We're going to do data now. Can't wait.
Awesome.
A little pivot. Okay, great. I am Laura Martin, and I am the Senior Media and Internet Analyst over here at Needham & Company. I am here on stage with the CEO and the CFO of DoubleVerify, Mark Zagorski and Nicola Allais. Zagorski, I have spelled your name like five times in the last week, and I keep selling like the crystals. I am like, no, he is not a crystal company. No, he is not a jewel. I wish you were a jewel.
I used to get Zagorski, you know, the helicopter people.
Yeah. Oh, I didn't even know that.
You know, that one falls in there too. I'll take helicopters or jewels. Those are much easier than ad tech these days.
So true. So true. Good point. Anyway, I had to laugh. I'm like, oh my God, you think I would have learned this after all these years? Okay, let's level set. Let's start with our first question should be, let's explain what DoubleVerify does and what your primary drivers of growth are. You do what it does. What are the primary growth drivers over the next, you know, 2025 and 2026? Let's keep it sort of short.
Yeah. DoubleVerify is an ad tech platform that ensures that ad spend is between a buyer and seller. Those ads are viewable, that they're fraud-free, that the ads are delivered in context that is suitable for that advertiser, and they're in the right geography. That was the core of our business and where we started. We have now expanded beyond media quality into optimizing the cost of that quality through our Scibids AI tool. We recently acquired a company called RockerBox, which now shows if that quality or that ad impression actually works. It does attribution. Think of everything from media quality to price compression for that media quality to determining whether or not that quality moves the needle. We are a complete independent platform for advertisers.
Okay.
The growth driver for 2025, and 2026, and 2027 is going to be to replicate what we've done in the open web for the wall gardens. Our solution works across the entire digital ecosystem. We now have access to the wall gardens in a way that we can replicate the success we've had in the open web on the wall gardens.
Okay. Let's just talk to product specifically. You had, you started with a post-bid product where you'd measure after the fact, like almost like a measurement Nielsen kind of idea. Here's what happened after the fact. Then you very cleverly introduced a pre-bid product. Most cleverly, you said you couldn't buy the pre-bid product without the post-bid product. You bundled the two together, which took the, they get paid as a flat fee, like $0.08 per thousand. By bundling the pre, which I think was $0.14, it turned it into a $0.22 ad unit. Now you have pre tied to post, and you were doing that in the open web. Now you're doing it with the wall gardens. Specifically, I think the importance of the wall gardens is they're huge.
Specifically TikTok and Facebook, because you're already doing it with YouTube before, right?
We were.
That is not new. What is sort of new is the Facebook, let's call it Meta, because it is not just Facebook.com. The Meta and the TikTok are what is new when you say replicate on the wall gardens. Okay. Great. Fantastic. One of the things, Mark, I wanted to talk about is you guys have seen some of the biggest margin, not margin, valuation multiple compression. You are down at $2 billion. It used to be a $6 billion company. Tell me what you think the market is missing about DoubleVerify, that it is getting wrong, that it is underappreciating about DoubleVerify today.
Yeah. You know, during that period, you know, the fundamental value proposition of what we deliver to our customers hasn't changed, right? So we ensure that their spend is protected, and we are increasingly helping them perform and ensure that it performs. I think what the street is missing is a couple of things. Number one, what Nicola just mentioned, which is the opportunity in social for us is great and broad. We are not just an open web company. Now, you know, a great part of our growth in the past has been in our activation line and things like ABS.
I don't know what that means.
Authentic Brand Suitability, which is a tool that actually creates custom filters for advertisers when they're buying on the Trade Desk or they're buying on Google DV360, but buying open web inventory. That same model is now being transported into the social universe, which arguably attracts 70% of ad spend right now. Number one, we're not just an open web company. We're increasingly a social media evaluator company. Number two, the fact that although we started, our core value proposition was in protection, was insurance, making sure your ads don't show up next to bad stuff, making sure they're viewable or not fraudulent. We're increasingly being seen as a performance business. Can we help the ad spend drive a result? Can we do that cheaper than anybody else? Scibids is helping us compress the cost of quality.
RockerBox is a new solution that we have that will help attribute that quality. I think they're missing that aspect of the business as well as we kind of evolve over time. The third is just going back to the fact that this is a highly profitable business that still has strong growth, that is underpenetrated in most markets, particularly outside the US. We have growth levers, not just new products. We have new markets that we're expanding into. We have new platforms, like we just mentioned, TikTok and Meta, which are still in early days. Even if you look at our Q1 growth, it came from not just new customers, but core customers expanding with us on new products too. We have probably more growth drivers and more growth levers than anybody in this space right now.
Okay. What do you say, Nicola?
I think in addition to all of that, if you compare us to other players in the market, we have been gaining share in our strategy around M&A and being able to diversify our product offering. The fact that we're not just, as Mark said, verification, but we're all the way to performance now just sets us up for a much greater expansion of what we can do for our clients in a way that others cannot in the industry. I think when people start to see the results of that, they'll understand the potential.
Okay. One of the subjects that has surprised me on this stage today is we have been really spending a lot of time on curation, right? Which you guys know immediately what that means, but it's a new word for the audience, right? And that's just moving data from the DSP sort of to the SSP. I would shorthand it. How do you, is that good for you or bad for you? Are you indifferent because you were getting paid by Trade Desk anyway, and now you're just going to get paid by Magnite, and your fees aren't any different, so you don't care?
Yeah. I mean, you know, our thesis has always been, let's get our data wherever and however advertisers buy, right? And as you noted, you know, initially everyone was buying and applying our data through Trade Desk or through DV360 or through Microsoft. And that's great if that's how they buy. Now they're increasingly saying, hey, let's attach data to the sell side. We don't, we're indifferent, right? So we announced, you know, last quarter that we're working with Microsoft and Criteo and Index Exchange and Google all on sell side curation. We will.
Not yet.
We will talk about that at some point. We are deeply embedded on both the buy and sell side. We have had relationships with all of them across many different solutions. I think curation is just another way of buying, which I think the big question around curation is going to be, are advertisers comfortable and willing to change the way they buy, right? I think, you know, you have to change an entire workflow in some cases if you are going to take the DSP out of the equation, right? If I am just going to use Clearline and buy directly on Magnite. I think at some point, if the cost savings are great enough, they will. For us, again, we are such a small part of that transaction fee. On average, it is like 1%, 2%.
You know, you're looking at other players that are taking 10%, 12%, 15% fees, not, you know, transaction fees, right? DSP fees can be as high as 15% plus, and SSP fees are higher than that.
On your statement that other, so one of the things that somebody on my stage, and I'm already losing track, I'm sorry, said this morning was that a lot of times platform fees on the DSP are only 8%, but the average gets up to 20%, and that's all layering all the data. You know, at 1% and 2% each, it's easy to get to 16% or 12% data fees on top of the 8%. You are saying, what I heard you say, Mark, is that you price your product the same, whether it's attached to an SSP or a DSP, so you really are indifferent. You're not pricing it higher at the SSP. You're just pricing it the same. You are indifferent. You don't make more money. You don't make less. Wherever somebody wants to buy the data, you'll let them buy it there.
There's one difference, and the fact that the DSPs take 20% from us and the SSPs don't.
That is a difference.
It's a big difference for us. It doesn't matter to the buyer, but it matters to us.
Right. So to me, that isn't priced the same. Then you're not indifferent. You'd rather have it attached to the SSPs because they're taking it.
At this stage, yeah. The scale of the SSPs on curation is very, very small right now.
It's new. It started in January.
Like it's a brand new thing.
Yeah.
Okay. But so would not it make you incent you to raise your price on the DSP data so you can cover your 20% fee that you are not having to pay on the SSP side?
You know, at this point.
I'll kill you if you cut your price, Mark. Seriously.
We're not cutting any prices. No, look, our driver here is to keep friction low and make buying really easy. You know, driving prices up or down is not part of our goal right here. That's another thing that is important to understand about DV is that we drive revenue through volume and through product stacking. It's not about the individual cost of a product. We want people to use attention with us and context with us and ABS with us and do measurement and pre-bid. Every impression, we want to stack as many products as possible on top of it from a data perspective. The individual cost of each one of those products is less important than us selling through more products over time.
Okay. Okay. So one of the things that, you know, you and I talk about a lot, Mark, besides price, which I know I just give you a really hard time on, is this issue of are you inventing the products or are others? You have just said that a big pivot of yours is moving towards performance, but you bought that, right? And outcomes, that was RockerBox. And then with Scibids being more efficient, like you are pivoting from where DV started to where it is going, you have had to buy both of those products. Tell me why, tell me buy versus build. Is it just that you saw something coming, they had already been working on it, they had decided three years earlier, so they had been building it, and it was just going to take you too long to build, so it was cheaper to buy them?
You know, look, we started talking about performance well before RockerBox or Scibids was even on our radar screen. We've always looked at ABS and some of our pre-bid tools as performance tools. When you pull garbage out of the system, what's left performs better, right? We have leaned heavily into that. We started playing around with, you know, looking at bidding algos, and we found, hey, we can either build out a data science team ourselves, or we can buy this great team that's in France right now and integrate it really quickly. Same thing with RockerBox, which is if we want to look at closing the loop, we can start building that competency, or we can find a bunch of great technology folks who've been doing this for the last six to eight years and put it into our strategy.
I think, you know, we've had this thesis around acquisitions, which is either they expand geographic footprint, so we're able to move into a market quickly, eliminate the competitor there, and like kind of put our platform in. It accelerates our roadmap, something that we're going to build, or is a complementary toolset that we don't have a ton of like in-house knowledge on. I think RockerBox is one of those things that is totally complementary. Understanding media mix modeling, multi-touch attribution, we don't have that DNA in our business. However, it's an extension of what we're doing today, and it made total sense to acquire that business. The common link between all of these is that they're generally underscaled because they haven't invested in sales. They don't have access to big customers, but they've got really good tech teams.
If you look at the last couple of acquisitions, like we've had very low turnover because we've kept those teams together. We've actually grown the resources around them, and they've given us a core base. It's kind of just, they've almost been acquirers because the revenue from them has not been big.
They're not big acquisitions. They're tiny for you guys.
Right. They're all done with cash. We don't have debt. They also already had, right, no earnouts. They also already had a product in the market and the integrations with the DSPs or the other partners.
Which is important, right?
Actually allowed us to go faster. Scibids is a great example. I mean, we've now sold them to 200 customers already, upsold them since we acquired them almost two years ago that they would never have had access to, right? Now they have, you know, some of the biggest brands out there, everyone from Diageo to, you know, to, you know, huge global brands that we talk to every day, right? That they would not be able to get into those customers. Same thing with RockerBox. Very small company, had two salespeople. Now they have access to 150 salespeople, right? You know, that's the value of bringing these assets in.
Where is RockerBox?
New York.
Okay. Okay. What I was going to say is I cover a lot of companies that aren't based here. I think it's so funny because outside America, people are like, if I build great tech, they will come. Like that's not a thing. Like if you build great sales, they may come, and maybe the tech can be secondary. I think it's a great, like it's a great arbitrage. You guys have great sales and great relationships. That actually matters in media a lot. Yeah. And great tech, you can buy. I mean, it's better to buy them and put their awesome tech to somewhere we'll actually have impact. It is really a win-win for everybody.
Look, we've never met a CMO who goes, wow, I wish we'd have three more companies calling on us, right? They don't want that. They want one company to call on them that can provide them multiple solutions, right? They want someone to come in with a complete platform to say, great, so you can tell me what's good, you can get me what's good cheaper, and you can tell me if what's good worked. Awesome. I don't need to talk to anybody else today.
Now, when you think about the Scibids and RockerBox products, and you just said stacking is a key, like important thing to you, do you stack those on top? Are they stacked products from your point of view, or are they somehow open new TAM, which isn't really a stacked product?
There's a little bit of both. From a go-to-market perspective, we're starting to now bundle them more, right? I'll give a good example. We were pitching an RFP last year.
Request for proposal.
Request for proposal. Every acronym, I'll try to define.
By the way, we don't have that in ad tech other than you. So it's not like a thing they should necessarily know what an RFP is.
Okay. It's more software. It's more software-like, right?
Yeah. That's fair.
We're pitching that for a large global CPG customer, and they've been a verification customer for us for years. You know, quite large, but they're like, hey, we want to put you out there and see how you go against everybody else. The old way we did it was we do these head-to-heads, right? Put our platform against the competitor's platform, see who filters out more fraud, do all that stuff. That was part of it, and we knew we were going to win that. Then we brought Scibids in and said, guess what? If you bundle these two together, we will guarantee that you're going to save enough money by using Scibids that you'll actually pay for our measurement solution. Because every $1 that you push through Scibids, we save you $4 in media costs, right?
Now we're bringing two solutions together to an advertiser and saying, no one else has these two together. If you're buying verification from somebody else, you're going to have to buy optimization and algo optimization from another party. We'll bring them together and show you that we'll save you enough money to pay for this other solution.
That's for free in a sense.
Exactly. In a sense, they're paying for it.
Scibids will give it to you for free.
I mean, they're paying for it. They're paying for both, but we're saving them enough money. I think that's where the value prop comes from, like stacking solutions, right? We're selling you one thing, now we're selling you another thing. Now we can go in and say, we're going to sell you RockerBox too. That's now one core value prop that's integrated, sold together. If you look at the average spend for our top customers, so customers spending over $200,000 with us, grow 14% in Q1, in the last quarter. Our customers are spending more with us, right, on average. It's not just because they're buying more media, it's because they're buying more products for us.
Okay. One of the reasons I liked Scibids so much was because they got paid as a % of platform revenue, not as a fixed fee, which I despise, as you know, as a fee structure. Anyway, moving on. My question is, have you kept that business model? And given that you just said just now that 200 brands that they never would have had access to have adopted, are all of those brands paying for Scibids based on a % of ad revenue that they ad spending that goes through Scibids?
Yes and yes. They're percent.
The answer I wanted to hear. I'm happy that's the answer. That's totally great. Okay. In pricing power, one of the things I always ask you on any opportunity, Mark, is your prices remain the same when you move from, I'm going to call it DV Plus, but that's the Magnite product, when you move from the open internet product to connected television, even though the cost per thousand that you were adding value to went up 10X, right? $20 CPMs when you started, no longer because we have more supply now. At the beginning, it was $20 CPMs versus $2 CPMs. You charge that same, let's call it 20% rate per thousand. I objected. You've said for a long time, you know, we know we're adding more value to CTV. We need to raise price. Tell me where you are.
I get that you agree with me. When are we actually going to see price raised on the CTV piece?
We've been talking about price increases on CTV for a while. I think we are right on the verge of actually providing a much different value prop than we have to date. We still, look, CTV measurement still has a lot to do with finding non-viewable impressions. We found almost 8% of apps that we were measuring were not sending a signal that the TV screen was off, which is crazy. You know, there's still issues with CTV fraud. You know, those things are still incredibly valuable. What advertisers really want and what they pay for, as we started the discussion around kind of brand suitability, is can you give me a media quality score? Can you actually tell me something?
We are on the verge of actually kind of introducing that solution set, which has a quality aspect to it the same way we do on the open web, the same way we do with social, to do it in a much more granular way for CTV. When we get that product to market, we believe that's the opportunity for us to actually get a price commensurate with the value that we're delivering on CTV.
It sounds like you wouldn't, the old product would stay at the same price and you get the price increase by, I'm going to say, stacking this new product onto it.
Yes.
Okay. I don't object. You know, because that's what you did with pre-bid when I was yelling at you at the time when you only had one product. I'm like, when do we get a price increase? You're like, we're just going to introduce this new price and bundle it with the old, which tripled the price point. In a way, it was better than what I was asking. I've totally, this is totally a fine way to raise. Look, you're basically saying everybody has to be a customer first at this $0.08 per thousand, but then we're going to add stuff that gets you the call. That takes the meeting, right? You already have a relationship with them. We're going to upsell something that we know.
A score would be, so would a quality score for Coke then be a different quality score for like diapers? Is the quality score related to what the ad pod is?
It could be. Because think of brand suitability for every brand is different.
That's what I was thinking.
Right? So it's a suitability or brand quality score based on what their preferences are and based on the granularity of data we can get from the content providers.
Okay. Okay. So like a brand suitability score, it wouldn't be like Hulu has all these super high- quality units. That still might not be the brand safe. That might not be the same brand suitability score for diapers versus Geico versus Coca-Cola. It would be unique to the advertiser.
Right. Think of other.
Scale?
Absolutely. Because it scales in ABS today. Every customer has a different ABS profile. Think of the other aspects too of CTV. Things like screen resolution, right? Things like what screen was it actually seen on? How big was that screen? Was it fully delivered? Also the things that a lot of people do not talk about, which is, was this really on the network or was it an extension?
What's that mean?
A lot of CTV inventory is sold in bundles or in PMPs, right? Private marketplace packages. Those private marketplace packages can include the publisher entity that you know and love, but they may.
Paramount Plus.
Paramount Plus. It also could include impressions on other places that are part of the Paramount Plus network. The same way retail media networks use extension, CTV does extension too.
This would be really helpful then.
This provides much greater transparency, yes.
You guys have access to this data?
We are slowly building relationships to give us that access, yes.
That would be really, that is really valuable, especially to the extent they use extensions and they're putting it on a FAST channel. Yeah. Very interesting. Okay. The timing of this product rollout would be 2025?
It'll be at some point in 2025.
Okay. All right. This would be, I think this would be very exciting, mostly because of the pricing implications, but just to have the notion of a product that does quality scoring for CTV is really interesting. Because basically that becomes best in class and everybody else has to keep up with that. It would make better behavior of the CTV ecosystem, it seems to me.
Absolutely.
Okay. Let's talk about acquisitions. To both of you, question. You guys acquired Scibids, and that was just to tell you guys, that was in the third quarter of 2023, which was for $125 million, RockerBox for $85 million. Again, tiny little acquisitions, but hugely beneficial from a bundling pricing, let me call it product offering point of view in terms of when your salesman goes in, you want him to have, it's almost like a ride at Disneyland. You want him to be able to talk about something new. They took the meeting for a reason and not just, we want a price increase on what we showed you last year. I totally get that one a year makes a lot of sense. Going forward, it sounds like you're building the connected television product that allows you to raise price.
What other kinds of things can you see building that would make this stacking idea more valuable?
I'll just say, I think from the, just to be clear, M&A is not a strategy, right? We have a strategy. That strategy is to evolve from protection to performance and ensure that we close that whole loop. If M&A fits into that, great. You know, our main driver right now is to take these assets, these raw materials, and look at ways of bringing them together to create unique value. Can we bring media quality plus Scibids together to create a unique value prop for advertisers, which gives you quality at a lower price, right? Can we bring RockerBox together with Scibids that allows you to take what's working and optimize against an attribution performance metric that sits within RockerBox? We've done that. We've done that with clients before we even started buying these companies.
I think that's the one thing to note. All of the acquisitions that we've made over the last two years are companies that we've worked with. We've worked with them before we bought them. We built solutions together because we saw that there was a path towards where we wanted to get to. We didn't say, oh, well, let's buy this company to get into this space. Let's buy this company in this space. We're like, we're going into this space. Let's start working with them. If it makes sense for us to buy them, let's buy them.
Right.
No, I would say the question was, what are we going to be innovating on? I think creating the full picture of verification, performance, and outcomes is really what we're focused on, right? There are two prongs out of the three there that we're the only ones that have in the space for what we do. We did acquire the technology and the integration, but that's what we're really focused on in terms of how much more differentiated our product is.
Okay. I'm a big believer in bundling. Bundling says it lowers churn by 50%. The bigger your bundle gets, the less likely you are, at least from a consumer point of view. I assume it also applies to enterprise. I've only done the research on consumers.
I think the bundle here too isn't just a sales bundle. It's a tech bundle. It is actually a seamless solution. One UI, one data set that can move seamlessly from verification to optimization to actually attribution. Like those things are important. That takes a lot of work, right? We're still in the early stages.
If something doesn't work, there's somebody to call and say, fix this. You just fix it.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
It scales, right? That's another thing.
That's the key.
I would assume this kind of thing is a faster growth driver than going offshore. Wouldn't it be? I mean, don't you have enough growth in America that you don't have to go offshore where they might want different things?
I mean, look, some of these products, so specifically about RockerBox, RockerBox is an acquisition that actually expands the dollars that we can go after. Brand, brand marketing, brand advertising is really what verification is about. RockerBox is performance dollars and performance marketing, which for us expands our funnel down towards smaller advertisers, more DR-focused advertisers. And smaller advertisers outside of the U.S. is a more prominent kind of activity. It does actually help us kind of expand our reach outside of the U.S. I do not think it narrows us to the U.S. I think it is global.
Yeah. I'm just wrong. Completely.
No.
I think that's fine.
No, but the other thing too.
I learned something.
When we think of expansion outside the U.S. too, it's not like us going into market. For the most part, we sell local brands in local markets. But you know, we're working with folks like Microsoft and Unilever and Colgate and Reckitt, they're global companies, right? And they have divisions all around the world that need support and that their ad spend is different in market A to market B. You know, Southeast Asia is very heavily social focused, right? They spend a lot on mobile and social. So having solutions that serve Unilever in Southeast Asia is just as important as having products that service their brand business in North America as well.
I will tell you, Wall Street has decided, sometimes we're wrong, that the future of television is performance. That because Amazon has set this new benchmark, that to keep up in connected television, you really do have to drive to purchase. The question is, does that make data irrelevant? Like you're selling a lot of data and verification, but I think one of the things you and I have talked about in the past, Mark, is that let's say half the impressions are wasted and they're fraudulent. So long as somebody's spending $1 and getting $4 of return at the purchase level, it doesn't matter. Like they're not going to pay to hear that half their impressions are wasted because what they're going to solve for is, I spend $1, I get $4 a purchase. Can you speak to that?
First off.
You just agree with me.
Wouldn't you rather not buy those four impressions that were wasted? Like why waste the money? That makes your return even better to begin with, right?
That's what you're saying.
That's the first thing. The second thing is, you know, what you noted is, yes, but who determines attribution? The platform that you bought from? Amazon's going to be the only people that give you attribution? Absolutely not.
Fair point.
That's why we have RockerBox now to say, you need to be outside of that and say, okay, well, the person saw a CTV ad, they also did a search, they were in, saw an out-of-home ad. Like where, who gets the credit? I think who got the credit has been gamed by a lot of the big platforms for a very long time, right? I think, again, our position and our value prop has always been, we're outside of the transaction. We're independent, we're agnostic. In the same way, you know, we're not going to make a call based on the quality of an ad based on what platform it's on. We're not going to make a call on giving attribution to somebody based on the platform. We're going to give attribution based on an agnostic, independent way.
I think what you just said, sure, if everything goes performance, okay, who determines what that performance is? It can't just be the platform. There has to be someone independent outside of it to say that.
You're raising a really interesting question that I'm thinking, or a really interesting learning that's happening on my stage in real time. My very first speaker, which was Criteo in the morning, said that the sides are softening. The DSPs are taking on SSP capabilities. SSPs are taking on DSP capabilities. The open internet is getting to act more like a walled garden within themselves. These walled gardens, the rise of Amazon and TikTok are so powerful that these walled gardens are becoming more powerful as a group in a sense. Probably they're mostly taking share from each other, I would say. Anyway, my question is, staying with this thing, this point you've just made, Mark, is, are we seeing that really going forward, your solution speaks to walled gardens? That's where you said you're going. And the open internet both.
Is the whole ecosystem, is the demand and supply requiring more of a holistic look so that you take away the disadvantages of the walled garden and marry them with the advantages of the open internet, which is comparability? Your solution compares walled garden, self-grading homework to the open internet.
100%. Right. I mean, that's, look, again, when we verify an impression or a transaction, we're indifferent to whether that transaction was on social or on the open web. It creates an even playing field for quality. It also, you know, now with RockerBox, it creates an even playing field for attribution, right? If you can work with the same metrics wherever you buy, have the same kind of independent view wherever you buy, then I think that makes open web on par with social across the board with regard to how advertisers evaluate the efficacy, the quality, and the return on spend.
Tell me where that goes. Is that good for the open internet or bad?
Sure. It's good.
That would imply that the open internet's returns are at least as good on a, well, like for like basis as walled gardens. Is that true?
I mean, look.
Because you see both.
I mean, I'm not going to, it depends. There are so many factors. It depends on the advertiser strategy, what they're willing to pay, what their actual KPIs are. I mean, if advertisers were not finding value on the open web right now, they would not be spending there. They obviously are, right? They are finding value. They find value in walled gardens. I think a robust strategy includes all of those things. There will not be a single advertiser, I do not believe, that will sit on the stage and ever say, we spend all of our money in just one place. They do not. They spend their money where people are. If people are on the open web, then they are going to spend money there. If people are on TikTok, they are going to spend money there. They want to engage customers. They want to sell product.
They want to know that their ad spend has been efficient. We can help them with that third thing, which is understanding how their ad spend across all those things compares.
The point I would build on is incrementality. Even if your walled garden was the most efficient way, Amazon, just to be first CPG, you still have to reach everybody. Not everybody is on Amazon. Amazon tells us they only have 120 households here. We know there are 240. You need to reach the other 100 if you are selling certain products.
Yeah. Linear TV still is a multi-billion dollar business, right?
The biggest thing Wall Street's gotten wrong in the last decade is how many linear TV subs there still would be in the U.S.
People are still on linear TV. People still are watching connected TV. Like again, there's the, you know, if you want to reach a mass audience, if you are P&G or Unilever or any CPG company, yes, you want to lean into building brand through social, but you also have to reach everybody. You do that through multiple different media.
That's true. Okay. Questions for DoubleVerify. Anybody? Any questions? Okay. Great. We have about five more minutes and then it's time to go. Okay. Let's talk about moats. Competitive advantage, pricing power. I really like this strategy you're articulating. Not only the pivot to performance, I like that a lot, but the bundling strategy of adding more things and adding products that drive pricing power. I'm like a huge, it's sort of an editor of CEOs and CEO strategy. I like all of that, like on the 10 out of 10 level in terms of adding value. Bigger, more complicated bundles, lower churn, more pricing power through more value added. I totally hear that that works. By the way, if it doesn't work, they'll push back and you'll have to cut the price. You guys are good.
So far, you've been really good at pricing products at a premium and then getting them adopted. So far, I think you have a really good track record of introducing.
Can we just stop right there, Laura?
No.
I just want to leave right there on that comment. We'll be done.
Okay. I hear you from this thing that I've learned on this stage, which is maybe where advertising's going is integrated walled gardens to open internet. You guys have a pole position in that because very few people can say that. My question is, competitive advantage moats, which goes to pricing power, of course. Tell me how you think, do you only think of your competitor as IAS? Or do you, I mean, is one of the benefits that you have pricing power because there's only two of you? Or do you think of single point solutions as competitors? Who's your competitive set? I would have come on to this stage saying you're just getting displaced because as we drive to purchase, we don't need the data layer. You probably disagree with that. I mean, you disagree with that.
I mean, I think we have a very robust competitive set, right? Particularly, you know, due to the fact that there are lots of point solutions that solve small problems, right? Ultimately, I think when we talk about moat though, scale matters, right? Even with AI, the data that you train your AI on matters. That data that you train your AI on is advertiser data. We have, you know, a thousand of the biggest brands on the planet that work with us, including every major tech company. TikTok's ad spend, Meta's ad spend, Google's ad spend.
Who does this? No one except them and you.
Right. So we, you know, so like we have an incredible data set that's unique that we can build knowledge on. We've got broad scale and we've got agnostic ubiquity across platforms, not just open web, but walled gardens, CTV, et cetera. I think that puts us in a unique position. It does not mean there aren't competitors out there, including, you know, some of the platforms themselves.
Not really. Because they only do themselves.
They only do themselves and you can't take a metric from platform to platform, right? We are in a unique position and I think that gives us, you know, strength moving forward.
Yeah. I mean, that's what they don't have, right? Each platform doesn't have what we have, which is scope across every.
Yeah. That's right. I wouldn't define them as competitors, actually. I'm going to ask my last hard question, Mark, which is, when you think about Gen AI and data, how are you guys using Gen AI to lower costs? The part that's hard is you are adding employees, second only to the Trade Desk, because I'm going to ask this of too. This is common. You guys add employees like no one else in the business except for Trade Desk. What that says to me is you're not a tech platform. You're some kind of service platform because scale should mean that your revenue per employee is going up and it's not, you know? When you add Google and Facebook, they are really tech platforms and they scale. Why are we adding so many employees, please?
Look, I think you have to look at where we are in the evolution of the business and when we really started growing as a company, which is only in the last few years. We're still building infrastructure around the world from account management considerations, marketing considerations, like all of those things, like feet on the ground, boots on the ground still matter. Yes, we're a tech company, but I'm going to tell you that a major CPG brand wants a person in Singapore that they can talk to for their division there. That's just the reality of it. You need to have that. However, we have incredible leverage in our model. You're going to see that we've mentioned in the last two calls. You're going to see headcount growth start to level off as we see efficiencies of scale.
You know, right now, 25%+ of our customer service requests are now being managed by Gen AI, right? So that's helping. We, you know, I think 20%-30% of our code now is being created through AI tools. We've been able to manage and have an incredibly high gross margin of over 80% the last two years because of our Unified Content Intelligence tool, which does predictive modeling to understand context of video and short form video, which has been blown up across Shorts, you know, TikTok and Reels. So like if you look at the volume of transactions we're measuring versus kind of how fast we're growing, we're getting incredible leverage and it's only going to become better.
Yeah. I think, you know, these are investments against innovation, right? That provides us for more scale and actually a greater share of the market, right? Like we're growing faster. We're now a larger company than our closest competitor because we continue to innovate.
Okay. That's okay. I spent an hour with Roku, and the CFO has convinced me that revenue per employee is not the right productivity metric. We will be changing our productivity metric. I do not know how you guys come out on that, but I'm keeping a close eye on FTEs, as you know. I'll call it there. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Laura.
Thanks very much.