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spk05: Good afternoon. Thank you for attending the Fluent Inc. Q1 2022 earnings call. My name is Matt and I will be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Dan Barsky with Fluent. Dan, please go ahead.
spk02: Good afternoon and welcome. Thank you for joining us to discuss our first quarter 2022 earnings results. Joining me today on today's call are Fluent CEO, Don Patrick, our CFO, Segunda Kondiwal, and Ryan Schilke, our co-founder and chief strategy officer. Our call will begin with comments from Don Patrick and Segunda Kondiwal, followed by a question and answer session. I would like to remind you that today's call is being webcast live and recorded. A replay of the event will be available following the call on our website. To access the webcast, please visit our investor relations page on our website, www.fluentco.com. Before we begin, I would like to advise listeners that certain information discussed by management during this conference call will contain forward-looking statements which are covered by the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any forward-looking statements made during this call speak only as of the date hereof. Actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied by our forward-looking statements due to risks and uncertainties associated with the company's business. These statements may be identified by words such as expects, plans, projects, could, will, may, anticipates, believes, should, intend, estimates, and other words of similar meaning. The company undertakes no obligation to update the information provided on this call. For a discussion of the risks and uncertainties associated with Fluent's business, we encourage you to review the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the company's most recent annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. During the call, we will also present certain non-GAAP financial information relating to median margin, adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted net income. Management evaluates the financial performance of our business on a variety of indicators, including a median margin, adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted net income. The definitions of these metrics and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the earnings release issued later today. With that, I'm pleased to introduce Fluent's CEO, Don Patrick.
spk03: Thank you, Danny. Good afternoon. Thanks to all of you for joining our call today. I'm here together with Ryan Schuelke, our Chief Strategy Officer, Chairman of the Board and Company Founder, and Segunda Condewall, our Chief Financial Officer. Our first quarter results are consistent with what we articulated in our 2021 year-end earnings release and represent the continued progress we're making towards our long-term strategic growth plan. focused on building high-quality digital experiences for consumers while creating more effective, efficient, and sustainable customer acquisition solutions for marketers. We continue to invest in strategic platforms where we remain confident that as we establish fluent presence and gain market share, we'll also be able to expand our margin over time by way of our operational capabilities. In Q1 2022, Our financial results are as follows. Revenue of $89.1 million represents 27% year-over-year growth and is a positive reflection of prioritizing our long-term growth strategies. We continue to lean into opportunities where we can establish and leverage freelance brand credentials in the marketplace. Our median margin of $26 million is up 4% year-over-year at 29.1% of revenue. This reflects our ongoing strategic investments focused on expanding our media footprint. An adjusted EBITDA of $4.8 million represents 5.3% of revenue. As we've consistently stated throughout 2021, our strategic growth plan is focused squarely on consumers and the quality of their experience in our performance marketplace. We believe this consumer-centric strategy represents the winning road forward and provides us a competitive advantage. Fluent inherent brand strength and a foundational principle of our business model through creating a more effective and sustainable customer acquisition solutions for our clients while successfully positioning Fluent as a market leader in a rapidly evolving industry environment. Our strategic growth plan, along with our voracious appetite to test and learn, has validated two major hypotheses. First, delivering consumers more meaningful quality grounded experiences has enabled Fluent to more frequently re-engage them after their initial visits to our owned and operated media properties, all based on their needs and wants. In turn, we're enhancing consumer lifetime value for our clients as well as Fluent. Second, as we connect the more engaged consumer to our client's brand platform, it's enabled us to more efficiently and effectively deliver against our clients' customer acquisition goals while improving their ROI. In turn, our total alignment with consumers and clients is driving improved monetization across our fluent performance marketplace, while enhancing our brand equity with clients. We will continue to focus on revenue growth, leaning into a variety of strategic growth initiatives that we believe are sustainable. As we continue to learn, evolve, and scorecard our business initiatives, We also assess where we believe we have a competitive advantage utilizing market share gain as a consumer validator of our longer term potential. We believe this is the road to strategic revenue growth and opens the door for expanding margins over time. So in the near term, our quarterly margin profile will reflect our strategic investments and growth. As we consistently articulated, Fluent's competitive advantage is grounded in three strategic growth pillars, our media footprint, our platform, and our performance marketplace. Strengthening our go-to-market capabilities with each individual pillar is our everyday mission. Where Fluent is differentiated is in building out our preferred marketplace while determining the logical points of intersection across each strategic pillar. With that operational scale for growth, while enhancing client performance via our cross-functional team play. The end result is exceeding clients' performance expectations by way of delivering a more targeted and engaged consumer audience, which also increases client ROI. In the past, we've discussed our media footprint and performance marketplace. Today, I'll spend a little more time on our platform and strategic relevance. Our platform, at its highest level, is a proprietary and integrated data, analytics, and technology marketing solutions and capabilities. We previously outlined investments we've made to expand and strengthen our marketing position. At the core is our first-party data asset, which given the ongoing and well-documented data privacy changes, designed to provide a significant competitive advantage in delivering higher quality, interactions, and value for consumers and clients within our performance marketplace. Apple's move to enhance consumer privacy on its devices and Google's announcement of 2023 being the year to end third-party cookies is forcing marketers to take action shifting away from third-party data. Data from outside sources can improve short-term performance and marketing, but unlike first-party data, can't explain the relationship with consumers and their path to purchase. The breadth and depth of Fluent's first-party data gives us an important advantage that it offers the kind of insight to give us real control over our long-term strategic growth plan. The power of our first-party data and our ability to gather and enable real-time insights through analytics and technology is critical to driving meaningful, higher quality consumer engagements tied to measurable performance-based outcomes. When a new consumer visits a property with Influence Digital Media Portfolio, we ask simple questions to determine individual interests, needs, and preferences, and then present relevant offers from our world-class clients, ultimately creating a more meaningful and rewarding experience. When a consumer returns, they proactively enable us with their prior survey responses and performance marketplace experience, which allows us to utilize these key insights as a strategy to strengthen relevancy and improve consumer engagement. In essence, increasing lifetime value. In this manner, the consumer wins, as does our roster of clients. As you can see, our platform is foundational, and we believe it's a clear competitive advantage that differentiates us in the industry. Our platform efficiently and effectively connects our media footprint with our performance marketplace. In turn, we've established fluid capability that solves a marketing problem that every advertiser chases, delivering the right offer at the right time to the right consumer and in real time with the convenience of automation. Over time, as our media footprint and performance marketplace strengthen and expand, Our platform is strategically positioned to drive long-term value to consumers and our clients, which represents a key revenue and margin path to our operating business units. Given the strategic value data plays within our ecosystem, we recently completed our Q1 data evaluation with TruSet, who measures data accuracy in several popular demographic attributes and provides scoring against their current cohort of data providers. across 19 top tier data providers, including Axiom, Epsilon, B12, and DataAxle. Fluent ranked number one for accuracy in more attributes than any other data provider except one. The accuracy of our first party data is a reflection of higher quality consumer experiences in the Fluent marketplace and further enhances our relationship with them while enabling us to competitively leverage relevant strategic insights with our clients. In Q1, we were also encouraged by our continued progress with our other two strategic growth pillars, our media footprint and our performance marketplace. We're actively expanding our media footprint via strategic growth initiatives that extend and reach into new media channels, where we can provide more relevant content and offers to consumers and our clients. This leaves us strategically and financially motivated as we explore longer-term growth opportunities that a larger fluid media footprint will create while we concurrently extend our reach into new media channels. We'll discuss this further as we learn more. Relative to our performance marketplace, our key strategic growth initiatives continue to primarily be driven by building out fluid sales solutions and separately our CRM capabilities. both of which are grounded in higher quality consumer experiences. These strategic initiatives provide a significant marketplace in creating meaningful downstream experiences for consumers while expanding our relationship with world-class clients in key industry verticals. Critically inherent to our strategic framework is that we're enhancing each consumer's lifetime value. More to follow here in subsequent quarters. In closing, We remain fixated on our well-defined pillars and will continue leaning into strategically compelling 2022 revenue opportunities where we believe we have a differentiated position and significant consumer runway. Earning market share where we can leverage our consumer-centric core and execute via our operational capabilities will be the key driver of our longer-term growth agenda. These are the strategic bets we are constantly making, prudently investing as we launch and establish our longer-term path in a growing marketplace. In parallel, we'll manage the business mix across our investment profiles with a clear goal of expanding fluent business margins as we scale and establish a competitive advantage. Overall, we believe our 2022 financial results will show revenue growth returning at or above industry growth rates and required priority number one. We are then shifting our sights on sequential margin improvement as we scale. And with that, I'll turn to Segunda to provide more details on our financial results.
spk00: Thank you, John, and good afternoon to everyone. We are pleased with strong first quarter results and continued momentum in the business as we execute on the fundamentals and progress with our strategy. Our unique first-party data assets and strong advertiser relationships have put us in a great competitive position. The Q1 results build on the momentum that we saw as we closed 2021 in terms of progress against both our strategic and operational priorities. In the first quarter, Fluent generated $89.1 million of revenue, up 27% year-over-year, and above the guidance that we provided in the previous earnings call. This growth was driven by three primary areas. Firstly, we saw significant strength in our core rewards business, driven by expanding our media footprint in both the US and international markets. Rewards is the largest piece of the Truend business, and our portfolio includes websites in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, as well as the mobile app. Millions of consumers visit our rewarded properties every day to discover products and offers by learning rewards, and we are encouraged by the strong top-line growth from our rewarded properties. And the second area of growth in the first quarter was our internal CRM capability, primarily email and SMS, which enables us to re-engage consumers who have already registered on our own media properties and enhance their overall lifetime value. Lastly, fluent sales solutions remains a strategic priority for us and continues to be a key growth driver. Through this live agent capability, we are now able to drive new demand across different industry verticals and high consideration categories. while increasing the use of contracted call center personnel. As a part of the traffic quality initiative, we took a strategic and deliberate approach in building high-quality targeted media traffic while reducing the volume of lower-quality traffic. While we are conscious that our commitment to quality will reduce our traffic volume, we are pleased that our monetization increased almost 50% in Q1 as compared to the same quarter last year that supported the strong double-digit revenue growth. Our media margin in Q1 was $26 million, up 4% year-over-year, and representing 29.1% of revenue. For contact, we spent nearly $63 million on paid media in the quarter, our largest cost component. In the course of deploying the media spend, we found success with new promotional campaigns which expanded our addressable audience and new means of cross-promoting our program across students' own media properties. On the last earnings call, we noted the opportunity to drive high-quality traffic from biddable platforms, albeit at margin levels below the affiliate side of our media mix. While we expect this next shift to digital media platforms to continue in the near future, we remain confident in our ability to optimize our stand levels and ultimately drive higher profitability over time. Our operating expenses on a CAD basis for Q1, comprising sales and marketing, product development, and G&A grew in aggregate by $1.6 million, or 8.8% year-over-year, to $19.7 million. Within that mix, sales and marketing increased by $900,000, driven largely by an increase in business travel, events, and in-person meetings. Our product development expense increased by $1.1 million, reflecting continued investments that we made in our technology and analytics platforms as well as development of new ad-based media properties, expanding beyond our traditional focus on web-based media properties. Lastly, our GNI expense came down by $400,000. The decrease was mainly a result of an accrued expense for foot call consideration related to the monopoly acquisition during the first quarter of 2021 that did not exist in the first quarter of this year. This GNI expense was offset partially by increased litigation costs and certain acquisition-related costs. On March 31, 2022, it released a settlement with the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance regarding sales and use tax for $1.65 million. The amount was paid to the tax department on April 1, 2022. Our accrual increased from $823,000 in the fourth quarter of 2021 to $1.65 million, resulting in an incremental expense of $827,000 in Q1. Finally, on profitability, our adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter was $4.8 million, representing 5.3% of revenue and up 0.5% year-over-year. This is higher than the outlook we provided on the last earnings call and is driven largely by the benefit we saw on median margin. Moving forward, we will continue to focus on driving revenue growth and market share gains while maintaining a disciplined approach to overall operating expenses, throwing revenue down to the bottom line. Our interest expense declined by $600,000 year over year, benefiting from the lower cost of debt under our new credit facility. In Q1, we continue to be a non-cash federal taxpayer due to the availability of NOLs. We reported gap net loss of $2 million in the quarter and adjusted net income, a non-gap measure, of $1.1 million. As a reminder, our non-GAAP metrics are reconciled in the earnings release and our 10Q filings. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $29 million of cash and cash equivalents. This represents a decrease of 12% year over year. Working capital, defined as current assets minus current liabilities, ended the quarter at $46.6 million, up 1.7% year over year. Total debt, as reflected on the balance sheet, entered the quarter at $45 million. Again, we are pleased with the first quarter results and feel good about the underlying strength of our business. Our leadership team has a number of exciting strategic initiatives currently underway that will allow us to differentiate ourselves and enhance students' value proposition and generate a strong revenue and earnings profile. Thank you for your time. We are glad to take questions now.
spk05: If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If for any reason you would like to remove that question, please press star followed by two. Again, to ask a question, press star one. As a reminder, if you are using a speakerphone, please remember to pick up your handset before asking your question. We will pause here briefly as questions are registered. The first question is from Michael Graham with Canaccord. Your line is now open.
spk01: Thanks a lot. And hey, everyone, thanks for all the good information on the call there. I wanted to ask a couple questions if I could. The first one is just, you know, it seems like on your traffic quality initiative, you know, it seems like you're still getting some good benefits from that. Can you just You know, maybe provide a little context on like where you think we are there in terms of the evolution of that footprint and then I have one other one.
spk03: Thanks, Michael. Thanks for the question. The TQI, you know, is something that we're over a year into, and it originally started around the traffic and around the quality of that. It is something that we originally thought was going to be a project for about a year, and then we'd move on from that. Actually, we've seen such strong benefits from it in our business that at this point, it's embedded into our core operating principles. And the quality of the traffic is playing dividends both with our clients from an ROI perspective and is equally important in our monetization side. So we continue to work with the partners aggressively to continue to improve their quality so we can drive better results for our clients and better results for us. So I feel good about where we are from a foundational perspective, but there's still a lot of opportunity around the monetization side that we think we can play into.
spk01: Okay, thanks, Don. That makes sense. I also just wanted to ask about CTV more broadly and, you know, such a dynamic area. And I just want to, you know, kind of get some updates from you in terms of, like, how it's going, how it's impacting, you know, kind of your business model going forward.
spk03: Mike, I'll turn it over to Ryan, who's been leading that effort for us. So thanks for the question.
spk06: Yeah, Michael, you know, in terms of channel expansion, connected TV and other mediums where we can go out, utilize our first party data and, you know, everything that comes with that strength is very, very attractive to us. TV is a new format for us. We're testing and learning as we go here, but seeing some really interesting performance trends as we start to apply some of the best practices, data driven approaches from the digital world into places like connected TV and start to learn more on the creative side, how that will influence things. So it's still very new, but exciting for us, exciting for our partners. This type of traffic is coming in at a different quality profile. We're seeing different types of behavioral trends just with somebody that's coming off of these new types of mediums that we're testing into. So it certainly is something we're optimistic about growing as we roll on here.
spk01: All right, awesome. Thanks, Ryan. And I'll go back in the queue, guys. Thank you. Thanks, Michael.
spk04: Thank you.
spk05: The next question is from Jim Goss with Barrington Research. Your line is now open.
spk04: Okay, thanks. I've got a couple. First, it seems that the initiative involves sort of reducing the number of overall clients to favor quality over quantity. If that's the correct assumption, please tell me that. And is there a way to scale just how many points of contact you have right now relative to how many you did have and where that would be headed?
spk03: Thanks, Jim. So you're asking about reducing the number of clients. It's clients, not consumers, that your question's about?
spk04: Yeah, well, the consumer, the ones you are targeting, not the business clients, but the individuals you are targeting. The consumers.
spk03: Yes. It's a good question, Jim. Thanks. There's multiple pieces to answer here, so I'll sort of walk through a couple. Bill Benos, First is as we've talked about before there's there's when the consumer first comes on to our under our properties. Bill Benos, And then it's how long in a lifetime value that we have in terms of our relationship with them. Bill Benos, So one of the things that we've been talking about now for for a little over a year is is all our CRM efforts and our ability to build the consumer journey and extend that in a much longer. TAB, Mark McIntyre, Time period, then it has traditionally been excellent so, although there might be less overall consumers coming in, the number of consumers that are on our properties every single day has continued to to increase. TAB, Mark McIntyre, The second big thing is is looking we've talked about in terms of just. how when they're on our websites and they're on our digital properties, how many interactions are we having with them and what can we do with those interactions with our first party data? So we have millions of site interactions per day. We have hundreds of thousands of campaigns interactions per day, and we use that data to make it more relevant for the consumer and obviously drive better ROI for our clients. So it's more about the quality and the lifetime value that's been extended. The second piece I'd answer, Jim, is we've been extending what I'll call our media footprint in our pillar. And that is not only on sort of the traditional web-based properties, but we've been expanding internationally. We've been expanding with mobile apps. We've been expanding with other properties like jobs. And expanding that also allows us to – to continue to drive the consumers and the amount that we have in and also the interactions that we have with them.
spk04: Okay. And are you looking to sort of maintain more of a continuing relationship with these clients? And how do you effectively make that happen?
spk03: Absolutely. We are looking to maintain and continue to leverage that over a longer time period that is defined by the engagement that we have with the consumers and the value that they're getting out of it. So a key piece of our fundamental business proposition is that when the consumers come onto our digital properties, how relevant is that? and how engaging is that to their needs and wants at that time when they're on our property. So the way we sort of measure that is around how often they're coming back, the monetization, what verticals they're interested in, and the length of time in which we're able to work with them, whether it's 30 days, 60 days, three years, five years, that's the measurements that we're looking at now, Jim.
spk04: Okay, last thing for me. You made the comment about accuracy of first-party data, and I was just wondering, how is that measured in back home?
spk03: The example we gave in the earnings release is a third-party data. Evaluation company called truce that they do a quarterly and they look they pull cohorts together they volunteer people they ask data providers to come in and they independently. Value independently rank the data providers, based on the data that comes in how accurate is based on. External sources so it's independent and, as I said, we ranked for we ranked first in more categories. than everyone else except one. And the names we were going against are very long-standing data providers that have been in this business for a real long time. So I think it tells you the power that when, as they come onto our properties, both declare data, it's first party, and the relevancy of us being able to use that to provide meaningful experiences to them allows them to continue to interact with us and give more insight into what they'd like to see and what they'd like to be engaged with.
spk04: Okay. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
spk03: Thanks, Jim.
spk05: Thank you for your question. There are currently no further questions registered, so as a reminder, it is star 1 on your telephone keypad. The next question is a follow-up from Michael Graham. Your line is now open.
spk01: Yeah, thanks. I just wanted to slip in one more. You mentioned your sales capabilities, you know, and kind of expanding those. And I just wonder if you could put any, you know, kind of framework around, you know, the magnitude of that effort and, you know, what it looks like over, you know, the next year or so.
spk03: Sure. Thanks, Michael. We've seen, we've continued to see strong growth in the food sales solutions group. And Q1 was certainly another very strong quarter for it. The way we talked about it last time is that we really leaned heavily into the health vertical. And then in Q1, we got into the life insurance. And then right now, we're really spinning up our third vertical, which is around auto. The one big difference that we've talked about is our competitors tend to take a sales approach to the business. They look at the demand and they say, how do I get the supply for it? We're taking a very consumer-centric approach here. We look at the audiences and we look at our consumers on our digital properties, and then we say, how can we build the right audience and connect them to the world-class brand? So we will not be the biggest, but we certainly think our quality and our consumer experience will be the best. So we did grow double digits. We continue to look to have double digits growth on the top end side throughout 2022. And it's going to be mostly around building out the new verticals, getting the marketplace right, and continuing to drive that value within those core verticals. So you'll see another vertical in Q3. And as we continue to test and learn, you'll see another one in Q4. So we're being very methodical on how we grow those out.
spk01: All right, thanks a lot, Don.
spk03: Thanks, Michael.
spk05: Thank you for your question. There are no additional questions waiting at this time, so I will pass the conference over to the management team for closing remarks.
spk03: I want to thank everyone for joining us today. The earnings release will be out shortly, and thank you very much for your support and your questions.
spk05: That concludes the Fluid Inc. Q1 2022 earnings call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.
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