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spk03: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the IAC and Angie third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star and then one using a telephone keypad. To withdraw your questions, you may press star and two. Please also note today's event is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the floor over to Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President and CFO of IAC. Sir, please go ahead.
spk04: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Christopher Halpin here, and welcome to the IAC and Angie Inc. Third Quarter Earnings Call. Joining me today is Joey Levin, CEO of IAC and CEO and Chairman of Angie Inc. Similar to last quarter, supplemental to our quarterly earnings releases, IEC has also published its quarterly shareholder letter. We will not be reading the shareholder letter on this call, and it is currently available on the investor relations section of IEC's website. I will shortly turn the call over to Joey to make a few brief introductory remarks, and then we will open it up to Q&A. Before we get to that, I'd like to remind you that during this presentation, we may discuss our outlook and future performance. These forward-looking statements typically may be preceded by words such as, we expect, we believe, we anticipate, or similar statements. These forward-looking views are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Some of these risks have been set forth in IAC's and Angie Ink's third quarter press releases and our respective filings with the SEC. We'll also discuss certain non-GAAP measures, which, as a reminder, include adjusted EBITDA, which we'll refer to today as EBITDA for simplicity during the call. I'll also refer you to our press releases, the IAC shareholder letter, and again to the investor relations section of our websites for all comparable gap measures and full reconciliations for all material non-gap measures. With that, I will hand it over to Joey.
spk02: Thanks, Chris. Welcome, everybody, and welcome back to our simplified earnings call format. As Chris said, I am very pleased to be here in two different capacities, CEO of IAC and now CEO of Angie. I'm running Angie right now because given the performance of the business, we all agreed it was time to make a change. I love the opportunity for this business, and I want to make sure we nail it. I've only been in the seat 30 days, so I'll have more to share in February, but the big strategic vision has not changed. We're here to bring homeowners and service professionals together. We're here to make that process more consistent, more reliable, and less hassle. That means we'll continue to offer a mix of advertising, leads, and services, but some things will change. And the theme around change is simplicity and balance. The exposure and presence of services in the organization is going to be more balanced. I think we've overcomplicated the product, not just in services, but I think we've overcomplicated the product a bit, and I think we need to simplify both for homeowners and for service professionals. I think we're also going to be more disciplined on expenses. Our OpEx growth the last few years has outpaced our gross profit growth, and only part of that is marketing related to the rebrand. I think we can get back to a much better balance there. We also have a lot of talent in this organization, and I think everyone's ready to be energized and uplifted and focus on delighting the customer. I've spent time in New York, I've spent time in Denver, I've spent time in Indianapolis, and I've met a lot of people who are really excited about delighting the customer, and I think we have a tremendous opportunity to do that better than we've done in the past. As far as the rest of IAC, we have work to do at dot dash Meredith, but nothing we've seen yet has undercut the fundamental thesis. And I know you all have a lot of questions, so let's get to them. I just will ask your forgiveness in advance if I won't be able to answer all your Angie questions right now as I work into the details of the business and nail down a concrete plan. If I can't answer it now, I will have an answer by February when we're together again. Mark, let's start with the first question.
spk04: Okay, thank you. Operator, let's go to the questions.
spk03: And ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will begin the question and answer session. Once again, to ask a question, you may press star and then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, we do ask you please pick up your handset prior to pressing the keys to ensure the best sound quality. To withdraw your question, you may press star and two. Once again, that is star and then one to join the question queue. We'll pause momentarily to assemble the roster. And our first question today comes from Eric Sheridan from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead with your question.
spk07: Thanks so much for taking the questions and I hope everyone on the team as well. Joey, I want to come back to your sort of comments there to kick off the call. I think with the changes at Angie, I wanted to maybe hone in on two issues. you know, why do you and the board think you're the right person to run that business at this point in time, considering you're already running IEC on a day-to-day basis? So maybe going a little bit deeper on the decision process there and why you feel you're the right person to take over that challenge at this point in time, number one. And then number two, as you referenced, there's a lot of ambition and a lot of market opportunity. And Angie, and as you said in the letter, we've been through a lot of CEOs over the last half decade. How should we be thinking about your broader business philosophy? Is Angie going to be run for growth? Is it going to be run for a balance of growth and profits? How should we be thinking about you striking the right balance there to amplify returns when measured against the market opportunity? Thanks so much.
spk02: Thanks, Eric. In terms of why me, and I guess I can weave in the answer to your second question in that. First, I've been involved in this business in one way or another for a very long time. I know the things we've done that have worked. I know the things we've done that haven't worked. And so I have a significant working knowledge of the category, the product, the customers. Second, some of the fundamental things that we need to accomplish at Angie are very consistent with things we've accomplished at other businesses. how to handle search, how to handle monetization, things to optimize for in conversion. And I think that experience is going to be very relevant to Angie here as it would be to other Internet businesses. Third, I believe in this business. I think it's important to have a leader who believes in the business, and I have believed in this business for a very long time, and I know that we can create enormous value here. We also have to move quickly. I think that we've made some recent mistakes that we need to fix. And I don't want to say I'm the CEO of convenience, but I did happen to be available very quickly to do this. And I think that that allows us to make the change that we want to make faster than a longer process. And the last thing is, and this gets to your second question, is I think the organization needs to be more disciplined. And disciplined means balancing the short term and the long term. Any leader, I think, can optimize for the short term, and any leader, I think, can optimize for the long term. I think the right manager, the best managers, and the right operating philosophy is to be balancing the short term and the long term. I think we have to deliver for 2023, and I think we have to deliver more profit for 2023, and I think we're totally capable of doing that. But I also think we have to focus on the long term and make sure that what we're doing for our customers, our homeowners, and our service professionals is something that's going to keep them around working with us for a very long time, and we have to balance those things. I think that is totally possible to do. I think we perhaps drifted from some of that balance In short and long term, I think we drifted in some of that balance from profit and growth. And I think that we can run this business in a much more balanced way, which will be healthy for everybody in that Angie ecosystem.
spk07: Great. Thanks, Joey.
spk03: Thank you, Eric. Our next question comes from John Blackledge from Cowan. Please go ahead with your question.
spk08: Great, thanks. Two questions. First on Dot Dash Meredith's digital revenue, could you just discuss the ad trends in 3Q that led to the ad declines, particularly around brand versus performance and also key verticals? And then what did you see in October that leads you to believe that digital revenue could be flat in the first half and then turning positive in the back half of the year? And then just second question on the EBITDA, if you can unpack the new guide of 240 to 250 million and kind of bridge us from the 300. Is it all revenue shortfall? And then thanks for the caller on the 23 REV trajectory. Just any thoughts on EBITDA on 23, perhaps framing an EBITDA margin range would be helpful. Thank you.
spk04: Thanks, John. It's Chris. And we spent... real time in the letter trying to frame this out, which I'll refer to as we go through it. There are two dynamics to dot dash Meredith digital revenue that are just key overhangs on our performance this year, and that ties both to third quarter trends, what we're seeing now, and where we are on dot dash EBITDA to your second question. The first is the integration and specifically the migration of the Meredith digital properties to the DotDash platform. And then the second is macro and overall ad market. I'll take those one at a time. On the migration, we said in the last quarter we were overly aggressive on our expected timing of the migrations. As a reminder to those who are newer to the story, this is the acquired properties. Meredith was about two-thirds the size of DotDash. In a serial fashion, moving those properties over to the DotDash platform, and that means much faster site speeds, reduced ad inventory, and eliminating old content and producing better content. And we'll go, I'm sure, into more depth in this call. Those delays pushed us from an expected completion, say, around the 4th of July of all the major sites to where we are now, which was we completed the migrations by the end of September, early October. Two things happened. One, because the sites were not migrated, we could not drive the traffic increases we expect from migrated sites. as early and capture as much of that in this year as we expected. The second is we were not able to run, as we call it, the dot dash playbook and integrate performance marketing and e-commerce into the Meredith sites and all the additional revenue sources that we expect to drive. That was one overhang from migration challenges. The second is Our expectation was that the early migrations would be very comparable to the later migrations in terms of complexity, ad serving, et cetera. That's true with historical performance, unfortunately, and this has been a challenging journey through the summer, thankfully heavily behind us. But we found that with some of the larger laded sites, there were idiosyncrasies to ad serving to surfing activities that led to underperformance and we had to make tweaks. In the case of our lifestyle sites, we saw, you know, we needed to constantly update the ad performance, the ad serving performance, which we're now on the other side of. And, for example, in food and recipes, we've continued to need to optimize ad load relative to pricing uplift. Those are just things that happen when you move a lot of properties. And dot dash Meredith management feels very good that where we are in early November with 90 plus percent of the sites and all of the big sites migrated, those challenges are behind us. But those were definitely drags on Q3 performance. Additionally, we just had some sort of break and fixes on ad serving, on e-commerce integrations, and those were drags, as you'll see in the queue, on performance marketing in the quarter. The market overhang, we talked about this previously, May, June, July, we saw a rapid decline in ad demand from retail, CPG, and home, as well as some smaller subcategories. That continued through the summer, but we actually saw a couple categories, including retail, come back and back to school. And while they're not back to last year levels, we've seen strength. Unfortunately, we've seen other categories, beauty, tech, telco, really soften year over year. So it's a choppy ad market. So what we'd say broadly to your question on brand versus performance, there's not a lot of brand in the DotDash portfolio. There was some in Meredith, but everything about the playbook is moving our pitch to advertisers and our reporting to performance. But the ad market is choppy. We'd expect brand to be weak next year, and the current market will only accelerate performance and ROI and clarity, but we don't have a significant brand portion in our portfolio. In terms of the EBITDA decline, it is all driven relative to the $300 million we initially put out after the first quarter. It is all driven by digital revenue declines. Print is solid. Expenses are in good shape, and corporate expenses are in a good spot post combination. The margins, the incremental margins on digital revenue, we've always said are very high, as well as on e-commerce, et cetera. We expected to have the migrations go more smoothly than we did, especially over Q3. And we expected a more solid ad market, not a great ad market, but a more solid ad market in this quarter And we've now accepting a choppy one through the rest of the year. So that is the dynamics. When we look forward to 23, we talked in the letter, October traffic volumes are down about 5%. A big chunk of that is just going back to go forward on the big sites we've recently migrated. We expect to continue to improve that. We also expect to take share On the ad sales side, you know, we said that we'd look to get back to flat in the first part of the first half of 23 and just more specific to our own opportunities grow for the entire year. In terms of numbers, you know, we're in the midst of business planning and we'll be coming back to you all in the next earnings call with greater clarity on our plan for the 23 financial year. Thank you.
spk03: Thank you. And our next question comes from Corey Carpenter from JPMorgan. Please go ahead with your question.
spk06: Thanks for the questions. Joey, I wanted to ask for an update on what you're seeing in the macro environment across the portfolio, maybe both on the consumer and the enterprise side, and how this informs your outlook into the holiday season. And then secondly, on Angie, just hoping you could give us an update on where you're at with the roofing turnaround. and how this could impact growth for the rest of the year. Thank you.
spk02: Sure. Mostly what we can see is the consumer still spending. I mean, the clearest things you see in travel, which I think has been well covered, you know, we see Turo and MGM doing phenomenally well. where that's direct spending, but also where we see in Dot Dash Meredith consumer spending through e-commerce performance marketing type stuff is that they're still spending on good. Now, some of that spend has shifted from certain kinds of goods to other kinds of goods, but still spending. I mean, people aren't opening crypto accounts anymore, so that kind of thing has come back. But the general spending is still happening as far as we can see. really everywhere on the consumer side. There's some things in Angie that make it a little bit harder to read in terms of how we're adjusting our marketing on demand. I would say that demand has lightened at Angie generally, but again, there's a bunch of noise in that, both when looking at comparables, sort of exceptionally high comparables in the prior year, and specific changes we're making around our marketing. So it's an imperfect picture, but I'd say still reasonably strong on the consumer side. On the enterprise side, you heard what Chris said on advertising and what we talk about generally on advertising. We think spending, certainly people are pausing right now. When there's uncertainty in ad markets, people hold their spend. That is, I think that once, whether we settle in at a high market or a low market, I expect spending to come back on advertising, but it's the uncertainty piece that I think is driving a pullback in ad spend. And we can see that across other of our businesses, too. On care, it is interesting. in that we're seeing utilization go up on the consumer side for, sorry, as it relates to our enterprise business in care, we're seeing utilization among employees go up, which is a good thing for our business. And that should long-term be a good thing for enterprises because the enterprises will realize that the consumers really, or their employees really like this product. And so hopefully that should translate to growing enterprise strength in terms of new sales. But that is, I'd say, an aggregate of what we can see from our picture. Your second question was Angie Groth and Angie Roofing. We went from, in Angie Roofing, just sort of fixing some fundamentals to a literal hurricane came through and hit all of our main offices, actually, in Florida. I mean, that's a terrible thing in general. It's a reasonably good thing for roofing in the sense that we happen to have a lot of people and a lot of capabilities to deal with roofs that were damaged by the hurricane in that area. So we saw a huge surge in demand that, of course, tapers, and then we have to work on fulfilling that. We're still working through some of our fulfillment issues there, making sure we've nailed down materials, making sure we've nailed down labor, we've scaled up labor meaningfully, and now we need to make sure we can put all that together and deliver on fulfillment. I think that is net a good thing for that business. And how we execute that, I think we need to prove over the next couple of quarters, but a significant increase in demand over a short period of time is for sure a good thing for that business for now. I don't think it's a material change to Angie overall or the business overall, but just as it relates to this moment in time, I think the hurricane hitting where it did for that business was a positive.
spk04: And, Corey, the only thing I'd add for the group on roofing, relative to the timing of the storm at the end of the month, Essentially, you know, the patterns were the last 10 days or so, very little activity in the roofing in terms of actual installation or orders as people, A, managed their own safety, but B, held off doing any activities until they understood what their roof would look like after the storm. And then following that two-week period where You know, there were much bigger priorities in those markets than organizing roof reconstruction, just baseline health and safety activities going on. So from a revenue perspective, the hurricane would be a headwind in both September and October. There's now the very large backlog that Joey spoke about, and that will be worked out through the next year. say, four-plus months, and it's really just around fulfillment and staffing.
spk02: I think that answers, Corey. I think that covered all your questions.
spk06: Yes. Thank you both. Thank you.
spk03: Great. Next question, please. And our next question comes from Brent Phil from Jefferies. Please go ahead with your question.
spk10: Hey, good morning, guys. This is David on for Brent. Thanks for taking the questions. Two, if I may, for the first question, could you maybe just talk a little bit about the sale of Blue Crude to Employee Bridge? Maybe any color you can provide on the cash receipt and the equity you have of the combined company. That would be helpful. And then second, I want to ask on capital allocation. Do you guys have any updates on how you guys are thinking about assets in the public markets versus maybe the private markets? And, you know, maybe, you know, we saw that you guys bought some MGM and bought back some stock during the quarter. Any color on how you kind of thought about pairing the two would be helpful. Thanks, guys.
spk04: Sure. It's Chris. I'll start on Blue Crew and then hand to Joey on capital allocation. We have sold the business into Employee Bridge, which is the industry leader in light staffing. Proceeds were about $50 million in cash, and then equity in the pro forma company, where we are a minority shareholder with a board seat. We're very excited about the combination of combining EmployeeBridge's scale with BlueCruise technology, software, and client base. And then also, we were investing heavily in that business, and as we disclosed in the letter, had an EBITDA loss of $26 million. on an LTM basis, which you can pro forma out following closing. With that, I will hand it over to Joey.
spk02: Yeah, well, I'll just add that I think that Blue Crew employee bridge combination is a really interesting one, and it'll be fun to see that vision executed on a bigger scale. Capital allocation, we are always, as you know, looking at what to do with our cash, and evaluating external opportunities against internal opportunities. The landscape of things we consider hasn't changed, so we prioritize our internal businesses, both through the P&L and through TACON M&A, where we think we have a significant advantage. And then we look externally, and of course we look at share repurchases, and there's a big surface area for share repurchases for us right now in the sense of there's IAC, there's Angie, there's MGM to some extent, and there's Turo to some extent. All these things are things that we evaluate very regularly and will continue to evaluate regularly. We're not going to make a prediction right now or a proclamation right now on which ones we'll buy and when. or whether, but we'll just tell you that we continue to evaluate that very regularly, and that's a very important part of our capital allocation process. I think, generally speaking, public markets are pretty attractive right now. I think that you can buy things that have risk where you can get a significant reward for taking that risk. And I think that's pretty interesting. I think that private markets are still not there yet and they've always lagged and they'll continue to lag and eventually there will be an adjustment. Uh, you probably don't want to be a private company who needs capital right now. Uh, but if you are a private company who doesn't need capital, that's a lovely place to be right now because you get to make up your valuation and nobody else gets to do that right now. Uh, but I, if there's opportunities, I think they're more likely public, but who knows, we'll, we'll continue to, to look at both. And, uh, That's kind of how we've always been and will continue to be on capital allocation. Thanks, David. Let's do the next question.
spk03: Our next question comes from Ross Sandler from Barclays. Please go ahead with your question.
spk01: Hey, guys. Just a couple follow-ups on Dot Dash Meredith. So on the growth rates for next year, How much is baked in in terms of the digital ad market industry growth into your forecast? So if the ad market continues to tank, how much sensitivity do we have around that forecast? And if we look at the Meredith properties, it seems like most of the portfolio will be kind of in that 10%. traffic growth zone based on that chart in the letter. And I know you're shifting some of the ad sales from programmatic to premium and performance, as you mentioned. So could you just bridge traffic to revenue and what kind of monetization you're baking in to that forecast? Thanks a lot.
spk04: Yeah, sure, Ross. Thank you. In terms of growth rates and tie-in industry, we said in the letter that that we expect to get back to flat in the first half and then growing for the full year without an improvement in the ad market. And that confidence, and this ties to your second question as well, of the linkage between traffic and revenue, that confidence ties to some specific factors to Dot Dash Meredith, the integration, and where we are. One is that the migration was a challenging journey, but we are predominantly on the other side of it, heavily on the other side of it, and feel like the drags that occurred, the integration-related drags that occurred on volumes, on ad serving, et cetera, will lead to easier comps year over year. The second is that we expect to grow sessions on the migrated sites now that we can run the dot dash playbook, which at the end of the day, audience times price is the revenue model on the advertising side. So we expect consumption and audience to increase as we push these sites forward and they perform better with faster sites, fewer ads, and improved content. The third is that a Nealon team view just core opportunities to like-to-like improve CPMs across the portfolio as we move the merited sites onto the platform and have better ad-serving technology, have better pricing models, et cetera, and just certain conventions that we can And then finally is e-commerce and performance marketing, where the Meredith sites have trailed. I think Neil and team have been dying to get their hands on those Meredith properties and brand names to do the dot dash performance marketing playbook, and we can go from there. Overall, we are not sanguine on the ad market, especially in the first half of the year. And so we are focused on our knitting, improving our sales, driving the consumption increases, and we're really in that fine-tuning mode of content ad-serving e-commerce on the merit sites. I think that's it. Thanks, Ross. Operator, next question.
spk03: Our next question comes from Jason Helfstein from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead with your question.
spk13: Thanks, everybody. I'm Joey. Can you just talk about the shortfall, you know, the last call at 12 months or 18 months at services versus leads? And what have you learned that gives you confidence in the current strategy as opposed to kind of, you know, making another pivot? Thanks.
spk14: Sure, Jason.
spk02: I guess the Services, we mentioned in the letter we've done a billion dollars in services revenue. That is a tremendous amount of revenue to do in this category. Not a lot of service professionals have gotten to that volume. We did that across a lot of tasks, and we did that across a lot of geographies. What we learned in that process was there's some areas and types of tasks that we, I think, can do very well. and there's some that are harder to complete. What we also learned in that is that there's customer experiences that work out really well for customers and some that work out less well. And we are now taking that learning and honing down to what we think is a great consumer experience. That consumer experience melds when done perfectly, melds very well with the ads and leads experience, meaning a homeowner comes in, a homeowner makes a choice, a homeowner understands a choice clearly between one path and the other, and gets a job done on the way that they want to get a job done. I've talked about for a very long time the fact that consumers in this category can be very different and can have very different needs. There's the consumer who says, I just want you to do all the work, Angie, and there's the consumer who says, I want to do all the work myself because I don't trust anybody else to do it. And when I say do the work, I don't mean lay down the tiles. I mean find the person who's going to do the work and negotiate with them and figure out price and decide how to evaluate whether they're capable or not. We have those consumers, and those consumers are very passionate about which one of those paths they want to pursue. And I think that we now, having served a lot of services, can do a better job honing which customer should go down which path and help them make that decision. That's probably the biggest learning, and that's also likely to be the biggest change in terms of how we present those opportunities to homeowners and how we present those opportunities to pros. I think I guess embedded also in your question is what's the outlook for both of those businesses. Both of those businesses have substantial upside relative to where we are. It is possible that in services we readjust what we're doing there in a way to start from a different area to grow again. And we're working through that as it relates to our 2023 plan. But we are, I believe both of those businesses are very good businesses, can very much serve homeowners and service professionals, and can grow substantially from where they are over time. Does that answer your question, Jason?
spk03: Still there? I'm going to assume yes. We'll go to the next one. Our next question comes from Dan Kernos from the Benchmark Company. Please go ahead with your question.
spk05: Great, thanks. Good morning. Joey, if I can just stick with more structural. I mean, I think we've gotten enough data now to suggest that, in general, monetizable queries and actions across network sites are just way down. So forgetting the macro for a second, I know you said you don't think there's anything structurally wrong at DDM, which obviously you know we've generally agreed with, but there has clearly been a shift in recent times to retail media, and I'm just wondering how you're kind of viewing sort of intermediaries versus direct to what's becoming increasingly digitally native organic traffic as it impacts BDM. And then on, on Angie, you know, you kind of just answered this question, but I mean, for what it's worth, you know, locals even saying that home improvement is up like mid teens as a category right now. So just structurally how you're thinking of growing ads and leads as a share of a pie, which, you know, seems to be one of the few bright spots in a rather messy macro backdrop. Thanks.
spk02: I'm not sure I understood the first question, but I'm going to try, which is I think that the digital media properties had an absolute torrent of traffic, of just floods of traffic in 2020, 2021, and that has abated. I've I think that was the first question, but I'm not positive.
spk05: I'll rephrase it this way, Joey. I think there's kind of a view out there that digitally native brands and Amazon and everyone, they're kind of taking share just through organic direct traffic rather than you know, consumers utilizing intermediary sites. And I'm not obviously implying that Dodge Ash really falls into more of the network bucket, but just trying to understand how you think structurally about that shift.
spk02: Yeah, so we don't see that, and I think we see the exact opposite of that, which is the number one, that consumers are looking for intermediaries to help make these decisions, and those intermediaries are adding value. And that's validated by the behavior we're seeing on the people who, want the end result of that traffic, meaning the folks who are paying for our e-commerce traffic or performance marketing traffic, and increasingly eager to engage with that audience as we're helping them make decisions and divine intent. So that is not a trend that, I mean, obviously you worry about Amazon in any capacity, and the big tech giants have lots of levers to pull in all kinds of areas, but generally we think that we're in a good place there relative to homeowners and the partners on the other side.
spk04: I just forgot the second question. Performance in the overall home segment.
spk02: Yeah, sorry, okay. Ads and leads is, I believe, a very good business and a very long-term business. I think that, number one, it's generally, we've talked about this before, it's reasonably hedged in this market in the sense that as demand comes down, interest among service professionals for our product goes up. That's a good thing. That's probably the opposite of the services business, which is in an excessive demand environment, the services business is a very important solution. And so those things are somewhat opposite. But I love the ads and leads business and the services business and believe both have significant growth from here. Was there something more specific in the question?
spk05: It's all right, Joe. I think I could probably follow up. It was really more just around market share given real strength and kind of local and some other channels we're hearing about. Yeah, I got it.
spk02: Okay, yeah. Look, that one is, I think we've got work to do on share, and that's something I'm very focused on making sure that we fix.
spk04: Yeah, and I think that, Dan, it speaks to Joe's comment about the need to focus more beyond services where, There are attractive market opportunities available to Angie in ads and leads, and that can be driven through real focus and prioritization, given what we see in the broader market. Got it. That's super helpful.
spk03: Thanks, guys.
spk02: Thanks. Next question.
spk03: Our next question comes from Justin Patterson from KeyBank. Please go ahead with your question.
spk12: Great. Thank you very much, and good morning. You know, sticking with just the Angie business, could you talk about the confidence level in terms of fixing traffic acquisition? This hasn't been the first time that there's been challenges with that. I realize it's now one brand in there, but talk about just some of the levers you have to improve that over the coming quarters and how we should think about that timeline. Thank you.
spk02: Yeah, this is an area where I have a lot of confidence. And you're right, Justin, we've made some mistakes on here in the past. I think that the mistakes have been actually kind of similar. So in the case, going back a while, where we combined Angie's List and HomeAdvisor, a lot of stuff changed in traffic in that and mapped some things that weren't happening underneath the surface. I think that the rebrand was a similar story, which is we – did the rebrand, that was a massive shift in traffic and brand exposure, and that a lot of small things got consumed in the story of the big thing. And I'm really focused on the small things, which is what matter in generating traffic, and I think if we execute against the small things, we ought to deliver significantly in traffic. The reason I believe that is I've seen us do it in other places, and this now has very, very high priority in the organization. If you talk to anybody who's interacted with me at Angie over the last few weeks, they will tell you that same thing back, which is we are focused on fixing this, and we are doing all the things necessary in the organization to make sure that we are getting the traffic back. The things that win in traffic... Long term is having, obviously, having the best content and having the best experience. We've seen this over and over again in search engines. Sometimes they get it wrong for a while. Hopefully long term they get it right and we can deliver getting it right. The things that matter for getting it right in this category are we have full listings of service professionals. We have ratings and reviews on service professionals. We have closed loop reviews. whether a service professional and a homeowner actually worked together and whether they met, and so we can use that as an extra verifying step. We have cost guides. We actually know what was paid in many cases directly, and that cost data is really important. And the last thing is we allow the consumer to take the action on our site, which means that combination of things combined with the reliable and trusted brands ought to be winning in search, But we've given up ground there, and we've given up ground because we've held some of those things back. We've given up ground because we haven't totally focused on the fundamentals. We've given up ground because I think sometimes we've focused on some shiny objects that we didn't need to. This is very much blocking and tackling. We have a great new leader here who's focused on execution. We've started to pick a few examples just to prove out the thesis, and we've proven that out with a tiny handful of examples. Now we just need to scale it and systematize the scaling of that, which is something that we know how to do and that we will get done. And I'd be very surprised and disappointed if we can't fix that over time. The other thing that's a factor, and sorry to go on here, but I'm passionate about this topic and I think we have a lot of opportunity here, is we've let conversion decline in some areas, too. I think a good business doesn't let conversion decline really in any area over time. Everything we should be doing should be driving up conversion over time, and there should be teams and disciplines focused on driving up conversion. As I've gotten into some of the details, I've seen some declines in conversion that I didn't really expect to see, and I believe that most of what I've seen is fixable with focus, and when you get those things going up, then again, all the other channels start to flow through. Again, sorry for the long-winded, but I feel very good about our opportunities there.
spk03: Thank you. Next question.
spk02: Great.
spk12: Thank you.
spk03: Our next question comes from Logan Reich from RBC. Please go ahead with your question. Mr. Reich, is it possible your phone is on mute? Let's go to the next one and come back to Logan. Our next question comes from Tom Champion from Piper Sandler. Please go ahead with your question.
spk11: Thanks, good morning. Joey, the letter highlights the sum of the parts and it seems like clearly there's a disconnect with the assets in totality and where the stock is trading. What do you think is the primary source of the disconnect and what kind of addresses that ultimately? And maybe one more, if you could just... update us a little bit on Vivian and some of the investments made since the capital raise. Thank you.
spk02: Sure. I think the primary source of the disconnect is execution, and then the other source of the disconnect is, as is the case in any sum of the parts, what people are focused on is the ability to access the parts, and there's probably a perceived time or gap between now and ability to access the parks. That's something I've talked about a lot. That doesn't really worry me. And everything that we have, we maintain that optionality. That option has value. The value of that option doesn't really decline. And so we don't feel real pressure to exercise those options. But the thing that we have done in realizing value in those things over time is we have certainly demonstrated an ability and willingness to exercise those options in tax-efficient ways. Right now, that's not a high priority focus for us. The focus for us is execution against all of our businesses. And then those options will become available or more exercisable over time. And that usually shrinks the discount. The discount is, as you know, something that I've talked about a lot and that I find interesting and an opportunity. And the bigger the discount is, the more exciting the opportunity is there. Second question, was Vivian capital raised? Vivian activities, what we've been doing, performance. Vivian is doing great. I mean, two things going very well for Vivian. One, it's in a tremendous market, which is the health care market and health care labor is a significant supply, demand, and balance, and we are serving that. And I think we're serving that very well. We are also delivering a, I'll say, bespoke product for the category, meaning most of the platforms that have most of the share are delivering generic products that cover lots of categories. What Vivian is doing very well is nailing a category specifically, and this is started as travel nurses and it's going broader to more healthcare, but the thing that it accomplishes is it serves the job seeker with exactly the data that they need in that category, and it serves the employer with exactly the data that they need in that category. And being in that position is, as I say, a good place to be in a market where there's a lot of employers looking for workers there.
spk04: And the only thing I'd add relative to some of the parts and the stub or non-public pieces You know, dot dash is a major element of value there. It has been a disrupted year through the migration as well as the advertising downdraft. We really tried to provide insight and color on the performance and dynamics there and bifurcate what is integration merger related versus macro. And we will look to continue to do that. But we also believe across CARE, Vivian, Turo, and elsewhere, there are, you know, tremendous value sources in the IAC family that the market's not recognizing. Thank you. Let's do one more question. Yeah. Operator, one last question.
spk03: And our final question today comes from Yusef Squally from SunTrust. Please go ahead with your question.
spk09: Great. Thank you. That's the truest that's happened. A couple of questions maybe. Joey, can you maybe just contextualize where you are with dot dash Meredith relative to your initial expectations both operationally and obviously the 450 million segment EBITDA for next year is now off the table, but how far are you behind your initial expectations? Then in the letter on Angie, I think you talked about your intention of being more balanced. That means between services and ads and leads. Practically, what does that mean? Are we just talking about the marketing spend and conversion that you've talked about in addressing a question that was asked earlier? Or is there something else beyond just the go-to-market strategy with marketing? Thank you.
spk02: Sure. I'll do them in reverse order. The balance of services versus ads and leads actually runs differently. all throughout the organization. So first, just how we expose the various products to consumers and when we expose the various products to consumers. That will change and be more balanced. Second is how it exists inside the organization. Right now, or historically, I'd say decisions were made to prioritize services. in all kinds of organizational decisions, and that will be more balanced. The organization was operated in a way that was, I would say, services first, and I'd say going forward its services is very important. And services is a great service for homeowners, but it will be services, ads, and leads, and it will be homeowner first in terms of how to think about our operations and how to think about the customer experience. The second question was not to ask Meredith and how far behind we are. I think... realistically, we're probably one to one and a half, maybe, years behind schedule. I think there's, one, the delays that we've talked about extensively in the integration, and that was probably an aggregate of six-month delay. And then I think that the ad market on top of that has certainly not helped. Uh, and I think just generally being delayed in the integration, you know, led to exposure of more issues that needed to be addressed. So I, I think in aggregate has put us on maybe that. Roughly that timeline again, not, I really don't think there's a single thing that we've seen yet. It says the fundamental thesis. is flawed, but the surrounding environment is a tough one, and that's made all this slower and harder for us, and self-inflicted wounds over the last six months have added to that, too.
spk09: Thanks, Joey.
spk02: Thank you, Seth.
spk14: Well, thank you all for joining us this quarter, and look forward to talking to you next quarter when hopefully we'll have a lot more to share.
spk03: And ladies and gentlemen, that will conclude today's conference call and presentation. We thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.
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