Tremor International Ltd.

Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call

11/22/2023

spk07: Welcome to Tremor International's conference call for the three and nine months ended September 30th, 2023. At this time, participants are in a listen-only mode with a question and answer session to follow at the end of the presentation. This conference call is being recorded and a replay of today's call will be made available on the Investor Relations section of Tremor's website. I will now hand the call over to Billy Eckert, Vice President of Investor Relations, for introductions and the reading of the Safe Harbor Statement.
spk08: Billy, please go ahead.
spk06: Thank you, operator.
spk01: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Tremor International's financial and operating results call for the three and nine months ended September 30th, 2023. With us on today's call are Oprah Drucker, Tremor's chief executive officer, and Figi Neri, the company's chief financial officer. This morning, we issued a press release, which you can access on our IR website at investors.tremorinternational.com. During today's call, we will make forward-looking statements. All statements other than statements of historical fact could be deemed as forward-looking. We advise caution and reliance on forward-looking statements. These statements include, without limitation, statements and projections regarding our anticipated future financial and operating performance, market opportunities, growth prospects, strategy, financial outlook, partnerships, and anticipated benefits related to those partnerships, and forward-looking views on macroeconomic and industry conditions, as well as any other statements concerning the expected development, performance, and market share, or competitive performance relating to our products or services. All forward-looking statements are based on information available to us as of the date of this call. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those implied by these forward-looking statements, including unexpected changes in our business or unexpected changes in macroeconomic or industry conditions. More detailed information about these risk factors and additional risk factors are set forth in our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including, but not limited to, those risks and uncertainties listed in this section entitled Risk Factors in our most recent annual report on Form 20-F. Tremor does not intend to update or alter its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law. Additionally, the company's press release and management statements during this conference call We'll include discussions of certain measures and financial information in IFRS and non-IFRS terms. We refer you to the company's press release for additional details, including definitions of non-IFRS items and reconciliations of IFRS to non-IFRS results. At this time, it is my pleasure to introduce Ofer Druker, CEO of Tremor International.
spk05: Ofer, please go ahead. Thank you, Billy, and welcome to everyone joining us today. I will begin by providing an overview of our results and strategic initiatives, then we'll end the call over to our CFO, Sahin Uri, to discuss our financials. We will then open the call for questions. Please note, results for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2023, reflect the combined performance of Tremor International and Amobi, while results from the same prior year, include a mobile contribution from September 12th, 2022 through September 30th, 2022. I would like to start today's call by thanking everyone who has reached out and extended their thoughts, prayers, and sympathy following the October 7th terrorist attack on Israel, where our company is headquartered and where many of our employees and their families go home. Your support means a lot to us, and is greatly appreciated. While Tremor International is a global ad tech company, we generate the vast majority of our contribution over 85% in the US, which is also where the overwhelmingly largest base of our employees sit. Despite the conflict weighing heavy on our thoughts, and despite certain Israel-based team members being called to active duty, We are doing our best to keep our business activities and operation relatively unaffected by the situation. We commend the bravery of our active duty employees in service to their country and intend to honor them by working out to continue providing best-in-class service and solutions to our customers and partners in their absence, and supporting them and their families in every way we can. With the holistic integration of Amovi, which emphasized bringing its valuable employees, customers, and technology into our company, and the initial rebrand to Nexen behind us, in Q3, we focused primarily on scaling mid- to long-term revenue-generating initiatives and increasing engagement and awareness with advertisers and publishers, particularly through a demonstration of our new and recently enhanced capabilities. During the quarter, we deepened the relationship with existing customers and emphasized introducing our capabilities and solutions to new potential partners, and bolstering our sales and marketing teams to position us for accelerated growth within our core strategic drivers, PTV, video, and data. The rebrand to Nexen was still in early stages, as improved our positioning by simplifying our story and valuable position for customers and prospects, enabling our sales team to seamlessly package several solutions and create a pathway to expand the sustained revenue per account growth to increase cross-selling opportunities. We also believe we have further amplified the power of our rebrand by recently installing a new chief marketing officer with a strong product marketing background, who join us from one of our closest EdTech peers. We feel the experience and expertise in product marketing he brings to our organization is a perfect fit and comes at the right time to expand on our groundwork initially laid by the rebrand. We believe we have built one of the most comprehensive platforms in all of EdTech for our customers across the ecosystem. which include major advertisers, agencies, and media partners. And now, we feel our marketing efforts need to generate further momentum with customers and prospects to complement and better highlight the strength of our technology and data products suite. While it's definitely a work in progress, we believe we are now better positioned to highlight the meaningful, holistic value of our unified platform. Our main goal now is to showcase how partners can leverage our platforms, multiply offerings to simplify activation efforts through advanced data-driven targeting and measurement solutions, and achieve their goals through a media platform that enables them to maximize the value of their first-party data, all while realizing significant cost benefits only possible through partnering with a holistic platform like ours. The next step in enhancing our market position through our rebrand is to change the name of the parent company from Tremor International to Nexen International, which shareholders will vote on our AGM in December. Assuming the vote passes, our intent is to trade under the new company name shortly thereafter and to change the stock ticker in both markets from TRMR to MEXN. We do not currently anticipate any changes to our ordinary share or ADR structure in connection with the name or ticker changes. In addition to recently enhancing our marketing efforts and sales positioning, the successful integration of Amobi has significantly boosted our tech and data capabilities, particularly through enhanced DSP and TV planning features and enable the creation and addition of powerful solutions we believe are pivotal for driving enhanced relevancy, efficiency, and better returns for our customers. We believe Amobi has already added a tremendous amount of value on this front and uniquely differentiated us while positioning us strongly for success in the future of the advertising ecosystem. Over the past few months, we have seen dramatic increase in the level and frequency of conversation about linear shifting towards and conversion with digital. It's clear to us that the major players in the advertising industry understand this is an important, rapidly evolving trend and reality they need to address. We believe capable technology partners like us with robust cross-platform capabilities are best positioned to help them achieve continuous success, converting linear budget into digital. It's a long adoption process. However, we believe we have unique products that fulfill the needs of the major players that advertise across linear TV and that already currently utilize CTV or plan to do so in the near future. Now it's time to market the product and create a solid base of partnerships that will fuel our future CTV growth as we become more active in assisting with the conversion between linear and digital. We believe in excellence as a critical advantage on this front and is well positioned for this development specifically through the first to market cross-platform planner we launched in April. The cross-platform planner creation was made possible by the linear planning tools we gained through Amobi that were developed for years prior to the acquisition. The solution enabled customers to realistically plan campaigns across linear and CTV, and also allocate budgets between formats within the push of a button. The planner has already driven early adoption by major industry partners, including A&E Network, Fox, Televista Univision, and we expect others to follow suit over time. The solution is providing us a strong foundation for opening significant partnership discussion, and we believe we experience strong growth related to this tool over the intermediate and long term. We will continue to work tirelessly on further integration of this solution into new and current partnerships as we are confident it reflects a strong potential future growth driver for the business that can deliver significant value by attracting new customers and enticing existing customers to increase spending on our platform. For our customers, success is often a byproduct of efficiently and effectively ensuring their messaging reaches the widest and most likely-to-buy audience on the right screen at the right time. However, before a campaign is activated through existing, success begins with customers finding and understanding their audience by having a grasp on what content their targets are consuming, as this is a strong indicator of trends they are following, interest they have, and future purchasing behavior. Nexon Discovery, our data field BI tool, also gained through the AMOBI acquisition, optimized these efforts by enhancing audience insight and has been generating immense interest with prospective customers and partners in essentially every demo and across a wide range of use cases. Customer leveraging the solution are able to integrate powerful audience consumption data and trends from across web, social media, and TV into their planning efforts to then activate in campaigns through our DSP, providing a seamless and frictionless experience. Customers that previously had to leverage several partners for audience discovery, cross-screen planning, activation, and measurement are finding that working with a single partner that can do in all including offering TV data unavailable anywhere else, reflects an obvious value proposition for the simplicity, efficiency, and increased returns it enables. We also believe Nexon Discovery will be instrumental and provide significant value for customers seeking solution in advance of and around the 2024 U.S. election cycle, thanks to its segmentation capabilities a valuable audience insight, which can provide unique feedback for partners that choose to leverage it. The addition of tools like Nexon Discovery into our platform also highlight a notable and growing opportunity for us to deepen relationship and expand revenue footprint with customers. HNL is a great example for this as the agency choose to adopt more solution with us, including Nexon Discovery, Vida ACR data, and our cross-channel planning technology after their successful collaboration with Nexon DSP. As our recently added product, rebrand and enhanced marketing efforts continue to gain traction. We anticipate generating similar success stories where partners expand adoption behind a single product to take greater advantage of our broader ecosystem. Overall, the Amobe acquisition added a preliminary and highly synergistic features that we believe, when combined with our pre-existing capabilities, has resulted in one of the most comprehensive and data-rich platforms in all of EdTech, purpose-built to help customers meet and exceed their video and CTV advertising goals. We feel we are now unmatched in our ability to assist customers on both sides of the ecosystem across their entire workflow, from audience discovery through measurement and cross-format including linear and CTV to one unified platform with endless possibilities. We are also incredibly excited to share that we have recently begun the process of accelerating monetization related to our exclusive global access to VIDA ACR data gained through our investment in VIDA. As a reminder, VIDA is a fast-growing CTV operating system and subsidiary of ISEN. We have already been monetizing VIDA's ACR data in the U.S. for CTV targeting and measuring. However, we very recently also launched the data offering in the U.K., which we believe is unique and offers a significant value proposition for customers in the market, given the size and scale of the growing audience which we have built. The offering launched In the UK, it's expected to start generating revenues in the COVID quarter. However, we believe revenue related to the UK launch will scale significantly in 2024, and that the offering will continue to generate revenues through the remainder of our sustainability period over the next several years. We intend to launch the ACI Data Offering next in Australia during Q1 2024, and are excited for the benefit that we can enable for our customers there, as we also have a significant audience reach in that region. We believe the impending launch in Australia can also generate stronger revenues opportunities for us in 2024 and beyond. It is clear to us that this is becoming extremely attractive to advertisers, agencies, and targeting the measurement in major markets. Our sales team has done a great job already generating interest within the industry for this scaled and growing ACR data footprint. And we believe this key differentiator can bring truly significant revenues to the company over time through both new and existing customers. VitaRapid growth has been fueled by the ongoing expansion of its parent company, iSense, which continues to grow its CTV shipment volume at the world's fastest rate in Q2. According to Omidyar, iSense continues to rank second globally for TV shipment volume, holding a roughly 14% global shipment volume share, while shipment increased 19.3% . In Q2, iSense expanded its global market share by 1.6% , also reflecting the fastest expansion rate by any TV brand globally. As demand for ISIS-connected TV powered by VISA operating system continues to grow, driven by consumer desire for high-quality, low-cost smart TV options, we believe our company and its customers will increasingly benefit from our strategic investment in VISA. The trend of expanding our advertisers and supply partner base while retaining major customers continues in Q3. and was driven by demand for our newly launched and recently enhanced product, as well as our rebrands and sales and marketing team improvements. In Q3 2023, the company added one other content team, new actively spending first-time advertiser customers that go retail, travel, finance, and CPG verticals, as well as others. This also included the addition of 11 new enterprise self-service advertiser customers, highlighted by some of the world's largest and most recognizable technology companies and apparel brands. Over the first nine months of 2023, the company added 223 new actively spending first-time advertiser customers. Nexon Studio formerly Trudy continued to generate impressive growth amongst enterprise clients, leveraging the company's creative services, highlighted by 58 and 79% increase in demand for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2023, respectively. The company also added 109 new supply partners, including 100 in the US during Q3, across several verticals and formats, including CTV, broadcast TV, and mobile, with notable recent momentum amongst mobile gaming publishers. Over the first nine months of 2023, we added 283 new supply partners, of which 249 were US-based. Our ability to expand revenues relationship and product adoption with customers attract new partners and generate continued momentum through our rebrand, talent enhancement, and an end suite of tech and data solutions contribute to notable growth in Q3. Despite challenging market conditions, driving continued cautiousness in the advertising spending environment, particularly in managed service, we generate contribution of $76.6 million in Q3 2023, which reflects year-over-year growth of 18% compared to $64.9 million in Q3 2022. For the nine months ended September 30, 2023, we generated contribution aspect of $223.7 million, which reflects 8% year-over-year growth compared to $206.7 million in the same prior year period. Contribution-X tech growth was largely attributable to significant growth in programmatic revenue, as our core business benefited from increased demand for our programmatic solution, as well as the integration of Amobic, which features strong programmatic footprint. During Q3, we generated programmatic revenues of $74.2 million, which reflects 23% growth from $60.1 million in Q3 2022. For the nine months end of September 30, 2023, we generated programmatic revenues of $230 million, which reflects 18% growth for $179.9 million in the same prior year period. We believe the industry will further embrace programmatic advertising over time to automate the purchase of video and TV inventories, and that we are still in the early innings of this long-term trend that we are heavily indexed to and we are strategically prepared for. We also continue to further strengthen our impressive time base across all major focus areas of the company. As I mentioned earlier, we hired a new chief marketing officer, Ben Kaplan, who we are very excited about, and who brings significant and direct edtech product marketing experience to our organization. Ben has led teams across major tech and media companies, such as Meredith, Twitter, and most recently, Fabmatic, and is already clear that his product marketing expertise will strongly complement our rebrand and be a great asset to our going forward. Additionally, as we scale our enterprise customer base following our recent DST enhancement, we were excited to add Ariel Beach as our new VP of Enterprise Sales, who comes to us from AmazonAid. We also filled several other sales vacancies, hiring experienced ethics sales veterans to enhance and expand our team in key metro areas like New York and Los Angeles. We believe we now have the right structure and team members in place to best showcase the value proposition of our comprehensive suite of offerings and that we are well positioned to accelerate long-term growth and share gains through the combined strength of our people and platform. Finally, I'm pleased to report that our board intends to approve the launch of a new $20 million ordinary share repurchase program pending approval from the Israeli court which is expected in the new term. If humanly obtain code approval, the new potential program would be financed through existing cash resources and would follow two previous programs in which we invested a combined $95 million in our ordinary share, repurchasing roughly 13% of shares outstanding. Looking ahead, we believe investing in our business to drive growth. as well as repurchasing our shares represent the best mid-term capital allocation priorities to generate long-term shareholder value. True shares remain at discount valuation levels, and if the company remains cash-generating in the future, the board also indicated it would consider pursuing additional future share repurchase program after completing the impending potential 20 million ordinary share repurchase program and is willing to seek future approval from the Israeli court as required. The board, as I confident in the company future growth prospect and believe repurchasing It shows at current level reflects the strong long-term investment opportunity for the company and its shareholders. As always, we will also continue to evaluate acquisition opportunities over the intermediate and long-term, given our historical success, integrating them to create value for our customers, business, and shareholders. However, for now, we are confident in the strategic competitive positioning and breadth of our platforms' current offerings. With that, it's my pleasure to turn the call to Sagi.
spk04: Thank you, Ofer. Today, I will review the highlights and key financial and operational drivers of our performance over the three and nine months ended September 30, 2023, and we'll also discuss our forward-looking guidance. As a reminder, results for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2023. reflect the combined performance of Tremor International and Amobi, where results for the three and nine months ended September 1st, 2022, include Amobi contribution only from September 12th, 2022 through September 30th, 2022. For the three months ended September 30th, 2023, we generated contribution extract of $76.6 million, reflecting 18% growth from $64.9 million in Q3 2022. For the nine months ended September 30, 2023, we generated contribution X tax of $223.7 million, reflecting an increase of 8% compared to $206.7 million in the same prior year period. Contribution extract growth over both periods was driven largely by a significant increase in programmatic revenue. We experienced strength in shopping and food verticals during Q3 2023, as well as in mobile desktop display and PMPs. Conversely, toughness was observed within our CPG vertical and within CPV as challenging market conditions drove reduced advertising demand and softness in managed service, particularly in July, causing customers to temporarily shift spending from CTV into lower-cost options such as desktop and mobile, as well as displays. While we believe conditions in the CTV advertising market have stabilized compared to July, we expect ongoing market uncertainty and managed service softness to constrain advertising budgets and drive customers to continue to more so leverage our lower-cost solution through at least the end of 2023. Programmatic revenue for the three months ended September 30, 2023, was $74.2 million, which reflected a significant 23% increase compared to $60.1 million in Q3 2022. For the nine months ended September 30, 2023, we generated programmatic revenue of $213 million, which reflected an 18% increase from $179.9 million in the same prior year period. Programmatic revenue as a percentage of revenue increased dramatically to 93% in Q3, 2023, and 90% for the nine months ended September 30, compared to 85% in Q3 2022, and 79% for the nine months ended September 30, 2022. The increase was driven by our strategic shift of sales, resources, and focus into Discord business, as well as the added programmatic footprint gained through Amovi. CTV revenue for Q3 2023 was $19.6 million, which reflected a decrease of 21%, from $24.7 million in Q3 2022. As I mentioned, the year-over-year decrease in CTV revenue was largely driven by weakness earlier in Q3, particularly in July, as macro uncertainty drove managed service softness, causing customers to temporarily shift spending from higher-cost options like CTV into lower-cost options like mobile and desktop, as well as displays. To highlight this point, contribution extract from mobile increased 20% year-over-year, contribution extract from display increased 138% year-over-year, and contribution extract from desktop increased 38% year-over-year in Q4. While we are seeing our customers focus near-term spending in lower cost options, where we are still able to provide value-added solution to assist them, we continue to expect CCV to remain a key center of investment and long-term growth driver for the company. We expect our recently enhanced suite of premium CTV solutions will continue to drive increased long-term future industry demand, particularly as macro headwinds and uncertainty inevitably ease over time and add budget and spending expense. For the nine months ended September 30, 2023, We generated CTV revenue of $65.6 million, which reflected a 2% increase from $64.1 million in the same prior year period. Video revenue continued to account for a majority of our programmatic revenue at 66% in Q3 2023, and 70% for the nine months ended September 30, 2023. Video revenue as a percentage of programmatic revenue was 93% for the three and nine months end of September 30, 2022. Year-over-year decreases in Q3 were attributable to the addition of Amobi, which had a historically stronger display revenue base. Year-over-year decline in CTV revenue, driven by challenging market condition, and significant year-over-year increases in programmatic revenue. Despite the short-term customer spending focus on lower cost option outside of CTV, which we expect to shift over time as demand for our CTV solution increases and as market conditions improve, our impressive ability to increase contribution extract in Q3 and over the first nine months of 2023, despite a lack of significant growth in CTV, highlights the strength and durability our diversified revenue model provides. It also favors support our belief that as market condition improves and customers shift more aggressively into CTV advertising in the future, that we are very well positioned for outside long-term market share gain, given our vast capabilities and footprint and how heavily indexed we are to CTV. The new customer base added through Amobi, which has historically largely leveraged display solutions, provide a significant long-term growth runway to cross-sell our video and CCD capabilities and grow our overall video revenue footprint. We strongly believe that our pre-existing and newly launched solution will enable us to expand the base of customers gained through the Amobi acquisition, that leverage us for multiple video-centric solutions in the future and also attract new video customers to our platform over time. During the three and nine months ended September 30th, 2023, we generated $21.3 million and $51.2 million of adjusted EBITDA, respectively, which compared to $30.1 million and $108 million in the same prior year period. The year-over-year decrease in adjusted EBITDA were driven by the acquisition and integration of Amobi, which was generating significant losses when we first acquired the company, as well as a weaker comparative advertising demand environment earlier in 2023. We will continue to work towards further optimizing our cost structure and improving efficiencies to improve profitability. We believe as we generate higher level of contribution extracts that the majority of increased contribution extracts will flow through to adjusted EBITDA, given the strength of our operating model, which provides strong and increasing degree of operating leverage. For Q3 2023, we generated an adjusted EBITDA margin of 27% on a revenue basis and 28% on a contribution extract basis, which compared to 43% and 46%, respectively, during Q3 2022. For the nine months ended September 30, 2023, we generated an adjusted EBITDA margin of 22% on a revenue basis and 23% on a contribution exact basis, which compared to 47% and 52%, respectively, in the same prior year period. Turning to our cash flow, we generated $13.1 million in net cash from operating activities during Q3 2023 and $17.1 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2023. After generating net cash from operating activities of $12.6 million during Q3 2022 and $59.1 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2022. During the nine months ended September 30th, 2023, we incurred approximately $6 million in severance and retention bonus related costs associated with the reorganization of Amobi employees into the Tremor International base. As of September 30th, we had $98.9 million in net cash, as well as $80 million undrawn on our revolving credit facility. We intend to leverage our considerable cash reserves for the ongoing needs of the business, investments in internal growth initiatives, and future potential share repurchase program in the near to intermediate term, and to support other future potential intermediate and long-term strategic investments, initiatives, and acquisitions. We also generated non-IFRS diluted earning per ordinary share of $0.09 in Q3, 2023 and 12 cents for the nine months ended September 30th, 2023 versus non-IFRS diluted earnings per ordinary share of 11 cents in Q3, 2022 and 44 cents for the nine months ended September 30th, 2022. Finally, I'll now turn to our outlook. Well, we've seen evidence of ad market stabilization, particularly since July, We are also seeing signs that the recovery will remain uneven and that ongoing macroeconomic headwinds and uncertainty will limit advertising demand and budget, drive continued managed service softness, and cause our customers to continue to focus near-term spending on our lower-cost solutions, such as display, through at least the remainder of 2023. As a result, for full year 2023, we now expect contribution X tax in a range of approximately $310 to $315 million and adjusted EBITDA in a range of approximately $80 million to $85 million and continue to anticipate that programmatic revenue will reflect approximately 90% of our full year 2020 free revenue. We continue to believe that the combination of our durable business model, and diversified revenue stream, focus on core strategic growth drivers, enhanced ability to drive multi-solution enterprise deals, greater stability following the completed integration of Amobi, and growing demand for our programmatic solution and recently added products, will strongly position the company for outside future market share gains, contribution extract growth, and improved profitability. particularly as CTV advertising demand conditions improve and as our rebrand and recently strengthened sales and marketing team continue to gain favorite traction. With my remarks completed, I'll turn the call back to Ofer.
spk05: Thank you, Sagi. With Amobi's team members and technology successfully integrated into our business, we believe we are developed and now boast one of the most comprehensive TV and video-focused platforms in the market, differentiated by unmatched data-powered solutions that enable better outcomes and greater efficiency for customers across the entire advertising value chain. The integration of Amobi further accelerated our product innovation leadership role and enabled us to launch thought-after and desperately needed solutions that we believe will deepen our relationship with customers, attract new customers, and further position us as a trusted industry partner and leaders in the combined future CTV and TV advertising ecosystem. Moving forward, the core focus will now be to build on the initial success and momentum generated through our rebrand by ensuring our marketing and sales efforts strongly complement and best emphasize the strength of our platform. We have confidence we made important steps on this front that will better position us for 2024 and beyond. We believe the combination of our rebrand alongside our strengthened sales and marketing organization positions us much more strongly to showcase how our current and future customers can best leverage One Data's new platform to meet and exceed their advertising goals in KPI. We also believe we will be able to achieve outsized future share gains, grow contribution act stack, and improve profitability over time, particularly as market condition improves, and as customers continue to embrace and grow spending within our data-driven suite of programmatic CTV and video solutions. We have many reasons to be excited and look forward to continuing to provide best-in-class service and solutions to our customers and partners. I would like to thank all of our employees and shareholders for their continuous support. And operator, we will now take questions.
spk07: Thank you. At this time, we will open the line for questions. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1. Our first question comes from Matt Swanson with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
spk10: Yeah, thank you for taking the questions. And I, of course, would like to extend my thoughts and prayers to you and your employees impacted by the war in Israel. But maybe starting with you, Siggy, and kind of where you left off on the comments, looking at the guidance, thinking about the macro environment you've seen in October and then November to date, Can you just kind of help us think about what your guidance implies for the end of November and December? And basically, like, are you thinking of the macro getting better, stabilizing, kind of like you've seen, or getting worse within that context?
spk04: Thank you, Matt. Yes, I think, as I said, we are seeing, like, in October, November, December is already coming. We are seeing stabilization in the macro. Of course, it's not as it's been before, before the macro challenges and headwinds hit all of us. I think the guidance that we give is cautious and conservative. We have a lot of different deals that are being handled as we are talking, but since we are not sure everything is going to hit our revenues by the end of the year, and maybe some will move into 2024, We are trying to be cautious as we can.
spk10: Yeah, that's helpful, Kala. And then maybe this is for Ofra and Siggy. You know, the strategic gains we've been talking about with, you know, especially the cross-platform planner and then, you know, next in discovery sounds exciting and seeing some more traction from the ATR data, it's obviously kind of getting offset a little bit by the macro currently. So could you just maybe give us a little more color on the CTV market specifically? about what's kind of giving you confidence that you are making those strategic gains, even though the macro is kind of impacting some of the, you know, top-line results from that.
spk05: Of course. Thank you, Matt, and thank you also for your support. When we are looking at the CTV market in general, we are in this business for only in already for five years, and we invested two years ago in vida in order to create the acr now it's operational in the us and also in uk next quarter we are going to push it also to australia and then we will probably announce more markets that we are going to to launch our acs acr solution and i think this is this is like a of course all our initiatives connect including the cross platform is being shed a little bit by the macroeconomic situation because people are spending less on CTV, which is more expensive format than they are. As Sagi indicated, people are moving most their attention to more performance-oriented formats like display, mobile, and so on. But in general, when you look at the ecosystem, and we have some luck that we are the last that are basically reporting, so we can hear the rest of the peers talking about it, but many people spoke about the conversion between linear and digital PTV basically. And we are, I think the most ready around that. Why? Because basically through the acquisition of a mobile that we made a year ago, a little bit more than a year ago, we basically acquired the ideology that there's like a very strong linear planning tools, one of a kind in the industry. And we added to that the cost platform solution that we basically launched in April. was already integrated and used by a few of the biggest broadcasters. And now we are moving the attention also to the demand side for that. And I think that linear advertisers in general, they understand now that in order to reach the audience, they need to also to expand and to reach digital and CTV in order to reach the audience. Because linear shrinks basically, and it will continue to shrink probably in the next couple of years, so they need to do that. The only platform that is ready as a cross-platform platform is ours today in the market. And I believe that when the macroeconomics will change, the adoption of this platform, the usage of the platform will grow together with our readiness early next year to offer it to demand-side partners that will be able basically to use it and also to use basically our CTV marketplaces in order to create the user extension as they need it. I totally agree with you. I think that macroeconomic conditions are not great for the flourishing of CTV, basically. But I think that when you're looking at mid-term and long-term, we build the capabilities around targeting and measurement through the ACL data that we got. We got the cross-planning solution, and we have all the tools that we developed before that. And in general, I think that we are able to offer a very comprehensive solution to people that are using CTV or linear advertisers that want to expand or need to expand to CTV. I think that we are there. And hopefully, when the market condition will be better, people will be able to see that in full scale, our capabilities, and we will enjoy from the growth that is associated with that. I hope that I answered your question.
spk06: Yeah, no, that was great. Thank you. Thank you.
spk07: Our next question comes from Laura Martin with Needham. Please go ahead.
spk00: Hi, can you hear me okay, you guys?
spk05: Always. Hi, Laura.
spk00: Great. Hi there. Okay, so I want to focus on partnerships. You brought up partnerships a couple times over, but I noticed you're petitioning the Israeli courts to buy in another 20 million of shares, and you just finished buying 95 million of shares. Typically, partnerships bring money with them, which obviously you don't need or you wouldn't be buying shares. So can you talk about what you're looking for from your partnerships you're talking about?
spk05: So I don't think that we are talking about partnerships that are supposed to bring us money. We are looking at partnerships that can give us capabilities or reach the market and stuff like that. We are, of course, a cash-generated company, and we have net cash. of close to $100 billion. So we are not looking for partnership that will give us a, we are not looking for investment. We are generating cash and we are cash positive. And we are buying shares because for two reasons. First of all, we already fulfill a lot of our ambitions around acquisitions in the past few years. The last acquisition was last year that we acquired a mobi a massive company with a lot of capabilities that are added into our stack now and all the companies basically integrated into into our company it was a huge effort and it came after additional three acquisitions that we've done in the last four years so we are not looking now for additional acquisition in the near future in general and when you have cash like we do and we generate cash we think that according to the share price that we are witnessing now, it makes sense for us to repurchase our shares in order to basically support the shareholders and potential investors that will come to the company. And this is the best usage of cash as we see that right now.
spk04: Yeah, it's the best investment we are seeing outside now.
spk00: Okay, but the capabilities you're looking for in partnerships are more new products or add-on platforms or like what you did with DITA?
spk05: So it's typical, we have a, of course, the partnership is a wide definition, but we are, for example, the partnership with Vita gave us the ACL data, gave us media on CTV, giving us a lot of access to data that we need in several, in different markets and so on. But we have a lot of partnerships that we are holding with measurement companies, with target, with data companies, with media companies. It's a very wide definition. Usually we are doing that in order to create win-win situation with partnerships that are adding on complementary to our capability, or they can use our technology in order to gain their target. But that's in general. And we always look for good partners that can grow together our business.
spk00: Okay, super helpful. And then I think Google is finally going to deprecate cookies after pushing it off four times. Can you remind us how much of your ad targeting comes from cookies and how you guys are positioned over 2021 as Google finally starts deprecating cookies starting in Q1 of 24?
spk05: So we have, of course, our graph. We have, of course, the fact that we are end-to-end solution is reducing our... dependency on the usage of cookies, of course. The fact that we are heavy on CTV also reduces this cookie dependency. So I think that in general, we are getting ready for that. And I think that in general, the fact that we are an end-to-end solution will give us even advantage if it will happen because of the fact that we are sitting on both sides and we can basically create the match even without the cookie in most cases. So I think that we are in a very good position on that front.
spk00: Okay. And you're calling, following up on Matt's question earlier, you're applying for a dramatic deceleration in Q4, and we're already sitting here six weeks into the quarter, and your extract revenue has been accelerating in every quarter to date, like, you know, really nice growth in the third quarter, so congratulations on that. but you're showing negative year-over-year growth in your guidance for Q4. So I just wanted to push on that a little bit and find out what you've seen in the last six, sorry, the first six weeks of this quarter that is so decelerated. Like what verticals specifically have so decelerated from that wonderful Q3 18% revenue growth rate? So I think that, Laura, again,
spk05: The fact that we are coming late with our notices helping us to look at other people and what they are seeing and thinking. I think that there is a lot of instability in the market. So people are feeling that people, the advertisers are more cautious about their spending. Sometimes they are like creating orders and then delaying them or minimizing them and so on. So I think that the macro is still affecting us and we want to be on the conservative side on that matter. The second thing, we have a lot of partnership and agreements that we are doing with companies that are supposed to use our services that we feel that we are taking the opportunity, we are taking into account the opportunity to slip into Q1 instead of happening this quarter. So we are trying to be cautious around our guidance. But I think that the major thing is the macroeconomic that is. It's a little bit better than the beginning or the middle of the year, but it's still not great in Q4. And you see the assitance of the advertisers and their cautiousness about investing the money right now in advertising, basically.
spk08: Thank you very much.
spk06: Thank you.
spk08: Our next question comes from Andrew Maroc with Raymond James.
spk07: Please go ahead.
spk02: Great, thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to dig in a little bit on your recent leadership hires in the sales and marketing organization. Just any color you can provide there on any potential changes in strategy, how your incoming leadership tends to think about the overall sales and marketing strategy, if that differs from what you have now.
spk05: Of course. Thank you for this question. So I will start with marketing, if you don't mind. When we are looking at what we did in the past year or so, we basically took a very big company like Amobi and we integrated it into Tremor just to give you a little bit of a scale. Amobi was one and a half times in size than Tremor in general with a lot of technology that was developed and acquired over like 10 years or so. So when we connected everything together, We took the best of every solution and we funded some of our solutions and so on. And we had a lot of brands that we were using, like we were using Tremor and Wooly and Amobi and so on. So we basically rebranded, but it's not enough to rebrand. You need to do a lot of work about your offering in the market to make it more simple to the salespeople and to the market to understand what you're offering. So we look for a CMO that will have very strong product marketing experience that will be able to help us to connect the dots explain it in a meaningful manner to the market so it will make the story simple and also for the sales people to to comprehend and understand it very easier and to be offering it without confusing the clients of using so many names like we used before so that's a massive change that we've done the rebrand hiring this CMO Ben that is standing with a lot of experience in product marketing, because I think that the rest of the marketing we are doing very well. But on the product and sales enablement side, we wanted to bring someone that can take us to the next level. And I think that we found the right person to do that. And we, of course, trust him to lead us to this path. On the sales side, when we are looking at the sales side, one of the reasons that we acquired Amobi was the strong enterprise solution that was there. They developed it over many, many years. And to build an enterprise solution sounds easy. It's not, because you have a lot of layers to that, which is also coming with a lot of professional people that knows how to support the client, how to explain to him how to use it, to guide him, to train him. to give them a lot of a ecosystem around the DSP itself in order to support its day-to-day work. And basically to offer this enterprise solution is a different sell than to sell many solutions. And we wanted to take this, we took basically the DSP of Amobi integrated as our main DSP with our capabilities, but we wanted to keep the enterprise solution, of course, alive and kicking and we are hiring now people that will be able to sell it in the market. That's why we are bringing new people also to the enterprise side that will be able to offer this to new clients, to agencies, to dependent agencies, to brands that are looking for a solution like that. And I feel that it's important because the sale of an enterprise solution, it's a little bit different from selling a basically managed solution or PMP and so on. It's a longer process. You are talking to different people in the organization, and you need people that have an experience in doing that, and this is exactly what we are doing now.
spk02: Got it. Thank you for that. And then one more on the macro, I'm afraid. So in terms of customers seeking kind of lower-priced formats, Like one thing that we've heard kind of across the space this quarter is that CPMs on non-CTV video are coming down. And so if there is a flight to like discounted inventory or lower price inventory, I may have expected non-CTV video to be a little bit stronger for you guys. Is there anything else at play there or is it really just, you know, customers are seeking the lowest CPMs on an absolute basis, which is driving more strength in mobile and desktop? Thank you.
spk05: I think it's a combination of two things. First of all, it's what you said, it's to buy cheaper CPM, basically. But the second thing is also performance metrics. And I think that still, we spoke about it in several of our earning calls in the past, that we believe that CTV will become a performance also oriented platform, oriented format, but it will take some time. So I think that right now, when people are looking for performance in this macroeconomic situation, They are basically looking for mostly for different solution and different formats than CTV, which is they have more like track record of proving that generate performance, which is display, OLV, mobile, and so on, and less CTV. But we feel that, of course, when the macroeconomics will improve again, I think that people will shift again their attention to CTV. That's one. And I think that this is important also to remember that some of the key verticals that we're dealing with CTV, like automotive, entertainment, and so on, were not in great shape in the last six months, some of them with strikes and slowdowns. So we feel that it's also influenced a little bit the market of the CTV in general, even for the people that are willing to pay ICPN in order to reach their target audiences.
spk06: Thank you. Thank you.
spk08: Our next question comes from Andrew Boone with JMP Securities.
spk07: Please go ahead.
spk09: Good morning, and thanks so much for taking my question. I'd also like to just say, hey, we're thinking about you guys as the Israel conflict continues to progress. Going back to kind of Laura's question on thinking through the 4Q23 guide, The run rate now implies something that's fairly negative into 2024. Is there any way that you can help us understand organic growth, maybe for 3Q, or any thoughts on 2024 as we begin to really fine-tune our estimates for next year?
spk04: Yes, Andrew. Thanks. So we are not guiding the market regarding giving a formal guidance regarding 2024. I think that when, as Ofer mentioned, we are seeing all the opportunities that are laying in front of us, the different capabilities, the different products that we can enable different players within the industry and the deals that we are now trying to facilitate through Q4 and maybe Q1. I think that to say that we will be on the lower double-digit growth is something that we can stand behind.
spk06: That's very helpful.
spk09: And then, Sagi, another one for you. In your prepared comments, you said Tremor will work towards further optimizing our cost structure. Can you talk about what's left in the business to optimize? Where may be areas that there can be additional efficiencies rung out?
spk04: Yes, I think we did a lot during 2023, and we optimized our cost structure all over the year. We are doing it from time to time on an ongoing basis regardless of any acquisition or any restructuring. I think that we are seeing some of the products that we inherent through the Mobi acquisition and some other acquisition that we can optimize the structure of the R&D teams over there because now we are more familiar with the tools and we tweak them so we can be more efficient over there. Of course, some of it is part of implementing different AI solutions in order to make our work better, faster, and cheaper. Other than that, I think, you know, sales and marketing we will continue to invest in. The other supporting departments we are optimizing as we are moving. So most of the optimization will come from R&D probably and taking our resources and taking more out of that. with probably lower staff.
spk09: And then the last one for me is, Ofer, historically, Tremor Nexen has been kind of built by M&A. Or Mobi is now fully integrated. How do you think about M&A going forward as you guys have kind of a new streamlined run rate business?
spk05: So we just finished the integration of Mobi. I think that we mentioned it in the previous course that what also slows us down a little bit because we needed to work very hard on the integration. I think that we need to give the company some space now to get together like we do and to start performing on the assets that we got. When we are looking at our technological assets, I think that we are We have everything that we need. We can always enhance something, but I think that we have everything that we need. We have a very strong DSP that is basically a result of a lot of DSPs that we integrated into one technology, and we build it best of with technology around the DSP. We have a DNP. We have an SSD. We have an ad server for CTV. We have planning tools. We have discovery tools. We have all the technology that we can really dream around. I think that if you will make a new additional acquisition is always, we are looking at, we call it for capabilities, for clients or for additional territories or geographies that we want to include in our growth. But I think that in the, as we say in the near future is less of an issue. And I think that like we indicated the best investment that we see now is to repurchase for now our shares whenever we can in order to support our growth and the value we tend for our shareholders.
spk06: Thank you. Thank you.
spk08: Our next question comes from Eric Martinuzzi with Lake Street.
spk07: Please go ahead.
spk03: I wanted to better understand the Q4 guide, your contribution XTAC.
spk04: is based on the outlook expected to be up about 15 percent quarter on quarter wondering how you would compare that with normal seasonality yes so i think you know then the numbers that you extracted from our guidance of course are the right numbers i think that we as we said we had a lot of deals going on in q4 which all of us understand you know macro or or not macro are supposed to be uh the strongest quarter within the year uh and and seasonality is eating over there i think that we uh we wanted or we assumed that we are going to do better in q4 but then because we have now a lot of new revenue stream which are as offer mentioned the the sales cycles over there are much longer and it needs it needs to take more time for us to educate the clients about exactly what we are buying and how we are operating it. So some of the deals that we assume that will happen in Q4 will go and sign in Q1. And again, I think as Ofer mentioned as well, the macro is putting a little bit of shade over here. Companies does not want to sign a new contract for a new product tool in Q4 and they prefer to do it at the beginning of a new year. So this is like, you know, the color behind why we are growing 15%, and of course Q4 is the strongest.
spk03: Okay, and then a layer deeper on CTV. You know, CTV revenue declined from Q2 to Q3, essentially went from, in round numbers, $25 million in Q2 to $20 million in Q3. What is implied in the Q4 outlook? Does CTV increase, and if so,
spk05: what's the expectation i think that there are a few reason for to a pressure on the ctv as we indicated i think that if we didn't start at this quarter it started a little bit earlier earlier we are talking about macroeconomics so as we mentioned people are looking for lower cpm pressure on cpm so even if they are buying they are buying on lower cpm and they are basically saving some of their costs so it's less revenues for for companies like us in the edtech the second thing is also verticals that in the last day the last year that were like very strong on on ctv like entertainment and automotive they suffered from internal issue for them of the of the verticals that basically affected also their their buying matrix and and affected the size of the industry and as we said shifting of budget basically from CTV to performance so even if people are are willing to buy CTV and because of the microeconomic and because of them being cautious they are prefer to go some of them the newcomers to things that they are more familiar with and they are moving their spend to two areas like display mobile and OLV which is online video instead of CTV which is much more expensive, but it's, let's say, less performance-driven in this stage. So I think that all of that together showing weakness in CTV, like we see across the board, not just with us, but I think that we have the tools, as I mentioned, like the ACL that we are now expanding into new territories with success, and the cross-platform that we have initiated to the publisher side, and we are moving it now to the demand side in the next year. This will be elements that will help us to grow the demand of CTV and to offer like something unique in the market that is able to capture the attention of the advertisers and serve their needs.
spk06: But do you expect it to grow sequentially?
spk05: We expect it to grow, but you know, we don't know. We believe that in general, if the market, if the macroeconomic will improve, we will see a much bigger opportunity for us. But if the macroeconomic will keep pushing the market down, it will be more limited. But in general, we believe that it will, of course, will keep going.
spk06: Thank you. Thank you.
spk08: Our last question comes from Mark Kelly with Stiefel. Please go ahead.
spk11: Great. Thank you. Two quick ones. Sorry to go back to the macro, but I guess how would you frame the visibility into next year? at this point um you know i know obviously uh last year budgets really didn't come to fruition um or people didn't really have visibility till till february or march um is it better this year i guess that's the first thing and then the second thing just back on ctv you know with more inventory coming online uh you know cpms and ctv have come down as well um so i guess What's the bigger factor in your eyes in terms of the cautiousness on CTV? Is it the absolute CPM of the inventory that is out there, or is it the services component of CTV and folks are just not willing to pay the markup for your services? I guess how would you kind of parse those two dynamics out? Thank you.
spk05: Okay. I would start with the forecasting that you mentioned about next year. Usually, usually only in the middle of Q4 you start seeing, we see that already earlier, but the push for next year is starting in the second half of Q4. Basically, people are shifting gears and basically starting to look at the next year, 2024. It's too early to say, of course, as you mentioned, last year only in February or March, people were able to give like a better picture about the year. I think that especially when you have like a, situation and microeconomic situation like we are experiencing now, it's very hard to basically predict now what will happen in the end of 2024. But in general, we have like two streams of revenue. One of them, which is more infrastructure and selling platforms and so on that we can, we see the interest, we have new platforms that we are sharing with the market, that we are marketing like the ACR, like the cross-platform. Like, the discovery tools that we see that, as we said that the things need to happen in the next 6 to maybe sleeping a little bit into Q1. But we'll serve us next year and the 2nd thing is basically booking of business. That is coming and we believe that in the next 6 weeks, we will start seeing like a. acceleration of that and we will be able to know more in the in the areas of time that you mentioned which is the need of you want usually you could get like a better feeling on the planning on the size of budgets of advertisers for the for the full next year so i think it's too early now but we are since we have much more much more products much more capabilities we feel that we will be able to to get more traction on this path and to grow our revenues around that next year. Around the second question, it's about CTV that you asked. So I think that as always in life, it's not one matrix and it's not just one thing that is basically influencing something. I think it's a mix and everything is like different from each other. But in general, there are a few factors here that are pushing the CTV down, as we mentioned. I can repeat it. It's like moving more to performance because of microeconomics, lower CPM because of microeconomics, some internal issues in some of the verticals that are usually supporting the growth in CTV and so on that are being affected. And in general, cautious about the market that is slowing down the industry. So it's very hard to put the weight on what is there. And also the point that you mentioned, like a lot of inventory, and in this period of time when microeconomics hit, and you don't have a lot of demands to cover that, it's, of course, lowering the CPMs, lowering the traction, and so on. But in general, when you look at it, it's very hard to put the finger on one element that caused this slowdown. I think that CTV, for sure, is something that is here to stay. It's the most engaging and interesting format in the market. People believe in that. The growth will come also not just from digital advertisers that found this opportunity, uh found this format and and using it in full extent but also from linear advertisers that as i mentioned before they need it in order to reach their target audience in different markets and they will use digital and ctv in order to do that which will drive a lot of budgets into ctv in the years to come so i strongly believe in that i think that we are on the right direction with choosing ctv and investing in that but if In this period of time, it's a little bit more down because of all the effects that we just said, but it doesn't lower from this importance, from its center, and from the future of this format. I'm sure that also when you hear the rest of the peers talking about it, this is the main effect in the years to come, and we are very strongly invested in that. We believe in that, and we have the capabilities to serve clients and publishers around CTV.
spk06: Understood. Thanks very much. Thank you.
spk07: There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Ofer for any closing remarks.
spk05: Thank you. I have a short summary that I would like to share with you today. Basically, people are asking us about the situation in Israel all the time and are we affected. It's important to me to say that, well, every human being should be affected. when terrorist organizations enter into civilian cities or villages, massacring, torturing, kidnapping kids, women, older people, and poor families. And all the civilized world should be affected by that, for sure. We are doing our best to keep our duties and lives aligned, and I want to use this opportunity to thank our employees in Israel and all over the world for the extra effort. I hope that the people that were kidnapped will return in peace home, Our wounded will recover and I give my condolences to the families that lost their loved ones. I want to make a few comments about what we discussed about the macro. So we all heard about from our peers also. You know, there is a pressure from macroeconomics on the performance of the advertising industry for sure. We believe that after the acquisition, after the massive acquisition of Amobi, we build our teams and we are ready for the future. And hopefully with better economy that will encourage goals, you will see the results of what we created and built in the last few years. About CTV, I think that there are two points that I would like to indicate here. First of all, linear to CTV. When we hired all the discussions and conversations that are happening in the industry lately about this conversion between linear and CTV, I think that, as I mentioned also in this call, we got the technology, which is, according to what we see, is the best in the market now for cost platforms. Linear advertisers need additional reach in order to reach their audience, and we can basically offer them that in confidence and with much lower duplication in order for them to save money, in order to reach their audiences. And this is a massive thing that will happen in the industry in the next three to five years, and we are ready for that. It's very important to understand. On the second thing, which is the CTV in general, there is, as all the questions touched almost, about the weakness or softness of CTV. We all, I think, agree in the industry that CTV, as I mentioned, is something that is very big, very important, you know, very effective in general because when you're looking at people that want to advertise and to create attention and engagement, they need to use the CTV in order to do that. And I think that after five years that we are in this business, putting all in in order to create the best technology, to collaborate a lot of our technologies in order to serve the best CTV, building partnerships like the partnership with Vida and investing in Vida in order to be able to offer ACR for targeting and also in the future, two partners for measurement. I think that we are ready for that. We believe in that. And the acquisition of Amovic just added to us tools that enable us to lead in this market and to be one of the innovators and the first to offer technologies and services that are needed in order for people, advertisers to achieve basically their targets and KPIs. So I think that we are well situated. We are, you know, we are ramping up now our capabilities with the acquisition of Amobi, and we are ready for 2024. So thank you very much.
spk07: This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect.
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