Is this your show?
Very rare that I'm in charge, so.
Let me know. Are we ready to go, sir?
All right.
Got the thumbs up.
All right. Thanks so much for joining for this Wells Fargo fireside chat with Chris Riedy, Chief Revenue Officer from Ibotta.
Thank you, Ken.
I'm Ken Gawrelski from Wells Fargo, run Internet research here. I'll do a very quick intro and then everyone's favorite Safe Harbor.
Thank you.
You know, you love that. Chris Riedy, Chief Revenue Officer, joined in 2025, this year, about a year ago, to lead the company's revenue-generating departments, including sales, sales ops, sales enablement, and account management. Prior to Ibotta, Chris was Chief Revenue Officer at TV Scientific, and prior to that, 11 years at Twitter, working his way from sales manager to ultimately overseeing all global sales. Chris, welcome. I will give a quick Safe Harbor. All right, Shalin. Today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements. These statements reflect Ibotta's current expectations and are based on the information currently available to Ibotta, and Ibotta's actual results could differ materially. For more information, please refer to the risk factors on Ibotta's recent SEC filings, including its 10-K and its 10-Qs. All right. With that behind us, now we'll kick off.
Chris, nearly a year into your time at Ibotta, can you take us maybe first into what attracted you to the sales leadership role at Ibotta? Tell us about the opportunity you saw at the company.
100%. And thanks for having me, Ken.
Of course.
It was, I guess, about a year ago, like, pretty close to right now, maybe a little bit earlier in the year, but, when I met Bryan. And, as, you know, as you said, I had a long chapter at Twitter, both in the U.S., and then I went abroad and came back and, worked with the company in the transition to X. Did that whole thing. And when I left, I went to a startup. I wanted to do something much smaller and much more of a build opportunity and was having a great time doing that, TV Scientific, cool company. But I met Bryan, and I think, one, he's a very compelling guy, and it was great to meet him, and we got along very well, very quickly.
The thing that really compelled me was that when I heard Ibotta, I thought of this Consumer App focused on coupons, which seems like it has a meaningful place in the world, but having worked at a Consumer App that had a bird on it, I knew how hard it was to grow usage. What I learned when I met Bryan is that it was so much more than that. The Walmart partnership, soon after the Instacart partnership was announced and DoorDash more recently, but meeting the shopper where they are is really, really compelling from a performance marketing standpoint. That was thing one. Thing two is he really understood the tenets of performance marketing. He understood what it meant to be able to leverage data effectively to drive outcomes and profitable outcomes.
When you talk to the industry and you ask the question, "Is there anybody doing performance marketing really well for CPG?" the answer's mostly no. Put all of that together, and I said, "Let's do it.
Great. Great. Post the IPO last year, Founder and CEO Bryan Leach embarked on a roadshow to really understand how clients could scale with Ibotta. I think that created a real shift in his mindset and what he was looking for in a sales organization and leadership. Can you share some of those learnings and how you are now executing against that opportunity?
Yeah. Happy to. I think the first, maybe most tangible thing that he heard is that the money that people were spending with us, they could not validate if it was driving their business in an effective way or not. Marketing and growth within the marketing and media spaces really requires proof. Oftentimes, that could be in your own dashboard. It could be from a third party, but you need to be able to show that you are delivering the outcomes that you say you are delivering. I think what Bryan heard pretty consistently is that we spend with you because, you know, you move some units for us, but we do not know if it is a dollar worth spending again or not. That change really or that understanding really precipitated this push into what we would call performance marketing or now have named Live Lift.
Maybe to level set with the audience, can you describe what Live Lift is and how it differs from the standard sales offering?
Yeah. Absolutely. Ibotta, if you imagine it from a consumer standpoint, if you're on Walmart or you're on Instacart or even the Ibotta App, you're gonna see a promotion tied to a product. You do a search for toothpaste inside of Walmart, you'll see all the search results. All of those companies have the opportunity to work with us to have a dollar of Walmart cash affixed to the product, let's say. Nothing changes there. The way you'd show up in Walmart or the way you show up at Instacart or even the Ibotta App, all of that's the same. The core principle here is really adding value back to the marketer. And there's two, two key tenets there. The first is, a more effective measurement solution.
Really looking at the incremental sales that we're delivering, not just sales, but the incremental sales, sales that would not have happened had the consumer not seen the offer. That's thing one. What that measurement gives us is the ability to score a campaign. What is the cost per incremental dollar required to earn a new dollar of revenue? Is it $0.25 ? Is it $0.50 ? Or is it $0.10 ? Once you have that information, you can make a decision around, "Is the campaign going the way I want it to, or should I optimize something?" That is very powerful. Launching a promotions campaign, be able to measure it in flight, then be able to take that measurement and have it affect future change, that's performance marketing. You know, that's what everybody in digital media does every single day.
It's much different in the promotion space.
Is this language you're using now, how does this translate to the traditional buyers of your product? Is this language they're familiar with? If not, how do you approach, is it, do you approach a new buyer at the organization? Do you adjust language? Is it a learning process? Talk to us about the process.
Yeah. Sure. The in CPGs tend to be relatively complex org structures and tend to be somewhat inconsistent, and in the sense that there are each company has a different structure for who's buying, who's influencing, etc. Historically, we've leveraged center of excellence roles. So these are roles that sit at the midpoint of the organization, and they work up or around the organization to the different business units. When somebody says, "Hey, I'm slow on sales. I need to activate some promotions," they call their center of excellence person. They would ultimately call Ibotta. We would help them. I think we still maintain those relationships. They're very important for us, but we are much more focused on multi-threading our way through the organization to understand who really cares about incremental revenue growth.
If you think about a procurement person or center of excellence person, they might just be gold on driving costs down. They may have no goals around driving more profitable growth for the business. We want to make sure we're selling to the C-suite so they understand the opportunity. We wanna make sure we're selling into the business unit owners. If you own oral care in that example, I want you to understand what we can do so that you then say, "Well, gosh, I wasn't thinking about you like that." I don't wanna just rely on the center of excellence to be the mechanism for us to win. I think it's yes and. If we do that well, the value that we demonstrate will enable us to obviously serve, serve the customer better.
Ideally, I know you said all of these CPG organizations are, you know, structured differently, but ideally, are you communicating at the brand level, you know, to make sure that you understand their needs in the moment? Is that ultimately where you're headed?
I think that if you can have an understanding at the category level or the brand level.
Okay.
Just depending on the org.
Sure.
One of those two, making sure you have a real understanding of what's going on inside the business, the puts and takes inside the business, the areas of focus, and the areas of risk. That's really critical. Additionally, making sure you understand from the measurement side of the house, what does good look like? Making sure you understand from the finance side of the house, how they're seeing the business unfold. What we've found is that as we work our way across the businesses and evangelize or socialize what we're doing, it helps give people more confidence and ultimately allows them to be more comfortable, feel more comfortable with us, providing innovation for them.
Understood. How do you think, how should we think about sales cycle? Historically, the promotion kinda trade world has been on a 12-month cycle. Sometimes it feels even longer. How do we, how should we think about how the sales cycle is changing with the new Live Lift product?
I think you're right that a lot of these promotions, trade spend historically has been planned well in advance because of the physical requirement of getting things printed and getting them shipped and getting them in place. That's something that we're dealing with all the time. In any media business, you're always thinking about what is that next year's commitment. That, I think, will always be in play. If you think about the Live Lift product and you think about any innovation that you're selling in, usually what I've experienced is when you sell a pilot, you set out some campaign objectives. You usually hit some of the objectives.
Maybe you hit all of the objectives, but afterwards you sit back down and say, "Did this do what we wanted it to do?" You may have to do more socializing of it. I think it remains to be seen as we keep going through these pilots if the results that we show compel customers to buy more frequently or more quickly. I believe that the Ibotta product gives a consumer brand the opportunity to change behavior in the moment. You know, it does not require six months of lead time. It does not require any physical manufacturing. It just can happen in a couple of days. I would like that to make it easier for us to sell all the time to these customers.
To your point, if the budgets are allocated so far ahead of time, will there be a budget there to sell into? That, that's to be determined.
Got it. I mean, ideally, you're to what looks like always-on or always-available type?
The always-available concept, what I really want the manufacturers to appreciate is that we're focused so intently on delivering incremental sales impact for them. When we do that, they should think about leveraging it whenever needed, i.e., if there's media that's running that isn't effective and there's an opportunity to test with us, let's try to do that. I want them to hold us accountable, but also to hold other partners accountable to drive true value. If we do that, it feels like the sales cycle would shift, but there's work to be done there.
Understood. Understood. You alluded to the pilots, the number of pilots with clients that, with Live Lift, many of which have turned into live commercial campaigns. Can you walk us through some of the learnings there? Is there a consistent theme for those clients that have had the most success, and are proceeding with commercial campaigns relative to those who have decided for whatever reason to hold off?
Really good question. You know, Bryan shared this in the earnings call, but we've got about 83% of the initial batch have reactivated. Here's what I'll say just over the time period. One, the first half of the year was a lot of building and a lot of learning and a lot of learning together. When the campaign ended, it wasn't like, "This is good or bad." It was collective work to say, "Okay. Me as the sponsor inside the business, this did what I wanted it to do, but now we need to go talk to finance. We need to go talk to revenue growth management. Let's get to other business units to start socializing this." That takes time. You do those meetings.
I think that the first thing that I would say is as we were building, there was a lot of cooperative work with the brands to figure out what's the next way we use this. That's thing one. I think thing two is, you know, just the desire to be innovative, but also to value kind of cutting-edge measurement. And whether that's the Circana third-party measurement that we provide or we just announced a partnership with ABCS that's also providing third-party measurement, or it's our first-party measurement, just thinking about a promotion as an economic value driver versus just moving units, that does not exist inside of every company we go visit. It does not exist in every call that we have. I think there's two things.
There's this level of engagement and desire, but there's also this, you know, "I wanna innovate, and we believe that we can deliver more value here." The good news, in my opinion, is, as I stated earlier, it's the same product from a consumer standpoint. Nothing has to change in that regard. It's helping the brand show up more effectively, more precisely to the consumer and then giving them more benefit on the back end. Whether you run a Live Lift campaign or a standard campaign, for you and I, we wouldn't know the difference inside of Walmart, inside of the Ibotta App.
Got it. And you alluded to the third-party studies to validate your results. Where are you? You, the Circana, you had the provider yesterday that you announced. Where are you in this process? How should we think about the timing and scale necessary of these third-party research studies to prove the efficacy, you know, to not just current customers, but future clients?
Sure. Sure. So, you know, what's the p you may ask, like, "What's the point? Why do you need this third-party validation?" I think any kind of innovative or cutting-edge media that is coming on, on the scene needs this validation. And frankly, I think Circana does a lot of work with some of the biggest platforms in the world today. They're kind of an always-on provider, but especially in the moment where we're really trying to break through around incremental sales. These partnerships are critical because we want to be transparent.
Mm-hmm.
We want to be held accountable to delivering results for the customer. We're measuring to the best of our ability. It's not like we use Circana because we're like, "Oh, maybe ours, ours we feel very good about. We just wanna put it in a third-party's hands so that they can provide more comfort back to the brand." I think that there's two things that happen. These studies, historically, they kick off at the end of a campaign. If you've been running a YouTube campaign, campaign ends, you pass exposures, you pass any conversion information, Circana does crunches numbers and passes something back to you. Same thing happens with us. What I'd like to figure out is how we can shorten that cycle.
That's what we're gonna, we will work with them to see if we can get data to them at a more regular basis so that they could be doing these more in a rolling fashion, if you will. Right now, it's a couple of weeks or a month to get one of these built at the end of a campaign.
Okay. Okay. When you think about the sales process now, can you talk about how customized it is? I think this is one of the things that Bryan talked about on some prior earnings calls was the early pilots. They were highly customized. It was very hands-on. It would take a lot of time and effort to replicate that across tens and eventually hundreds and thousands of clients. How do you automate certain elements of that sales process? Where are you in that process?
The first campaigns were, you know, true team effort, labor-love stuff. We had a lot of people focused here because it's really important to our business. I think if you, the go-to-market motion, it's more than sales. It's the support side as well. If you think about where we were in January or February, we didn't have the same revenue operations infrastructure to help get us organized and to build the cohorts of customers we're going after. We didn't have the same B2B marketing, sales enablement infrastructure to help tell this story as well. We definitely weren't doing Circana announcements or Live Lift branded announcements.
I think the first thing I would say is we've just made so much progress on that sales support side to help the seller such that when they show up and talk about something, they either have compelling materials or somebody had heard about it in advance. I would say that's, that's thing one. Thing two is we are relatively formulaic in how we want to attack the market. We're gonna look at the TAM from a total revenue opportunity and put resources against the largest opportunities. That's a bit of a shift that we've had over the course of this year where we've really rethought how we allocate resources. We haven't grown the size of our team materially, but we have put more resources against the largest CPGs because they are A, so complex, as we've discussed a little bit, and just the opportunity's really big.
From there, it's really about driving discovery effectively, understanding what's important to that company. If you're these CPGs are like holding companies, you need to understand which of the brands underneath matters in this moment so that you can build a credible proposal for that brand, get the right data. What we've been able to do is build that sales support infrastructure, then help the sellers go to market in a more specific way. What we were doing in January and February to crunch the data to help the brand understand what the offer variant should be, it's just much, it's going much faster now. What I'll say is that, credit to all of the teams inside of Ibotta, it has been a very methodical and systematic approach. We knew that in the beginning of the year, we were learning a lot, and it was hard.
We knew that learning would pay off. We did not wanna get too far out in front of ourselves, even though had we been able to say we have, you know, 2x'd or 5x'd or whatever x'd the number of participants and pilots, that would have been a nice thing for us to be able to say. We were really methodical about how we worked through that. I think what you will see from us is continuing to simplify the process, but also to learn because I am sure there are more things that we are gonna learn at the beginning of next year that will help us make the process better.
Should we think about in success, it looks at least in the first, call it two to three years, it's more about penetration of these targeted advertisers, and it's less about, you know, the number of total advertisers, the total less than the total number of clients?
That's a very good question. You know, if I think about the CPG industry in the United States of America, pick your number for where enterprise and emerging stops, but let's just say there's 100 for round numbers' sake, enterprise-worthy customers. What I wanna see us do is have the conversation with all 100. Now, all of them, I hope, are already working with us and finding value, and this is a way to add additional value. Next thing is getting a pilot live with each of them. That gives them an opportunity to start to learn, to start to see the optimization impact, which really tends to stand out in these campaigns.
Once that one keeps going, then it is getting to number two inside of that parent, and then to number three, and to number four, and to number five. I think that is how it will flow. The question ultimately will be, again, how do we shrink the time of delivery of data? How do we make sure that we are, you know, nailing it on this is the right offer variant and we are hitting your goals? That is critical in this whole thing. We have got to be able to do that. We feel really good about our ability to do that.
I think if you start with that 100 and then you start unpacking from there, I hope that we end up needing to hire more salespeople and more account managers to service what looks like one entity today because we're able to keep landing and expanding inside of the inside of the business.
Got it. On last week's earnings call, you spoke about a more challenging macro environment for your mostly CPG clients. Any further insight you can or color you can provide about that? Does getting back to growth in 2026 and 2027 require meaningful improvement in the macro for these clients?
I believe that we have the opportunity to be effective even in what I would consider to be a pretty challenging and really kind of confusing macro time. You know, I was at a conference a couple weeks ago, Consumer Brand CEO Summit, and just talking with CEOs and listening to panelists. The amount of new challenges that are coming to those CEOs, very different in their business. They have built these distribution businesses where they get the ingredients, they make the product, it gets packaged, it goes, we sell it, we market it, make America healthy again, different packaging requirements, obviously tariffs, inflation, and ultimately that is just pushing back to value, right? How do I get value to the consumer? It is a tough time. I empathize with those leaders. Ultimately, that is creating some headwind for us. There is no way it is not.
What I'm hopeful is that given our focus, you know, our North Star is delivering incremental profitable sales results for these partners, that can be affirmed or, you know, confirmed by a third party. I'm hopeful that even in those moments, we stand out because we deliver the value that they need. They need to grow share, and they need to grow profitability. That's the name of the game for them. I'm hopeful that as we keep having these conversations, launching these pilots, delivering the results, that we seem or we appear or we begin to be a true value driver for them. It's not gonna just happen. We've gotta go earn that. I hope that we can push through the challenging environment.
Got it. I'll put you on the spot here a little bit. In three years in success, what percentage of ad revenue at Ibotta comes from or what percentage of revenue comes from the standard offering versus Live Lift?
Wow. I mean, have we cleared that with Shalin? Or that, I mean, I do not even know if that question is answerable. It's a really, really good question that is really hard for me to answer. I'll go back to the following principles. First things first, of those imaginary 100 customers, I want them all to see that Ibotta drives value. We move units for you, full stop. When it's Tuesday and you realize that you've got a sales gap next week, you've got to move units, we can get an offer live for you in that amount of time, and we can reach 200 million American consumers. That is really important. That's thing one. Thing two, I want, it makes sense to me that Live Lift would stand out because, you know, it has an enhanced measurement capability, offers the ability to optimize.
It's hard for me to put a percentage on what that will be. Where we have our teams really focused is building the best products that deliver the best value back to the brands and then having our go-to-market teams show up in a thoughtful and empathetic way such that they can understand what the customer needs. If we pull those two things together, we do those effectively, I do not, I'm not too worried about percentage A versus percentage B 'cause I know we will become a durable partner rather than a vendor that shows up every six months and has a 30-minute conversation.
Got it. Let me ask it this way then. When you're in a, when you're selling, you got the standard offering of Live Lift, are you pitching this as a, this is an and versus a or?
That's right. That's right.
Right? The idea is this is an and you should be doing our standard offering, and then on top of that, this is.
That's right. You know, there's some instances where the brand may wanna run a two-week campaign, let's say. Let's say that, again, you've got a sales gap. You've got, I need this live in three days, and we gotta move as many units as we can in two weeks. Two weeks is probably not gonna get us to statistical significance plus an opportunity to optimize. And that, you know, that's kind of the core tenet of Live Lift. If somebody presented that challenge to me, I would wanna be able to help them, and we would. I would also say at the same time, "Okay, I understand what we're doing here.
What's something that is a little bit more evergreen and that, that you know needs to run for a longer period of time where we can actually spend the time to think about what are the economics behind it, what's the right offer variant, we can align on what the goals are, what success looks like, and we get the space to be able to get live, get to stat SIG, run the optimization, see the improvements? Those two things, for me, no reason that they can't coexist and both be value drivers. Again, it would make sense to me that you'd want the enhanced measurement capabilities, you'd want the ability to optimize over time, but we just need to see how that plays out.
Understood. Understood. Thank you. Some are concerned, I should say, that the moves you're making put you into maybe a bit more direct or, you know, more competitive stance with retail media offerings, right? It's not exactly the same, but, you know, it looks far more similar than the standard offering, so the Live Lift. Can you talk about what, first of all, your view about that? What's the delineation? Where does retail media begin and end? Where does a product like Live Lift begin and end? Are they overlapping in any way? What's been the reaction in the marketplace? Do some people say, like, "This looks, you know, this can, this should be part of my retail media budget"?
Very good question. Lot of retail media interest these days. You know, a lot of retail media interest, both on platform and off platform, you know, leveraging data to buy CTV or buy social. Here's my take. These are highly complementary solutions. I see it as the, you know, the one plus one equals three concept. If we think about consumer journey, in general, I think we probably think we know why people make decisions and what they're gonna do. I, I don't think we really know what makes somebody do something at any given time. But we know that you have to drive awareness of your product, you've gotta drive consideration, and then ultimately you've gotta drive through, pull through to a conversion. You know, the funnel is real.
I think for, you know, the manufacturers, we go back to the, you know, the toothpaste example, they've gotta make sure they're selling products, and they have to do a lot of work to understand, do people know that our product exists? When they know that it exists, are they choosing us? And if they're not choosing us, is it a value play or is it a functionality play? All those things work together in real time simultaneously, hard to parse apart. I think the beauty of retail media, on platform or off platform, and something like an Ibotta offer is that for that consumer where value is the key, you could bring the offer into your CTV spot. You could bring the offer into your on-platform retail media. It already shows up in the search results as part of the product listing.
That enables the capture or the drive up, if you will, of consideration, ultimate pull through to purchase. The reason I think it works really well from a business standpoint is our pricing model, we only get paid when the product is sold. You could be buying your retail media on a CPM. You could be buying it on a different cost per cost per view if it is a video. Ultimately, layering in $2 off, $2 cash back on this product, it does not cost anything until the product is bought. When the product is bought, if we do a good job of setting up the offer variants to deliver profitable growth, it should be a win-win.
Understood. Understood. Just, maybe one or two more. Talk to me about what you found with your distribution partners. You know, you have Walmart, which is, you know, the original, you know, very large distribution partner, but you've added DoorDash and Circana and Instacart recently. Can you talk to us about the receptivity you see at those partners, the health of those relationships? I know you don't do on the on the BD side, but.
Yeah. That's okay.
As a leader in the organization.
Yeah. And look, I think when you're operating in an environment like Ibotta is, when you're in network, so you're working with other entities, if you're not actively working with their commercial leadership teams, you're probably leaving something to be desired. First things first, it's important for me and the broader revenue leadership team to build relationships in each of those instances. We do that. We sit down with those folks when we see them at conferences. We do calls with them on a pretty regular basis to talk about, one, what they're seeing in the market, but also, you know, how do we get the cash-back offer to show up in that video ad spot?
'Cause if we're hearing if we share a customer and the customer's saying, "I'd love for my Walmart cash offering to be more, pronounced," then we'll work together on that. My perspective is that, again, it comes back to that one plus one equals three thing. I don't think we're competing. I think we're helping one another. Retail media at a, discovery from a discovery lens is very, very valuable. Retail media from a consideration. Sure, it'll pull all the way through. We're an enhancement to that. If you put the customer as your North Star, which is, I think, something really important to do, you can deliver better results to the customer, it behooves both teams to work together. I feel like that's just the way that the enterprises are working together.
How do we deliver more for our customer, the shopper, if you will?
Understood. Understood. With that, I'll close it out. Chris, thank you so much for being with us today.
Thank you.
Really appreciate everyone for joining us. Thanks so much.