Integral Ad Science Holding Corp. (NASDAQ:IAS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Raimo Lenschow: Yes. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. And then, just more one point for modeling you guys next year. If you think about the Meta Feed access and that’s going GA in early 2024, are you going to limit that somehow to have like a more controlled rollout, or is this going to be like open for everyone? And how should we think about that kind of playing out in the numbers? Thank you and congrats from me again.

Lisa Utzschneider: Thanks, Raimo. As I like to say, we always follow Meta’s lead, and they are our largest social platform this year, and we expect Meta to continue to be our largest social platform in 2024. In terms of the rollout, as I mentioned, we are on track to offer brand suitability verification on Meta for both Facebook, Instagram and Reels and we remain on track to start the client testing in the fourth quarter of this year because we already have an established base of advertisers that are running IAS solutions on Meta. I do anticipate both the beta and GA will be accelerated, timing of the GA, like I said before, early 2024. But they’re such a valued partner for us. And then, the other thing I will call out with Meta, and just the social platforms in particular, is just the uptick that we’re seeing in short-form video, both with Meta Reels and YouTube Shorts.

I know last Q2 earnings call, we talked about the launch of viewability and invalid traffic, both in Meta Reels and in YouTube Shorts, and that has also been a nice tailwind for the 41% growth that we’re seeing in measurement in third quarter.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of James Heaney of Jefferies. Your line is open.

James Heaney: Great. Thanks for taking the question. Just looking at your Q4 revenue guidance, imply roughly sequential growth of 8% to 10%. Which if I look back historically, would be one of the slower sequential growths in the holiday quarter. Is there anything that has you concerned, or is there just some conservatism baked in? And then I had one more follow-up for Lisa. Thank you.

Tania Secor: Sure, James. Happy to address that. The third quarter, we’re really pleased with our above-expectation performance both on the measurement and optimization side. Two things that are worth noting, I talked about this a bit in the script, is that we saw stronger-than-expected growth in T&E, which is our second largest vertical. We expect that to moderate in the fourth quarter. And then, secondly, we did see very strong growth in context control, double-digit with multiple factors driving that growth. But as we have shared in the past, we do expect context control growth to moderate in the fourth quarter. But really pleased to be raising our guide for the fourth quarter by $2 million at the midpoint.

James Heaney: Great. Thanks for that. And Lisa, could you just talk more about the traction that you’re getting on the TikTok product? I think you’re now live in like 50 countries. Just talk about the contribution from that product and how to think about the roadmap for 2024. Thank you.

Lisa Utzschneider: Yes. Great question, James. So with TikTok, we are firing on all cylinders across social platforms and including TikTok. So we continue to drive customer adoption of our TMQ brand safety and suitability measurement product on TikTok. TMQ is now available to advertisers in 50 markets. That’s up from 30 at the end of second quarter and ahead of our expectations of 40 markets by year-end. And then I know we had already said it previously on the call, but our active post-bid campaigns on TikTok more than doubled year-to-date, and impressions have quadrupled. So we’re just thrilled with our partnership with TikTok. We’re thrilled with the fact that brands are leaning into our differentiated technology backed by ML/AI. And I’m incredibly proud of the team on just speed to market and again, delivering differentiated value for our brands.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Brian Fitzgerald of Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

Brian Fitzgerald: Yes, I think that was me. Great to see the acceleration in optimization. We wanted to ask, among the larger customers that you have. You’ve done a great job with contextual penetration there. But wondering if you could talk about continued runway for optimization growth with those customers? Can they light up contextual more geos from more campaigns? And then wondering if you could talk about attention as well. Does that potentially drive a wave of adoption and growth similar to what you’ve seen with context control? How are you thinking about that?

Lisa Utzschneider: Sure. I’m happy to take both, Fitz. As I mentioned previously, a few things. We’re pleased with the double-digit growth that we’re seeing in context control for this quarter. And it’s reflected both with the acceleration that we’re seeing with mid-tier and then also it’s driven by contribution that we’re seeing from some of the large CPG logos that we signed several quarters ago. Mid-tier is an area that I know we’ve talked about last quarter, but we’re very, very focused on driving the acceleration of the mid-tier channel. And again, we are seeing great growth quarter-over-quarter, more than doubling, and we’ll continue to invest and innovate in automation, in simplifying our product offerings, and in particular, simplifying our optimization products for our mid-tier channels.

So that’s where we’re at with mid-tier. And then great question on attention. As we’re seeing in the landscape with attention, brands are increasingly seeing attention as a key component of their media quality strategy. We were pleased to launch our quality attention post-bid beta in third quarter. It has generated a high level of interest from advertisers. We’re now on track to launch the second phase of the measurement beta in fourth quarter. It includes Lumen. You might remember the partnership that we announced, Fitz, with Lumen that has an industry-leading eye-tracking technology. And a few things to call out since our attention beta launch. We’ve already measured over 1 billion impressions using multivariable ML models which identify which signals are more relevant to optimize the insights being delivered.

It’s incredibly cool technology. And then the other thing that we’re seeing that’s very encouraging, in our early beta analysis, we found higher attention can lead to nearly 3x lift in conversion rates. So again, feeling really good about the rollout of the beta, looking forward to the second phase of the beta with Lumen’s differentiated eye-tracking technology, and the advertisers are completely leaning into the solution.