Media Alpha at William Blair Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Wednesday, 04 June 2025, Media Alpha (NYSE:MAX) took center stage at the 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference. The company, a leader in online insurance advertising, highlighted its robust market position and strategic innovations. While Media Alpha showcased impressive growth and profitability, it also acknowledged challenges such as potential automotive tariffs affecting claims costs.

Key Takeaways

• Media Alpha reported over $1.7 billion in media transactions in the past year.
• The company achieved significant growth in Q1 2025, with an adjusted EBITDA of nearly $30 million.
• Media Alpha’s platform connects hundreds of supply and demand partners, leveraging data-driven optimization.
• The company is exploring expansion into non-insurance sectors.
• Potential challenges include the impact of automotive tariffs on claims costs.

Financial Results

• Transaction Value: $1.75 billion in media spend over the last twelve months.
• Profitability: Profitable since its third month of operation, approximately 14 years ago.
• Q1 2025 Performance: Adjusted EBITDA close to $30 million, with triple-digit growth rates.
• Cash Flow: Strong cash flow with minimal CapEx and mandatory debt amortization under $10 million annually.
• Revenue Model: Operates on a performance marketing model, earning revenue per click, call, or lead.

Operational Updates

• Two-Sided Marketplace: Connects hundreds of publishers and insurance carriers, brokers, and agents.
• Technology Platform: Handles millions of shopping events daily, providing real-time customer acquisition capabilities.
• Media Model: Predominantly cost-per-click (CPC) based, with over 90% of P&C transactions using this model.
• Data Utilization: Employs machine learning for campaign optimization and yield improvement.

Future Outlook

• Market Recovery: The P&C insurance market is recovering, with growth expected over the next three to five years.
• Automotive Tariffs: Potential tariffs could impact claims costs and budget allocations.
• Secular Trends: Increasing online shopping and the importance of targeted data-rich marketing.
• Data Asset: Early stages of capitalizing on data, viewed as a crucial future asset.
• Ad Spend: Digital ad spend projected to reach $14 billion next year, a 27% increase.

Q&A Highlights

• Carrier Spending: Spending levels have returned to or surpassed pre-hard market cycle levels.
• Competitive Differentiation: Media Alpha positions itself as a marketplace aggregator, unlike lead generators such as EverQuote.
• Technology Evolution: Focus on enhanced data integrations with carriers for improved campaign optimization.
• Budget Allocation: Carriers adjust budgets based on market conditions, similar to Google Adwords.
• Carrier Remarketing: Supports carriers in monetizing non-converting consumers through comparison ads.

For a deeper dive into Media Alpha’s strategic insights and future plans, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference:

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: For joining. Adam Klauber, William Blair. I run our insurance and insurance tech group, so thanks for thanks for joining. We have Media Alpha, Steve Lee, who is CEO and founder, and Patrick Thompson, is CFO. Yep.

CFO. Sorry. And just wanted to look at the website for disclaimers. I’ll say two seconds on Media Alpha. It’s a really, really interesting company.

You know, it’s a sector that really has been emerging, I think, in the last five, six, seven years. You know, creating markets for digital markets for in and around insurance. And insurance is obviously a massive market. Just on the personal line side, auto home, it’s a $500,000,000,000 market. So think about that.

Mean, that’s a massive consumer market and, you know, still even though the capabilities around digital have been emerging over the last seven, years, it’s still relatively nascent to emerging, still relatively small, and that really goes to the lack of capabilities, tech capabilities of the insurance companies and that’s where Media Alpha comes in, helping to bridge the gap into, you know, real time digital consumer demands for buying quickly and efficiently and accurately and the insurance company systems who can’t get there. So, you know, Media Alpha, you know, for a long time, you know, have been helping to bridge that gap and, you know, we’ve seen it. And there’s some other good competitors out there, but we’ve really thought, you know, not just thought, but think they are the the quality of the group. So based on that, Steve, you can talk about the company a

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: little Sure. Should we

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: Either way,

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: you’re more comfortable, we can I’ll sit and see how it goes. Yeah. Appreciate it, Adam. I’ll say I mean, Adam covers the intersection between insurance and personally particularly personal lines, property and casualty insurance, and the intersection of that and technology and the impact that the technology has had on distribution, I think, as well as anyone. So I always appreciate being here, reading the research.

So I think Adam Adam described what we do well. I think I would characterize our mission as as being one to help every insurance company. I I kinda put an emphasis on every, reach online shoppers through our platform. And so I think that it’s a basic mission, but as as Adam mentioned, it’s an important mission just because most insurance carriers aren’t very good with technology, and that kinda makes sense. And so that’s one of the visions that we had when we first started the company, and that mission has really held true, and I think it’s more relevant than ever.

There’s a J. D. Power, report that just came out, that that basically placed the percentage of online, shopping in auto insurance as being at or at least 47% of auto insurance policies are now bought digitally, whereas it’s 32% as recently as 2020. Right? And not every insurance carrier, as Adam alluded to, is well equipped to actually handle that and tap into that channel.

I think that’s really where we come in. Really about our platform, the three key tenants are about the efficiency, making sure that carriers are able to actually buy policies through our platform at the lowest cost per buying possible. It’s about transparency, full data about every consumer coming through based on the data that they’ve entered on the insurance shopping sites, which are on the supply side of our marketplace, which I’ll go into later. And most importantly, for advertisers, really transparency into where these consumers are coming from. Are they coming from insurance shopping site like the Zebra?

Are they coming from a personal finance app like Credit Karma? Are they in fact being referred by other carriers? And we’ll talk a little bit more about that. And then it’s also about the measurability as well, making sure that we have integrations with carrier to know exactly what the outcomes are. You know, did this click result in a policy sale?

If so, what’s the expected lifetime value of that policy? And the granularity that that enables in terms of measurement of return on ad spend, has enabled us and our carriers to rescale to the levels that we’ve achieved over the last couple of years. So I think, you know, at a glance, the really the key messages I’d like to have all of you take away is just, you know, we have the scale that now matters. I think the last twelve months, we have transacted over $1,700,000,000 in media through our marketplace. We’re about a 50 people, so that it’s about $12,000,000 per team member, which really underscores our strong operating leverage.

We grow very quickly and profitably. We’ve been profitable since the third month of existence when we founded the company about fourteen years ago. And this past quarter, q one, our adjusted EBITDA was almost $30,000,000, which is up over a % year over year. Overall, as I’ve mentioned, we benefit from very strong secular tailwinds, which is driving change in an enormous industry. As Adam mentioned, it’s a half a trillion dollar industry that personal lines PNC space, which is our core focus.

Overall, digital ad spend there is expected to hit $14,000,000,000 next year, which is 27% growth from this year. Again, far outpacing the growth you see in overall digital advertising, again, because of the simple fact that insurance carriers and the sector has generally been slow to adapt to online technology and embracing online channels as a primary way to distribute their policies. And, again, that’s changing. I’ll go over this because I’ve already addressed this. This just goes to how much more quickly the marketplace for insurance industry online advertising is growing vis a vis just the overall online advertising sector.

This is a snapshot of our ecosystem. And here, what I’d like you to take away is really that we’re a two sided marketplace with about, you know, several hundred supply partners and, again, several hundred demand partners. Our supply partners of you’ll hear us refer to them as publishers. They’re basically insurance comparison websites, personal finance apps, lead generation websites, and actually carrier websites themselves where typically cost per click listings are displayed to consumers when they’re shopping for insurance. And so one example would be, like, Insurance Zebra, which is a price comparison site, a site that’s that’s striving to be the kayak of auto insurance.

We work with them to place our cost per click ad listings on their sites on the results page as a way to help them monetize, consumer shopping on for insurance on their website. We will also work with insurance carriers to display ads on their sites. When a carrier displays a rate to a consumer, they know exactly really what the probability of that consumer what the probability is for that consumer to buy a policy. And if it’s sufficiently low, they actually generate more revenue by kinda pivoting to becoming a media company and actually showing comparison ads on their quote page, you know, from some of their competitors. And so we work with over 40 insurance carriers to do that, again, to help them generate media revenue from all the insurance shopping traffic on their websites.

On the demand side, that’s simpler. That that’s just companies trying to sell insurance. Again, on the p and c side, mostly carriers, but we also work with agents and brokers as well. In terms of the media that we leverage to connect online shoppers with sellers of insurance, again, predominantly, it’s a cost per click model. Carriers buy clicks, and so within the property and casualty space, it’s over 90% are really clicks being sold to insurance carriers.

We do also have leads and calls as an ad product as a way to connect online shoppers, and predominantly, that’s used to connect online shoppers with agents and brokers who don’t have that online policy enrollment capability. When we talk about our platform, this is really what we mean, our technology platform. The scale that we have. We have the ability to really handle millions of shopping events daily through hundreds of publishers. Again, with the volume that we have and the scale that we have, we’re quickly becoming one of the most important distribution and marketing channels for a lot of the carriers that we work with.

It’s about real time customer acquisition. It’s the ability to really reach consumers on a real time basis at or close to the point of purchase. And because they’re at the point of purchase, not only do you have very high intent consumers that you’re targeting, you have consumers that where you have you know a lot about the consumers because typically what they’ve done is filled out a form to get a quote and you have data about how many cars they have, whether they’re a homeowner or not, how many kids they have, their driving history. And carriers can then use that to refine a very granular bid that they wanna place to try to reach that consumer. Allows these carriers to really de average what they’re paying to acquire consumers, and that’s one of the keys to the scale that we’ve been able to achieve.

Talked about the multiple touch points, again, predominantly cost per click model, but we support leads and calls as well to support the entire ecosystem and really trust and transparency. Advertisers know exactly where there’s where they’re where they’re reaching the consumers, whether it’s on an insure another insurance carrier’s website, whether it’s from a lead generator’s website, whether it’s from a price comparison site, and they can price the media, what they’re willing to pay for that consumer, a click from that consumer accordingly because where they’re coming from really makes a big difference in conversion rates and the expected lifetime value. And the publishers also know exactly who’s buying their inventory and what they’re paying for it. You know, we’ve this we’ve touched on this a lot. Really, the hallmark of the media that we create a marketplace for is the amount of data that’s available about the consumers.

So, again, they filled out a form and so oftentimes you’ll have 25, 30 pieces of data about them that then carriers can use to really refine what they wanna pay to acquire that consumer. And then in turn, all of this data allows us to really be able to leverage, you know, our machine learning capabilities to really optimize campaigns on behalf of consumers and on behalf of advertisers and then optimize the yield for advertisers as well. Because oftentimes, for a lot of the carriers we work with, we know exactly what the outcome is. Again, did that lead sale result in a customer sale? If so, how much was the expected lifetime value?

Which clicks resulted in in in quotes? Which, you know, which clicks resulted in policy sales? And again, what’s the value of the policies that were being sold? And we leverage all of that data and increasingly are able to leverage machine learning to really optimize things on behalf of all participants in the ecosystem. Focused on insurance, again, our our really core vertical is really personal lines, property, and casualty, mainly auto insurance, but also home and others within that property and casualty space.

We also have a health health insurance vertical as well. That’s the big focus area there is really Medicare Advantage. As carriers start to go online to do direct distribution for a lot of their Medicare Advantage policies, that’s our area of focus there. We also have an under 60 five business that falls into that vertical. And then the other verticals, really non insurance ones, really, we don’t focus too much on that, but it does give us option value to to get into other verticals and and get outside of insurance if that’s something that we wanna do in the future.

I think, overall, to get you caught up in where the personal lines, p and c industry is right now, many of you may have known that it went through a difficult underwriting cycle in the back half of COVID. Essentially, when people started to drive again and get into accidents again, the industry discovered just how much claims cost inflation there had been because of supply chain issues related to the pandemic. And so, essentially, claims costs went up by, you know, 50%, you know, from the beginning of the pandemic or prior to the pandemic to the end of it. And so carriers need to then adjust their pricing, which then there’s a little bit of a regulatory lag because, you know, 50 insurance commissioners have to approve pricing increases. And so the market kinda went into what’s called the hard market period for a period of two to three years, as insurance carriers got their pricing to where it needed to be to retain or or regain profitability or target profitability.

At this point, we’re just emerging from that cycle. You just have big carriers like Progressive and Allstate and others who are kinda early to get those pricing increases approved, you know, starting to market heavily again. Certainly, I would say the recovery is not isn’t fully taken afoot because a lot of the carriers beyond that really haven’t regained or gone back to their normal levels of spend. But the market is improving and has been improving for the past year or so, and is really poised for a period of growth for the next, I would say, you know, three to five years, although you really never know how long these cycles go. So I’ll hand it I’ll hand it over to Pat for the next financial review.

Thank

Patrick Thompson, CFO, Media Alpha: you, Steve. So, as far as our financial profile goes, I think Steve walked through a lot of the key pieces on here. But there are a couple of new ones I wanted to touch on. So I think Steve talked about how we’re a two sided online marketplace and those businesses tend to reward scale and tend to be at least winner take most markets. And he talked a lot about the, you know, kind of the tailwinds we have in the industry in terms of auto insurance growing.

Number of users growing kind of with population. We’ve got some tailwinds of premiums arising inflation plus a little bit. Then you add in the tailwind of online shopping, which is fast and we’re probably in the middle innings of that transition. And then you add in share gain on top. We think it’s pretty exciting.

The operating model we have, I think Steve touched a little bit on it, but we’ve got 150 people. And so we have always run lean. We’ve always been profitable. That’s core to our DNA. And we’re kind of seeing leverage increase in the model.

We’re diversified across verticals. We’re heavily weighted towards property casualty, but that is both a mix of auto insurance and home insurance. And then we’ve got, a nice health business across, Medicare Advantage in particular, but also under 65. And finally, we have really attractive cash flow characteristics that we’ll get to. So as far as the economic model for us, it’s actually pretty simple the way it works for us.

And so our top line our key top line metric is transaction value and that’s trailing twelve month basis about $1,750,000,000 and that represents total media spend by carriers, brokers and agents across our platform. Then we get a cut of that action for us, which is based on kind of the marketplace model we have. It can either be an open marketplace, which is our kind of full service offering that we have. Or we have a private marketplace model, which you can think of as being more of a technology provider fee and that’s a much lower take rate that we take. And that is, a private marketplace tends to occur between really large publishers, call it top five, top 10 publishers.

And their top maybe one or two advertisers. And as you think about our business, it is fully a performance marketing model. So we get paid per click we deliver per call and per lead. There’s no risk on our side. Quite frankly, we recognize revenue just like Google does where a consumer clicks, boom, that’s a revenue generating event.

We would bill a carrier for it. We take our cut and we remit it to the publisher. So moving to the piece that’s near and dear to my heart is the CFO, the financial And we’ve got the wind at our back right now. You can see here the trajectory of the business really shows, the impact of the hard market cycle and the subsequent market recovery that we’ve seen in P and C. So 2020, which is not on the chart, was a good year for us.

2021 was pretty similar to 2020. ’20 ’20 ’2 and 2023 were tough years as carriers were focused on, taking underwriting actions and taking rate to get their P and Ls where they needed them to be and they were not at all focused on marketing. And as carriers have gotten a rate adequacy, you can see what has happened to their desire to acquire customers and our business results coming from that. And so we’ve been hitting kind of record highs in 2024 and in Q1 of twenty twenty five and we’ve put out guidance for Q2 that was relatively strong as well. And so we feel like we’ve got the wind at our back as we are going through 2025.

And you know, we just wanted to deeper dive on Q1 and you can see the growth rates here which have been triple digits for both top line and bottom line for us. Finally, and I touched on this at the beginning of my section, I just wanted to talk about the cash flow characteristics, of Media Alpha as a business. And so simplistically, what cash flow is, it’s adjusted EBITDA plus CapEx. We have virtually no CapEx as a firm. We do not capitalize software development expense because it doesn’t meet the threshold for that under the accounting literature.

And the CapEx we have is office fit outs and laptops. Next piece for us is working capital. We are a modest working capital business. There’s a bit of working capital usage as we grow, but it’s been relatively modest. And really the biggest use of adjusted EBITDA as you think about it is debt service for us.

And so we’ve got some mandatory amortization of a little under $10,000,000 a year plus interest on it. But this is a business that has always generated cash, I think since the third month it has been. And we’ll continue to and we’ve been excited to see the cash balance build as results have improved. And so as we think about this business, over time, we’ve got attractive secular trends. We’ve got market leadership in a business where scale ultimately matters.

We are seeing more carriers move online and kind of recognize that consumers are starting and often ending their shopping journey on the Internet and realizing that the targetability and the data richness of our marketplace allows them to go after the exact types of customers that they want and that they win with. And we’re seeing that virtuous cycle manifest in wins with suppliers or publishers. And so Steve mentioned, you know, some of the big publishers that we have, but we’re, you know, we are signing new folks that are interested in targeting their existing user base with insurance offers. And we’re also seeing folks that are players today switch to us increasingly, which has been, very exciting. And lastly, our marketplace is very, very data rich.

And so we consumers provide a lot of information voluntarily on themselves in order to get, customized offers and quotes. And we are seeing more and more data as well. We’ve got carriers passing us data. We’ve got publishers passing data. We’ve seen shoppers multiple times over the years or even in a short period of time.

And so we’ve got a database that really gives us a tremendous amount of insight into how consumers shop, what they’re shopping for, and what they look like. And we’re in the early days of kind of capitalizing on that data, but we think that is ultimately one of, if not our most important assets going forward, and we’re really excited to see what the future holds.

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: Great. Got a couple. Sometime I’ll kick off with a question or two and then we’ll have some time. The environment, you know, clearly is, again, the wind’s at your back, but, you know, it hasn’t been a straight line. So ’24, you know, Progressive, who’s the guerrilla, got back in the market, spent a lot of money.

Towards the end, Allstate State Farm got in. First quarter, different reasons Allstate pulled back, State Farm pulled back. GEICO was still pretty low level. It was a big spender. How are you seeing the progression, you know, throughout the you know, conversations, not actually, you know, that you can’t give your data, but, you know, in conversations with with the big carriers, you know, how’s the progression look for the rest of the year?

Are are they beginning to get back in the market?

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: Yeah. I mean, I think the the the conversations with carriers are good. They’re positive. I would say that the only, you know, the the only, I guess, like, overhang that we have right now is really the the potential for the automotive tariffs to have an impact on claims costs. Mhmm.

And so I’d say that a lot of the insurance carriers are really being a little bit more cautious than they otherwise would be at this point of the underwriting cycle. Mhmm. And so it’s not manifesting itself in terms of any kind of pullbacks, but I we do think that it’s having an impact on their ability to really or willingness to really allocate even more budget or or increase prices even further.

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: Okay. And then excluding progressive for, you know, maybe four four to five, and this is not exact, but just to give people an idea, what level of spend are they at maybe end of twenty four compared to what they were back in 1920? In other words, are they, you know, were they at a quarter? Were they at 10%? Not looking for an exact, but, you know, is it that low?

Patrick Thompson, CFO, Media Alpha: Yeah. And I can take that one. I would say they’re spending quite a bit more. I would say we we’ve never given a hard number on it, but it’s significantly more than they were spending at the prior peak. And I think, you know, if you were to look at the

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: Not progressive, the rest.

Patrick Thompson, CFO, Media Alpha: The rest I would say, you know, are spending, you know, probably at or above where they were in the prior week.

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: Okay. So they’ve already picked up.

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: Well, they have, I would say, that sometimes I mean, just that our marketplace has expanded so much since 2020. I would say maybe proportionally in terms of just the share of the overall marketplace. Some of them are are behind where they were in 2020. Yeah. But certainly, in terms of, like, absolute levels of spend, they’re actually higher.

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: Okay. Okay. But their premium is much much larger than it was in 2020. Yes.

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: Exactly. Exactly. The volume of shopping shoppers that we have within our marketplaces is a lot greater than

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: what we had before as well. Just again, I’m not looking for an exact number, but, you know, the the upside and downside, I mean, it’s been a tough market for auto consumers, so that’s that’s translated into a lot of shopping. So, you know, the velocity of the market, shopping, is it up twenty, thirty, 40, 50 percent compared to, like, pre cycle, like, 1819? I mean, not looking for an exact, but, you know I mean? Yeah.

Just some idea of how much more shopping is going on.

Patrick Thompson, CFO, Media Alpha: Yeah. And I can take it.

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: Yeah. You can

Patrick Thompson, CFO, Media Alpha: add on it. I would say, you know, the number of shoppers we’ve seen come through the platform has grown significantly. Mhmm. Since then, you know, probably, as much or more than some of the numbers you’ve talked about.

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: Okay.

Patrick Thompson, CFO, Media Alpha: The challenge is it’s hard to attribute that to the average consumer. Right. Because I think Steve had a stat of 30 some percent of customers shopped online a couple of years ago and 40 some percent today. There’s been share gain as well, which is our platform is growing. And so, you know, we would say that, you know, shopping is clearly elevated right now, but we’ve been benefiting from some of those secular trends that will continue, so we believe a lot of it will persist over time.

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: Okay. Any questions from the audience? Yeah.

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: So the other publicly traded companies in this space, would you know, so there’s a couple that we can differentiate from. One is EverQuote. One is LendingTree. I would characterize those companies as being primarily lead generators who have a broad network of both carriers as well as was insurance agents that they’re selling leads to. And so they’re not a network of of supply partners or publishers.

They’re really generating leads for themselves from their own sites, you know, buying traffic from Google, for example, driving it to their own site, converting it into a lead that they then sell to agents and clicks that they sell to carriers. And so even though they sell the same media types, they’re really just they would be one publisher within our marketplace, for example, and then they’re at a decent scale. But but, again, they are not in the business of actually aggregating and pulling together hundreds of different websites and apps to actually aggregate a lot of the shopping behavior that you’re seeing from consumers. QuinStreet, I would say, a more directly comparable business. I would say that their their overall market share I mean, I think we have a a much higher market share than they do, third party publishers.

And so in terms of the scale game, and I think we’re starting to, you know, really put some distance between us and others who are who are working with third party publishers. I think that scale is starting to beget sort of competitive advantages because advertisers can carriers can actually optimize much better with the scale that we have in our marketplace and the data that’s available. And then publishers are benefiting because there’s just a lot more demand or more demand in our marketplace than others because, again, because of our scale, and more demand just begets higher yield, and so they just make more money by being with us versus a smaller network.

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: Different different question that again, the market’s had a lot of ups and downs, but I’d be interested in how maybe in the last four or five years your tech platform stack has evolved. And I think about it, and please position it differently, you know, there really is a couple components. You spend a lot of time in programming time hooking in and creating APIs into the insurance companies to get a lot of data. So that’s one area. I think the second to me is that you obviously have got a very robust marketexchange that people shop on.

But then the third, but also the third, is you’re also providing a lot of the analytics to the insurance companies and also helping them shop. I sort of think about those three pockets, they’re all interrelated.

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: Right.

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: Obviously, you can describe it differently. So I guess in, you know, the last four or five years, what’s been evolving? What’s been updated? What’s new and different today versus four or five years?

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: Sure. I I would say that a lot of a lot of what’s new are things that you wouldn’t necessarily see as as a buyer or a seller on our platform because our technology used to be much more about the bidding platform and the optimist in the in the inventory management platform that we expose to advertisers and publishers. And so, certainly, that aspect of our technology, we believe, is still best in class. But it’s really been, in the last four or five years, been about the data integrations that we’ve been able to get with carriers. You know, most notably, all of the data that we get back about the outcomes of the clicks, leads, and calls that’s go that is that’s ultimately being directed to them so that they that we can help them calculate really what their return on ad spend is.

And then all of the additions that we have with carriers and the publishers to actually get the data that’s being entered by the consumers and then passing it on to the to the buyers or the insurance carriers to actually make for a more seamless conversion experience. And then all the the data that’s available Stay

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: with that for a second. So are because you’ve had the integrations with carriers for, you know, a good number of years. Is it the integrations are better? Is are your systems pulling the better data? Are the insurance companies having better systems to get the what

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: what I would say a lot of it. I would say that we have we have a conversion tracking our outcome integrations with more carriers than before.

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: Okay.

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: I would say that those integrations are are more robust so they don’t something as simple as they just don’t go down as much as they used to. And then the data that we’re getting back is is more accurate than

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: before. Okay.

Patrick Thompson, CFO, Media Alpha: Yeah. And to put a point on it, like, the way a number of these integrations have worked over time is they might have been they send us a spreadsheet once a month was how they started. Right. And then we’d have to do a bunch of manual manipulation on it, you know. Oh crap they added a new column, deleted a column, you know, whatever is going to happen and there’s latency on the data, it doesn’t always get updated, it might be incomplete.

And now, you know, suddenly it’s on an API basis and boom, it automatically gets pushed a number of times a day. It’s automatically ingested and there’s way more data that gets pushed in something like that versus a spreadsheet that a person needs to manipulate and send. And so, you know, it hasn’t been a linear journey, but I think, you know, that example hopefully shows kind of the power of automation, you know, because we can just get, you know, more, better, faster, cheaper.

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: And before we continue, that’s the end of the official presentation. We’re actually doing the breakout here, so please feel free to stay and, you know, you know, ask questions. But so sorry. If you wanna continue, Steve.

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: Well, I would say that the second part that you really don’t see is the data science and how important data science has now become. I think a lot of companies talked about it, us included, but now that we act you know, for years. But the reality is is that vision of using machine learning to really optimize campaigns for advertisers and optimize yields for publishers really wasn’t a reality until fairly recently now that we have the scale, and the data that comes along with the scale. And so I would say that those are the two main things that have really changed about our technology and what we focus on.

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: Okay. And from an outcome standpoint, I would guess, but please please let me know, that probably translates into more more of an accurate market and, you know, better, probably conversions ultimately. I mean, is that can you demonstrate that ROI or, you know, is that the outcome? But can you

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: Yeah.

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: That actually see that?

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: Yeah. That is because the the more the the more you can help carriers more accurately price access to a given consumer, it just benefits the entire ecosystem. And so it results in higher yield for publishers, and it gives publishers a signal as to what’s more valuable to go out and acquire because the publishers are making traffic acquisition decisions themselves, and so they’re figuring out what to bid on Google for certain keywords. Right? And so the more accurate the value of clicks from those keywords are when they ultimately convert it into clicks that they then send on to carriers, the better that they can bid on Google, for example.

And so they can get more of what’s valuable and less of what’s not.

Patrick Thompson, CFO, Media Alpha: Okay.

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: And so that helps the entire ecosystem. And then ultimately, once that granularity results into higher performance at scale for advertisers, then they just are allocating more and more budget. Right. Right. Okay.

Yeah.

Patrick Thompson, CFO, Media Alpha: Yeah.

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: So they it’s it’s a it’s largely a spot market, and so the carriers can come and then they allocate whatever budget that they want. Again, we get we get visibility probably, you know, a couple of months ahead of time. They give us budget indications and the spend indications. I would say that it operates a lot like Google AdWords in that sense. Right?

They can come and increase their spend when they want. They can decrease their spend when they want. And at times like this, when it’s a soft market cycle, when they’re really looking to increase the level of customer acquisition investments that they wanna make, you know, our ability to really handle that increase, I think, is unparalleled, which is why I think one of the reasons that we’re getting allocated so much budget in this up cycle. And certainly, it works the other way in a down cycle as well, and one of the reasons that during the last hard market cycle that, that our p and c business went down a bit.

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: Part of your business has always been not just how I say it won’t be right, not just selling clicks to insurance companies, but you also help them buy and then remarket. One, could you talk about that business a bit? And over the years, has that been expanding? And is that is that a big bigger and bigger part of your business?

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: I’d say it’s it’s expanded in one realm. So let me just describe what that means. That’s one of the things I described early on in my presentation where one of our big publisher bases, are insurance carriers themselves. And so we work with carriers like Allstate and Progressive and others where they’re not just buyers in our ecosystem, they’re actually sellers. And so when a consumer is on one of those sellers, a carrier site, and they get a quote, again, they know that, hey, this consumer is not gonna convert with me or I don’t have a good price for this consumer or maybe I don’t even have a product for this consumer.

And so what we do is work with those carriers to help them generate revenue from those consumers who, again, otherwise wouldn’t have purchased the policy from them by showing them that consumer comparison ads oftentimes from competitive insurance carriers. And so and so what that enables them to do is then spend that carrier to spend more in the upfront marketing that they do to get users to their site. And so it really supplements the monetization that they have, that they can generate from customers that they’re acquiring to their site, and supplements the policy sale revenue that they generate from that. And so I would say in one way that program has expanded because we’re doing this kind of a program with more insurance carriers than ever, I think it’s 40 plus at this point. In terms of growth, I would say that the I mean, the growth of other publishers, notably, like insurance comparison sites, has meant that this part of our business probably isn’t as big as it was maybe, you know, five or six years ago, but it’s still a very important part of the overall ecosystem.

I don’t know, Pat, if you have anything to

Patrick Thompson, CFO, Media Alpha: add to that. I think you covered it.

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: You know, apologize. I I made a mistake. Sorry about that. Because I thought we were in the same room.

Steve Lee, CEO and Founder, Media Alpha: Okay. We

Adam Klauber, Analyst, William Blair: actually break out as up and burn them. Okay. So I I apologize about that as people are leaking into this. Alright. Thanks, And I’ll I’ll join you guys.

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