All right. Great. Thank you, everyone, for joining us here today. I'm Chris Kuntarich, part of the UBS Internet team. Pleased to have Bryan Leach, CEO and founder of Ibotta, here with us today. Yeah, we're gonna jump into things right away. Bryan, IPO this year. For those maybe less familiar with the story, just could you kick it off at a high level, kind of? Yeah.
Yeah. Well, nice to see all of y'all. Thanks for joining. Thanks to all of you online. Founder and CEO of Ibotta, we operate the largest digital promotions network in the United States. So we work with consumer packaged goods like Coca-Cola, you know, Mondelēz, Unilever, Kellogg's, these kinds of companies to help them efficiently drive incremental sales of their products in stores like Walmart, places like Instacart, and across all the places that their products are sold. We started out as a direct-to-consumer cashback app. We had 50 million people download our app. It's still one of the most popular savings apps in the United States. However, really the focus of our business the last five years has been building out a network of publishers that we use as channel distribution for these digital promotions.
So we have an exclusive partnership with Walmart, with Instacart, with Dollar General, Family Dollar, Schnucks, others to be announced. And basically, this is a way that we can push an offer for, let's say, General Mills products like cereal, Cheerios, for example, out to reach 200 million American consumers. But what's interesting about this is that instead of doing a one-size-fits-all promotion, we can actually look at the historical purchase behavior of a given consumer and figure out what's the optimal reward, an optimal incentive to change behavior in an incremental way. So how inexpensively can I incentivize someone to take an action they wouldn't otherwise have taken? Which allows us to look at the cost per incremental unit, and things that are really revolutionary in the CPG industry that are relatively commonplace in digital performance marketing settings. So we're in that journey.
Really excited about it. As far as other just high level, about 850 people, all in the U.S. focused right now, based headquartered in Denver, Colorado. Companies, you know, generating free cash, profitable, growing as well. So we can get into some of that. But that's a thumbnail sketch.
Great. And as we just kinda think about the value proposition specifically for the brands and retailers, like, what is Ibotta enabling here that's really unique?
Yeah. So the people that pay us are the CPG brands. So let's take Cheerios as an example. They are trying to do two things. One, they're trying to find a way to grow or regrow, since a lot of them are down year over year in 2024, but do that in a profitable way. And that means they wanna know, what am I paying for every incremental dollar that I'm generating, and how does that compare to my margin on my product? And so what we offer is the ability to actually know that on a daily basis, to actually be able to look and see, wow, my cost per incremental dollar is $0.30, for example. Every other tactic, television, radio, out of home, you name it, influencer, you know, you have a real kind of econometric model, very assumption-driven, you don't find out for 12 months.
That real-time nature of that signal allows them to then not only be more agile about where they put their marketing dollars, but also to tune in the future, it'll allow them to tune their promotions not just using targeting, but using machine learning-driven targeting, which is a revolution in the promotions industry that we expect to hit in the back half of next year. From a retail perspective, what we do is source between $500 million and $1 billion of incremental rewards content from cross-retailer national marketing budgets. So a given retailer, any single retailer cannot do that because by definition, they in their dealings with that given brand would be, you know, talking about a trade fund or a shopper marketing budget that's retailer-specific.
We bring Walmart the opportunity to have hundreds of millions of dollars of Walmart Cash earned by their shoppers that does not trade off with investments in price or in Walmart Connect or Luminate or other things that are kind of Bentonville budgets. We also manage an ecosystem so that if someone's redeeming an offer at Walmart on the Ibotta app and using Walmart's white label program that we help them create, we prevent stacking of those offers. Then we handle everything through a single analytical interface. You can think of it like The Trade Desk, in the sense that we have a network of publishers, but instead of distributing, you know, display ads on the open web through a single interface, we're distributing digital promotions across a variety of publishers through a single interface.
Got it. And maybe let's just kinda take it back to the model here for a second. Like, as we think about real revenue drivers in 2025 versus longer-term revenue and margin expansion opportunity, how do we think about 2025 versus longer-term?
Yeah. So let's just, at a basic level, there are a couple different drivers of growth in our business. The first is we wanna grow the audience of people who we can put these offers in front of. And we've really demonstrated this year, you know, very high level of growth, I think, proving that we can grow to over 15 million redeemers, growing and ramping that rapidly even since our IPO. There's a ravenous demand for everyday rewards on things that are non-discretionary purchase items. And so the more of those consumers we can reach, for instance, by launching Instacart, which we just launched, it's gonna ramp up in the first half of next year. But now we're reaching another $30 billion of purchases.
We believe that's between half to two-thirds the size of the opportunity we see at Walmart today because most of the redemptions that we're driving at Walmart are still online. We've yet to really unlock the in-store flow at Walmart. So Instacart is a really big opportunity to grow the audience of what we call redeemers. Then the other side of that is if we get more offer content, you can hit more baskets with more relevant offers and people will choose those offers and buy those products. And the number of redeemers per, I'm sorry, redemptions per redeemer is relevant because our company gets paid on a fee per redemption basis. So, you know, we don't get paid on an impression basis or a clip basis. We only get paid when we drive sales for our customers, our clients.
And so being able to have more offers means we can extract more redemptions per any given redeemer, at a given moment in time. And so those are drivers of revenue expansion. As far as margins, you know, we continue to find that as we grow the third-party publisher part of our ecosystem, our margins improve. Because every new dollar of revenue that comes in at Walmart is, let's say, north of 80% of that drops to the bottom line of Ibotta. We don't have any cost of acquisition. Whereas, you know, in our original business, we had to acquire and maintain those users. That's a substantial cost that we don't face with third-party publishers. So just at any reasonable rate of growth, since the growth is coming from the third-party side of our network, that's gonna gradually tend to increase our margin over the next few years.
It's already, you know, very healthy, but we'll continue to get better. We have no CapEx. We have no debt. You know, we are a virtualized-in-the-cloud business. As far as the outlook beyond 2025, we really think that things like using machine learning to optimize promotions has other upsides for the business because, overall, what you can do is figure out the right cost per incremental unit that a brand is willing to pay. And if you can avoid subsidizing consumers unnecessarily for purchases they would have been willing to make anyway or would have been willing to make with a lower reward, that efficiency can ultimately drop into our bottom line in the form of fees that we charge. So that's another driver.
And then just as mix shift happens in our business, we think that there are other products that we have as we move into, for example, general merchandise categories outside of just fast-moving consumer goods where we have a nice higher MSRP product, higher fee. And that's attractive. And then just making sure that new publishers that join our network are doing so on attractive financial terms. So, for example, we have no revenue share with Walmart. We don't have a revenue share on every incremental redemption with Instacart. This means that these are attractive from a standpoint of preserving our margins over the long term.
Got it. And I guess as we think about the promotion environment and how that shaped up this year, how did that shape up this year versus your expectations? And I think we've thought about the U.S. digital promotion growing at something like 19% over through 2030. I guess, how should we think about your ability to outgrow that or catch up to that now?
Yeah. I mean, in the most recent quarter, we grew our redemption revenue by 30, I think 34%, something like that, 32% year over year. It was much higher growth in the second quarter and the first quarter because we were lapping quarters where we hadn't fully rolled out our partnership with Walmart. However, if you look at gross billings, you know, the total amount that a CPG company is spending with us, inclusive of our fees and the user awards that they're parting with to incentivize these purchases, we saw a 65% increase year over year, year to date through the third quarter. So brands are really stepping up their investment far, far faster than 19% on the Ibotta Performance Network. We would like to have seen that be even larger.
There are certain human constraints to how much a brand will proactively or preemptively allocate a budget of, say, 100% more than the previous year. They kinda take a let me see you prove that you have that scale before I give you that budget mindset in some cases. Nonetheless, we were able to get them up over 60% increase in year-over-year spend. I do think that we will outpace the general statistic just because we have capabilities that have never been introduced to this market before. I don't just mean the promotion space. I mean any marketing channel or trade channel of the $200 billion that's spent by CPGs every year.
There's not a single other channel I'm aware of that can measure incremental sales down to the day and allow you to optimize with all of these levers to solve for a target cost per incremental dollar. Just doesn't exist anywhere else. So I believe when we are able to get that out there, we will get to a place where people realize, wow, every transaction is net contribution margin positive. Why wouldn't I just run this like every other performance marketing channel where it stays on until I don't like the net contribution? That has never been possible in the world of promotions because you've had a promotion drop, six months later it goes into the newspaper, six months after that, you know, you measure it using a mixed media model or a lift study.
So you've had kind of annual planning and annual measurement, and it's prevented the kind of agile allocation of marketing dollars that all of us know from the world of Facebook and the world of AppLovin and the world of The Trade Desk. We're bringing promotions into that world.
Got it. And maybe just to go back to the third quarter call and what you saw in 3Q, you called out some exhaustion of budget there. How should we kinda square those comments up with that 65% year-to-date billings growth?
I mean, we were victims of our own growth in some sense. I mean, I think the good news is our clients are poised to renew their budgets and spend even more. I mean, if you talk to our clients, we have 96% client retention. There's a lot of clients that are spending dramatically more year over year, and there are some learnings for us, like we need to do a better job of transitioning the industry to this kind of programmatic buying on our network so that we can have a more predictable business over the medium to long run. That'll make life easier for investors, for us, and it'll also just help us unlock media agencies and other places that would happily buy if they could kind of put it into a frame that they understand, right?
They're accustomed to going and bidding on a CPC or CPM basis and looking at metrics to determine payback value of that. They've not been able to do that on behalf of their CPG clients who sell 85% of their products in physical stores, which, you know, it's not a pixel, it's not an SDK. How do you track those sales and measure incremental sales in real time? You have to have a panel of 5 million users where you can create a synthetic test versus control, and we're the first to introduce that. So bringing that to a set of other kinds of buyers, I think, will create a basic foundational layer of predictable spend. And then on top of that, introducing other techniques that I believe will help us predict the efficiency of campaigns so that we can get more certainty earlier on.
But fundamentally, we're not gonna need to grow 65% every single year in order to hit the growth goals that we have even within the current paradigm of annual planning. So I feel good about that.
Got it. And I guess you just brought up the idea of kind of the always-on spend here. And a lot of folks here may be more familiar with the idea of, how you spend on Amazon, right?
Can you just talk a little bit more about those gives and takes and what's different there and how, how far are we in that journey as far as, and when will we see this potentially be moved to an always-on spend?
By later this month, we should have the industry's first-ever real-time incremental sales lift tool. It'll be out there in the form of our Campaign Manager product that I spoke about on our most recent earnings call, and it will allow you to log in to our portal and see your cost per incremental unit. That's a really exciting starting point, then you need to create baselines by running targeted campaigns, so let's say you break down the segments of your consumers into loyal, agnostic, competitive, new-to-category, and you have a different program for each of those segments, and then you measure the blended cost per incremental unit of that program, and you make sure that that's where that brand wants to be along a continuum of sort of volume versus efficiency, right? There's always a trade-off.
You can get more volume if you're willing to have less efficiency in every marketing context, digital marketing context. And so, we'll partner with our partners to do that, our clients to do that in a more manual targeting way in the first half of this year. We'll continue to pull in data from the rest of our network to improve that real-time measurement, pulling in Instacart data, pulling in dollar channel data from DG and Family Dollar, pulling in Schnucks data, and ultimately being able to have a better version of that tool that's coming out in its first version later this month. And then in the back half of next year, we'll transition from human-based segmentation, which I just alluded to with those four categories.
Let's say a loyal buyer, you know, we'll ask them to buy three instead of two, and they'll get $0.50 when they buy three versus someone who's maybe a competitive buyer. Maybe we would offer them $1 when they buy one, right? So we have lots of levers: the threshold of the offer, the value of the offer, the pack shot, how many times the offer can be shown, that sort of thing. The transition in the second half of next year is toward machine learning, guiding all of those decisions in a split second. And so looking at the elasticity of demand, prior purchase habits, responsiveness to prior price signals to calculate the ideal net price for every SKU for every human instantly. And so that you can think of Ibotta as a digital coupon company.
But if you leave here thinking that, then I failed you because what we really are doing is using artificial intelligence, machine learning specifically to arrive at the correct net price for every individual. And that is a vastly more efficient frontier of pricing products than using a blunt, "Oh, let's just take $0.50 off the MSRP for the entire country." That intuitively makes sense to all of you. That's a revolution. We have the computing power, we have the data, we have the sophistication now to do that, and we're on the cusp of that.
Got it, and I guess as we think about what you've done so far in 2024 to kind of lay the groundwork, how should we think about investments you've put in the ground so far in 2024 and where you're going to need to invest to kind of realize this in 2025?
It's a great question, Chris. And we've, we've realized over the course of this year just how revolutionary this cost per incremental unit framework will be, talking to companies like Pepsi, talking to companies like Coca-Cola that have had reservations, frankly, about the measurement methodology that the promotions industry has used for the last, oh, 139 years. Things like return on ad spend, you can do better. You can do better. Asking about the return on ad spend doesn't take into account how much of that spend would've happened anyway. How much of that is incremental? What am I paying per incremental, dollar or per unit? So we, we really followed the lead of that. And, and one big win that came out of that was getting Coca-Cola offers live on our network for the first time ever.
We've had peripheral Coca-Cola brands, but in terms of main Coca-Cola Classic, you know, Diet Coke, Sprite, they joined the network in October. That was a big breakthrough. That was solely because we were able to speak to them about cost per incremental unit. We were able to create a segmented targeted campaign that has an attractive cost per incremental unit, and they're able to figure out where they wanna set that trade-off between efficiency and volume. We're gonna take those learnings from those clients, put those into more automated interfaces like Campaign Manager over the course of 2025. The goal of 2025 is to socialize the idea of managing your marketing budgets in a more agile way based on cost per incremental. That's our goal in 2025.
Our goal in 2026 is to take all the work we did on machine learning and basically run with that and tune the heck out of the machine learning for our clients so that in 2026 they're getting more and more and more and more efficient cost per incremental unit. We're getting better economics and getting learnings based off that baseline. And so we'll see a couple years of this play out. I don't think it's gonna happen overnight. There's also a mindset shift. I mean, if you're used to prescribing, "Okay, I wanna give that guy a dollar, and I wanna give Peter a dollar, and I want it to be, you know, during back to school." Okay. And that's how it's been up to this point. That's like saying, "I wanna give Chris, in Spokane this Facebook ad at 9:32 P.M." No.
Instead, you say, "I want a cost per install of $3." And Facebook figures out who to send that ad to and what creative and when and where and what fee, right? And so instead of saying, "I want Peter to get $1 during back to school," they say, "I'm looking for $0.30 CPIU, and I'd like to do this in the next 90 days." And according to the slider, we predict you can get 1,432,000 incremental units sold at that CPIU. And how and who gets what offer is not prescribed by you in some pre-approved process any more than it is on Facebook. It's simply determined by machine learning, and you log in and see, "Oh, that's nice. I'm at $0.29 cost per incremental. I got 1.2 million units sold. Pretty happy with Ibotta. In fact, you know what?
I'm willing to go up to a $0.40 cost per incremental unit move if I can move another 500,000 units in the next three weeks. Let me do that." That's where we're gonna be by 2026, and I think it's gonna be really, really revolutionary.
Got it. So, the one thing that really stood out to me there was it sounds like there's potential here for self-service portal. Should we be thinking about that on the 2025 roadmap? Yeah. Anything else besides, as we think about kind of AI-designed offers as well? Is there kind of a change in opportunity to change the content and the way it's presented, or is it more as far as the absolute dollar value we should be thinking?
No, I think it's very important, Chris. The point is it's to establish the unrivaled value of what we have. There is not a single better way to spend a dollar of marketing in CPG, period. And we're gonna prove it to you in 2025. And then it's to change the way people buy on our network so they can buy more like the way they buy The Trade Desk or Google or what have you. That is about leveraging the recent release of Campaign Manager and making that a tool that can sit on the desk of someone at a media agency, can sit on the desk of a media buyer inside of a brand. They don't have to call us. They don't have to speak to a sales rep. We'll always have a managed service business.
But is there a way that someone can go in and in the same way they say, "Yeah, I'd like to bid on this search traffic," they can bid on this type of, you know, incremental purchase? Once we get to that, we will unlock a kind of flywheel on the supply side of our business, and we will hit an inflection point that will be tremendously exciting, so we just launched Campaign Manager. We're in the early days of that. There's a real roadmap of that, especially in the first half of next year, but we have some work to do over the next 18 months to integrate that, but once that gets in place, I think it'll be, you'll see the same kind of flywheel we've established on the demand side of our business take effect on supply.
As soon as you see that start to spin, that's when you'll see, I think, the kind of true potential of this model.
Got it. I don't wanna dominate the conversation entirely. I think there will be mics going around the room. So if anybody wants to raise a hand, ask a question,
Or just shout and I'll repeat it for the people online. That's fine. Yeah, I got you, Peter.
Talk about the supply side. How many do what percentage dollars or labels do you have? So if I go on Walmart.com, right?
I spend $5,000. If I go on, you know, any product, there's a white label underneath that app, but they're not if there's a relationship with that CPG company. Then they sell monetization part, right?
Yep.
Kind of walk through building that supply and then how that works for Walmart.
Yeah. So the question for the benefit of the folks not in the room is how does the supply landscape work? I mean, how what kind of penetration do we have? What kind of logos do we have? What about within those key accounts? And then, you know, when you see something on Walmart.com, is that because it's come through our network? And if it's not on Walmart.com, why not? So is that a fair restatement? Okay. Good, so I would say that, you know, we work with most of the top CPG companies in one some form or fashion. We have about 750 total clients representing about 2,300 total brands. But within a given company like Pepsi, there might be 50% of brands that we don't work with at all.
And those 50% we do work with maybe are spending $2 million each on our platform, amounting to, say, $20 million of total spend across Pepsi. Now, that could be $200 million or $300 million across Pepsi if we introduced ourselves to the other brands that don't use us and convinced the brands that do use us not to just use us as a tactic for driving trial or innovation or closing a quarter from time to time, but as a fundamentally high ROI foundational layer of their marketing plan. There are a lot of clients that we've had for decades. I mean, over a decade. Now, we've only been around for 12 years, but since the very beginning, there's some that still, like you mentioned, Coca-Cola have been largely holdouts that we're persuading with this later, more recent methodology.
There are verticals we don't have much penetration in yet. general merchandise is one we're really focused on. We've done very well with toy and pet in the last two years, and they followed a similar trajectory to the early days of the CPG, you know, the grocery CPG. These are industries that don't have as much DNA of history of promotions. But as you reframe it as a way to more efficiently price your products and reframe it as performance marketing at scale, they get quite interested in that. A little less traction in some other general merchandise categories, but which we expect to gain traction: home improvement, home goods, clothing, electronics, etc. As far as the Walmart question, yeah, if you see a digital promotion on Walmart.com, that's us. Little blue boxes that say Walmart Cash, that's us.
If you don't see a little blue box there, and you're a brand, you are probably falling behind in terms of your weighting in the algorithm of search results. Type in laundry detergent. Go log into Walmart.com, type in laundry detergent, look at the results. Of the first five rows, probably 50% of them have a little blue box from us. Those are brands that are at the top of the search results because the click-through rate and the buy-through rate is attractive, and that also benefits their native performance in the algorithm for native search. If you're not on that list, it's probably 'cause you don't know about us yet for some reason.
You still think of us as an app from the old days, and we've only been in market with Walmart for 18 months, and yet we've had tens of millions of users at Walmart, hundreds of millions of dollars of Walmart Cash earned. And but I still, you know, I went to a meeting earlier this month ago with Nestlé, met their head of frozen, their head of pizza, and they still didn't know we had a network, right? So there's more work for us to do on the B2B marketing side, going to market. I think the IPOs really, really helped to raise our profile. It's raised the access to more senior people within the room. But when they see the performance, they all get really excited.
So we just need to convince them that we do indeed need that much more budget than we had last year and then ultimately get them beyond that construct of annual planning, which I think will take some effort, but on the flip side on the other side of that will be great benefit for our shareholders. Yeah.
Sure.
So is there a metric that you say if total CPG consumer spend?
Is there a metric that you state? So if total CPG spend in the U.S. is, I don't know if it's a couple trillion or whatever the number is.
Yeah.
and then that's kind of the TAM. And then you've penetrated only Oreos for Nabisco. I forget who owns it these days.
Mondelēz, but yeah.
Right. And so, you know, so then your addressable, your true.
Yeah.
Monetizable TAM is a fraction of that.
Yeah. Think of it this way. There's about $100 billion spent right now on marketing and CPG in the U.S. and $100 billion spent on trade, where our gross billings is not a number we publish yet, but think of it as in on the order of $1 billion. So we're about $1 billion penetrated into that $200 billion opportunity as we see it. About $20 billion of that is in some form or fashion involved in promotions. The other $180 billion is either other marketing, digital marketing, out-of-home, social influencer search, or trade, which is just flat price concessions, which is a pretty blunt instrument for adjusting your price. We think we're a better instrument in some cases.
Look, as far as the penetration that we have, we internally track something called an inventory score where we look at the percentage of a basket that we hit in any given time with our offer inventory that was substantially lighter in the fourth quarter than we projected because we just burned through so many budgets with a third quarter and a second quarter, both of which beat our estimates and beat our original analyst estimates from the time of the IPO. We've actually been conservative with our guidance, but actually beaten on the top and bottom line in the first, second, and third quarter, right? And that caused us to burn through more budget and be a little light in our guidance on the fourth quarter.
But bottom line is a 65% increase in year-over-year spend and a lot of excitement with the diversification of the network. So adding in, okay, great, you have Walmart, but what else do you have? Well, we now have Instacart, 1,600 retailers, right? That's a half to two-thirds the size of the Walmart opportunity. We have others that we're, you know, hoping to announce that are in the pipeline, and so as we diversify, that does actually help unlock supply on the CPG side as well. Are there other questions? We have a few more minutes. Or as I like to say in my company, who's got the next question? That way we presume there's another question. Or, is there one on the online? We can take it through the tablet. But does anybody else have anything else they would like to know about Ibotta?
Or I go watch the Denver Nuggets beat the Warriors tonight? I'll have one.
Okay. Great.
How should we think about in-store? How's Walmart in-store progressed? What kind of traction have you seen elsewhere outside of Walmart? How should we be thinking about that kind of mix in 2025 and beyond?
Yeah. So the redemption rates are always gonna be a little lower in-store than online because you have the extra step of having to go lay hands on the product, making sure it matches the offer, putting in your card, checking out. Now, at the checkout, you can put in a phone number in most cases or a loyalty card and voila, you're done. But at Walmart, that actually hasn't been the case for the last 18 months. You've had to pull out the Walmart app, find the QR code scanner within the Walmart app. Quick, find it. It'll take you five minutes and we'll be out of time. The whole point is to replace that with a phone number flow at checkout would be a big win for usage of our program, Walmart Cash in-store.
We expect that will happen at some point in the first half of this year. There are a lot of other punch list items that reduce friction. One of them we rolled out was Schnucks. We have a fully integrated with all the digital shelf tags in Schnucks. So Schnucks is the only American grocer that has full rollout of digital shelf tags. Who cares? Well, you care because eventually what's gonna be possible, hopefully very soon, is in addition to just putting a QR code on the tag that you can scan to unlock the reward, it says coupon available, you know, unlock reward by scanning. When you walk down the aisle, your geo-position will interact with the tag or other technology in the store and say, "Oh, you're on aisle 15.
These are all of the offers available to you on this aisle." And you can bring me retail media into the store by way of giving people savings. So the thing about rewards and savings is they're actually the key to changing consumer behavior. They're not just rewards, right? So if you want people to look at retail media in-store, why? Why would I do that? But if you tell me, "Oh, use in-store mode to find savings more easily," okay, now I'm gonna pull my phone out and use it in the store. And so that's one of the reasons why we're so complementary with retail media. We don't sell retail media, but we propel it. And the way we do that is we drive digital engagement, eyeballs on site, people opening their app in the store.
And that's one of the reasons why we have such a constructive relationship with Walmart Connect, Dollar General Media Network, Instacart. They decided to essentially give us their sell us their promotions business so they could focus on retail media. And that's a great example of the go-to-market posture we wanna be in going forward. But in the future, we would love for companies beyond Schnucks to say, "Wow, you know what? We should also have digital shelf tags, not only for the operating cost benefit of restocking, picking, and price changing, but for the consumer benefit of activating more consumer loyalty, building basket sizes, trip frequency, and so forth." Great question.
I think that puts us right at time here. Bryan, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
Go ahead and wrap it there.
Thanks to all of you.