DoubleVerify at Citi’s 2025 Conference: Strategic Shift to Growth Areas

On Friday, 05 September 2025, DoubleVerify Holdings (NYSE:DV) participated in Citi’s 2025 Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference. The company outlined its strategic shift towards high-growth areas like Connected TV (CTV) and social media. While navigating macroeconomic uncertainties, DoubleVerify is focusing on product development and AI integration to enhance its value proposition.

Key Takeaways

• DoubleVerify is transitioning from media spend protection to driving performance, with a focus on CTV and social media.
• The Media Advantage Platform (MAP) is central to the company’s strategy, aiming to optimize media spending.
• Despite macro uncertainties, DoubleVerify raised its guidance for Q3 and Q4, driven by Open Web products.
• AI integration is a key focus, with developments and acquisitions like Scibids enhancing capabilities.
• The company is balancing growth and profitability, with a margin target above 30%.

Financial Results

• Approximately half of DoubleVerify’s revenue is programmatic, making it sensitive to changes in advertiser sentiment.
• Q3 revenue is expected to be heavily weighted towards September.
• Guidance for Q3 and Q4 has been raised due to strong momentum from Open Web products.
• Large client wins from the previous year contributed about one percentage point to first-half growth.
• New solutions in social and CTV are expected to contribute more significantly to revenue in 2026 and beyond.

Operational Updates

• DoubleVerify is focusing on transitioning solutions to higher growth areas like CTV and social media.
• The company launched Authentic Advantage, an integrated verification and optimization tool initially for YouTube, with plans to expand to Meta and TikTok.
• Pre-bid and pre-screen solutions across Meta have resulted in an 8 to 9 point increase in suitability lift.
• An enhanced CTV measurement solution is set to launch in early Q4.
• AI is being integrated across tools, with acquisitions like Scibids improving algorithmic bidding.

Future Outlook

• 2025 is a year of evolution, with a focus on product-based transitions and building new solutions for social and CTV.
• DoubleVerify aims to improve its position in CTV by enhancing measurement products and capturing revenue commensurate with higher CTV CPMs.
• The company targets growth in social media through expanded relationships with platforms and new solutions.
• The Media Advantage Platform (MAP) will expand to include verification, optimization, and attribution in a single platform.
• Continued investment in AI will enhance contextual understanding, predictive modeling, and algorithmic bidding.

Q&A Highlights

• DoubleVerify emphasizes its unique position of offering verification, optimization, and attribution in an independent platform focused solely on advertisers’ interests.
• The company plans to integrate RockerBox’s exposure and transaction data with its verification data to map the journey from verified impression to sale.

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full conference call transcript below.

Full transcript - Citi’s 2025 Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference:

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Great. I’m Ron Jojek, cover the internet sector here at Citi, and this is always one of the more fun, exciting, and interesting discussions that I have at the event. Always happy to share the stage with DoubleVerify CEO Mark Zagorski, CFO Nicola Allais. I think we all know what DoubleVerify does by now. Maybe just a quick, you know, it verifies media usage, it optimizes ad performance, DoubleVerify measures the outcome, that sort of key. My goodness, now working with 2,000 brands plus, I guess, 100 plus countries, size scale is there. Mark, Nicola, thank you for joining us.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Of course.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: A lot to go on today, but let’s just start maybe bigger picture. I think this has been a year termed by the team as a year of transition, and it’s hard to say a year of transition when revenue accelerates. The transitioning seems to be going well. Multiple new products are coming to market here. We’re integrating AI, the acquisitions you’ve made more recently with Scibids and RockerBox, new products. Talk to us about this transition, and then, you know, more importantly, as we emerge from the transition year, how do we think about going forward?

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Yeah. Late last year and coming into this year, we talked about 2025 being a year which the business needs to evolve, right? A core part of that evolution is a shift of our solutions into higher growth areas like Connected TV and social media. I think if you look at what we’ve focused on so far this year, it’s been exactly that. We launched pre-bid and pre-screen solutions across Meta. We’ll be releasing some enhanced CTV solutions later on this year, and those developments are continued ongoing. Also, as part of that was the launch of a solution called Authentic Advantage, which is a verification and optimization tool for YouTube, initially for YouTube, but will be expanded into other platforms like Meta and TikTok over time.

That transition has really been a product-based transition that has focused on building and evolving new solutions that do what we do, which is verify and optimize and prove the effectiveness of media, but doing so in areas where really most of the ad dollars are going today, which is social and CTV.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: verify, optimize, prove.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Yeah.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: We’re also moving up the stack, if I’m not mistaken. Performance or understanding that. Talk to us a little bit more about how that sort of changed the purview or changed the scope a little bit.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Yeah, you know, DoubleVerify started out as a company that was focused on protecting media spend, right? You know, helping advertisers understand the context and the environment in which their ads were delivered and ensuring that that delivery was fraud-free, viewable, et cetera. What we looked at with that thesis was when we took the garbage out of the system, what was left performed better, right? Ultimately, even though we were a protection business, we were a performance business as well. We were driving better results by taking stuff out of the system. Fast forward to today, we’re saying, if we are really driving performance, how do we make that even better?

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Yeah.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: How do we evolve the business into helping drive real outcomes for advertisers? Doing so in a way that is unique because we’re independent of the media transaction. We don’t buy or sell media. We don’t own media properties. We’re outside of that transaction, so we can be totally agnostic. We can be totally independent and unbiased. I think that is a huge part of our value proposition, which is the fact that we don’t have an inherent reason to say something is either good or bad, to say whether something performed or didn’t perform. We’re here to be agnostic or agnostic deliverers of real truth.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Okay.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: What really happened. I think that’s the evolution of the business, which again flows from protection to performance, but building solutions that leverage our position as an independent arbiter of what works and what doesn’t work.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: That’s very helpful. That’s what we’ll get into, a lot of that. I wanted to talk, given the year of transition, Nicola, bring you into this on revenue visibility. We’ve had some volatility over the last year, two years, year and a half, two years or so. Just talk about the visibility going forward. I think existing advertisers are adopting more products, which we will get into the product side, but also a third of the growth is coming from newer advertisers. Help us understand the visibility as a CFO.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Yeah. You know, we’re working in an environment that’s very uncertain. It started uncertain at the beginning of the year, and it continues to be. Advertisers have been fairly resilient through the first half of the year and continue to spend. We didn’t really see pull forwards, based on the spend patterns that we were seeing. We have just remained focused on what we can control, which is all the product development and making sure that we effectuate a transition that we’re into for the year. In terms of spend, what we control is the upsell motion of our existing clients for the products that we currently have and the ability for us to get our new clients that we won last year to buy into our new solutions. We’ve done very well on both of those vectors. We won large clients last year.

They’re now actually adopting Authentic Brand Suitability, which is our premium priced product on Open Web. The moat wins of last year had an impact on the first half of the year, although not as large as people might have thought. It was about a point of the growth that we saw in the first half. There’s still a lot of opportunity there. The backdrop to your question on visibility remains very uncertain. Half of our revenue is on programmatic, which is a very transactional part of the business, and dollars can come in and out quite quickly around that. Based on the sentiment of an advertiser, that’s the part of the business that will be the most variable. We said when we reported the second quarter that one of the reasons for the overperformance was that programmatic actually did very well for us.

Most of it was on items that we control: upselling of existing clients and new clients using our new solutions. It is transactional, and it can really be affected by the sentiment that we see from the advertisers. Of the large sectors that we’re in, retail and CPG, if there was a change in sentiment, that’s where you would feel it probably the most in terms of ad spend.

Q3 is very heavily weighted on September.

It is an uncertain environment. We’re just focused on what we can control, which is upselling and making sure that we transition to the new products. Just one last point, which is that part, new products, and the contribution of our new solutions on social and CTV is still very small in 2025, right? That transition still continues. We had a very strong first half, but it’s not because these new solutions are actually contributing materially to the revenue.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Got it.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: The upside was really Open Web programmatic in the first half.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Got it. The new products are a key theme, I think.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Yeah.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: I want to talk about AI as we think about the year of transition. The media landscape’s transitioning. Mark, you and I have talked about this for years, but then, you know, for some time. Consumer behavior, platform, you know, everything is shifting here. Also, DoubleVerify’s been, I think, ahead of the curve from an acquisition perspective and integrating. Talk to us about how embedding AI across your tools has maybe changed the discussions with your clients.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Yeah. I mean, you know, there’s no doubt that AI is kind of upending everything. It’s upending the environment where advertising is being shown. It’s upending how advertising is created, and it’s upending kind of the way we analyze in our role in analyzing those advertising engagements. We have organic developments around AI. The way we contextualize and understand content has been driven by large language models and how we look at video and do predictive modeling against video and short-form video across TikTok and threads or reels and shorts. That’s all AI-driven things that we’ve developed. We’ve also acquired AI capabilities. We bought a company called Scibids, which does algorithmically based bidding, right? What it does is in programmatic platforms where advertisers are using them to bid for impressions, it basically creates a custom algo to manage those bids, not unlike what happens in the stock market, right?

With quant-based buyers who build models and go out and buy stocks, it’s very similar. Scibids is a custom algo company. Based on a brand by brand, they develop specific bidding strategies based on a KPI on the other end. How that’s changed our dialogue with customers is that our core solutions in verification are now enhanced with the idea that we can help them find that quality that we’re verifying at a much lower cost through custom bidding.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Mm-hmm.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: A great example of that is that we recently pitched a customer and they were looking for core verification services, so measurement, pre-bid solutions, et cetera. We now are selling them a platform which includes that, but also includes custom bidding. In this case, we showed them that we could save them $19 million a year in media costs, which would more than cover the costs of our core verification solution.

The go-to-market for us has changed. It’s given us the ability to bundle solutions and create enhanced solutions that are very differentiated versus our competitors and really anybody else in the market. It’s verification with optimization together, you know, provide a different go-to-market, a different value prop for our customers, and it’s allowed us to win big pieces of business like Microsoft and Kenvue and others.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: That’s great. That’s super helpful. Let’s maybe take it back a step, and building on what Nicola, you just talked about, how 3Q is very backend or September heavy. I want to talk about macro. We raised guidance, I think, for 3Q and 4Q just on sort of maybe that client spend momentum that we’ve been talking about. The macroeconomic, it’s still a little uncertain. Tariff headwinds, and we talked about CPG and retail. As we sit here today, any pockets to call out, CTV, social media, or verticals that might be improving or anything to highlight there? Of course, I’ve got to ask about back to school. Here we are.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Yeah. Everything you said is how we see it, which is Q3 in particular is back-ended. Retail and CPG are the two sectors that would be the most affected if the sentiment changes. The advertisers did spend through the uncertainty around tariffs, but it’s also a time now where you can start to feel it, right? What you hear in the press is some advertisers are saying, "We’re just going to spend through it," right? We’re just going to keep advertising through it. Some others are saying, "No, we’re going to be a lot more cautious in terms of what we do." For us, it’s about managing through the uncertainty. Retail and CPG are our two largest verticals.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Okay.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Obviously, there is something that happens on the macro that impacts the sentiment and the spend. We would feel it on those two verticals. For us, it’s really just about continuing to go through the transition. You asked a question around what led us to increase the guidance in the second half of the year. That was really the momentum from the first half, which was all around the success of our Open Web product.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Okay.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: It’s really not tied to the transition that we’re doing around the product side of things, right? That impact will be more felt in 2026 and beyond. That’s really what we need to continue to focus.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Let’s talk about CTV and social then, because I think there’s, you know, we’ve had discussions with everyone in the industry, a little bit of, I don’t know if fear of missing out might be the right way to say it, but there’s a lot of competition in there. If a brand is spending, if a brand is not spending, your competition is to a certain extent. I wanted to understand that dynamic in light of uncertainty or spending through sort of any insights on that.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Yeah. You know, look, I think it’s CTV and social are two different sides of a coin. One, you know, CTV is obviously TV 2.0.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Yeah.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Which is for CPG brands incredibly important, right? That’s how they connect with consumers. That’s how they build brands. CTV is an absolute must on just about every media plan today, right? The ability to do things that linear TV couldn’t, which is target and collect data, I think are really important. Platforms like Amazon are doing an amazing job connecting exposure to purchase.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Yeah.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Right? I think that’s very solid. Social is a pure performance media. I think the social platforms from Meta to TikTok, and everyone else in between, have done an amazing job connecting exposure to transaction, very much like how Amazon’s doing in CTV. Meta has been doing that for years, which is basically trying to attribute a sale to an exposure on Meta. I think those two media in particular are incredibly resilient in any type of economic environment because one is kind of a must-have, because if I’m a brander, I have to be on the large screen in someone’s living room. The other is if I’m any type of brand, I know I can prove the effectiveness of my spend on a social platform. That’s why we’re leaning into it.

The interesting thing about that is it’s not just with our traditional verification products, but with the acquisition of RockerBox. RockerBox does multi-touch attribution and media mix modeling, right? Tell me what works. That is increasingly important to advertisers. We started off talking about performance. Performance is different and measured differently for every advertiser, but there is not an advertiser out there today that is not a performance advertiser.

Even brands are focused on performance.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Mark, how has that changed over the past couple of years? Ten years ago, we were on stage, were we talking about brand performance as a, you know, or now it’s more than ever because of social and CTV?

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: I think the constant flow of data, the much easier ability to connect, exposure to transaction. I mean, all of the modeling and the attribution capabilities have gotten so much better.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: That’s good.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Even the biggest branding advertisers want to connect the investment in brand to sales, right? Even something as simple as what American Eagle just did, right? Big branding campaign, sales go up, right? They are connecting those two things. One was certainly not data-driven, but it was emotionally driven, but still had an impact on sales. Everything has to drive sales. I don’t think that’s ever changed. It’s just become more explicit and much easier to track. I think that’s an interesting place for us to be part of as well, because we’re now verifying spend, we’re optimizing the cost of that media, and helping prove what works or what didn’t work. Doing so in an independent way puts us in a very unique position and also lets us address top of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, across the funnel advertisers in a much more holistic way.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Yeah. That’s a great segue into let’s talk about the investments the business has been doing and the newer products that are coming out. The Media Advantage Platform or MAP that’s come out, I think it was a key launch that came out earlier this year. Just talk to us about how MAP adds the value prop and how your conversations with advertisers have sort of gotten to that next level with this tool.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Yeah. The Media Advantage Platform is really a framework for doing what I just mentioned, which is ensuring that spend is.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: I should have asked that before.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Ensuring that spend was delivered in the right place, that those impressions were bought as cheaply as possible, and that we can prove that they worked. I think it puts us in a very different position with our advertisers. Rather than being a vendor of a solution that says, "Hey, just measure whether or not this impression was in the right context or was viewable," we are now a partner in helping them drive success. That’s a very different dialogue. It doesn’t involve just the brand safety team, for example, at a brand. It involves the media team. It involves the analytics team. It involves a much bigger take, and it means our engagements are much larger with customers. From their perspective, we become more important. From our perspective, we become more entrenched, right?

That means that we go from being almost a have-to-have than we were in the past, which is kind of like we were insurance, right? People felt they had to have DoubleVerify just to make sure that their spend was verified. Now they want to work with us. They want to work with us because we can help them show results. They want to work with us because we can help them save money. No other company in our space can do these things and do them in an integrated way, in a single platform, through a single engagement. I think that’s really important because we’ve been up on stages like this for years and talking about our competitors. Most of that dialogue was, "Well, our solutions just work better.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Yeah.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: We find more fraud, we provide more granular brand safety and suitability, et cetera, et cetera. Now we talk a very different story, which is we have a very different engagement. We are saving our customers money, we are protecting their brand, and we are helping them understand what works and doesn’t work. That’s the power of the Media Advantage Platform, and that’s what we’re selling today.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: That’s a different sales motion.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Totally.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Are you seeing your conversation more elevated within your clients?

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: They’re longer.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Yeah.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Because they’re bigger, they’re more elevated because they involve more different parts of the organization as well. Again, they become more enterprise-like over time.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Yeah.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Which I think is really important. On the contrary side, though, interestingly enough, it has also provided us with more entry points into customers that maybe we couldn’t shake loose their core verification business. We were just in a pitch that we didn’t win, right? We didn’t win with the customer on our core verification. However, they came back and said, "You know what? We really like this optimization piece in Scibids. Can we work with you here?" We’re like, "Sure. We’ll work with you on this because eventually we’re just going to stick our foot in and take over the rest of the business as well.

I think it’s given us a broader engagement with our customers, but it’s also given us more points of entry with new customers or with new clients.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: just talked about Media Advantage Platform (MAP) and how that’s changing or evolving the strategy, the sales motion, and the product. Authentic Advantage, I think, is launching shortly or launched.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: End of this month.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: End of this month. That’s exciting. Just talk about, I think it’s live on YouTube. You mentioned that earlier, but then there’s also opportunity in other platforms. Talk to us about Authentic Advantage and what that brings.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Authentic Advantage is the first integrated product in the Media Advantage Platform framework, and it brings together our core verification with Scibids optimization in a seamless workflow, with a seamless delivery of results. One of the challenges, particularly on YouTube, that we found is that when we used our pre-bid verification solutions, we took inappropriate content out of the advertiser’s buying purview. What happens is costs went up.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Sure.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Right? Junk food is cheaper than good food.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Yeah.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: When costs go up, advertisers start hesitating and say, "Was the content really that bad I was going to be around? Is it okay?" They start hedging on it. What Scibids does, or what Authentic Advantage does by leveraging Scibids in the workflow, is it enables the advertiser to stick to their brand suitability and safety requirements while compressing cost and expanding reach. We find the good stuff cheaper, and that’s really important. It helps us sell more core verification, it helps us sell more measurement, and it helps advertisers more easily move into solutions on YouTube with us because the cost of those impressions is no longer gone out. We’ve seen costs go down by tens of %, we’ve seen our reach go up by over 40% in certain cases. It’s been a very, very strong product. It proves itself from day one.

You can deliver great suitability at a lower price while also increasing reach. That is the golden triangle, and that’s exactly what we’re focused on.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Leveraging that a little bit, somewhat different, but maybe similar to Meta pre-bid?

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Meta pre-bid has not fallen into the Authentic Advantage solution set yet.

Meta pre-bid is just the first part of that, which is filtering out bad stuff.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Okay.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: However, that still is, it’s a brand new opportunity. We launched Meta pre-bid earlier this year.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Okay.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: We’ve already had several dozen customers working with us on it, and it’s scaling ahead of where we expected. That’s, you know, again, the ability for an advertiser to create a custom violation list based on what they see in Meta brand safety or suitability measurement, pushing that back into a custom filter for themselves to avoid that content over time. We’ve seen upwards of 8 to 9 points of increased suitability lift after using the filters. That’s been a real win for us. We haven’t got to the point yet where we’ve combined optimization in that to compress the cost, but that’ll be the next iteration of Authentic Advantage.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: That’s the beauty of newer products. You always have new things to add that can.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: New platforms to go after.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Exactly.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Yeah, for sure.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: We mentioned or we called out social and CTV as sort of must-haves. You have to be there.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Yeah.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Let’s talk about social specifically. I think social measurement revs are up mid-teens, maybe in 2Q, and Meta is becoming a bigger and bigger part of the business. Would love to hear your thoughts on just how these social platforms are evolving on DoubleVerify. You know.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Yeah. Our relationships with all the so-called walled gardens have really evolved over the last several years. It used to be us knocking on the door and saying, "Hey, can we come in? Can we start verifying this up?" Now they’re actually proactively leaning into us. I think that’s a good thing. A lot of it has to do with the fact that we work with some of the largest advertisers in the world, the two largest software companies, the two largest CPG companies, the two largest technology companies. They all work with us exclusively. It gives us some leverage to go to the platforms and say, "Hey, you know, Unilever is a big partner of ours. They want to have the ability to do brand safety and suitability on your closed walled garden platform." It gives us some leverage.

We’ve had much more robust and proactive partnerships with the platforms. When Netflix, for example, decided to sell advertising, we were there, one of the first calls they made. They said, "We need to be able to market our inventory out to advertisers. We need your third-party trust to do so." Same thing with Reddit. When Reddit was building their advertising business and saying, "We’re going to go public as a company. We need to drive advertising business. We need to work with third parties who are independent to allow advertisers to feel comfortable spending on our platform." We’ve seen a very big shift in the walled gardens and their embracing of third-party solutions. I have to give a lot of credit for that to TikTok. When they, several years ago, came into market and said, "We’re going to scale your advertising business. We’re going to do so with partners.

There was a sense of, "This is, you know, a new kid in town. Do we trust, you know, what’s going on on that platform?" They said, "Look, don’t trust us. Trust these guys as well." I think it’s been very helpful. Our engagement has grown. Social will be a large part of our growth in the future. I think we’re under-indexed across social and across CTV, and I think that’s why we’re leaning into solutions and expanded relationships there.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: We just brought up CTV under-index, right? Impressions were up 45%, I believe. It’s among the fastest growing mediums that are out there, at least on DoubleVerify. Overall, just like, how do we get over-indexed or regularly indexed? Is that the right way to say it? I don’t know on both social and CTV.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: It’s all product-driven. Right now, CTV, I think the one gap that we’ve had is our CTV measurement product has been, I’d say, pretty basic. I think there’s different levels of enhancement that we need to provide to actually get paid for that solution, what I think it’s worth. Right now, we charge the same for our CTV measurement as we do for measurement on any type of video platform. It could be on a mobile phone. It could be social video, et cetera. I think the way we change that is by enhancing that measurement solution. We will be doing that. We’re launching an enhanced CTV measurement solution early in Q4, so later this year, and also enhancing some of our pre-bid products, our pre-screen products around CTV. There’s more to come there.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Yeah.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: It is really product-focused because we’re getting the impression growth, but we’re not getting the commensurate revenue growth because we haven’t been able to kind of charge what I think that product actually can be charged. CTV media, CTV CPMs are probably 10 times what display CPMs are on average. We’re not getting 10 times.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Right.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: You know, our fee for that, but we’re definitely going to get a free % of that.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: In terms of how CTV is bought and sold, you and I have talked about in the past, is it audience? Do we get the show-level data from a CTV perspective? How do you see the broader industry evolving here? That’s question one on CTV. Question two, you mentioned working with the two largest CPG companies, technology companies, and missing a third one that you mentioned. How are their views evolving from a CTV perspective?

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Yeah, I think the one thing that is really interesting around CTV is there’s always been this supply-demand imbalance, which there wasn’t enough supply, right? Demand was squeezed and CPMs went up.

A lot of advertisers accepted the lack of transparency, right? You couldn’t, unlike traditional linear TV, where you could buy American Idol on Tuesday nights and I could buy certain programming. Most CTV isn’t sold that way.

You don’t buy specific programming. You buy audiences, you buy genres, you buy networks. You get kind of a mixed bag. That lack of transparency now has been upended. I think the main catalyst was Amazon coming into the market.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Okay.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: With Prime. Prime dumped a ton of inventory into the market, which compressed CPMs. It also made advertisers double, you know, take a double take. Like, why am I buying this inventory with such a lack of transparency, right? With no ability to target really programming that I want, with no transparency in what I’m actually getting. I think what that’s done is it’s created a new environment now on CTV where companies like ours can now basically say, "Look, there needs to be more transparency in this transaction. There are things going on like publishers selling inventory not on their sites." Basically doing extension networks. I think I’m buying publisher X, but I’m actually buying a whole bunch of sites, right? And a lack of transparency on that. We’re going to open that up. There are questions around how effective do not air lists are.

Advertisers are very specific around do not air lists. We’re going to help them drive better clarity around their do not air lists. There are a lot of opportunities to open up, kind of the black box of CTV.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Yeah.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: You asked about big advertisers. They’re the ones who are pushing this. They’re like, "Hey, we wield a lot of power," and they’re much bigger. They’re a much bigger impact on CTV than they are on social. Because if you think of social networks, a lot of social networks are SMBs. Probably, I would say anywhere from 70% or so of social network ad spend is coming from SMBs, not from brands.

Flip that in CTV. Almost all the revenue for CTV is going to be large brands. They have a lot more sway. I think this is going to change the dynamic of how it’s bought and how transparent those publishers are going to need to be with their inventory moving forward.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: I said two largest CPG companies. I think I forgot to say two largest CPG companies.

Two largest tech companies.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Yeah.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: The list goes on. We have a few minutes left. Are there any questions in the audience? Of course, I can keep going, but I don’t know. Is there a mic, or maybe you can say it and we can repeat it up here.

Unidentified speaker: Just curious whether you could talk about the alternatives that your clients have for achieving the same results that they would get from your new bundled offerings, and whether they can achieve that anywhere else, or are you opening some daylight between you and the competition?

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Yeah, I mean, specific to the companies that are considered competitors in our space, there’s nothing comparable. They don’t have any optimization solutions. They certainly don’t have anything that can measure attribution or help do media mix modeling. It is a very differentiated proposition for our competitors. The platforms themselves do some attribution, but I don’t know if I trust the guy who’s selling you media to tell me the media works. They do some level of verification, and some platforms, even DSPs, have optimization tools as well. I think our unique position is the fact that we’re bringing all those together in an independent platform whose only customer and only focus is on the advertiser and making sure that they have transparency, they have performance, and they can understand what works. I think that puts us in a very different position than anybody else in the space.

Unidentified speaker: If you also talk about the data that RockerBox uses to measure performance and the data you already have, would that combination add?

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Yeah, so the question was about RockerBox and the data that they get to kind of measure attribution and performance. It’s an interesting dynamic, and Ron, you asked the question before, like the relationship with the platforms. This is a relationship since RockerBox, their job is to say, "Hey, this platform drove the sale," or, "This platform drove the sale." The platforms are incredibly enthusiastic about giving them data. They’re like, if their data doesn’t get put into RockerBox, they don’t get any credit for a sale. It’s basically granular, transactional data and exposure data that they get from the platforms themselves.

When I say the platforms, it could be anybody from a Meta to, you know, digital out-of-home company to, you know, they take data across every different type of media, because they look at exposure data and they try to map that to transaction data, and they have models, data scientists do this, to try to show where can I attribute this sale to? If you went to social network X five times last week and you saw the ad 10 times while you were there, and then you purchased the product on this day, is that the last hop before you bought it? It was very interesting. I can tell you, although we have good relationships with the platforms, I’ve never had a platform call me up and say, "Hey, how can we get you more data?" They did when we bought RockerBox.

They were very enthusiastic. If you think about it now, we have kind of exposure and transaction data through RockerBox. We have the traditional customer ad data that we’re getting for our verification business. The whole goal is to map those together so that we can show the journey from advertiser impression that gets verified, that we can squeeze and optimize the cost of finding that impression, and then prove whether that impression actually drove the sale. That’s the last part. We haven’t connected those data sets yet, but that’s the last kind of leg of the Media Advantage Platform.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: That’s awfully compelling. That’s the goal.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: We’re excited.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: We are out at, we’ve got 15 seconds. Nicola, I’m going to come to you very quickly.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: Right, right.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Just talk to us about balancing growth and profitability, given all the new products coming out here, plus the profitability side.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: It’s all about growth. It’s all about product development, investing within a margin that’s over 30%. AI is allowing us to free up more resources to do that.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Right.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: It’s, you know, the view is really on the top line and differentiating ourselves versus others.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Couldn’t have asked for a more concise, appropriate answer.

All right.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: That’s why you didn’t ask me that.

Ron Jojek, Analyst, Citi: Thank you very much, Mark and Nicola.

Thank you very much.

Mark Zagorski, CEO, DoubleVerify: All right.

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