All right, so we're at the top of the hour here, so why don't we go ahead and get started. Thanks, everyone, for joining us at the Raymond James TMT and Consumer Conference this year, and thank you also to Mark Zagorski and Nicola Allais, CEO and CFO of DoubleVerify, who are here for a nice little presentation, so Mark, Nicola, thanks for joining us.
Great. Great being here.
All right, so the classic start-off question. So for those who are maybe in the room not as familiar with the DoubleVerify story, can you give us the overview of the company and where you sit within the digital advertising ecosystem?
Yeah, so DoubleVerify is an integrated software platform that, at its core, enables advertisers, digital advertisers, to verify, optimize, and prove the effectiveness of their ad spend. So think about what we do is ensure that a digital ad is viewed by a real person in a contextually relevant environment that's viewable and ultimately delivers a result for that advertiser. That was our core value proposition, ensuring that that kind of transaction between a buyer and seller was safe and secure. We've expanded from that to not only ensure that that ad is delivered in, basically, what we say, an authentic way, but also done at the price that is most optimal, and that it drives a result as well.
So we don't buy media, we don't sell media, we are outside of the media transaction, but we ensure that everything about that media transaction is effective for an advertiser in the digital ecosystem.
Great. Definitely want to get into some of those elements a little bit more deeply over the course of the conversation. But before we do, let's take a little 30,000-foot view of the macro environment right now. I think we've heard kind of some uneven feedback on macro conditions through different participants in the market. So I guess from your perspective, both on an industry basis and a DoubleVerify basis, how are you seeing the macro environment playing out?
Yeah, so our business model is fundamentally driven by volume, right? The more we can verify, the better it is for us. And of course, that means that it is tied to advertising spend patterns. And so to the extent that advertisers are impacted by what they're seeing in their own business or in the macro, particularly around this year around tariffs and other uncertainty in the macro, that obviously impacts the volume that we're able to see, which impacts the recurring part of our business. In particular, what we saw, and we mentioned it for Q3, it was specific volatility around the retail space. Retail and CPG are two large verticals for our business. And so to the extent that it impacted their spend, it impacted our business. What can we do about it? We have ways to control the other parts of the business.
So if the recurring volume is impacted, we can control new clients that we can gain in the market. So we said that of our growth came from new clients to the business. We can impact the number of clients that upsell to our new solutions. And we can impact it by new products that we put into the market. So those are the three things that we can control that are going to go against any sort of recurring volatility that we can see in the market.
Great. And then maybe on that new customer side, I guess, is there any specific type of customer or customer cohort who's now coming into your fold?
Yeah, so our bread and butter are large enterprise clients, right? Those are the ones that have spent a lot of money on their own brands. And so brand safety is obviously something that they're looking for. Return on their investment is something that they're very focused on. So that's where the company started, and that's where most of our revenue still comes from. We do have a business that these tools are as useful for large enterprise clients as they are for smaller clients. And we have about 10%-15% of our monthly programmatic business that comes from clients that we don't necessarily have a direct relationship with, but do pick DV as part of their solutions when they use a programmatic partner. So we do appeal to a lot of different types of clients, but obviously the large enterprise clients is the bread and butter of our clients.
Great. And then maybe let's touch on that product momentum that you were talking about. So you've made a couple of notable acquisitions over the last several quarters, and in June held an Innovation day to show how some of those capabilities are being added into the DV platform. So I guess, how is that product offering overall evolving, and how have Scibids and Rockerbox enabled that change?
Yeah, so this summer we talked about the launch of what we call our Media Advantage Platform. And this is a combination of leveraging our core verification assets, so what I mentioned earlier, making sure that that ad is viewable, delivered in a brand-safe or suitable environment, is not fraudulent, and is geographically aligned. That combined, that starts off as our core. We go from there to ensuring that that spend, when an advertiser goes and looks for those verified impressions, that they can do that at the cheapest rate possible. That's optimization, and that was the acquisition of Scibids, right? So Scibids allowed us to do what we call algorithmic-based bidding. So to take a KPI like brand safety or suitability or viewability or attention and optimize against that KPI by basically using AI to bid for impressions. That's where Scibids came in.
Then we bought a company called Rockerbox, which allows us to kind of close the loop and say, did that impression actually drive a result? The idea behind the Media Advantage Platform is we verify, we optimize, and we prove the effectiveness of the solutions. Started off as three separate entities, so our core business, Scibids, then Rockerbox. We've now started integrating those solutions so that, for example, we also launched DV Authentic AdVantage on YouTube. An advertiser now can find high-quality impressions, so safe and suitable impressions, at a considerably lower cost by integrating Scibids and our core verification pre-bid and post-bid measurement.
The idea behind all of this is that we've created a high-value closed-loop system that enables advertisers to find exactly the quality of the impressions that they want at the price that they need and determine whether or not it actually drives a result.
Great. And then maybe on that theme of driving results, performance is something that we've heard come, I don't even want to say into vogue, but it's becoming much more emphasized among a lot of what we would maybe consider traditionally brand-focused advertisers. I think one thing we've historically heard about verification, it's maybe harder to calculate ROI, like what is the value of brand safety or blocking an objectionable impression. But I guess, how does this performance shift in the industry help quantify that for decision-makers?
Yeah, so it's interesting. I think performance has always been part of the math that advertisers use, right? As 60 years ago, there was a concept of, you know, I know that half of my spend works, I just don't know which half of it works, right? The old John Wanamaker quote. That still exists today. Advertisers, even if they're big brands, want to ensure that their advertising is actually making people do something. It works. It's effective. Part of that is starting with the math behind it. And so when advertisers first look at verification, there's a direct ROI from verification. If we're taking fraud out of the system, if we're taking non-viewable ads, those ads have zero impact. A bot crawling on an ad can't buy something for the most part. We can talk about that later in a second. For the most part, fraudulent bots can't.
The ads that aren't viewed or never rendered don't deliver a result, so when an advertiser looks at our data and we can show, for example, that 5% of the ads were fraudulent on a $10 million campaign, we're able to save them $500,000 right there in showing here's a direct ROI by cleaning out results that were not delivered to a human that couldn't actually have an impact on the return, so I think the ROI of verification is pretty straightforward, and we actually have a dashboard that allows advertisers to look every day and see what percentage of their ads that were delivered were not authentic, right? Not viewable, not delivered to a real human, and brand suitability and safety have an impact on performance as well.
Ads that end up in extreme violent content or ads that end up in terrorist content are not going to sell product, right, for the most part. So there is a direct relationship between suitability, safety, and performance, as well as the bottom line of ads that aren't delivered to a human or not viewable. So there is direct ROI around that. On top of that, with the new introduction of tools like Authentic AdVantage, where we're actually optimizing pricing and lowering the cost of finding quality, those things are no longer mutually exclusive. And I think there has always been this thought, well, it's great, you've pulled ads that I can't see out, but for me to find higher quality costs me more money. What is that worth to me?
We've now changed that whole thesis in saying that you can get high quality without having to pay as much as you used to because we're able to use our optimization tools and Scibids to lower the cost of that. So Authentic AdVantage on YouTube now has been able to find at least as high quality and suitable impressions at 20%-30% lower CPMs, which allows advertisers to get 30%-40% more reach for the same cost. So there's a direct relationship between now quality and reach and performance that we're able to drive. So there is real ROI around verification. And we're even driving better results on that ROI based on some of the new tools that we acquired and are integrating into the platform.
Great. Really interesting. And then maybe another specific product question around some of the streaming TV features that were announced just ahead of the 3Q report. I guess, how do they add to the overall holistic DV offering? And what are some of the unmet needs in CTV that you'd still be interested in fulfilling for your clients?
Yeah, I think it's super relevant today based on what's happening in the streaming world, right? Like CTV is eating all really premium video engagement. We see that just in everything that's happening with linear, what's happening in the consolidation in the space. And I think advertising really hasn't caught up with regard to you've got this mix of the beauty of sight, sound, and motion that television has already been able to produce and the efficacy of digital, right? And that's what CTV brings together. That's why advertisers love it so much. The challenge there, there's a pretty significant lack of transparency. Outside of YouTube, most of the large streamers don't provide a level of granularity that you would expect from digital advertising. I want to know where it showed up. I want to know the context around it, where it showed up.
I want to have greater transparency of what I'm buying. It's just not there. So we've launched a series of tools around CTV that allow advertisers to better understand where their impressions are showing up. We've estimated around, and believe it or not, it seems like it's nonsensical. If I'm buying certain CTV, I should be getting CTV, right? Not if you're buying through a lot of programmatic channels where there's reselling going on. There's obfuscation of where the actual CTV ads are coming from. Advertisers have had to put up with this because it was the only game in town, right? If I want to get CTV, I have to buy in this blind manner, and I don't get a lot of transparency around it.
We've found around 15% of what advertisers supposedly are buying as CTV are showing up in things like solitaire apps or outstream players, not in high-quality environments. That's over $1 billion a quarter, we estimate. With our tools now, we're able to actually flag and verify whether an impression went into what we call a branded player environment. If you bought Hulu, it ends up on a Hulu player someplace, right? It's not a resold impression that you're ending up someplace else. We're able to show that and give advertisers a lot more transparency around their CTV spend. We've also launched what we call automated Do Not-air lists. Again, until we get full contextual capabilities on CTV, most advertisers now use what are called exclusion lists. The ability to say, I don't want to be around this kind of programming.
I don't want to be around these kinds of shows. The publishers still allow that to occur. You can't cherry-pick programs, but you can exclude programs. We've automated that through platforms like Trade Desk now. So when advertisers are going and buying, they're able to say, exclude these programs from my list because they don't align with who I am as a brand. I think these are some of the first steps in giving advertisers the real control over CTV spend like they have with all of their other digital media spend. And if CTV, if the real publishers, if the Netflix, the Paramounts, the Warners of the world want to compete against YouTube, they have to provide that level of granularity or advertisers are just going to spend all their money on YouTube.
Makes sense. And maybe Netflix and Warners will be the same publisher. Who knows?
Exactly.
Maybe turning to AI quickly. So first, we've heard questions from investors about the impact of generative AI on the business. The bear case being that AI can interpret the signals that DV does and do the job of verification, so maybe it could be brought in-house. But the bull case is that AI is making new threats, creating new opportunities for DV to drive efficiency. I guess, how are you looking at the threat and opportunity landscape here that AI is posing?
We only deal with bears now, with bulls at DV. So I look at AI. AI is a tool, right? It's a hammer. And hammers don't build houses, right? Architects and people build houses. We look at AI as a tool. We are now using AI in our verification solution that it's now enabled us to verify and look at contextual cues 2,000x faster, do so at volumes like we've never seen before, and actually eliminate significant overhead in both people and other technologies to do so. So AI for us is a tool in doing what we do best and better. People trust us. Our advertisers trust us. If you look at the tenure of our top 25 customers, it's nearly eight years, right? People and large brands work with us over time because they trust what we do.
They trust our analysis of context to create a verification score that makes sense to them and that is independent of the media transaction. That's super important, right? AI, as we've all seen, AI is incredibly powerful, but we've all got hallucinations. We've all seen bad results. And an advertiser can't rely on an AI just doing something without some human control. It's a tool. And we're the masters of those tools. So we're using that to actually drive better results for our customers. So I think on that, addressing that kind of bear case of AI is just going to do what you guys do, it can't do it. A hammer just doesn't build houses on its own. I think the bull case is really interesting for us because as we've seen now, we've now crossed the Mendoza Line, right?
There's more content being created by AI than there is by humans now on the open web, so more content on the open web is created by AI. A lot of it is junk, right? A lot of it is what we call AI slop. It's infiltrating everywhere. I just saw an article today about Reddit having challenges pulling it out of their feeds. Their content moderators can't do it fast enough. We've launched tools to allow advertisers to identify AI slop, and because if you're a big brand, right, you invested millions, if not billions, in your brand over time. The last thing you want to end up next to is some weird AI-contrived content that your logo is going to stand next to, so we've given advertisers the ability to avoid that on a pre-bid basis, to measure it and block it on a post-bid basis.
So AI is creating new opportunities for us to do what we do best, which is ensure that advertiser spend is aligned with who they are as a brand and is not wasted in places that won't move the needle for them.
The SlopStopper.
That's it. SlopStopper.
That's right.
But then, last on AI, maybe talking about the bots who can interpret ads and can buy products. Of course, speaking about agentic AI advertising. So you announced an agentic verification solution a few weeks ago, maybe putting aside things like deepfakes and AI slop. I guess, how do you see AI affecting the way brands advertise agentically and how does DV meet them where they are?
Yeah, it's kind of a really interesting time for us right now because in the space, it's always been, as we started, bots were always seen as bad, right? They're just waste. They don't do anything. Bots don't buy, was the old saying. So why advertise to a bot? Well, bots are starting to buy, right? Personal agents are going out and crawling for people and saying, "Hey, I want to purchase something." So think of it this way. If you were a consumer and you sent your bot out and said, "Hey, I'm interested in a new winter coat. Go look for the cheapest price for a Moncler ski jacket for me." The bot would go out and look for those. And let's say you're at Saks Fifth Avenue without it and you're engaging with that. In the past, you'd say, "Don't engage with the bot.
It's not going to buy anything," but maybe you could say, "Wait, this is a shopping bot. I want to give a 10% discount to this bot so it can come to the Saks Avenue and say," That's the new world we're living in, so we launched the first stage of kind of that universe is identifying who the bot is. Are they a good bot or a bad bot, right? To quote a movie, that's also very popular today, and identifying that is the first step in kind of realizing, "Okay, now how should I engage with that bot if I'm an advertiser?" Because bots right now ignore all advertising. They're trained to ignore advertising. And that's why those ads generally aren't rendered on pages.
If they are rendered, advertisers are like, "Don't pay for it." Very shortly, and I say in the future, like we're talking quarters, not years, advertisers will want to engage with that bot. That bot will want to engage with that advertising. We're at the position, the perfect position to manage that. We are already tagged on trillions of ad transactions, right? We're already seeing all of those today. As a matter of fact, we see billions of ad transactions as well with those kinds of bots. There is a point at which not just identifying those, but helping advertisers monetize those and engage with those is going to be part of what we do as a company. It's all evolving very fast. We're literally at the crossroads of that activity.
I think it's a good place for us to be to take advantage of it.
Yeah. Yesterday, I used the shopping research tool from a certain scaled AI company yesterday, and it was really interesting, and I can definitely see the opportunity there. I used it for shopping for myself, not for holiday gifts. I don't know what that says about me. But yeah, it's a very interesting surface for advertising to come to. Then, of course, I don't want to neglect DoubleVerify's social business. You've got the pre-bid offering scaling and announcements about product expansion within social networks still coming pretty frequently. What's the roadmap for the social business in 2026? How are you thinking about the expected contributions?
Yeah, everything we do from a verification perspective, we look at all places where advertising runs and all places where consumers engage, whether it's the AI universe, the social universe, the open web universe, the CTV universe as being important, right? Important parts of our roadmap and important parts of where advertisers are looking for return. On the social side, we've now launched a series of what we call pre-bid or pre-screen filters, which enable advertisers on Meta, on YouTube, now on TikTok, to actually put their brand suitability criteria in and allow them to avoid certain content that doesn't meet that suitability criteria. Meta was launched earlier this year. It's scaling quite nicely. We announced in Q3 that we've got 56 of our brands now using it.
We're ending the year. We should end the year at around a $7 million run rate, which I think is going to grow considerably faster over time. And we're seeing growth for that. We've got a continued expansion of our Social Activation business on YouTube. Social Activation grew for us 20% last quarter. And I think it will continue to grow at a really strong rate for us as more and more dollars move into social. So for us, it's all about making sure that advertisers get the core verification solutions they need on any platform that they're in, whether it's, again, social, CTV, or open web.
Great. And Nicola, thank you for joining us. Haven't forgotten about you. But last quarter, you talked about a 10% revenue growth base case for 2026. What are some of the more likely factors that could drive outperformance versus that base case?
Yeah. So first, what's this base case based on, right? So we have an NRR that's been consistently over 110%. It was 112% last year. And so you have that. That basically informs a 10% base case before we talk about everything else that I mentioned upfront, which is new clients, new products, and upsell, right? The motion of those three things are what's not in the 10% base case. And we've been talking about a lot of new products that are going to be driving that growth above the 10%. The next cycle of growth that we see is going to be product-driven, right? Everything that we're launching is what's going to get us to be above the 10%. But the 10% is based on just basically the recurring clients that we have continuing to spend at levels that we've seen in the past.
That's kind of how we're building the whole story.
Great. And then ad tech is kind of an arms race in terms of tech and product, and you have a lot of irons in the fire. How are you thinking about the margin trajectory given the investment needs of the business?
Yeah. So we've been at 33% margin for now quite a few years. And we've said already that we think that that's certainly sustainable, again, as a base case as we go into next year. The exciting thing that's happening in our business is everything we discuss about AI, right, which basically unlocks a lot of efficiencies in the business. The AI classification tools that we now have in place allow us to classify a lot more information much, much faster and without necessarily having to hire as many people in-house. So our expectation is that the growth in headcount is not going to be a significant amount.
And the beauty of the business that we have now is that all the efficiencies that we have unlocked through AI are dollars that we can reinvest in the business, which is why we continue to think of a margin that's fairly steady around 33% as a base case, even though we are generating quite a bit of efficiency in the model. So not as many headcounts growth. And talking below EBITDA, stock-based comp is something that we're looking at as well and sort of resizing the level of equity incentives that we're going to use going forward. We've mentioned that we don't intend to have an equity grant that's going to be as high as 25. It's actually going to go down. Over time, it will impact stock-based comp as well.
Got you. Thank you for that. I think we have time from the audience for one question if anybody has anything particularly burning. Go ahead.
As your efficiencies grow with AI applications within your product, do you see that the free cash will be used for more acquisitional purposes or for [audio distortion]
Yeah. Capital allocation. So we've been very diverse, right? We can do M&A. We've done some stock buybacks, and we've been able to invest in the business. I think we're going to stay pretty disciplined around the three. We still have $90 million available in the stock buyback. So it'll depend on what we think can help us accelerate our roadmap faster.
Anyone else? All right. Well, I guess the last one. And I guess since we have two people up here, I will allow two. But if you had to call out one thing each, maybe, that investors should look forward to in the DV story for 2026, what would you highlight?
I'll start so you feel like the big one. All right. Look, we mentioned this idea that we want about half of our business to come from non-open web, and so everything we discussed today, which is TV, social, all these new AI solutions, is really, as I said, the product-driven growth that we're going to see in the next few years, so that's one measure that we will keep an eye on to see exactly how the business is evolving.
Yeah. And I think for us, the second thing would be just looking at AI as a catalyst, not as a headwind. It's helping us become more efficient. It's helping us build new solutions. And it's creating new opportunities for new products for us. And that's really exciting for us.
Sounds great. Mark, Nicola, DoubleVerify. Thanks for joining us.
Thank you.
Absolutely. Thank you.