Innovid Corp.

Greetings. Welcome to the InnoVid Q1 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the full presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, John Williams. You may begin.

Thank you, Operator. Before we begin, I'll remind you that today's call may contain forward-looking statements and that the safe harbor statement in today's earnings release, available on our investor relations page, also pertains to this call. Changes in our business, competitive landscape, technological or regulatory environment, and other factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed by the forward-looking statements made today. Our historical results are not necessarily indicative of future performance, and as such, we can give no assurance as to the accuracy of our forward-looking statements and assume no obligation to update them except as required by law. In addition, today's call may include non-GAAP financial measures. We use these non-GAAP measures in managing the business and believe they provide useful information for our investors. These measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for our GAAP results. Reconciliations of the non-GAAP measures to their corresponding GAAP measures, where appropriate, can be found in the earnings presentation and earnings release available on our website and in our filings with the SEC. Hosting today's call are Zvika Netter, Innovid's co-founder and CEO, Tanya Andreev-Caspin, Innovid's CFO, and Tal Chilozin, co-founder and CTO, who will participate in our Q&A session. I'll now turn the call over to Zvika to begin.

Thanks, John, and thank you all for joining the call today. I'll begin with some thoughts about the first quarter and some recent business updates and highlights. Our CFO, Tanya and Jeff Kaspin, will provide details on our Q1 performance and updated guidance, followed by Q&A. We were excited to share our preliminary results a few weeks ago, and I'm even more thrilled to share our full Q1 results and updates on our progress today. I'm proud of our team for winning new business and remaining focused on execution. So to start, let's talk a bit about our quarter and the current environment. We beat both our guidance and consensus, and are tracking ahead of where we hoped we'd be when we last spoke back in February. Our Q1 revenue grew 18% year-over-year, and imposed a year-over-year adjusted EBITDA improvement that exceeded our guidance. We remain very focused on profitable growth, and our Q1 results demonstrate that we're executing on our plan. Innovate benefits as linear shifts to CTV. This is a crucial part of our story. Even in a down market for advertising, we can still grow because of our favorable secular trends in CTV and the critical nature of what we provide for our customers. We continue to have a great deal of success adding new customers. Our core client growth exceeded 20% on a performer basis year over year. We expect that when the ad market bounces back, we'll see a growth multiplier effect as our larger customer base ramps back up and we deepen our relationships as they can activate more products and our cross-sell efforts pay off. To be clear, the overall advertising market is still challenged. While we saw some indications of modest terming in Q1, our visibility is still limited, and some of our existing customers have pulled back ad spending due to macro concerns. Specifically, looking at verticals, we've seen strength in telecom, CPG, and auto, and weakness in tech, financial, and insurance, and consumer electronics. Importantly, advertising verticals tend to move in cyclical fashion, so we expect the slower growth areas to pick up as macro trend improves. Now, for a few additional quarter highlights. We continue to see success in adding new logos to our platforms, exciting recent wins And expansions include PetSmart, UPS, Apartment.com, and Bookman. We also announced several new partnerships, most notably with Walmart DSP. Looking ahead to the rest of 2023, we'll focus on cross-selling for additional upside. I'm thrilled to report that we renewed and expanded our relationship with Verizon. continuing our partnership in video ad serving, MDCO, and adding Innovate XP measurement. We also very recently expanded our relationship with Disney, building on our multi-year Hulu relationship to enhance measurement for more than 60 advertisers and key vehicles including travel, telco, and e-commerce across Disney addressable footprint. We're excited that Disney and others are adopting Innovate's measurement solutions to further enhance their streaming strategies. For Innovate, Scanning up further in measurement is a key long-term component of our strategy. More than ever, brand advertisers need a centralized platform and measurement capabilities to help them navigate this complex environment and its lack of standardizations. For us, this is fantastic. It aligns with our value proposition across ad serving, measurement, and personalization. And our continued growth in core clients shows just how much customers value what we bring to the table. In summary, we had a solid quarter, including some key client wins and expansions, and experienced some ad industry firming. We exited Q1 still cautious, but are a bit more optimistic about the remainder of 2023. We remain confident in our position as the clear leader in building the critical technology infrastructure for the future of TV advertising, and specifically, CTV. I'll now hand the call over to our CFO, Tanya Andreev-Casping, to discuss our first quarter results and updated guidance. Tanya?

Thank you, Tzvika, and good morning, everyone. We are happy to report our Q1 results and are pleased with our performance. We beat the top range of the initial revenue guide by 5% and delivered positive adjusted EBITDAs. Q1 revenue grew 18% year-over-year to $30.5 million on a reported basis or 1% on a performer basis. Measurement grew 1% on a performer basis and represented 23% of total revenue in Q1. Ad serving and personalization services were up 1% year-over-year and represented 77% of total revenue in Q1. Innovate's ad serving and personalization revenue closely correlates with ad impressions volume served through our platform. Q1 CTV volume grew 13% year-over-year and represented 54% of all video impressions, up from 49% in the first quarter of 2022. Mobile volume decreased by 9% and represented 34% of all video impressions. while desktop volume decreased by 10% and was 12% of all video impressions. CTV demonstrated resilience and generated growth, while desktop and mobile, more susceptible to the challenging macro backdrop, declined in the first quarter. We expect the growth of the CTV business to continue to outpace other channels, gaining even more share of total video impressions. On to our geographic breakdown. In Q1, U.S. revenue grew 18% on as reported basis and represented 91% of the total revenue. International revenue grew 14% year over year and represented 9% of quarterly revenue compared to 10% in Q1 last year. Now moving on to expenses. Cost of revenues increased by 2.3 million year-over-year in Q1. The increase is primarily attributed to the TV squared acquisition and stock-based compensation. Revenue less cost of revenues was 73% of revenue in Q1, down from 77% in Q1 of 2022. Again, impacted mainly by TV squared. We expect the legacy TV Squared business to eventually operate at or close to our pre-acquisition margin level. Q1 operating expenses, excluding depreciation and amortization, were 36.7 million, up 1.7 million, or 5% year-over-year. Most of the increase is due to the increase in stock-based compensation and the TV Squared acquisition. primarily offset by a reduction in one-time expenses, particularly the 4.4 million acquisition and IPO-related expenses incurred in Q1 last year. Employee count at quarter end after Q1 reduction in force was 465, a 16% decrease compared to the previous year on a performance basis. Q1 net loss was $8.6 million, or per share loss of $0.06. Q1 adjusted EBITDA was positive $0.1 million, representing a half percent of positive adjusted EBITDA margin, versus a negative 12% in the first quarter last year. Now on to cash and capital allocations. We are comfortable with our cash position and liquidity and expect our focus on profitable growth in 2023 to reduce our already modest cash burn and support our overall liquidity position. We ended the quarter with $45 million in cash and cash equivalents and $20 million in debt, with an additional $30 million available on our revolver. Quarter-end common stock outstanding was 136.6 million shares. Finally, I would like to discuss our outlook. We are encouraged by our Q1 performance and a projecting and modestly improved outlook for the full year. For the second quarter of 2023, we expect total revenue in the range of $31 million to $33 million, representing negative 6% to 0% year-over-year growth. We expect Q2 adjusted EBITDA in the range of 0 to positive 2 million. Two additional reminders. First, our outlook includes the full expense benefit of our recent 10% headcount reduction, completed in Q1. Second, beginning in Q2, we will no longer be breaking out as reported versus pro forma, as we will be lapping a full year since the TV Squared acquisition. Full year outlook. We are increasing our revenue guidance for the full year to slightly higher than year over year. versus our previous guidance of flat year-over-year. We expect a full-year adjusted EBITDA margin of at least 5% and improvement versus our previous full-year guidance. We are encouraged by the current business momentum and if the economic environment improves, we believe we could exceed the profitability expectations we have already factored into our guidance. In conclusion, we are pleased with our first quarter results and remain focused on driving profitable growth. Innoviv is well positioned strategically and financially to continue building the critical technology infrastructure for the future of TV advertising and driving value for our customers and shareholders. Thank you again for joining the call. Zvika, Tal and I are now ready to answer your questions. Operator, please begin the Q&A session.

Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Our first question comes from the line of Laura Martin with Needham. Please proceed with your question.

Great. Good morning, you guys. Thanks for taking the question. I guess I have a couple. I guess I'm most interested in generative AI. I think that's all the rage right now. I'm very interested in how you think generative AI affects your business. Investments in terms of the cost side, but also how you think it aids revenue growth and productivity over the next several years.

Sure. Hi, Laura. Thanks for the question. Generative AI, as you remember, I think you also attended our investor back at New York Stock Exchange Investor Day back, I believe, in November. where we already presented, before Generated AI was all the rage, where AI fits into our platform and how it's actually already in production, improving results. What's unique about Innovate, AI operates on data, right? Data, data patterns, inputs and outputs. So basically, because we're the ad server, we deliver all the CTV ads through creative optimization and creative, we can change the creatives as we serve it. And then, of course, measurement. You see how many households will be checked, what frequency, and most importantly, the outcome. What's exciting is when you connect these three pieces of the system with a brim that can see what's going on and based on the customer's goals can optimize the performance. That is something not just by targeting, which is the media part, but actually optimizing the creative, optimizing reach and frequency. So this is something that's already in the system. Obviously, generating that eye in terms of the next generations that we're seeing now can help with the creative, creative versioning, creative generating both text and images for our DCO engine. And there's some exciting ideas that we're looking at right now on the measurement side insights. So overall, it's an excellent thing that's going to push us further. and make the job of our customers much more efficient.

Fantastic. And then I heard you talk about the Verizon win on measurement and the Disney comments on measurement. Could you talk about what you are learning now in terms of companies that are adopting your measurement solution? What are they like? What do they need? You know, what kinds of things get to change? Can you just bring us up to date on what you're learning about measurements and where you have to go from here in terms of integrating measurements into your go-to-market strategy?

Sure. So basically what drove our TV squared acquisition a few months after we went public was years of working together with our largest customers, the largest brands out there, and Verizon is definitely a great example. And what they told us back then is while they love our CTV insight, the data that we generate from the ad server, and they can see a lot of insights around the CTV portion, what they really wanted to see is a cross-platform, looking both linear, because linear television broadcast TV ads are here to stay for at least another 5, 10, 15 years, and as people migrate to CTV. So The big view that they wanted to see is a combined view of both the linear television and the connected TV. And that's what drove the acquisition. It was more than a year ago since then we integrated the teams, integrated the product, and launched Innovate XP, which is a single platform that you can see reach frequency, how many households you reach and what frequency. And, of course, the more important part is the outcome, what outcome that brought. So that's the promise of Innovate XP, and this is exactly what Verizon did. But if you recall, TV Squares was a company that was focusing more on direct-to-consumer, smaller-type customers. With Innovate, we came and refocused on the largest TV advertisers out there, and again, Verizon is a good example. That took some time in terms of introducing the product to them, testing, and now it's in fully production. So the conviction was there years ago, and now we're delivering on that promise. And Verizon using not just our ad server and VCO, but also adding the measurement component is kind of the holy grail. This is what we would love to see from all our customers. And this is, by the way, Verizon directly. The deal is with Verizon. Disney is another great example on the sales side. So Disney is actually a publisher, one of the largest media owners in the world, looking to do the same thing. Cross-platform plus outcome. It's a very unique integration because it's always on. and it's connected to their first-party data that is very unique. And I'll pause there because there's still a long bucket. Both of these are very, I would say, from any of its perspective, very iconic large deals, and we expect to see more like this throughout the year.

Super helpful. Thanks very much.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Boone with JMP Securities. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, guys. Matt on for Andrew. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe first, just taking a step back, can you guys just talk to us long-term about your philosophy around pricing? And then also, great to see positive adjusted EBITDA in 1Q, guide calling for expanding margins in 2Q. Can you guys just talk about cost controls and how you're thinking about investments for the remainder of the year? Thank you.

Good. Hey, Andrew. So on pricing, we definitely feel... that there is room for us to explore unique and different and further expand our pricing. Currently, from the history of the ad server, this is where we started, it's a very, I would say, rigid fixed price that was actually set by Google many, many years ago as kind of almost the standard at the lowest level possible. So we started from there as we gained more and more market share. But as we're now, CTV becomes a bigger part of the company. As we're investing in innovation and DCO and measurement, we definitely feel we can present a more flexible pricing structure and in some cases also rewarding minimum commitments, annual committed deals, and things like that. Definitely in the mindset of, you know, you mentioned the the margins, the free cash flow, and all that stuff. So we believe as our deals with large brands are entering the millions, the multi-millions a year, and as we transact more and more with brands directly, we believe there are more models that come from the enterprise software world that we can introduce that are somewhat different than the models that media companies use with agencies. So that's underpricing. On EBITDA, we're very proud of this. I mean, we always said that we have a long-term goal to get to 30%, 35% EBITDA within a couple of years. Obviously, the acquisition in the down market last year made it more challenging to see our focus on the EBITDA, and we're very happy now in Q1, and we'll expect to see it in Q2, and we expect to see it improving throughout the year. It's constantly controlling our costs. and giving very clear KPIs in terms of how we progress on both EBITDA and free cash flow. While ideally the top line grows, what you should see is that a lot of that growth is going to go all the way to the bottom line and improve EBITDA. As Tanya mentioned, we made about a 10% headcount reduction earlier in the year. This is post-acquisition, so it's the right thing to do anyway. And what we're making sure is to continue to control that cost. We already have three products. They were in market, in production. We're focusing more on existing customers and upsell like Disney and Verizon. Both of them are existing. All of these things will ideally allow us to grow at the top line, but definitely maintain a growth on the bottom line.

Great. Thank you.

Thanks, Matt. Our next question comes from the line of Shweta Kedruriya with Evercore. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, this is Jocelyn asking a question for Shweta Kedruriya. Could you elaborate a little bit more on how did advertisers demand trends through the quarter, and then what are you hearing from advertisers as you think about the rest of the year?

Can you repeat the question? You said advertiser, something through the quarter. I couldn't hear.

Advertiser demand trend.

Demand trend through the quarter. And the second question?

I'm just wondering what are you hearing from advertisers when you think about the rest of the year? What's your expectation?

So this is what we're seeing is definitely, and as you can see also from the results and we're now more optimistic than we were a couple of months ago. I mean, we're definitely in an economical, you know, challenging economical environment. And we see it at Innovate and other companies. At the same time, we're definitely seeing improvement throughout the quarter. And we're seeing that improvement going into Q2. So it's definitely not going back to normal. So that's why we're being cautious with our guidance because, you know, situation can change. But we're definitely feeling more, we're slightly more optimistic. based on what we're seeing. The customer demand, so this is specifically on spend. The actual demand for our products has never stopped. As you heard, we closed on the ad server new customers like UPS and others, existing customers buy more products from us, and overall people spend more on CTV. So while overall media spend is shrinking, because of the growth of CTV that even in this difficult environment grew 13% in, in Q1. And now it's more than for the first time, it's more than half of the company. So half of 54% of all the ads we deliver, uh, delivered in Q1 were on CTV. So CTV continues to grow. Customers continue to buy ad servers or additional products from us. Um, so from that perspective is very optimistic. I would say to your question about advertising in general, Like any other business, companies are cautious and are spending very diligently where they actually see a return, and we believe that's a great thing for adopting our platform.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Shyam Patel with Susquehanna. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, guys. This is Jared on for Sean. Thanks for taking the question. Thanks for all the color on how you're thinking about profitability for the year and managing the cost base. Towards the end of the prepared remarks, Tanya, you mentioned that we could see a potential acceleration in growth in the second half flowing through to EBITDA margin expansion. How are you thinking through the tradeoff there between margin expansion and areas of potential growth stepped-up investment, expense areas that you might want to lean back into to the extent that we do see an improving environment.

Thank you for the question. Great question. So when we prepared the plan for 2023, we set a very clear financial goal for the year to be focused on profitable growth. In the economy, like in an uncertain macro situation as we are all experiencing right now, we believe we need to focus on what we can control. And those are our investments, our investments in R&D, our investments in sales and marketing, but we have to make it in the most efficient way. And that's what we are saying. We already delivered Q1, which is profitable, and we indicated to the market that we will be improving our profitability for the year, delivering 5% at least adjusted EBITDA margin. And that's what we absolutely stay focused on right now. We don't want to be distracted by the economical downturn and such. We think that that's what's important for us. And as you can see, our P&L, we still invest quite substantially in R&D and new technology.

Great. And then one more, if I may. I was hoping that we could just dig in a bit further on how you guys are thinking about the retail media opportunity broadly at this point. And then that recently announced Walmart partnership, how you're thinking through the various elements from personalization to ad serving and anything else that you might call out there.

Sure, I'll have Tal, our CTO, take that. We're definitely seeing really great progress on that front.

Tal? Sure. Thanks, Jared. So, yeah, we definitely see retail media as a massive opportunity. I think in general, if you follow the industry, and I'm sure you do, connected television is the main focus and the main growth driver, along with retail media as a tremendous opportunity. We think that there's a couple of ways that we play in the retail media space, a lot around ad serving and allowing marketers to really buy media everywhere across all places and leverage data. And the second one is using creative personalization, which plays a massive role when you talk to consumer packaged goods or other type of advertisers that have multiple products in their portfolio and can leverage data uh, retail media networks, uh, as, as data to optimize the creative and align the message to specific users. So we think that so far we've seen a lot of progress on retail media, uh, in the industry around targeting. And we think that the next generation, a lot that we will see, uh, right now, and this is where, uh, where we put a lot of efforts is around creative messaging and personalization. We're very excited about our partnership with, uh, Walmart DSP that we announced this quarter. And we think that, again, as I said, the retail media networks, retail media in general, is a massive opportunity for industry and for us to capitalize on.

Great. Thanks, guys. And our next question comes from the line of Matthew Koss with Morgan Stanley. Peter, we'll see what your question is.

Hi, everybody. Thanks for taking the questions. When we look at the first quarter and just the top line beat, you mentioned the macro situation firming up, but there's still real uncertainty into the rest of the year. Was the outperformance versus your guidance in the first quarter a function of kind of that firming up macro, or were there some key products that outperformed or some wins that you would call out as kind of the driver of the beat? And then just secondly, thinking out to the rest of the year and the full year guidance, when we think about the competitive landscape, does your guidance for the year as you see market growth this year imply maintaining share, gaining share, or maybe ceding some share? Thank you.

Sure. So in terms of driving the outperformance, it's definitely the performance of the company, the KPIs, and what's you know, what basically brought it to the level it is. It's kind of the softness in the market, but we're definitely adding more. If you think about it, just, you know, and I'll give you kind of a high-level overview, almost all the KPIs that drive our business that are CTV-related are up and to the right, right? So it's like bigger part of the company is CTV and smaller part of the company is mobile and desktop video. We have, there's more content out there that is ad-based. People are watching more ad-based content. So overall, the The supply, the impressions out there are constantly increasing. Brands spend more. While brands are cutting overall budgets in many cases, they spend more money on CTV because more people. So you have two factors. One is maybe cooling down, but the other one is increasing fast in that CTV. So that's causing the CTV to grow 13%. If all of it was 100% CTV, you'll see a much faster growth. And this will happen over time. On top of it, as we added today, we added we were gaining share. So especially around the ad server where we gained share out of Google, from Google Campaign Manager, that for the last five years did not change. It all goes mostly in one direction. We gained share. Overall, we gained share constantly, and it's usually out of the platform of Google. So there's no reason that in the foreseeable future, from our perspective, we don't expect to see a dramatic change in trends. So you should expect every quarter to hear about more and more customers that join our platform and more and more customers that are using more than one product in any of it. And the model is fixed volume-based. So all this joy should create a much faster growth on the top line. What's cooling that is the overall macroeconomic environment and spend, Our cautious idea because that's the one thing we don't control. We control all the other factors and we are very bullish on them and we keep investing in them. What we're looking for is once the market starts to recover, much steeper growth on the top line that will flow to the bottom line. So that's basically what we're looking for. But in terms of share expansion and selling more products to more customers, that did not change and continues to grow. In terms of the competitive landscape, can you repeat the question? I wrote it here, but I'm not sure I got the full question.

Yeah, the question was, you really kind of answered it on the leadership perspective.

Yeah, so from a platform perspective, we don't see a reason why we will see a change in trend. In a way, actually, difficult environments like this encourage customers, brands, to look at every dollar they spend and try and look to optimize it. And if I'm connected to the question Laura asked about AI, generative AI, we're just using technology. Technology is a great way to understand the outcomes. What are you getting when you're spending $100 million on a campaign on television? How many households? What frequency? What type of action it created? And constantly optimize. So an environment like this is actually good for closing new business and upselling new product. It's less good in terms of overall spend, but we all know that this is a temporary thing, so it will go dramatically. Thank you.

And as a reminder, if anyone has any questions, you may press star 1 to join the question and answer queue. And it looks like we have reached the end of the question and answer session. And this also concludes today's conference. And you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.