Podcast #47 - Integral Ad Science deep dive

An early pioneer in advertising, John Wanamaker once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” In today’s world of digital and programmatic advertising, content is created at a rapid and growing pace, driven in large part by the exponential growth of social media and video, adding new dimensions to trust in the marketing world. Advertisers are increasingly focused on brand reputation and they want to ensure that their ads appear in contexts that match their values, and also that they’re seen by eyeballs and not algorithms!

On this week’s pod, we deep-dive another potential hypergrowth stock, Integral Ad Science (IAS), one of the emerging leaders in ad viewability, ad fraud, and ad safety and suitability.

• Founded in 2009 and IPO’d on 30 June 2021 at a valuation of $3.3B. Insider ownership is low at 1%, and a 70% controlling interest is still held post IPO by Vista Equity Partners, a US private equity investment firm who have other investments in the ad-tech space.
• Based on a March 2021 analysis by Frost & Sullivan, the global market opportunity for ad verification solutions is $9.5 billion (growing at a 16.2% CAGR), and the global market for ad measurement and effectiveness solutions is $6.3 billion (growing at a 20.5% CAGR).
• eMarketer estimates that the global non-search digital advertising market surpassed $180 billion in 2020, and will grow to over $270 billion by 2023. Marketers are increasingly aware of wasted media spend related to ad fraud (for example, when ads are served to bots or non-human traffic instead of real people) or viewability issues (for example, when ads are served but cannot be viewed by a person). Juniper Research estimates advertisers will lose approximately $100 billion in annual ad spend to ad fraud in 2024, an increase from approximately $42 billion in 2019.
• Powered by artificial intelligence, IAS’s solutions identify non-human traffic by automatically detecting new threats and uncommon patterns, however, there is justified scepticism by experts around the effectiveness of IAS’s technology, although these claims apply equally to their competitors - and to some extent, digital marketing companies have few options if they want to protect, or at least to be seen to protect, their customers’ ad investment.
• With over 2,000 customers, IAS are one of the more dominant providers in their market. Between 2018 and 2020, their average revenue per customer for their top 100 customers has grown at a CAGR of 22%. In 2020, Twitter announced new partnership agreements with Integral Ad Science and a competitor, DoubleVerify, to provide advertisers with increased assurance around the placement of ads on a Twitter timeline, safeguarding against potential brand association with controversial content.
• IAS’s total revenue for 2020 was $241M a modest increase of 12.7% YoY. Dollar-based net retention rate reduced from 112% to 108%, but this may be a consequence of deferred advertising spend during H1 2020 due to the pandemic.
• IAS are operating at the intersection of a number of trends in the ad industry: programmatic ads, connected TV, social media, ad safety, consumer privacy and the localisation of global brands. IAS is an early-stage investment opportunity with significant growth potential however, investments of this type come with significant inherent risks.

The following companies are mentioned in this episode: IAS, MGNI, TTD, DV, TWTR

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