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

Shweta Khajuria: Okay. Thank you for taking my questions. Could you please comment just at a high level what you experienced and what you are hearing in terms of brand advertiser sentiment right now? You talked a little bit about October and your confidence in giving and raising the guidance for the fourth quarter, but any more granularity on whether – on certain verticals? I know in one of the prior fourth quarters you had the auto vertical headwind. So, where do you stand now given the Strike versus perhaps CPG or some of the other key verticals if you could provide some comments? And then have you seen any political spend start to flow in, in terms of political advertising ad-serving in the fourth quarter? Thank you.

Zvika Netter: Sure. Thanks, Shweta. So, in terms – and as Tony mentioned regarding the fourth quarter, we feel pretty comfortable in terms of the trend. We have not seen – last year we started seeing a tipping at the end of the third quarter. And of course, this year, “behaves normal”. So it’s a surpassed normal. Definitely, there are customers that reduced their spending on brand advertising, on TV advertising. TV advertising declined in general, but what helps with CTV is the fact that the audience continues to move from linear to CTV, so that keeps pushing the numbers up into the right in terms of viewership. So, the budgets, even if a certain brand contracts, you can see increase in their CTV spend from that perspective.

Now, in terms of specific verticals, we are seeing a pretty consistent behavior where some verticals like CPG and pharma continue to invest, I would say, more aggressively compared to others, and we see nice year-over-year growth compared to last year, even compared to the healthy part of last year. And other areas like financial services, insurance companies, technology companies, we are seeing a decrease. Overall, it’s still a positive. We’re obviously looking forward that all verticals will go up into the right. And to your comment about auto, we are not seeing anything, back those days it was more related to supply in like vertical-specific dynamics. What we are seeing now is general economy dynamics. And we are also following closely some of our largest customers’ earning calls, and they are giving some indications in terms of their spend and investment in marketing, so that helps us.

So overall, we feel pretty comfortable about Q4. And overall, for next year also, while we are not providing guidance, we are not seeing significant volatility, we are not seeing sudden extreme decisions by our customers, so that helps us plan both through top line and bottom line. And regarding political ads, on that front, political ads, is not an area that we are heavily focused on. It comes and goes. And it tends to be more performance-oriented. We work on the measurement side, on the sales side with publishers in terms of creative tools, personalization, things like measurement. That’s an area that we definitely see an uptick in political revenue. But on the “brand”, the brand itself, is not usually an area that we heavily invest.

Shweta Khajuria: Okay, thank you very much.

Zvika Netter: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Next question comes from the line of Shyam Patil with Susquehanna. Please go ahead.

Shyam Patil: Thanks for taking. One more question. This is for Tony. Clearly, Innovid has seen some nice margin expansion over this year. I know you are not providing guidance for 2024 at this point, but just wanted to see if there is any additional color you can share about how to think about Innovid’s margin profile going forward? Thank you.