Fair Money & Economic Opportunity

Direct Digital Holdings, Inc. operates as an advertising platform, not a financial institution offering lending or deposit services to consumers. Therefore, most KPIs related to financial products, APRs, debt, and traditional financial literacy are not applicable. The company's initiatives, such as the AI Council and Momentum program, aim to democratize access to AI tools and advertising opportunities for small and mid-sized businesses and underrepresented/multicultural publishers.

While these are forms of business support and education, the rubric's definition for 'inclusion_initiatives' and 'financial_literacy_initiatives' is specifically tied to financial products, loan books, or financial services, which the company does not provide. Similarly, 'product_simplicity' in the rubric refers to financial product disclosures. No specific quantitative data was provided to score the percentage of underserved clients or the impact of wealth-building outcomes in a financial context.

Fair Pay & Worker Respect

None of the company's employees are covered by a collective bargaining agreement.

As of December 31, 2023, the company had 90 employees, and 79 employees in 2024. The company states it has not experienced any labor-related work stoppages and believes its relations with its employees are good. The company adopted a clawback policy in 2023 to comply with SEC and Nasdaq rules regarding executive compensation.

Kind to Animals

Direct Digital Holdings, Inc. operates as a service-oriented company providing digital advertising and marketing solutions.

Its business model does not involve physical products, animal-derived ingredients, animal testing, animal agriculture, or direct impact on wildlife habitats. Therefore, all KPIs related to these activities are not applicable to the company's operations.

No War, No Weapons

No specific, concrete data points or factual evidence were found in the provided articles to assess Direct Digital Holdings, Inc. against any of the KPIs for the 'No War, No Weapons' ethical value.

Both articles explicitly stated that no relevant data was present or could be extracted, leading to the omission of all KPIs.

Planet-Friendly Business

The provided articles discuss Direct Digital Holdings' partnership with Scope3 to offer clients tools for measuring and reducing the environmental impact of their digital advertising campaigns.

This partnership aims to provide "green media solutions" and make sustainability metrics available for client campaigns. However, the articles do not contain any specific, quantitative data regarding Direct Digital Holdings' own operational environmental performance, such as carbon emissions, renewable energy use, water consumption, waste diversion, or any environmental targets or certifications for the company itself.

Respect for Cultures & Communities

The provided articles, consisting primarily of financial filings and press releases, do not contain specific, concrete data points or metrics related to Direct Digital Holdings' engagement with local or indigenous communities, cultural preservation, or related social impact initiatives. While one article mentions a focus on multicultural publishers

and another discusses board diversity , these do not provide the quantitative evidence required for any of the 'Respect for Cultures & Communities' KPIs, such as formal partnerships, revenue reinvested in local development, cultural appropriation incidents, or cultural impact assessment protocols. Therefore, no KPIs can be scored based on the available information.

Safe & Smart Tech

Direct Digital Holdings (DDH) has not experienced any identified risks from cybersecurity threats that materially affected its business, operations, or financial condition in the past two fiscal years (2023 and 2024).

The company has detailed incident response procedures and policies. DDH has an AI Council that developed a Responsible AI Framework and a "Responsible AI: A Beginner's Guide" for business leaders and technology teams, outlining key principles such as transparency, fairness, accountability, privacy, and reliability, and addressing alignment with major regulations. The AI Council also created a framework for employee generative AI usage, which includes guidelines for ethical AI use, data privacy, human review, and cyclic structures for evaluating and auditing AI tools. The company provides annual and ongoing security awareness training for employees. DDH's Colossus SSP platform, through a partnership, reduced security violations from 0.19% to less than 0.002% and ad quality violations from 1.57% to 0.08%, making ads served 20 times safer than industry norms. The company states it supports all existing and emerging consumer data privacy and protection regulations and advocates for them. However, the company's privacy policy indicates that personal information is not shared, but also states that users can set their browser to refuse cookies, and the site stores IP addresses as a partial identifier. The policy also mentions the site uses cookies to save passwords, and there is no mention of multi-factor authentication. The company's 10-K filing mentions engaging third-party services to conduct evaluations of security controls, including testing both design and operational effectiveness. The company faces risks related to changes in data collection, use, and processing regulations, and incurred costs in 2024 to regain compliance with delinquent SEC filings.