AI Briefing: Ad verification’s duarchy touts AI to Wall Street amid expansion plans

Both companies, which reported earnings late last week, showed off their road map for winning over mid-market advertisers across new channels like social media, CTV, and retail media. They’re also moving beyond the thorny issue of brand safety to try and prove themselves in yet another tricky area: performance and measurement.

As for the numbers themselves

• DoubleVerify reported fourth-quarter revenue growing 11% year over year to $191 million. Total revenue for 2024 grew 15% year over year to $657 million.
• Meanwhile, IAS reported fourth-quarter revenue of $153 million, a 14% increase year over year. Total revenue for 2024 also grew to $530 million, a 12% increase over 2023.
• DoubleVerify, which missed expectations, saw its stock price fall 35%. On the other hand, IAS beat expectations and saw its stock price jump 10%.
• DoubleVerify’s overall measurement revenue grew 7% to $64 million, activation revenue rose 10% in Q4 to $110 million and supply-side revenue jumped 34% to $17 million. Meanwhile, IAS saw optimization and measurement saw year-over-year growth of 11% and 12%, publisher revenue jumped by 30%. 

Moving mid-market

On a call with analysts, DoubleVerify CEO Mark Zagorski described 2025 as a “transition year” following what he acknowledged was a disappointing quarter. He said DoubleVerify is still in the investment phase of building out new tools across social, sell-side tools, outcomes and attribution. 

One part of the plan is the newly announced $85 million deal to buy Rockerbox to help build out new capabilities around performance attribution and optimization. Rockerbox, which DoubleVerify estimates will contribute around $8 million in revenue this year, will also help unlock a new segment of mid-market, direct-response advertisers to widen its addressable market. Zagorski emphasized the deal fits into DoubleVerify’s broader strategy of transforming its business from a static verification exercise into something more holistic. 

“You have to innovate, or you will die,” Zagorski said. “So we think there’s an opportunity for us to continue to invest in growth.”

Some ad tech experts say buying Rockerbox makes strategic sense and will help compete in curated media buying and measurement. Others wonder if it might compromise the third-party verifier’s neutrality but say it might also give DoubleVerify more incentive to improve media quality.

The acquisition could help with DoubleVerify’s push to attract small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and expand beyond brand safety into performance validation.

Karsten Weide, an analyst at W Media Research, said it could also give DoubleVerify a performance edge against competitors like IAS and Human — and against Adjust and AppsFlyer, which don’t have media quality expertise.

“The opportunities this acquisition presents are substantial,” Weide wrote in a post about the deal. “First, it broadens DV’s [sic] total addressable market by targeting small to mid-sized performance companies, a segment historically underserved by its enterprise-focused offerings.”

Industry analysts are split on the deal’s financial logic. Weide said the $85 million price tag is steep, especially if Rockerbox is only expected to generate only $8 million in revenue this year. However, Gartner analyst Andrew Frank said $85 million is a “pretty small deal in the overall scheme of things.” He’s interested in Rockerbox’s use of synthetic data — a growing trend in AI adoption —  to model missing exposures and infer ads that may have contributed to a sale.

“It’s going to plug more and more holes in the targeting and measurement foundation, which has been a growing problem for a lot of advertisers as well as the publishers who are trying to convince them that the ads are worth it,” Frank said.

On Integral Ad Science’s earnings call with analysts, CEO Lisa Utzschneider said there’s a lot of room to go after mid-market advertisers. She defined the category as companies that generate between $200,000 and $1 million in revenue for IAS. “We are investing both in the front end in investing in more sellers, more support, more technical support,” Utzschneider said. “And on the back end, performance really matters to the mid-market advertisers. So pouring fuel on our performance products, investing in automation and self-serve.”

Outside the open web, into walled gardens 

DoubleVerify and IAS have expanded efforts across social media offering more measurement and activation within walled gardens like Meta and TikTok. Last month, both announced new content-level avoidance integrations for Facebook and Instagram Feeds and Reels. 

Like its rival, IAS is working to bring its AI offerings into walled gardens. Last month, it announced content blocklist optimization tools across Meta’s platforms. Earlier this year, IAS debuted a new deal with Reddit to let advertisers integrate AI tools from IAS to measure brand safety and suitability campaigns. 

So far, DoubleVerify only measures 5% of all U.S. social impressions, but it’s already become a $110 million business, Zagorski said. DoubleVerify also sees both Rockerbox and Scibids playing roles in social media by combining Rockerbox’s performance data and Scibids’ AI optimization. DoubleVerify plans to use its Universal Content Intelligence AI platform to help advertisers avoid unsuitable content and optimize performance. It has also expanded its brand safety tools across TikTok and YouTube.

One analyst asked if Meta’s plans to pull back from fact-checking might give IAS an inroad. Utzschneider said it’s too soon to tell but also noted the topic came up a lot during CES in meetings with advertisers. 

“I will say our role in the digital ecosystem, our role in providing a best-in-class multimedia classification in all of the major live feeds of social platforms, is a tailwind for our business,” she said. “The brands were very clear during CES….They’re leaning into us to help navigate with them the environment that we’re operating in right now, and that’s a big reason why we continue to invest deeply in our tech.”

The shadow of Adalytics 

DoubleVerify and IAS have both been under increased pressure to improve their brand safety efforts following the recent Adalytics report and subsequent letters from Congress expressing concerns about everything from URL reporting to more transparency into how its AI systems operate.

Adalytics wasn’t mentioned on either earnings call, but some of the questions analysts asked seemed to have it in mind. One analyst asked about DV’s plans to expand URL-level reporting. Zagorski noted it’s more about making features more broadly available than offering anything new and added that it’s “more of a transparency initiative than an actual revenue or growth driver.”

“It kind of shows our commitment to driving greater transparency in the ecosystem to giving our advertisers comfort and confidence in where and how they’re buying,” Zagorski said. “…We look at it as part of our responsibility in driving trust in the ecosystem.”

Whether advertisers will continue to trust DoubleVerify and IAS with their spend is something Wall Street will have to wait until next quarter to find out.