Zeta Global Holdings Corp. (NYSE:ZETA) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Zeta Global Holdings Corp. (NYSE:ZETA) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript November 1, 2023

Zeta Global Holdings Corp. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.2726 EPS, expectations were $0.09.

Operator: Greetings, and welcome to the Zeta’s Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Scott Schmitz, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Scott Schmitz: Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Zeta’s third quarter 2023 conference call. Today’s presentation and earnings release are available on Zeta’s Investor Relations website at investors.zetaglobal.com where you will also find links to our SEC filings, along with other information about Zeta. Joining me on the call today are David Steinberg, Zeta’s Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Chris Greiner, Zeta’s Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I’d like to remind everyone that statements made on this call as well as in the presentation and earnings release contains forward-looking statements regarding our financial outlook, business plans and objectives and other future events and developments, including statements about the market potential of our products, potential competition and revenues of our products in our goals and strategies.

These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These risks and uncertainties include those described in the company’s earnings release and other filings with the SEC and speak only as of today’s date. In addition, our discussion today will include references to certain supplemental non-GAAP financial measures, which should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for our GAAP results. We use these non-GAAP measures in managing the business and believe they provide useful information for our investors. Reconciliations of the non-GAAP measures to the corresponding GAAP measures where appropriate can be found in the earnings presentation available on our website as well as our earnings release and other filings with the SEC.

With that, I will now turn the call over to David.

David Steinberg: Thank you, Scott. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Our third quarter of 2023 was one of our most eventful and productive quarters yet, highlighted by key events including Zeta Live, our Customer Advisory Board Meeting, and our first Investor Day. Most importantly, we continued our track record of consistent execution, delivering results above our guidance for the ninth consecutive time. In the quarter, we delivered record revenue of $189 million, up 24% year-over-year, with adjusted EBITDA of $34 million, up 51% year-over-year. This translates to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 17.9%, up 310 basis points year-over-year. We generated $23 million of cash from operating activities, up 17%, with free cash flow of $13 million, up 43% year-over-year.

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Q&A Session

On a year-to-date basis, our adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow have grown approximately 70% faster than our revenue. Our strong results reflect our growing impact in the marketplace, which was evidenced by the 50% increase in viewers for our third annual Zeta Live conference to over 12,000 people. This year’s Zeta Live conference brought together thought leaders from around the world to learn about the growing impact of AI, discuss innovation that drives business growth, and hear from practitioners about the emergence of intelligence-powered marketing. A full replay of every session is available in the Resource Center section of our website at zetaglobal.com. With hundreds of new brands and existing customers added to our pipeline, Zeta Live continues to be an investment in accelerating our business and raising our brand awareness.

The evolution of Zeta who to why Zeta was evident in record third quarter RFP volumes, with even greater growth in dollar values as we experienced an increase in more complex multichannel opportunities, which was further driven by Zeta Live. Growing deal activity is just one indication of the market moving in our direction. We were also recognized in key industry reports. In the third quarter, we were named a leader in the IDC MarketScape for omnichannel marketing platforms for B2C enterprises. The ZMP was recognized for simplifying the complex marketing ecosystem. While we still have further to go to achieve broader recognition across industry analysts, we believe our differentiated approach of bringing identity, intelligence, and activation together in a single platform position us well to win against our core competitors, including Oracle, Salesforce, and Adobe.

Our industry recognition, along with our pipeline growth, is fueled by our innovative product roadmap, which was on full display at Zeta Live. With the release of the Zeta Opportunity Engine, or ZOE, marketers have the ability to ask critical marketing questions and receive real-time answers. And through new forecasting and recommendation tools, marketers can generate new ideas and strategies with speed and scale so they can deliver higher ROI and accelerate results. In addition, recent customer requests have highlighted an opportunity to innovate upon basic mobile capabilities that have been the status quo in the market. Similar to the enterprise market, moving on from its first generation CDPs sophisticated marketers are seeking mobile to be integrated into a more comprehensive platform rather than used as a point solution.

To capitalize on this opportunity, Zeta is making investments into expanding our enterprise mobile capabilities to fuel conversational experiences. Feedback from customers and prospects at Zeta Live also reinforced our belief that we are at the beginning of a marketing cloud replacement cycle. In fact, at Zeta Live, we signed a multi-year, eight-figure deal with one of the largest discount retailers in the United States to replace their legacy marketing cloud and consolidate seven different vendors in their technology stack with just the ZMP. After an extensive search, they chose our next generation technology because of our identity, personalization, customer journey, and AI capabilities. This retailer is in the process of a multi-year digital transformation that has re-architected their entire tech stack to include our partner Snowflake, which is another key driver of our current record RFP volumes.

This customer is an excellent example of our belief that Zeta helps marketers with modern data architectures to deliver better experiences for consumers and reduce the total cost of ownership for enterprises seeking to replace legacy technologies. One of the fundamental problems marketers face today is the inability to deliver what consumers want due to a personalization gap created by legacy systems. Even though data is abundant, intelligence is scarce because legacy systems lack the sophistication to turn data and insights into action. Our software platform solves this problem by unifying complex and disparate sources of data into a single view of the customer. Our proprietary AI synthesizes billions of behavioral signals and environmental data to create intent-based scores tied directly to the individual.

We then activate this intelligence through marketing programs that combine precision and scale across every channel. This is intelligence powered marketing. Unlike legacy systems, the Zeta Marketing Platform has data and AI as native to the application layer, offering a differentiated approach for sophisticated marketers seeking to control their data and extract more value from each interaction. This quarter we also continue to grow our relationships with key players in the value chain, including agencies where our strategy is defined opportunities to partner to enhance their assets and capabilities so that together we deliver more to the world’s biggest brands because this allows us to serve many brands through a single business relationship.

This one-to-many strategy accelerates our market penetration and exposes Zeta to marketing decision makers across a broad range of the enterprise brands. As we discussed at our Investor Day, the number of brands we serve is nearly 40% larger than a reported scaled customer count. Looking forward, in addition to our continued growth with agencies, the emergence of the partner channel and the benefits of the replacement cycle, we expect the macro environment will continue to drive scrutiny on how and where enterprises invest in marketing technology. As the need for efficiency and effectiveness rises, enterprises are more likely to change to improve their marketing programs and lower their total cost of ownership. As we heard at Zeta Live marketers are looking to consolidate spend with fewer vendors and simplify their technology stacks.

Marketing budgets must be tied to measurable outcomes that generate a strong verifiable return on investment, which Zeta delivers. In summary, I am incredibly proud of our team and what we have accomplished this quarter. We continue to be well positioned to capitalize on the need for more efficient and effective marketing technology. As always, I would like to sincerely thank our customers, our partners, team Zeta and all our shareholders for the ongoing support of our vision. Now let me turn it over to Chris to discuss our results in greater detail. Chris?

Chris Greiner: Thank you, David, and good afternoon, everyone. During today’s call, I will focus on the drivers of our consistent execution along with key considerations for the fourth quarter’s outlook. Starting with the results, we delivered $189 million in revenue, up 24% year-to-year. On an organic basis, and adjusting from last year’s political revenue, growth accelerated from 24% in 2Q to 26% this quarter. I’ll note our growth rate also includes continued headwinds from the insurance and automotive verticals. Our reported growth would have been in the mid-30s plus excluding these two verticals. The strength of our revenue growth this quarter was once again driven by scaled customer additions coming in above the high end of the model, we updated that our Investor Day of 8% to 12% growth.

We ended the third quarter with 440 scaled customers, up 15 from 2Q and up 13% year-to-year. We also saw healthy growth from our 1 million plus super scaled customers, which increased by six quarter-to-quarter to 124, up 17% year-to-year. The addition of scaled customers came from industries ranging [ph] from travel and hospitality to education to several across advertising and marketing. As such, we continue to see strong diversification across industries with six of our 10 largest verticals, once again growing more than 25% year-to-year. And for the 13 consecutive quarter, scaled customer ARPU with double digits coming in at 418,000 growing at the same 10% rate we’ve seen throughout the year and at the midpoint of our 8% to 12% growth model.

Like we’ve discussed in calls earlier this year, ARPU growth is influenced by the success we’ve seen in closing pilots this year with half of the 51 scaled customers added in the last 12 months in the less than 500K revenue band. This is an encouraging data point for us. If you refer to Slide 28 in our earnings supplemental, we show a multi-year trend demonstrating how scaled customers reliably grow spend the longer they’re on data’s platform. As illustrated on the slide, scaled customers less than one year on the platform spend an average of 400,000 compared to the one to three year cohort spending 1.5 million and the more than three-year cohort spending over 1.8 million. Not only does this draw a trend line for the scaling potential of these less than 500 scaled customers, but it also bodes well for net revenue retention.