I cover internet here at JMP. I'm very happy to host DoubleVerify. Mark, Nicola, thank you so much for being here. Let's kick it off with a catalyst for 2023. In my mind, Facebook testing brand safety is a very big deal for you guys. You're now live with Reddit, Twitter, TikTok for brand safety. Talk about the demand that you're seeing for social channels broadly.
Yeah, it's a great question, Andrew. Thanks for having us here today. We're excited to be here.
No intro, Mark. Just go straight to the point.
No, I'm good. I want to say hello to all the folks listening at home. If you're listening on your treadmill today, the recorded remarks, we'll try to keep them exciting so you can keep running. No, I mean, look, social is going to be a nice driver for us for growth, mainly due to the fact that if you look at the value proposition that we offer, the Authentic Ad, which we measure, is looking at whether something is viewable, whether it's delivered in the right geography, whether it's a fraud-free transaction, and then finally, whether it's brand safe or brand suitable. In social networks, one of the biggest challenges for advertisers is brand safety and brand suitability. And we've seen that once we start expanding coverage into that area, advertiser interest just skyrockets. So we launched brand safety and suitability, for example, with TikTok earlier this year.
Month over month, we saw a 33% increase in advertisers signing up month to month since we've launched. I mean, it's huge. Not just campaigns. That multiplies to a huge growth in number of campaigns. Brand safety and suitability is probably the number one issue for advertisers within social media and walled gardens. When we talk about Meta, which we hope to launch later this year, it's a big opportunity for us. Meta is the first or second largest social network that we work with. Social for us is around 16% of our total revenue. That is a big growth driver when we think about the opportunity there to expand into brand safety and suitability. Right now, we see in the news feed, we're only doing viewability and fraud or invalid traffic.
So we know the real growth driver there will be adding brand safety and suitability.
Is there anything that you would think would be different about Facebook than a TikTok? Is there any reason to think that that sort of demand wouldn't extend to Meta?
No. And if anything, it's the number of impressions that we expect to see from Facebook will be multiples higher than what we see, for example, in video environments like YouTube or even TikTok, where it's more of a linear session, whereas Facebook is a much faster stream. So we think the number of impressions will be greater. But it's important to note the work that we've done with Twitter and TikTok over the last year, building brand safety tools for them, is really applicable to what we're doing, what we have to do with Facebook, which I think is great because we've got to kind of try out some of the tools like our universal social pipeline, which pulls in data and allows us to analyze it at scale. We were able to do that in these other environments before we actually moved into Meta.
So the only thing I think that we're looking forward to is lots of great scale, which is good for us because we drive money from measured transactions, and that's a scale business.
Okay. Let's transition to CTV.
Yeah.
Right. The thing that strikes me about CTV is just brand safety. As you move to AVOD platforms and kind of the streamers that are out there, there's certainly content that's just darker than what was on traditional television. Can you just talk about the conversations you're having with advertisers? What are they saying about brand safety and CTV? What's the opportunity there more broadly?
Yeah. I mean, look, there's definitely a lack of transparency in a lot of CTV buying just due to the fact that there's a supply-demand imbalance. There's a ton of demand still for a limited amount of premium supply. So that means that the suppliers kind of hold the cards. They don't want to share a lot of information. I think that's going to change over time as you see new entrants come into this place, like Disney+ and Netflix and other premium content. So there'll be a greater demand for transparency. So we are hearing rumblings from advertisers saying, "Hey, brand safety and suitability is important." However, to reel it back a little bit, we just launched a viewability solution for CTV that was the first and only accredited fully on-screen product that's out there because there is a challenge, and I know it sounds crazy, with CTV viewability.
You'd assume that you're sitting in a living room, you're watching a TV, it's viewable. However, what we found is that in almost 25% of top applications, we're running ads while the television was off. That's a huge issue. If you're an advertiser, you're paying for ads that are running when the TV is off. That's a big issue. Also, with the viewability solution that we've launched, it measures IAB standard viewability on CTV, which means the ad runs for two seconds. Those two things are, I think, a bigger challenge for advertisers today than brand safety and suitability because they're a direct reflection of wasted dollars, so I think CTV is not just a brand safety and suitability story. There's a viewability story emerging because of the TV off issue that we've seen, and there's a growing fraud issue.
Usually, the fraud around CTV is not in CTV itself, but other types of content and impressions representing themselves as CTV, i.e., we saw refrigerators impersonating connected televisions a few months ago. I know it sounds crazy, but someone came up with a way to spoof connected devices, i.e., refrigerators, and represent themselves as CTV devices, which we saw had sold tens of millions of dollars away from advertisers. So there are lots of challenges around CTV. I think it's a great environment. It's exciting because it's pulling dollars from linear and making digital advertising bigger. But we're seeing some of the same challenges we saw with mobile and we saw with display 15 years ago.
So given that those are two of kind of more measurement-oriented kind of formats, if you will, Nicola, let's bring this over to you. So talk to me about measurement kind of through 2022. What has to happen for that to really accelerate this year in 2023?
Sure. So our measurement business grew 17% in 2022, which was well ahead of what our peers were able to achieve. And measurement is driven by growth in social impressions that we measure and then the open internet. And what needs to happen, I'll mention three items that need to happen. One is the social integrations that Mark has already spoken about. Once those are online, they will definitely drive a lot of volume for us. The second driver needs to be a return to growth in international. It's a small part of our business right now. It's about 25% of our measurement business. But the second half of 2022 was very slow based on macro events in the region. We believe that that's going to return and that will drive measurement growth.
The third one is new client wins, which we've already seen, and that's already showing strong signs for the beginning of 2023 ahead of what we saw in Q4.
Yeah. It's interesting to have just a layer on there. We closed more deals, both from an ACV value and a number of deals in Q4 of 2022 than we did in 2021, which, considering what the market has been saying about 2022, the end of 2022, I think is a great indicator of what we look at our future to be like.
Did you list those in reverse order? Is it?
Impact?
Yeah.
Yes. I did. I wanted to finish with the big one, which is 2023.
Okay. Fair enough. All right. Activation line. ABS, $123 million in revenue in 2022, used by 65% of clients. The question is whether you guys are seeing any sort of a ceiling for ABS. How do you feel about penetration? What needs to continue to happen for that line to continue to grow and really drive the activation line?
Yeah. I mean, look, ABS is the gift that keeps on giving for us. ABS volume grew 50% in Q4 and revenue grew, I think, almost 38%. So I look at Tejal in the audience. She knows all the numbers. I just check with her. So it's still on a fast track. And although it's 65% penetrated with our top customers, one, that means 35% haven't used it, which is good. It still gives us growth there. But even when we look at the growth of ABS, 60% of that revenue growth was made up of new customers, totally new customers, but also current customers who hadn't activated it yet. So that growth that we saw last year still has a big chunk of new customer growth and current customer implementation growth.
So that on top of the fact that 40% of the growth was just volume, and volume means current customers turning on into new markets, current customers expanding to new campaigns. That product has great legs. It'll continue to grow. It's a premium product, and I think we've got a long runway there.
Okay. Nicola, back to you. Let's talk macro. It's a little bit confusing from the outside looking into the business and trying to understand softness. Understood, CPMs come down. Mark, I think you've said this a couple of times just in terms of, "Okay, CPMs may go down, but that means impressions may go up." So help us understand how macro kind of impacts the financial model. How do you guys experience that?
Yeah. So the macro would impact the model as one of the many factors that impact our model. So it's macro, it's new products, it's new sectors, it's new geographies. It's one of those. It's one of many. What would really happen with significant macro would be lower volumes. And the reality is we haven't really seen it in Q4. The number of impressions that we measured grew by 22%, which was a fairly challenged quarter for other companies. And we reported 27% growth in Q4. I think the overall impact on macro just won't impact us as much as other companies, as you mentioned, because we're not impacted by the CPMs. Since the beginning of the year, frankly, it feels like it has stabilized. I mean, spending needs to happen for advertisers.
To the extent that spending needs to happen, the volumes will be there for us to verify. Q1 looks a lot more normalized than it did at the end of last year and looks more just as a seasonally adjusted Q1 as we would have in prior years.
Yeah. Clearly, you guys had some nice client wins in Q4. Do you guys experience this in terms of the sales cycle? Does it elongate or anything not there?
We haven't really seen an elongation of the sales cycle. We really haven't.
No. And if anything, we may have mentioned this on our calls, that the dialogue is actually shifting to one of a bit more urgency on advertisers because we're an ROI driver. When we filter out fraud or impressions that aren't viewable that don't perform, that drives performance. And if you're a CMO and your budget has been cut by 20%, every impression has to count. So we're delivering a return, and they want to make that return happen. So we definitely see not an elongation of the sales cycle and almost a greater sense of urgency when people are looking at our tools as ROI drivers.
Okay. Authentic Attention. I think this is a major differentiator for you guys, especially as it really builds through 2023. Snap at their analyst day literally talked about their attention benchmark, their attention versus the benchmark. The question is really, how are you guys educating the industry about Authentic Attention? Where do you think you are in terms of awareness, and what's the biggest opportunity as you look at it?
Yeah. I mean, look, attention, we're trying to build an entirely new category, and we're leading in it. We're literally going through the jungle and cutting down the grass in front of us and saying, "We're going to bust through here." Building a new category is hard. We always say there's three steps: socialization, standardization, and commercialization. On each of those fronts, we're making amazing progress. So on the socialization side, we launched a freemium version of attention for our customers. In Q4, we had over 3,000 individual customers log in, access their attention profiles, and start looking at how it impacts their business. That generated over 200 leads for us. So we're running down 200 major brands. On the standardization side, in January, we announced getting our attention metrics accredited. We are the only accredited attention metric that exists in the market today.
So I think we're making great progress there, as well as our involvement with leading the IAB working groups on coming up with standard terms around attention. And finally, on the commercialization side, our revenue on attention grew 115% last year. So it's getting there. It's a long take, but we think this is a long ball. This is one in which we're getting out ahead, but we know if we can own the attention category, it is a major revenue generator for us in the future.
Okay. As advertisers are kind of going in and checking attention, is that additional engagement for Pinnacle?
Yes.
Is there an overarching benefit there as you think about just advertisers logging in more often?
There's something for sure to do with the level of engagement because we look at all of our metrics as driving towards currency status. How you drive currency is ubiquity. It's accepted everywhere. It's also constant use. If you want to have a currency, you have to use it on a regular basis. The more people use our verification data, whether it's viewability or brand safety or suitability criteria, and now going into attention, it just makes it that much more currency-like. The more engagement we get, absolutely drives longer-term value prop. It's important also to think about attention as part of that matrix of solutions, which is an advertiser is looking for a bundle of metrics that they can use everywhere. That's the power of where we sit. We sit outside the media transaction.
So whether it's social on Meta, which we've talked about, or TikTok, or if it's CTV on Netflix or another platform, or it's a direct buy through a programmatic platform, we're measuring those things. And I think attention just adds to that matrix of tools that we add, which makes us that much more attractive to an advertiser to work with.
Okay. That segues really nicely into Authentic Direct about just the relevance overall with the overall platform. Talk about how that's strategic. How does that play into the overall platform and just leans into your scale with 5.5 trillion impressions?
Yeah. I mean, Authentic Direct is a really cool development that I love because it takes the idea of ABS, which is Authentic Brand Suitability that is used in programmatic, and it takes that same data, those same criteria that advertisers are using, and lets them use that on a direct buy. So if I'm buying through Trade Desk or I'm buying through Amazon or Google, I can use my ABS criteria to filter out impressions. But now if I'm doing a direct buy on a publisher, I can take that same profile for that same campaign, no matter how many campaigns I'm running, and say, "Apply it to this publisher." It gives that advertiser the confidence that this currency that they're using in programmatic, Authentic Brand Suitability currency can now be applied to a direct buy. It's super strategic.
It's not going to be a huge revenue generator for us because it's a publisher tool, and publishers don't like to pay for things, but that's okay. But what it does is it's kind of like that whole Visa is accepted everywhere idea. You can be the Discover card. That's great, but I'd rather be Visa and get accepted everywhere. And that's the idea. ABS is accepted everywhere. Programmatic buys, now on direct buys. And eventually, we'd love to be able to move ABS-like tools into social as well.
Okay. Curveball. Gaming and audio. Again, just thinking about covering all aspects of media plans. How do you think about just the trajectory in terms of making kind of those categories larger? And what else are you guys missing?
Yeah. I mean, those are definitely two sizable categories where I think our penetration has been pretty late. We do work with Twitch on the gaming side, and we've made some traction in the audio space with Pandora and others. I think our mantra is follow the advertiser and where their spend is going and where they have the biggest concerns. And the advertisers right now are saying social is what we care about the most. It's TikTok. It's Facebook. So we're leaning in very heavily there. We'll get into those other categories in a deeper way, I think, eventually. And I think when you talk about ad categories, our vision is verifying every impression on every platform and every market on the planet. There's $1 trillion of ad spend supposedly out there, digital ad spend. We want a piece of every one of those dollars.
So we won't stop until we get gaming covered, until we get audio covered, until we get digital out of home covered. All of these things have issues. So we'll get there. I think the opportunity is there. We are following customer spend first.
Okay. International. I actually asked you guys this on the call, but let's go back into it. It's 60% of ad spend globally, more or less. What are the bottlenecks? Is it just the U.S. is a more programmatic market, and therefore other places are behind? Is it a macro thing? Is it a sales execution thing? What's the unlock for international?
It's a people and coverage thing right now. I would say this is we've had explosive growth, and we've done so with relatively limited investment in sales and marketing, particularly outside the U.S. Now, we've changed that over the last few years. Only about 25%, as you noted, of our measurement revenue comes from outside the U.S. We've got a big gap to fill there. So, for example, over 50% of our hires last year were outside the U.S. And we're selectively investing in markets where our customers, again, following our customers, are going. So we'll unlock it. It's just going to take a little bit of time. We know that when we get a salesperson in front of an advertiser, we have an 80% trailing win rate over the last 12 months. We will get that deal. We will close the deal. It's just about getting sales force out there.
And the cool thing and the extensibility of our business is it's a cloud-based business. We don't need technology resources on the ground in these countries. We just need salespeople. And as you see, we're closing more and more deals that are local. We've got great global deals with people like Unilever and Mondelēz, but where we're closing more deals are with local advertisers in local markets that are still really big. Air France, McDonald's Japan. These are local advertisers. And I think that takes feet on the ground, and we're investing very smartly in those feet.
All right. We're under five minutes, so I want to open it up if anyone has anything. Keep going. Retail media?
Yeah.
Just help me understand what clients are looking for in terms of solutions. What's the job that you guys are doing?
Go ahead.
Okay.
Retail media is really a really cool one for us because, I mean, this is a $40+ billion business that will be bigger than linear television by 2025. A lot of it's coming from areas like co-op spend or search. It's like found dollars. It's like linear dollars coming into CTV. Retail media dollars are coming into retail media networks. We work with Walmart, Kroger Precision Marketing, Target, Macy's, Amazon. Where the dollars are coming in there actually impact all three lines of our business. We have measurement, we have activation, and we have a platform business, which is small. Because of the nature of retail media, they run their own networks. They employ us on the activation side when advertisers are looking to filter out, for example, viewability issues that may happen on retail media networks.
We get employed on the metric side when people want to measure if there are brand suitability or safety conflicts because even though impressions are ending up on retailer sites, people forget that retail media networks include a huge number of impressions that land off-site. There's only so many impressions on the Macy's.com website. So what they do is they take that data and they use it off-site as well. So we are protecting against that. And then for a lot of these platforms, for Amazon and others in particular, we are providing a base level of viewability and a base level of fraud protection for the platform itself. So it's a category for us that grew over 100% last year, year- over- year. It will be in the tens, multiple tens of millions of dollars for us as a category this year.
It is, for the most part, lots of new dollars coming in, with one additional cool aspect to it, which is it's opening up dollars from SMBs to us as well. Because a lot of the people that are advertising on retail media networks are small OEMs, small retailers who we don't have a direct relationship with, but they have a direct relationship with Amazon or with Kroger or with Macy's. We'll never do a direct deal with them, but they're buying through those platforms or buying within those platforms, employing our data, and we're getting the benefit of it. It kind of opens up that whole group of SMB clients through a channel partner that we wouldn't have been able to touch a couple of years ago before these retail media networks existed.
All right. Nicola, I'm going to go fast here. 80%+ gross profit margins. You guys are still growing strong in terms of 2023. That means that there's a lot of incremental dollars that you guys have to invest.
Yep. Correct.
So talk to me about where you guys are investing in 2023. Maybe it's international. Maybe it's something else. Flesh that out.
The primary focus of our investments in 2023 are going to be around two key categories: R&D, because we do need to remain innovative and ahead of where the industry is, and then people. So on the R&D side. I'm sorry, R&D and then machine learning and AI. So on the R&D side, it's personnel continuing to work on our products, continuing to be ready for when the platforms are ready to deploy our products. That was a large category of additional investments for us as opposed to our peers in the industry. We spent a lot more money on R&D, and you can see in our results where we can afford it, and we continue to do that. And then machine learning and AI will be an interesting way for us to accelerate our product roadmap.
Those will be tools that will allow us to, again, deploy solutions on new platforms and new integration in a way that is a bit more automated. So we are continuing to invest. I mean, we need to continue to invest to maintain the margins that we have. We're not looking to reduce cost investments at all. We feel like the top-line opportunity is very strong. We're just going to continue to do that.
Yeah. There is a huge greenfield opportunity for us right now. And we've talked about it on the call. We're going to continue to invest in that. We're going to invest more than our competitors are in that space because we think this is an absolute opportunity to land and expand with the marketplace that's out there. And we're going to invest today to grow tomorrow.
I'll sneak it in and I'll try it. What's the long-term EBITDA margin potential of this business?
It is long-term. We have a lot of growth to go, so we're going to continue to grow into it. So I think the 30 is a number that we'll keep our eyes on for a while, while we continue to gain market share.
I tried. All right, guys. Thank you so much. I appreciate you guys attending.
Absolutely. Thank you.