Inuvo at LD Micro Main Event XIX: AI-Driven Ad Tech Strategy

On Tuesday, 21 October 2025, Inuvo (NYSE:INUV) shared insights at the LD Micro Main Event XIX Investor Conference. The company highlighted its innovative ad tech solution, IntentKey, which leverages AI to address privacy challenges in advertising. While Inuvo is nearing a significant revenue milestone, it faces stiff competition in a rapidly evolving market.

Key Takeaways

• Inuvo’s IntentKey uses AI to discover new audiences and activate media buys without relying on consumer IDs.
• The company is close to surpassing the $100 million revenue mark, with strategies to expand further.
• Inuvo’s technology is reported to outperform competitors by 60%, contributing to high client retention.
• The company targets sports gambling platforms like FanDuel as potential major clients.
• Inuvo has a strong focus on expanding its self-serve client base.

Financial Results

• Inuvo reported a five-year quarterly CAGR of 24% through Q2 of the current year.
• The company is approaching the $100 million revenue milestone, with plans to scale to $125 million - $150 million.
• Inuvo maintains cash reserves and access to $10 million in capital facilities.

Operational Updates

• Inuvo added 36 self-serve clients and 42 new clients across its IntentKey portfolio this year.
• The company boasts a high client retention rate, with its technology outperforming competitors by 60%.
• A strategic shift towards direct sales with brands is underway.

Future Outlook

• Inuvo plans to engage more directly with brands using mixed media modeling to optimize ad spend.
• The company is eyeing opportunities in the sports gambling sector, targeting significant advertisers like FanDuel.
• Expansion of its self-serve IntentKey platform is a key growth area.

Q&A Highlights

• FanDuel, with its $1 billion annual advertising spend, is identified as a target client.
• Inuvo’s sales team targets both brands and their advertising agencies for a comprehensive approach.
• Self-serve clients offer high margins, nearly 100%, enhancing profitability.

For more detailed insights, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - LD Micro Main Event XIX Investor Conference:

Rob Buckner, COO, Inuvo: Hi there and welcome streaming viewers. I understand we’ve got some people remotely. So so I’m Rob Buckner. I’m the COO of Inuvo. Inuvo is a disruptive ad tech but not new to the party.

We’re a ten year company competing in a very sophisticated landscape right now. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with ad tech. I know we’ve got energy tech, health care, a lot of things going on, but I’ll try to break this down over the course of the next twenty five minutes for you. A few words on my background. I’ve spent decades working with some of the world’s most admired brands the world over, running agencies, networked agencies, worked for two holding companies.

And I joined the board of Inuvo in February, and I’m now the chief operating officer. So bring a 360 degree view of the industry and understand importantly marketing decision makers’ conflicts right now in in where they invest their money. And I think that’s kind of a central theme of today. Alright. So here’s who we are.

We are a predictive AI, a large language model to discover new audiences, new prospects and actually activate those media buys. Alright. Here’s the disclaimer. Do not operate heavy equipment after watching this presentation. Alright.

A little bit about our story. We are an ad tech built on a proprietary large language model. Right? We’ve got a leadership advantage in the privacy compliant landscape, which is increasingly important. You’re gonna see as I break that down.

We have two sources of revenue, a platform business in service of some of the world’s largest digital supply chain. So we actually help the digital search business supply those inventories and generate traffic for their clients. We also service agencies, both networked agencies, independent agencies. And then we actually go direct to marketers as well. The technology is built on 19 patents and six pending.

So we’ve locked up this large language model. And while the world of ad tech, at least the legacy systems are built on antiquated data technologies and they’re increasingly wrapping themselves in OpenAI, we’re something different than that. Ours is proprietary. I already mentioned the agencies that we serve. I wanna mention partnerships.

We can integrate this technology at different points in the ad supply chain. So it’s a very compatible technology and we’ll be mining those partnerships ahead in the future. Okay, here’s the landscape in which we compete. 64% of every U. S.

Ad dollar is funneled through programmatic media buying platforms across an array of channels, digital video, connected TV, that second one is a very growth oriented segment. Social video, retail media networks, so those are large retail big box stores like Best Buy or Target who are monetizing their ecosystems across platforms. The category is a $20,000,000,000 category and it’s growing. But here’s the dirty secret, the ad supply chain is crumbling. And that’s because the legacy systems are built on consumer IDs called cookies and most Americans don’t want their identity to be tracked.

So if you have an iPhone, your identity in the sites in which you go cannot be tracked. So that seriously compromises most legacy ad buying systems. Increasingly, Americans are just turning to their handheld devices and talking to it for a search. I’m interested in something for my pool and all of a sudden the AI comes back to you. You don’t have to go to those websites.

We’re actually insulated from that because our large language model goes outside because we’re still all going to websites. We’re just able to get out in front of that behavior. And it’s further strained because of these closed ecosystems which the mega technology brands have built and they hold most of the consumer data. So this supply chain is under duress right now. And most marketers, while they may be aware of it, are failing to act upon it, okay?

So this is where the opportunity exists. We’re an anecdote to that. We should have a video. No, here we go. One more slide.

All right, there are a couple of applications for our technologies. It’s really versatile. So up in the upper right, this predictive mixed media modeling. This is where we look at historical spend patterns from a marketer’s budget across all their channels and put that mix against the business performance because at the end of the day, that’s what marketers want to know. Did it increase sales?

Did we grow our share? Which channels are outperforming? Which ones are underperforming? Our algorithms can help marketers make those decisions and that becomes kind of an on ramp for our large language model also. So audience discovery.

So our technology knows what people are doing in real time, what media they’re consuming and our large language model builds those models with a high degree of accuracy. And then those buys can actually be transported into the exchanges which marketers are already using. Importantly, the idea of aligning your message with the audience media is really important. We’re able to see patterns perhaps that would inform the creative brief. So almost like reengineering your creative messaging based on the consumption of the media.

And again, our buys can go right into the existing infrastructure. This is a portal. We call this IntentKey, that’s our signature product. So what this does is it’s very user friendly. You’re able to put a prompt in just like other large language models.

I’m interested in pet insurance. My dog is a German Shepherd. And what it will do is it’ll go out and it’ll read everything on the Internet in that moment and come back with what we call a concept graph, which is a clustering of those data points and it will give us an indication of audience size for that moment. We’ll predict it forward. It will give an indication of brand sentiment, demographics, and we can bring that model right down to a ZIP code level.

Alright. I’ve got a video that’s gonna break this down for you.

Unidentified speaker: 25% of all digital ad spend fails to hit its target. Data signals are fading. Audiences are harder to reach than ever. Legacy buying systems are still reliant on stalking people around the Internet. Our tech doesn’t need personal data.

IntentP is a privacy by design AI that creates audience models for programmatic media channels. IntentKey analyzes billions of real time signals from the open web to uncover intent pathways and build precise scalable audiences. How do we do it? We started with AI at our core, not bolted on top of old data, but designed to see the web in a new way. IntentKey reads billions of pages of content in real time, organizing them into a concept graph, a dynamic map of how ideas and motivations connect.

From that, we create predictive audience models that refresh every five minutes and discover purchase intent before it’s obvious. Instead of chasing yesterday’s clicks, imagine reaching tomorrow’s prospects first. Here’s how we deliver targeting leverage. Our models identify future customers up to a day before any other ad tech can bid on these inventories while enabling brands to reach audiences across CTV, display, online video, audio, and more. And because our models flow directly into the platforms marketers already use, there are no extra steps, no extra fees, just custom designed audiences right where advertisers already buy.

The future of advertising isn’t reactive. It’s predictive. It’s intent driven. It’s in Nuvo.

Rob Buckner, COO, Inuvo: So let me kind of explain to you how it works in practice. So we’re not working with UnitedHealthcare, but we are working with another major healthcare provider. I just didn’t have permission so I wanted to just run a model. And by the way, any of you guys can go to the website right now and run your own models. It works for everything like any other large language model.

But healthcare is really interesting because right now we’re in the open enrollment season. This is when share gain and share loss occurs. Lions share of the investment happens over this period and millions of consumers are approaching the open marketplace for a host of reasons, whether or not you’ve become self employed and you need COBRA or you’re aging into Medicare or you just wanna understand the different legal components within your state. We actually go out when you run a model like this and it will draw data from all over the country and bring it down to the region in which you place. So it gets insight nationally and can drop it right into the zip code level.

What we do then is these signals are built into campaign flights. These campaign flights determine where the ads will be placed, whether it’s on digital display, connected TV or on website pages. So it’s got great elasticity across categories. We work with major technology brands, the biggest in the land. One of the top three auto brands in America, we’re in the healthcare space, we’re in the retail space.

We work mid market brands, emerging brands. Here’s just another dynamic that I’d tell you about. Direct to consumer branding has been a thing forever. We all buy those brands from social feeds and what have you. The problem is as those brands mature, they can’t get the reach that they need to draw new prospects into their franchise in those channels and they’re paying premium price to get that same audience and there’s audience fatigue.

What our technology can do for those direct to consumer brands is actually open up their prospecting to a much wider audience on the open web. So again, I want to make sure people understand our competitive advantage. We find high intent audiences based on what people are engaging in and our technology scores level of engagement from becoming aware to going deep and then how that linkage occurs if you go back to that video from top of the funnel all the way to the purchase process or purchase decision. Our technology fundamentally is built on not targeting consumers based on demographics. That has been the norm forever.

I want to reach working moms with kids, right? With $150,000 household income, well guess what, there’s a million providers that will give you those data sets. Ours wanted to know why that working mom with kids is interested in a particular subject as it relates to one of our clients. This was a privacy first, Rich Howe here is the CEO and founder of Inuvo. In anticipation of this privacy era, built the large language model.

So we have a lead on the industry. So as people are coveting their privacy, we’re able to build these not on the individual, not by stalking an individual’s data around the internet, but by looking at the collective interest in subject matter in congregating where those people are, right? Again, this targeting leverage piece I think is kind of critical to our future because I don’t think people realize if you can get a twenty four hour lead on building an audience and executing that buy, you’re not bidding through those exchanges with everybody else, you’re buying that audience at a discount relative to others. So that’s leverage and that saves millions of dollars for a major marketer who’s on the system. And then again, because it was built and architected for the infrastructure that’s out there, we can pass those buys through in a frictionless model just by pushing the deal IDs through.

So we sell our services in this technology a number of ways, through agencies, direct to marketers and both those parties have the option to literally execute their buys on their own. They don’t need us on the service end to do it. And that’s a huge opportunity going forward because it’s very high margin business. So a lot of clients, it’s just a sampling of some brands and yes, Apple is a client, Disney. Travel and tourism, so think about spontaneous trips that might occur.

Storm’s coming into Chicago, I wanna go to Vegas, alright, I’m gonna go to the airlines first, I’m gonna check the weather report, I’m gonna check availability at a hotel, I’m gonna whatever it is, there are a lot of different ways in real time that we can, with high degree of confidence, predict what those audiences are gonna do in real time. Importantly, our performance. The efficacy of this technology has been proven for eight years running and outperforms all the other ad techs that are out here. This is actually a conservative figure at 60% over competitive platforms. And our clients come back for more, we’ve got a really high retention rate.

Actually I’m relatively new to this side of the field, that kind of retention rate is unseen in any other aspects of marketing as a service provider. Okay. We trade on New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol, INUV. And these two fellows here, Rich Howe and Wally, our CFO, have built a really handsome business. We have traction.

We have a good trajectory. We have a five year quarterly CAGR of 24% through Q2 of this year. We’ll be reporting earnings shortly. We’ve got cash on the books and we’ve got $10,000,000 we’ve got access to capital through our facilities. So we’re going in right direction.

We’re about ready to break through that $100,000,000 barrier. So listen, I’ve been here for a couple of days now, and I keep hearing the malaise of small cap, micro caps. But we’re a proven technology that has traction. And once you get past this mark here and some of the strategies I’m going to talk about, this business will scale to $125,000,000 $150,000,000 onward. And the people that built this system have had success building billion dollar technology companies.

All right, just a few words on how we’re going to do it and a couple of key milestones. So we’ve added 36 self serve clients. Those are people who are accustomed with the platform, the IntentKey platform and are on the keyboard executing their own buys without any service from us. We have 42 new clients across our IntentKey portfolio already this year. We’re operating in a climate that is confused, but we’re on the right side of privacy and that makes a huge difference.

So the consultative sales, let me say a few words about this because I’ve been asked a few times over, how are you going to get more sales? Well we’ve got to get closer to the budget decision makers. There’s a lot of intermediaries down at the tactical level. But if we can use our mixed media modeling technology to help determine optimal spend and optimal performance, that the most valuable thing you can bring to a Chief Marketing Officer of an organization. Other shifts, we’re going to again go a little bit further upstream.

We want to work more directly with brands. The advertising universe, you guys are 13,000 to 15,000 agencies in America and they’re being washed out. It’s really a tough environment for agencies. So going brand direct with this technology is really important to our future. So that’s the show.

We’ve got about four or five minutes. If you guys have any questions, go ahead.

Unidentified speaker: I have two questions. First, can you talk a little bit more about the channel market? Who talking a little bit about your sales team? And who would the white males be, right? You talked about the needle on the revenue line.

Like, who would be the big, you know what would be

Rob Buckner, COO, Inuvo: a great win for you? I’ve got one in mind. Alright. So you just take sports gambling. Right?

FanDuel or any of the MGM platforms. So this is not just a this is a national phenomenon. It’s a generational thing that’s occurring. Brands like that are spending over a FanDuel spends a billion dollars in America. Billion dollars a year.

And people are making those little micro bets on their phones in the moment. And what they’re doing is they’re going to get intelligence from all the fantasy sites, that would be the obvious place you place ads. But what about all the other things? What’s going on in the city? What’s going on with the weather?

If we can get advertising, so that, you know, that’s we’re not in that business right now. That’d be a whale with real real direct implications for it.

Unidentified speaker: So you so you would your your sales guys would go straight to FanDuel or would go to their advertising agency?

Rob Buckner, COO, Inuvo: Both. We’ll hit them both. Yeah. We’re not here to decouple agencies from the brands which they serve. We’ve got multiple points of entry and I think it’s my job to balance that.

Unidentified speaker: Is your sales team cost free

Rob Buckner, COO, Inuvo: of both? Yes, are. Yes, they are. Some do are dedicated to self serve because that is a big part of our future. It’s really high margin, almost 100 margin.

Unidentified speaker: The other question I had was just I was looking at the quarterly sales

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