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Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2024

Sep 11, 2024

Moderator 2

Okay, yes, so all right, so in the interest of time, we're gonna keep the train moving down the tracks. It's my pleasure to have our next fireside chat with the team from Ibotta, represented by Bryan Leach, CEO. I'm gonna start with a safe harbor. I'm unfortunately unable to make this as exciting as probably the rest of the fireside, but today's conference may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to inherent risks, uncertainties, and changes, and reflect Ibotta's current expectations and information currently available to the company, and Ibotta's actual results could differ materially. For more information, please refer to the risk factors in Ibotta's recent SEC filing. In addition, all results discussed today will be Non-GAAP, unless stated otherwise. Reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures are available on Ibotta's investor relations website at investors.ibotta.com.

Okay, with that, Bryan, welcome to your first Communicopia and Technology Conference.

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Why, thank you.

Moderator 2

Since you went public within the last year. So for those in the audience that are less familiar with the company, especially since you're a recently public company, I always like to start the conversation with letting you set the stage for the journey you've been on at the company, and what you're trying to build for the medium to long term.

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for joining our session. I'm Brian. I'm the founder and CEO of Ibotta. We're about an 830-person company, headquartered in Denver, Colorado. We started out as a direct-to-consumer cashback mobile app that you could download for free and use to get rewards on everyday purchases, like in the grocery store. You would buy items, and then get rebates, basically, on PayPal. Grew that to about 50 million users, and then about five years ago, decided to build out a network, which we call the Ibotta Performance Network, which is basically a channel distribution strategy. So we are now powering the loyalty programs of large retailers like Walmart, Dollar General. We recently announced a major partnership with Instacart.

So if you are using those services, and you're just a logged-in user, you don't have to know about Ibotta, or download Ibotta, or create an account. You just earn Walmart Cash, or you get a discount, and we're the ones powering that behind the scenes, white label. So we work with 2,500 different consumer packaged goods, or CPG, companies, Coke, Kellogg, Unilever, Nestlé, et cetera, and we essentially put their digital promotions, not only on the original Ibotta app, but also on the Walmart, you know, app, website, on Dollar General, on Instacart, across all their different retailers, and you can redeem these offers for discounts or cashback. We're really focused on taking the promotions industry and modernizing it.

Instead of having a one-size-fits-all promotion, which might be a risk of subsidizing somebody who is already gonna buy a product, you put the right offer in front of the right consumer at the right time, and you use AI to basically predict what that person's baseline level of purchases would've otherwise been, and then try to spend as little money as possible to change their behavior. That might be going from never buying Pepsi to buying Pepsi, or it might be going from buying it three times to buying it five times, or spending $50 a year to $70 a year, but really thinking about how do you solve for the lowest possible cost per incremental dollar that you're gaining, using kind of machine learning?

And that concept, and real-time measurement, and all these other ideas are really taking the CPG industry from a little bit behind the curve, in terms of performance marketing, and bringing it to the forefront. So instead of annually allocating a budget at Kellogg's, and waiting a year, and using a media mix model to measure that, you know, every 12 months, you can log in and see the real-time performance, the payback period, the cost per incremental unit, and you can adjust your campaign accordingly. So that's what we do. We are in the giving away money business, I like to say. We've given away $2+ billion to American consumers, and we're very proud of that. Our mission is: Make every purchase rewarding. And we really are the kind of clear leader in our category, and we're really elevating that category.

Currently only in the U.S. , for the time being, but a lot of opportunity here and ultimately beyond here, but looking forward to today's conversation, so thanks for being here.

Moderator 2

Thanks, Brian, for that. That was great. I know we're gonna talk about a lot of that in more detail. I think, sticking with the short term first, because one of the big recurring debates or themes coming out of this conference is sort of the end demand environment that we currently find ourselves in.

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Mm, mm.

Moderator 2

You obviously play in both the retail environment and the advertising environment-

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Yeah.

Moderator 2

Have a lot of conversations with CPG companies. How are conversations with advertisers trended in the recent months, and are advertisers increasingly prioritizing lower funnel channels, like yourself, in an environment like this?

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Yeah, I mean, there are a couple things going on right now that are known to everyone in this room, so I won't belabor them. Number one, we're in a super price-sensitive environment for consumers. We also know that consumer packaged goods companies have raised prices a lot and are losing market share to private label brands, need to make sure that they are staying in the purchase habits of a generation of consumers. And so one thing that we offer is the fastest way to adjust your price. Rather than going around and trying to do that, you know, by changing your manufacturer's suggested retail price with each retailer, which takes a long time, you can pull a lever and move, you know, the price down, and consequently drive, you know, ten million units of sales in 60 days.

There's nowhere else you can do that. But then the other piece is that we're a performance-based company, so we don't charge for media in the sense of cost per impression, cost per click. We have a fee per unit sold, sort of CPA model that's rather novel. And so in this environment, I think, there's more of an emphasis on making sure that you can measure and truly feel good about, kind of have accountability for your marketing spend in CPG. So you can, you can buy a radio ad or a television ad or a connected TV, and you can rely on a model that tells you that this percentage of attribution is given to that tactic, and, you know, a Super Bowl ad has seventy weeks of attribution assigned to it, so that's back to the last Super Bowl.

Or you can pay for something where you're only gonna pay if it results in a sale, and they'll tell you what the number of incremental sales is and the cost per incremental sale, and that's pretty popular in this climate where you're looking for more accountability in spend. And so it's not an or. I mean, you still want upper funnel brand, but it works in concert with more of a direct response component. So if you have a strong brand, like Coca-Cola has a strong brand, that just may mean that you don't need as deep of a discount to motivate people to try a product, right? We're really getting people to think about this is, as I like to say, not your grandma's coupon.

And is not only a great volume driver, but actually one of the highest ROI places you can put your marketing dollar. And I think that the last piece has always been true, which is that until you get to a certain scale, you just... You know, it's hard to get in the room with the CMO and kind of become a major strategic pillar in a marketing plan. And I think for us, with the announcement of our Instacart deal on top of Dollar General, Family Dollar, Walmart, Schnucks, we're getting to a point where, we're really considered not just a tactic or an add-on to something else that's going on seasonally, but a kind of perpetual pillar of the marketing plan.

Moderator 2

Okay, understood. You introduced this earlier in your first answer, but the Walmart relationship-

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Mm

Moderator 2

Is obviously where there's a lot of investor attention.

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Yeah

Moderator 2

-and a lot of focus. Can you talk a little bit about how that partnership has been scaling since Walmart Cash launched, late last year? How to think about consumer adoption, conversion rates, online and offline channels. How does that relationship continue to evolve?

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Yeah. So for the benefit of folks who are newer to the Ibotta story, if there are any in this room, basically, the Walmart partnership was a transformational moment for our company. We entered into an agreement that lasts the better part of a decade. It's a strategic partnership. They have a warrant in the company that struck at $2 billion valuation to own up to 12% of the company. We're their exclusive provider of item-level rewards content for every category in the store, for in-store, online, click and collect throughout the U.S. . And so that has been scaling dramatically. I mean, we've gotten to a place where several hundred million dollars of Walmart Cash has now been earned by their shoppers in the first kind of 18 months.

It's one of the most popular features of shopping at Walmart, and it's grown really nicely. We sort of break out our redeemer counts by the direct-to-consumer and the third-party part of our business, and we're ahead of schedule on that shift toward third party. So a really high percentage of our redemptions now, what used to be kind of a third of our redemptions or a quarter of our redemptions were coming from third-party publishers like Walmart, is now all of a sudden, within a year, more like, you know, 65% or 70% of our redemptions are on third party. That's really the growth can come from these places that have so much scale, and there's better margins because we don't have to acquire users at Walmart.

We just get to piggyback on accessing 140 million weekly shoppers, so there's a lot more to come at Walmart. Most of our redemptions are happening on online grocery purchases, whereas that's only 10% of all purchases at Walmart, so we think that there are some items on the horizon that could increase usage in store. And then, of course, with the addition of Instacart and others, diversifying is also something we're doing, so we wanna grow each publisher, as we call them, but we also want to reduce concentration, and I think with Instacart having 1,500 supported retailers, it's not just like adding one publisher, it's almost like adding, you know, 1,500 retailers at once.

So, we're excited about that and excited about the reaction that we're getting from the brand community to the opportunity, through a single interface, to reach all these publishers, kind of like the way they can reach a large group of publishers with display ads through something like The Trade Desk.

Moderator 2

Maybe just one follow-up here, Brian. One of the questions we get a lot is, in terms of driving continued redeemer growth-

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Yeah

Moderator 2

Through the parties that are publishers on the IPN, how do you think about some of the friction points that are still trying to be solved for, to continue to sustain and scale the redeemer base inside the IPN?

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Yeah. Let's just take Walmart. I mean, these are all observable facts in the public domain. Right now, to check out and get your Walmart Cash in the store is a fairly laborious process. You know, you have to download the Walmart app, of course, but you have to then find the section of the app that allows you to scan the QR code on the screen, and what if that was just a phone number, right? That would be dramatically less friction. Knowing about the program in the store is a big opportunity. We are excited about digital shelf technologies, like electronic shelf labels, as a way to interact with the retailer's mobile app and let you know that in this aisle, you have these offers available because of the Bluetooth connection with the electronic shelf tag.

Many of you saw the Caper Carts that have been on display this week here at this conference, and that's exciting. You know, we are live at Schnucks, which has fully deployed electronic shelf labels and has Caper Carts, so these are technologies that will reduce what we sometimes call the scavenger hunt problem, which is, I know there's an offer here, but where the heck is it, and how quickly can I lay hands on it? I don't want to go on a scavenger hunt. This is not a fun version of scavenger hunt... and then there are many other things, so on the website, is it listed prominently in the main navigation? Is it that I can search for items and see offers embedded in the search results? Great, but if I log out, can I no longer see those?

Lots of details, but the bottom line is, we think those are upside to just the general trajectory of as you add more offers, more people try these programs, they like them, they come back to them, they seek them out, they tell their friends, and then just e-commerce is growing in general at a place like Walmart, baseline, 20%, so it's sort of best thought of as there's a general trajectory of growth, and then there are these punctuations that can happen when some of these initiatives are implemented, and we have weekly conversations with each of our publishers to try to inflect, to persuade them, you know, to prioritize those initiatives.

Moderator 2

Okay, understood. We've talked a lot on the first couple of earnings calls about the publisher pipeline, and I think you've expressed a lot of optimism about the conversations you have and the potential for building scale there. Talk a little bit about framing that current pipeline, and for those publishers that don't currently work with you, what are some of the gating factors you hear the most to sort of get over that hurdle and bring them into your network?

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Yeah. I mean, I would say that the fact of going public, the momentum from, announcements like Instacart, has catalyzed a lot of inbound interest in joining our network and made the response rate and uptake rate and urgency categorically different than before the IPO, which is really exciting. I think that, these things tend to snowball because, people are trying to remain competitive on price, and if you are looking at something like Instacart and, you know, you want to be a competitor, but you don't have offer content on these thousands or tens of thousands of items, you're at a disadvantage, from a consumer experience standpoint. And you may, in some cases, even be coming out of your own pocket to do price matching, which you don't want to be paying for if you're at a large e-commerce retailer.

Gating elements-wise, candidly, it's pretty boring, some mundane things like, for instance, "Well, this is gonna take seventy-five days and three engineers, so is that something I wanna throw on my roadmap now when I already had these seven items on my roadmap?" You know, who moved my cheese kind of stuff, right?

Moderator 2

Yeah.

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

My cheese was here, my roadmap was here, and now you're telling me I got to drop this on the roadmap right now. Or there might be a couple instances where there might be a previous contract that's sort of being run out before they switch over to our network. But it's not. I mean, I don't want to insult my sales team, but it's not the world's hardest sale to say, "Hi, I have, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars to give to your customers at no cost to you." So I believe that we will continue to grow our publisher ecosystem, and I think if you look at what's happened with Dollar General leading to Family Dollar, leading to other interest, I think you'll see these little sort of pockets of snowball effects.

That then, in turn, prompts the brands to want to invest more because, wow, now I have this opportunity to reach this exciting, tech-savvy, online grocery shopper, for instance. It's not as concentrated at Walmart, and it also makes the business a little bit more predictable over time as well.

Moderator 2

Okay. Just sticking with that theme, and I had Fidji here yesterday and had a fireside chat with her.

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Mm.

Moderator 2

I know you talked a little bit about the Instacart partnership. I want to come at this from two perspectives. I think investors generally were surprised when you announced it, because I think people thought maybe that would happen somewhere down the road-

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Mm.

Moderator 2

And might have happened a little bit sooner. So I'd love to go a little bit deeper in the genesis of the partnership. What it about, a little bit of the backstory. And then with that now having been announced and being deployed, how do you think about that opening up the potential to unlock other third-party online marketplace or food delivery platforms? Just as you talked about, you get a little bit of momentum in subsectors or pockets of the broader retail economy. How do you think about that potential?

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Yeah, so let's take those in turn. I think to the first one, the genesis of the partnership, that's a fun one. I have an email from June of 2014, where I've just come back from a meeting with Apoorva and Nilam in South Park, here in town, and suggesting that they partner with us. And, you know, it took a decade, basically of persistent staying on. Now, admittedly, at that time, we were proposing that they take people off of Instacart, have them download the Ibotta app, and participate over in this other app. It wasn't until several years into the. You know, it's fairly obvious now as you look at it, that that, that ain't gonna hunt. You need to create a white label version of this.

You know, what's significant is they actually built a promotions business for a decade, and they are essentially transitioning that over to Ibotta, their preferred partner. We are taking this off their hands so they can focus on selling Criteo ads and other things. I think it relates to your second question, because if you're in food delivery, for example, and you're considering, "Should I partner with Ibotta, or should I build my own promotions business, or I guess, partner with somebody else?" It's powerful to see that the sort of first mover and leader in the space, having built something for 10 years, nonetheless decided, "You know what? Let's recognize that Ibotta is really focused just on this," right?

Moderator 2

Yeah.

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

This is actually harder than it might have looked. Targeting offers is important. Measurement needs to be uniform, a set of uniform analytics tools. That's all they do, whereas what we do is last mile fulfillment and Caper Carts and ad sales, and let's concentrate on that. I think it's critically important that they have the most offers for their customers, because as they think about growth, they need to grow the addressable market of people who will use these services. All of us in this room are affluent enough to pay for convenience, I'm guessing. But a lot of people, you know, gosh, if I have a $60-$75 grocery bill, and you want me to pay ten bucks, you know, to cover the convenience of delivery, that's an intolerably high price to pay.

And so as you wanna move into the fat part of the bell curve of the market, being able to offset that by $7, $8, $10 per trip through the content we provide, is actually really strategically valuable, in addition to allowing their sales team to concentrate on, say, retail media. I do believe that this will send a clear signal to others in the delivery space, and we'll have to see how that turns out. But I am confident that, as happened with Dollar, there will be a lot of attention on the opportunity that exists here.

Moderator 2

Okay. I know it doesn't get as much focus as the IPN, which is certainly growing quite nicely, but maybe just do a check-down for us on the direct-to-consumer business-

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Yeah

Moderator 2

... and the Ibotta app. Obviously, I think the messaging has been trying to sort of strike a balance between profitability and not necessarily investing in a ton of incremental growth.

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Right.

Moderator 2

So how are you thinking about striking that balance and what the DTC business looks like in the years ahead?

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Yeah, I think the first thing that I wanna say is that I, you know, the redemption business is just the redemption business. When brands sign up with us, they don't sign up for a certain number of redemptions on our DTC app and a certain number of redemptions on our Walmart and a certain... They just sign up, and we democratically distribute offers, and it's first come, first served, wherever in the network that redemption should occur. So Ibotta is just another publisher, increasingly a smaller and smaller one, in the grand network, and what's important is the growth in redeemers in the network and redemptions in the network. We get paid the same thing, whether that redemption is here or there, right?

So for a given product at a given MSRP, that same product, let's say Jif, you redeem that on Ibotta, you redeem that on Walmart, we get paid the same, right? So what probably, in hindsight, would've been cleverer would've been to just report total redemption revenue rather than, you know, the mixes here or there, because the mix is moving a little faster toward third party than we maybe anticipated. That's great, right? It's still the same number of total redemptions. Ultimately, the budgets are gonna grow with the capacity of the overall network. I think the one caveat, Eric, is that we do have this sort of legacy ad business in our D2C-

Moderator 2

Mm-hmm

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

... which are the banner ads that we sell inside of the mobile app. So as you open the mobile app, you'll see these little strips at the top that say, Purina, or they say whatever they say, you know, Dog Food X, and we sell those. And those are about 15% of our business right now, and declining to closer to 13%, future, less than that, right? That's not the most distinctive part of Ibotta, because a banner ad, you can find a banner ad in a lot of mobile apps. In fact, what is distinctive about Ibotta is the cost per action success-based model that is where a lot of brands would prefer to put their dollars. So we have faced some headwinds in terms of that portion of our D2C business.

I would say you're starting to see that stabilize, and we feel good about the trajectory of that. The fundamental reason why all this happens is a constraint in the amount of offer supply at a moment in time.

Moderator 2

Mm-hmm.

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

So if you rapidly grow redeemers, let's say 3X year over year, well, you might have gotten budgets to go up 2X or 2.5X relative to the previous year. You start to see a little bit of constraint, which means that an offer might not last as long on Ibotta, the app, as it used to, which then means there's fewer redemptions occurring on Ibotta than there otherwise would've been. If you have more offers, supply, deeper budgets, you're gonna see offer redemptions go way up on D2C, and with it, tends to go the ad products, 'cause it tracks the eyeballs and so forth in the app.

So when we launched Walmart, we said, "Hey, market, we need a lot of offer supply here to cover this." And then Walmart kind of, you know, came out a little bit more gradually, so we had a surplus of offers relative to redeemers, and our D2C business went up 20%, right? And that springs back real quickly, based on kind of available offer inventory. So the real name of the game is, how do you step up offer supply as quickly as possible? And then how do you get out of this sort of annual budget allocation cycle and into something that's more familiar to us in digital performance marketing, where there's just a sort of real-time, you know, engine that you can bid for, the way that Facebook or others do?

I think we're taking some good steps toward that. That's gonna be a journey, but all to say, we continue to feel good that over the long run, the D2C business will grow modestly in the sort of single digits, and the overwhelming majority of the growth of this business will come from third-party publishers, and there, the business is really singing.

Moderator 2

Okay. One of the other questions we get a lot from investors is, I know you talk about competing against legacy practices in the consumer landscape, but who do you see as the competitive landscape that the IPN is competing against today?

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Yeah, I mean, any dollar that is not able to be tied out to sale deterministically, any dollar that is reliant on an MMM model to tell you whether or not it worked, which is to say, television, radio, connected television, out of home, brand ambassadors, you know, sampling programs, paper coupons, those are all competitors that I think are, are precariously positioned relative to our offering. If you're the CMO of Coca-Cola and you have a choice, you can put that incremental dollar into a program on Google, for example, or you can put that onto the Ibotta Performance Network, well, in Google, you're paying for a click, and you're worried about the conversion, and you don't really know whether that product converted to an in-store sale.... that's a risk, right? With Ibotta, you're paying on a fee per unit sold basis.

You know how many of these units would have occurred without the campaign, because you have a test versus control environment, and you can see that in real time. We think that's really compelling, and then there are these strategic benefits that you get as well, because you're driving throughput at your key customers, and in many cases, you're going to get, you know, end caps and better shelf placement that you ain't getting on Google, right? So, I really think that the $100 billion that's spent on marketing CPG products in the U.S. annually is addressable, and there's another roughly $100 billion spent on trade spend. And in some cases, that might be, you know, something that we could look at helping them make that more efficient. In some cases, you know, that's going to be off limits.

But, you know, as you think about every form of digital marketing or analog marketing, we don't think that it has the combination of what we call Super Bowl scale with pay per sale efficiency.

Moderator 2

Okay, understood. We only have a few minutes left, but maybe trying to bring it all together.

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Yeah.

Moderator 2

When you think about the long-term opportunities ahead-

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Mm-hmm.

Moderator 2

How do you think about aligning capital that you have today against your key priorities on investing in the business longer term and potentially, you know, driving capital back to shareholders or driving capital behind M&A as a potential for the opportunity? What are the choices that are in front of you with respect to capital, and how do they inform some of your investment priorities?

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Yeah, I mean, look, the company is generating $100-plus million dollars of free cash a year. So we have the money we raised in the IPO, the money we had before that, and the money we're generating all the time. So we do need to be thoughtful about what we're going to do, but we also have the degrees of freedom to do more than one thing, you know? So if we see an opportunity in M&A, maybe something that accelerates the consolidation of aspects of our industry or is a technology that's complementary to our offering, we could do something like that.

At the same time, we are investing in R&D on the M&A, sorry, the ML and the AI aspects of our business, by having 400, you know, engineers on our team, far more than anyone else in our industry. I don't, you know, I don't see us needing to dramatically increase our labor expenses, that we have a large team that is gaining efficiency, and that's offsetting the people that we're hiring. So there's modest increase in kind of, labor expenditure, but really, that then leaves things like, okay, are we gonna return a great return to our shareholders by buying back our stock, for example? If we feel opportunistically that we can do that, you may have seen that our company authorized a $100 million stock buyback.

At this price, we're buying the stock, and we feel really confident that that's an excellent use of capital versus, you know, 5% interest sitting there growing. So I think our board is pretty flexible and opportunistic about thinking about a variety of different uses of that cash. You know, we're obviously a growth company. We want, first and foremost, to not be constraining ourselves if there are opportunities to enter new markets, for example, and say, we have to hire a team in a different market to source offers, so that with a couple of publishers that want to go international, we have that opportunity, that'd be something we could do with the cash. But right now, you know, we're continuing to just focus on the...

With the stable of people we have, building out this next generation technology, and I think if you asked our CTO, he would say he's got what he needs right now. So yeah, and that's part of why we didn't raise that much in primary proceeds in the IPO, because we do have a lot of cash generation in our business.

Moderator 2

Okay. With the last few minutes we have left, I always like to end these conversations with a sort of big-picture question looking forward.

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Yeah.

Moderator 2

So when you look ahead over the next 12 to 18 months, what are the key priorities and milestones that you'd like the company to achieve? Any other emerging themes that you think we should be paying attention to, that maybe aren't top of mind for investors, but are top of mind for you?

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Yeah, thanks for that. I think, first of all, I would be remiss if I didn't say that as a public company, we've learned some lessons around, you know, how we can forecast our business, make sure that we are perceived as a reliable, predictable business by public market investors. We need to address the lack of liquidity in our stock. I think that'll happen with the lockup coming up here soon and with a few other developments, just as the business seasons. And I think those things are sort of the technical stock market things that will take care of themselves as long as we perform well, which we are.

I think some other things I'm focused on are, as I go around after the IPO and talk to the CMOs of large companies, I am realizing that there's an opportunity to really be thought leaders around this real-time measurement conversation, around this kind of, yes, targeting, but how do we move beyond targeting, really, to AI-driven systems that optimize for real-time metrics like cost per incremental dollar? Bless you. I think those things are an eighteen-month journey, you know, to really build out those tools, to go from kind of standard to strategic to advanced.

You know, if standard is kind of one size fits all, strategic is kind of manual, targeting based on preset rules, and advanced is really this kind of Facebookification of kind of AI is deciding the cadence of the offer, the value of the offer, the threshold of purchase required for the offer, the number of waves of the offer, the pack shot in the offer, in real time for each person. We've got to continue to evangelize that message and see that come across. I think we can do a better job with third parties validating kind of grading our homework, whether that's you know a measurement company for example or agencies, and there's room to sort of-...

build that climate of trust higher, which is something that Amazon and Google and Facebook and others have done successfully along the journey of building really big advertising businesses. And then I think there's digital technologies in the store. You know, in the U.S. , it's a sub-1% penetration for electronic shelf labels. That's a huge opportunity for our business. If, as I'm walking down the aisle, my phone can tell me that these are the five Walmart Cash offers on the aisle, if I can push a button, and it can light up a color like a constellation on the aisle, there goes the scavenger hunt, right? In a good way.

If I can, you know, come into a store, and I can put my phone number into a tablet that's mounted on a shopping cart or use a Caper cart, and then it will essentially tell me, based on my geolocation, what opportunities are to buy things and save money, that will inflect our business a lot. So focused on meeting with the thought leaders in that space, companies like Vusion and Hanshow, and really looking into some innovation in that area for ourselves is something I think is probably not talked about that much.

And then I just think making sure that as we move beyond our core kind of grocery mass club into this new type of publisher or kind of online marketplace publisher like Instacart, just really needing to prove out that this is a bigger deal than people realize. You know, I think Instacart being kind of half to two-thirds the size of Walmart as an opportunity for us is not widely understood, just because it's, oh, Walmart's so huge. Well, I mean, Walmart's e-commerce business is only a couple times or 50% bigger, whatever you want to say, than Instacart.

And so for us, dialing that, making sure that we move that into a set of best practices with excellent, you know, marketing life cycle communications, targeted offers, some of the things that haven't been possible on that platform, and showing how our thought leadership and kind of consultation, expertise, and loyalty can unlock even more value than just an audience size at that publisher will be important. So those are some things on the horizon. But, yeah, it's been fun so far. I feel like we've got a lot more proof points. You said people didn't expect us to do Instacart. Good. We've got more coming, and so we want to continue to prove out that this is going to become the clear, kind of de facto standard for intelligent promotion.

Moderator 2

Brian, first, thanks for the opportunity to have the conversation.

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Yeah.

Moderator 2

I really enjoyed it. Please join me in thanking Ibotta for being part of the conference this year.

Bryan Leach
Founder and CEO, Ibotta

Thanks. All right.

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