All right, I think we can go ahead and get started here. Thanks, everybody, for joining us today. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Vic Casavobota. I'm one of our senior research analysts here at Baird. I lead our coverage of the internet sector. Very excited to be hosting the conference this week. Right now, it's my pleasure to welcome Integral Ad Science to the stage. Joining me from the company is the CEO, Lisa Utzschneider. We have about 30 minutes scheduled for this fireside chat, plenty to talk about. We'll dive right in. Lisa, maybe just to start, for the benefit of those who are less familiar with the company, if you could start off just giving us a brief overview of IAS and the value proposition that you offer to your customers. Sure. Thanks, Vic, for having me. Hi, everyone. I'm Lisa Utzschneider, CEO of IAS. Pleasure to be here today. IAS, we're a leading global measurement and optimization company. We've been around for 15 years. I joined the company just six years ago. We took it public in June of 2021. Our core customer base are Fortune 500 advertisers. That makes up 84% of our revenue, as well as we have a robust publisher business at 16% of our revenue. Ultimately, what we do is we ensure that global brands like a Nestlé, a L'Oreal, or a Coke, wherever they run their digital advertising across any tech platform, any DSP, we ensure that their ads are viewed. They're viewed by humans, no fraudulent bot activity. Also, their brands run adjacent to brand-safe, brand-suitable content. In addition to protecting Fortune 500 brand equity on behalf of these advertisers, we also focus on performance to ensure that the brands are getting the highest efficiency, highest ROI as they run their digital advertising. A lot to talk about as it relates to the business. Maybe we can start off just talking about some news from this week, which is that you guys announced a new. Yeah, we announced this week. Appointed a new CFO. Yeah. Maybe you want to spend a minute talking about that. Yeah. We were thrilled to announce Tuesday morning of this week that we hired a new CFO. Her name's Alpana Wegner. She has deep software SaaS experience. She's been a public CFO in her last two public companies. We were thrilled to bring her on board. She starts actually next Tuesday, June 10. Prior to Alpana, we've had an interim CFO, Jill Putman, who has been our audit chair and a board member. She's been interim for the last five months. We conducted a robust search. I was deeply involved in the interviews. We had a really strong slate of CFO candidates. We're just thrilled to bring on Alpana. She has deep financial expertise, deep in FP&A, analytics, analyzing monetization, also is a really strong people leader. Just can't wait for her to start. That's great. Looking forward to getting to know her. I think one of the big themes this week throughout our conversations has been the macro environment. Obviously, you have a unique perspective with the type of business that you operate. It would be great to hear your perspective on what you're seeing out there right now and how advertisers are responding to all the kind of puts and takes in the backdrop right now. Sure. From a macro perspective, and I spoke to this in our last Q1 earnings call a few weeks ago, I spend a lot of time personally with our customers, both the brands, the major platforms, and publishers, especially over the last few months, just listening intently into their perception of the macro, their plans. What we're seeing is more of a shift. We're not seeing a pullback on ad budgets. That shift is reflected in our Q1 results. We posted strong earnings in Q1, both top line and from an EBITDA perspective, 17% growth year- over- year. The shift I'm talking about is from open web display to optimization. That's our programmatic business, where we posted 24% growth for the quarter. Brands are leaning into programmatic because of the flexibility of programmatic. They're tapping into their working media budgets. They're loving the fact that we have really doubled down in offering optimization or programmatic products that provide greater transparency, taking the black box out of programmatic buying, linking media quality data with media cost, helping the brands drive higher outcomes. From a vertical perspective, we're very diverse from a vertical perspective. The verticals in Q1 where we really saw strength in leaning into optimization was insurance, the insurance category, coming out of the LA fires, as well as financial services. A lot to unpack there. Yeah. Maybe it would be good to kind of go through each of the different parts of your business and unpack some of the trends. Maybe first, you referenced the Q1 results. In your measurement segment, you guys had talked about kind of this bifurcation of growth between social and the open web. You just referenced it just now in your last answer. Maybe you could elaborate a little more on what you're seeing in those two environments and, as you play this forward, how you think that can affect your business and get your perspective there. Sure. As I like to say, with the major marketers, the brands want to be where the users are. Where the users are spending a disproportionate amount of their time, I know I see it in my house with a teenager, they're spending it on social platforms, right, especially with the explosion of short-form video, viewing content, sharing content, ingesting content, short-form video, and then also within the landscape of CTV or streaming. Because that's where the users are spending their time, the brands, they are shifting billions and billions of ad dollars into CTV and the social platforms, tailwind for our business. In Q1, we had social growth of 15%, which we're very pleased with. We're very pleased with the adoption we're seeing of our social measurement products. You're familiar with Total Media Quality. That's our post-measurement classification of the live feeds of the social platforms. The brands want to rest assured wherever they're running their digital advertising, whether it be the major social platforms like Meta, YouTube, TikTok, as well as back half of last year launching the product in Pinterest and Reddit, as well as Snap. They just want to know where they're running their ads, it's brand safe and brand suitable. That, again, is a reflection of the adoption of that product that we're seeing, as well as, I mentioned before, optimization in particular. Last year, over the last, I'd say, 12- 18 months, we've really invested both on the back end when it comes to all things optimization from a product perspective, from streamlining and simplifying the integrations within the DSPs so that we have pre-bid, post-bid capability. We brought in a new Chief Product Officer, Sristi Gupta, as well as new product leaders who are fluent in all things programmatic. We have been beefing up our front end too from a sales and service perspective, bringing in more programmatic expertise. The clients are loving the value that we are driving. They love the transparency that we are offering in performance. Yeah. A few things I want to come back to there. Maybe we should spend a minute also just talking about your publisher business. It seems like that's been a great source of strength for you. Segments, I think, have been growing above the consolidated average for the past few quarters. That's right. What's been driving that part of your business? Yeah, sure. We were also pleased with our 33% growth in Q1 on publisher. A couple of tailwinds to speak to on our publisher business. Publica is a leading CTV platform. We actually acquired Publica shortly after taking the company public. It is a big differentiator for IAS as we are helping large OEMs like Samsung drive higher yields, higher monetization of their programmatic CTV inventory. Over the last, I would say, 6-12 months, we have been really focused on refining the bidding capabilities and functionalities within Publica. You are seeing the results of that. That is a tailwind for our publisher business. With our traditional publishers, we have integrations with over 400 publishers. Think of publishers like The New York Times, like Reuters that have adopted IAS's verification measurement solutions. We're seeing nice uptick there, especially with the Oracle wins that we made last year. It was the summer of Oracle, as you know, last year. We won a good amount of publisher business. We've integrated those publishers, and they're now ramping. Yeah. That might be a good segue because I was going to ask about the Oracle wins from last year. Just maybe talk a little bit more about how those integrations are going. I know part of the view is the ability to kind of cross-sell more products to those customers over time. Where does that stand? What's your perspective on that today? Sure. One of my favorite topics. Last year, as everyone recalls, Oracle exited their advertising business in June. What was a three-horse race has become now a two-horse race. Last summer, the team did a great job of winning a sizable amount of the Oracle accounts. We had over a 70% win rate. We won over 75 accounts, as well as we brought their talent over. Everyone knows how strong the Oracle talent is. We hired the global CRO of the Oracle advertising business, Mark Grabowski, as well as brought over 30 employees. Think of Q4 of last year as the integration onboarding of this new business. The new business included brands and publishers and platforms. Now the team is cranking on cross-sell and upsell. With this robust business, we continue to target double-digit growth for our business, as well as north of 30% EBITDA margin. This is beyond the 2025 guide that we shared in our Q1 earnings call. Maybe staying with that theme of customer focus, you've talked a lot about recently just the new focus on, or not new, but continued focus on the middle markets part of the segment. You obviously mostly work with large advertisers today. Just talk a little bit about why that middle market opportunity could be significant and the process you've gone about going to market with that group relative to your main customer base. Yeah. We see mid-market as a new revenue channel for IAS. Think of it as a new TAM. As I mentioned before, our existing customer base, we have over 2,000 advertisers, many of them Fortune 500 accounts, brand marketers. They make up the majority of our revenue today. Mid-market, we define it as spending between $200,000 and $1 million on IAS annually. When you take a look at the mid-market channel, these are performance marketers. These are performance marketers who deeply care about efficiency, ROI, selling as many products as they can, signing up as many new subscribers as they can. They know that because of our programmatic offerings, we have tools today where we can provide greater transparency into their programmatic buying. It is less of a black box. We can connect the media quality signals with the media cost, QCPM, so that the advertisers have a better understanding of how we're driving efficiency and ROI. They provide their outcome data to us so that we can connect the dots and say, based on the $100,000 you spend in Google DV360, here's the transparency of what's happening with that $100,000. Here are the SSPs that are efficient and performing well. Turn them up real time. Here are the SSPs that are inefficient. Turn them off. Because of that transparency, we help to sign up more subscribers. Here is the incremental return from investing in our products. We then take that outcome data and we feed it right back into our models so that for future bidding, that advertiser gets almost dynamic optimization from us so that we help that advertiser better understand, do not bid on this impression. Bid on that one, has higher media quality, higher likelihood of driving up more subscribers for you. This product is called Total Visibility. It has completely taken off. It is the sweet spot of mid-market because we are combining that media quality, media cost to outcome. We saw a tremendous adoption rate last year. It is a reflection of that 24% growth I mentioned in Q1. One other data point that we're seeing from a programmatic perspective getting back to Oracle is now that we've onboarded these Oracle accounts, and Oracle did have a robust mid-market business, in Q1, we're actually seeing accelerated adoption rate out of the previous Oracle targeting customers. We're seeing accelerated revenue out of those Oracle targeted or performance customers. Again, it's a testament to the value that we're offering to our entire advertiser base, also the great work the team is doing in demonstrating the value and driving the cross-sell, upsell. Yeah. Maybe just staying along that theme of customer segments, another area that seems to be growing well is your international business. Yeah. Maybe just talk a little bit about what you're doing with that group and how you're going to market and maybe which countries you think represent the biggest opportunities right now for you. Sure. We're very, very pleased with our international performance too. It's a big differentiator between us and our nearest competitor. We break out the full revenue in international, represents 31% outside of the Americas. Q1, we posted 18% growth in international. It reflects the breadth and depth of the relationships we have in major regions like EMEA, like APAC. The investments we're making in emerging markets like Latin America, Southeast Asia, India. We also announced first to market in China in December, where we've been running an alpha. The verticals in particular that have been asking about China, the alphas with luxury brands, luxury CPG. We also had an event in Shanghai with 40 potential partners sharing how our capabilities are available to global brands who want to run verification when they're running digital advertising in China, as well as offering IAS's solutions outside of China. Those emerging markets in particular, we're seeing tremendous growth. We're very thoughtful about where we put the boots on the ground, both from a sales and service perspective. Again, we're very, very pleased with our international growth. Yeah. Maybe want to shift gears a little bit and talk about product development and what's evolving there. One of the other big themes of this conference this week has been AI and the impact that it's having on different industries and companies. Would be great to hear your perspective on AI, how that's going to affect your business and some of the use cases that you're seeing emerging and maybe how that's affecting your approach to tech and development at the company. Yeah, sure. So science is in the name of IAS. We've been in AI or leveraging AI for years. A third of our engineering team is made up of data scientists. When you take a look at the suite of our products, the majority of our products are powered by AI. Premium products like Total Media Quality, the classification product, Context Controls, our contextual targeting solution. Our new products in 2025, and they are all out in market mid-Q2. I mean, talk about shipping fast. The majority of our new products too are powered by AI. We view AI as a critical tool to both improve the accuracy of our classification products, the velocity of shipping our products, dynamic optimization, as I mentioned before, enabling brands and helping brands to drive up performance, drive up efficiency, and ROI. We are all in AI, both from a product and tech perspective. I would say we are AI first in running our company too. We have a complete corporate AI strategy for the company. We are going across all of the functions internally, whether it be finance, service, sales. I could keep going, marketing, and have a robust plan in terms of how we're driving efficiencies, how we're freeing up time for employees to spend less time on the manual stuff and more time on the mission-critical stuff that matters for customers. This corporate strategy, we review on a quarterly basis with our board. Yeah. Maybe to put a finer point on some of the things you mentioned there, it feels like the last couple of years have been very robust in terms of new product announcements, the growth of the portfolio that you're offering. Just as you think about the product roadmap going forward or the partnership roadmap, what should investors kind of be looking out for as opportunities for you over the next few years? Yeah, great question. I would say when you take a look at the growth levers for the business, it stays within the wheelhouse that we're in in terms of social, right? The largest social platforms will continue to innovate with Meta, with TikTok, with YouTube, continue to drive adoption of the post-measurement Total Media Quality. We have global brands that have adoption, for example, in 100 markets. That is dozens of languages. That is meaningful scale. Continue to drive that cross-sell, upsell, continue to drive pre-bid social optimization on the Metas and TikToks of the world so that a brand can say, "Okay, when I'm in Meta, I want to identify the content I want to be adjacent to, the content I want to not be adjacent to," and then confirm it once the impressions run. Social platforms, really important runway. There are additional inventories within those platforms that we have yet to launch our solutions. The second lever is all things optimization. You can see it loud and clear with the 24% we put up. The brands, they deeply care about greater transparency and programmatic buying, seeking out solutions that are differentiated, that drive up performance, efficiency, outcomes. We will continue to invest in all things performance and especially go after the programmatic CTV inventory. CTV, that is the fastest growing channel. We have made deep investments in CTV. We love the 33% growth that we are putting on the board. I would say those three areas in particular. The other area where we're investing a lot of time and energy right now is in our data in terms of productizing our data, leveraging our media quality data, layering our media quality data on top of interesting third-party data sets. We have a partnership with True Data. We're layering their audience data. We're layering brands' first-party data to create enhanced contextual targeting, again, to drive up that efficiency and ROI. We see lots of runway, lots of greenfields, both on a channel platform perspective, but also continue to drive cross-sell, upsell with our enterprise accounts. Those are the top 100. Go hard after mid-market. Continue to invest in the emerging markets. Okay. That might be a good segue to talk about just some things as it relates to this year. I want to talk about the guidance for 2025. When you posted Q1 results, you raised the midpoint to the guide for 2025. Obviously, a lot of puts and takes in the backdrop right now. What gave you the confidence to raise the guidance for this year despite all the changing dynamics in the macro that we're seeing? Sure. We are pleased, again, with our Q1 performance and the fact that, to your point, we moved up the midpoint of the annual guide and posted the 12% growth for the annual guide. A few things that we talked about on the call that continue to be the tailwind. It is the bet that we made on performance. We made a big bet last year on performance. It is clearly paying off with that 24% in Q1. The differentiation that we are offering the brands, the fact that we are helping the brands drive efficiency, ROI, differentiated value. We are feeling very confident about our performance capabilities. The second is the fact that we have diversification in our verticals. We are not overly dependent on one vertical or another. Across the verticals, we are just seeing strength with the product adoption. As we spoke to before, at a macro level, we're seeing a shift, and we're seeing a shift towards performance. That's the big bet we made last year. We have all of our products in market in 2025. It is all about execution as a team, continue to execute the business, continue to drive value. Yeah. You touched on this a little bit in your prior answer, but as we think about the biggest areas of investment for 2025, anything you'd call out in particular? It sounds like you touched on a lot of it in your prior answer, but anything else you'd mention on that front? Yeah. Just to reiterate, the investments include continue to strengthen our classification capabilities. Our technology is differentiated in the market. We hear that loud and clear. We see it with our 15% growth in social. Meta selected IAS last summer to build the pre-bid social optimization with Meta, which is now in market. That is a reflection that's not even just our customers are seeing. The differentiation of our classification tech, the platforms are seeing it too. Continue to invest in the modeling, in AI, so that we can detect all the inappropriate stuff at greater velocity, greater accuracy. Continue to double down in performance. Again, we love the adoption rate that we're seeing. We love the value that we're driving. CTV continues to be elongated. Continued investment there, as well as our data strategy. We love the green shoots that we're seeing in these enhanced contextual segments that we're offering to brands. Again, it all comes down to executing the business. I couldn't be prouder of our team right now in terms of how we're executing the business and just keep doing that in 2025. Yeah. Maybe we can spend a minute touching on capital allocation as well. Obviously, very profitable company, a lot of free cash flow as well. How are you thinking about capital allocation right now? Yeah. We are pleased with the fact that we paid down our debt. M&A is we continue to apply a Build Partner Buy lens to everything that we do. We are taking a look at interesting M&A opportunities tied to what I spoke to before, things like performance, interesting data sets, outcomes, and CTV. Just about coming up on time here. I wanted to leave a little bit at the end just to maybe ask you, when we fast forward 12 months here at this conference again, what's going to define success for IAS? What are you most excited about? What are you kind of looking to to measure progress in this upcoming year? Great question. I would define success based on our customers' success, right? Our customers' success is helping them drive higher performance, higher outcomes, higher efficiency in wherever they are running digital impressions. We ride along every single impression with them. Our customers' success is our success. The customers, again, they are hitting their ROI metrics. They continue to adopt our products. They continue to lean into our solutions. We continue to grow the company, as I mentioned before, targeting that double-digit growth. Okay. I think that might be a good place for us to wrap up here. Thank you, Lisa, for joining us today. Thanks, everyone in the audience. Thank you, everyone. Let us know if you have any follow-ups, and we'll leave it there. Okay. Thanks everybody.