Welcome back everyone, to the Software Conference. We have the pleasure of introducing IAS team. Lisa is with us, CEO, Joe is CFO, and Jonathan is also with us. He is VP of Investor Relations. He had spent seven or 10+ years at Blue Shirt helping to advise East Coast-based companies, spent three years at the Nasdaq as the VP of Listing and Capital Markets, and brings a tremendous amount of experience in investing in IR to the team. I want to welcome everyone together, and thank you, Jonathan, for being part of it. I think what you're going to find here is an incredible team. Lisa and Joe both worked at Amazon. Lisa also had a chance to work for one of the best software companies in the world. From a leadership perspective, very rare to find the quality of the leadership on both software and internet combined, and I think that's what makes Lisa really unique, among many other things. Lisa, thank you so much for kicking this off. For those that are still kind of coming up to speed on your story, maybe you can just set the 40,000-foot view from your side, and maybe we'll follow up with Joe after, and we'll let him go through why leave Amazon to come here, and ultimately, what's driving the financials at such a great rate. Give us a little sense from your side. We'll let you guys kick off with that. Thank you. Hi, Brent. Thanks for having us, good morning, everyone. I'm Lisa Utzschneider, CEO of IAS. I joined IAS two and a half years ago, shortly after the Vista Equity Partners acquired the company. As Brent had mentioned, I've spent 20 years working for global tech companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo, building ad businesses. I'm very passionate about all things related to technology and data and honored to be CEO of IAS and on this incredible journey. In a nutshell, what we do at IAS, we're a leading global ad verification company. The way to think about that, think of a Nestlé video ad running on YouTube. Our software solutions verify that the Nestlé ad was viewed. It was viewed by a human and not a bot. There was no fraudulent activity. That Nestlé ad ran adjacent to brand-safe and brand-suitable content. The last thing that Fortune 500 brands want to do is run adjacent to violent content or hate speech. In addition to that, we also more recently launched a contextual targeting solution, helping the Nestlé's of the world programmatically seek out segments that they want to run their brands adjacent to in terms of contextual environments, but also contextual environments that they want to avoid. We're a global company. We've been around for over 10 years with over 2,000 customers around the globe. The majority of our customer base, over 90% of our revenue, is advertiser direct. We also have a robust publisher business with over 150 strategic publishers. Joe, would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, everyone. As Brent said, I came from Amazon. Joe Pergola, Chief Financial Officer. I started out my career at Ernst & Young and worked in the capital markets role at Time Warner, then post-MBA, have really been building best-in-class companies, and finance divisions across Yahoo, CBS, and The Weather Channel. Brent, I love that question of why did I leave Amazon to come here. There's a few things, of course. A bittersweet, but at the end of the day, main one was Lisa Utzschneider is legendary at Amazon till to this day. I love that when I had the conversation with my leader over there when I was making the jump, he said it would be the only person he would allow for me to go work for. Outstanding reputation. I've known about her and her career for quite some time. The entire leadership team and the mission of IAS. While I was at The Weather Channel, I was actually a customer of IAS, so truly embrace the ROI value proposition of digital media quality there. I know your other question was about our financials. If you'd like me to jump through, I could walk you through our business model. Good. Sounds good. As you know, we have a very agile and scalable business model, and we're focused on high revenue growth and margins, and our solutions are always on, and they're measuring all impressions on behalf of our advertisers. We partner with our top global advertisers and marketers, a significant amount of the Fortune 500, and we serve over 2,100 customers globally, supported by about 11 offices worldwide, eight countries. It's been really interesting in this virtual time during COVID. We've had incredible acceleration internationally across LATAM and APAC, and we're adding great customers at the regional and local levels there. We break out our customers across our financials in three ways with two main differences. First, our advertiser direct and our programmatic revenue represents all of the spending from the buy-side customers. Those are our advertisers and marketers that we work with. Then our supply-side revenue, those are our publishers, and that's where it's reflected, those relationships that we have with them. Our average top customers have spent over 6.7 years with us. Coming out of Q2 2021, our net revenue retention was 142%. High watermark for us, of course, and we continue to expand our large customer base that spend over $200,000 with us. As of Q2, that group stands at 187. That's a +21% lift period- over- period. Those are our customers. I always like to make sure that everyone understands who those are. With regards to our revenue model, it's primarily based on impression volumes, and we transact with our advertisers with fixed CPM rates. It's independent of the media rate CPM that our marketers and advertisers work with. We continue to work with those top advertisers to sign multi-year minimum impression commitments. What that allows for is not only the revenue growth and the acceleration with our long-term customer base, but a lot of visibility into our forecasting and our business. Key drivers for us as we accelerate through this digital-first lifestyle, it's that increased consumption on premium video and CTV and use of our Context Control products via the programmatic channel. Those are all premium price for us, which continues to drive our business model. We talk in the software industry about a Rule of 40. If you have 30% top line, you get a 10% margin. I think last quarter you had the Rule of 89 with an incredible top line at 55% and EBITDA at 34%. You're getting more than double what the software industry talks about. I understand, look, we've had a surge of digital ad spend come back. You're helping ensure that. We're obviously going to come into tougher comps and market will theoretically slow down relative to what happened, obviously still stay strong. When you think about what's enabling you to have such a balanced model of great growth and margin, it's fairly rare in the tech industry. What's the secret sauce? Why is this happening? Why is this sustainable? I'm not asking, and saying you're going to have a Rule of 89 forever. Yeah. I would say rule of 89, similar to net revenue retention of 142%, is a high watermark for us. We really look at rule of 60 as a North Star for our business, focused on that top-line revenue growth. We've been very efficient. There are some timing there, return to office costs, things like that, hiring ramps and other things that continue to power our investment in product and technology. I would say rule of 60 North Star. As we continue to expand internationally in our programmatic business, as you saw, it went from 34% to now 42% of our portfolio. We continue to create that efficiency that drops more dollars to the bottom line. Lisa, I think during all of our due diligence on you guys, when we talked to advertisers, they were very clear. It's different in SaaS, where you might have five different SaaS companies, but it's very clear when a large global brand makes a pick to ensure they go with one. They don't go with many. You guys are pulled into some of these big global brands. Maybe give us a perspective of why that dynamic exists in your market and we don't see that in any other market. Sure. It is a dynamic we've seen at IAS, especially the last 18 months, that more and more of these Fortune 500 global marketers, brands like Nestlé, Coke, GlaxoSmithKline, Adidas, who are all global strategic accounts of IAS customers. More of these brands are taking brand safety and brand suitability to a much more strategic level at the C-level of the companies. They're looking for one global verification partner to work with, and they're leaning into IAS. We're seeing more of these brands sign strategic global accounts, two-to-three-year contracts with IAS, and it gives us tremendous opportunity to both cross-sell with those accounts and then also upsell them with new products and expand into new markets. A big differentiator for IAS is our global footprint. Our revenue split is 60/40. 40% of our revenue is based internationally because we've been in the international markets for over 8 years. We have deep roots, both in EMEA and APAC. We continue to invest in emerging markets like Latin America and Southeast Asia. I would say that's one of the biggest differentiators between us and our competitor is our deep global footprint and a big reason why these global marketers are choosing IAS. We get the question, why can't Google, Twitter, Snap, TikTok, all these platforms, why are they not offering this as part of their own solution? It is easy to say that you just need an independent auditor that is in this, and you will become the independent provider. How would you address that question? Sure. Great question. A quick story I'd like to share is when I joined IAS, having spent 20 years in the field, working closely with customers, meeting global sales organizations. I'm customer obsessed. It's one of our company values. I went on a customer listening tour. I met with 50-ish customers, partners, and the consistent piece of feedback I heard was, "IAS, you're in the business of trust." Marketers trust that we are an independent third-party verification company. They trust the accuracy of our technology, and they never want a Google or a Facebook to grade their own homework as these marketers move more and more of their linear TV dollars to the social platform. Being the Switzerland of the Internet is just so important for these marketers, and we will continue to build trusted relationships with them. It seems like you've had a very good relationship with Google. Can you just maybe talk to what you're seeing there as it relates to that partnership? Sure. It's an area, a partner I personally spend a lot of time with Google, coming from companies like Microsoft and Amazon. I so believe in the power of global scalable platforms and driving deep integrations with those platforms. Google, in particular, we have a very trusted relationship with them. We are so far under the tent with Google. We have joint product roadmaps every year. We launch roughly two to four products with Google annually. Many of these products are first to market. For example, Google Auto Tag, which enables marketers to launch verification solutions seamlessly across the internet. It's embedded in the Google UI, push of a button for the marketers. Second example is our contextual targeting Context Control solution that we launched about 17 months ago. We are still the only verification provider to offer contextual targeting in Google's DV360 in their DSP. Google's just a tremendous partner, and we'll continue to partner closely with them. When you think about the move to connected TV, how are you going to play a role there? Sure, Brent. You saw the headlines. We acquired Publica. We announced that right at our first quarterly earnings call for Q2. Publica, we've figured out a formula, successful formula when it comes to acquisitions. It's now the third acquisition since I joined IAS. What we do is we partner with the company before we buy them. That's been a winning formula for us. We've been in partnership with Publica for a year and a half, so we're able to do the proper diligence under, get a good sense of their engineering and leadership talent. What Publica brings, it's a leading CTV video platform. If you think about IAS as business, we're heavy on the buy side, deep integrations, deep partnerships with advertisers. What Publica brings is deep integrations on the publisher side, with leading video platforms like Samsung, CBS, Viacom CBS, and Philo. Publica also brings a video ad server, unified ad auction, deep integrations across 25 leading SSPs, and enables us to have access to massive volumes of programmatic CTV inventory. We're now working on our integrations plan and can't wait to leapfrog and disrupt and be the leading global addressable CTV platform in the world. Stay tuned for our integration plans. The positive feedback that we're hearing across the digital ecosystem from the publisher partners and the marketers, it's just two thumbs up in terms of the potential in CTV. One of the questions we get is just sustainability. Again, I know 89, the Rule of 89's tough, and you said the North Star is closer to 60. When you think about just overall advertising momentum right now, last year we saw, obviously, that start to accelerate in the back half of the year. When you think just overall, is your sense that we're on this inevitable shift to digital advertising that's unstoppable? Kind of like this initial wave that came in seemed a little bit bigger than most people thought. You've seen it across Google, Snap, your results. Ultimately, your thoughts about what's going on with digital advertising as a whole, what you're seeing, are we going to see a little bit of a pullback given such a surge, or how do you shape the curve of demand in overall advertising right now? Happy to take that, and Joe, feel free to add. Well, as you know, Brent, we're living in a digital-first lifestyle. We've all been working from home, doing everything from home for the last 18 months. When you take a look at the trends, the consumer adoption rate of social platforms, the amount of time consumers are spending on the social platforms is at an all-time high. Same thing with viewing streamed content at an all-time high. As I like to say, where the users go, the marketers go. Where the marketers go, the fraudsters go. I think this is absolutely here to stay and will continue in the future, this incredible adoption rate of both social platforms, connected TV, and marketers because they want to connect with consumers wherever they are. That's why we're seeing this tremendous shift away from linear TV into those areas like programmatic social TV and connected TV. It's absolutely here to stay. Joe, anything to add to that? Yeah, I totally agree. The research analysts can't revise their forecast fast enough. You see eMarketer how they called programmatic marketplace to be about $95 billion by the end of next year. That's under revision. We continue to pace higher than those rates as well as if you look at CTV, that Lisa cited, $8 billion go up to $18 billion. There's a lot of opportunity out there, and that's the change in digital-first lifestyle and the consumption habits. For us, again, as we price, we have premium priced products across premium video, CTV, as well as programmatic contextual controls. We're set up nicely to continue to monetize as a result. There was a client question just around the differentiation of the TikTok Twitter feed partnership and the thoughts on the potential for a Facebook news feed solution. Great question. We are very bullish about the opportunity within live feeds of the social platforms, and in particular, building scalable brand safety and brand suitability solutions within the live feeds. What we announced is we've launched an early beta with TikTok, and this beta is running in several markets with a handful of Fortune 500 advertisers. Basically what it is we have built a video classification technology. What that means is we can classify frame by frame, video, image, text, and audio, so that marketers can rest assure that when they run their brand advertising in something like the live feed of TikTok, that it's in a brand safe and brand suitable environment. The other thing I'll call out with TikTok, few other things, is this solution is also in conjunction with the GARM standardized segments of brand safety. What I mean by that is there are standardized definitions of 11 segments. Things like standardization of what is adult content, for example. This will be standardized across the digital ecosystem. The other thing that's really exciting about this technology, it's portable. It's early days because we're in a beta, but our data science team has built a product that we will be able to port over to the other social platforms. TikTok, we're in beta now. It was also publicly shared late last year that Twitter selected us and another verification provider to build a brand safety solution on Twitter. Twitter's up next. Twitter's a little bit different. It's less complex technically because it's text-based, not video-based. When it comes to Facebook has yet to open up their live news feed to third-party verification companies. We have been in discussions with Facebook since last summer, since the boycott of Black Lives Matter, where 1,000 advertisers boycotted Facebook because they wanted to hold Facebook accountable and say, "Come on, Facebook, your live feed, it's not squeaky clean in there. You got to do something about it." What Facebook has done, they've shared this publicly, is they've since launched a first-party solution this year. It's in beta, where it's taking a look again at the live feed content. I am confident that as more and more advertisers see the results of TikTok, get comfortable investing more in the TikTok feed, running more ads in the Twitter feed, it will only apply more pressure to Facebook to open up their live news feed to third-party verification companies. One other thing I'll add is we have ongoing discussions with Facebook about this. The question I get is, from a technology perspective, it just seems the scale of what you're running is incredible. If I'm watching connected TV and that ad comes up or I'm looking at a page like the speed and quality is you have to run at incredible speeds. Since we're at a software conference, we know you have your own secret sauce, and you can't open the jar and let us see it because only you can see it. When you think about the other companies in the software industry that you use, I think you are an Amazon backend, I believe. Can you talk to Amazon and how they're helping you and anything else that you can share just from the ingredients of what makes this work at scale? Great question. I'm a firm believer in the power of build everything that's global, scalable, and repeatable, having helped build the ad businesses at the companies I mentioned before. When I joined IAS, I like to say we transformed over the last two and a half years, the IAS house top to bottom. One key area that we transformed was moving off of all of our legacy systems into a cloud-based platform. We do have a partnership with AWS, and we're running and processing a lot of data because we have such coverage across the buy-side and the sell-side of the digital ecosystem, massive amounts of data that we process. All of the data that we process is related to the ad event. The what and the where, never consumer data, never PII data. Again, we build everything to scale. It's been phenomenal, especially during the last 18 months in this digital first lifestyle, the volumes that we are seeing, the volumes of inventory that we are processing. That's another good reason why we're so thrilled about the Publica acquisition, is we are such firm believers that when it comes to connected TV, it will be 100% programmatic. The fact that we can get further upstream with Publica at the header bidder point programmatically and be able to help marketers and help publishers deliver and also verify high-quality media. Things like Publica enable us to leapfrog and scale in growth areas like connected TV. That's great. We could keep talking for an hour plus, but we got to cut there. Thank you so much, Lisa, and Joe, and Jonathan for joining. I really appreciate your support of the Jefferies team. Thank you so much, Brent, for having us. Thank you. Have a great day. Thank you, everyone. Bye, everyone.