Okay. I think in the interest of time, we're going to get going on our next conversation. It's my pleasure to have Ibotta back to the conference again this year. Chris Riedy, our Chief Revenue Officer. Chris, you were new to the company a year ago. Welcome back
Thank you. It's great to be here
to the conference, second year in a row. I am going to read a quick safe harbor. The conversation today could contain forward-looking statements. Please refer to Ibotta's quarterly and annual SEC filings for more information. With that out of the way, for those who don't know the company as well, maybe just set the stage for our conversation and talk a little bit about the Ibotta platform and what you guys are trying to build and scale.
Yeah. Again, thanks for having me.
Of course.
So if we go back to where it started, there is kind of three beats to this story. The first beat is Ibotta, the direct consumer app. Ibotta was founded with the idea that there was a way to deliver digital cash back rewards and digital savings to consumers. The company was built around an app that you would download from the Google Play Store or the App Store. You would log in, you would see some discounts, you would go to your grocery store, you buy them, everything was great. That business, over the course of time, had a lot of traction. There were 50 million downloads, or there have been 50 million downloads of the app. There was a significant amount, billions of dollars in cash back given to American consumers. Everything was really cool. The challenge is, running a digital app business is really difficult.
It is hard to get people to stay engaged. It becomes expensive to get new customers into the business. The company realized to hit the scale that it wanted, it needed to maybe rethink or retrench. At that point, the company did a deal with Walmart to be the exclusive provider of item level cash back rewards. It comes to life in something called Walmart Cash, fully Walmart branded. You would never know anything about Ibotta when you are in the Walmart experience, and that is part of the beauty of the experience. That initial deal started what we refer to now as the Ibotta Performance Network. Within the Ibotta Performance Network, we meet American consumers in native ways inside the dollar channel at Family Dollar and Dollar General, inside Last Mile with Instacart, DoorDash, and Uber, some regional grocers like Schnucks and Giant Eagle.
Most recently, we are really excited to add 7-Eleven to the experience, the convenience channels. Very exciting. Think about that first V1. You have got proof of product market fit. We love that. Next, we expand the network. Now we have scale. We have got real scale that we are working with. We are now entering a part of the business that is about delivering proof back to the CPG. We want to show the CPG that when they spend a dollar with us, they are driving incremental revenue to their business. We want them to see that we are delivering profitability for their business and that we are not a subsidization vehicle. We are in that journey right now, but it is a very exciting place to be. If you can deliver performance on behalf of an advertiser and you can deliver scale, you are in a really nice place.
Okay. Of all of those themes, I do want to go a little bit deeper on.
Sure.
Let's just stick with you for one minute. You were brought in to be the Chief Revenue Officer. Talk a little bit about when we spoke, when I got the opportunity to speak a year ago in this forum, you were talking about what you were going to try to accomplish and the reorganization effort to align the organization with sort of the priorities about how to optimize for monetization and go-to-market strategy. Just refresh us a little bit on how those efforts have gone and a little bit of mark to market on the journey in your specific role.
Yeah.
Then we'll come back to the company more broadly.
Yeah. I was saying this earlier today. Chief Revenue Officer seems to mean something different at every single company you go to. In my case, I joined to lead the sales business, then we realized we needed to build a B2B marketing practice inside of the revenue team, so we did that. Then we built a revenue operations team to help make sure the trains are running on time. Most recently, we've brought in a measurement and insights team-
Yep
again, to help the team. What we really focused on is pivoting from a reactive sales force to a proactive sales force. We have been really focused on building this, what I consider to be a flywheel, where we are showing up to talk to the customer in a customer-centric way. We want to ask the right questions to understand what is most important to that brand. Just because one food brand wants to go left does not mean all the food brands want to go left. So it is important to show up and ask the right questions.
From there, we are really working closely with the marketing team to bring the right materials and to really promote the right ways to show up inside of the experience, rather than just showing up every time and saying, "Hey, would you like to run a promotion on Walmart?" Or, "Would you like to run a promotion inside of Ibotta?" We are getting much closer to either seasonal moments or maybe industry-focused moments that really speak to the customer. Then finally, we have got this revenue operations team that is tracking everything just to understand what sales plays are working. Well, how is it working when we send this email versus that email? When we show up in person, how much more effective we are. All of that shows up like sales. But without the whole thing, you are a much less effective sales force.
Inside of all of that, we talked a little bit about this last year, we went from a geographic focus into an industry vertical focus.
Yeah.
When our teams show up, we want them to be experts in their field. If you are going to talk to a food brand, I want you to understand the economics of food. I want you to understand what it means to be challenged by GLP-1s. I want you to know that protein is really popular right now. Two years ago, we might have had you bouncing from laundry care to deodorant into food in a single day. And obviously that is a lot of context switching. It is hard on the salesperson, and that makes a worse experience for the customer. We have made a lot of progress through all of that.
We're feeling really good about where we are, and there's more space for us to improve. Let's bring it back to the company and the platform transition you guys are going through. When you think about where you and the team and Bryan want to take the company to the medium to long term, how is the confidence trending with respect to the pathway of that transition and the signals you're getting back from the broader market?
Confidence is high. I feel really good about the work we're doing. I also just want to say, I think it's very early innings. I really think that we are starting to scratch the surface. I'm proud of the work that we're doing, both on the go-to-market side and on the technology side, and there's just a lot of space in front of us. From a signal standpoint, look, we told the market we would get the business back to growth in quarter three of this year. We achieved that in quarter two, so a little bit ahead of expectations, and that's a really nice signal. But every day, it's really about the behaviors of the sales team. That's the stuff we're paying attention to. How many meetings are we having? Are we getting on the road? What does the pipeline look like? What does pipeline per account look like?
Do we see more opportunities, not only at the parent brand level, but as we all know, these CPGs-
Yeah
they're kind of like these big holding companies.
Yeah.
Really just understanding that we're getting closer and closer and closer to the customer, and that's the thing that we pay attention to every single day. We've seen really nice growth in those metrics, and those are the inputs. Those are the leading indicators that give us confidence that ultimately what we need to deliver is revenue growth and profit growth, and that gives us confidence we're going in the right direction.
Okay. Maybe just one more big picture one, which would be on the macro environment. Obviously, CPG advertisers have faced a shifting environment over the last couple of years. When you go in to have conversations with CPG advertisers, how do you think about what's differentiating you from other digital advertising channels, and how is the macro environment sort of impacting the overall conversation you're having with your advertisers?
Really good question. A couple things that I want to say. CPG is dynamic right now, from a couple ways. One, you've got acquisitions happening at some places, and then you have divestitures happening at other places. So some companies are getting bigger, and then you're dealing with integration challenges. Other companies are splitting apart, and you're working through that. That's the first thing. Second thing, in the food space, GLP-1s are a very real thing, and the food stamps business, what's happening with just affordability is a real issue that folks are facing. Then broadly, you have the economy. Whether it's tariffs, whether it's personal pocketbook, it is harder to be a consumer today, and you are searching for value. So what I find most broadly is when we talk to CPGs, it is really important to be thoughtful and empathetic when you show up there.
This is not easy times, and it's new playbook times.
Right.
That is something that I think is really important, and where that customer-centric selling approach that we are trying to bring forward, an insights-laden pitch, rather than just, "Look at us, we are amazing." I really want our teams to show up with data such that the customer knows that we are actually thinking about how to grow their business. That is how I would describe the macro. If you think about us and just digital media in general, I think that the most obvious thing is how we make money. We are a pay-for-performance vehicle. We only get paid when we sell a product on behalf of somebody else.
All things being equal, if you are a CFO and you say, "Okay, I can give a dollar to Ibotta, or I can give a dollar to somebody else," when you know for sure that when you give a dollar to Ibotta, that means a product moved off the shelf, that is a nice place to be. That is something that I think gives us an advantage right now. Ultimately, I want to be held accountable, we want our business to be held accountable, delivering profitable revenue growth for the end customer. We want a CPG to see us as a partner. We want a CPG to see us as a mechanism that can spur units next week if that is what is needed, and over the course of the next year, that can help with a steady stream of profitable growth.
That is what we want to be seen, which I think is more than a tactic. It is much more of a partnership.
Okay. Sticking with that theme of sort of earning customers on the dollar side and confidence in customers on the dollar side, talk to us a little bit about how third-party validation has played a role in increasing or changing the nature of the conversations you are having with advertisers.
Unfortunately, we are not the only sales team in the world. It would be nice if we were the only people that showed up and said, "Hey, we can do something for you." There is a lot of vendors, if you will, that are showing up at CPGs, and they are compelling, and they say, "We want to make your business better. Trust us." If you are that CPG, if you are the CFO or you are the CMO, it can be hard to, "Gosh, these guys said they were going to do it. These guys also said they were going to do it. This team said that they could deliver better results for us." I think the Circana, ABCS, third-party validation et al., that is really about us being transparent and willing to let somebody else grade the homework.
All the digital platforms, they have to grade their own homework because the grades that come out, that is what drives the optimization. That is the whole business. You have to do that. You do not have to hand your data over to anybody else to have it validated or to let them look at it. We believe it is critically important to do that to build trust. So when we show up and say, "Look, we are going to run this campaign, and then at the end of it, we are going to give you our read on how well it performed, and we are happy to put it in Circana's hands, and they can measure it against the media that you have run elsewhere and give you some like for like results." That is proving to give us a little bit of some tailwinds on the trust side.
It, again, just like the business model shows that we are in it together, this is another element of showing the CPG that we have skin in the game and that we want to show them that we are delivering profitable revenue growth for them rather than just being somebody that is a bit of a flash in the pan.
Okay. One of the things we have talked about on prior earnings calls would just be the journey that CPG companies themselves are going on about how they think about performance marketing broadly. You guys have talked about trying to change some of the perception of what you are as a company, couponing, promotion, always on performance marketing dollars. Talk a little bit about the industry transformation and how you are repositioning yourself for where the industry would like to be in a couple of years' time.
Yeah. The North Star for us is profitable incremental growth. We think if you can deliver a profitable dollar of growth, if you can show that that growth is incremental, i.e., it wouldn't have happened otherwise, you've got something very durable. Given where we are in the macro, more and more media buyers, CMOs, and CFOs in particular are saying, "What did we get for that dollar? Please show me what we got for that." That is why that is our North Star, because we're not in this for one to two months or one to two years. We're really trying to build a world-class marketing platform that CPGs can leverage every single day. To do that really well, you have to have the scale that we talked about earlier.
You have to have the data that we're able to collect from not only our first-party app, but from our third parties. Then you got to be able to build models that will tell you how incremental something is. There's a lot of work to do there. I feel that we are really well-positioned to do this. When we talk to customers and we lay that vision out for them, that's something that they want to get on board with. They understand. We talked about this last year. It's a year later. We're still working on this. Hopefully, we'll be back in a year, and there's still work to do. This is not an overnight build for us, but it is that commitment to delivering value on behalf of the CPG. It's a consistent theme for us. We feel good about where we are.
I think we're very well-positioned. I think we're in a pretty unique space to do this well, and we have a lot of work to do to continue to execute here.
Sticking on that theme of sort of the evolution of CPG and you becoming more critical to them, the other interesting dynamic is CPGs have very unique budgeting cycles, which is both a pro and a con to this, right? You have a lot of time to prepare for the next budgeting window with a lot of CPGs, but if you miss a window, it obviously could be quite a while before you get a CPG to want to engage with you again. Talk a little bit about both the opportunities and the challenges of how frequently you get to engage with customers where there's a budget decision that's tied to those conversations.
Well, you are right. CPGs, at times, can have very long decision-making cycles. I guess that does give you a little time to get your business in order and to show up hyper effectively. I would much rather take, bless you, I would much rather take multiple swings than just one swing.
Yeah.
I think that gives you a better shot. What we are really trying to do is just have an opportunity to win more frequently. If you think about how digital media works outside of promotions or outside of CPG, if you are buying a CTV campaign right now, a connected television campaign, you are looking at results intra-campaign. You might be moving up on some programming, moving down on other programming. You might find that one provider is meeting your needs or meeting your goals more effectively, and you are going to move budget around accordingly, a very practical and pragmatic approach. What we are trying to get to is something similar, where you might have an annual allocation that you think is the right number to put forward to a partner like Ibotta. Over the course of the year, Ibotta, we might add retail partners.
This year, we have added Giant Eagle, added Uber, their properties. We will launch 7-Eleven soon. Whatever you had in play for us at the end of last year, it is a different world now. That is the one side. The second is that we might just start, maybe we are meeting your needs more effectively. Maybe we are actually meeting the target that you have set forward. That is what is so important about delivering that incremental or profitable growth. Because in a pay-for-performance marketing ecosystem, you tend to have dollars continue to follow when you are meeting the goals, and dollars do not follow when you are not meeting the goals. I think about having an opportunity every single day to sell to our customer. The way that we do that is by highlighting the results that we are doing.
When we are beating benchmarks or beating the goals that they have set forward, we are going to ask for more, not because we want more just to have more, but because we have already agreed on what good looks like.
Yeah.
When we can achieve good, let's do more of that. That's very common in digital media, less common in this world of promotions, and that's one of the reasons we're so excited about what we're doing. We really think we can cross a bit of a chasm here, where you start to buy this much more like you would a connected television or a social campaign, where it becomes very normal to, "Okay, let's look at the results. Yeah, we got to heavy up there because it's going really well." A year or two ago, that wasn't as common.
Well, sticking with that theme, you guys have introduced this concept of make it easy. From a platform standpoint, where do those initiatives sit today in terms of reducing as much friction as possible that's in the system to make it as easy as possible for people, either on the advertiser side or the publisher side, to engage with you as a company?
Even on the internal employee side.
Yeah.
We're trying to make it easy for our employees as well. I think the most simple answer is it's going really well. I'm very encouraged by the work that our technology team is doing this year. Not to go as fast as they possibly can forward, but to really survey the full scene and to understand where are we in a place to go forward today, or where are we in a place where we might want to take a step back and do a little backwards work before we go forward, such that we build a really durable solution. If you think about this year, it's really building the underlying systems, those foundational elements that will allow us to start scaling on top of. I think we'll start to see that pay off in 2027.
But it gives me a lot of confidence that we are making it not only easier for one of our client partners or account managers to do their day-to-day job, but as that gets easier, then we have the infrastructure that could start to expand through APIs that could go elsewhere. That could make it much easier for the advertiser to interact, either inside of Ibotta, potentially inside of an environment that they appreciate. Obviously, the team will still be present, so we still want our sales team managed service to be there for them. I think that the work that's happening right now is really about just putting us in a much better place to scale effectively. Kudos to our teams, because they're doing a lot of work, and I think it's often underappreciated. Ibotta's a 14-year-old company.
That means there's lines of code that are 14 years old in some repository somewhere that are still running the business. When you're trying to evolve that technology stack and you're running a business every single day, it's like that treadmill thing that they say. You're running on one treadmill, and you got to jump to the other one, and you can't fall over because we got to deliver the revenue every single day. The technology team is just doing a really nice job of going forward, but doing it in this methodical way, such that we don't, "Oh my gosh, forward," and then fall over, because that'd be hard.
Broadly, let's talk a little bit about how AI continues to evolve, as both in input in the business and how your processes are changing, and the element of putting more of it into the company overall. Love to get a quick update there.
We're 22 minutes in, according to the clock in front of us, and this is the first AI.
Yeah. But I am contractually obligated to bring it up in every conversation.
I am amazed that it was 22 minutes. Brings a smile to my face. Gosh, it is everywhere, isn't it? The first thing that I would say, if you just take this artificial intelligence and a cousin to machine learning, the thing that is really exciting for me is leveraging AI and ML on top of this really rich corpus of data that we have. We have 14 years of business that has happened inside of Ibotta. There is a lot of data that we are sitting on top of. There is a lot of data that we are collecting every day. And when you have all that transaction data, you can start to ask yourself, what is the right offer variant for somebody that has never bought this product? What is the right offer variant for somebody that seems to buy this product occasionally?
Yeah.
What is the right offer variant to get person A, who is in category but not with the product that I sell, but with a competitive product? Historically, a lot of the offer variants or what the requirements were driven by the CPG because they said, "Hey, we have seen this. We understand." And that makes a lot of sense because it is their business. We are now able to provide a perspective based on our data. Ultimately, it is 100% their choice. If they want to do a dollar off versus $0.50 off, that is going to be their choice. They are in control there. But we can use the data, and then the AI and ML on top of that to really help make informed recommendations to them. And as campaigns are going, we have the ability to think about, okay, is this campaign hitting the marks that we said?
Is it ahead? Is it behind? Do we need to scale it left? Do we need to scale it right? This goes back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago, which is every day, you are talking about the results. Every day, you are striving to deliver better results on behalf of the customer based on what you talked about earlier. I would say that is thing one. It is really working through data at a much larger scale than you or I could do reasonably. The next thing is just kind of the run the business, the make it easy stuff. Being able to have agents deployed just to take tasks that are either done through a series of technological steps or through human steps, and just automating those. That is something that is really exciting. I think you probably see that in most businesses right now.
But it's something that we're paying close attention to because we do believe we can make it easier, drive more effectiveness and efficiency. The last thing that you have to mention with AI is agentic commerce. I don't really know what that is going to be. I think there's a lot to be determined where that lives. Does it live inside of a retailer? Does it live inside of one of these third-party applications, the GPTs, if you will? What I believe, just as a consumer, is that if I'm looking for a product, I'm interested in a few things every time. How much does it cost? Is it available? When can I get it? For us, being a lever in that, how much does it cost, acting as metadata around price, that is very important.
However the consumer application comes to life, the fact that we're helping all of these CPGs deliver the right price to the right customer at the right time, whether that's in the Ibotta experience, the DoorDash experience, the Walmart experience, or some other one, that's okay. We're excited about where that goes, but I think that's a little bit of the future that I don't know that we know yet.
Okay, understood. But sticking with the idea of the partnerships you've built on the publisher side, you obviously have expanded into a lot more verticals. You did come to the public markets on the back of what you had done with Walmart, and then continued to expand the publisher side. What are you most excited about on the publisher side to either deepen relationships that exist today or look at new avenues of growth on the publisher side that maybe you haven't tapped into yet?
Awesome question. Similar to, we've got this technology team that I think is doing great work. We have a business development and a strategic account management team that's just really operating on all cylinders right now. It's happening on two sides. One side, there's bringing new businesses in, right? Giant Eagle is something that has launched recently with us. Uber Eats is something that's launched recently. We've talked about 7-Eleven. 7-Eleven is very exciting because it is the convenience channel. It is a really, really anchor tenant there. That is very exciting to us because for our CPG customers, it's something new. It's single-serve, it's beverage-centric, snack-centric. We might be working with a beverage manufacturer on larger pack sizes. Now we have a new opportunity to go down into more single or different SKUs.
That's very exciting for us, and I think that team is doing a really good job putting forth the value proposition, whereby we're trying to deliver profitable revenue growth to the customer we share, that CPG that we have in common. That's going really well. The other thing that I think you just have to call out is that the work that we're doing, whether it's with Walmart, the oldest partner, or anyone in between, really spending more time with our existing partners just to talk about what's going well from their perspective, what's going well from our perspective. As we look at our shared customers, how are they using us? How are they using them? What could we do together? It's not a one size fits all. All of these partners are their own businesses, and they're at different stages of growth and different stages of digital penetration.
I am really happy with the work that we're doing just to lean in to deliver the best outcome we possibly can, not only to the consumer, but also to the CPG. That's just all kudos to our business development team.
Maybe a quick follow-up there, because you kind of addressed a lot of what I wanted to ask next, but I want to build on it, is the network effects inside this business, where you have advertisers on one side, consumers, publishers, you're collecting a lot of data. You sit in the middle of all of this budget and transactional dynamic that plays out in the CPG space. Talk about how you could see scaled effects of network over time that continue to build.
Yeah, I think it's a great question, and it's something that we're really excited about. I started to mention it with the 7-Eleven example. It's something that I hadn't really thought of in advance of, but when we announced 7-Eleven, I got a level of response from some of our customers that surprised me. We're always, "Hey, just want to let you know, we've signed a new partner." You always get back a nice note, "Congratulations. Happy to see your business is going well." But this one was, "Congratulations. Glad to see your business is going well. Can we get on the phone to talk about this?" That's because it's such an important channel to some of these manufacturers, because they move a lot of units through it, and it's just a different SKU set. That's a specific example.
I think if you widen out, publishers beget publishers. Each publisher that joins, it gives more confidence to the next publisher that, okay, this makes sense. Whatever could be holding you back from joining, as you are starting to add more and more kind of blue-chip companies, I think that just makes more people say, "Hey, let's have the conversation." The other thing is that publishers beget advertisers. Some advertisers thrive in the mass channel. Some thrive in grocery, some thrive in convenience. As we are moving through, that opens up the opportunity for new advertisers. Then I think it happens in the other way, too, where advertisers that we start to build really good relationships with will say to us, "Hey, where are you trying to expand next? Could we maybe be helpful to you?
Could we maybe join you in a meeting with another publisher?" Ultimately, we are doing this in service of the American consumer. Ibotta, the motto, the belief in Ibotta is to make every purchase rewarding. That is a cool concept, but it is about driving value for the American consumer, and that is what we are really focused on. The way we do that best is by being in as many outlets as possible, be it last-mile delivery, be it mass, be it club, be it convenience. We just want to be wherever we can be. Then we want to be the best partner possible for these CPGs, because it is a competitive world for them and it is a challenging world. It is not getting any easier to be a CPG today, so we are seeing some of those network effects.
We are proud of the work we are doing, and we have a long ways to go. I am excited about what has happened in the year since we spoke, and I am excited about what I might be able to tell you about a year from now.
All right. Well, I think that is a good way to maybe leave it there. Chris, thanks so much for the opportunity to talk. Please join me in thanking Ibotta for being part of the conference this year.