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spk07: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to ATRN's third quarter 2023 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your first speaker, David DiStefano, Investor Relations. David, Please go ahead.
spk26: Good afternoon and welcome to Ad Therent's third quarter 2023 earnings call. We will be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after the market closed today. With me today are Ad Therent's Chief Executive Officer Jim Lawson and Chief Financial Officer Patrick Elliott. Before we begin today, I'd like to remind you that today's conference call will include forward-looking statements based on the company's current expectations. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially. For discussion of factors that could affect our future financial results and business, please refer to the disclosure in today's earnings release and our other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All of today's statements are made based upon information available to us today, and we assume no obligation to update any such statements except as required by law. We will also refer to both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures during the call. You can find the reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP measures included in our press release posted to the investor relations section of our website at www.adtherent.com. All of our non-revenue financial measures we discussed today are non-GAAP unless we state otherwise.
spk09: With that, let me turn the call over to Jim. Thank you, David, and good afternoon, everyone.
spk16: Thank you for joining our third quarter 2023 earnings call. During today's call, I will discuss our high-level results for the third quarter, provide a progress update on our ongoing investment initiatives, highlight recent and upcoming product innovation, and briefly comment on the macroeconomic and industry backdrop. I will then turn the call over to Patrick, who will provide a more detailed look at results and provide guidance for the fourth quarter and full year 2023. I am pleased to report that AtDarren's third quarter performance met or exceeded our financial objectives. Our unique machine learning offerings continue to attract elevated interest and uptake, driving an increase in demos, evaluations, new contracts, and ultimately more spend on the platform. Third quarter revenue of $40.9 million was above the midpoint of our guidance range and a return to year-over-year growth, up 9% versus Q3 2022. Thanks to the hard work and strong execution of the AtDarren team, We remain on pace to deliver revenue growth for the full year of 2023. We also drove operating leverage during the quarter, delivering $4.7 million of adjusted EBITDA, an 11.6% margin above the high end of our guidance range, and up 32% year-over-year, driven by higher adjusted gross profit margins and continued cost discipline. Results were especially robust in areas of investment, including self-service, ad theory and health, and our algorithm-based predictive audience solutions. all of which saw exceptional growth during the quarter as customers responded enthusiastically to our differentiated offerings. I'll discuss each area of investment in more detail. Beginning with self-service, we believe we have the best performance-oriented DSP in the market, and we are confident that continued self-service adoption will drive long-term growth. We saw record activity again in the third quarter, driven by a strong mix of new logo wins and increased wallet share, as advertisers gravitated to our cost-efficient, and transparent self-service platform for both media buying and audience creation. Compared to Q2, self-service revenue increased 28%, impressions purchased through the platform increased 36%, and advertiser count increased 57%. We also saw very high retention rates, an expanding pipeline of established agencies and brands, and outstanding customer satisfaction. This gives us confidence that self-service momentum will continue. In addition, in the coming days, we will announce a strategic partnership with Hero Media that establishes the first black-owned DSP in programmatic advertising, Hero One. This audience-focused programmatic offering will combine AdSense award-winning platform and technology with Hero Media's media network, exclusive properties, and unique data and insights, allowing us to reach diverse audiences at scale. Our work through Hero One will elevate multicultural programmatic advertising beyond assumptions-based retargeting. This exciting opportunity will accelerate adoption of our platform within multicultural segment targeting. A $12 billion market in 2022, the media trade organization Portata estimates will reach over $16 billion by 2027. This market is also perfect for our algorithm-based audience creation tools using aggregated self-declared race and ethnicity data. we can target multicultural users with a level of thoughtfulness and insight into multicultural families and culture not seen with any other product in the industry. This horizontal opportunity, available for both managed and self-service customers, will add multicultural depth to each of our verticals. Moving to Adtherne Health, our uniquely tailored solution and privacy-forward architecture, have proven highly effective and are driving tremendous success in the complex healthcare sector where privacy regulations are especially strict. In our view, adherence specialized techniques and safeguards, most notably leveraging machine learning algorithms, instead of relying on targetable user IDs, give us a sustainable advantage relative to large generalist DSPs. These embedded advantages and our track record of delivering superior campaign outcomes drove 28% year-over-year revenue growth and a 51% year-over-year increase in advertiser count during the quarter. Looking ahead, we expect even greater revenue growth from AddDaren Health in the fourth quarter. The number of active campaigns running AddDaren Health audiences also increased meaningfully in Q3, up 89% to 36% versus 19% in Q2. I will briefly talk about two of these campaigns. First, For a pharma client looking to target patients with a rare medical condition, At Their End Health Audiences outperformed all campaign benchmarks as measured by an independent third party, including 60% outperformance on the cost benchmark and 40% outperformance on audience quality. Second, for another pharma client looking to target condition sufferers with unfilled prescriptions, At Their End Health Audiences drove a 34% more efficient conversion rate than benchmark as measured by an independent third party. We are also making great progress bringing HABI, our health audience creation tool, to self-service users. Through HABI, self-service users can explore de-identified health records in real time based on diagnosis, procedures, prescribed medication, healthcare specialty, and many other attributes. Based on the attributes selected, users can see a variety of health insights, such as top diagnosis, top prescribed medication, top procedures performed, age gender and geographical breakdown this allows advertisers to create and activate custom health audiences on the platform that are tailored to their unique objectives we couldn't be more pleased with the customer interest generated in such a short period of time in q3 we conducted 26 product demos and one month into the fourth quarter we have another 15 already completed or committed the out there in health dsp combines three of our largest market opportunities health self-service, and algorithmic audience creation. We are extremely excited about this opportunity and look forward to providing more updates. Finally, in Q3, we received valuable third-party validation for our health audiences with Neutronium's NQI data quality certification based on our superior capabilities in areas including consent and compliance, data quality and sourcing transparency, privacy, and performance. This follows our receipt last quarter, of a Neutronian certification for our non-health predictive audience solutions. The NQI health certification involves an extremely comprehensive review of the underlying health data feeding adherence proprietary machine learning modeling processes, validating adherence position as a leader in privacy forward and industry compliant healthcare solutions, and it distinguishes us as a high quality provider in the healthcare industry. Switching gears to adherent predictive audiences, Across verticals, customers are leveraging our proprietary ID independent methodology for audience creation that delivers superior engagement rates while eliminating the expense of third-party audiences. During the quarter, there were 66 active campaigns running at their predictive audiences, a 32% increase relative to the 50 active in Q2, driven by our ability to repeatedly demonstrate uplift in campaign performance versus third-party audiences. In Q3, As part of a controlled test with a holding company partner, at-their predictive audiences went head-to-head with a major DSP competitor utilizing third-party audience targeting in the CPG industry. The results validated the performance we see regularly across our customer campaigns. This particular test concluded with at-their outperforming the competitor across all metrics, delivering a 43% higher click-through rate at a cost per click that was 51% more efficient than the competitor. Ad-their predictive audiences are an important part of our strategy. This product suite invites deep collaboration and data sharing with customers and showcases our market superiority in the area of machine learning and algorithmic targeting. In the short time since we've introduced our audience products, they have become a focal point of our strategic sales efforts. Finally, we continue to expand our premium CTV offering. During the quarter, we added additional AVOD inventory with MAX, Discovery, Roku, Viacom, A&E, and more. And we'll be adding Hulu in Q4. This builds upon our live sports and the live addressable TV offering that we rolled out last quarter, enabling buyers to target live premium inventory across a greater variety of online cable apps. In Q4, we will continue to expand our content metadata initiative to include network and channel information. As we have said before, Much of the data in the CTV bitstream is not standardized or normalized. Having network and channel data differentiates out there in CTV, making it performance-oriented and enabling clients to target, model, and report out on more granular content signals. Our ML-based models for targeting, pricing, and optimization facilitate smarter media buying, and the additional data further improves these models, generating measurable improvement in ROI. CTV performance was particularly strong within our self-service offering, where revenue increased sequentially 172% compared to the second quarter of 2023. As a result of this mixed shift, overall CTV revenues grew just 1% year over year. But self-service adoption continues to increase, and our new and innovative solutions are brought to market. We are confident CTV will return to robust growth. I would also like to make a few comments about the ongoing work of our world-class technology, product, and R&D teams, whose ongoing contributions are expanding our competitive mode. Our mission is to make programmatic advertising more valuable and efficient for marketers by deploying advanced machine learning technology and data science solutions, leading the programmatic advertising industry into a privacy-forward future not dependent on ID-based user retargeting. I'd like to briefly talk about two impactful innovations launched during the third quarter that advanced this mission. First, building on our natural language processing capabilities, we expanded keyword targeting beyond URL analysis to the page level. A travel client looking to target keywords that contain airlines or flight deals can now do so based on both the page URL and in-page content across the open internet. Our predictive models We'll also pick up these keywords during the campaign, and we'll optimize towards those that are driving the strongest performance. Second, as we previewed last quarter, we rolled out our themes taxonomy, which organizes our inventory into themes based on common keyword vectors. So that same travel client can utilize our themes capability to target travel content as a whole, in addition to using our robust keyword targeting capabilities. These NLP solutions are an important part of AddDarren's product suite, as they offer advertisers highly effective targeting methods that are machine learning-based, privacy-forward, and not reliant on user IDs. We also continue to receive more industry recognition for our achievements. Notably, we won the Digiday Technology Award for Best Buy-Side Programmatic Platform, and we remain Ukraine's best places to work for the 10th consecutive year. As we move into the fourth quarter and into 2024, we are pleased with our momentum and growth prospects. Even though advertiser outlook for ad spending remains mixed with ongoing concerns about the macro economy, we have strong momentum behind our core offerings, which we have enhanced materially in the past four quarters as we execute our strategy. Our budget and spending approach heading into 2024 will reflect the broader advertising caution but we are positioning for a solid year of profitable growth in 2024. Across our primary growth sectors, we're witnessing increased engagement from brands and agencies, and our sales pipeline has never been more promising. We have never been more confident in our ability to capture a growing share of programmatic ad budgets by delivering consistently superior campaign performance using cutting-edge machine learning and data products and verticalized solutions, and in the process, leading the industry in data flexibility, ID independence, and pricing transparency. We have made tangible progress during the quarter due to the patience and persistence of our world-class team, focused around a strategy which is successfully positioning Adtheon for sustained market leadership. We expect this momentum to continue. We remain on track to meet or exceed our full-year projections for 2023, and we are looking ahead to 2024 with optimism. Thank you for your support and confidence in Adtheron. Now I turn the call over to Patrick.
spk13: Thanks, Jim, and good afternoon, everyone. We are pleased to deliver strong Q3 results as Adtheron returns a solid year-over-year revenue growth. The quarter's revenue exceeded the midpoint of our outlook, and adjusted EBITDA surpassed the high end of our previous outlook. In the third quarter, revenue was $40.9 million, an increase of $3.3 million, or 8.8%. compared to the third quarter of the previous year, driven by continued momentum in our healthcare platform and from self-service advertisers. While we continue to see a challenging environment for ad budgets, particularly in verticals impacted by higher interest rates, this was more than offset by excellent execution and strength in our core areas of investment. In Q3, AdSert health revenues grew 28% from Q3 2022. and the number of health brands advertising on the platform increased over 50% year-over-year. As Jim pointed out, there is a significant increase in the number of advertisers utilizing Add Theran Health audiences. We also drove continued expansion in self-service revenue, which we've seen every quarter of this year, with a sequential increase of 28% compared to Q2 2023. This growth can be attributed to a 57% sequential rise and the number of advertisers using self-service, coupled with increased spending on the platform from existing advertisers. Turning now to expenses. In the third quarter, our adjusted gross profit calculated as GAAP revenue less traffic acquisition costs was $26.4 million, or 64.5% of revenue, up 50 basis points from Q2. The sequential increase in AGP margin is due to a higher mix of adherent health audiences which are less reliant on expensive third-party data. On a year-over-year basis, the ATP margin declined from 65.8% of revenue due to competitive introductory pricing to encourage self-service adoption and a shift in mix to CTV offerings, partially offset by the increase in health audiences and other predictive audiences. Total GAAP operating expenses were $41 million in the third quarter. up $1.7 million, or 4.2% from Q3 2022. The increase in operating expenses was driven by higher traffic acquisition costs and hosting expense to support the higher revenue base, partially offset by reductions in technology and development and general and administrative expenses. Stock compensation expense in the third quarter was $2.6 million for a decrease of 0.2 million or 7.2% compared to the $2.8 million recorded in Q3 2022. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $4.7 million, up $1.1 million or 32% compared to the third quarter of 2022, primarily due to the increases in year-over-year revenue and AGP offset by higher operating expenses. Consistent with our track record of cost discipline and commitment to prioritizing profitability, we once again exceeded the high end of our quarterly EBITDA outlook. Turning to our cash flow, we reported $1.2 million in free cash flow for the quarter versus $4.3 million in Q3 of last year, primarily due to the timing of working capital. Year-to-date, free cash flow was $1.8 million compared to $6.1 million for the first nine months of the year, mainly attributed to reduced revenue. It's worth noting that, similar to Q2, capitalized software costs increased to support our ongoing product and platform initiatives, with year-to-date capitalized software development costs up $2 million versus the prior year. It's also important to keep in mind that a significant portion of our annual cash flow is generated in the fourth quarter. We exited Q3 with a strong cash and liquidity position. At the end of the third quarter, we had $74.3 million in cash versus $72.6 million at the end of 2022. We have no debt on the balance sheet, but continue to have access to $40 million on a revolving credit facility. Now turning to our outlook for Q4 and the full year. The positive revenue growth momentum we saw in Q3 will continue into Q4, driven by strong demand for our new products across various verticals. The progress in our key investment areas, including our self-service platform, AdFerent Health and Audience Builder products, and CTV offerings, is driving improved results on a year-over-year basis. Our forecast assumes no significant changes in the macroeconomic environment. For Q4, we expect revenue to be between $55 million and $57 million, representing 8% revenue growth at the midpoint compared to Q4 2022. The adjusted gross profit for Q4 is expected to be at least 64% of revenue, and we anticipate adjusted EBITDA to be between $10 million and $11.5 million for the fourth quarter, or a 30% adjusted EBITDA margin at the midpoint, reflecting our significant operating leverage. Regarding our outlook for the full year 2023, we've previously provided projections for revenue, AGP, and adjusted EBITDA, which contemplated revenue growth, adjusted gross profit between 64% and 65% of revenue, and adjusted EBITDA within 16% and 19% of adjusted gross profit. Today, based on year-to-date actuals through Q3 and our Q4 outlook, we can be more specific about our full-year expectations. For the full year, we expect revenue to grow approximately 1% at the midpoint of our range, AGP to be approximately $107 million, and adjusted EBITDA to be approximately $19 million, or at an 18% margin. In summary, we are encouraged by our return to growth in Q3 and the many growth opportunities that lie ahead for AdFerent. Across our key growth pillars, we see enthusiasm from brands and agencies, and the sales pipeline has never been better. The business continues to track toward our longer-term goals, and we expect to sustain the second half growth momentum into 2024. At this time, we would like to transition to the Q&A session moderated by the operator.
spk09: Thank you.
spk07: The floor is now open for your questions. To ask a question this time, please press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster.
spk09: Our first question comes from the line of Maria Rips with Canaccord.
spk07: Your line is now open.
spk19: Great, good afternoon, and thanks for taking my questions. First, is there anything incremental you can share with us in terms of the state of the advertising market in Q4, and I guess how much conservatism is embedded in your guidance? And more broadly, what's the tone sort of of your conversations with some of your key clients?
spk16: Yeah, thank you, Maria. I appreciate the question. are sensing a very improved dynamic with a lot of our customers. There's a lot of enthusiasm and optimism around the products that we've brought to market in the last few quarters. In terms of incremental, incremental has always been a big part of the fourth quarter in our business, and we've already received and enjoyed some incremental. That has been a nice change from past quarters. And I think that our guidance, it should be noted that our guidance does not contemplate any unknown or kind of like unexpected incremental. Our guidance incremental would be additive to what we've guided the streets. So we feel good about where we are. We feel like the enthusiasm from our customers is a positive change from prior quarters. I think some of that's due to macro improvements. I think some of that's due to, frankly, the time and market with a number of our new products that we've talked about in our prepared remarks, our health offerings, our self-service offerings, our algorithm-based audience offerings. So I think that the enthusiasm and adoption of those is driving a lot of the momentum that we're seeing. But we are also seeing improvements in the macro. Patrick, would you want to add anything to that?
spk11: I mean, I can just give some more color that our Q4 guidance, the range really is dependent on slippage or our expectations around whether or not campaigns get moved to the future quarter or canceled. whereas any additional incremental would be upside to our guidance range for Q4.
spk19: Got it. That's very helpful. And then secondly, Jim, you sound pretty optimistic about next year, and you mentioned a strong pipeline. So given all the progress on the product side so far, how do you think about sort of your ability to grow and take share relative to the broader advertising space next year?
spk16: Yeah, thank you for that question. So last year at this time, we were looking forward to a 2023 where we had less certainty around growth and commitments from a number of our customers because our self-service offering at that time was close to being out of beta. In 2023, looking into 2024, it is a completely different picture. We have a self-service offering That has not only gone through beta, but has been incredible and driven incredible results for our early customers. And we have a lot of enthusiasm around customers seeking to deploy ad theory and self-service as part of their media buying strategies. So I think when we look into the 24 buying period, we have more commitments. We have more visibility into revenue, and we have just a much greater level of confidence as to the revenue foundation that we bring from 23 into 24, on top of which we will drive growth. So when we had, you know, if in 23, 22 going into 23, we had a customer that wanted to move into self-service, and we had a very early innings version of self-service, We didn't get that opportunity, and that impacted us, and that impacted our ability to drive meaningful growth at the beginning of the year especially. It's a different picture going into 24. I believe we have a self-service platform that can compete with any self-service platform, and moreover, we have a highly differentiated, verticalized set of capabilities, especially in health, where we have a significant advantage in our view relative to other platforms, and we believe we'll capture a significant portion of that opportunity. So we couldn't feel better as we sit at the end of the year looking into next year, so we're excited to keep you posted.
spk19: Great. Thank you so much, and good luck with the rest of the quarter.
spk09: Thank you, Maria.
spk07: Our next question comes from the line of Laura Martin with Needham. Your line is now open.
spk18: Hey Jim, can you hear me okay?
spk07: Yes, thank you Laura.
spk18: Great, hi. Okay, so I wanted to drill down on Hero 1 first, because from reading the press release, I'd like to learn a little more about that, because it sounds like reading the press release you're going to have sort of exclusive access to content in addition to data instance sites, which sounds like you've done a deal with a supply side, and you've been a pure play DSP today. So am I just reading that wrong about what Hero 1 is please?
spk16: Thank you for that question. We're really excited about our partnership with Hero in creating the first Black-owned DSP in partnership with Hero. We're very excited about tapping into our audience building capabilities, our algorithm audience building capabilities. Hero brings to the table a number of things. They're a multicultural agency. They have access to a number of data assets. supply-side assets that will be very valuable in creating multicultural offerings and fueling data and algorithms that we can use to provide thoughtful audience targeting in multicultural contexts rather than just the methods that are being used now, which again are largely assumptions-driven ID targeting based on one-off content consumption. So I think Hero brings a wealth of expertise about the communities in which they advertise and work and the clients and customers with whom they work, as well as a publisher network that they have where we'll get unique access to inventory that we have not had in our network before. So we're not shifting to be on the supply side. We're clearly doubling down, tripling down on our demand side capabilities and our ability to deliver value on the buy side. But we're partnering with a partner in Hero that will allow us to fuel our data assets, our models, our audiences with unique data and to give us unique destinations for multicultural advertisements.
spk18: Super. Okay. So you're still a fuel for DSP. Very helpful. My other question was on C2C. My other question was on CTV, Jim. So you said that self-service CTV grew by 127%, but that total CTV grew by 1%. So is the implication of that that all we did is substitute managed service CTV for self-service and kill our take rate? Am I interpreting that properly?
spk16: No. Laura, there's a shift mix in self-service. With regard to CTV, you're going to have a more self-service SKU. And I think that's good. I think we knew that self-service and CTV were going to go very well together. So, no, we're encouraged by that. I mean, I think we're going to see growth across both managed and self-service when it comes to CTV. At this point in time, it's the law of small numbers. I mean, we're seeing that we've had much more growth in this particular quarter through self-service. I think there will be quarters where we'll have a lot of growth across managed. But at the end of the day, the longer-term view is that we have a fantastic data-driven, machine-learning-driven self-service offering. And being able to provide that to both self-service buyers and managed buyers is going to be a key to growth. So I don't view it as a one-quarter story. I view it as the beginning of laying a foundation for driving growth across CTV, and self-service is going to be obviously a very big part of that.
spk18: Okay, and then my last question is, it looks like Google is actually going to finally deprecate Hushies in the first half of next year. Does that act as a catalyst to push more campaigns towards you? What's your opinion on that?
spk16: Yes, 100%. We feel very good about where we sit relative to the post-cookie world. We've talked a lot in our prepared remarks and in our prior quarters about the audience situation. algorithmic audience capabilities that we've built. We've talked about our contextual advancements and contextual advertising with keyword and natural language processing inputs to our data science models. And we're also working with additional partners to create more one-to-one insights so that we have one-to-one data as well. But at the end of the day, the cookie deprecation is coming. I also believe that there are other IDs that are things that need to be thought about and when you when you look forward being in a machine learning world where we can score impressions and we can understand data using statistics and we can have more than just an id based approach gives us a significant advantage And there are a lot of platforms talking about their household graphs and those types of things. We have great household graphs. Many of them are tied back to IP addresses. We also are thinking beyond the IP address. We're thinking beyond other data signals. So it's not just about the cookie for us. We want to bring to the market a really future-proof solution for targeted advertising that leverages machine learning and goes beyond not just the cookie, but beyond a lot of these signals that are taken for granted right now. And I think we're going to be in a very exciting place to share some of that information, and I look forward to doing that.
spk17: Thanks very much. Thank you.
spk09: Thanks, Laura.
spk07: Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Boone with JMP Securities. Your line is now open.
spk24: Great, thanks so much. This is Brianna on the line for Andrew Boone. Thanks so much for taking my question. Two questions for me. On CTV, what have you learned through this year? What CTV trajectory looking like for 2024? And then are there any impacts from the potential deprecation of IP addresses by Google?
spk09: Thanks.
spk16: Yeah, thank you for your question. We feel good about the CTV growth. Again, we were We were talking about the fact that there's a bit of a mix shift to self-service with CTV, and we think that's a good thing. We think it's actually going to drive a lot of adoption of our self-service platform. We've increased our inventory reach, our AVOD inventory with Max, Discovery, Roku, Viacom. We've recently added Live Sports, Live Addressable, and we're adding Hulu in the fourth quarter. We're also continuing to make investments in understanding the content object metadata in the CTV world so that our machine learning algorithms can use CTV signals and the bid requests so that we can score those impressions and drive performance and make CTV more of a performance-oriented engine. So I think we feel really good about it. I think the growth rates are going to be there. We're going to, again, we're early innings relative to other more established platforms on self-service. So as we scale self-service, I think we're going to really see great numbers on CTV. It's a big part of our strategy going forward, and we feel very optimistic about that. Regarding the deprecation of the cookie, as I just mentioned to Laura, we feel really good about where Adtheron is positioned. We are not an ID-focused company. We do not emphasize the one-to-one nature of targeting. We have a lot of different capabilities We focus on signals and bid requests, understanding those signals using machine learning algorithms to predict the outcome of serving an ad to an impression with given data on it, rather than just retargeting IDs, whether that's a cookie ID or other IDs. So we have a number of strategies that we're excited to share as we get a little further along in the year. We will share our view on the way that the post-cookie world will exist and Adtherent's role in that and why we believe that we have an opportunity to take full advantage of those changes that are happening. We're not waiting for Google to make those changes. We're actively working on building a future for Adtherent that gives us the advantage of being a machine learning company in a world dominated by ID-based one-to-one targeting. And I think it's a great, great opportunity for Adtheron and a great time to be a stakeholder in Adtheron for that reason.
spk09: Next question, please. Thank you.
spk07: And our next question comes from the line of Michael Kopinski from Noble Capital Markets. Your line is now open.
spk05: Thank you for taking the question. I just have a couple of things. One, that you had mentioned about all the new products and initiatives that you are bringing to the market and so forth. And in terms of your guide in the fourth quarter, I was just wondering if it was a way to quantify the new products that and the take rates of those new products relative to your guide. I'm just trying to get a sense of the tone of the marketplace, the advertising marketplace, versus some of the new initiatives that you have, and just trying to kind of gauge what the key drivers are across the marketplace.
spk11: Yeah, thanks for the question. Yeah, you know, we're very encouraged by our return to growth in Q3, and then we see persisting in Q4 and into the future. We do believe that this is primarily driven in this macro environment by our new product initiatives and our investments in our key strategic growth areas, including health and audiences, self-service, CTV. It is difficult. We haven't provided a lot of detail on parsing between growth from new initiatives versus other. But I could say a majority of our growth is from our new initiatives. A rebound in the macro environment would be a bonus for us. In Q3, not only were our number of active customers higher, but our average spend per customer was up 7% year over year. So that is indicating that what we're doing with our customers is resonating.
spk16: Yeah, I would add to that that we also have a lot of confidence that our margins will continue to remain strong and potentially get even stronger as we go with these new offerings. With the ability to utilize algorithmic audiences, utilizing our tools in our platform, utilizing the data that we have, rather than over-relying on purchasing third-party audience segments It's incremental margin for us. We're excited about that. And I also think that the use of those and the adoption of those that we're seeing in self-service has been very, very positive. Seeing the adoption by a self-service user who can either choose or not choose to use an ad theorem-based audience, I think it's quite impactful and an indication of of the future margin improvements and sustainability that we see at this point, given our new offerings.
spk05: Thanks for the color. And just one more further question, just talking about, as you indicated, the rebound. We're still waiting for a rebound in the total ad market. There's been some reports out there that the advertising environment is being fueled by the largest advertisers and that there's still a large number of smaller advertisers that are still struggling and not really spending. Is that the sense that you have, or in what regards were you referring to just a rebound, just an overall volume increase, or just the breadth of advertisers? I'm just trying to understand what you're saying.
spk11: Yeah, I mean, you know, specific to us, and as Jim mentioned earlier – as we go into Q4 and into 2024, we do have higher level of confidence in the sustainability of our second half growth persisting in 2024 because we're having better discussions. We're seeing incrementals come through already in Q4. And our spend commitments from our existing customers and the visibility into their spend for next year is at a higher level than it was last year at this time. So there is some incremental visibility and positivity there that we're seeing kind of across our customer base. But I would say that, you know, as we pointed to, you know, the areas of bigger growth, health, self-service, is where we're seeing this our area's investment really, really materialized.
spk16: I would also add that a lot of that, a lot of the answer to your question depends to some extent on the verticals that you're talking about. I mean, with health and pharma, we saw a lot of demand in government, CPG, really strong, and we're really pleased with that. There was some weakness in banking, financial services, and insurance. There are a number of I think offerings and products that were challenged or under pressure because of high interest rates and other macro considerations. But I think the bottom line is we feel really good. We have a very diverse set of vertical clients. We have large clients. We have more large clients than we've ever had. We have great middle market-based independent agencies and brand direct relationships that are really strong and growing nicely. And, you know, we're really trying to focus on those independence and middle market opportunities as well as, you know, we've made a lot of great strides with some of the largest media providers in the world. And those arrangements don't happen overnight, and you don't get there overnight. But we're really happy with the progress we're making getting our platform in front of those types of organizations, and I think it's going to be a really exciting 2024. Terrific. Thanks for answering the questions.
spk09: Appreciate that. Sure, thank you.
spk07: There are no further questions at this time. I'll turn the call back over to Mr. Jim Lawson, CEO.
spk16: Thank you. In closing, I would just like to thank everybody for joining us today. I would also like to thank Adtheon team members, our customers and clients, and our shareholders who have made it possible for us to deliver strong results which we believe are only a beginning. We are very excited about the momentum in the business and the future of AdTheon. We look forward to speaking with many of you on the road and to sharing the AdTheon story and our future plans. To that end, we've posted an investor presentation to the IR section of our website, which we plan to update quarterly.
spk09: Again, thank you and have a great evening. Thank you. you Bye. Thank you. Bye.
spk01: Bye.
spk07: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to ATRN's third quarter 2023 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your first speaker, David DiStefano, Investor Relations. David? Please go ahead.
spk26: Good afternoon and welcome to Ad Therent's third quarter 2023 earnings call. We will be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after the market closed today. With me today are Ad Therent's Chief Executive Officer, Jim Lawson, and Chief Financial Officer, Patrick Elliott. Before we begin today, I'd like to remind you that today's conference call will include forward-looking statements based on the company's current expectations. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially. For discussion of factors that could affect our future financial results and business, please refer to the disclosure in today's earnings release and our other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All of today's statements are made based upon information available to us today, and we assume no obligation to update any such statements except as required by law. We will also refer to both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures during the call. You can find the reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP measures included in our press release posted to the investor relations section of our website at www.adtherent.com. All of our non-revenue financial measures we discussed today are non-GAAP unless we state otherwise.
spk09: With that, let me turn the call over to Jim. Thank you, David, and good afternoon, everyone.
spk16: Thank you for joining our third quarter 2023 earnings call. During today's call, I will discuss our high-level results for the third quarter, provide a progress update on our ongoing investment initiatives, highlight recent and upcoming product innovation, and briefly comment on the macroeconomic and industry backdrop. I will then turn the call over to Patrick, who will provide a more detailed look at results and provide guidance for the fourth quarter and full year 2023. I am pleased to report that AtDarren's third quarter performance met or exceeded our financial objectives. Our unique machine learning offerings continue to attract elevated interest and uptake, driving an increase in demos, evaluations, new contracts, and ultimately more spend on the platform. Third quarter revenue of $40.9 million was above the midpoint of our guidance range and returned a year-over-year growth, up 9% versus Q3 2022. Thanks to the hard work and strong execution of the AtDarren team, We remain on pace to deliver revenue growth for the full year of 2023. We also drove operating leverage during the quarter, delivering $4.7 million of adjusted EBITDA, an 11.6% margin above the high end of our guidance range, and up 32% year-over-year, driven by higher adjusted gross profit margins and continued cost discipline. Results were especially robust in areas of investment, including self-service, ad theory and health, and our algorithm-based predictive audience solutions. all of which saw exceptional growth during the quarter as customers responded enthusiastically to our differentiated offerings. I'll discuss each area of investment in more detail. Beginning with self-service, we believe we have the best performance-oriented DSP in the market, and we are confident that continued self-service adoption will drive long-term growth. We saw record activity again in the third quarter, driven by a strong mix of new logo wins and increased wallet share, as advertisers gravitated to our cost-efficient, and transparent self-service platform for both media buying and audience creation. Compared to Q2, self-service revenue increased 28%, impressions purchased through the platform increased 36%, and advertiser count increased 57%. We also saw very high retention rates, an expanding pipeline of established agencies and brands, and outstanding customer satisfaction. This gives us confidence that self-service momentum will continue. In addition, in the coming days, we will announce a strategic partnership with Hero Media that establishes the first black-owned DSP in programmatic advertising, Hero One. This audience-focused programmatic offering will combine AdSense award-winning platform and technology with Hero Media's media network, exclusive properties, and unique data and insights, allowing us to reach diverse audiences at scale. Our work through Hero One will elevate multicultural programmatic advertising beyond assumptions-based retargeting. This exciting opportunity will accelerate adoption of our platform within multicultural segment targeting. A $12 billion market in 2022, the media trade organization Portata estimates will reach over $16 billion by 2027. This market is also perfect for our algorithm-based audience creation tools using aggregated self-declared race and ethnicity data. we can target multicultural users with a level of thoughtfulness and insight into multicultural families and culture not seen with any other product in the industry. This horizontal opportunity, available for both managed and self-service customers, will add multicultural depth to each of our verticals. Moving to Adtherne Health, our uniquely tailored solution and privacy-forward architecture, have proven highly effective and are driving tremendous success in the complex healthcare sector, where privacy regulations are especially strict. In our view, adherence specialized techniques and safeguards, most notably leveraging machine learning algorithms, instead of relying on targetable user IDs, give us a sustainable advantage relative to large generalist DSPs. These embedded advantages and our track record of delivering superior campaign outcomes drove 28% year-over-year revenue growth and a 51% year-over-year increase in advertiser count during the quarter. Looking ahead, we expect even greater revenue growth from AddDaren Health in the fourth quarter. The number of active campaigns running AddDaren Health audiences also increased meaningfully in Q3, up 89% to 36% versus 19% in Q2. I will briefly talk about two of these campaigns. First, For a pharma client looking to target patients with a rare medical condition, At Their End Health Audiences outperformed all campaign benchmarks as measured by an independent third party, including 60% outperformance on the cost benchmark and 40% outperformance on audience quality. Second, for another pharma client looking to target condition sufferers with unfilled prescriptions, At Their End Health Audiences drove a 34% more efficient conversion rate than benchmark as measured by an independent third party. third party. We are also making great progress bringing HABI, our health audience creation tool, to self-service users. Through HABI, self-service users can explore de-identified health records in real time based on diagnosis, procedures, prescribed medication, healthcare specialty, and many other attributes. Based on the attributes selected, users can see a variety of health insights, such as top diagnosis, top prescribed medication, top procedures performed, age, gender, and geographical breakdown. This allows advertisers to create and activate custom health audiences on the platform that are tailored to their unique objectives. We couldn't be more pleased with the customer interest generated in such a short period of time. In Q3, we conducted 26 product demos, and one month into the fourth quarter, we have another 15 already completed or committed. The out there in health DSP combines three of our largest market opportunities, health, self-service, and algorithmic audience creation. We are extremely excited about this opportunity and look forward to providing more updates. Finally, in Q3, we received valuable third-party validation for our health audiences with Neutronian's NQI data quality certification based on our superior capabilities in areas including consent and compliance, data quality and sourcing transparency, privacy, and performance. This follows our receipt last quarter, of a Neutronian certification for our non-health predictive audience solutions. The NQI health certification involves an extremely comprehensive review of the underlying health data feeding adherence proprietary machine learning modeling processes, validating adherence position as a leader in privacy forward and industry compliant healthcare solutions, and it distinguishes us as a high quality provider in the healthcare industry. Switching gears to adherent predictive audiences, Across verticals, customers are leveraging our proprietary ID independent methodology for audience creation that delivers superior engagement rates while eliminating the expense of third-party audiences. During the quarter, there were 66 active campaigns running at their predictive audiences, a 32% increase relative to the 50 active in Q2, driven by our ability to repeatedly demonstrate uplift in campaign performance versus third-party audiences. In Q3, As part of a controlled test with a holding company partner, AddDaren Predictive Audiences went head-to-head with a major DSP competitor utilizing third-party audience targeting in the CPG industry. The results validated the performance we see regularly across our customer campaigns. This particular test concluded with AddDaren outperforming the competitor across all metrics, delivering a 43% higher click-through rate at a cost per click that was 51% more efficient than the competitor. Add-in predictive audiences are an important part of our strategy. This product suite invites deep collaboration and data sharing with customers and showcases our market superiority in the area of machine learning and algorithmic targeting. In the short time since we've introduced our audience products, they have become a focal point of our strategic sales efforts. Finally, we continue to expand our premium CTV offering. During the quarter, we added additional AVOD inventory with MAX, Discovery, Roku, Viacom, A&E, and more. And we'll be adding Hulu in Q4. This builds upon our live sports and the live addressable TV offering that we rolled out last quarter, enabling buyers to target live premium inventory across a greater variety of online cable apps. In Q4, we will continue to expand our content metadata initiative to include network and channel information. As we have said before, Much of the data in the CTV bitstream is not standardized or normalized. Having network and channel data differentiates out there in CTV, making it performance-oriented and enabling clients to target, model, and report out on more granular content signals. Our ML-based models for targeting, pricing, and optimization facilitate smarter media buying, and the additional data further improves these models, generating measurable improvement in ROI. CTV performance was particularly strong within our self-service offering, where revenue increased sequentially 172% compared to the second quarter of 2023. As a result of this mixed shift, overall CTV revenues grew just 1% year over year. But self-service adoption continues to increase, and our new and innovative solutions are brought to market. We are confident CTV will return to robust growth. I would also like to make a few comments about the ongoing work of our world-class technology, product, and R&D teams, whose ongoing contributions are expanding our competitive mode. Our mission is to make programmatic advertising more valuable and efficient for marketers by deploying advanced machine learning technology and data science solutions, leading the programmatic advertising industry into a privacy-forward future not dependent on ID-based user retargeting. I'd like to briefly talk about two impactful innovations launched during the third quarter that advanced this mission. First, building on our natural language processing capabilities, we expanded keyword targeting beyond URL analysis to the page level. A travel client looking to target keywords that contain airlines or flight deals can now do so based on both the page URL and in-page content across the open internet. Our predictive models We'll also pick up these keywords during the campaign and we'll optimize towards those that are driving the strongest performance. Second, as we previewed last quarter, we rolled out our themes taxonomy, which organizes our inventory into themes based on common keyword vectors. So that same travel client can utilize our themes capability to target travel content as a whole, in addition to using our robust keyword targeting capabilities. These NLP solutions are an important part of AddDarren's product suite, as they offer advertisers highly effective targeting methods that are machine learning-based, privacy-forward, and not reliant on user IDs. We also continue to receive more industry recognition for our achievements. Notably, we won the Digiday Technology Award for Best Buy-Side Programmatic Platform, and we remain Ukraine's best places to work for the 10th consecutive year. As we move into the fourth quarter and into 2024, we are pleased with our momentum and growth prospects. Even though advertiser outlook for ad spending remains mixed with ongoing concerns about the macro economy, we have strong momentum behind our core offerings, which we have enhanced materially in the past four quarters as we execute our strategy. Our budget and spending approach heading into 2024 will reflect the broader advertising caution but we are positioning for a solid year of profitable growth in 2024. Across our primary growth sectors, we're witnessing increased engagement from brands and agencies, and our sales pipeline has never been more promising. We have never been more confident in our ability to capture a growing share of programmatic ad budgets by delivering consistently superior campaign performance using cutting-edge machine learning and data products and verticalized solutions, and in the process, leading the industry in data flexibility, ID independence, and pricing transparency. We have made tangible progress during the quarter due to the patience and persistence of our world-class team, focused around a strategy which is successfully positioning Adtheon for sustained market leadership. We expect this momentum to continue. We remain on track to meet or exceed our full-year projections for 2023, and we are looking ahead to 2024 with optimism. Thank you for your support and confidence in Adtheron. Now I turn the call over to Patrick.
spk13: Thanks, Jim, and good afternoon, everyone. We are pleased to deliver strong Q3 results as Adtheron returns a solid year-over-year revenue growth. The quarter's revenue exceeded the midpoint of our outlook, and adjusted EBITDA surpassed the high end of our previous outlook. In the third quarter, revenue was $40.9 million, an increase of $3.3 million, or 8.8%. compared to the third quarter of the previous year, driven by continued momentum in our healthcare platform and from self-service advertisers. While we continue to see a challenging environment for ad budgets, particularly in verticals impacted by higher interest rates, this was more than offset by excellent execution and strength in our core areas of investment. In Q3, AdSense Health revenues grew 28% from Q3 2022. and the number of health brands advertising on the platform increased over 50% year-over-year. As Jim pointed out, there is a significant increase in the number of advertisers utilizing Add Theran Health audiences. We also drove continued expansion in self-service revenue, which we've seen every quarter of this year, with a sequential increase of 28% compared to Q2 2023. This growth can be attributed to a 57% sequential rise and a number of advertisers using self-service, coupled with increased spending on the platform from existing advertisers. Turning now to expenses. In the third quarter, our adjusted gross profit calculated as GAAP revenue less traffic acquisition costs was $26.4 million, or 64.5% of revenue, up 50 basis points from Q2. The sequential increase in AGP margin is due to a higher mix of adherent health audiences which are less reliant on expensive third-party data. On a year-over-year basis, the ATP margin declined from 65.8% of revenue due to competitive introductory pricing to encourage self-service adoption and a shift in mix to CTV offerings, partially offset by the increase in health audiences and other predictive audiences. Total GAAP operating expenses were $41 million in the third quarter. up $1.7 million, or 4.2% from Q3 2022. The increase in operating expenses was driven by higher traffic acquisition costs and hosting expense to support the higher revenue base, partially offset by reductions in technology and development and general and administrative expenses. Stock compensation expense in the third quarter was $2.6 million for a decrease of 0.2 million or 7.2% compared to the $2.8 million recorded in Q3 2022. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $4.7 million, up $1.1 million or 32% compared to the third quarter of 2022, primarily due to the increases in year-over-year revenue and AGP offset by higher operating expenses. Consistent with our track record of cost discipline and commitment to prioritizing profitability, we once again exceeded the high end of our quarterly EBITDA outlook. Turning to our cash flow, we reported $1.2 million in free cash flow for the quarter versus $4.3 million in Q3 of last year, primarily due to the timing of working capital. Year-to-date, free cash flow was $1.8 million compared to $6.1 million for the first nine months of the year, mainly attributed to reduced revenue. It's worth noting that similar to Q2, capitalized software costs increased to support our ongoing product and platform initiatives, with year-to-date capitalized software development costs up $2 million versus the prior year. It's also important to keep in mind that a significant portion of our annual cash flow is generated in the fourth quarter. We exited Q3 with a strong cash and liquidity position. At the end of the third quarter, we had $74.3 million in cash versus $72.6 million at the end of 2022. We have no debt on the balance sheet, but continue to have access to $40 million on a revolving credit facility. Now turning to our outlook for Q4 and the full year. The positive revenue growth momentum we saw in Q3 will continue into Q4, driven by strong demand for our new products across various verticals. The progress in our key investment areas, including our self-service platform, ad-parent health and audience builder products, and CTV offerings, is driving improved results on a year-over-year basis. Our forecast assumes no significant changes in the macroeconomic environment. For Q4, we expect revenue to be between $55 million and $57 million, representing 8% revenue growth at the midpoint compared to Q4 2022. The adjusted gross profit for Q4 is expected to be at least 64% of revenue, and we anticipate adjusted EBITDA to be between $10 million and $11.5 million for the fourth quarter, or a 30% adjusted EBITDA margin at the midpoint, reflecting our significant operating leverage. Regarding our outlook for the full year 2023, we've previously provided projections for revenue, AGP, and adjusted EBITDA, which contemplated revenue growth, adjusted gross profit between 64% and 65% of revenues, and adjusted EBITDA within 16% and 19% of adjusted gross profit. Today, based on year-to-date actuals through Q3 and our Q4 outlook, we can be more specific about our full-year expectations. For the full year, we expect revenue to grow approximately 1% at the midpoint of our range, AGP to be approximately $107 million, and adjusted EBITDA to be approximately $19 million, or at an 18% margin. In summary, we are encouraged by our return to growth in Q3 and the many growth opportunities that lie ahead for AdFerent. Across our key growth pillars, we see enthusiasm from brands and agencies, and the sales pipeline has never been better. The business continues to track toward our longer-term goals, and we expect to sustain the second half growth momentum into 2024. At this time, we would like to transition to the Q&A session moderated by the operator.
spk09: Thank you.
spk07: The floor is now open for your questions. To ask a question this time, please press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Maria Rips with Canaccord. Your line is now open.
spk19: Great, good afternoon, and thanks for taking my questions. First, is there anything incremental you can share with us in terms of the state of the advertising market in Q4, and I guess how much conservatism is embedded in your guidance? And more broadly, what's the tone of your conversations with some of your key clients?
spk16: Yeah, thank you, Maria. I appreciate the question. are sensing a very improved dynamic with a lot of our customers. There's a lot of enthusiasm and optimism around the products that we brought to market in the last few quarters. In terms of incremental, incremental has always been a big part of the fourth quarter in our business, and we've already received and enjoyed some incremental. That has been a nice change from past quarters. And I think that our guidance, it should be noted that our guidance does not contemplate any unknown or kind of like unexpected incremental. Our guidance incremental would be additive to what we've got in the street. So we feel good about where we are. We feel like the enthusiasm from our customers is is a positive change from prior quarters. I think some of that's due to macro improvements. I think some of that's due to, frankly, the time and market with a number of our new products that we've talked about in our prepared remarks, our health offerings, our self-service offerings, our audience algorithm-based audience offerings. So I think that the enthusiasm and adoption of those is driving a lot of the momentum that we're seeing. But we are also seeing improvements in the macro. Patrick, would you want to add anything to that?
spk11: I mean, I can just give some more color that our Q4 guidance, the range really is dependent on slippage or our expectations around whether or not campaigns get moved to the future quarter or canceled. whereas any additional incremental would be upside to our guidance range for Q4.
spk19: Got it. That's very helpful. And then secondly, Jim, you sound pretty optimistic about next year, and you mentioned a strong pipeline. So given all the progress on the product side so far, how do you think about sort of your ability to grow and take share relative to the broader advertising space next year?
spk16: Yeah, thank you for that question. So So last year at this time, we were looking forward to a 2023 where we had less certainty around growth and commitments from a number of our customers because our self-service offering at that time was close to being out of beta. In 2023, looking into 2024, it is a completely different picture. We have a self-service offering that has not only gone through beta, but has been incredible and driven incredible results for our early customers. And we have a lot of enthusiasm around customers seeking to deploy ad theory and self-service as part of their media buying strategies. So I think when we look into the 24 buying period, we have more commitments. we have more visibility into revenue, and we have just a much greater level of confidence as to the revenue foundation that we bring from 23 into 24, on top of which we will drive growth. So when we had, you know, if in 23, 22 going into 23, we had a customer that wanted to move into self-service, and we had a very early innings version of self-service, We didn't get that opportunity, and that impacted us, and that impacted our ability to drive meaningful growth at the beginning of the year especially. It's a different picture going into 24. I believe we have a self-service platform that can compete with any self-service platform, and moreover, we have a highly differentiated, verticalized set of capabilities, especially in health, where we have a significant advantage in our view relative to other platforms, and we believe we'll capture a significant portion of that opportunity. So we couldn't feel better as we sit at the end of the year looking into next year, so we're excited to keep you posted.
spk19: Great.
spk09: Thank you so much, and good luck with the rest of the quarter. Thank you, Maria.
spk07: Our next question comes from the line of Laura Martin with Needham. Your line is now open.
spk18: Hey Jim, can you hear me okay?
spk16: Yes, thank you Laura.
spk18: Great, hi. Okay, so I wanted to drill down on Hero 1 first, because from reading the press release, I'd like to learn a little more about that, because it sounds like reading the press release you're going to have sort of exclusive access to content in addition to data instance sites, which sounds like you've done a deal with a supply side, and you've been a pure play DSP today. So am I just reading that wrong about what Hero 1 is please?
spk16: Thank you for that question. We're really excited about our partnership with Hero in creating the first Black-owned DSP in partnership with Hero. We're very excited about tapping into our audience-building capabilities, our algorithm audience-building capabilities. Hero brings to the table a number of things. They're a multicultural agency. They have access to a number of data assets. supply-side assets that will be very valuable in creating multicultural offerings and fueling data and algorithms that we can use to provide thoughtful audience targeting in multicultural contexts rather than just the methods that are being used now, which again are largely assumptions-driven ID targeting based on one-off content consumption. So I think Hero brings a wealth of expertise about the communities in which they advertise and work and the clients and customers with whom they work, as well as a publisher network that they have where we'll get unique access to inventory that we have not had in our network before. So we're not shifting to be on the supply side. We're clearly doubling down, tripling down on our demand side capabilities and our ability to deliver value on the buy side. But we're partnering with a partner in Hero that will allow us to fuel our data assets, our models, our audiences with unique data and to give us unique destinations for multicultural advertisements.
spk18: Super. Okay. So you're still a pure play DSP. Very helpful. My other question was on C2C. My other question was on CTV, Jim. So you said that self-service CTV grew by 127%, but that total CTV grew by 1%. So is the implication of that that all we did is substitute managed service CTV for self-service and kill our take rate? Am I interpreting that properly?
spk16: No, Laura, there's a shift mix in self-service. With regard to CTV, you're going to have a more self-service SKU. And I think that's good. I think we knew that self-service and CTV were going to go very well together. So, no, we're encouraged by that. I mean, I think we're going to see growth across both managed and self-service when it comes to CTV. At this point in time, it's the law of small numbers. I mean, we're seeing that we've had much more growth in this particular quarter through self-service. I think there will be quarters where we'll have a lot of growth across managed. But at the end of the day, the longer-term view is that we have a fantastic data-driven, machine-learning-driven self-service offering. And being able to provide that to both self-service buyers and managed buyers is going to be a key to growth. So I don't view it as a one-quarter story. I view it as the beginning of laying a foundation for driving growth across CTV, and self-service is going to be obviously a very big part of that.
spk18: Okay, and then my last question is, it looks like Google is actually going to finally deprecate Hushies in the first half of next year. Does that act as a catalyst to push more campaigns towards you? What's your opinion on that?
spk16: Yes, 100%. We feel very good about where we sit relative to the post-cookie world. We've talked a lot in our prepared remarks and in our prior quarters about the audience experience. algorithmic audience capabilities that we've built. We've talked about our contextual advancements and contextual advertising with keyword and natural language processing inputs to our data science models. And we're also working with additional partners to create more one-to-one insights so that we have one-to-one data as well. But at the end of the day, the cookie deprecation is coming. I also believe that there are other IDs that are things that need to be thought about and when you when you look forward being in a machine learning world where we can score impressions and we can understand data using statistics and we can have more than just an ID-based approach, gives us a significant advantage. And there are a lot of platforms talking about their household graphs and those types of things. We have great household graphs. Many of them are tied back to IP addresses. We also are thinking beyond the IP address. We're thinking beyond other data signals. So it's not just about the cookie for us. We want to bring to the market a really future-proof solution for targeted advertising that leverages machine learning and goes beyond not just the cookie, but beyond a lot of these signals that are taken for granted right now. And I think we're going to be in a very exciting place to share some of that information, and I look forward to doing that.
spk17: Thanks very much. Thank you.
spk09: Thanks, Laura.
spk07: Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Boone with JMP Securities. Your line is now open.
spk24: Great, thanks so much. This is Brianna on the line for Andrew Boone. Thanks so much for taking my question. Two questions for me. On CTV, what have you learned through this year? What CTV trajectory looking like for 2024? And then are there any impacts from the potential deprecation of IP addresses by Google?
spk09: Thanks.
spk16: Yeah, thank you for your question. We feel good about the CTV growth. Again, we were We were talking about the fact that there's a bit of a mix shift to self-service with CTV, and we think that's a good thing. We think it's actually going to drive a lot of adoption of our self-service platform. We've increased our inventory reach, our AVOD inventory with Max, Discovery, Roku, Viacom. We've recently added Live Sports, Live Addressable, and we're adding Hulu in the fourth quarter. We're also continuing to make investments in understanding the content object metadata in the CTV world so that our machine learning algorithms can use CTV signals and the bid requests so that we can score those impressions and drive performance and make CTV more of a performance-oriented engine. So I think we feel really good about it. I think the growth rates are going to be there. We're going to, again, we're early innings relative to other more established platforms on self-service. So as we scale self-service, I think we're going to really see great numbers on CTV. It's a big part of our strategy going forward, and we feel very optimistic about that. Regarding the deprecation of the cookie, as I just mentioned to Laura, we feel really good about where Adtheron is positioned. We are not an ID-focused company. We do not emphasize the one-to-one nature of targeting. We have a lot of different capabilities We focus on signals and bid requests, understanding those signals using machine learning algorithms to predict the outcome of serving an ad to an impression with given data on it, rather than just retargeting IDs, whether that's a cookie ID or other IDs. So we have a number of strategies that we're excited to share as we get a little further along in the year. We will share our view on the way that the post-cookie world will exist and Adtherent's role in that and why we believe that we have an opportunity to take full advantage of those changes that are happening. We're not waiting for Google to make those changes. We're actively working on building a future for Adtherent that gives us the advantage of being a machine learning company in a world dominated by ID-based one-to-one targeting. And I think it's a great, great opportunity for Adtheron and a great time to be a stakeholder in Adtheron for that reason.
spk09: Next question, please. Thank you.
spk07: And our next question comes from the line of Michael Kopinski from Noble Capital Markets. Your line is now open.
spk05: Thank you for taking the question. I just have a couple of things. One, that you had mentioned about all the new products and initiatives that you are bringing to the market and so forth. And in terms of your guide in the fourth quarter, I was just wondering if it was a way to quantify the new products that and the take rates of those new products relative to your guide. I'm just trying to get a sense of the tone of the marketplace, the advertising marketplace, versus some of the new initiatives that you have, and just trying to kind of gauge what the key drivers are across the marketplace.
spk11: Yeah, thanks for the question. Yeah, you know, we're very encouraged by our return to growth in Q3, and then we see persisting in Q4 and into the future. We do believe that this is primarily driven in this macro environment by our new product initiatives and our investments in our key strategic growth areas, including health and audiences, self-service, CTV. it is difficult we haven't provided a lot of detail on you know parsing between um growth from new initiatives versus other but i could say a majority of our our growth is from our new new initiatives a rebound in the macro environment would be a bonus for us um you know in q in q3 not only were our number of customers Active customers higher for our average spend per customer was up 7% year over year. So that is indicating that what we're doing with our customers is resonating.
spk16: Yeah, I would add to that that we also have a lot of confidence that our margins will continue to remain strong and potentially get even stronger as we go with these new offerings. With the ability to utilize Algorithmic audiences utilizing our tools in our platform, utilizing the data that we have rather than over relying on purchasing third party audience segments. It's incremental margin for us. We're excited about that. And I also think that the use of those and the adoption of those that we're seeing in self-service. has been very, very positive, seeing the adoption by a self-service user who can either choose or not choose to use an ad theorem-based audience. I think it's quite impactful and an indication of the future margin improvements and sustainability that we see at this point, given our new offerings.
spk05: Thanks for the color. And just one more further question, just talking about, as you indicated the rebound. We're still waiting for a rebound in the total ad market. There's been some reports out there that the advertising environment is being fueled by the largest advertisers and that there's still a large number of smaller advertisers that are still struggling and not really spending. Is that the sense that you have or in what regards were you referring to just a rebound, just an overall volume increase or just the breadth of of advertisers. I'm just trying to understand that, what you're saying.
spk11: Yeah, I mean, you know, specific to us, and as Jim mentioned earlier, as we go into Q4 and into 2024, we do have higher level of confidence in the sustainability of our second half growth persisting in 24 because we're having better discussions. We're seeing incrementals. come through already in Q4. And our spend commitments from our existing customers and the visibility into their spend for next year is at a higher level than it was last year at this time. So there is some incremental visibility and positivity there that we're seeing kind of across our customer base. But I would say that as we pointed to the areas of bigger growth health self-service is where we're seeing this our areas of investment really, really materialize.
spk16: I would also add that a lot of that, the answer to your question depends to some extent on the verticals that you're talking about. I mean, with health and pharma, we saw a lot of demand in government, CPG, really strong, and we're really pleased with that. There was some weakness in banking, financial services, and insurance. There are a number of I think offerings and products that were challenged or under pressure because of high interest rates and other macro considerations. But I think the bottom line is we feel really good. We have a very diverse set of vertical clients. We have large clients. We have more large clients than we've ever had. We have great middle market-based independent agencies and brand direct relationships that are really strong and growing nicely. And, you know, we're really trying to focus on those independence and middle market opportunities as well as, you know, we've made a lot of great strides with some of the largest media providers in the world. And those arrangements don't happen overnight, and you don't get there overnight. But we're really happy with the progress we're making getting our platform in front of those types of organizations, and I think it's going to be a really exciting 2024. Terrific.
spk09: Thanks for answering the questions. Appreciate that. Sure, thank you.
spk07: There are no further questions at this time. I'll turn the call back over to Mr. Jim Lawson, CEO.
spk16: Thank you. In closing, I would just like to thank everybody for joining us today. I would also like to thank Adtheon team members, our customers and clients, and our shareholders who have made it possible for us to deliver strong results which we believe are only a beginning. We are very excited about the momentum in the business and the future of adhering. We look forward to speaking with many of you on the road and to sharing the adherence story and our future plans. To that end, we've posted an investor presentation to the IR section of our website, which we plan to update quarterly. Again, thank you and have a great evening.
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