Marchex, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the March X fourth quarter 2020 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one in your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Trevor Caldwell. Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives and Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Tamaria. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to March X's business update and fourth quarter 2020 conference call. Joining us today are Michael Renz and Russell Horowitz. Before we get started, I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements, including references to our financial and operational performance, and actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. Risks and uncertainties that could cause these results to differ materially are set forth in today's earnings press release and in our most recent annual and quarterly report filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we take no obligation to update these statements for subsequent events. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. The earnings press release is available on the investor relations section of our website. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Michael Renz, our co-CEO and chief financial officer.

Thank you, Trevor. Good afternoon, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. In November, on the back end of our strategic evolution and following the separation of our media assets, we moved to realign our operations in order to take advantage of the significant opportunity in conversational analytics and sales engagement solutions. This included moving aggressively to accelerate our robust product development cycle since the organization was able to focus exclusively on this core opportunity. We expect these efforts will be a key driver of progress this year. As we reflect on the last few months, We recognize the ongoing impact of the pandemic and the massive disruption on many of our customers over the past year, as well as its resulting impacts on us. However, because we made the early strategic bet to focus on conversational intelligence built upon aggregating anonymized data of hundreds of millions of sales conversations between global brands and their customers, including both voice and text, we now find ourselves at a unique advantage as we approach an inflection point in our opportunity. We can help our customers understand what is happening during these conversations at a deeper level than ever before. With our growing capabilities, our customers see us more and more as a critical partner to help them engage more prospects, grow their customer base, and close more business. These early investments have created a significant market opportunity that is transformational for March X and has given us room to both grow with our existing base of customers and expand that base meaningfully. Pieces are coming together in multiple ways. For example, in the fourth quarter, we've launched the first of our planned product rollouts, MarchX Marketing Edge. This solution enables brand marketers and agencies to tie revenue-generating conversations back to the specific marketing campaigns that generated them. MarchX Marketing Edge captures conversational data across multiple communication channels, including calls, text, and chat, as well as web form completions, then uses AI-powered conversation intelligence to identify and classify the conversations that are driving sales. By tying these high-value conversations back to their marketing sources, we empower businesses to make smarter media buys that deliver more high-value conversations to their sales teams. Should a sales conversation fail to convert, our customers need not worry. The product's integration with MarchX Sales Edge Rescue means they can immediately receive an alert to re-engage the prospect and rescue the sales opportunity before they call a competitor. MarchX Marketing Edge was recently awarded the Gold Stevie Award for the Marketing Solutions category. The Stevie Awards for Sales and Customer Service are among the world's top honors for customer service, contact center, business development, and sales professionals. The award noted that MarchX Marketing Edge is an innovative solution that enables marketers to make better data-driven decisions while increasing customer reach. This is another point of meaningful validation as we prepare for a post-COVID world. Many businesses are still adapting to the new normal and navigating the changing environment created by the pandemic. One of the ways we are helping our customers is by integrating texting solutions into our conversation platform. Adding text conversations has been a significant task, but there is urgency for our customers to broaden their real-time insights across high-priority consumer communications paths as they look to improve the customer experience while engaging consumers in the ways they want and in their communications channels of choice. We have added numerous customers to our texting solutions across Cord Vertical since the start of the year and expect we will continue to make progress adding more customers as we integrate our texting solutions throughout our new product pipeline. To help our customers emerge stronger from this period, We dove into the data and wanted to understand at a deep level just how much the pandemic has impacted consumer behavior. This led us to release our most ambitious consumer study yet. We chose to focus on the auto industry first, given our continuing penetration and significant growth opportunity in this vertical. We surveyed 1,700 in-market auto buying customers and analyzed 250,000 sales calls through conversational intelligence technology. The data was aggregated over the course of 2020 and revealed significant and surprising insights for dealers. A study found, for instance, that five potential buyers reached out to a dealer, they're ready to close quickly on a purchase. In fact, our data found that 75% of these shoppers who contact a dealer are ready to buy a car within three weeks. but only if they feel a high level of trust with the dealership. Additionally, 83% of consumers are researching and qualifying dealers more so than before. 71% report visiting fewer showrooms than before the pandemic and prefer to do much of the transaction at home. The study also revealed nearly 40% of consumers use a phone to call or text the dealer to make initial contact. making the phone the leading channel for consumer outreach. This far outpaces any other form of initial contact, including email or chat. These are just some of the findings the auto industry needs to understand in order to sell more cars in this new normal. MarchX has witnessed many of these changes over the last year by utilizing our conversational analytics technology on behalf of our customers as the pandemic has altered the consumer paths to purchase across several verticals. And now, through our various innovations, we are providing paths for many key industries to adapt and thrive in the future. With that, I'll hand the call to Russ.