much higher, right? So the value prop of what people are paying for our service versus what they're paying on the media side is even greater. So it is there. It's an opportunity that it will remain. It's not something that we are extremely focused on in 2022 or even 2023, right?
Because we are upselling premium products, which does have a positive impact on MTF anyway, and the volume growth is just so strong still.
Yeah. I think one other thing to add there, too, which may also kind of provide some clarity, Michael, around your question is, you know, it gets tougher to grow on bigger numbers, as you always said. Like, you know, is there a place to play with EBITDA? You know, we didn't dig into it real deep here, but our cost model for measuring an incremental impression is so small. If you think about it, our core dataset that we use for all those products that we showed that build that beautiful graph that shows how many times we can make money off an impression, it's the same dataset, right? Authentic Attention is pulling from the same dataset that we built the Authentic Ad from around viewability, et cetera.
It's not like we have to go out and get new media or new raw materials. Our ability to continue to a, our cost of measuring that impression is really low, right? You saw what our, you know, our CapEx costs are incredibly low and our cost of goods is even smaller, right? Or is slightly larger, but it's certainly small. The second thing is that our ability to extract value from that dataset and extend it into multiple products is really only limited by our ability to actually be smart and do so, right? I think when we look at margins over time, there's not a lot of heavy lifting we need to do to continue to kind of expand on the same cost base.
Yep.
I've got the mic, so I guess I'll go. Two, please. Can you help us understand the potential size of social? If you think about UGC, there should be greater demand for brand safety tools on social platforms. Over time, can this be a bigger opportunity than the open web more broadly?
Yes. Short answer is yes, I believe, because... Look, there are challenges on both environments. You know, open web has lots and lots of URLs that people don't understand who they are or what's going on there. Social networks have lots and lots of people that no one understands what they're doing or what they're posting, right? They both are subject to random acts of bad behavior. I think the social business for us has continued to grow at a pace that's faster than our entire business, right? As a sector, it grows faster than our business. I think a lot of that is dependent upon our coverage, so ensuring we're where our clients want us to be, so as we get integrated to more and more platforms.
The efficacy of our products in those platforms and allowing us to have products that truly provide levels of brand suitability and brand safety that are valuable. You know, you saw during the demo what OpenSlate is able to do on a creator level, right? When you start looking at some of these social networks, it's the broader take on what happens in those networks and being able to see lots of things that happen through feeds. But sometimes it always boils down to looking at the actual creators themselves, right? That's what becomes really important. Net net, the answer is yes, we think social will continue to be a bigger part of our business and can be as large as our whole open internet business, as more and more dollars flow to those places as well.
For my second question, thinking about 50% of hiring in international markets, just logistically, like blocking and tackling, what do you guys have to do to unlock that spend where that starts to mirror the overall digital advertising kind of breakdown?
The nice part about our international expansion is we take a client-first lead, right? Because we've focused on the top 700 advertisers or so globally, those advertisers, for the most part, have resources everywhere, right? When we close a large advertiser who has operations around the world, that acts as our entree into those markets, right? You close a large CPG company who's based in the U.S., but has operations in India and around the world, we follow them into those markets, pick up their local brands in those markets, and grow from there. The idea around the actual on-the-ground implementation of resources has always been follow the client for us. As we move further and further into the executive suite, as we expand with those clients, we follow them into markets.
Taking the position, and we likely won't, of just, "Hey, let's throw 50 people into a market, right? And let's try to open up Southeast Asia." Right? No. It's like, "Let's follow, you know, Yahoo! Japan and into Japan and open up the Japanese market from that partnership there, because we already have a client there. Let's follow, you know, Mondelez, who's here today, who has this huge footprint in India. Let's follow our relationship with them into India and work with them there." It's been a client-first driven expansion, and it's worked really well for us to date.
Awesome. Thanks for having us, guys. Mark, I thought the part of your presentation about how post-campaign measurement solutions actually informed and drove the innovation on the pre-campaign side was pretty interesting. My question is, as you develop these pre-campaign solutions further and innovate on that front, is there a point where a brand may say that post-campaign measurement is actually not necessary because I'm taking care of it on the pre-campaign activation side? Is that a goal that you're driving towards given the pricing differential that exists in those activation solutions, or do you consider that more of a risk from maybe a cannibalization standpoint?
It's a great question, and I would say that the good thing about saying, "Hey, I'll just use pre-campaign and not use the post-campaign," is the way that we've tied the solutions together is that the learning that happens in the measurement side fuels the pre-campaign side. They work best together. That's the power of, like, for example, ABS, right? We have brand safety that stands alone, right? From our post-bid measurement solutions. ABS, which is now 50% of our programmatic business, takes fuel from the measurement and optimizes it through the cycle. All of our products get better with measurement on the other side. Remember, those are performance products we're talking a lot about.
When you look at quality and safety products, you always wanna have that last-mile safety blocker there to ensure that something doesn't get delivered that you don't want. That's where. Remember, we call it measurement, but it's really measurement and blocking. It's post you bought it, right? Even in programmatic platforms, remember, we have folks that buy on programmatic platforms but use our measurement and blocking on the other side, which helps inform and optimize, but it keeps anything from slipping through the DSP or the programmatic platform from being delivered. We think they work together really well. We've built them to work together really well, and I think, from an advertiser perspective, the measurement solutions, and remember, a lot of those are focused on quality and safety.
That's your last mile of protection, and no one's really gonna walk away from those at the end.
Mm-hmm.
I've got a question on fraud. Where is it originating from? Can you imagine a world in which regulators actually are able to combat the problem to a point where, you know, what you're doing may not be as necessary as it is today?
I'll answer the last part of that question with a "people still rob banks," right? Kind of answer. You know, no matter how well the enforcement gets on a federal or government level, there will always be bad players out there. Taking a step back to where does it come from? I would love to say this is some kid in his basement who figured out a way to steal money from, you know, an advertiser. It's not. These are sophisticated criminal enterprises that usually emanate from places in the world that are not friendly to the United States. At many levels, this money does not come and go into some guy's pocket someplace where, you know, he's happy to make $10,000. These are multimillion-dollar schemes that end up, in many cases, funding disinformation campaigns against democracies around the world.
These are not lightly produced kind of scams out there. There are, and we catch those as well, but these are sophisticated attempts, and that's why. Look, this is a constant game of Whac-A-Mole, and you see that, you know, multiple times a year, we'll find a new scheme that does something. We'll find another attempt at taking money or spoofing domains. This is not just about DV. It's a part of our business, but it's about the whole industry, right? That's why we welcome, you know, new efforts by folks like Roku, who are out there with their watermarking, you know, by our partners across the board and looking at how we can take fraud out of the ecosystem.
Because advertisers, you know, they don't want to waste their money. Like, this is just stealing money from them, and it's funding things that are not good for our country and not good for democracy. I know it sounds crazy, but that's it. I mean, this money goes into well-funded criminal enterprises that we would love to get greater engagement from authorities. A lot of times, though, by the time we're able to track it down and shut it down for our clients, those guys have moved on to someplace else. One last thing to note is that because we've been around this space so long, you know, people still go into banks with notes and guns, right? There's not much new when it comes to robbing a bank.
Same thing happens when we look at digital fraud. The same thing that we saw happening in display fraud moved to mobile, moved to CTV. We're able to look at those patterns over time, recognize them, and learn from them over time, the same way we learn. You know, how what brand suitability and, you know, issues are and viewability issues are, we see them with fraud too. There are patterns that we recognize, we put into the system, and we use them over time to be able to stop it.
Let's move on to the virtual audience. We've got a couple of questions from there, and we'll get to your question right after. Starting with a macro question, how do you read the tea leaves in macro as you go through this year as it relates to ad spend overall, and are you baking in any levels of conservatism given the geopolitical tensions?
Aren't there like really trained economists in this building somewhere who could? You know, look, we can't build our business, you know, based on exogenous things that we can't control. We know we have an incredibly important value proposition to advertisers, and that we continue to focus on that moving forward. Those advertisers, you know, spend based on their desires to sell products, and their desire to sell products never goes away, even when market challenges occur. The things that we like to focus on, and which, you know, Nicola alluded to, is a core part of our strategy moving forward when we look at those exogenous factors, is ensuring that we're well-diversified, right? Ensuring our spend is not only across multiple different sectors, but multiple different types of platforms too.
That's key to know because you hear a lot about, like, hey, you know, auto spend was down, there were supply chain issues around auto spend in Q4, and it killed a lot of folks. What it killed is it killed a lot of people who are focused on TV 'cause auto spends a lot on TV, right? They spend a lot on linear, they spend a lot on CTV. That, you know, a reliance on a certain sector also can sometimes be a reliance on a certain type of media. Because our advertisers spend across everything, so and we cover everything, so social, you know, mobile, display, CTV, video, that brings that allows us to kind of balance out that risk level. Because we're not concentrated on any one sector, that balances out as well.
I would love to be an expert at reading the tea leaves. You know, we never know. One black swan event seems to be happening on a yearly basis now as opposed to every, you know, 25 years. But I think we're really well-positioned to deal with whatever comes our way. Now we, you know, certainly are dependent on ad spend, not as a percentage of media, but as a number of impressions. So when spend goes down, in many cases, our business can be challenged. However, it's important to know we are a technology company, not a media company. CPMs to us, the cost of media does not impact the cost, what the cost of our product, right?
Even during COVID, when you saw revenue for all the big media companies, you know, pretty much collapse, remember, people were watching more media at that time than ever. What that meant is the number of actual impressions served was really high, just the supply-demand balance was out of balance, so the CPMs went down considerably. Our impression levels were still very high during COVID, you know, but because we charge a fixed fee per impression, we don't take a rev share or take rate, we were less impacted. The net-net is, I don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow. I don't think anybody does.
We, you know, we would hope for a continually growing economy and a continued stabilized world, but at the end of the day, we are as well-insulated as a tech company can be who's based on the advertising world, which is we've got diversification of portfolio kind of clients, we've got diversification of platforms, so not stuck on TV or CTV, and we've got a business model that is not dependent on the cost per unit or the rev share aspect of media. So the supply-demand imbalance doesn't really impact us as much.
Got it. The second question is on the Comscore partnership. The question is, can you give us an example of why and how an advertiser would use the new unified audience measurement product that you're going to be developing?
Yeah. Yeah, really it's the combination of our authentic ad quality data, right? Taking verifiable quality data and matching against their reach data, and by that meaning it gives a qualified reach number, which hopefully creates a more accurate picture of who's engaging with that media, right? It's the first time we've been able to combine those two things. It'll be delivered in a single interface so that the advertiser can see what's happening with what I'll call authentic reach right now, right? It's what happens when there are real people on the other side of that equation. Again, going back to the example I used earlier, if a TV set is off, there may be a real person in that household, but should you be counting that as a real ad impression? Because we've verified that the TV was off, right?
Those kinds of examples are what we're gonna be filtering out so that advertisers get a clearer picture of who they're actually reaching in a marketplace.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I have two. Has signal loss led to stronger interest in performance solutions like Custom Contextual and Authentic Attention?
Yes. You know, again, another short answer that I'll now make really long. Yeah. As identifiers and individually, the ability to target individuals based on some ID or some cookie becomes more challenged. Other types of proxies, and that's, you know, that's really a big part of our thesis. This cumulative level of different types of proxies will help drive an outcome. Things like context, right? What's happening on a page? Metrics like attention, right? As we talked about all of those attention metrics that we showed, level of engagement, exposure, all of those things are true measures of how well an ad can possibly do but aren't reliant on an individual identifier, et cetera.
Yes, we've seen increased demand for contextual-based solutions, and it's also created an opportunity for us to drive more metrics that are not person-based, that are not privacy challenged, to be part of the dialogue for an advertiser who's looking to drive an outcome.
On pricing, you currently price the same on a display or TV ad. Given the high CPM and CTV and value added, have you thought about having a more dynamic pricing model?
Wanna take that?
We know it's there. We know the opportunity is there. We obviously think about it, but the volume part of the equation is still so strong for us that we'd rather have the advertiser seamlessly choose to verify wherever they're placing their ads than having a situation where they're thinking, "Well, if it's a higher fee for this one, maybe I won't." I think the volume growth is so strong right now that we're obviously aware of it and we keep evaluating it, but right now we just see it as an opportunity for the future.
Well, with that, we're out of time for our Q&A session, and we're going to move on to.
Thank you.
Oops. We need to move our chairs. This way.
This is how we keep EBITDA margins strong. We do all this stuff on our own.
CEO, CFO.
That's right.
Move chairs. All right. Hi, everyone. I'm Julie Eddleman, and I am the Global Chief Commercial Officer at DoubleVerify. It's awesome to be here today. I've been at DoubleVerify for about a year, and it's been an incredible experience. I get the opportunity to talk with you a little bit about the success because of our trusted partnerships that we have created with our advertiser and our agency clients. I would like to share just a few slides highlighting these long-standing relationships and our ability to grow with these clients as we expand product offerings and geographical coverage. First, you can see that we have long-standing customer tenure because of technology advantages and our best-in-class customer service. Our top 75 clients average 6.9 years, our top 50 clients 7.4 years, and our top 25 clients have been with us over a remarkable 8 years.
Next, as Mark referred to earlier, we have been able to dramatically grow our annual revenue per customer by working with those who started with us as post-campaign measurement clients, and then we've been able to cross-sell and upsell our pre-campaign activation products, in addition to our ever-expanding social media products. Our average revenue per client has gone from $700,000 in 2018 to $2.2 million in 2021. Some specific blinded examples will show you how we've been able to do that. For a CPG client, we have been able to triple our revenue from $2.5 million to almost $8 million by starting in the U.S. and then expanding globally.
With the telecom company, we have gone from $4.5 million to almost $18 million by covering their ever-increasing programmatic investment with our best-in-class Authentic Brand Suitability product, in addition to having them lean in on Custom Contextual. This financial services company example is a U.S.-based company who started with one line of business, saw the benefits of our products and our amazing client service that we provide, and chose to expand across the rest of their business to grow from $700,000 to $6 million. These are just a few of the many examples of clients who are seeing DV drive real value for their media investments. We continue to grow the number of clients spending over $1 million and had a 42% increase in that stat from last year.
Our customer base is widely diversified across industries with no single vertical, having more than 20% of our revenue, which protects us, as we referenced earlier, from any macroeconomic disruptions like COVID or supply chain issues. You can see we have a very strong and very consistent revenue growth story. I would like to now bring up two of our important customers to talk with you about disruption in the advertising industry and why one of our long-standing clients from Mondelez continues to partner with DV to get the most out of their media investment. We're gonna bring the chairs back over, and I'm gonna introduce our clients here. If they come to the front. Come on over. Again, even our chief strategy officer is,
Helping out.
Helping out here. Our client does the same. Thanks, Jon. Yep, got it. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you both for being here. First, I'm gonna introduce Helen Lin over here to the right. Helen is the Chief Digital Officer of Publicis Media and has over 20 years of experience in digital media and marketing. Helen manages the digital investment and all negotiations on behalf of the entire Publicis Media network, and many times represents the group in industry-leading digital initiatives. Helen has worked with many leading companies across a variety of industries, such as Nestlé, Reckitt, Verizon, Toyota, Oracle, and many more.
Never heard of them.
Just some small little clients. Jonathan Halvorson is the SVP of Consumer Experience and Digital Commerce at Mondelez International. He is responsible for all working media investments. Their data strategy and digital marketing across the company's amazing portfolio of brands, such as Oreo, Ritz, and my kids' favorite, Sour Patch Kids.
Mm.
Even though they're teenagers, it has been their favorite candy for 10 years. Jonathan Halvorson has a very diverse background, with previous experience at Twitter and General Motors, in addition to beginning his career on the agency side at both Omnicom Media Group and Starcom. Thank you both so much for being here. Really appreciate it.
Thanks.
All right. Helen, we're gonna start with you. You've helped advertisers achieve KPIs over a really long period of time and drive real business outcomes. From KPIs to real business outcomes. Could you help our audience understand the new challenges that your clients face in the increasingly fragmented media landscape, especially with the sunsetting of third-party identifiers? And what are the needs for your clients that have emerged from this disruption?
Well, first, that presentation and that Q&A was fantastic, so just congratulations on that. Well-articulated. You've also articulated the biggest disruptions that are hitting us in that fragmentation. As humans, you guys all know, just even, like, the news that are hitting us all now today, you're getting it from every single source, television, OTT, Roku, social channels, and you don't even often know who the source is, you're just getting linked to it. While that's great for consumers, 'cause you can be anywhere, you can have a break, a five-minute break here, and you can catch up on things, it's really hard for us as advertisers to amass that audience and that reach. Then what's doubly hard is that the consumption is now happening on platforms that are not traditional vehicles where the units are commodities.
On the television, all of the television networks are selling the same unit. On social, all these units have different forms, different types of user behavior on the platforms themselves. No fault of the platform, but the duration of time spent with ads, the behavior is just different. What ends up happening is these social platforms create their own metrics that make sense for the platform, but they make it really hard for us as planners and buyers then to allocate budget and to understand where is real performance coming from, versus just the impression. That need what's come of that need is to have a third party that does come in and help us harmonize, and not necessarily make everything diluted, but give us common core metrics across all of these channels.
I can understand, okay, an impression across all these different platforms based on a common definition of duration, what does that look like regardless of the platform? Fragmentation, great for people as us as users, but really hard for advertisers to manage, and we're looking for third parties to help us make that simpler, because we're also doing other things like managing creative and optimizing, and the last thing that we need to be doing is correcting, adjusting for all these other disparate measures. I think you also mentioned privacy, but I feel like I've taken so much time.
That's okay. Privacy is incredibly important, and definitely one of the
A little bit on privacy. It makes, again, what's good for consumers is it creates a short-term challenge for us. I think we all agree, this is gonna help all of us. We're going to, as advertisers, create better value propositions that are going to earn that data exchange. We're gonna get there. We're not there now. It's pretty messy, and we probably have tracked a lot more than what consumers understand, right? There has to be an adjustment for that. Where that translates to what we'd say future-proofing for privacy is a good thing, but the short-term pain is that we are getting a lot of limitations on how we've transacted, how we understand campaign performance, how we then use every impression, feedback and signal to understand consumers better, then go into that pre-planning that Mark was also talking about.
What that has left us with, though, is signal deprecation, which then means we have to rely on other signals, other signals that are not audience-specific. Things like the placement, the site, not only the site, but the placement itself, the type of placement, the amount of time the average user spends in that type of placement and context. Those other signals, not just grading the audience, but grading where you're showing up, now becomes really important because we start to rely on other things. Privacy has caused us to also look at, okay, then what other signal can I use for a quality proxy? Knowing that people are spending more time and attention in a particular placement over another helps me continue to make those decisions on, do I put more money into this partner?
Even within this partner, which placements are earning me more of that attention?
Absolutely. No question, that's why we're investing in our Authentic Attention product, and we'll talk a little bit about that in a second. Jon, what are your measurement requirements of a complex global company like Mondelez that has numerous sub-brands and regional requirements, but especially you, in your role, need some central governance?
Yeah. This is how I'd encourage you guys to think about this space. This is a partnership. This is a core central relationship inside the CMO's office that we have to manage because of the complexity that really comes into this. If you look at Mondelez as an advertiser, we're talking about 853 brand country combinations that we're advertising, right? So that comes with complexity. We're talking about major transformation. Digital marketing has gone from something where this was low 20-20% of our media mix to well over 50% dominant, and if we project that into the future, 60%, 70%, 80%, as we've talked about with digital, social, connected television, where that goes. The requirements of a partner become different. It becomes a very core relationship.
I think the first thing that comes to it is you have to be able to scale with my business. I need to have one consistent partner around the world, because I can't handle the complexity of having a different measure here and there. We've probably all been in those scenarios where someone brings one number, and then the other person brings the other number. I have enough of that in my business. I need to have one simple way of kind of looking at it. The second thing is, I think you need a partner who will grow with you. These are gonna be long, stable relationships. What my needs were three, four years ago when we started our relationship are very different now. When I started a few years ago, I wasn't investing in the levels I am in TikTok.
I wasn't forging ahead and all of a sudden making big moves into connected television like I am on a year-over-year basis. When you go into those new and emerging spaces, you need a partner to kinda shine the light and kinda protect you as you go in that space. It helps if that partner has been there before, is working with other leading advertisers so they can provide a lot of advice to you. The third thing is, it's gotta work on a local level. There's no way to get killed faster as a global client than to give your local team something that they don't want. Ultimately, you have to be very catered to the local needs. Let's remember where this space is born of. It's very born of brand safety, which is fundamentally local.
The words that we would block in one local market are very different than another, and you have to have that local nuance. I think those are kinda like the core things I look for. I have to just trust you because at the end of the day, I don't wanna be spending a lot of time with this. It's important. It's a C-suite issue. When there is an issue, I have to pick up my phone, I'm calling my CMO, my chief legal counsel, and I have the CEO's phone number, personal and private, so that at any given point, and I've had to call him on Thanksgiving before and say, "This is what happened." And I lived that reality three years ago, and after that, I was like, "No more," because I need to have an answer.
I've gotta trust when there is an issue that I believe in those numbers because I will get asked about them, I will have to defend them, and I have to look the board of directors in the eye when they say, "You're moving more into digital. This is a big fraud area. Why do you say that we're safe, that we're being smart?" Because I am having to defend the value of those assets, Cadbury, Oreo, Sour Patch Kids, every time I go put a dollar of advertising out there. I have to trust.
Awesome. Thanks, Jon. Jon Loves us, but he doesn't wanna spend any time with us.
Which is a beautiful relationship.
It is a beautiful relationship.
It's a beautiful relationship.
There is nothing better.
Yeah.
Helen, on the path to driving outcomes, how important is ad verification in that? How important is it to have a partner that will be able to verify with you?
Well, the obvious thing, of course, is that if we're paying for an impression just from a transaction standpoint, we need to know that it actually hit the intended audience as we had planned. From the basic level, we need that verification. I'm adding to the Q&A earlier, we want that from a third party. Even if fraud was abated in one particular instance, even if that were the case, we don't wanna only pay what the media supplier tells us we should be paying. We need a third-party auditor to make sure that the standards are upheld over time, right? That Jon isn't micromanaging all of his agencies and suppliers and et cetera. That ecosystem has to be managed. It's actually getting
Now it's not just the verification. I really love that Mark talked so much about the pre-planning of it because the signals back, every impression is an opportunity for me to sell you something as an advertiser consumer. However, it's also an opportunity for me to understand something, for you to tell me and signal something to me that was compelling, that wasn't compelling. I like this part, I didn't like that part. I liked it in this context, I didn't in that.
Really, when I think about performance, it's also the insights that come out because the better I plan, it's not going to take away the need for the auditing, but then it just helps me do less on the optimization, so I can spend more time on things like creative optimization as opposed to managing fraud and viewability and things that are probably that a third party could do better for me. Performance isn't just the validation that it's a human, but I wanna also make sure that I have the qualitative understanding of that impression. Of course, that is so important because it comes back into the system and fuels how I plan the next dollar, where I invest more. What's really important is that we don't wanna only invest where there are people growing.
That's important, but we wanna invest where people are spending more time, right? Because they want to. They're not just getting in and out, but it's a quality experience. There's multiple levels of performance in there where verification fits in.
Pre-planning is one of the reasons why we made the investment in OpenSlate, and we're really excited about that opportunity moving forward.
Lots of benefits with that one.
Absolutely. Jon, we've been partners for a long time, DoubleVerify and Mondelez. What do you think really differentiates DV from the other competitors out there?
I think that the first thing is innovation. When you move as fast as we do, and you have to move into spaces 'cause that's how you create advantage, is by arbitraging attention that essentially is undervalued in the marketplace, you're gonna have to move fast. As Julie mentioned in my bio, in between stints in ad agencies, I worked at Twitter. I led video product strategy, so I oversaw engineers who built the product. I wanna know that I'm working with a partner that when those guys are building product and they're building APIs, that it's the priority, 'cause I don't wanna be second. I don't wanna be sitting there talking to someone at Google or Facebook or TikTok, and they say, you know, "Hey, this partner...
Your partner is gonna be in the second wave, and that comes out in a quarter from now. I don't have that time. I think innovation becomes really important. I think that the second thing is accreditation. Are you accredited? Those badges, you know, might seem, from the outside of the industry, you might look at those and go, "What do those really mean? Do those really stand for things, or is that, you know, a real big deal?" It's a big deal. It matters. It matters in how clients perceive it. It matters in my confidence. It matters in really, it's 'cause it's a high standard. They don't hand those out like gumballs. I think that the third thing is it a real partnership and relationship, or is it transactional? This isn't a relationship that's short-term.
You commit to this for the long haul. The switching costs are super high. If you're gonna change, you better have a good reason. You're in this with this partner for the long haul. Are they gonna provide insights for you? Are they people that when you have a problem, you're gonna call? If we're having a deep conversation, it means we're going into a new strategic area, or we're doing that, and you're gonna want some insights, and you need a thought partner. It can't be just someone that you're just trading pixels and dollars for. That's not how this space works.
Awesome. Thanks, Jon. On the topic of media quality, Mondelez initially focused with post-bid measurement and blocking. That's how we started our relationship. Can you tell us a little bit about the process that you did from moving from that to pre-bid? We have a very holistic relationship, but how did you make that?
Yeah. Look, when you do post-bid, the essential thing is you're finding out after the fact, and then the moment has passed. Brand managers have timelines. There are launches that are scheduled for a reason. I don't get to do Easter twice. Easter is at a certain time. I need to make it work. If you do a post-bid, then you're reconciling post, then you're trying to have to go chase it down. Then through the value of the supply chain, it's gonna be a mess. We switched to pre-bid. We did a test.
Mm-hmm.
Made sure it worked. They said, "Hey, we think this is what we should do." We leaned in early, and you see inside the case study, we went from 11% to 4%. You go, "11% to 4%, is that a big change? Does that make a big difference in your life?" That's a big savings. That's a big operational cost of time, and it also takes out a bunch of soul-sucking work that my team and my agency doesn't wanna do. That's, like, the easiest trade going on in town. It's like, we will save you money, we will cut your complexity, and we will shift to that place. I will do that deal every day because this is. Marketers are getting to a place where they're getting advanced. This isn't digital 101 anymore.
The best marketers are advanced digital marketers, and these are the things you do to squeeze the value out of it. Because the foundation of growing ROI, particularly as you're shifting to digital, is having verified audience. If you don't have that, it doesn't matter if you have the most beautiful Cannes-winning ad in the world, doesn't count.
Actually, can I add on that?
Yep, absolutely.
Back to that performance question around that, though, too, is that when you don't know, you're looking at outcomes, and you have your pool of outcomes, this whole aggregate number, and you look back to what it took to feed that machine to generate those outcomes. When half of that denominator is you don't even know what factor to discount it by, how are you making decisions about where you put your next best dollar? From an insight standpoint, when you don't know which audience segment drove that, then which is why we the Comscore partnership is a very interesting one, then that's also another lost opportunity. Back to performance on that, I think it's important, too, to the human aspect, and then also just calculating the denominator, so you're able to forecast where you put your dollars.
Yeah, I mean, to build on that is, like, as clients start getting into advanced analytics and machine learning, if you haven't cleaned it up in advance and you found it out on the post, you're gonna have to go back and clean out your data to do all that 'cause you're gonna have a bunch of bad data.
Yeah, misleading.
...that will skew your supply chain, skew this. You see it in e-commerce a lot. There's a bunch of people, they arbitrage stocks from Nike. Buy a bunch of stocks, they buy it cheap, they go sell them that way, and then they return whatever they don't, and it throws off the entire supply chain. You can't have that throw off my entire marketing supply chain. Think about the size. We're the 37th largest advertiser. If there's 10% dud data telling me how to spend that money, that's a bad outcome. That's missed opportunity for me to beat the competition.
Yeah. In the future, the modeling gets totally screwed up for the future results.
Oh.
Yeah.
Compounds.
Helen, in terms of performance management, how are your clients mostly measuring that today? Does it vary by format, and the types of advertising?
Well, we have MMM is a model that is not going away, but people do use it to help allocate across different channels. Media mix modeling, so how much in television based on historical performance. What you wanna do is be able to optimize in real time to make adjustments to that plan so you beat your forecast, right? These days, because of privacy and signal deprecation, we're unable to track a lot of that. What we were getting used to with MTA giving fractional attribution to different areas is has been thwarted. What we've become reliant on are a lot of these walled gardens and their clean rooms, their privacy-enhancing areas where you're able to optimize within your investment in them, but you're not really then optimizing across them.
What you gain in being able to use more signals to optimize where you're spending the most on these big walled gardens and social platforms, but you're kind of missing that. You're going back to relying on MMM for the broader set. Something that we really are thinking about these days too is this whole discussion about attention. Because as more dollars are moving into digital or we should just say it's digitized, but it's also still on the linear screen, right, the television screen. The opportunity you have now 30 seconds, right? It shouldn't be graded on last touch, which we never thought it should be, but like a click rate and a last touch attribution.
When you add in the qualifier of time, you can now understand what is the value of in the funnel of those branding placements, and you can start defending and rationalizing why you had those high-impact placements on your plan that are usually reaching more people, which you do need to drive, you know, incrementality. But it comes at a premium, and oftentimes they get optimized out of because there's high, what we call non-working costs in the production. It just seems to be more high risk when you then measure it based on click-through rate, right? Reach and click-through rate. Having measures like how much more time people are spending with these placements and plus the reach then help us actually to use digital in a more full funnel way so that we're understanding all of the contribution.
We're still looking at click rates and landing page and drop off. We're still looking at that, but you have a fuller picture of all these new media that are becoming digitized. Otherwise, if they were all graded on digital performance, they would never come into the media mix. We know that we have to bring them in because that's where consumers are consuming. It's broader. The performance picture is broader than digital performance in e-commerce.
You've both talked about attention, and mentioned it, and Jon, Mondelez was part of the pilot for Authentic Attention. Can you just talk a little bit more about how Mondelez is thinking about attention?
Yeah, I think it'll build off of Helen's answer. If you look at correlation between metrics to sales, it's ultimately all my CFO cares about. Clicks looks like shotgun. There's no nice linear correlation. You look at impressions, obviously not. You look at a lot of other metrics, you don't see that core correlation to sales. Attention, you do. We care about opportunities for us to optimize towards attention and understand it better because when we drive attention, we drive better sales. I think that that really helps us understand about how we optimize our entire mix. It's super important in an impulse category. People are not going to spend a lot of time thinking about what chocolate bar they're gonna buy. It's not an existential question.
Only Cadbury every time.
That's right. You are so good at that.
It's not even a question.
I know. This is why you are one of my favorite agents.
It's just a trigger. Just a trigger.
See?
One of his favorite agents.
One of my favorite agents. That's right. I think that's why. You see it in the metrics. I mean, I encourage you guys, we don't have the time to go through all the case study piece. That's a piece of work I'm really proud of.
Mm-hmm.
I'm really proud of that work because you can see it. Again, Mondelez has been on a journey. I mean, we shared this in CAGNY last year, so no secrets. We've increased our digital ROI by over 100% from 2017 to present. When you double the amount of net revenue you're generating off of that as you are scaling it, like, these are the things we do to drive those outcomes. This is at the core of how we create value and create more. It's why we continue to invest and do these innovation projects.
Mondelez is recognized industry-wide at really being the best in their ROI improvements over the last five years, and it's been really cool to see you be a part of that and really leading that, Jonathan Halvorson.
There's a lot of research, industry research that shows that click and even landing page hits for non-e-commerce are not the leading indicator of sales. We used to have to rely on brand lift, and brand lift is survey-based. Something with an attention metric where you're measuring on every impression, the time, and you're using different proxies, and time is not the only attention metric. This is evolving, and there's, it's gonna become more of a boolean as it evolves, but you can actually measure that on every impression. Whereas in the past, the signal for it that was highly correlated, purchase intent and sales, was something that we, you know, had to hope that 20,000 people would fill out a quick survey to tell us, and certainly not real-time in terms of being able to action.
We're gonna start wrapping up. I do wanna ask about contextual, Helen, from you in particular. Are your clients spending more in contextual, and how are they looking at that, as there continues to be challenges with reaching consumers?
I will say that because we can still target on audience, that is the default. There's an addiction to it because it's easy and it works, and we're gonna use it until it's gone, right? Budgets are not growing. From a share of the budget standpoint, it's still heavily audience-focused, but of course, you do your contextual buys, where ultimately you're creating content with a partner and you're distributing it programmatically and programmatically based on audience. What is actually growing, come 2023, contextual will be a huge portion, but for now we're still heavily on audience. What we're talking about is actually less audience and more contextual. What we're talking, strategizing about is contextual.
Because in the past, contextual meant that I bought ESPN because I was trying to reach sports. Contextual these days, the strategies are very data-driven. It could be like Google, for example, moving to topics using URLs. There is clients using first-party data to understand other affinities within their high-value consumers that they may not even be thinking about to target endemically in terms of content. That's being added in. There's AI-driven media placements based on people's historical propensities to convert in different contextual environments. There's so many other ways now to buy contextual and have contextual strategies even more of a reason now to have verification because these are theories, they're hypotheses. You have to actually figure it out.
Like, okay, is that where it was delivered there, did it actually make sense? I would say that, like, contextual now, adoption from dollars is gonna hit in 2023, end of 2023. In terms of time spent talking about it is the dominant thing right now because we have to figure out our hypotheses, put the testing matrix in place, which ones are actually gonna have scale. Some of them are, some of them are not. We've got to try everything. It's very dominant in terms of what we're talking about.
All right. We're gonna wrap it up with one last question for both. Social platforms are huge magnets for advertising dollars.
Mm-hmm.
I would love to know how both of you feel about the new entrants in terms of being able for the social platforms to have third-party verification?
I feel like it's the term crisitunity always comes to my mind when it comes to social, because it's been a horrific two years for everybody, right? Whether it touched you personally or you know many people, it's been a horrific two years. Prior to that, what platforms, social platforms and feed partners would tell us is that there is no association between the ad adjacency and the content around it. It's like, you know, algorithmically driven based on the user's preference, so trust me, that's not offending that user. That was really what they held on to, what the social platforms held on to. It wasn't just COVID, it was a cultural crisis. It was riots, political uprisings, genocides.
There's so many things that all of these terrible crises came to a head in the last two years, that what did come through was that advertisers deserve and need choice and controls. Regardless of if it affects your advertising and your branding, advertisers are funding these platforms, they deserve control and choice and executing that. That's why we do see this, the innovation, or this push on openness now, just in the nick of time for the platforms, because our spend is growing there, but their reputations are kind of going into the toilet if they don't do something about it. It's good for us. Obviously, we've been clamoring for it. I would say that it's hard to do contextual within feed.
As you guys know, OpenSlate had a very creative solution around this, creating adjacent we call safe distanced inventory by pulling out inventory and then creating a buffer and then having controlled spots and then putting it back into the feed. It takes creativity and partners like what Jon was saying, innovative partners that understand that will help us move into where we're spending inc you know, double-digit growth numbers, and that's not gonna slow down. As e-commerce, social commerce continues to pick up, those dollars won't slow down.
Yeah, I look at. First of all, I agree, so I'm aligned. I think advertisers need visibility, control, and choice. I think you will see social continue to scale because of commerce as more businesses come onto e-commerce, and I'm not on the, like, I sell chocolate. It's very hard to ship chocolate, guys. It melts, terrible. I feel that big pull in my business. What do you feel if you're in a more endemic commerce category? I think that will continue to drive money into social networks. I think there's a continued desire to have more focus there, and that continues to be the driver of where these guys go. As I sit here, I think that those things move in those directions. Do the rate of growth have to slow down?
Yeah, because obviously the business is maturing and the business can't hockey stick forever, sadly, for anyone who invested in it. I would say it's maturing. I think it'll continue to grow. There's no doubt that I think that what is important is if it's ever going to continue to pace out and grow, there are going to have to be that visibility or there will become 'cause it is a hesitancy. If I were to unpack social, I would say brand isn't growing because there isn't this. Commerce is the fuel of their growth. If you look inside Facebook or you look inside some of these advertisers and you see who the top advertisers are, it is more commerce-driven. If they're gonna carry brand growth, they're going to need-
Mm-hmm.
Partners like this to solve their problems.
Great.
Provide those tools.
All right. I know we need to wrap up. Jon, Helen, thank you so much for your time, your prep, your expertise, most of all, for your partnership. As you can see, this is a very complicated space. There is, you know, a lot of work that we all need to do together. Both Publicis and Mondelez are really deep strategic partners of DoubleVerify, and we're very thankful for you. Thank you.
Thanks for having us.
I'm gonna turn it back over to Mark.
That was amazing. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Jon.
All right. Wow. That was amazing panel. Like, you cannot get insight like that from just me up here as a talking head. I mean, that was from the horse's mouth and truly incredible. The only thing I would challenge is what Jon said at the end, is like, you can't grow forever. DV can. Take that off your list. Hey, it's been a great day and thank you so much for sticking with us. You know, look, over the last three hours, we covered a lot, and we covered a great deal. I mean, we started talking about how DV is uniquely positioned to solve the problems that are keeping advertisers from measuring and driving better outcomes. As a result, we've had exceptional growth.
We talked a lot about highlighting our issue with Comscore or our partnership with Comscore. We think this is a hugely exciting opportunity. If there's three announcements just to keep in your head today that came out today, it's one, the Comscore partnership, which puts us in the audience business for as far as verification, which I think is really exciting for us. Two, it's Authentic Attention and what we're doing about rolling that product out to all of our clients in Q2, getting a sample of that in front of them to get that metric ubiquitous. Three, the amazing financial statistics that Nicola was able to deliver today via the press brief we sent out. There will be more announcements to come.
You know, we have earnings, official earnings in a few weeks, so we kept a few things in our pocket. We'll have more exciting things to come, so on the announcement front. You know, we thought about what else we covered today. We dug in with Jack on the product roadmap, talk about how we leverage our core into new products, and we talked about Authentic Attention quite a bit today. To stress, we are the only company that has an attention metric out there today. It's we think it's a unique differentiator for us and will be a great product moving forward. I mentioned Nicola, who gave a performance snapshot of how we deliver against our mission. We continue to thrive and grow at industry pace. See, this is what happens when you get too much off script here.
I'm not clicking the slides the right way. We talked about performance and how we continue to do very well. Finally, Julie really brought it home with perspective on our clients, right? To show the nature of the stickiness that we have with our customers and then the fans that we've been able to build. Trust me, you know if you've been in business long enough. No one is a fan unless you're truly helping them deliver better results, and we are. We're delivering better results for our clients, and they're sticking with us up to eight years for some of our top clients. It's really unheard of in this space. I wanna close when we think about what we're trying to do here. When we talk about what are the things I should remember? A few key things.
We break through measurement disruptions, and that positions us as a clear leader in delivering better outcomes. We're essential. Our innovation-driven expanding leadership position has made us essential to the world's biggest brands, some of which were here today. More and more are coming into the fold. One thing to note, we gave the stat in our Q3 numbers. We ended up the year with 176 client wins. 61% were greenfield, 39% were competitive wins. We are taking share and growing share around the world. Because of this, people just don't come to us because they like us, but we drive value. We drive value for them, and that proposition has led to market-leading growth and created a flywheel that allow us to drive success into the future.
This flywheel drives incredible stakeholder value and maximizes stakeholder value for all of our clients. We're incredibly excited about our future, and we hope that today you got as excited as we are. To all of you, thank you for your time. It's been a pleasure sharing our story with you. To those of you who joined us in person, thanks for making the trip. It's so good to see people. If you're there online, this room is full, and it's amazing that we're able to get it full. For those of you who came today, you'll be rewarded with an open bar that starts in about 15 minutes. After a week like this, and I know some of you are still in earnings, you all deserve it. Thank you for joining us today. For those of you at home and those of you here, stay safe.
Have a great weekend. We appreciate it very much.