MediaAlpha, Inc. Canaccord Genuity's 46th Annual Growth Conference

Great. Thanks, Maria. Thanks for having us, Maria.

Yeah. I think the industry backdrop that we have right now is very good. It's a very good position. Broadly speaking, I'll probably oversimplify things here, but every auto insurance carrier is profitable right now. I'm sure if you canvassed, you could find one of the top 100 that isn't, but pretty much everybody is making money. Carriers are increasingly pivoting from being in a situation where they're focused on getting underwriting results where they need them to be. So they've kind of pivoted from that to looking for growth. As you look over the last four, five, six years, the lion's share of industry growth has gone to one or two players in the industry. A lot of the other players are now, I think, answering questions from investors or from the boardroom of, "How are you going to grow?

You need to grow." That plays very much to our strengths of being a performance marketing channel that's very measurable and allows carriers to focus on the customer segments, cohorts, and characteristics where they are most likely to win. We really like where we're positioned right now. We think that we've got the wind at our back, and we should continue to do that for the years to come.

Maria, I'll take that one. I think you're right to point out where we are in the cycle, which is firmly kind of in a soft market, right? That's where carriers are competing aggressively for new customer acquisition. I'd say that historically, these are multi-year cycles, right? We're a couple of years into a recovery from a generationally hard market in 2022, 2023.

But as you look back, the leading indicator here of combined ratio and carrier profitability, and we sit in a really good spot as an acquisition, right? With everyone seeing combined ratio at or near peak levels of profitability. And so even when the market starts to harden, what we've seen in the past, and I'll point to 2006 and 2016, you see ad spend growth maybe moderate a little bit, decline in the low to mid-single digits. And from there you have years of equilibrium where ad spend continues to kind of grow at a modest rate. And so where we are today is a place where we see a broadening of demand and a lot of carriers really turning to growth and trying to drive policy in force. And it's coming from everyone outside of the top 2, right?

And so that, I think, signals to us that we're in a good spot in the cycle. We expect that to be a good multi-year run, right? Rather than a softening that's led by just one or 2 carriers.

What are you seeing? We're seeing the larger carriers continue to focus on growth, and highly efficient growth.

What we're seeing is an acceleration from the field, right? Everyone other than the top 2 really stepping on the gas and starting to catch up, right? And so it's mostly the, I won't call them new entrants because we've worked with these carriers for years.

They just hadn't stepped up the level of investment in our channel the way they have here in 2026. I think one stat that we put out there was everyone outside of the top 2, what we've seen from carriers 3, 4, and 5, is a 4x growth year-over-year, first half 2026 over 2025 in terms of ad spend growth. The top 2 continue to grow at double-digit rates, but it's really that field catching up.

That's a really good sign for us.