Conference Transcript - IBTA 2026-06-02

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

all right i'm uh mark mahaney at evercore part of the internet research team along with austin riddick and we're hosting chris reedy the chief revenue officer of ibotta i apologize for my my voice i gave a commencement address this last weekend true story and i mentioned ai and all of a sudden all the heckles started and i had to shout the rest of my presentation my uh i went to a really demanding uh elementary school and the kids just get wild these days okay I made up the last part, but I did lose my voice, so we'll get through this. So Chris, thanks a ton for joining us, but please give us your background with Ibotta. I think you've come from a couple of different companies. I know you were at Twitter for a long period of time, so just, you know, what's your role at Ibotta, how long have you been there, and what was your background coming to the company?

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

You got it. Thanks, Mark. It's really nice to be here. My name's Chris Reedy, Chief Revenue Officer at Ibotta. I've been at the company for 18 months. Immediately before Ibotta, I worked for CTV Startup TV Scientific, since acquired by Pinterest. And then before that, I spent 11 and a half years with Twitter, both in the United States and then also running the Europe, Middle East, and Africa business. I think that the through line amongst all of that is a keen focus on trying to deliver strong performance for advertisers. I've had an opportunity to really understand the ingredients that go into successful performance campaigns. And also, I continue to chase it. And I think there's a real opportunity at Ibotta to deliver true value back to the advertiser.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

Okay. So double-click just a little bit on that, pardon the pun. So you chose to come to Ibotta 18 months ago. What is it specifically that you saw that was interesting about the opportunity?

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

Yeah, so the thing that really stands out is if you look at the CPG marketing industry, traditionally, it is not a performance-oriented marketing industry. And I'm talking like a D to C marketer, if you will, that's measuring every single thing, optimizing for success, kind of feeding the winners, starving the losers. CPG has not had that strategy, because it's more of a sponsorship model or a cheap reach model. relies on retailers to move to move product and I bought a we have a really unique opportunity and a very clear North Star to deliver back to our CPGs proof that we deliver incremental sales impact so not that we deliver a great media mix model not that we deliver a great cost per view on the on the television side but that we are actually delivering sales and not just sales but at incremental sales. And for me personally, when I met Brian, our CEO, first of all, he's a really compelling guy, so that was great. But also, we just share this belief that if you can unlock performance advertising for CPG, you have an opportunity to build a really successful and really large company. And that's hard to find right now. So I'm thrilled to be taking a swing at it.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

And you probably did your due diligence checks. were there one or two data points that you saw or one or two companies that you talked with that said there really is an opportunity here? I'll tell you the thing that stood out for me

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

is the misunderstanding I had of what Ibotta is. So I knew Ibotta. Ibotta had been an advertiser for one of my teams at Twitter, driving a lot of mobile growth, mobile app install growth. I paid attention to the IPO, but I had no idea that Ibotta was much more than the app. And when I saw the integration that Ibotta has inside of Walmart, Ibotta is the exclusive provider of Walmart cash. When you shop at Walmart and you search for toothpaste or you search for deodorant or you search for chips or beverages, whatever it may be, we give brands the opportunity to put Walmart cash, which is Digital Cash Reward, in front of the shopper. There is no requirement to know anything about Ibotta. There is no requirement to log into Ibotta. There is no requirement to do anything except to be a Walmart shopper. And when you think about that impact, going from millions of users inside of a direct-to-consumer app like Ibotta to tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of consumers natively inside of Walmart, just that did it for me. because that wonderful execution that we have built upon with Instacart and DoorDash and recently Uber and Giant Eagle meeting consumers where they are authentic way seamless way simple way that's really really powerful that was

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

the thing that showed me that this thing could really scale has Walmart progressed the way that I bought it would like it to progress I think pretty impressively

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

You know, if you think about the history of the partnership, we started out only available to Walmart Plus subscribers. And I think that's 2022 time frame. Walmart Plus in 2022 was a nice size, bigger than the Ibotta app, but it wasn't gigantic. A year later, Walmart rolled us out to all logged in digital users, so via .com or the And that was a real big kind of momentum, wind in our back Since then, we've worked really closely with Walmart to enable in-store activation. So if you have saved a reward, or you've added something to your shopping cart that has a Walmart cash award associated with it, and you check out in-store, there's a very clear call to action that says, if you want to be able to receive Walmart cash, put in your phone number, which links to your Walmart account and then that happens and as we progress forward I think there's opportunity for us to do more in store with Walmart overall I think that from my perspective the partnership is has progressed really nicely and we were

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

we've got a good thing going with them and then just just about one or two more high-level questions just sort of CPG opportunity to you know to really We offer performance marketing to them. How difficult do you think this is going to be? Is this like a year's slog? And yeah, I know there's a lot of CPG ad spend.

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

So yeah, if you just think about the TAM that we're talking about, $200 billion in the United States, more or less, from dollars that are spent to compel a consumer to buy a product. That could come from media activation, It could come from sponsorship. It could come from trade marketing. So it's a big number that we're talking about.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

Now, to your question, how long is it going to take?

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

I don't think it's overnight. I mean, I'm 18 months into this thing, and we're making nice progress, but it hasn't been overnight. This is going to be one of these things that requires kind of systematic and methodical execution. One, to tell the CPG businesses just what we just talked about, that we actually live natively inside of Walmart, that it's not an app that you have to go to and then go to Walmart, that it's all just seamlessly built. The second thing that we have to do is, and we've done a lot of this, we have just to show up really well as a revenue organization, a sales and marketing machine that meets a customer where they are. And I talk a lot about customer obsession. We're doing a really nice job there. And then we'll talk about this today, but delivering proof that you are adding value to the customer, not in a hand-wavy way, but really showing that not only are you paying for performance, the dollars that we earn are based on how many products you sell, but that the impact, the incremental impact, would not have happened had you not been working with Ibotta. All of that has to come together effectively. And we're making really nice progress there. But there's work to do. So this will not be overnight. But I do think it is a journey that we're on,

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

and one that we're excited about i think the company has consistently stated that a primary bottleneck to near and maybe medium-term growth is the supply getting getting enough advertiser offers yeah so just talk through that how do you get those yeah that the um the what we call supply

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

is is is advertiser participation and the world of promotions traditionally has been driven by a center of excellence inside of these big CPG so you've got these massive holding companies with all of these business units and then all of these brands inside and then there's this one or two people that are a center of excellence that that are the masters of promotions And in the old days, that's Ibotta's main point of contact. We would talk to that person, and we would say, hey, here's what we're doing. Do you want to buy more promotions from them? And had that person not heard from the oral care business or the fabric care business or the snacks division saying, hey, we need more promotions, they would have said, hey, thanks for the information, and if I get more requests, I'll feed them to you. What we've really done is three things. We've pivoted to becoming much more customer-obsessed and really trying to multi-thread our way through an organization. So rather than just working with that center of excellence, we're working with the brand teams. So we know the oral care people, the laundry care people. We know the snacks division. We're understanding what the marketing objectives are. We're understanding and meeting with finance teams so we can understand what the economics of a given business look like. We want to meet with the growth teams. We want to meet with the measurement teams. So, we are not beholden to that single entity saying, hey, we're ready to do something. We're learning as we go what is important to each team and finding a champion, if you will. The second thing that we're doing is working really hard from an insight standpoint, just to bring information to the customer that says, hey, here's a nice time to activate, and here's why. Rather than we just added Uber, do you want to try it, going and saying, what uber will do for you is X Y or Z and that gives the customer something that they can respond to and hopefully that customer had already said to us you know it'd be really helpful if you could help me with X Y or Z the last thing that I'll say here is effort matters and this is not a really simple sell when I was at Twitter in 2012 nobody had social media agencies nobody had teams buying social media. You had TV teams, and you had omnimedia teams, and you had digital media teams. We had to figure out how we fit in there to get social media off the ground. Now, fast forward 10 years later, and there was more people buying social media than you knew what to do with. And Facebook had scaled massively. We had done OK. Snap had done OK, et cetera, et cetera. If you look at when I went to TV Scientific, TV traditionally has been a brand channel.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

And we came against that and said, no, it's a performance channel.

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

What we're doing here is not dissimilar. We're really trying to break through and be a trailblazer. That requires being in person. That requires asking the right questions. That requires the nuance to understand who you need to work with. And I think all of those things together are helping us unlock supply. That's helping us, which really means just sell more effectively.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

Switching gears a little bit, you initiated, I think, structural reorg of the sales force in 2025. Or is the reorg, has the reorg been successful? Do you have the, are you set up the way you want to be? What changes did you make? And is it all translating into commercial wins? Yeah, so let me work those one by one.

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

First things first, like, we're a continuous improvement org. So yes, we did execute a reorg. I feel really good about that. But that doesn't mean that every day we're not trying to find better ways to operate. So that's thing number one. As it relates to have we seen the success, in quarter one, we reported 6% year-on-year growth with regard to our redemption revenue. And that's ultimately the offers that are being redeemed inside of Walmart, inside of Instacart, inside of the Ibotta That's the core of our business, and it is going the right way. I feel really good about that. Why did that happen? Well, we took the team and we organized it around industry verticals rather than geography. We had a team a year and a half ago that was east-west, north-south based. And in in those given environments, in the morning you could be at a beverage manufacturer, in the afternoon you could be at a paper company. And And that is really hard to do if you're trying to be a customer-obsessed, empathetic salesperson. To understand the margins of those businesses, to understand the pain points that they're finding, it's too hard. And so we now operate with a food team, and a beverage team, and a health and beauty team, and a home and general merchandise And we hire experts in those fields. We hire folks that have done this before, that have the relationships. And that has been really, really helpful for us. And ultimately, it's allowing us to deliver that, you know, redemption growth, which we believe is the catalyst for forthcoming growth, like we've talked about on our earnings calls.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

That 6%, is it a point where you're starting to build off that, so we should see faster and faster growth?

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

That's a great question. I would love to say you should expect that, but I don't think we're there to be able to make that statement. What I can tell you is we are a team that is singularly focused on how do we get in front of more CPGs and how do we sell them more offers. A year and a half ago, we had folks looking at the app that is a nice opportunity to make money, but we might have been a little overextended there. We've taken those resources and moved them around, and you'll see kind of in our D2C business that that business is down a little bit, you know, and that could cause concern. Ultimately, we want to drive redemptions, and if they happen at ibotta it's great they happen at walmart that's great they happen at giant eagle that's great to do that effectively we need the cpg sales team focused on that redemption business your speaking engagement must have been a real doozy i want if it is on the interweb i would like to get a copy of it um i'm feeling for you i've got some uh some mints in my pocket if you run low i

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

will i think i may i may need your help one of the core goals of this uh sales reorg i think was moving upstream into the cpg planning cycle what does that mean operationally and how does that change the budget pools you can access yeah we we talked i i talked a little bit about this a

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

moment ago but um we can't be beholden to a singular person inside of an organization when you're trying to sell a breakthrough story an innovation story uh if you just sell it to one person you know high likelihood that that may be the wrong person so that that's the first thing We use a term, Brian has actually adopted this, I think he used it on the last earnings, called multi-threading. Simply meaning, we've got to meet many different people inside the organization, because as we meet them, we learn more. As we learn more, we can triangulate what really matters. As we understand what really matters, we can bring the right solution to each of the folks. I think that we are on the right track there. her. And ultimately, I'll give you an example about how this can come to life. If you're just calling on the Center of Excellence for Promotions, and you say, hey, we added Uber, they might say, oh, yeah, that's cool. But no one's called me and asked me for promotions on Uber. So when they do, I'll be sure to let you know, and then we can activate. But now, we do something different. We talk to the brand teams, and we ask them, How does last mile stack up for you? Does it matter or is it just Walmart and Kroger and Albertsons? We talked to the marketing teams. How are you thinking about it? We talked to the finance team. How's your business when you run through Instacart or Uber? Do you want more of that or less of that? And all of that learning enables us to say, you know, these folks They said that last mile really matters to them So when we announce uber we make in advance of announcing uber tell them kind of an under an embargo say hey this is going to get announced next week we want you to be aware of it we want you to be aware of it early because you mentioned to us the last mile really matters and that is such a different sales motion and then you're providing a solution based on what somebody's asked you for and when somebody's asked you for it that's a really nice thing to sell so that's enabling us to drive more supply better salesmanship if you will just by asking more questions and just by showing up more effectively you've got this metric

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

Patrick, do you call it CPID? We do, we do, yes. Not Cupid?

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

Cupid, I think, has already been taken. So we wanted to steer clear of Cupid.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

Yeah, that could kind of be misinterpreted. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

CPID, we don't know that that's being used anywhere else.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

I've never heard it. Yeah, me neither. Cost per incremental dollar. So who came up with this? And has this created a bit of an unlock for your sales momentum?

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

That's a it's a great question on who came up with this I Would just think that Brian came up with this, but I'm actually not sure if Brian is the ultimate architect CPID predated me walking into the building and Just to to level set because it isn't a a known or a name-brand metric See it yet. Well said well said CPID is really the inverse of of iROAS. So if you if you're thinking about what's the incremental ROAS that this campaign delivered for me, let's say it delivered a three to one, and I'm not talking about ROAS because as we all know ROAS is a bit faulty and everybody claims success, and so everybody's ROAS is incredible. So incremental ROAS, let's say it's a three dollar incremental ROAS that you receive, so every dollar you spent you got three back, and that wouldn't have happened otherwise. What CPID is, it's just the inverse. It's one over that. So the $3 IROAS would be a $0.33 CPID. And the way that we think about this is when we're with our manufacturing partners, we ask them, and it's why the finance teams and the growth teams are important to us, what is the margin that's available, after all other costs are taken into consideration, to grow a dollar, to earn a dollar of revenue? And that's different if you're a paper company, if you're a soda company, if you have a great manufacturing setup, or you don't. Ultimately, though, what this is allowing us to do is socialize the fact that we are incredibly focused on the success of our partners. We want them to deliver and receive, I should say, to receive incremental revenue growth. Not revenue growth that would have happened otherwise, but truly, this doesn't happen if you're not doing this. and we are when you go into a to a customer and you can say hey look you spent a million dollars with me but we we delivered seven million dollars back to you and that wouldn't have happened otherwise those are really nice conversations to have really nice conversations to have so CPID and our journey our North Star to delivering incremental impact is really encouraging and that ties back to that thing that I mentioned the beginning when I met Brian the first time he said I think there's a real opportunity to deliver performance marketing to CPGs. Performance marketing isn't just easier marketing. It's actually marketing that shows that it works. That's why Meta has exploded. That's why TikTok has done well. That's why AppLovin is out of nowhere in the last three years. They have proof that they are delivering results. We're after the same thing.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

All right, you've got a lot of new stuff here. Live Lift, I like that, the sound of that. So you had strong pilot traction. I think you talked about this on the Q1 earnings call, an 80% re-up rate. So, what is LiveLift? How does that differ from the core product offering? And is there some sort of special monetization to this, extra monetization associated with LiveLift?

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

Yeah, so LiveLift is the encapsulation of everything that the metric CPID lives underneath. So, CPID is the metric, cost per incremental dollar. LiveLift is the solution. And if you think about what Ibot has been doing forever, we've been measuring campaigns forever. We've been providing performance metrics forever. We only charge customers when they actually sell a product. So we've been a pay-for-performance platform since well before I joined. The LiveLift suite of products really layers on top of our core offering. So if you imagine a core offering might run for two weeks, you might spend a couple hundred thousand dollars and then a month later we'll tell you okay here's the impact you drove this many sales this many of them were incremental you should feel really good about this or maybe it didn't deliver the results and we need to we need to change some things what live lift does is it gives you the ability to set an incremental sales target before the campaign starts so we sit down our data science teams with your measurement teams with your finance teams and say okay what is the goal you know how many units or do you want to move and at what cost per incremental dollar and we'll then come back and we'll say okay this is how much we think we can deliver they'll say okay we could we can buy this much of that so we'll set that target as the campaign's running we're providing intra-campaign reporting and that's a real difference between live lift and our core offering so rather than just a report at the end of the campaign we're providing intra-campaign updates. The reason that's important is because when you have an intra-campaign update, you can actually make a change. You could double down. It's going really well. If it isn't going great, you could pause. And that's really the ethos of digital marketing that worked so well. You know, what we did at Twitter when we were scaling, you know, an app install business, what we were doing at TV Scientific when we were running CTV campaigns trying to get mobile gaming properties he's installed it was all about running these experiments quickly seeing the results and then seeing where are we working and where are we not working and you feed the winners and you starve the losers and that's that that information that you're getting intracampaign enables that optimization and that flywheel is the thing that is really really exciting about what we're doing building something like live lift which is very data intensive it's very model machine learning intensive it's not something that you do overnight and it does require a lot of testing it requires a lot of work and so we are pretty intent on not going too fast here we are really focused on building a world-class product and delivering wonderful solutions to our customers and so sometimes somebody says hey I'd love to run live lyft and it might not be the right campaign setup might not be long enough might have too many parameters that don't align and And that's OK, because we have this core product offering that works great. But think about LiveLift as a mechanism that can sit on top of a standard campaign and that ultimately provides increased functionality that just helps the CPG brand understand, am I delivering incremental impact? And when I am, how do I do more of this? And if I'm not, because I'll be honest, not every campaign works. We've run campaigns, and we set targets, and we don't meet those targets. And when that happens, that's OK. Turn it off.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

Chris, is LiveLift still a pilot program?

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

LiveLift is early days. We've been running these campaigns for over a year. But I would not say we're at a place where this is generally available. Why not? Because we're still refining the models. We're taking in the data. We're building the infrastructure. We're modeling more effectively. And then ultimately, kind of leveraging APIs to pull all of that together to give the right result. you know as pilots and alphas and generally available go we're making real progress here ultimately though the thing that's most important is for our customers for the cpgs we deliver value that we have to do that every day and we're not going to get over our skis by going too fast here

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

brian has talked about a pricing strategy evolution trans transitioning from a flat fee price bands to a continuous percentage of price structure yep actually makes a ton of sense to me but how's it been received by your enterprise accounts yeah it's been received well um and

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

and the way that you see that is historically you know this is not unusual you look at a rate card and if you rewind 20 20 years and you think about like a media rate card for this many impressions you're going to pay this cpm for that many impressions you're going to pay this many and and it and there were sometimes there's some gaps in there and and that's what we had we had a pricing if your product costs from this to that it'll this is your fee if it costs from that to of that, this is your fee. Now it is just a percentage of. So it's a very reactive and responsive pricing mechanism. And it does make a ton of sense. The thing that it's really done nicely is for lower priced products, it responds effectively. So if you have a $2 product and you're paying a percentage of base price that's consistent with your $10 product, you're not saying, well, gosh, the way your fee structure is, I can only run offers for products that are $8 or more. So this whole set of inventory that I have, it just doesn't work for me economically. That has been a really nice unlock for us, because we would like all pack sizes and all SKUs to be active from our customer. And if we only have a pricing policy that incents you to run multi-packs or kind of the big values, then that's going to be hard on us. So it's been received nicely. And just to be clear, it's simple. You know, it's really easy to understand. If you have a percentage of base price, you just multiply it times the price of the product, and you understand. You don't have to refer back to a sheet that tells you how much you're going to pay.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

You mentioned Uber, and you've touched on Giant Eagle. You had a major competitive displacement with Giant Eagle. Who did you displace, and why, and how?

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

So let me tell you about how. Let me tell you about why. the the how really comes down to the LiveLift platform that we're building what I think the the retail ecosystem sees from Ibotta right now is a platform for tomorrow a platform that will help them drive incremental revenue growth on their own how does that happen well we're using intelligence as we've just been talking about to show CPGs that we deliver true value well we do that more More CPGs activate with us. So we have a wider swath of offers available today or tomorrow than any of our competitors would. That's a really good thing for Giant Eagle, because now their shopper has more of an opportunity to receive cash back and to find value. What is the American consumer looking for today? What are they looking for? More value. And then more value, because it's so unpredictable, what's happening in our world today. So I think that is the thing that is driving the interest in Ibotta. And I think you can expect us to continue to work on this. We want to meet the American consumer where they are. We've had great success. Walmart is such a great platform, Instacart, DoorDash, Uber. But the thing about Giant Eagle that's really nice, it's a regional grocer. There's a lot of folks in that part of America that that's where they shop. And a lot of Americans are omnichannel. So in the afternoon, they're on Uber or Instacart. But on the weekends, they're going into the grocery store, or maybe building their baskets through e-commerce. So we are really intent on building our network through more retail partnerships such that we can just be this resource for the American consumer. You don't have to know about Ibotta. We just want to show up authentically inside of all of these ecosystems. And that delivers for the retailer, because it delivers for the CPG, because it delivers for the consumer. Where is Giant Eagle? giant eagle is pennsylvania and ohio by and large okay i went to school in pennsylvania i only saw wah-wahs uh i don't know the wah-wah i went to school in ohio though and i saw i saw a lot of

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

mire in ohio do you have any mire in no no but i was in philadelphia maybe that's different yeah probably to big city life yeah yeah big city all right um wonderful city i always was a fan of All right, direct-to-consumer app declined 25% year-over-year. Does this matter anymore, I wonder? Is the legacy DDC app in structural decline? I think it is. I don't think you're, I don't think it's a priority for the company, is it?

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

You know, you got to be thoughtful about, when you add Walmart, or you add Instacart, the aperture widens dramatically. We're trying to find, we're trying to make offers move faster. we don't mind if a redemption happens at walmart or instacart or giant eagle or the ibotta app and so if you think about the economics where five years ago we had to spend to grow the ibotta app because that was our only connection point with the consumer if the ibotta app didn't grow didn't maintain that was a real challenge because that put all of our budgets at risk as we've been able to expand the ibotta performance network it's less of a need from a revenue standpoint now let's be clear more revenue is better I would like that we are going to constantly look at different ways we can monetize the app that's something that that we're keen to do but what we're less keen to do is put the marketing budget behind the app right now to grow users because it is it is not incremental from a redemption standpoint because we have such a large footprint

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

throughout the ibotta performance network okay two more questions and then i'll see austin if you want to jump in with a question but uh cpg ad budgets under scrutiny and um revenue is supposed to inflict back to positive growth in q3 so were that hypothetically to happen why would

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

revenue growth start inflecting back up I think a couple reasons one because we're showing up effectively so we're just we're just executing well two we have a product that delivers value and as we were just talking about the American consumer is looking for value price is a major problem for the consumer today the last thing I'll say if you're CPG the bar has been raised on on how and where you allocate a marketing dollar. You are under pressure, as you mentioned. And when that's happening, you've got to be pretty discerning with where your dollars are So if you have a platform and a partner that says, look, we are purely paid for performance. Only give us money when we actually sell one of your products. And two, hold us accountable to delivering incremental impact. Not just impact, but incremental impact. That's the way we show up. That's a pretty compelling way to win dollars from a CPG. So, while the category is definitely challenged right now, our mode of operation is in the right place. We are delivering value. We are delivering proof. And that's what the American consumer is looking for, that's what the CPG is looking for.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

I see it. Two more questions. What's harder, convincing advertisers to commit to Twitter, or, you know, in the past, or convincing CPG advertisers to commit to Ibotta?

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

I think Twitter in the early days was really hard because advertisers didn't know what they were doing. What are they getting from this? Honestly, we were selling when someone clicked the heart on a tweet. That's really hard to turn into economic value, or selling when somebody clicks the retweet button. So that was tough. What Ibotta has, I would have dreamed for at Twitter. We have a pure pay for performance product. Only give me money when I sell your product. That's the only time. That is a relatively awesome value proposition. The hard part, as I mentioned earlier, is just that when you aren't deep inside of an organization, and something that Twitter had was pop culture cred. And so if I wanted to get into a company when I was at Twitter, you make a few phone calls, you can get a meeting, because Twitter was everywhere. And Ibotta is well known inside of the CPG promotion space we've got to expand through that we've got to help promotions break out that's what we're doing and so once you get in there our value proposition is

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

easier to sell having a brand like Twitter it's kind of shrunk hasn't it I think based on what I've gone I think it's called X I think even though the ad base has been cut like in half or 80% 80% yeah I think that I think the

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

numbers it was plus or minus five billion dollar run rate yeah acquisition and now we're at about

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

one yeah you think you can recover i think it's gonna be real hard i think it's gonna be real hard

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

i think i'm not sure if any usage metrics have been published but my instinct is that usage is way down um and the uh there's a lot that has happened in the last three years in the social sphere there's been a lot of innovation and gosh it's going to be tough to catch up hey by the way

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

i'm sorry i keep uh if if if cpg advertisers aren't where are you trying to get dollars from where are they spending those dollars now like what's your source of funds good question so um

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

you know there's two major major budget silos or or entities inside of a cpg there's a there's a The trade budget that tends to live on the sales side of the house or the finance side of the house, that historically has been allocated retailer by retailer. Now you're seeing more of a national approach. So rather than retailer A versus retailer B, there's a national pool. And that's where the cash back funding comes from. So if and when we're running a campaign, the cash back coupon side, if you will, is funded by trade. Generally, the fees that come to Ibotta are funded by the media side of the house. So that is a little different than just selling media, because you've got to be able to get folks that may not actually live in the same org to be able to get their budgets to work together. As it relates to where is it coming from, what I feel really confident about is, given what we're talking about the the CPG industry you know it's it's challenged today and the bar for where dollars is going is raising and I think we eclipsed that bar because we deliver proof and we are a paper for performance partner and I think what will happen is as people see our results what will happen internally is you'll start to look at not trade not media but how do we just look at the lowest performing what you'll see is more of these brands will start to call the bottom performers, the bottom quartile of where they're spending their social media, where they're spending their CTV, or where they're spending their digital display, or if they have trade allocated to retailers that are shrinking, or maybe they don't have the same shelf space. I think you'll see those dollars come back into the center of the org and be up for grabs for the partners that are truly delivering value. And that's where I think we can really stand out, because we deliver value. Could you give us some examples of what

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

would be in that bottom quartile that's being culled?

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

Well, it's hard for me to say what is performing, but what is performing and what isn't performing. But I think if you're a marketer, marketing plans tend to be portfolio strategy. You're not just buying one thing. Now, part of your strategy might be to sponsor the Champions League, or might be to sponsor the US men's national team. We've got the World Cup coming up. But you also have, you've got CTV running. You might have TV, linear TV. You've got social running, you have digital display. You've got all these different things going together. Put it in a media mix model, and it tells you something. I think what you'll see happen is that the chief marketing officer will sit down with the chief financial officer. And the chief financial officer will say, hey, if I needed 10% of your budget, not to take away from you, but to ask you to reallocate it into higher performing things, where would you find that 10%? And I think the chief marketing officer, and it would depend company by company, will say, OK, this is lagging. That is lagging over there. And so let's pull that, fund experiments. And then if the experiments pay off, well, then we double down. And if they don't, then cycle it back through. And that's what you see in performance marketing. Performance marketing is another continuous improvement channel. You think about the mobile app ecosystem. It doesn't stop. Your goal's never, OK, we're done. We did it. Now give us a lot. No, it's every single day you have to improve. And CMOs inside of a mobile gaming company, they look much more like CFOs than they do like creative geniuses. That's a difference. A CMO of a traditional media company, or sorry, a traditional marketing shop, they're not going to be the CFO. But I think we're seeing that change a little bit. So I can't say explicitly who is going to fall through. But I will say, I like to be in places where the platform can deliver proof. And if I was working for a company right now, asking for advertising dollars, and I couldn't tell you how it was delivering value back to your company, that would make me nervous.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

Are you still sponsoring the Denver Nuggets? We are still sponsoring the Denver Nuggets. You get courtside seats? There are some tickets available.

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

They're nice. Call Brian Leach. No, I'm kidding.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

Last question. And I can't believe I've gone this far without asking about how Ibotta fits into an agentic commerce world. Is the CPG ad spend the last to figure this out?

Chris Riedy, Analyst — Other

No. There's a lot of talk. Has anyone figured it out? I think agentic commerce is very cool sounding buzzword. But here's what I think. You know, I was having this conversation the other day. A use case of this agentic commerce, which makes a ton of sense to me, is not the high consideration part of shopping. So personally like if I'm doing a vacation I like to experience the looking at the websites and thinking about where we're gonna be I don't want to just say to one of the agents go figure this out for me You know if you're buying a house you're not gonna go figure this out for me, but what about consumer staples? You know what about what about laundry detergent? What about toothpaste? What about? You know soda what about milk? So where I think it gets interesting is is the metadata that sits behind a product. So you've got a product. Let's just say it's toothpaste. It's a three-pack. It's got these features and benefits. It's available at these stores. As a consumer, I feel there are a couple of things you're really interested in. One, availability. So can I actually buy the thing? Two, how quickly am I going to get it? If it's whatever time it is, 2.30 on a Tuesday afternoon, to him. I need it for 6 p.m. tonight. Well, that rules out a lot of other things. The other thing is price. It could be absolute price. It could be the amount of discount right now. What we believe is all we're doing is offering a brand the ability to discount a price. And it sounds simple, but it's really important. And as agents become more prolific, more ubiquitous, they're going to be looking for price. Why? Because you and I are gonna say, hey, for this product set, please provide me the three cheapest options, or please provide me the three options that are on the deepest discount right now. Some other folks are gonna say, only give me the products that I can get in one hour. Period. Full stop. That's the list. And that information, is it available? How quickly can I get it? What is the price? What is the discount? That is just metadata that should live with each product so I believe as these agents and whether it's one of the the big AI companies or it's Sparky inside of Walmart or I think Alexa has taken over Rufus at Amazon wherever it happens availability delivery time price I think it's I think it's integral to how those those things work and I think we sit right there so i feel really excited about it um i don't know personally my household has not adopted agentic shopping in that regard yet so i think there's still a little bit more time a little more work to do you want to ask a question we're at the end of we got to get

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore

you a water chris reedy's chief revenue officer of ibotta thank you very much chris great to see