PubMatic Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
May 7, 2024

There are 13 speakers on the call.

Operator

Joining me on the call are Rajeev Goel, Co Founder and CEO and Steve Pantelik, CFO. Today's prepared remarks have been recorded, after which Rajeev and Steve will host live Q and A. If you plan to ask a question, please ensure you've set your Zoom name to display your full name and firm and use the raise hand function located at the bottom of your screen. A copy of our press release can be found on our website at investors. Omatic.com.

Operator

I would like to remind participants that during this call, management will make forward looking statements, including without limitation, statements regarding our future performance, market opportunity, growth strategy and financial outlook. Forward looking statements are based on our current expectations and assumptions regarding our business, the economy and future conditions. These forward looking statements are subject to inherent risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict. You can find more information about these risks, uncertainties and other factors in our reports filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent Form 10 ks and any subsequent filings on Forms 10 Q or 8 ks, which are on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission and are available at investors. Pomatic.com.

Operator

Our actual results may differ materially from these contemplated by the forward looking statements. We caution you, therefore, against relying on any of these forward looking statements. All information today is as of May 7, 2024, and we do not intend and undertake no obligation to update any forward looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise, except as may be required by law. In addition, today's discussion will include references to certain non GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, non GAAP net income and free cash flow. These non GAAP measures are presented for supplemental informational purposes only and should not be considered for financial information presented in accordance GAAP.

Operator

A reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is available in our press release. Over to Rajiv.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Stacy, and good afternoon, everyone. We delivered another outstanding quarter, highlights the growing need for sell side technology for digital advertising, our strong customer relationships and our breadth of solutions resulting in growth across all formats and channels. Revenue and profit significantly exceeded our expectations, marking multiple quarters of accelerating revenue growth. Revenue grew 20% over Q1 last year. Excluding revenue from Yahoo's owned and operated inventory, year over year revenue growth was 25%.

Speaker 1

Adjusted EBITDA margin was 23% and we generated over $16,000,000 in free cash flow. I'm incredibly proud of the team's hard work and focused execution, which has positioned us well for the growth opportunities that lie ahead. We've built an integrated platform that is flexible and efficient, so we can meet the needs of a growing customer base as we expand our total addressable market. We see continued momentum in the business evidenced by adoption of new solutions and growth in customer count as clients across the ecosystem choose to build their ad businesses on PubMatic technology. With these strong results continuing into April, we are raising our full year guidance.

Speaker 1

Adding to our confidence is the increasing importance of being positioned on the sell side as the advertising ecosystem evolves. The need for deep and specialized technology to monetize ad inventory and audiences is increasing at a rapid pace. New opportunities, including changing privacy regulations, the onslaught of new ad inventory from CTV and Commerce Media and the increasing need for buyers to control how their head budgets are deployed are best addressed on the sell side, which sits closest to the consumer. Pimatic is unique. Our focus on our owned and operated infrastructure and strength in organic innovation results in robust technology that efficiently connects buyers and sellers.

Speaker 1

We spent 17 years building differentiated solutions and our competitive mode continues to widen even as our logo list continues to grow. These advantages attract both advertisers and publishers to POMATIC, adding scale to the platform and fueling continued growth. Let me explain. Advertisers are looking to gain scaled access to premium inventory, audiences and data, which is primarily done through sell side technology, whether they connect directly to us via Activate or via a demand side platform. Our owned and operated infrastructure provides an efficient, transparent, omni channel, global and privacy forward solution, while giving buyers granular capabilities to control how their ad budgets are deployed.

Speaker 1

At the same time, premium publishers and data owners are using POMATIC to gain access to our scaled buyer demand, further amplified by supply path optimization and Activate. Moreover, our addressable market continues to grow as we attract new entrants to the digital advertising ecosystem, like leading streaming providers, commerce media participants, and now social media companies. The most recent example of this is roadblocks. When the global immersive platform was looking to enable programmatic ads for the first time, they tapped PubMatic to power this offering. Not only can PubMatic provide scaled access to premium brand advertising demand through our buy side relationships, but we also understand the needs of content providers across web and app environments.

Speaker 1

As Roblox's VP of Global Partnerships, Stephanie Latham explained and I quote, partnering with POMATIC unlocks the opportunity for more advertisers to seamlessly engage this community through preferred content formats like video while providing advertiser controls around brand suitability. More broadly as cookie deprecation nears and privacy regulations increase around the world, the future of digital advertising resides in technology like POMATIX that sits closest to the publisher and therefore the consumer. We have a unique opportunity to tap into the myriad of behavioral, demographic, identity, interest based and contextual signals that publishers have access to, all while enabling media owners to maintain control of their data and access, a critical component as they build their ad tech stacks. As we cross the 500 person mark in product management and engineering, we continue to focus on building solutions ahead of the trends that are playing out today, namely buyer spend consolidation via SPO, growth from connected TV and expansion of commerce media. I'd like to walk through these growing areas and how we've differentiated ourselves in each.

Speaker 1

Our goal is to maximize content creators access to programmatic advertising budgets. While we work with top DSPs on a global basis, we know that advertisers and agencies have tremendous influence over how and where their budgets are spent. With large ad budgets continuing to shift from linear to programmatic, SPO via activate offers ad buyers a highly efficient and fully scaled solution that directly connects buyers with premium video inventory while reducing operational friction. Further, our approach focuses on both ad buyers and content creators interests. We deliver increased ROI that warrants higher CPMs, which elevates the value of the entire digital advertising ecosystem.

Speaker 1

I couldn't be more pleased with the success we are seeing as we continue to expand customer engagement through new products and regions. Several of the top global agency holding companies are in the process of ramping up their adoption of Activate. We've also recently expanded Activate into Latin America. Our comprehensive suite of buyer solutions is what makes our SPO offering so compelling. As a result, ad buying activity from SPO continues to drive growth across the POMATIC platform.

Speaker 1

Our multiyear partnership with GroupM is just one example of how we are meeting the growing needs of buyers. We initially engaged with GroupM for SPO in 2019. Over time, we expanded the relationship from desktop display to mobile, online video and ultimately connected TV. We further partnered to power their premium marketplace across Europe and Asia and most recently in the U. S.

Speaker 1

In 2023, we launched a comprehensive private marketplace deal library across multiple GroupM agencies, which consolidates media buying onto approved inventory packages that meet their performance and quality standards. And just this past month, we announced a first of its kind solution to deliver AI generated cohort based audience models customized for each GroupM advertiser client. What's most interesting about this journey is that it can only be done with technology like PoMatteX that sits on the sell side. At the end of the Q1, SPO activity increased to 50%, up 4 percentage points from the end of Q4. Our SPO activity is creating a growing moat and flywheel to attract new publishers who want access to the unique demand only available on Podmatic.

Speaker 1

I anticipate that over the next several years, there is potential for SPO activity to be 75% of our total buyer activity. Driving this confidence are a few things. 1, the nature of our land and expand strategy. Our net spend retention rate from ad buyers with at least 3 years of spend reached 125%, which gives us high visibility into impression and revenue growth. 2, we are adding 50% more buyer focused sales this year so that we can bring the same efficiencies and high ROIs to mid tier agencies and large advertisers as they too embark on SPO initiatives.

Speaker 1

And 3, total global digital ad spend is estimated to grow by 32% over the next 4 years to nearly 850,000,000,000 dollars We will disproportionately benefit as the industry continues to consolidate. The capital outlay needed, global scale requirements and ongoing pace of innovation make it challenging for other platforms to compete and even harder for new entrants to emerge. At the same time, publishers are also mandated to find increased efficiencies and greater monetization. Both of these objectives can be solved by shifting from in house software POMATIC solutions, which allows publishers to focus on their core competencies, creating content and connecting with consumers while leaning on trusted experts like POMATIC to power more of their tech stack. For example, OpenRamp, our header bidding wrapper solution across CTV, mobile app and web environments drives increased yield for publishers and streamlines our engineering and ad operations.

Speaker 1

Publishers like realtor.com, Internet Brands, Sports App Live Score and NPR are increasingly realizing the benefits of OpenWrap as we have more than doubled the number of paying customers year over year. The same mandate to find increased efficiencies and greater monetization holds true for streams. Even the biggest names in CTV are opening up their inventory and data to access a greater proportion of ad budgets in order to drive growth. In fact, as an increasing share of CTV ad budgets move to programmatic transactions, top streamers are increasingly adopting POMATIC to support direct transactions with buyers via private marketplace or programmatic guaranteed auctions. Beyond the one to 1 direct access, our technology enables streamers to optimize yield across multiple bidders and improve impression level data available to buyers that can drive higher yields.

Speaker 1

Our strategy to penetrate CTV budgets is multi pronged. First, our growth in SPO and Activate provides publishers with unique demand on the POMATIC platform not available elsewhere. This creates a catalyst for growth, allowing us to rapidly expand our CTV publisher base, which increased 15% year over year in Q1. Further, as publishers derive value from our platform, they are increasingly choosing to move more of their direct sold deals to PubMatic, which is a significant portion of how CTV an online video is sold today. The results of our strategy are clear.

Speaker 1

Last quarter, we added Dish Media and Vivo to our platform and we most recently onboarded Virgin Media, one of the UK's premier entertainment and communications companies. Virgin Media selected POMATIC as one of only a few sell side technology companies helping to power their free ad supported TV or FAST offering because of our strength in SPO and private marketplaces. We believe we are at the early stages of this new CTV and online video flywheel for growth, particularly as Activate begins to ramp. Convert, our commerce media platform also benefits from the scale of premium inventory on our platform. This supply coupled with the richness of our data capabilities allows us to attract retail media budgets.

Speaker 1

Programmatic retail media expands our TAM by $10,000,000,000 in the fastest growing part of the market, where ad buyers use retailers' unique datasets to deliver relevant high performance ad campaigns. Further, this is a nascent market today with plenty of greenfield opportunity. In addition, commerce media sites with their trove of first party data signals stand to benefit the most as the 3rd party cookie is eliminated. As this transition unfolds and adoption of alternative signals increases, a more resilient supply chain will emerge delivering more relevant ads for consumers, better performance for advertisers and superior monetization for content owners. We integrate directly with retailers and their data positioning us well for growth in retail media.

Speaker 1

We are already seeing strong interest in Convert from some of the largest commerce media platforms. Just a few weeks ago, we announced a partnership with Instacart, allowing buyers to leverage Instacart's 1st party retail media data to reach audiences across our expansive inventory. Equally important because we sit primarily on the sell side of the ecosystem with direct access to scaled omni channel inventory, we are in a unique position to deliver off-site audience targeted campaigns in a privacy compliant way. As these large content creators embrace their advertising potential, they are also choosing POMATIC to power their on-site inventory. Varna, the global payments company that boasts the world's fastest growing community of shoppers recently partnered with POMATIC to monetize the native inventory on their app.

Speaker 1

They chose POMATIC because of the scale we provide so that any advertiser regardless of their DSP can reach Klarna's highly engaged audience at the point of purchase for better campaign performance. While still early days for Convert and our Commerce Media business, I'm excited about the breadth of opportunities ahead of us. Our strong agency and advertiser relationships driven by SPO and Activate coupled with our strong portfolio of audience solutions are gaining traction with commerce media companies. Collectively, the driving forces of innovation and growth in our industry are creating a wealth of opportunity for the open Internet. Buyers are looking to engage their audiences alongside brand safe, professionally curated content, which the walled gardens do not provide.

Speaker 1

I've had numerous conversations with key advertisers and media buyers at global ad agencies that how they are actively looking to move media buys out of walled gardens, but need the performance and ROI that they are accustomed to. I believe that the open Internet has the potential to deliver performance consistent with walled gardens, especially after 3rd party cookies are deprecated and first party data from CTV publishers and commerce media partners continues to scale. In summary, we delivered an outstanding start to the year with continued momentum into April. We've added new clients and established deeper relationships with content creators and buyers. And we are investing in the highest return areas of the business like Activate for SPO, Connect for Data and Convert for Commerce Media.

Speaker 1

As a result, we expect revenue growth to accelerate in 2024. Our competitive moat is widening as is the need for sell side technology. Those that are looking to build their advertising businesses need 3 things, technology that carries them into the future and ensures control of inventory, data and buyer preferences, access to premium inventory and buyer demand and an efficient transparent path to execute direct programmatic transactions. At POMATIC, we have global omni channel scale, a rich innovative product roadmap and the resources for ongoing investment. We have tremendous opportunity in front of us as we expand our addressable market and deliver real value to content creators, buyers and data partners.

Speaker 1

I will now hand it over to Steve for the financial details.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Rajeev, and welcome everyone. We've once again exceeded guidance on the top and bottom line, led by strong execution and continued momentum in our business. Several factors drove accelerated year over year revenue growth of 20%. Monetized impressions increased for every format and channel in aggregate by 17%. CPMs were stable across formats and channels and emerging revenue streams comprised of new products, data partnerships and enterprise software integrations contributed approximately 2 percentage points of growth in the quarter on track to double their contribution by the end of the year.

Speaker 2

This strong outperformance also drove incremental margin expansion with adjusted EBITDA margins of 23%, Once again demonstrating the strength of our business model, which is built on owned and operated infrastructure, innovation investments to deliver differentiated products and operational excellence. Compared to Q1 last year, we doubled our adjusted EBITDA and tripled our free cash flow. Breaking Q1 down by format and channel, which includes Yahoo! Unless otherwise called out. Omnichannel video revenue from CTV, mobile and desktop devices grew 33% over Q1 last year, driven by an increase of monetized impressions by more than 50%.

Speaker 2

As we continue expanding our roster of new customers and growing our share of wallet with existing customers, we see a long runway of opportunity in this high value channel. We also saw continued strength in display, most of which was via the mobile channel. Display revenue grew 10% over Q1 last year, led by a double digit percentage increase in monetized impressions. Excluding Yahoo owned and operated inventory, display revenue grew 17% year over year. On a global basis, Evergreen grew double digit percentages in the Q1.

Speaker 2

As mentioned in prior earnings calls, our results include the revenue headwind in our business from Yahoo! Excluding revenue from Yahoo! Owned and operated inventory, revenue grew significantly by 25% over Q1 last year. We anticipate this headwind diminishing in the second half. We also added 99 publishers on a year over year basis, including premium CTV and transactional commerce brands.

Speaker 2

And we grew our existing publisher revenues on a trailing 12 month basis with net dollar based retention at 106%. Excluding Yahoo! Net dollar based retention was 114%. Looking at growth in ad spend, the top 10 ad verticals combined increased by 20% compared to Q1 last year. Within this group, the majority of ad verticals grew nearly 30% year over year.

Speaker 2

Our relationships with buyers continue to expand as activity from SPL climbed to 50% of total activity on our platform. Underscoring the long term strategic value and stickiness of these relationships, the trailing 12 month net spend retention rate from SPO partners with at least 3 years of spending on our platform was 125%. As a share of SPO to total activity increases, we anticipate revenue visibility further improving and the proportion of high margin revenue growing. In February, I outlined our key operating priorities for delivering accelerated year over year revenue growth and incremental margin expansion. Consistent with our long term track record, we remain focused on investing in high impact, high return projects, while driving further efficiencies across the business.

Speaker 2

First, we are executing our plan of adding over 150 net new team members this year to accelerate product innovation and go to market expansion. We are adding engineers to create incremental data monetization opportunities for Palmatic as we generate both publisher revenue and data fees from our Connect transactions. Prior investments in this area have led to increased value creation for clients, resulting in the number of Connect customers more than doubling over the last 12 months. These investments are also focused on expanding our alternative data signals. Similarly, increased sales and engineering investments in OpenWrap have broadened our value proposition and capabilities that we deliver.

Speaker 2

Our wrapper solution generates revenue via our core SSP revenue stream as well as software based fee from all publisher revenue flowing through the wrapper. We've also expanded our buyer focused sales team by nearly 20% year over year to accelerate growth in SPO and Activate. We expect this broader team will enable us to further penetrate large agencies and advertisers as well as bring on mid tier buyers who are starting to embark on SPL initiatives. You recall that in February, I shared that our plan was to increase this SPL focused team by 50% over the course of 2024. 2nd, we continue to make prudent investments in CapEx with a focus on funding new products and efficiently increasing capacity on the platform.

Speaker 2

As previously communicated, we anticipate full year CapEx to be marginally higher than last year's level. And third, our team is building on cost saving efforts from last year and optimizing via software and AI to deliver incremental efficiencies across our owned and operated infrastructure. For the trailing 12 months, these efforts reduced our cost of revenue per million impressions processed by 10% compared to the comparable prior 12 month period. Moving down the P and L. Q1 GAAP net loss was $2,500,000 or $0.05 net loss per diluted share.

Speaker 2

Non GAAP net income, which adjust for stock based compensation expense and related adjustments for income tax was $4,800,000 or approximately $0.09 per diluted share. We have a strong balance sheet that supports our long term capital allocation strategy. We ended the quarter with $174,000,000 in cash and marketable securities and 0 debt. Year to date through April 30, 2024, we repurchased 1,100,000 shares of Class A common stock for $20,100,000 in cash. Since the inception of our repurchase program in February 2023, we have repurchased a total of 5,100,000 shares for $79,400,000 We have $95,600,000 remaining in our repurchase program authorized through December 31, 2025.

Speaker 2

We generated $24,000,000 in net cash provided by operating activities and delivered $16,000,000 of free cash flow, which was more than 3 times the free cash flow we generated in Q1 of last year. Now turning to our outlook. In Q1, we saw terrific growth across our business and this momentum continued through April with revenues up double digit percentages over last year. Both omni channel video and display revenues in April increased over last year and the majority of our top 10 ad verticals grew over 20% year over year. We are also making steady progress on our 2024 operating priorities in terms of hiring for continued product innovation and go to market expansion that we believe will help accelerate year over year revenue growth.

Speaker 2

These data points give us confidence in our underlying growth strategy and the effectiveness of the growth investments we are making. Our Q2 and full year outlook also reflects an anticipated headwind as one of our top DSPs has informed us it is modifying its bidding methodology in Q2. This change had been made by other DSPs over the past several years. Nearly 100% of impressions on our platform will now be transacted via a similar bidding approach. Based on prior experience from similar DSP changes, we expect lower bid prices from this specific buyer to be partially offset by real

Speaker 3

time competitive reactions by other DSPs.

Speaker 2

Further, we anticipate that our strong underlying growth across ad formats, channels and regions as well as growth of our emerging revenue streams will help us offset this headwind throughout the year. For Q2 revenue, we are projecting $69,000,000 to $71,000,000 or approximately 11% year over year growth at the midpoint. For the full year, we expect revenue between $296,000,000 $304,000,000 or 12% year over year growth at the midpoint. In terms of costs, we expect GAAP cost of revenue to increase sequentially each quarter in the low single digit percentage range. We also expect Q2 GAAP OpEx and subsequent quarters to increase sequentially in the low single digit percentages as we continue to invest for long term growth.

Speaker 2

With our revenue guidance and expected cost structure, which is largely fixed in the near term by design, we expect Q2 adjusted EBITDA between $17,000,000 $19,000,000 or approximately 26% margin at the midpoint. For the full year, we expect adjusted EBITDA between $90,000,000 $94,000,000 or approximately 31% margin at the midpoint. We expect CapEx between $16,000,000 to $18,000,000 for the full year. In summary, we had a very strong start to the year, which continued into April. SPO relationships now account for 50% of activity on our platform.

Speaker 2

We added significant new customers. All regions grew double digit percentages and new products are contributed to growth. Our results highlight the profitability and the durability of our mall as we focus on sustained innovation, go to market expansion and operational excellence. As one of the largest independent sell side technology providers, I'm very excited about our long term growth opportunities and the trajectory we're on for sustained double digit revenue growth this year and beyond. With that, I'll turn the call over to Stacy for questions.

Operator

Thank you, Steve. Our first question comes from Matt Swanson at RBC. Please go ahead, Matt.

Speaker 4

Yes. Thank you, guys. And congratulations on the quarter.

Speaker 5

This might be

Speaker 4

a little bit of an SPO question, but I kind of want to phrase it differently and go back to an idea we used to always talk about which is omni channel. So as new formats like commerce media and CTV continue to gain scale, could you just talk a little bit about customers' focus on being able to get these things back to a single pane of glass, right, as they get bigger and more part of their ad buying process? And then I guess the importance of the work that you're doing PubMatic to kind of redefine yourself for this expanded definition of omnichannel. Sure.

Speaker 1

Yeah. Hey, Matt. Thank you. So I can take that. So absolutely, I think what we see is that complexity for the ad buyer.

Speaker 1

Right? So whether that's an advertiser, or it's an agency, that complexity is growing. Right? And you've got privacy regulations. You've got whole classes of new media impressions and data coming online, like CTV and Commerce Media that you mentioned.

Speaker 1

And buyers are increasingly trying to assert their control over the buying process, right? Meaning, how do they buy, what inventory, what signals are they using, what are the performance or brand KPIs of those campaigns. And doing that across multiple platforms is very challenging for the brands. Right? It creates a lot of operational complexity.

Speaker 1

Their teams have to learn a lot of different user interfaces, enforcing something like a frequency cap when you have, you know, siloed systems that you're working in is difficult. Workflow, data aggregation, performance measurement, all of these things are much harder. And so we are finding great benefit, you know, as evidenced by the SPO metric at 50%. We're finding great benefit for buyers and being able to consolidate, lean into fewer partners, manage the workflow, manage the data, manage the targeting. And that's exactly where we are focused.

Speaker 1

And I think what we're continuing to see, which we've been seeing over the last couple of years, but we're going to continue to see as a consolidation of the ecosystem towards fewer, bigger platforms that can provide the control, that can provide the data, that can provide the workflow capabilities. And I think a particular note, which we're calling out here in the earnings comments earlier, is that, that capability to deliver on the needs of buyers is shifting to the sell side of the ecosystem. And we talked already about what are some of the drivers of that. But privacy regulation is certainly one of them, where data is more and more encapsulated on the cell side of the ecosystem and, of course, primarily as an SSP. But now, of course, doing more and more with buyers via SPO and Activate, we're able to bridge from the buyer into the sell side of the ecosystem very deeply.

Speaker 4

That's really helpful. Maybe picking up right on SPO, obviously impressive to get to 50% this quickly. But also thinking about that long term view of 75%, could you just kind of talk about, 1, is that expansion going to imply moving, I mean, not down market, but to like smaller enterprises? Or is it just even more spend from the largest enterprises? And then I guess, how does that kind of dictate how you're thinking about maybe R and D and where your costs are going, if it is more of an emphasis on those largest customers?

Speaker 1

Sure. Yeah. So there's, I think, 2 key ingredients. 1 is, further share of ad budgets within buyers that were already penetrated into. And then the second is, of course, going after entirely new buyers.

Speaker 1

And so on the first, obviously, we've been doing SPO now for, I think, maybe about 6 years. We've grown, as you said, that metric quite a bit. We were in, I think, the thirties percentage a year ago, up to 50% now. But there's still plenty of runway inside of, you know, the large agencies and advertisers that we're already penetrated into. And so when we look at, you know, share by ad format, by geo, by type of publisher, there's still plenty of runway inside of those existing customers.

Speaker 1

And then the second piece, which is a key area of investment for us is expanding our sales team that is covering SPO opportunities is to go after independent agencies and a bigger roster of brands. And the bigger roster of brands is still very much large brands. I think where our sales team was historically, we didn't have enough bandwidth to cover as many brands as we wanted to. One of the key things that the industry report, I think it was the ANA, Association of National Advertisers report last fall highlighted is that only about 30% of large brands have engaged in supply path optimization. So that speaks to the opportunity that for us is underpenetrated in that remains in net new brand acquisition for us.

Speaker 5

Thank you.

Operator

Thanks, Rajeev. Our next question comes from Ian Peterson at Evercore. Please go ahead, Ian.

Speaker 6

Two quick questions. First one, I know the Q2 guide implies a material decel to 12% year over year growth at the high end and softer than historical seasonality despite the continued comps. Can you help us unpack this? Steve, I know you called out the potential impact from the DSP changes. Have you sized this potential impact?

Speaker 6

And is there any other puts and takes embedded in your Q2 guide that we should be aware of? And secondly, for the raised full year guide, can you help us unpack your confidence in the back half of the year? Besides the timeline for cookie deprecation getting pushed out, are there other factors that give you more confidence maybe from emerging products? Thanks.

Speaker 2

Sure. Thanks, Yidi, for the question. So when we put together our Q2 guide, we as we typically do, we focus on providing an objective viewpoint. And we took a look at the balanced view of opportunities and challenges. And as you point out, I called out a headwind that we anticipate emerging latter part of the second quarter related to a single DSP making a bidding methodology change.

Speaker 2

And so that obviously does factor into our adjusted guide. And I'd say the way to think about it is our underlying growth has been very strong, very strong in Q1, continuing into April. And we've tried to balance it out for the remainder of the year. And so the Q2 reflects a partial quarter impact from that DSP bidding methodology change and then a full quarter effect in the Q3 and Q4. But what I'd call out is that in the background, you have a strong growth across every format and a channel.

Speaker 2

And so we anticipate being able to offset that over the balance of the year. And so some of the things that we're very confident about in the second half is the SPL momentum. Of course, that's been a long term growth driver for us. We are expanding our team, as Rajiv, just called out, to go after incremental opportunities both within agencies and large brands, but also new SPL buyers. We're seeing really positive progress in our emerging revenue opportunities.

Speaker 2

We commented on in the prepared comments, OpenMap, Connect, in the quarter that added percentage points of growth. We anticipate that continue to develop in the second half. You've seen some of the very important deals that we've signed recently, Instacart, Klarna, Upam. We anticipate those deals will add to the top line later in the year. And then of course, as the presidential election comes into focus, 6 months away, we're starting to see political spend starting to firm up.

Speaker 2

So when we put together our full year outlook, we saw strong underlying growth of an offset related to this headwind. But overall, on balance, we're raising our full year guide to 12% at the midpoint.

Speaker 6

Thank you, Steve.

Operator

Our next question comes from Justin Patterson, KeyBanc. Please go ahead, Justin.

Speaker 7

Stacy, Justin has disconnected.

Operator

Thank you, Kelsey. Moving on, we'll take next question from James Heaney at Jefferies.

Speaker 8

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. Can you just walk through just what this DSP bidding change really is? I just don't fully understand at a granular level how it impacts the business. So if there's any more detail you could provide on that, that would be super helpful.

Speaker 8

Thanks.

Speaker 1

Yeah. Hey, James. I can take that. Happy to. So the DSP in question, they're converting all of their auctions to 1st price auctions.

Speaker 1

And historically, they've used a combination of 1st price and 2nd price auctions. And these changes will make their methodology consistent with what the rest of the industry does. And the rest of the industry has made this transition really over the last several years. So after this change from this DSP, nearly 100 percent of auctions on our platform will be 1st price auctions using a consistent methodology. Now, as Steve called out, we operate a real time auction.

Speaker 1

And so based on our experience in managing this kind of a transition with other DSPs in the past, We anticipate that the bid prices from this particular DSP will be lower given their changes. But those lower bid prices will be partially offset by other DSPs, who should see an increase in impression wins because they're already had already moved to this methodology. And then further, we anticipate that, you know, given the strong underlying growth across ad formats, channels and regions, as well as the growth of our emerging revenue streams, that we will, you know, offset, this headwind throughout the course of the year.

Speaker 8

Great. That's helpful. Just one more on Acctivate. Would love to hear just the momentum you're seeing on that business. And I'm also curious like where you feel we are in that transition from, you know, direct insertion order into biddable.

Speaker 8

I'm curious kind of where you see that that journey.

Speaker 1

Sure. Yeah. I'll just briefly comment on that second and then get get more broadly into Acctivate. I think we're still quite early. So that journey is definitely underway, but I think still a lot of runway ahead of us.

Speaker 1

So in general, with Acctivate, you know, we're really excited about the progress that we're making. And so there's a clear progression of steps, you know, when you roll out a new product like Acctivate. We've trained our sales team to talk about it at scale. So that's in every region across, multiple customer types, agencies and advertisers. We've gotten very strong and positive feedback in terms of our vision and the initial capabilities.

Speaker 1

Our vision is definitely resonating with the problems or challenges that buyers have, that prospects have. And they do trust us to solve these challenges for them, you know, given our track record of success with supply path optimization. I think the commercial and contractual process is also resonating. And as a result, we're signing up advertisers and agencies at a pretty good pace, and we've completed deals in every region around the world. Now what we're also learning is that inside of large agencies, large advertisers, this is very much an enterprise initiative.

Speaker 1

And so who we are pitching the value prop of the product into can be different from who are the hands on people on the keyboards you know, that are setting up deals and, you know, managing the actual campaign spend. And so it takes time to get all of the teams on board, you know, fully up to speed, fully educated on how to use the product. And so there are, you know, things that we are looking into to try to accelerate that, which we are in the process of working through. But at the same time, what I would also add is just that we see business acceleration around SPO, even if Activate isn't in place. And that's because customers know that they can do more with us over time.

Speaker 1

Right? And so as a result, they tend to pull supply path optimization levers to move more business to us and grow the mutual relationship even if they're not using Acctivate today and they plan to in the future or if they don't have any current plans to use Acctivate, but it's something that creates optionality down the road.

Speaker 8

Great. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Mauricio Munoz at Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Speaker 7

Mauricio, if you are on mute, please go ahead and unmute yourself. You now have permission to speak.

Operator

Okay. Mauricio, we'll come back to you. Our next question comes from Mark Hagan at Lake Street. Please go ahead,

Speaker 3

Mark.

Speaker 7

Mark, please go ahead with your question. If you'll go ahead and come off mute for us, Mark.

Speaker 9

You got me now?

Speaker 1

Yes, we can.

Speaker 9

Oh, perfect. Sorry about that. So just a lot of the stuff I had has already been addressed, but just wondering if there's any promising verticals that you're seeing, whether new or existing in

Speaker 3

the next, call it, 6 months, year? Steve, do you

Speaker 1

want to take that from the ad vertical perspective?

Speaker 2

Sure. I mean, I'm happy to. Let me just sort of preface to the comments. I mean, we've seen a pretty sizable shift over the last year in terms of just a more constructive ad environment. We saw that in the Q4.

Speaker 2

That has continued into the Q1 and April. And the good news from our perspective is, it's across the diverse group of ad verticals that we have. We comped it on overall the top 10 and the Q1 grew 20% year over year. Within that, significant majority of that group grew close to 30%. So strong recovery across the board.

Speaker 2

And the call outs that just from a relative basis year over year, shopping continues to perform well. It was definitely under duress in 2023 and that's recovered. Business, strongly performing, personal finance, food and drink, etcetera. So we have a diverse set of ad verticals that help us propel our revenue growth. Now another component to think about is as we go into these new areas that Rajiv called out in terms of roadblocks, Instacart, etcetera, we are exposing ourselves to more and more advertising types.

Speaker 2

And that is going to be very helpful to us in terms of our diversity of our business, but also just the long term tailwind of opening up new markets for us.

Operator

Great. Thanks, Steve.

Speaker 3

Steve. Thank you. Sorry.

Speaker 9

I had to mute again.

Operator

That's okay, Mark. Do you have a follow-up?

Speaker 9

Nope. Nope. I'm all good. Thanks.

Operator

Okay, great. Our next question comes from Zach Cummins with B. Riley.

Speaker 10

Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. I really appreciate it. Can you potentially dive a little bit into the investments you're making on the SPO side, specifically expanding the sales efforts there?

Speaker 10

Can you talk about the progress you've made on hiring on that side and when you expect those investments

Speaker 3

to really start translating into improvements in the

Speaker 10

P and L? So

Speaker 3

far

Speaker 2

So far, we've increased our SPL focused team by 20% on a year over year basis in the Q1. So absolutely making headway in terms of bringing on new team members. It is a process where we are bringing on highly skilled experienced sales people. So there's not what I would call a long lead time to get them up and running. And also it reflects the nature of the sale.

Speaker 2

We have a lot of connectivity into the major agencies, large brands. And so it's really about getting more coverage. And so we have a clear roadmap, a team focused on it. And so we consider it to be right on track with our expectations. When we went into the year, we thought, based upon the opportunity and the momentum, that we really wanted to put our foot on the accelerator.

Speaker 2

And so overall, our game plan is to increase this team focus on supply path optimization by 50%. And so we're executing that plan. And our expectation is that there'll be a quarter or 2 of ramp up, but we should start to see some of the incremental benefit from these investments later this year. And of course, as the quarter was to come, 25% went young.

Speaker 10

Understood. And just my one follow-up is really around the product development. Most of the new solutions over your history have really been through organic development. So just curious of how you're thinking of allocating ongoing investments into the organic development side versus maybe potentially looking at M and A to further expand your platform.

Speaker 1

Yeah. I can, I can take that? And then, Steve, obviously, feel free to chime in. So, I mean, for sure, our primary focus is on organic innovation and organic growth. So we have done, you know, as you noted, a couple of acquisitions maybe over the last 8 to 10 years.

Speaker 1

But, while we remain open to the opportunity, right, and constantly on the lookout for things that might be a good fit for us, You know, as I mentioned, we're at now 500 people just crossing that mark in product management and engineering. So we are really built to focus on understanding from our customers what are the needs and opportunities and then building organically at a very rapid, very rapid pace in order to deliver those needs. So I think that's where we'll see the vast majority of innovation come from. Steve, anything to add?

Speaker 2

I would say that from our perspective, when we think about how we utilize our balance sheet, we have a very targeted capital allocation strategy to ensure that we have investment dollars for organic growth. But we also have incremental dollars for M and A if it makes sense. Our typical strategy has been if it can accelerate our roadmap development, we'll definitely take a hard look at it. And then the final tranche of our capital allocation strategy is to share buybacks, which we've been very successful over the last year plus. So overall, we feel like we're in an excellent position to make these choices in a very considered data driven way.

Speaker 2

But as Rajiv called out, we've been very successful in organic innovation, certainly leveraging AI in the last year. And so we anticipate that becoming the main engine going forward, but we won't necessarily say no to an appropriate M and A opportunity.

Operator

Our next question comes from Jason Helfstein at Oppenheimer. Please go ahead, Jason.

Speaker 11

Hey guys. You came in nicely above the revenues like 8%, dollars 5,000,000 or so. In case I missed it, did you call out, was there a specific catalyst or broad base? That's the first question.

Speaker 2

Sure. Hey, Jason, good to connect. So I would say when you reflect on Q1, I think the thing that jumps out is that it really was across the board. Our team, our business was firing on all cylinders, all formats, all channels grew nicely in terms of the omnichannel video business that grew 33% year over year. Display, including the Yahoo!

Speaker 2

Headwind grew 10%. So overall, very pleased with the underlying growth of the business. And of course, we hit a major milestone with SPO at 50% of overall activity. And into the Q2, that momentum continued double digit growth for April. And underpinning all of this has been our long term efforts in terms of innovation and building differentiated solution that continues to resonate with existing and new customers.

Speaker 11

And then just a follow-up, I guess it was talked about last quarter and I guess intra quarter just some of the investments you're making in headcount. Are we kind of at that rate or are you thinking about kind of still material increases in headcount as you move through the year?

Speaker 2

So for the Q1, our overall headcount was up a little over 10%. And our game plan for the full year is to be about 11%, 12%. So by and large, we're on the track that we had set out to do. But I would say just from a timing perspective, we'll see some of that investment accelerate Q3, Q4 because of the normal cycle of bringing people on recruiting, etcetera. But overall, right on track with our goals, but I would expect some acceleration into the second half.

Speaker 1

Yes. Maybe I can just add, give some little bit of context on the headcount investments. You know, they're really focused on where the market, the industry is growing the fastest. And based on all of the product innovation work that we've been doing over the last couple of years, we see tremendous upside opportunity. So for instance, you know, last year we had 2 big product launches with Activate for SPO and Convert for Commerce Media.

Speaker 1

And so there's a lot of work to be done to now that we validated those products. We've gotten great feedback from customers. Obviously, you saw Klarna and Instacart as two examples on the convert front, SPO at 50% multitude of signed, activate deals now. So what's happening is as we engage more with customers, they're coming up with additional product requirements that they'd like

Speaker 3

to see. And so we're investing behind

Speaker 1

that opportunity. And then we are also investing in the sales team to go out and create more opportunities and convert those opportunities into closed deals. So we view it as all both growth, both revenue as well as profit accretive over the medium to long term.

Speaker 3

And you

Speaker 2

know, one thing I'd just like to add to Rajeev's comments because I think it's important for the group to understand, we've had some major new customers announced in the last couple of months, Instacart, Klarna, etcetera. And the reason why we're so positive about these is that it helps it identifies a clear path to do what we've done in the past and that's land and expand, bring these customers in and then sell them the portfolio of opportunities products that we have. And the reason why that's important from a financial perspective is that all of these products are on top of our unified platform. And so these kinds of deals help us get more utilization of our platform and ultimately will help us expand our margin. For example, in the case of Instacart, we earn a data fee as well as our core SSP fee.

Speaker 2

With GroupM, we anticipate continued acceleration of SPO spend, which is further driving utilization. So overall, the journey that we're on is to bring on customers that where we can really land and then upsell the portfolio of offerings that we have.

Operator

Great. Thanks Steve. Our next question comes from Mauricio Munoz at Raymond James. Mauricio are you there?

Speaker 5

Yes. Can you hear me okay?

Operator

Yes, we can.

Speaker 3

Yes, we can.

Speaker 5

All right. Thank you for taking my question. Yes, I just want to go back to your SPO results and objectives. Rajeev, you spoke about this on your prepared remarks, but maybe if you could please expand on the drivers of the 1Q upside. I'm particularly interested in the contributions and traction from Activate this quarter.

Speaker 5

And then maybe while we are on it, you could speak about the competitive dynamics. We're seeing some DSPs commenting on some traction trying to cross this SSP, DSP demarcation line. So if you could provide some color on that, that will be helpful. And then I have a follow-up.

Speaker 1

Okay, great. Thanks, Mauricio. So let me try to get to

Speaker 11

all of that. If I leave out any part of

Speaker 1

your question, please remind me and I'm happy to add to it. So I think the first thing just from a context perspective is that from what we see and, you know, engaging with publishers and buyers, the importance of deep technology on the sell side of the ecosystem is going up at a pretty dramatic rate. And there's a couple of drivers of that. 1 is certainly, you know, what's happening with privacy regulations, you know, cookie deprecation timeline. Obviously, with Chrome, that's just the latest, but, you know, we've seen similar moves by other browsers or other operating systems.

Speaker 1

And so data on the sell side of the ecosystem is now being more and more limited in terms of the ability to transmit it to the buy side of the ecosystem. And so that's one driver. You have a lot of new media coming on board, high value media in CTV, in commerce media, where buyers want to have a more efficient way to transact when the CPMs can be, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40, dollars 50 as opposed to, $1 $2 display ad impressions. And then the third is that buyers are increasingly asserting themselves in terms of controlling how ad budgets are spent. And that can be for reasons of differentiation, for performance.

Speaker 1

You know, they don't want a monopoly player in the industry to control, you know, both the sell side and the buy side of the ecosystem. So all of these things are driving up the importance of technology on the sell side. And that's exactly the one of the primary opportunities we're going after with supply path optimization and Acctivate. And then to your Acctivate question, Mauricio, so what we are seeing there is that buyers and sellers alike, they want a more efficient way to transact. And the historical paradigm of DSP and SSP has a lot of great benefits to it.

Speaker 1

But there is a lot of operational overhead to that. And data being transmitted from the sell side to buy side is also a challenge. And so with Activate, what we are doing is introducing we've introduced a single layer of tech that connects the seller and buyer primarily around the fixed price deals that are transacted in insertion orders for CTV and online video. And so that is resonating quite a bit with buyers, as I mentioned earlier. They see the efficiency gains.

Speaker 1

They trust us. They see the operational overhead gains in simplifying the tech stack. And so we are, you know, gaining share as a result. Now activate is a different kind of sale for us in that. That does require a lot of onboarding and training of buyer media buying teams.

Speaker 1

So these are the hands on the keyboard. And so that is a process and education effort. And so we're learning things about, you know, the speed with which we can do that, different tactics to accelerate that. And so we're applying more energy there to speed up that process. And then, Mauricio, the 3rd part of your question, I think, was around DSP competitive dynamics.

Speaker 1

Is that right?

Speaker 5

Yes. Yes. We've seen some DSPs, some also talking about gaining some traction on crossing over to, yes. And we've seen that mainly as well, okay, I'll give you the floor. Yes.

Speaker 1

Yes, yes, absolutely. So I absolutely understand that. And I think the significant advantage that we have is that we've been building publisher relationships now for 17 years. So if we get one buyer to leverage our platform, they can access all of the media, all of the inventory, you know, all of the audiences that we've been building over 17 years. I think when you approach this problem from the buy side of the ecosystem, you have many buyers maybe using a particular buy side platform.

Speaker 1

But the breadth of publisher inventory is quite limited. Right? And so that DSP or, you know, buyer interface, they have maybe been working on plugging in inventory for the last 6 months, 12 months, 18 months. And so the scope of inventory, the scope of audiences, typically when you think about the variety of ad formats, a variety of geographies, that can be very limited. And so what we're seeing that resonates very strongly with buyers is we can go in and say, hey, all of the types of media that you might want to buy all over the world, we have that available inside of POMATIC and inside of ACTIVATE, and that's available today.

Speaker 1

And so I think that's a very compelling

Speaker 3

value proposition.

Speaker 5

That's very helpful. And if I can squeeze in one more, it looks like you are on full steam to expand from your historical focus on the top 5, 6 agency hold calls and this is related to SPO as well, perhaps into other smaller independent agencies mainly in the form of headcount additions. But how should we think about mainly in the form of headcount additions. But how should we think about the margin profile from revenue contributions from those somewhat smaller agencies and brands as you bring that cohort into the, SPO fold?

Speaker 1

Yes. I want to take

Speaker 2

that. I'm happy to. So from our perspective, we already get a significant amount of leverage just given sort of the centralized nature of our GTM organization. We have a few people covering relatively large loss of customers. And so we're going to apply the same model.

Speaker 2

We're not going after every SPO opportunity, because we have our IT client profile and we're focused on that. So we're feeling pretty confident in terms of getting the leverage and the appropriate economics from the go to market side. Now from an overall cost of serving and dropping it to the bottom line, all of these opportunities ultimately help us to fill more of the impressions that we process. And because we've already incurred the cost to process, last count $650,000,000,000 impressions on a daily basis, The upside is fairly significant if we can increase that fill rate. And so we see this as a very positive direction for us because ultimately they were not having to incur incremental processing costs.

Speaker 2

We're just monetizing more of what we already process. And we're doing that in every major region. So we're feeling very good about the strategy. We're early days in the execution. And as Rajiv has commented on previously, we anticipate upside to about 75% of volatility through SPL relationships.

Speaker 2

And you can see coming through the financials, how that does benefit us, not just from a profitability perspective, but also from a staking perspective. I shared this stat about 125 percent net spend retention. That's incredibly powerful just in terms of revenue visibility and stickiness and scale over time.

Speaker 5

Very helpful. Thank you.

Operator

We have time for one more question from Justin Patterson at KeyBanc. Please go ahead, Justin.

Speaker 12

Great. Thank you very much and good afternoon. I just wanted to go back to the land and expand strategy with, you know, now 77% of revenue coming from high value formats and channels. That seems like it provides some nice margin tailwind of the business. So curious how you're thinking about just, you know, taking some of that margin and driving more growth with with new customers, existing customers versus having that margin drop through play out?

Speaker 12

Thanks.

Speaker 2

Hey, Justin. Thank you for the question. And it's something that we think about every day, given sort of our strong profitability, but also strong goal imperative to keep driving the top line. You can see the results from the last quarter. From our perspective, it's a balance.

Speaker 2

But absolutely, going into the year, we said that we're going to incrementally invest in a couple of key areas, the areas that we envision to be the fastest growing around video, mobile, supply path optimization in the commerce media space. So we feel that now is the time to make those investments and we're appropriately managing those in terms of timing and the magnitude. You can see from our guidance that we still have a very robust expectation forecast for the year at 31% at the midpoint. And I would say that for us, it's really about taking advantage of the opportunities that we have and we see them emerging. And we've proven an ability to innovate and then capture that opportunity.

Speaker 2

And so we're going to keep doing that and still deliver very robust margins and free cash flow.

Speaker 12

All right. Thank you.

Operator

Great. Thank you all. We're just about or actually over the top of the hour. So I'm going to go ahead and turn the call back over to Rajeev for closing remarks.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Stacy, and thank you all for joining us today. We had a strong start to the year with continued momentum into April. This, along with the planned investments this year in high return areas, gives us confidence to raise our full year guidance. Content creators, ad buyers, data partners, commerce media networks, they're all choosing to build their ad tech stacks on POMATIC. Our platform offers efficiency and control across the digital advertising ecosystem, resulting in higher CPMs and increased advertiser ROI.

Speaker 1

And our logo list continues to grow, fueling greater access to ad dollars, data and high value inventory. We'll be out on the road over the next month and we look forward to seeing many of you then. Thanks and have a great afternoon everyone.

Powered by Quartr
Earnings Conference Call
PubMatic Q1 2024
00:00 / 00:00