Thanks for doing this. It's nice to see you.
I always look forward to your to your your smiling visage on the on the calls. You're a good support, Ron.
That's you know, there's there's a lot going on, so I'm glad you're here.
There's a lot. There's a lot to talk about. Where am I looking for the broadcast?
Is there a broadcast? No. It's just It's just audio. Oh, it's just audio.
Just audio. Great. I'll concentrate on
my voice. And now we're officially yeah. Caught you in your voice. We're officially live now. Great.
So great. Let's let's kick off. So I'm Ron Josey. I cover the Internet sector here at Citi. And, look, I'm happy to have with us today Ibotta's CEO, founder, Brian Leach.
Brian, you know, I think you all know who Brian is, your your background from from the legal industry to entrepreneur, and now call it disrupting the promotion industry not disrupting, call it evolving the promotions industry, I think there's a lot that we can learn from and and go through. Mhmm. So, Brian, thanks for thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me. So we're about a year and a quarter post IPO, if I have that right.
Mhmm. And and I think for those in the audience that are less familiar with Ibotta, given we're still relatively new to the public markets, give us an overview of the platform, how the strategic focus has evolved for the most part, and and then we'll we'll go from there.
Yeah. So we're in the consumer packaged goods industry helping these companies figure out how to deliver profitable revenue by using digital promotions. And so traditionally in our industry, you know, you had paper coupons, very blunt instruments, and there developed a certain conventional wisdom around that that, you know, you do a certain amount of that, but not more than that because your fear was you might be subsidizing somebody who was already gonna buy your product. And so it was a way of moving sales very quickly. It was a way of placating your retail partners through whom your products are distributed, but it wasn't necessarily agreed that it was a very profitable way to drive market share growth.
It was still a large industry, important industry, and we we went a very long way initially as a d to c app just disrupting the the distribution of paper coupons and clearing houses and this sort of thing. So now you could have an app that you could download. It would work anywhere. You could go in and buy a featured item that you saw in our app and get cash back instantly on your PayPal account. So we gave away more than $2,000,000,000 to American consumers.
We you know, our our mission is make every purchase rewarding. And about five years into our business, we realized, gosh, you know, we could take this and make it a much broader network. So we could distribute these same promotions on Walmart's website, on Dollar General's website, on Instacart, DoorDash, etcetera. And so we built out something called the Ibotta Performance Network. And the reason why it's called the Performance Network is that unlike traditional media where you pay for clips or impressions, you paid on a performance basis a fee per sale, fee per redemption model.
So it was lower risk. The evolution since then, since the IPO, has been the realization that the industry is ripe for a revolution in measurement. And so what has been measured in
a
very kind of coarse way, here were the sales in period a, here are the sales in period b when we ran the promotion, The difference must be lift. Well, the problem with that is there are many variables occurring between period a and period b, and so everyone is claiming that they cause the lift. And and that's why you have things like mixed media models that are that are complicated and debatable. The gold standard is true media lift study, where you have two statistically matched populations in the same time period, and you're looking at one is exposed and the other is not exposed. So you're isolating the variable of exposure and making claims about causation that are way, way more rigorous.
And this is what Google does, Facebook does, The Trade Desk does. Everybody relies on these lift studies. We basically, since the IPO, built a system where we're able to to measure incremental sales lift on a real time rolling basis. And that statement, real time measurement of incremental sales, is truly a revolution in our industry. No one has done that, not just in promotions, but anywhere in the CPG industry, because most of these products are sold 85% of them in stores.
And so unlike where you have a pixel or an SDK, and you know which Google ad or which Facebook ad converted to an app download or a sale, it's very hard to do that in the physical world until now. Because Ibotta has millions of consumer loyalty card baskets that we can look at and we can create statistically matched audiences and actually track the number of incremental sales that our promotions are delivering down to the day, compare that to the cost, and prove that it's actually profitable. Yeah. So that is the big revolution that we've been working on the last year.
And and so it's a big revolution. Measurement in all of advertising is always a challenge. And so we've seemed to have figured out that incremental lift. And we call that, CPET,
right, Cost per incremental Cost per incremental dollar. And the reason why we express it that way rather than incremental ROAS or whatever is that we want you to compare the margin of your product and say, you know what? As long as my cost per incremental dollar is lower than my my, you know, my very in light of my variable cost, I am contribution margin positive. Why would I ever turn this off? Right.
And take it from a limited tactical some, you know, uptime some of the time to an always imperative, thing I want as much
of as possible. So how do we do that? How do we develop this, you know, incremental measurement of sales that forever the coupon industry or the performance industry has not been able to do? So take us a little bit deeper into just how how we did it on the technology side, and then I have questions about how we implement it.
Yeah. So Ibotta is the first company that's had enough data and enough innovation capability to reproduce these best practices of media list studies on a rolling basis for promotions in the CPG industry. So we take millions of consumer baskets, and let's say, I'll I'll exaggerate this for for effect, but a million people were statistically matched to another million people, and the only variable that's different is exposure to the offer or not exposure. And then we track how many of the featured items or related items are purchased by each group, and we only take credit for the difference between those, the statistically significant. So I don't care about total sales.
I care about total incremental sales only. So if you were already buying this product, that's fine. But if I got you to buy two, then I take credit for that one that's above and beyond what you would have bought anyway. Sure. And I don't I don't take credit for the other one.
Right? And so that responds to this fear of subsidization because you say, well, look, loading all that in, taking all that into account, had you not done this, you would have had $35,000,000 of sales. Because you did this, you had $70,000,000 of sales. So we'll take that $35,000,000 difference, divide it into the fully loaded cost, not what the industry has sometimes done where they don't include the user awards or don't include the setup fees. No.
No. No. No. No. We'll look at the fully loaded cost compared to just the incremental, and we'll prove to you that you're in the black.
And that's a big, big, big turning point. Right? And we the other thing that's happened since the IPO run is that we now have third party validation. So this industry has graded its own homework for a hundred and forty years until this year. Till this year.
So there were occasionally data put into a mixed media model based on a generic idea of a coefficient of causality of coupons modeled after some 1980 survey. That's not what I'm talking about. This industry has never had a third party measure Lyft in this kind of test versus control way. Now it has. So now from Ibotta, you'll be able to buy a Lyft study that says don't take our word for it.
These are other companies that have their own data, their own data scientists, their own statistical methodologies, and they will tell you the statistically significant lift to the ninety ninth percent confidence level between the control group that didn't see the offer, the group that did see the offer across the network. We they will tell you, here's how many incremental sales and here's your CPID according to us. Yeah. That that's a major deal. Right?
And if you look in the history of performance marketing, we think that that, you know, that is something that has always unlocked more investment. It it it I should say it will be a major deal. We have only a couple of these studies right now. Until we got hundreds of them, you know, I can't claim that we've shifted the paradigm, but we now have two companies, two separate companies that have produced reports that show that our methodology is conservative at Ibotta, which is a really exciting start. That's great.
And so that was the next question. So we have the validation, but we've also run two pilots Mhmm. And we have multiple pilots coming up here Yeah. Of of, you know, the cost per incremental dollar. And so tell us about the pilots thus far, and then how this third the third party measurement, which might have come after the pilots or during the how has that changed your conversations with the buyers, if you will, with CPG?
Yeah. It's it's a great question. I I think the way I'll answer it is to say that we have all you know, since the last year, we've built a system to measure the cost per incremental dollar using Ibotta's capabilities, but that has been more manual to calculate that. That has taken some time to do that, which has prevented us from scaling this across our entire client base. Now we've gotten that process down to a much, much more shorter, and it's getting better all the time.
And so what we'll now be able to do before too long is just make available to all of our clients. Here is your historical data for the last year of every campaign you've run on Ibotta. Here's your CPID. As long as there's statistically, you know, enough data there to make claims, most of our almost all our clients will see in a portal all of a sudden, oh my gosh. There's this whole completely new world of of data Measurement.
Yeah. Right, which is just activated, lit up for everyone. Right? If they want, they can go check that with third parties, and we're now making that available if they if they would feel more comfortable taking that to their finance team. And that's a really big step because you don't have time as a person at one of these companies to go, you know, deep into Ibotta's methodology.
You wanna be able to say, I checked with such and such third company, and they said it's good. And so I'm sort of politically in a in a much safer place to make a much, much larger investment in that in that company. I think that the automation of the process internally now allows us to where we'll be in a situation where we can have a conversation not just every other week about performance, but every week about performance. And then it'll be every day they can log in and see the performance. So you're getting to this place where it really does start to resemble other forms of media that they're accustomed to.
The Trade Desk, AppLovin, Meta, Google, they all have the ability to set targets. Right? This is my cost per install. This is my cost per conversion. Ongoing measurement, I can log in weekly or daily and see how it's going.
And the third principle, optimization. I don't wanna wait till after the campaign. I wanna optimize in flight. So if you take these three ideas, set targets, measure in an ongoing way, optimize, we're just taking those very well worn, proven constructs and applying them to one of the last industries that doesn't happen. And so
we have a lot to jump off in. I know. I know. And so I love the comment. All the historical data will be available.
This is for 800 clients. The questions we always get is what's the timeline for this? And so Yeah. Talk to us about if I am one of your 800 clients, when does my portal for Ibotta get populated with historicals? And then what's the process to to, you know, get a third party to validate and things like that?
Right. So I don't know exactly by when because we do these things in phases, and we wanna make sure we get through the first phase and that we incorporate learnings before we move to the second phase. But our intention is that, you know, within the next six months, we should be in a place where all the clients that have enough statistically significant data in our platform have access to our new measurement breakthrough. Okay. Right?
So they they should be able to see their historical CPIDS and incremental sales, not just the CPIDS, but what what how many incremental sales have they delivered for for every offer filterable by brand soon. Yeah. And the thing the other thing people don't realize is that we're not going to make our clients come up with a net new budget to pilot this capability. They can take the dollars they've already allocated to Ibotta on our old rails, our old capability, and we can use those dollars to demonstrate. So they don't have to go there's something already in the budget?
Great. Let us take that and demonstrate the full power of these new optimization capabilities, in flight measurement, in flight optimization, using more machine learning based recommendations. That's that's, I think, an important point to get across because it gives you more optimism that we'll be able to fairly quickly demonstrate the quantum leap that we're we believe we're bringing to the industry. As far as the third party part of your question, look. Right now, a brand that wants to can say, I would like to get I'd like to purchase a third party study from one of these two companies, and we're talking to many, many more companies.
But these are the the leaders in media list studies, and they can look at that analysis and decide, you know, if it's if it's what they're looking for to corroborate. They have norms. They average for media. They can see that ours are you know, ours typically outperforming those norms by a pretty meaningful amount. They can see the breakdown of how am I getting to those incremental sales.
Is it by greater household penetration? Statistically, what's the significance in the lift of net new households. They can see the the buy rate. They can see the basket size. So they can actually see a sub composition of how they're getting to those incremental sales on the third party reports that are that speaks their language in an exciting way.
So as they start to socialize those in the building, we'll see how many of those they wanted. They may it may turn out like Google and Facebook where they check once or twice a year. It may turn out that we buy some of those for them. It may turn out that there's more of that going on in the early days and less of that going on as they feel, okay. This is means I can trust the daily dashboard that Ibotta is giving me. We're gonna have to see.
Yep. And so seating adoption. So Yeah. We've got some pilots coming on here. I I would love your thoughts on the changes inside of your 800 or so clients, like, how you go to market.
Yes. So now it's a different conversation. You're sitting down. You're saying we can actually, you know, talk about the incremental dollar. So talk to us about how we go to market and the changes, you know, we go to market to to sell inside of CPGs.
It really is a great question because it's different. It's meaningfully different. Yeah. We've been talking to the center of excellence, the procurement team, the folks that buy this thing, you know, sometimes viewed as more of a commodity tactic that they need a certain amount of. Right?
And and that might be the the coupon team. We're now talking to the brand owner, the p and l owner, the people that that actually are responsible for the the the need to deliver top line growth and bottom line growth. And we're saying to them, you can think about this as a promotions vendor if you want. But a better way to think about it is we are an engine that can deliver a certain certain amount of profitable revenue growth. And if you want this much profitable revenue growth that corresponds to one, two, three, four, 5% year over year increase in sales, we're your Huckleberry.
Would you like that? Here's a bundle of a $100,000,000 of incremental sales. Would you like to buy that bundle of a $100,000,000 of incremental sales for $25,000,000?
Right.
Does that sound interesting to you? Great. Don't you wanna try it out? Sure. Give me $5,000,000.
I'll show you, you know, that I can deliver $25,000,000, and then you can test it out with a third party. And then as soon as you do, you're gonna go, how much of this can you give me? How do I help you grow your network even faster?
And what were the conversations like before? Because you weren't talking to brand managers. You were talking to, to your point, the procurement specialists, if you will, the couponing team. So before, you couldn't offer that.
No. They they I still wanna stress. Like, Ibotta is still beloved. I mean, we we have had nine over 95% client retention in our existence because we're the best at delivering promotions. We have the largest network.
We have a fee per sale model. And so we were the we were the sort of, you know, best in a in a confined space. But now it's a different conversation. You know, there are companies that spend a lot of money with us that that where the brands the people that own the multibillion dollar brand p and l have never heard of us. Yeah.
And that's changed. And so I think it is a difference between, what's the best company to do this thing that I wanna do a certain amount of but not more to this is a unique company. I want as much of what they sell as possible. And that is a very palpable difference in the conversations. That just has to flow through to our financials, and I understand the investment community is waiting to see that happen, and we're waiting to deliver that.
Yep. No. No. For sure. And so we got new and maybe last one, then we'll move on to a different topic here.
Similar but different topic. We get questions all the time. We had some pilots in the first half of the year. Some of those pilots have not renewed. Timing issues, maybe.
But then we have multiple pilots coming up in the back half.
Yeah. And I would say it's it's not that they haven't renewed. It's that there's they paused Okay. For idiosyncratic reasons. And I understand how if you're, you know, like, you're an investor, you're going, oh, so they paused for idiosyncratic reasons.
That's convenient. But it really is what happened. Right? The first client is a situation where they wanted to take a a breath and and prove it out with a third party because we're asking them to spend dramatically more than they've ever spent. You know?
I think we we cited that they were up about eight x, you know, in their trajectory of their annual year over year spend. Get them to do that, it's understandable that they would say, now we need to show our finance team this third party measurement study. We've now done that with not one but two companies. So we feel good about having carried the burden of sort of proof production persuasion Yeah. On that.
The other company is representative of, I think, what you see when you're in a bit in the middle of a budget cycle and you're asking someone for tens of millions of dollars that hasn't been allocated. You get into questions of, well, whose budget is this coming from and when is it being allocated? They just have a lot of other things on their plate. So even if you're offering them, you know, a quarter billion dollars of incremental sales, that is important. That represents a meaningful market share gain, but they have a lot of other priorities in their business that are distracting them.
And so having the meetings we need to have with the senior level executives that that can authorize these things, and I feel really good. They're happy with the results. In neither case, is either side saying I they're not saying this isn't what we hoped it would be. This isn't performing. I already have this.
I've seen this elsewhere. Your competitors provide this. This isn't, you know, interesting to me conceptually. We're not hearing any of that. And it's really important that I say that clearly because I can understand how the inference would be that they're dissatisfied with it. That is not what we're hearing. Yeah.
Yeah. That that's a really key point. Okay. So, it's exciting because the 800 clients will start seeing their data being populated with the CPID. They can get third party.
Let's let's move on into the Salesforce side. So I think you brought in some new leadership there. We're now looking we're organizing, I think, as a shift to an industry, versus, versus a regional sales organization. So just talk to us the strategic rationale of changing the Salesforce and where we are in that process.
Yeah. I think, there are a couple different components to this. I think, first of all, we brought in a leader who has seen, you know, later stage multibillion dollar revenue company scale. Right? So he ran global revenue for Twitter, and his network brings in that digital media type of seller, someone who's gone in and built that that really relational sale where they become experts in the business.
And and and I think it's not just selling to that that's on that scale, it's also operating at that scale. So what does sales operations need to look at, like, in a business that aspires to be what we aspire to be? And that is about having proper sales training and enablement, better b to b marketing. It's about better having having better sales operations, sales finance. These are just functions that a smaller company, at some point, realizes that it lacks and needs.
And so adding that supports our sellers so they can spend way more time actually traveling, meeting with our clients, listening to them, mastering their business. Client analytics becomes much more of an outside sales function, less of a sort of producing deck support. We're automating a lot of that so that the decks can be standardized, reports can be standardized. We don't spend as much time fiddling around with PowerPoint and more time selling. And then we're bringing in an an upgraded caliber of talent.
We're rethinking how we do our quotas and making those much more rational. We're paying more for top talent. So there's a lot that's going on in terms of the the way we go to market, in terms of the the people and the process. And then, of course, we have a whole new product, right, in which we're training them Exactly. To talk about that product differently to a different audience, much more of a multithreaded go to market sales approach where we don't just talk to the day to day buyer of coupons, you know, wait for the phone to ring and go, oh, yeah.
We're the best at that. Here here's a couple options. Much more proactive talking to the CEO, CMO, head of trade spend, head of commercial. I've had probably 10 times more meetings in the last nine months with c level executives at CPG than I did in the previous eight, ten years. Like, it it it is a completely different situation because we're able to say we're using principles of artificial intelligence to help you find the most efficient frontier for growing your market, and they're interested in hearing from a thought leader about technology.
So it's this moment where they know AI is important. They wanna harness it somehow. They're all a lot of them are suffering on year over year. Top line growth is down, so they're hungry for better solutions. We've got a scale that now reaches 200,000,000 consumers, so it's wow.
This really moves the needle for us. It's worth my meeting. Right? I wanna take this meeting. And it's starting to get through that, you know, now you've got third parties saying that the and and so what's happening is it's teeing up, and and people are having to decide, you know, I don't want this incremental $152,100,000,000 dollars of of sales for $3,040,000,000 dollars of cost.
And a lot of people, you know, before they make that decision are gonna go talk to a c level executive. So we're penetrating a different tier within the company, but we still have to earn our our stripes as a really strategic partner that's brought in much more upstream in their planning process. And then and then to that is we so, I mean, we started this conversation on post IPO and
the evolution of the company, and it seems as if we are, finding something with CPID that is proving out the model in a way that maybe we didn't talk as much about during the IP. We knew about it. We didn't see. So my my neck and now we're optimizing the Salesforce to go after, and it's turning into better meetings or more meetings at the for the decision makers. Talk to us about the evolution of pricing.
Yeah. I I wanna I just wanna clarify one thing. So after the IPO, it was, you know, a quarter or two after the IPO that I I went around and did a a, you know, a concerted listening tour, and I said, what would it take for you to spend 10 times more money on this platform? Yeah. I I it was that that sort of set of meetings, August, September, October where we realized, okay.
What got us here, we could continue to do this. Yep. We could continue to make refinements and improvements around the edges and still be the best in our industry, and and we could grow, and we can be profitable. However, if we wanna go for something, an order of magnitude more exciting than that, there's an opportunity. But it's gonna require us to make a different level of investment in r and d than we've than we realized we might need to at the IPO.
Sitting at the IPO, that wasn't clear. What became clear later was that this opportunity was really a bigger opportunity to really transform ourselves, and measurement was at the heart of that. Pricing is also part of that. So I think it's important to maximize revenue, not maximize price per se. You know?
And I think we we hadn't taken enough of a look at what is going to be consistent with delivering profitable revenue growth for each client. So for example, we have a pricing sheet that says, you know, from x to y, maybe $2 to $2.99, you pay this flat fee. Well, by definition, if your price is $2.99, this is this percentage of your price, you know, four thirty five, forty cents is this percentage of $2.99. It's this percentage of $2. This is a very wide range in the percentage of the price of the product that you're selling.
And so since that's an input into how profitable the whole thing is, that doesn't make a ton of sense versus a single fixed percentage. So whether it's $2.13, $2.72, $2.99, it's the same percentage. Yep. That's just rationalizing the pricing. Right?
And it's it's making clear that no matter whether you sell a $40 bag of dog food or a, you know, a $4 single serve, you know, Coke Zero, whatever, there's there's way for you to use this platform and have it make sense. Right? And so that was part of the pricing. The philosophy of working with our clients to be more client centric about pricing is part of it. And then I think just generally speaking, being able to demonstrate that even with our pricing fully baked in with the user awards and and and so forth, it's still a very profitable thing to do.
We realized that since we could put it all into one single simplified price, we don't need fees for setup and fees for termination and fees for targeting. People expect to optimize and target. That's just table stakes. So why are we charging people for that? Right?
So we just decided to radically simplify, make it more client centric, and make it, you know, more rational, basically, all at the
same time. Yep. That's great. That that makes a lot of sense. Let's we spent much of this conversation talking about the supplier side or the the advertiser side.
Let's talk on the demand side and and and sort of your your partnerships with Walmart and Instacart and DoorDash and many others. Dollar General, I think, is in there Mhmm. And and etcetera. So let let's let's think about that. Let's say Walmart, for example.
Yeah. We've often talked about, Brian, I think Walmart is the next Walmart or, you know, the next Walmart is Walmart. Right? So now we have, I think That's a good line. The opportunity to be more in store.
Yes. I think you're right.
It in store. So talk to us about why in store is working, digital cards on the aisles, you know
There's a we're in the most exciting place we've been with Walmart, hands down. Been to see them a couple times in the last quarter. The level of sort of collaboration, cooperation, invention, alignment is very high across many different parts of the organization. From the merchandising organization to the marketing organization to the retail media group to the Walmart Data Ventures group to the senior executive level, everywhere in between, the in store, tech overhaul of their in store mode. There's just a lot of realization that what we provide can help shape consumer behaviors in ways that they prioritize, whether that's I need more digital ID.
I need more people putting in their phone number in at checkout so that we can build, you know, a a retail media empire on top of that digital ID. Or whether it is digital engagement. I need more people visiting my app, opening my app in the store, or bringing retail media into the store. I need people to have a reason to bring their phone out. Therefore, in store mode needs to more prominently reference digital promotions.
I need people to be aware of these promotions so that we can pay off the idea of everyday low price, and there isn't a disparity between how much people are saving online versus in store. And so there's real alignment around this, and and they've started to do a number of different things. There was a a marketing push that just went out recently. That's one of the first, you know, nationwide email pushes that references Walmart cash and Walmart manufacturer offers. There's more work being done to deliver awareness of personalized savings opportunities, not just digital manufacturer offers.
We're talking saving savings period, clearance, rollback and digital manufacturer offers, all being brought to the customer's attention through the Walmart app, signage of various forms. There are some tests that we believe will happen over the balance of the year that we hope go well in terms of in store awareness. So there's there's a lot of exciting vectors of collaboration with with Walmart. And then, you know, with other publishers, we're starting to to to do other things to bring new forms of content or just, you know, being best bringing some of these best practices to them. And then we've got a a pipeline of new publishers that we're actively pursuing that is really exciting. And then I think, continues to
On the new pipeline, Brian, we get the question, do we need more supply to bring in a major new publisher? Or in other words, do we need, you know, the the the advertiser side to really start ramping before we bring in? Because we've got a lot of publishers on the platform, but a lot of
these, You see
200,000,000 people.
It's it's certainly not escaped our attention that we will need to continue to ramp these the offer supply. However, we the whole industry needs that. Sure. Right? So right now, for example, I can think of a major mass retailer that has, I think, 13 national offers live.
Were they to sign on with us, even with our current constrained supply, they would have 45 times more offers, national offers for their guests. So it's all relative, first of all.
Right? For sure.
And there are plenty of budgets that we're not fully exhausting that that would immediately go and be available to them. There are some very popular offers that we're getting through more quickly, but I think these are chicken and egg. Right? The more we bring in these exciting national publishers, I think it'll only accelerate the the interest in in testing out all these new capabilities on the offer supply side. But, look, there's a reason why we focus so much on measurement and, know, these new types of optimization and and capabilities because that is really the rate limiting step that we think is the most important right now.
Let's talk about, your other partner, the digital native partners, if you will Yeah. Instacart, DoorDash. Are you seeing greater adoption in roughly similar time frames to Walmart? I don't know how to say it. But, you know, talk to us about adoption from these, audiences, how they've started off the bat, how they're evolving, and yeah.
Yeah. The adoption is similar. The redemption rates are similar. There are some yeah. Obviously, they don't have the in store upside.
I mean, we we see the vast majority of our Walmart redemptions are still online flow, and yet there's this world of online shoppers who don't even know about Walmart cash. So there's still a huge upside there to capture. That's different. But, you know, when you look at how high the redemption rates are because the user experience is so integrated into the search results, into the retail media display ads, there's still a a very high opportunity large opportunity there. And as we think bringing things like beer beer, wine, and spirits, which we've done in some cases but not others, that's another opportunity, other types of of general merchandise.
And then just looking at the growth of the underlying platform. So you look at something like DoorDash, they're they're growing really, really nicely on just online grocery delivery period. So we ride the upside of of all of that growth in the in their overall marketplace, you know, in these categories. And so, yeah, I think that and as they they continue to, you know, reach the next level, they say, well, what what else should we be thinking about? What other forms of offer should we be contemplating?
Or what other forms of personalized marketing could we condemn later? And then some of some of that is also working with them to just upgrade measurement or targeting capabilities so that the performance we can get on their platform is that much better or that much more measurable. And so sometimes that might be kind of invisible, but it's an important part of the conversation. Yep.
We've got about a few minutes left to see if there's any questions from the audience. I don't if not, I keep going, of course.
Let's do it. As I like to say in my company, who's got the first question? If not, are there any questions? Otherwise, Ron's just gonna keep asking.
Going, which is exciting too.
No. It's very exciting.
Alright. Well, let let's, tee up the questions. We got two, three minutes left here. But I I have an industry question and then some some other questions. But we you know, the news flow is pretty high in terms of CPG companies either breaking themselves up or looking for that next leg of growth, new management teams, etcetera, etcetera.
How do we think about those that those headlines relative to Ibotta? Yeah. I mean, this is a moment where these companies really need innovation. They really not just a new product, but a new way of building a brand. Yep.
And I think when some of these big companies that are piloting our network get on stage and start talking about what a game changer this is, a lot of folks are gonna be have a high a high appetite to bring us in and hear what the what what these innovations are. You know, year over year sales are are struggling. They took a lot of price in the last three years. Now they realize they've lost market share. In some cases, because of that, they need to reset their price in a more rational way.
But rather than doing that in across the board kind of very blunt way, doing that in a smarter way, in a way that takes into account a person's prior propensity to buy the product. Sure. You don't wanna needlessly reduce the price across the board and overdo that when, you know, someone's elasticity was such that that was totally unnecessary loss of revenue. So I think people understand that, but it does present a challenge in the getting their attention. You know, if you're going through a major acquisition or divestiture, it's it it can be, well, let's wait till the new team's in place till we decide to make this giant investment.
So it's business as usual kind of. Right? And so that can that can be both
good and and bad. Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And then I wanna sort of wrap wrap up today just talking capital allocation. I mean, the balance sheet is awfully strong.
We've, I think, authorized several share repurchases. How do you think about the use or the priorities of of the cash on the balance sheet?
Yeah. We're big believers in in capital allocation being a great way to drive shareholder value. My investors have sent me the outsiders. I've read it carefully page by page. Bottom line is we have a lot of information about the trajectory of the business.
We we're sharing it here so everybody can hear it. But we believe that we have the ability to recognize the significance of that information, and we're gonna be able to add value for shareholders if we believe it's a better use of money than an acquisition or additional r and d investment or whatever we get on the treasury. We also realize that there's some value in having cash on the balance sheet for a rainy day for another pandemic for who knows what. I will say, by and large, we're very happy with the rate at which we're investing in r and d. We we feel like it's certainly responsible to spend that in a share buyback.
But as you might imagine, we have active conversations with our board. We look at different price points and different scenarios, what the return to investors is compared to alternatives, and we evaluate that. And it's really got to be above a hurdle rate of what you know, our BATNA is. So I think we're pretty rational about it, but we're very, we're we've we've higher conviction in where we're going, higher ceiling, larger addressable market than I think we've, ever felt we've had. And so that's why we keep authorizing share buybacks. Love it. That that's
a great way to to sort of wrap this up for today. So higher conviction on where we're going and and a path to get there. You bet.
Thanks, Ron.
Brian, thank you for joining us today. Appreciate you. Very much appreciated. Thanks, man. Thank you. Alright.