VIZIO Holding Corp.

Good afternoon, and welcome to Vizio's Q3 23 earnings call. I'm Michael Marks, Director of Investor Relations. Joining me for today's discussion are William Wang, our founder and CEO, and Adam Townsend, our CFO. Also joining us for the Q&A portion of today's call is Michael Donald, our Chief Revenue and Strategic Growth Officer. Please note that in addition to our earnings release and today's remarks, a slide presentation can be found on our Investor Relations website at investors.vizio.com. I will refer you to the third slide in the presentation and remind you that certain statements made on this call, including certain statements about our expected fourth quarter results, advertising relationships and partners, product rollouts and functionality, and future customer demand for our products are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements are discussed in more detail in our filings with the SEC and our press release that was issued this afternoon. We undertake no obligation to revise any statements to reflect changes that occur after this call, except as required by law. During the call, we also refer to non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, and certain operational and financial metrics. Reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures for non-GAAP financial information discussed on this call, as well as further information related to guidance, definitions, and metrics can be found in our earnings release. which is on the investor section of our website. Note that our quarterly comparisons in today's remarks will be made on a year-over-year basis, and all metrics reported on today's call will be for Q3 2023 or as of the end of Q3 2023 as applicable, unless otherwise specified. Now, I will turn the call over to William.

Thank you, Michael, and hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Our third quarter results demonstrate that Vizio's continued focus on high-quality products and innovative user experiences is driving strong gains in user engagement and platform monetization. This, in turn, is driving our continued outperformance in advertising revenue in the connected TV space. I remain exceptionally proud of our seasoned team that continues to execute well. Despite some market uncertainty, Zizio delivered another strong quarter with 27% growth in advertising revenue. Our growth was driven by large ad categories such as insurance, QSR, retail, and CPG. Importantly, we are delivering growth in an efficient and scalable fashion, which is reflected in Visio posting the third consecutive quarter of record total company gross profit margin of 22.6%. Total company adjusted EBITDA came in above the high end of our guidance range, even as we continue to invest in expanding our multi-pronged growth strategy. There's no doubt that we are seeing the fruits of these investments paying off, as we have built up our platform resources across engineering, software development, and advertising tech, and sales. Sylvia has made tremendous progress in driving monetization. Over the past few years, we have learned much about user engagement and behavior trends, which informs about TV lifetime value. Growth in engagement drives Smart Cash, which grew 14% during the third quarter. to a record $31.55. Just two years ago, this was under $20. So we have come a long way in a brief time, yet we believe there is still continued room for future growth given the strong consumer shift to streaming. Given these monetization tailwinds, we are further refining our DeFi strategy and emphasizing larger screen sizes, which tend to be the primary TV in the home. We expect these larger units will generate greater economic value over the long term. We have historically seen stronger engagement measures, such as streaming hours and lower turn with our larger TVs, which together drives higher output. We believe that building a higher quality install base and investing in the right skills rather than focusing on overall shipment volumes, will best position us to drive sustainable growth and profitability over time. Additionally, over the past few years, we have been continuously retooling and enhancing our operating system to unlock further growth opportunities. Through these investments, our latest version is even faster and more responsive. with an improved user-friendly experience that drives engagement and customer satisfaction. We have also reached a stage where we believe we now have the software and experience to help other TV manufacturers within their platform solutions. For the first time, we are beginning to explore potential partnership opportunities with other TV OEMs who have been looking for an alternative operating system to help grow their CTV footprint in the U.S. Our deep expertise with integrated hardware and software provides distinct potential for mutually beneficial outcomes for Vizio and future partners. This will take some time to work through the details with potential partners, but we are excited to open up this additional growth opportunity for Vizio. Turning to our device segment, it should be no surprise to hear that TV environment has been hyper-competitive over the past quarters, which has had an impact on our market share. In the meantime, with financial discipline, we'll continue to focus on what we can control, which includes offering higher quality TVs at a price that deliver exceptional value to the consumers. We recently rolled out our all-new Quantum 4K QLED in 65-inch for an impressive $499 and 75-inch for $699. For that value, consumers can experience exceptional picture quality and premium gaming features. can also elevate the personal entertainment experience with one of Vizio's premium soundbars. Reviewers recently rate that consumers will be hard-pressed to find another Atmos-enabled soundbar for under $500. And, of course, this new TV collection comes with fast entertainment experiences right out of the box. No dongles needed. Everything comes built in. Our consumer can experience the recently added ESPN app, including ESPN Plus, along with almost 200 other building streaming apps, including our own Watch Free Plus. Within Watch Free Plus, we offer users over 290 free ad-supported streaming channels and over 15,000 on-demand titles spanning a wide range of genres. So, as we look towards the future, we are excited about new growth drivers and the opportunity we see ahead for continued growth. WebVisio has already come a long way. I still believe we are in the early innings of what a smart TV can become. Our focus on building a quality user base through our award-winning products comes with the potential for incredible upside. With the right team, the right products, and the right user experience, all at the right time. I'm more excited now than ever before for Vizio's future. With that, I will turn the call over to Adam to review our third quarter results in more detail.

Thanks, William. Before opening the call to questions, I will take you through our third quarter results and discuss our outlook for Q4. Our third quarter results demonstrate the benefits of our strategic focus on driving improvements in the quality and engagement level across our install base. Through this focus, we are seeing steady growth across many key metrics that we use to track the usage of and engagement with our platform. I will provide more detail on these metrics in a moment. But first, for the quarter, total company revenue came in at $426 million, down 2%. This was through a combination of lower device revenue of 12% on lower TV unit volumes and lower average unit price, partially offset by higher Platform Plus revenue, which grew 22% on continued strength in advertising. Again, benefiting from the rapid growth in our high margin Platform Plus revenue, total company gross profit grew 20% year-over-year to $96 million. Gross profit margin expanded by 423 basis points to 22.6%. As William mentioned, this was our third consecutive quarter of record consolidated gross profit margin. Platform Plus represented a new high of 37% of total revenue and over 100% of consolidated gross profit dollars. Total adjusted EBITDA came in at $27 million, well ahead of our expectations, benefiting from more judicious price promotion on device, capitalized software development expenses, and continued growth in high-margin advertising revenue. Net income totaled $14 million, up from $2 million in the year-ago period. While the retail environment has presented a number of challenges this year for many, I don't want to lose sight of the financial performance we have delivered so far this year despite these challenges. Through the first nine months, total gross profit grew 14% with a 480 basis point improvement in gross profit margin, and adjusted EBITDA grew 59%. Our advertising revenue grew 28% to over $300 million for the first time ever, and total company net income improved to $15 million from a loss of $7 million for the same period a year ago. Now to provide some additional segment level context for the third quarter specifically, I will start with Platform Plus. For the quarter, Platform Plus revenue came in at the top end of our expected range, and gross profit exceeded our outlook. This upside was due to stronger than expected home screen revenue, which along with the previously mentioned capitalized software expenses, also helped deliver higher than expected gross profit margin. Our strong Platform Plus revenue growth of 22% was driven by a 27% increase in advertising revenue. We are particularly pleased with the continued strength of our advertising business given some of the softness being seen across the broader advertising marketplace. As we have said before, we are participating in the fastest growing part of the advertising market and continue to take share within that market. We expanded our direct advertising relationships by 20%, adding 66 net new advertisers. And the returning advertisers increased their spend with us by 29% versus the year-ago period. As we bring more content to our viewers and utilize enhanced personalization tools, as well as an improved search and discovery experience, we are seeing continued growth and engagement. Growth in time spent streaming outpaced all other sources on our TVs during the quarter. Smartcast hours, a proxy for streaming time, grew 21% to 5.2 billion hours compared to a 10% increase in total Vizio hours. On a per active account basis, streaming hours totaled 290, the highest quarterly level we have seen in almost three years. Not surprisingly, this growth in streaming time came at the expense of linear video viewing, where time spent on cable declined by six percentage points. So taken together, SmartCast hours as a percent of total hours during the quarter reached an all-time new high of 58%. Said differently, our users are spending more time streaming through our SmartCast operating system than watching content on cable TV, broadcast, game consoles, and attached media players combined. Our non-advertising revenue within Platform Plus also showed healthy growth, up 8% to $33 million. Data and content distribution revenue growth was partially offset by a decline in button revenue due to fewer TV shipments. In Q3, our SmartCast ARPU grew 14% to a new record of $31.55. As William mentioned, we believe our strategic focus on driving a higher quality install base will only help accelerate this metric further. One way we aim to support this approach is through strategic unit pricing. Since we see about a 30% higher engagement level from larger size units, this is where we intend to concentrate our pricing investments going forward. Lastly, total SmartCast active accounts grew $1.3 million year over year to a new high $17.9 million. Turning to our device segment, total revenue was $270 million. TV shipments declined 8% to just over $1 million and a quarter, with our average unit price down 8% as well. compared to a 12% decline in the overall TV industry. In audio, soundbar shipments rose 19% versus the year-ago period, along with an 11% increase in average unit price, aided by strong demand for our higher-end products in our lineup. With these results, we improved brand share within the soundbar category to 19.3% from 16.7% a year ago. And finally, Our balance sheet remains strong and highly liquid. We ended the third quarter with cash and short-term investments of $335 million and no debt. So with that, let me now turn to what we expect for the fourth quarter. For Q4, we expect platform plus revenue to come in between $162 and $167 million, representing 20% growth at the midpoint. We expect Platform Plus gross profit of $97 to $103 million, representing a margin of 61% at the midpoints. And finally, we expect total company adjusted EBITDA in the range of $7 to $16 million. As we head into the seasonally strong holiday season, we remain confident that we have a compelling product lineup in the market with strong channel inventory levels across the major retailers. We will focus our pricing strategies to align with sell-through of units that help to best drive our business. 2023 thus far has been a year of tremendous progress and execution against our strategy. We have transformed our financial profile, resulting in steady growth in customer engagement, our highest gross profit margin, and record ARPU. As we looked at 2024, we could not be more excited with the many opportunities we see ahead. From the potential for new revenue and active account growth through our operating system partnership initiative, to the continued overall shift to ad-supported streaming, all the way to what is expected to be an all-time high in political spending, Vizio is well-positioned to continue to build on the investments and successes of 2023. With that, let's open the call to questions. Operator?

We will now begin the QA session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one or your touch-tone keypad. If for any reason you would like to remove that question, please press star followed by two. Again, to ask a question, press star one. Please limit your questions to one question and one follow-up. As a reminder, if you are using a speakerphone, please remember to pick up your handset before asking your question.

Operator, we will take the first question.

The first question comes from the line of Nick Zangler with Stations. Please proceed.

Hey, guys, another solid quarter of platform plus growth. So congrats there. Device margins, though, you know, under incremental pressure. And I think just in general, investors are concerned about the ongoing decline in those device margins. I'm wondering at what level do you see these device margins leveling out and when that might occur? And then just for the meantime, maybe you could talk about balancing negative device margins with active account growth and your view of the lifetime value of a customer, just to provide a better understanding of why you're willing to absorb negative device margins in the near term.

Yeah, I'll take that. Thanks, Nick. It's Adam. Yeah, I think it's really important, what you said there at the end, frankly, when you think about how this model works and how we drive growth and overall economics over time and the lifetime value of a customer, To your point about device margins going negative in the quarter, look, we're trying to balance being competitive while also being disciplined. We have been operating in a very extreme competitive environment lately, more extreme than many in this industry have been in a long time have seen. And so we want to make sure that we are competitive but being thoughtful about how the economics of the overall business work. And that may mean foregoing some volumes in the immediate term because we don't want to chase some of the really extraordinary pricing that we've seen. The way I think about it is more from a system economic standpoint because You can't really think about our device business as a standalone business separate and apart from our platform business. They work together, we manage them together, and all of our strategies and financial approaches take that into consideration. If you look at just on a year-over-year basis, I think the point about our gross profit margin continuing to expand and hitting actually a new record for us in the quarter speaks to that point. I mean, on a year-over-year basis, device gross profit margin came down about 160 basis points, but we expanded total company gross profit margin by over 400 basis points. So, it's working together. We think that's the right approach. We want to focus on driving quality accounts that are going to be highly engaged. The right units for our model will drive increased profitability and economics. We're now approaching a $32 ARPU on this population with a 60 percent gross margin. So, when you think about a lifetime value, which was a part of your question, you know, these highly engaged units tend to be with us for six plus years. And so if you run those economics out over time, a small upfront customer acquisition cost makes a lot of sense and is definitely going to generate a positive ROI over time. So we're comfortable with it. We think it's the right structure. Now that we've scaled up and grown our platform business, we can deploy this and the numbers work for us.

Understood. Thanks for that. And then you mentioned your willingness to explore partnerships with other TV OEMs and the possibility of licensing the SmartCast OS to, I guess, competing TV OEMs in the marketplace. You guys have always been so adamant about the unique combination of Vizio hardware and Vizio software. This obviously seems to represent a strategic shift. So the question is, what has changed and why now?

Yeah, Nick, this is William. I'll take that question. I continue to be a firm believer in the integrated experience. And consumers continue to show their presence in a great all-in-one smart TV. You can see that through the decline of dongles and external players. In my view, the best way to provide an exceptional user experience is to prioritize equal importance on hardware and software and make them work together seamlessly to give consumers the best possible experience. As you know, over the past several years, we have been investing heavily in our platform and our people to deliver great products, great user experience. But as importantly, to create a highly monetizable and more flexible operating system, Sproutcast. When most people think about a TV operating system, they often only think about how you support streaming apps like Disney Plus or Netflix. But it's so much more than that, especially when it's designed for integration with hardware you like. Our software not only supports great streaming experiences, but actually works directly with the hardware to make the hardware itself perform even better. One way this is done is through picture quality enhancement. Through our internal own software capability, we will be able to work with the best OEMs in the world and the best component manufacturers in the world to push the boundaries of the final product. This means better contrast ratio, better black level, better color accuracy, Better audio, just to name a few. As the race, we all know, to control the living room heats up, we see a great opportunity emerging in the market where certain highly valued OEMs are looking for a deeper partnership than simply a fold-on or render OS relationship. They want a partner that has resource or the know-how to help their product perform better and deliver an improved experience. They want a partner who can help them build better products, but not just giving up quality and race to the bottom on price, which in long term we all know is unsustainable. Most importantly, we believe we can create mutually beneficial partnerships, which we believe is not available in the market today. So as I mentioned earlier, we are already in early discussion, and this will take some time to come together, But we're very optimistic of the potential this can bring to leverage the investment we have already made to expand our platform penetration and further scale our advertising business.

Great. Thanks so much, guys. Appreciate it, and good luck going forward. Thank you, Luke.

Thanks, Nick. Operator, we will take the next question.

We will take our next question from Laura Martin with Needham. Please proceed.

Hi there. I have two. One is I'm really intrigued by the last bullet point of your press release that says you're the exclusive CTV partner of Intuit SMB Media Lab, which unlocks new TAM of B2B budgets and a new wave of retail media network partnerships for Vizio. I would really like to learn more about that. And then Adam, for you... This EBITDA, you way over-delivered. You doubled the EBITDA number versus our estimates. In the quarter, you just announced the third quarter, so up 60% year-over-year. But your guidance for the fourth quarter has the EBITDA down, the high end, down 20% year-over-year. So was there something unique that won't be recurring in Q4? Are you guys going to take a bath on the PV device pricing, which is going to wipe out the EBITDA and make it be lower in Q4? What's going on between the 60% growth in EBITDA on Q3 versus EBITDA down year over year in Q4 guidance? Thank you.

Yeah, I'll start. Thanks, Laura. It's Mike. I think we shared a little bit about this last quarter, but Intuit is launching a small business-focused retail media network. It's called SMB Media Labs. This allows advertisers to target customers of QuickBooks across kind of various media properties. Vizio is the exclusive connected TV partner of that, right? It's really valuable data for us to reach small businesses. We can augment kind of our best-in-class TV data with Intuit's high-fidelity data sets. This should continue to help us expand our partnerships in telco and travel, as well as newer categories, potentially like fintech. and workplace services. I think also partnering with Intuit helps put us into retail marketing discussions, which, as you know, is a rapidly growing portion of the ad market. So we're pretty excited to be the exclusive partner with them.

Hey, Laura, it's Adam. And on the EBITDA side, there are a couple things in the quarter to think about for this quarter. I mean, yes, I'm glad that we over-delivered, and it came in certainly ahead of our expectations, which is a good thing. To your question about non-recurring, I did comment about the benefit from capitalized software development costs. That was something that came up during the quarter. It was about $3 million of benefit to the quarter, and that will not repeat sort of going forward. That's one consideration. For the quarter in general, we were really pleased with the advertising strength and particularly the strength on the home screen. We were bracing with the challenges in the media entertainment space we guided pretty conservatively, making sure that we would capture the fact that those strikes were still underway. And while some of those were resolved, there's still a lot of hesitation in the market. The active strike had still been going on until just this week. And we were really pleased with the demand that still came in. And so that came in at a higher, that comes in at a much higher margin. And so that helped bolster, if you look at the platform plus margin particularly, you see a higher than we would have normally thought or higher within our guidance range expectation there. For Q4, now Q4 is definitely, it's a higher promotion type of period. It is the holiday season, right? So we've got a number of very attractive pricings out in the market to be competitive during this seasonally strong period for consumers. So that's part of it. That's what's in our expectation around the guidance, and that's why you see it on a down basis, because it is a higher promotion period. We will be leaning into that. It's a great time to be driving growth in active accounts around the holidays and the usual consumer demand that picks up at that time. So we try to factor all that in.

Thanks very much.

Thanks, Laura. Operator, we will take the next question.

We will take our next question from Ben Swinburne with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.

Hey, good afternoon. Two questions. One, anyhow, thinking about how the upfront went and how that might be impacting the fourth quarter advertising outlook into next year, And then secondly, I think, Adam, you mentioned you guys are targeting larger screen formats going forward given the higher engagement. I think I heard that right. If that's true, what are the sort of financial implications of that in terms of either investment levels or your relationships with retailers and shelf space, the competitive dynamics at that higher end? Anything you can share to help us think about what that means would be helpful. Thank you.

Yeah, this is Mike. I'll take the upfront question. I think that, as you know, upfronts have been kind of slow for everyone. But from our standpoint, we're up year over year already today in terms of commitments. I think we've seen increased commitments in categories like CPG, QSR, pharma. And while I would say some of the larger upfront market has slowed this year, that's kind of put us in a much better position of strength. thanks to our first-party data solutions, especially in the scatter market. So while we are up year over year on the up fronts, we're seeing the scatter market as really strong right now. We talked about having 66 net new advertisers this past quarter. A majority of those came through scatter. So our goal is always to ensure we have kind of a healthy baseline of committed dollars coming out of the upfront cycle. And we can close healthy upfronts with major agencies and brand partners, and then still kind of grow our scatter dollars over the course of the year, adding more of these net new brands to our platform. So our expectation is heading into next year is that you know, we will grow the upfront and with that healthy baseline and, you know, we expect to grow significantly as we improve even more and more in the scatter market.

Yeah, Ben, and on the other question, we really like that larger screen size part of the market. I mean, our data supports the higher engagement and therefore the longer and better, higher customer lifetime value of those units. There's no doubt, as I've mentioned, that if you look at our metrics, we're starting to see already some of the improvement in the quality and engagement metrics by the outpacing growth in streaming. Larger units, which tend to be the main screen in the home, are going to significantly outperform in terms of time spent streaming, which gives us a better opportunity to serve more ads and monetize home screen engagement and drive overall ARPU. As I mentioned in the prepared remarks, our larger screens, which tend to be those main screens in the home, actually deliver an ARPU that's 30% higher than the smaller units. It's obviously in the blended 3155 ARPU that we reported this quarter, but that subset or that cohort is certainly delivering much greater economic value. So we need to think about how we position. We've got great products in the market with great reviews around it. That helps drive consumer demand and interest. We work with our retailers very closely, those partnerships, to have attractive pricing and merchandising support. And so there is an element of leaning into that strategy that we know will drive much greater long-term value over time.

Thank you. Thanks, Ben. Operator, we will take the next question.

We will take our next question from Mike Morris with Guggenheim. You may proceed.

Hi, this is Charlie Wilber on for Mike Morris. Just wanted to, are you guys able to hear me?

Yep. Go ahead, Charlie.

Great. Yeah, I just, thanks for having me here. I wanted to follow up on the OEM partnerships and, you know, ask if you could provide any color on how you're thinking about the licensing potential there. And just how are you positioning your offer, your pitch to partners in order to compete with others like Google, Roku, and Amazon? And do you expect to share any advertising economics with the OEMs?

Yeah, look, it's early. We're really excited about some of these conversations that are already underway, and we're working out details of what these arrangements will look like. But we really are confident and feel strongly based on the feedback we're hearing that there's a real – demand for something different in the market. And we hope to be able to bring that to these partners. You know, I view it also as really a TAM expanding opportunity for us. You know, if you look at the U.S. TV market, it's a little over 40 million units a year. We're at about 11%, 12% market share of that. So it's a very large market outside of our own existing sort of our own product market share where there's an opportunity to break into that and penetrate more and more. The more we can expand our platform into the market, the more we can scale our advertising business, the more viewership we can take advantage of. We've become a more important partner for advertisers, content partners, really across the board benefits. So we'll update as these things come together, but early indications, we're really excited about the progress we're already making in these early conversations.

Great. Thank you. And one follow-up, if I could. On engagement, you noted the strong growth in the SmartCast hours. per account in the quarter. Can you speak to anything that drove this engagement lift, any impact you would call out from the launches of the ESPN or NFL apps, and then what levers you have to drive further growth from here?

Yeah, I'll kick this off. So one of the key factors, look, we continue to add more apps to the platform. I think we shared we added ESPN, we added NFL. We have a ton of great content partnerships that have helped drive more time spent in addition to the already great partnerships we have. But one of the key drivers this quarter was around the redesign we've implemented. So as you know, we redesigned our home screen towards the end of last quarter. It's more immersive. It's more interactive. It's got a cleaner look and feel. And we're really pleased with the results of the redesign. Reviewers were overwhelmingly positive. Consumers definitely are as well. And we know consumers are because they vote with their behavior. And not only are streaming hours up, but we've also seen engagement rates on the home screen up over 60% this past quarter. So it's been great for consumers. They're spending more time. They're engaging more with the home screen. They're using it more for search and discovery. This is great for advertisers. Obviously, it helps drive more engagement into the apps that they're promoting. It's great for Watch Free Plus because we invest a lot of home screen real estate in driving consumers into our owned and operated app. And what is a very important factor in it is it's all been backwards compatible. So if you bought a Vizio TV seven years ago or you have one, bought one yesterday, you have that same great redesign on the home screen to help drive more time spent and more engagement. Yeah, Charlie, this is Adam.

I just want to add that what I like about it is we're seeing real indication that it's not just engagement for the sake of engagement, but it's actually engagement in areas where we have an opportunity to monetize as well. If you look at the statistics we provided, the SmartCast hours per active account, You can calculate that was up 12%, but our ad revenue per average active account in the quarter was up 16%. So, again, showing that we're actually able to monetize that engagement, and that will help, you know, obviously drive our revenue and growth over time.

Great. Thank you.

Thanks, Charlie. Operator, we will take the next question.

We will take our next question from Steve Cahill with Wells Fargo. Please proceed.

Hey, guys. This is Omar. I'm for Steve. Just a quick question on the TV licensing opportunity. Do you envision finding partnerships in your current pricing range, or is this an opportunity more attractive to you guys for device types on price ranges where you have a lower market share, especially at the upper end of the market?

Look, I think we've got to be competitive in pricing on everything we do. I mean, that is the market, right? We know we compete with house brands like On. We compete with TCL, Hisense. We compete all the way up the ladder. And so whatever we do has to be compelling offering for the consumer. It has to be competitive. It has to be thoughtful. And we're looking for a partnership relationship, which, as we mentioned, can be mutually beneficial. So back to my comment about continuing to be thoughtful, competitive, but disciplined in our own products, and then having these partnerships be an opportunity to expand our TAM beyond that. That's really sort of the great add-on to this that this can bring to us.

That's very helpful. And maybe staying on the competitive environment, can you talk around what is it like out there from a pricing standpoint, especially across some of your close competitors?

Yeah, look, we track it, as you can imagine, very, very closely across the board to understand where we're positioned versus others. I would characterize the pricing dynamics as continuing to be very competitive, but not quite as extreme as we saw yesterday. in Q1 and Q2. Some of the big outliers have moved back up closer to the averages on a given skew. And that helps a bit. I mean, it certainly takes out some of those very, very extreme dynamics where you saw maybe one or maybe two, but really one particular brand gain a bunch of share in the first half of the year. That seems to have moderated a bit. And so we're encouraged by that. But there's no doubt we expect it to continue to be competitive into the holidays. And that's why we've kind of factored in our position and our expectations around the holiday period where there's a lot of demand. We want to make sure that we have, you know, strong competitive pricing. But again, we're going to continue to be disciplined about how we approach that.

Great. Thanks, Dan.

Thanks, Omar. Operator, we will take the next question.

We'll take our next question from Jason Cryer with Craig Hallam. You may proceed.

Great. Thank you. Adam, just a question on the device gross margins. I know with that turning negative this quarter and the focus on the bigger screen sizes, can you give any more color just on how aggressive you plan to get and on those specific skews that you're targeting kind of where margins could go there?

Look, we don't guide the specific margins. Obviously, there's really a lot of competitive detail and information in that. We look at our pricing versus the market, where others are on a skew-by-skew basis, and want to make sure that we are competitive. But again, avoid this sort of race to the bottom dynamic. We don't think that some of those pricing strategies are sustainable in the market. And as a result, we don't feel the need to chase them in the immediate term that can jeopardize further economics. And so we're going to apply that kind of discipline around it. But clearly, if you're supporting a 65-inch product with a higher average selling price versus, say, a 32, then... You know, there's different dollars that you need to support. But my point is that the customer lifetime value of a 65-inch, as an example, is significantly higher than a 24 or a 32. And so for that reason, you're willing to make that investment because at the ARPU level we're now generating and the strong margins in our Platform Plus business, it is a positive customer lifetime value in a significant way. And so when there's a race to gain households, as we've talked about, it's competitive to be gaining and representing the operating system in a living room. We want to be really thoughtful about how we do that. And we like our strategy. We like this dual revenue structure that we've built. We've scaled up and grown our platform business to a level now that gives us that financial and strategic flexibility. And we're going to be thoughtful about how we approach that in the overall market.

That's perfect. Thank you. Maybe one from Mike. Just curious if you can talk about the trends you've seen in advertising recently. We've just heard a lot of commentary on a tougher start to Q4. It doesn't seem like you're really guiding to that, but if you've noticed any of that in the market.

Speaking for Vizio here, we saw 27% growth in Q3. I think we're projecting pretty strong growth again in Q4. In terms of trends, you know, M&E, there's still some uncertainty, but as you mentioned, wasn't as bad as we were expecting. I think we're well positioned there heading into Q4. There could be more upside as things come to a close and potentially new releases come out or more premieres come out into the market. But you look at those 66 new advertisers we had, I mean, We saw strong vertical growth. CPG and QSR were all up over triple digits. Pharma was up. Insurance was up. I mean, we saw headwinds definitely in the automotive sector, but we were still up 60 percent. And we could have captured more dollars if there wasn't for a separate strike of their own. But by our ability to continue to add new advertisers, bring new partners into the fold, like automotive, we're able to dip down into the tier two, tier three categories to help accelerate some of the advertising dollars. So we continue to feel strong about our position heading into Q4. Great.

Thank you.

Thanks, Jason. Operator, we will take the next question.

We will take our next question from Corey Carpenter with JPMorgan. Please proceed.

Thank you. Mike, I wanted to ask you about political and how big of an impact you think that could have in the work you guys are doing to prepare for political advertising. And then maybe just a bigger picture question on SmartCast for Adam. $31 ARPU, you still have a gap that you're closing with peers. Where do you feel like you're still most under-monetized on SmartCast? Thank you.

Yeah, thanks, Corey. We're very optimistic about the 2024 political cycle. When you think about what political advertisers are looking for, they want targeted buys against local markets. And we're positioned incredibly well. We have the ability to target audiences down to the most narrow geographic regions. We just added 35 more local channels to Watch Free Plus recently to add more local content. We've got obviously unique data through in-scale viewing data, as well as broad reach in key swing states. So we're set up well to capture some of, I think, what people are projecting to be, I think, $1.3 billion in CTV advertising this cycle. Last cycle, 2022, we learned a lot about how to improve sales. We did okay, not as good as we should have, but we learned from that. We've added sales staff in D.C. to be closer to clients, and we've also kind of improved our programmatic partnerships and the capabilities we have there to capture additional demand. So overall, we're very optimistic about our political revenue outlook for the back half of next year.

Yeah, and on the ARPA question, I mean, obviously we've made tremendous progress and we're very proud of the team and the execution that's got us to where we are, but we also believe there's significant headroom from here. If you look at just the U.S. market, you know, we think there's a lot more room for growth versus this number that we're putting up today. And so we've got to continue to keep investing in a great overall experience for the consumer more content, use our home screen to drive engagement, and ideally drive engagement into areas where, as we've said before, where we have an opportunity to monetize. You want to deliver an exceptional user experience, but also have an opportunity to serve ads and monetize that time spent. There's no better place for us to achieve that than in Watch Free Plus. That's why we continue to add more fast channels there. We're adding more on-demand movie titles and television show titles. We're expanding that capability to bring users more to the consumer and a greater value proposition over all of them. As we can drive more time in monetizable content, more engagement means more ads served, which means more revenue. Also, as we utilize our targeting tools and the data that we have, we can deliver exceptional campaigns for advertisers who are looking for specific ways to deploy campaigns and messages to consumers. So taking all of that together, again, we're really excited about the upside that there remains to our ARPU number. Visio account is an area where there's an opportunity to your point about the gap. We only rolled this out a year and a half ago and we're building out the partnerships that are available on Vizio account, and that will help drive subscriber revenue in that business. We've got about 40% of all the SVOD and TVOD apps that are now including that functionality. We're going to be adding the NFL app later this quarter for subscriber revenue as well. So as we get the word out to our users that we've got this great way to manage their subscription services, to engage with Vizio account and drive growth, We're seeing great lift in premium apps like Starz. That's a place where there's still, to your question, a gap versus what you see in the existing marketplace today. So we're going to continue to work to close that.

Thank you.

Thanks, Corey. Operator, we will take the next question.

We will take our next question from Tom Champion with Piper Sandler. Please proceed.

Hi, good afternoon. William, I'm just curious, based on your experience and tenure in the industry, what inning of the price war on the device side do you think we're in, whether this cycle is following kind of a familiar template? What inning are we in? Could it extend well into next year? And would you expect the device segment to return to a positive gross profit contribution when when all is said and done. I had a second question on Visio accounts. Adam, you kind of just talked about it a little bit. Just wanted to see if there was any additional update there. Mike O'Donnell, I don't know if you'd have anything to add. Thank you.

Yeah, sure. So the TV market thing up and down for many years. I think the beginning of the year is definitely oversupply of components that drove down the price quite a bit. And that situation eased up quite a bit. And I think the component manufacturer, they are more careful with the pricing because the more that they sell at a lower price, the more they're going to lose. They don't want to do that anymore. 12 months ago, there was a surplus of inventories. So maybe a lot of irrational pricing decisions. But now that's kind of disappeared. But I think in the coming years, the price will be driven by not just components, inventory pressure. But I think that's gone away. I think it's really a competition between the CTV system where people are fighting for CTV market share. So that's yet to – it's been out there for years now. I think that will continue. But the component pressure surplus inventory eased up quite a bit in the past few months.

Adam? Yeah, look, on long-term margins, sure. I think over time, as this plays out, you could imagine that we would get margin back into device. But again, to our earlier points and the value of our install base and the growing value as we execute against the significant upside we have to ARPU, you know, just from a customer lifetime value standpoint, it continues to make sense to deploy the strategy that we're working on right now. So we're going to continue to be focused on that.

Yeah, Tom, on your question on Visio account, not too much data points to add beyond Adam. So I think you shared 40%. of the SVOD, TVOD base has integrated over 200% increase in terms of subscriber growth over last year. But one of the things we've done is we just recently held our developer conference this past quarter. And it's critically important for us to continue to grow our relationships with the developers on our platform. And Visio account is one way we're continuing to do that. We think it creates opportunities for them to drive more subscribers to get closer to our customer base. But we also leveraged it to help, and we had over 200 attendees, speak to them about other ways in which we can help them monetize, ways we can do that through advertising. and then also some of the unique tools we have put in place around interactivity, around our enhancements to our mobile platform, enhancements to our home screen, in which we can help them drive more innovation. So Vizio Account is one component that will help us continue to grow monetization, but I think it's also an important component that helps us integrate more deeply with the app partners on our platform and show them that we have a lot of capabilities for today and for the future.

Thank you, guys. Thanks, Tom. Operator, we have time for one more question.

We will take our final question from Tom . Please proceed.

Jim Goss is the next one.

We'll take on a question from Jim Goss.

All right. Thank you. Hi, Jim. Hi. I was wondering first the comment about the higher monetization of the larger sets. I was wondering if you could talk about the mix of drivers of that higher lifetime value. Was it the increased usage only or were there differences in the ad exposure and the monetization events that were taking place?

Well, look, I think it's sort of both. I mean, it's the way that they use the unit, right? If you could imagine, let's just use a 65-inch again as an example. That's going to be the main TV in the home. That's really going to be watching most of their Leanback long-form content. They're going to be highly engaged with streaming services. and engaging in a way that we have an opportunity to monetize that interaction, not only in the home screen, but obviously across a variety of third-party apps, and then hopefully they're spending a growing amount of time in our Watch Free Plus as we continue to build out and expand what that service offers. Contrasting that to a smaller unit where maybe over time it becomes a TV in the bedroom, it's not used as frequently, maybe it's a monitor, a lot of different use cases can span across the various sizes. And so as we understand that data more and more. We understand the lifetime value. We understand how long a particular TV stays active in our fleet. It really helps drive and inform us around decisions on pricing, on retail relationships, because ultimately, it's really about having an opportunity to expand the monetization.

And do you get a combined effect if you have multiple Vizio TV households? or do you treat them separately?

It's really a device metric, right? And so it all gets blended into our average reported statistics. So if a household has a 24-inch in one room and a 65-inch in the other room and they use them differently, that will show up on a blended basis in our overall reporting statistics.

Okay, and one other quick thing is the Vizio-branded content studio, you have one of your slides that addresses that. I wonder if you could talk about the potential importance of it, what you're planning to do with that.

Yeah, Jim. It's Mike. I'll take that. So from a home screen perspective, we've been looking at a lot of ways in which we can expand our advertiser base. beyond media and entertainment. And I think we've done a really good job, whether that be with promotion of certain content we have within our platform, whether that be sponsorships of custom curated collections or channels, as well as branded content. It's all ways in which we can bring a new fleet of advertisers into the home screen or monetize them beyond video or Household Connect. Branded Content Studio has been a great addition for us to our advertising offering. Our TV data, you know, helps us understand what our consumers like to watch. So the Branded Content Initiative helps us pair advertisers with content that's, you know, produced for their tastes. I think you see we just rolled out this past week our latest installment. It's called Merry and Bright, a holiday decorating show. with Jordan Sparks, and it's brought to you by Home Depot. We think the Branded Content Studio is great because it gives our consumers exclusive original content. It's great for the advertiser because our users are guaranteed to see the home screen when they turn the TV on, so it'll provide great branding for them, as well as integrations directly into the content itself. With Home Depot, not only are they integrated into content, but we also have QR codes, so we're able to create a shoppable experience as well. And then when you tie it all together from an economic standpoint, you know, all the investment that we're making in this original content is covered by the partnership. So we think it's a great way to continue to grow our relationships with non-media and entertainment partners integrated into the home screen.

Okay, thanks much.

Great. Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Jim. And thanks, everyone, for joining. This concludes today's call. Have a great evening.