The fight is on to lock in the brands and publishers that will soon be left without a brand safety partner when Oracle officially shuts down Moat at the end of next month.
Integral Ad Science CEO Lisa Utzschneider told investors during the company’s Q2 earnings call on Thursday that IAS is “in the thick of the Oracle opportunity, and we’re playing to win.”
Earlier this week, DoubleVerify bragged about adding former Moat clients to its roster, including Pepsi, Ulta Beauty and AB InBev.
Although Utzschneider didn’t explicitly name-drop any former Moat clients that have defected to IAS, she did note that IAS has already won “several deals” and is amid “dozens” of RFPs with advertisers, platforms and publishers.
IAS has also hired 20 former Oracle employees since June and is now factoring a contribution related to Moat into its full-year outlook. Guidance for 2024 revenue is now $544 million, up from $538 million.
Overall Q2 revenue increased by 14% to $129 million, with measurement-related revenue unsurprisingly making up the lion’s share at 86%. Social media revenue, meanwhile, grew 34% thanks in large part to new relationships with Pinterest, Reddit and Snap and expanded partnerships with Meta, YouTube and TikTok.
Open web who?
It’s worth double-clicking into the breakdown of IAS’s measurement revenue, the majority of which (53%) came from its brand safety and suitability tools deployed on social platforms.
The balance of IAS’s measurement revenue came from the open web, said IAS CFO Tania Secor, which “increased modestly” during the second quarter.
This is a noteworthy split, because it highlights that growth in the brand safety sector isn’t coming from the open internet – a fact directly related to where advertisers are choosing to spend more and more of their money.
Although the impact of brand safety technology on news publishers is a top concern for many in the online ad industry and beyond, the topic didn’t come up during the call. IAS leadership didn’t bring it up, and no investor asked.
But there were 35 mentions of some variation of “social,” “social media” or “social platform.”
Utzschneider said social platforms are responding to “high demand” among brands to offer pre-bid solutions, adding that IAS is already live with pre-bid optimization on TikTok, LinkedIn and X.
“We’re well on our way,” she said. “And as the brands continue to request pre-bid on other major social platforms, we’re poised to launch those products.”
During DV’s Q2 earnings call, CEO Mark Zagorski expressed similar plans. He told investors that DV is actively developing pre-bid applications across multiple major social platforms “where we see an activation opportunity potentially as large as what we have achieved in the open web.”
In other news, Utzschneider announced on the IAS call that former IAB, AOL and Razorfish big fish Bob Lord has joined the board, which is a very important detail to include because it rhymes.
