Unlock stock picks and a broker-level newsfeed that powers Wall Street. Upgrade Now
Q4 2024 DoubleVerify Holdings Inc Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Tejal Engman; Senior Vice President, Investor Relations; DoubleVerify Holdings Inc

Mark Zagorski; Chief Executive Officer, Director; DoubleVerify Holdings Inc

Nicola Allais; Chief Financial Officer; DoubleVerify Holdings Inc

Unidentified Company Representative

Matt Swanson; Analyst; RBC Capital Markets

Eric Sheridan; Analyst; Goldman Sachs

Youssef Squali; Analyst; Truist Securities

Maria Ripps; Analyst; Canaccord Genuity

Andrew Boone; Analyst; JMP Securities

Brian Pitz; Analyst; BMO Capital Markets

Laura Martin; Analyst; Needham & Company LLC

Arjun Rohit Bhatia; Analyst; William Blair & Company

Andrew Murrock; Analyst; Raymond James

Frank Surace; Analyst; Barclays

Arti Vula; Analyst; JP Morgan

Alex Brondolo; Analyst; Wells Fargo

Omar Dessouky; Analyst; Bank of America

Presentation

Operator

Greetings, and welcome to the DoubleVerify fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.
It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Tejal Engman, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Tejal Engman

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to DoubleVerify's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings conference call. With us today are Mark Zagorski, CEO; and Nicola Allais, CFO. Today's press release and this call may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to inherent risks, uncertainties and changes and reflect our current expectations and information currently available to us and actual result could differ materially. For more information, please refer to the risk factors in our recent SEC filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K.
In addition, our discussion today will include references to certain supplemental non-GAAP financial measures and should be considered in addition to and not a substitute for our GAAP results. Reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures are available in today's earnings press release, which is available on our Investor Relations website at ir.doubleverify.com. Also during the call today, we'll be referring to the slide deck posted on our website.
With that, I'll turn it over to Mark.

Mark Zagorski

Thanks, Tejal, and good afternoon, everyone. 2024 was a year of meaningful progress in the face of significant business and market challenges. We grew total revenue by 15% year-over-year to $657 million, powered by double-digit growth across all three revenue lines. We measured a record $8.3 trillion billable media transactions, a 19% increase year-over-year, demonstrating DV's unmatched scale across every digital media environment, format and device. We won an unprecedented number of large global enterprise customers in 2024, further cementing our position as the trusted partner for the world's biggest brands.
Our 2024 win rate remained above 80% across all opportunities with greenfield deals where advertisers weren't previously using third-party tools, accounting for 64% of full year wins. -- major new partnerships with P&G, Microsoft, Google, Kellogg's, Kennedy, DISH, National Bank of Canada, Bosch and BetMGM, highlight BB's continued industry leadership and reinforce the accelerating adoption of our solutions worldwide.
Moreover, our growth extended beyond advertisers. Supply side revenue grew 25% year-over-year, fueled by rising demand from retail media platforms and a record influx of platform and publisher customers. This momentum helped our business remain strong and profitable, delivering a 33% adjusted EBITDA margin and $160 million in net cash from operating activities in 2024, up 33% from last year. These results highlight our ability to execute effectively while also making the strategic investments necessary to leverage our unique data assets and client engagements and evolve DoubleVerify for a partner that ensures media spend is protected to one that also measures performance and optimizes the effectiveness of that spend.
Despite our successes, 2024 also tested our resilience and adaptability. Throughout the year, we navigated some isolated headwinds, including scale back ad spend from six large customers. And in Q4, one of our largest customers facing billions of dollars of sharply escalating commodity costs dramatically reduced its spend with DV as part of a sweeping cost reduction initiative that also impacted their other advertising and marketing partners. Although this customer has maintained limited engagement with DV while temporarily shifting to standard native tools within each tech platform, we have completely excluded them from our 2025 guidance to provide a realistic outlook for the year ahead.
These factors, combined with the absence of a post-election rebound in ad spend resulted in a disappointing Q4 that fell short of our expectations. Beyond these isolated customer challenges, we also saw the continued shift of ad dollars from open web programmatic to proprietary platforms like social, where most of our activation solutions were unavailable until early this year. And spending in private marketplaces, PMPs and direct programmatic guarantee deals or PG, also started to accelerate temporarily limiting advertisers ability to attach DV solutions to every transaction.
So let's be clear, these challenges do not define DV's long-term future. In fact, they have sharpened our strategy and fueled our drive for diversified growth and product innovation. We've taken decisive action to address these market shifts and will continue to do so. Our investment in prebid solutions across Meta and TikTok will position us for future social growth as dollars shift into proprietary platform. Our recent launch of sell-side curation and decisioning solutions on major SSPs will drive higher attach rates of DV data to PMP and PG deals, aligning with the evolution of the Protomatic ecosystem.
And with strategic acquisitions like DV Sybase and the newly acquired Rocker Box, we're expanding further into performance measurement and optimization, unlocking an entirely new TAM of mid-market customers and lower funnel direct response ad budgets. At the same time, we're accelerating revenue diversification by continuing to add large new customers.
In 2024, we grew the number of customers generating over $200,000 of revenue to $331, up from $290 in 2023. We are executing with focus adapting with speed and positioning DV for long-term success. With these actions in motion and with less macro variability than we saw around the elections late in 2024, we are entering the year with confidence. We are ready to drive continued growth. These tactical moves are part of a larger strategic evolution to leverage DV's unmatched data scale, relentless innovation and extensive client engagements to turn challenges into catalysts for future growth.
Our vision is simple but powerful, to unify media quality, optimization and performance measurements into a single platform to help advertisers maximize the effectiveness of every ad dollar. In a market increasingly driven by demands for efficiency and accountability, DV delivers the tools advertisers need to make every impression more impactful. Media quality has always been foundational to performance. It separates inventory the potential to perform from inventory that never will.
With our unique scale core data asset of essential signals like fraud prevention, brand suitability, viewability, attention and context, DV gives advertisers the critical insights they need to invest with confidence. The addition of Sybase AI, we take campaign optimization to the next level, leveraging these and other data signals to drive advertiser KPIs more effectively than standard bidding algorithms can.
Like the size acquisitions, the pending acquisition of Rocker Box, a leader in marketing attribution and performance measurement marks another important step forward for DV, by integrating Rocker Box advanced attribution capabilities with DV's media quality data and Civis AI optimization, we're giving advertisers a comprehensive real-time view of media performance. enabling cross-platform adjustments for smarter spending and stronger outcomes.
And it continues DV's legacy of powering media performance while remaining agnostic and independent to media channel and media investment. Expanding DV's capabilities to deliver a comprehensive end-to-end performance measurement solution meaningfully expands DD's total addressable market, unlocking access to midsized performance advertisers and get direct response budgets. While Rocket Box current client faster, which includes household names like Staples, Lowe's Hotel and Weight Watchers has minimal overlap with DV's existing customers, around 200 of their target customers already partner with DV.
This alignment opens the door for meaningful cross-sell opportunities and long-term revenue synergies, further enhancing the value we deliver to our customers. Driving media ROI is critical, and performance measurement is essential for all advertisers. By integrating Locker box, cross-channel attribution, DV's media quality analytics and Sybase AI-driven optimization we're transforming fragmented marketing data into a unified actionable intelligence platform. We've already seen a great example of this dynamic in action. With a direct-to-consumer brand that was using several DV's media quality solutions and it also employed rocker blocks to track media spend and performance. Their key conversion KPI was the cost of customer sign-ups for membership. And their goal is clear reduce CPA.
With DV's optimization, the brand was able to optimize their bidding strategies, leveraging the CPA data measured in RockerBox integrating these real-time performance insights to dynamically adjust their bidding algorithms. The results were immediate. A nearly 40% reduction in CPA within the first 8 weeks, followed by an additional 20% decrease in weeks 9 through 12. This is the power of a fully integrated performance measurement and optimization engine, delivering measurable business results at scale, an increasingly complex digital landscape. Together, we will provide advertisers with a single integrated solution can measure, optimize and drive real business outcomes with greater efficiency and an increasingly complex digital landscape.
To explore the future of measurement and data-driven innovation at DV and to highlight the role of RockerBox cross-platform performance and measurement capabilities, DV's executive team, along with industry experts, will host an in-person Innovation Day for the investment community on Wednesday, June 11 from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City. The event will also be webcast live.
Now let's take a few minutes to dive into how we're evolving DV's strategic vision to drive long-term growth across social media, the Open Web and CTV. Social media accounts for over 60% of digital ad spend, excluding search. Yet today, DB measures only about 5% of all US social impressions, highlighting a massive growth opportunity. In 2024, we grew our social media measurement revenue by 27%, making it a nearly $110 million business for DV.
That's more than double the $45 million we generated just three years ago in 2021, a testament to our relentless focus on expanding social media product and language coverage.
A key part of ensuring continued future growth in social is expanding DV's value proposition from solely post-bid measurement to prebid activation, helping advertisers optimize their media investments before they are made. I'm thrilled to announce the launch of our content level avoidance solution for Meta's Facebook and Instagram feeds and reels powered by DV's Universal Content Intelligence AI. This game-changing innovation ensures that advertisers can proactively avoid unsuitable content while continuing to drive superior media performance. In partnership with Meta, we're delivering this solution at an incredible scale. It was more by seamlessly integrating our content level avoidance controls with postpaid measurement tools, we've created a closed-loop system that ensures every ad delivers maximum impact.
In addition, we've rolled out 30 new content level avoidance categories, giving advertisers unprecedented control and precision in their campaigns across Facebook and Instagram feeds and reels.
Similarly, we launched TikTok video exclusion list solution powered by DV and expanded alpha testing, empowering advertisers to proactively exclude videos flagged as unsuitable through our reporting further strengthening our prebid coverage across social media. We've seen solid initial interest in both activation solutions with nearly 200 customers in our Meta pipeline and several already launched and live in the week since the solution has made available.
Rocker Box will also play a role as we continue to grow our overall value proposition in social. By linking social performance and conversion data from Rocker Box with DV media quality data and optimizing against both the Sybase, advertisers will be able to eliminate waste, drive better engagement and higher ROI, all while ensuring their ads appear in safe, high-quality environments. As we redefine how advertisers drive performance in social media, we remain as committed as ever to expanding our measurement coverage across key social media platforms with enhanced viewability and invalid traffic detection for display ads on Facebook reels.
On TikTok, we extended our brand safety solutions to 18 new international markets and introduced advanced vertical sensitivities tailored to local market needs. Finally, we recently expanded our viewability and brand safety coverage across additional formats on YouTube as well.
Now turning to the Open Web, the largest driver of DV's revenue across those activation and measurement, our performance solutions are already delivering strong results even as they scale from a relatively small base. In activation, DV's Sybase revenue grew over 50% year-over-year, surpassing the top end of our expectations. Since acquiring Sybase in August of 2023, we've successfully upsold the solution to 79 DV customers and 40 of our top 100 clients have started to use Sybase AI to optimize their campaigns.
On the measurement front, DDR's authentic attention continued its strong momentum, growing nearly 190% year-over-year. As I mentioned earlier, as advertisers increasingly shift their open web spend to PMPs and programmatic direct deals were being to this opportunity by deploying DV's activation solutions across numerous sell-side platforms. E-marketer projects US programmatic display ad spending to grow just 4% for the open exchange but over 30% for PMPs and programmatic direct deals between 2024 and 2026.
We always drive to ensure DV data can be employed wherever and however advertisers focus their spend. So as advertisers increasingly prioritize curated inventory that are turning to DD to help them achieve greater control, transparency and performance. By leveraging our trusted brand safety, contextual viewability and fraud data, DV delivers optimized inventory that powers smarter, more effective media investments through curated deals on the advertisers preferred platform.
To that end, I'm excited to share that we've launched an integration with Google Ad Manager allowed programmatic buyers to seamlessly access DV's media quality data through curated inventory packages. This integration allows advertisers to source inventory that meets critical benchmarks for context, brand safety and viewability all while driving better performance at scale.
By connecting directly with Google Ad Manager, we're making it easier than ever for advertisers to ensure their campaigns are optimized for safety and effectiveness, and hiring them to achieve stronger results across the programmatic ecosystem. This is in addition to other sell-side integrations we recently announced, including new solutions with Index Exchange and Criteo.
Turning to CTV, our strategic vision is helping fill one of the most exciting growth opportunities in Digital Media. In 2024, we delivered impressive results in CTV with measurement impression volumes growing 66% for the full year and 95% in the fourth quarter alone. This momentum drove a significant milestone. CTV accounted for 11% of DB's total measurement impression volume in 2024, more than doubling its 5% share in 2023. Our growing CTV base creates a significant future monetization opportunity for DV as we develop deeper content level contextual insights and stronger connectivity to outcomes data that drive performance.
Turning to Retail Media Networks. Our supply side Retail Media Solution grew 36% year-over-year in 2024, contributing to our overall supply side growth rate of 25% year-over-year. Led by our partnerships with the leading retail media platforms, our global reach and connectivity and Retail Media continues to expand. DV's measurement tags are now accepted on 124 key global retail media networks and sites, including 16 top retail media platforms and 108 major retailers with close to fast supporting DV measurement on their owned and operated properties.
More broadly, on the supply side, we secured over a dozen new platform and publisher deals in Q4, including things like Newsweek and Ozon, underscoring the continued opportunity for DV to support leading open web publishers. As we wrap up, it's clear DoubleVerify continues to make meaningful progress to address our challenges while we lay the foundation for future growth.
Looking ahead, our opportunity remains vast. We already work with nearly half of the world's top 1,000 advertisers, yet our revenue contribution represents less than 0.5% of their total media spend, demonstrating the significant runway for growth within our existing customer base. Beyond that, we continue to expand and diversify our reach, evolving our solution set to power performance measurement, outcomes optimization and attribution while strengthening our presence with mid-market and direct response advertisers. With a strong and profitable core and expanded customer base and an unmatched commitment to quality and innovation, DV is well positioned to capture the opportunities ahead.
With that, let me turn the call over to Nicola.