Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us with the fireside chat with IAS, Integral Ad Science. I'm very excited to have CEO Lisa Utzschneider and CFO Alpana Wegner. The format this morning is a fireside, so I've got a number of questions prepared. If you do have questions, you can put them in the chat, which you can see the link down below, or feel free to email me at jason.helfstein@opco.com. Thank you very much for spending the time with us. Lisa, you know we've covered you since the IPO. Many clients are familiar, but for those who are not familiar, maybe just give us a brief overview of IAS and its value to clients. Sure. Thanks, Jason, for having us. Hi, everyone. I'm Lisa Utzschneider, CEO of IAS. Thank you for having us today. I'll give a quick intro of the company, then I'd love to have Alpana, our new CFO, introduce herself. IAS, we're a leading optimization and measurement company. We are global, and we've been public for the last four years. Our core customer base are global brands, so think of global advertisers like Nestlé, Coke, AT&T, as well as we have a robust publisher business. What we do is we do a few things. As a global advertiser investing in digital advertising across the entire digital ecosystem, we ensure wherever their digital ads run, could be the open web, could be social platforms and connected TV, the ads are viewed. They're viewed by a human and not a bot. There's no fraudulent activity. Their brands run adjacent to brand-safe, brand-suitable content. In addition to ensuring we're protecting a Coke's brand equity, we are also doubled down on performance because, as we know, brands deeply care about getting the most for every dollar they invest in digital advertising. Ensuring we're helping the brands drive higher efficiency, higher ROI, higher outcomes with their digital advertising investments. That's a quick intro, Jason, but Alpana, would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, it's great to be here and excited to be here with IAS. I'm Alpana Wegner. I joined IAS in June of this year as a CFO and come from a background of tech and mid-cap companies in a variety of different industries across cyber, HCM, HCIT, and CRM systems. I'm super excited to be here and really excited about the opportunity with IAS and our ability to drive our growth strategy to create additional value for the organization. Great. I'm glad to be working with you and happy to have you at your first public appearance, first visual public appearance. Lisa, maybe talk about when the company came public, it had a, I wouldn't say a limited, but like a certain set of tools and products. It has evolved a lot since then. We could even kind of talk about pre-bid versus post-bid because that's probably been the biggest evolution in the product. Maybe just kind of talk about that a bit. Sure. Happy to take you through the evolution over the last four years. A couple of callouts, and this was all reflected in our Q2 earnings. We had our call last week. Happy to take you through those results. What's clear is we are innovating and investing on behalf of our customer base, both the global brands and the publishers. There are core areas where the brands are doubling down and investing in their digital advertising budgets. The first is social. When you take a look at where users are spending a disproportionate amount of time, and I know I see it in our household with two daughters, it is on the major social platforms: Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest. I could keep going, Reddit. As the brands invest in the social platforms, they want to make sure both pre-bid and post-bid, again, that IAS's sophisticated technology, we are detecting all of the inappropriate stuff to ensure that the brands are running adjacent to high-quality media. The second area of investment is programmatic or performance. As the brands double down and invest in programmatic, especially with the lens on video, both video and programmatic, CTV programmatic video, as well as short-form video, doubling down on pre-bid performance products, again, that help the advertisers not run adjacent, reduce their media wastage, but more importantly, connecting the dots between media quality to media cost drives higher outcomes. Higher ROI for the brands really matters. The third growth vector is CTV. CTV is the fastest growing channel in the digital industry. I see it in our house with Netflix, Amazon Prime, and the brands, they are shifting billions of dollars over from linear TV to CTV. I believe the CTV marketplace today is roughly a $30 billion business. We continue to invest again within the premium platforms like a Netflix, like an Amazon Prime, as well as we have a leading CTV platform called Publica, which we acquired four years ago, shortly after becoming public, where we're helping major OEMs like a Samsung drive up their optimization in the yield. Those three growth vectors of social, all things performance related to programmatic, and CTV are tailwinds for our business with an incredibly long runway for us to continue to innovate and scale the business. There's a lot there. Let's unpack it. I think initially the idea of post-bid was almost like, okay, this is something we need to pay for just to kind of keep our publishers or let's say our DSP honest, right? Whereas with pre-bid, you're bringing intelligence strategy. Are you able then to price pre-bid at a premium to post-bid because you could argue it's more strategic to the advertising strategy overall? Great question. The way to think about on behalf of our customers, the brands, they want to ensure, wherever they're running their digital advertising—open web, social, CTV—IAS, we've got their back. We have their back both in terms on a pre-bid level so that they are bidding on the highest quality media that drives the highest ROI. They're also activating pre-bid capabilities. Our core verification solutions—yep, Nestlé, your ads will be viewed, viewed by a human, adjacent to brand-safe, brand-suitable. On the post-bid measurement side, we confirm exactly what they activated pre-bid happens post-bid. We command a premium price for our sophisticated technology. Premium pre-bid segments like context control, contextual avoidance, or the types of contextual environments you want to run adjacent to, or things like our multimedia classification technology that we're running in the live feeds of the social platforms, we command a premium price. I think there's maybe a misperception in the market that you don't need this technology for CTV because, hey, everything, you know, Amazon has everything, Netflix has in CTV, or just everything in CTV is premium and safe. Why is that not true, and why is your solution so important for CTV? Yeah, great question. The brands, they deeply trust IAS. We play a critical role as an independent third-party player in the digital ecosystem, where we are holding the platforms accountable so that the platforms aren't grading their own homework. Those platforms could be DSPs, social platforms, the CTV platforms, and the brands deeply care that our solutions are integrated across the entire digital ecosystem wherever they're investing their digital advertising. To your point, Jason, CTV, as I said, fastest growing channel, the brands absolutely want our solutions embedded in the CTV platforms, whether it's premium inventory. As the platforms like a Netflix, like an Amazon open up to more programmatic CTV inventory, they absolutely want our solutions there so that we continue to provide the great service that we're providing our brands. I have a question for you. You know, as I'm sure you pay a lot of attention to the metrics around, you know, how many calls are we making and what is our close rate? Have you seen any change? How would you guys describe this environment when you're looking at the rate of deals closed, whether it's new deals, renewals, just any kind of thoughts on how the macro is affecting deal close rates and success rates? Yeah, as Lisa just mentioned, we are continuing to see positive demand as our brands continue to focus on driving ROI, efficiency, and performance. As a CFO, I can say even as an organization, as a company, you partner with the CMO in terms of how best to use your ad and your media spend. Those differentiated products that we are going to market with are driving the opportunity for the brand to protect its brand, its equity, its reputation, as well as drive performance. We're continuing to see strong demand in the market for, and those are the products, as Lisa mentioned, that are at the higher ECPM because they're returning a very correlated return to those buyers. We've also seen strong adoption across our product portfolio as we are launching new products. All products this year were launched earlier than any other year that we've seen, all being launched in Q2 or sooner, and seeing a nice ability to expand the customer base. We see that in our NRR rates, as well as differentiating in new logo opportunities as well. Our products are more relevant than ever, and we're excited about the demand that we're seeing and continuing to serve our existing customers as well as new customers with differentiated products. Did you see any kind of hiccup in the business based on tariff concerns, or was it kind of business as usual in the second quarter? Yeah, we have not seen, it's certainly top of mind for everyone, right? As you have conversations and dialogue, what we're seeing is that there's not a pullback of budgets. We were really happy with our Q2 results with 16% top-line growth, continuing to see, like we've been talking about here, just that shift in focus. That's where the dialogue is going in terms of where do you want your media budgets to go, but not seeing any pullbacks in terms of the more macro environment. We noted in our Q2 earnings, we did see financial services and retail verticals that had strong performances, which we viewed to be a positive indicator in terms of the macro and the media spend. Lisa, you gave a, I thought, a really good example in the earnings call that you saw an eight times more efficient ECPM and a $9 in return on ad spend, which was 93% higher than, like, this customer's target. When you think about those, those are very high ratios, right? If you sell 3x or 4x, that's great. You're talking about 8x. Is that example that you were trying to give kind of making the point that there is, like, if you do not use IAS, there's a high likelihood that you're going to generate an enormous amount of waste with your ad spend? Yes. With that, it basically reflects the point, and thanks for listening in, Jason, on the earnings call last week. It basically reflects that point I was making earlier that we are so invested both in the insurance for the brands, protecting their brand equity, brand reputation, as well as performance. I can't emphasize enough how much the performance value proposition matters for our customers. Equally, if not more important, is we need to continue to invest in demonstrating how we're offering and delivering performance for the brands. Our working thesis has always been, Nestlé, we are going to help you run your digital advertising wherever you're running it, higher quality media, bringing down the cost, taking a look at the cost, and driving higher outcomes. We're so committed, all of the investments that we made in our performance products, it is a flywheel effect. It is reflected both in the 16% growth for Q2, that's a team we put on the board, as well as 16% growth of optimization. Our customers, they're leaning into our products. They love the performance functionality. They love how we're investing in AI, and we're providing greater solutions that enhance their ability to drive up the outcomes with a more dynamic optimization capability in place. We'll continue to invest in that. One of the more often questions I get from investors is investors are surprised sometimes with the quarterly volatility and the revenue growth rate in that this is typically like it's an always-on spend. You have contracted CPMs, albeit you know volume can fluctuate. Maybe talk about when you do see kind of you know surprise to the upside, surprise to the downside, what tends to be the driver of that on a quarterly basis? I can speak to one point, and then Alpana, feel free to chime in. You were speaking to demand before. Another important differentiator of IAS is our international footprint. We have been embedded in the major regions of EMEA and APAC. We've invested in emerging markets for many years. We are so committed to the products that we launch and roll out. They're global, scalable, and repeatable. What I mean by this, Jason, is we have brands that have adopted our products in over 100 markets in dozens of dozens of languages. That's real scale. You take a look at that international expansion and the fact that social, we had 22% growth in the second quarter. Our Pre-bid Social Optimization, we doubled the number of advertisers quarter- over- quarter, with over 50% of those advertisers sitting in EMEA. What's so important is we continue to invest in international, and we continue to drive that scale. We're not just seeing it in social. This is another great, I don't want to call it a pleasant surprise because we've been investing in these bets and priorities. Publisher, we saw a 36% growth in publisher in the second quarter, Publica being the tailwind, important tailwind for that growth. We announced on the earnings calls a few international wins from Publica because we're investing in boots on the ground, both in EMEA and APAC. International, it's been a real strength. The investments that we're making are paying off. You can see it in our numbers, and you can see it in the adoption by the global brands. Anything else, Alpana, that you'd like to add? No, I would just, the only thing I would add is really from an overall fundamentals in the business, you know, on an annualized basis, double-digit growth. We're continuing to be committed to that at high margins, high 70% gross margins, and EBITDA margins that are for this year, 35% midpoint. You know, an almost kind of approaching rule of 50 company on an annualized basis. While there might be some quarter-to-quarter impacts in terms of timing and mixes, and also adoption timing of new customers across new products and in the new market segments that we are, that we're investing in, we on an annual basis feel very, very pleased with where the performance of the business is going. I mean, you know, generally we'd say like, oh, is there one, you know, kind of product that you're the most excited about, you know, over the next two years? Is the answer simply like the portfolio is so big, you know, or has gotten much bigger? You know, you've got social, you've got CTV, like there isn't, is there one area that you're the most, that you think kind of grows the most over the next two years, or it's really like the broad adoption of the products? Yeah, I think either Lisa. Go ahead, Alpana. I'll start because my answer is going to be yes. I'm excited about the multiple levers of growth that we have here. That's one of the reasons I joined IAS. To me, it's exciting that we've got runway with our existing customers with a product portfolio that's continuing to evolve and meet and anticipate the needs of the customers and partners of ours in the platforms. It's exciting to me that we are expanding market-wise into both from an international perspective, both existing global brand expansion capabilities and opportunity and runway, but also emerging markets and being differentiated and having a leadership position from an international perspective. We have expanded into the mid-market. We saw some really nice wins last year that we're seeing the benefits of as we go into the first half of this year and even into the future, both from their onboarding, activation, adoption, but then also expansion. We've seen many of those customers come in through the measurement side and then adding our performance products, which results in the optimization revenue. I'm excited about the multiple levers of growth opportunity here. That would be the thing that excites me, but Lisa might have a product perspective as well. Yeah, I mean, I can't choose one product or the other because it's like choosing one child or the other. You don't pick your kids. What I will say to add to what Alpana said is AI. What excites me the most, and we could spend two hours talking about AI, Jason, is just there are a few. We have 20 minutes. We have 20 minutes. With AI, science is in the name of our company. We have been leveraging AI for years. The majority of our products are powered by AI. The majority of our new products are powered by AI. All of our new products ship by mid-Q2. We talked about on the call our AI classification models and the fact that we're leveraging AI even more to create more sophisticated classification models. They are now 98% faster, 45% more accurate, and we are processing 40+ years of video content per day. When you take a look at two years ago, we were processing less than two years of content. Fast forward to today, 40 years of content. I'm sure you're sitting there, Jason, thinking, what does that really mean for the brand? What it means for the brand is that we are able to detect the inappropriate stuff more accurately, faster, at higher velocity, and stay in lockstep with this shifting world of AI that we're living in and providing additional value for our customers. The one other thing I'll say about our multimedia classification, and I spoke to this on the call too, is because we are so invested in AI, we are an AI-first company with our labeling, for example, how the technology labels content. We're removing the human from that process and making it more AI-first from a labeling perspective. It improves the accuracy rate, the velocity rate, and it provides more sophisticated technology for the brands. The brands are thrilled with the investments that we're making in AI and will continue to invest. We can unpack a few ways. One of the areas that's been interesting since the social platforms have been moving towards non-human moderation and AI moderation, the question would be like, oh, does it really increase the risk of inappropriate content? Hence, one would think that your products would be even more important, right? I don't know if there's something to talk to there. I want to spend a minute on kind of like the efficiency side on AI. Yeah, with that, just think about it as we're leveraging AI as tech platforms for their AI to identify, again, more appropriate content for the brands to run adjacent to. We view AI as a tremendous opportunity to provide differentiated value, incremental value for the brands that could create new runways of opportunity for the company. We will continue to engage with the big brands, hear their feedback directly, both in terms of what I was talking about before with multimedia classification, but also we're receiving a lot of feedback from the brands with things like as the tech platforms, think of Google PMax or Meta, they're using AI as a way to hit the brands, achieve the brands' KPIs, but do it more black box behind the curtain. Feedback for brands is get integrated IAS more deeply into the tech platforms so that you can help us have a better understanding of how the tech platforms are leveraging AI to achieve our outcomes so that we can understand how they're using AI. We're in the business of trust. The brands are leaning into IAS related to all things AI, and we see it as an opportunity. Alpana, how do you think about AI from a productivity enhancer on the financial side? The answer might just be, hey, we take all those savings and we reinvest them back in, but just maybe a touch on that. Yeah, so I think to all the positive aspects that Lisa just mentioned that hit the top line, right? Anytime a customer is getting value out of what we're providing to them and being pleased with the enhancements that we're making that will even serve them better, that at our scale and with our margins is going to lead to additional opportunity from a margin perspective or a reinvestment opportunity. The way that I see it is, you know, and Lisa gave a really nice example there with the labeling. To the extent we have the, we create the opportunity for ourselves to make that decision. Do we want to reallocate resourcing and capital, or do we want to reinvest it either in product, go-to-market, or other areas is what we tend to look at all aspects of the business through a lens of. We're really pleased with our 35% EBITDA margin that we had in Q2. As you know, we raised our guidance both on the top line as well as the EBITDA and holding to that or consistently providing for that 35% margin. The opportunity that I see also is to continue to drive the scale in the business as we expand and grow by enabling AI also internally. One of the things that we've done is it's not just in our product, but it's in everything we do. It's across the entire organization that everyone in the company is, you know, positioning themselves to challenge the status quo. How can we use AI, whether that's in a finance organization or a business ops organization, in our customer success parts of our organization, our internal IT, is looking at the various different AI capabilities that we either already have in-house or are evaluating on how those can be deployed across the organization and really drive our ability to serve both our internal and our external customers, even in a more efficient and effective. That's probably the most important part here is we are not giving up effectiveness or experience from a customer perspective just for the efficiency. The efficiency to me is kind of the gravy on top in that we get to then determine how do we want to reallocate those dollars, whether it's internal or to the bottom line. Lisa, let's spend a moment to talk about TikTok. I know it's definitely been an important platform for you. Maybe if you could talk about broad exposure, if there was a TikTok ban, which, I mean, who knows, doesn't seem like it's going to happen, but if there was a TikTok ban, how material is that for the company given that there's still the rest of the world business? Just some thoughts on TikTok. Sure. TikTok continues to be an important social platform for IAS. You might remember TikTok was the first platform a couple of years ago that we built our multimedia classification tech and launched it first on TikTok. Hats off to TikTok for being the first social platform. When you take a look at our revenue on TikTok, over 50% of our revenue on TikTok is international. It's the same with Meta. Over 50% is international. It is a testament to the demand that we're seeing across the global advertisers, our ability to launch global, repeatable, scalable products. With TikTok in particular, because we over-index so much internationally with the brands, if there were a potential ban, we don't have any concerns about it in the U.S. Okay. Spend a minute on CTV. You do disclose kind of video, which includes CTV and also online video. How should investors think about your specific exposure to CTV as a percent of total revenue and how fast is it growing? Yeah, so from a CTV perspective, it is one of our fastest- growing lines of business currently. As you saw in Q2, our publisher business, which CTV contributes to, grew 36%. The overall publisher business today represents somewhere between 15% and 16% of our revenue. With it being the fastest growing channel, we do continue to expect to invest in that area. We continue to be pleased with what we're hearing from a partner and a market perspective in terms of the demand there. One of the things I think Lisa mentioned earlier when she was mentioning what we've been able to do internationally is really been able to expand our international leadership in CTV in Q2 in particular as it related to both the partnerships that we have with major broadcasters as well as those that are specific to the GOs within the international footprint. Happy with how it's performing. Continue to see runway there and expect it to continue to be a meaningful part of our growth story in terms of a driver of growth for us. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting thing. Like when we look at, you know, Roku or we look at like The Trade Desk, right? Like those are companies, I mean, Roku, they're international, but it's very small. Trade is small. This idea that international has been behind the U.S. in ad tech, CTV is at the tail end of that. It looks like it's going to go right to programmatic. It's almost like they're going to skip over certain steps that we've done in the U.S., which kind of really means this could be a huge and even bigger opportunity as it unfolds over the next few years. I would agree with that. One other thing, we did two clicks deeper on that publisher revenue line. The growth of 36%. Jason, you might remember our publisher revenue, it's made up of two components. It is traditional publishers where we're offering our IAS measurement solutions. We have integrations with over 400 traditional publishers. Think of publishers like Reuters.com, WallStreetJournal.com. In Q2, we actually saw double-digit growth within our IAS publisher business. We are thrilled with the performance. One of the reasons we saw that double-digit growth is the sales team did such a great job last summer. Remember the summer of Oracle? Coming out of the summer and signing up publishers, both U.S. and in EMEA. It's great to see the adoption rate. Especially with some of these Oracle wins, we're actually seeing accelerated growth, accelerated adoption from the publishers. Getting back to CTV, that's the other half of our IAS publisher business with Publica's growth. The tailwind for that growth is continuing to innovate for major OEMs like Samsung. We mentioned that we renewed Samsung for another two-year commitment. Innovating and improving things like bidding capabilities for the OEMs, again, to drive up their yield and monetization with programmatic CTV in their platform. Both sides of that coin of publisher, the team's doing a great job and will continue to drive that growth. On the Oracle point, have all the kind of ex-Oracle clients been divvied up now? Is that kind of like that opportunity is already now baked in the numbers? Obviously they can continue spending more, but are there any more Oracle clients to win or it's all kind of over at this point? Great question. You might remember with the Oracle business, there were three types of customers that we were competing for on the jump ball, the court last summer. It included brands, publishers, and platforms. Towards the end of last year, we had shared a 70% win rate. We won over 75 accounts. Back half of last year, the team did a great job integrating, onboarding, ramping. Think of 2025 as ongoing upsell, cross-sell of these Oracle customers. We did put some new Oracle wins on the board for Q2. We're encouraging our team, just look under every single sofa cushion if there's any other new Oracle wins to pick up. Also, continue to drive that cross-sell, upsell. In particular, the Oracle accounts love the pre-bid performance products on the brand side. We have five more minutes. Just for the audience, if anyone has a question, feel free to put it in the chat. Let's talk about mid-market historical. That wasn't a big focus for the company, but it's something you're investing in. Talk about how you're thinking about mid-market and like when could we actually see that start to impact top line? Yeah, I'll maybe start because you ended on a great lead into the mid-market, which is along with that Oracle experience on the court, we also have the opportunity to sort of pull from Oracle's experienced base of commercial teams and brought over 30 Oracle, 30 or more Oracle folks that are hitting the ground running, both in the adoption and acceleration of that customer base, but also in establishing a mid-market go-to-market motion here that, to your point, Jason, had not historically been here. The combination of a new, really talented team that's very familiar with the mid-market as the seeding ground, then some investment being put in that area to expand it and further develop it. We are seeing and really pleased with what we're seeing from a demand perspective in that mid-market channel for IAS. The mid-market is all about performance. As we've talked about here this morning, with performance and the optimization products and the pre-bid side being so central to our product roadmap, the enhancements that we needed and made some modest investments in for that mid-market are already yielding some benefits that we're seeing as we are continuing to invest in that area. A combination of demand, meeting the needs through the performance-based marketing that that market segment is focused on that matches really nicely with our products, as well as the seeding of talent that we picked up last summer. Further expanding on that through additional investments has really made us very excited about the opportunity that we see from a mid-market. In terms of timing, you know, we don't break out different customer segments currently, but we're continuing to see, particularly on the new logo front, the benefits there of that business. It's certainly contributing to the growth that we're seeing this year and the expectation of the double-digit growth next year. Maybe I'll finish the last question, and maybe this kind of goes to both of you. In the quarter, you paid off all your long-term debt. You extended the credit facility, so kind of $300 million, which increases in borrowing capacity to something like $550 million. The company can clearly do a lot on the kind of M&A side if it wanted to potentially buy back. We'll focus on M&A. I mean, Lisa, just I guess what's the appetite for big M&A, small M&A, no M&A, and just improve the pristineness of the balance sheet? Sure, great question. We've consistently applied a build, partner, buy lens to everything that we've done. We have a strong track record historically of acquiring companies. Since I've been at IAS, three have been tech tuck-ins, the fourth being Publica, which has been more strategic. Not just integrating tech, but tech that's additive to our existing technology where we can quickly pivot and launch differentiated products that drive profitable growth. We continue to apply this lens in a few areas of interest. CTV, we've talked about the growth opportunities where the brands, that's where the budgets are growing. CTV and outcomes. I'd also say interesting data sets are out there, data sets that are complementary to our media quality data sets. Think of data sets like other types of measurement data, conversion data, outcome data. We are applying that lens and there is interesting technology out there. Great. I think that's a perfect segue to closing out. We're exactly on time. Thank you, Lisa, Alpana, for your time. If anyone out there has any further questions, feel free to email me and we can connect you with the IAS team. Enjoy the rest of the day, everybody. Thank you. Thank you, Jason. Thanks for your time. Thank you, everyone. Thanks.