Innovid Corp. (NYSE:CTV) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Aaron Samuels: Hi. This is Aaron Samuels on for Shyam Patil. Thank you for taking our questions. Maybe first, just on the fourth quarter guidance, could you unpack a bit what that assumes in terms of the macro and ad environment? Are you expecting things to generally remain steady from where they were in the third quarter? Or is that suggesting maybe a little bit of improvement? And also if you have any color to share on how October looked just from an ad demand environment that would be helpful as well? And I have a follow-up as well. Thank you.

Anthony Callini: Yes. Aaron, I can try to take this and Zvika can certainly add some color. So I think as we look at Q4, there’s some things that are encouraging to us and there’s some things that there’s still uncertainty in the broader market. So I think the increase in the guidance certainly reflects our confidence that while we haven’t turned a sharp corner and it’s not up until the right yet in terms of the macro, that we’re starting to see some signs. So I would say cautiously optimistic. There’s some verticals that are positive. There’s some verticals that haven’t quite rebounded yet. Traditionally, fourth quarter is where you see a lot of seasonality from a positive tailwinds perspective that historically the company has seen and didn’t see last year.

And so October kind of gives us confidence in terms of our guidance, but we haven’t seen November and December where really that seasonality hits yet, so trying to balance all of those things. So a number of different data points. But what I would say is we feel confident enough to be able to increase the guidance the way that we did.

Aaron Samuels: Excellent. And then maybe one question for Zvika. I think in the past we’ve talked about sort of the big media trends right now being CTV and retail media. Obviously Innovid has substantial CTV exposure. Can you refresh us on Innovid’s exposure to retail media and how you’re thinking about that opportunity more broadly? Thank you.

Zvika Netter: Sure. In terms of with retail media, what’s unique, of course, it’s the data sets. So we have been – some of the large retailers are actually customers of the ad serving data. And so we already have the relationship in place. As retail media comes in and they become data platforms and media platforms, they’re now on the other side of the equation as partners. Definitely using data to personalize and target – better target ads that we deliver in those platforms, measurements is a product that’s being used more and more to prove ROI to their customers. And so we have already several partnerships in that space. I believe, again, if we look into the future that we’re going to see much more, including the ability to do shoppable ads and really closing the loop.

If you think about what we talked about, the thesis and our strategy for 2024 for optimization, working with those platforms that you can actually close the loop. So better target, better target the messaging, target the audience to a specific product, be able to create a shoppable environment and then close the loop and see what’s working. And based on that, not only execute on retail media, but also execute later in other areas, but use the very unique data sets that those platform have to understand what’s working and what’s not working and then implement this outside of retail media. So absolutely any data rich environment and data environment that can give our customers feedback on the outcome is something that can dramatically improve the optimization, which is the key theme here for us for 2024.

Aaron Samuels: Great. Thank you very much. Appreciate the answers.

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Next question comes from the line of Shweta Khajuria with Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.