Good afternoon, and Welcome to the Azerion Interim Financial Results Q1 2024. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. For those of you who are joining via Zoom, if you'd like to ask a question at this time, please raise your hand by clicking the Raise Hand button at the bottom of your Zoom window. Once called upon, please unmute your audio to ask your question.
Good afternoon, everyone.
For those of you watching on the webcast, if you'd like to send a question through, please type it in the Ask a Question tab at the right-hand side of the player. These questions can be sent in any time during the presentation, and will be addressed after the live Q&A portion of the event. Thank you. I'd now like to turn the call over to Umut Akpinar for welcome remarks.
Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everyone. I am Umut Akpinar, Founder and CEO of Azerion. I am here with my colleagues, Mr. Ben Davey, our CFO.
Good afternoon.
Mr. Sebastiaan Moesman, our CSO.
Hello, everyone.
We would like to welcome you to today's webinar to present Azerion's Q1 interim results. Before we start, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the disclaimer. Our forward-looking statements. Thank you. Let's please move on to the presentation. This has been a strong quarter for us. Our platform advertising revenue reached record Q1 levels, and our total group revenue was approximately EUR 120 million. We have improved our profitability, growing our Adjusted EBITDA significantly compared to last year. We successfully integrated our recent Hawk acquisition as we continue to build a single media buying platform. Revenue from the platform has grown 21% to EUR 108 million for the quarter, compared to EUR 89 million the previous year.
This has been due to growth in higher margin, direct sales, improved spend in channels such as audio, CTV, and digital out-of-home, as well as increased monetization of our exclusive partnerships and owned and operated content. Total platform adjusted EBITDA increased by 150% to EUR 9 million in Q1 2024, compared to EUR 3.6 million in Q1 2023. Total group adjusted EBITDA in Q1 2024 of EUR 9.8 million, increase of 12.6% as compared to EUR 7 million in Q1 2023. This performance in part reflects the successful integration of the recent Hawk acquisition. We continued to build and develop our advertising platform, rolling out new features and improving our technology stack, of course, for the benefit of our clients in a highly competitive industry.
Seb will provide more details about this later in the presentation. Lastly, I'm happy with the progress we have made in our cost saving, with the results seen in our financial results, with total operating expenses decreasing 23% in Q1 2024 compared to Q1 2023. Turning to our business operational highlights, in the last quarter, our teams worked hard to deliver advertiser campaigns, improve our monetization capabilities, and expand our engaged audiences through new partnerships. We signed 42 new publishers, expanding our supply footprint across Europe and America with new CTV, audio, and in-app audiences. We strengthened our relationships with different publishers such as Moji, ITV, and Acast. We also made a minority investment in Eniro, bringing skilled audiences across the globe to advertisers in an easy and cost-effective way.
I would like to hand over to Seb to take you through our selected development highlights across our products and technology. Seb?
Yes. Thank you, Umut. In the last quarter, we continued to develop our digital advertising platform, connecting brands and agencies with audiences across the globe in a brand-safe environment. For example, we continued to develop our media interface and provide an integrated end-to-end omni-channel solution by integrating emerging ad formats. We launched Azerion Edge, our cookie-less solution, which embeds our first-party data solution for contextual and behavioral targeting. We integrated an AI-based yield management solution for publishers, allowing them to optimally monetize their content. Finally, we own our own content, as you know, which allows us to consolidate fragmented audiences into a single entry point, helping brands to access audiences at a big scale.
Last quarter, collectively with the Royal Dutch Football League, for instance, we launched a new Vrouwen Eredivisie application, making the whole league even more accessible and increase the interaction with the fans. So we integrate all of these technologies to bring greater efficiency and scale to our platform. And a good example of how we do this is through the transformation of our recent acquisition, Hawk. In October last year, we made the announcement of Hawk, a European demand-side platform, strengthening our position in the French, U.K., and German markets. And from day one, the synergies with Hawk and the growth potential was clear. In Q1 2024, revenue increased by approximately 58% as compared to the same period last year, contributing EUR 16.4 million of revenue in Q1 2024 to the group.
And that's an increase of approximately EUR 6.5 million organically. This has been accomplished by onboarding Azerion's brand and advertising clients onto the Hawk DSP, consolidating both our emerging and existing ad formats into a single media buying platform, which we have launched across the Azerion geographies. And by completing the accelerated integration of Hawk, we've been able to strengthen the platform's profitability through operational and technology efficiencies. Another example of how we create strategic partnerships and acquisitions is the investment made last month in Eniro. As an online publisher, search business, and provider of digital marketing services, White and Yellow Pages, the strategic investment in Eniro helps consolidate their position in the Nordic markets.
For this partnership, we gain access to over 50,000 SME businesses, which will, which we will extend our digital marketing solutions, formats, and channels to, while generating additional advertising volume towards our connected publishers. And at the same time, Eniro's search site and its apps provide our advertising clients access to over 10 million highly engaged unique monthly visitors to reach. Furthermore, Eniro will outsource its technology, operations, and hosting to us, which we will integrate into our already efficient and highly scalable cloud solution. And lastly, Eniro will leverage Azerion's expertise in digital advertising delivery to help optimize their operations.
I hope that gives you some insight in how, on the one hand, we turn around companies that we acquire fully and integrate into our platform, like Hawk, and how, on the other hand, like with Eniro, we strategically partner with companies to bring them the efficiencies of our scale while building together on the synergies that emerge from such a close relationship. With that, I would like to hand over to Ben to take you through our financial performance for the quarter.
Great. Many thanks, Sebastiaan, and good afternoon, everyone. So as we continued integrating and consolidating our past acquisitions, we've maintained our focus on cost optimization and operating efficiencies. As a result, during the quarter, we were able to reduce further the number of legal entities in the group by 14. So that's a total reduction of 39 legal entities since the first of January of 2023. We terminated a further office lease, bringing a total reduction of 23 leases since the beginning of last year, and we continued to align our teams across the whole organization, with FTEs at the quarter end standing at just over 1,030. And all of these areas of efficiency will continue to be a focus in Q2.
Overall, as a combination of improved revenue and the cost optimization program, we've seen our revenue per FTE grow by 58% as compared to Q1 of last year, to approximately EUR 117,000 of revenue per FTE. Turning now to the financial highlights themselves. Our net revenue for Q1 2024 was just under EUR 120 million. So that's an increase of approximately 6.2% year-over-year, driven by increased direct and automated auction sales, and the benefits of integrating and consolidating those past acquisitions, including Hawk, of course, as Azerion's single media buying platform.
Normalizing for the sale of the Social Card Games portfolio last year, and including only the organic growth in Hawk of approximately EUR 6 million compared to its Q1 2023 performance, we have an implied organic revenue growth rate for the whole group in Q1 2024 of approximately 7.6% as compared to the same quarter last year. Adjusted EBITDA for Q1 was around EUR 10 million, so that's up by approximately 13% as compared to the same quarter last year. As a result, adjusted EBITDA margin for the same period also improved to 8.2%, as compared to 7.7% for the same period last year. And that's, of course, notwithstanding the loss of the higher margin revenue due to the sale of Social Card Games last year.
I'll now move on to discuss our platform segment, which recorded its strongest first quarter of revenue at approximately EUR 108 million in Q1, and that's up by more than 21% compared to Q1 last year. As previously discussed, this growth was largely driven by improved revenue from advertising across both direct and programmatic channels, and the benefits of integrating Hawk as our single media buying platform. As a measure of growth, focusing only on advertising revenue for a minute, including therefore only the organic growth in Hawk of approximately EUR 6 million we previously discussed, we have an implied organic revenue growth rate for the advertising revenue in the platform in Q1 of approximately 15.9%. So that's 15.9% as compared to the same quarter last year. We're very pleased, of course, with that growth.
We also have an implied organic growth rate for the whole of the platform segment, which of course, then includes our AAA Game Distribution business of approximately 9.7%, as compared to the same quarter last year. So again, a very pleasing result. Our platform segment Adjusted EBITDA grew to over EUR 9 million in Q1, up by approximately 150% compared to the same quarter last year. And that's largely due to a number of different factors, growth in higher margin direct sales, improved spend on higher impact ads in channels such as audio, CTV, and digital out-of-home, increased monetization of our exclusive partnerships, and owned and operated content, together, of course, with the ongoing consolidation and integration of previously acquired businesses and the cost optimization program.
We also benefited from a gain on an acquisition-related earn-out of EUR 1.6 million. So the adjusted EBITDA performance, of course, also reflects the successful integration of that recent Hawk acquisition. So we believe all of these movements represent significant progress in the delivery of our platform strategy and will remain focused, of course, on continued improvement throughout the year. Looking now at our operational KPIs, in particular, average digital ads sold per month, those decreased to 12 billion, a small decrease in Q1 of 2024, from 12.2 billion last year, same quarter, reflecting an ongoing focus on premium digital advertising formats, such as digital out-of-home, digital audio, drive to store, which results in higher CPMs, but slightly lower digital ads sold.
Taking a closer look at our platform segment, just giving you the numbers from a different angle, we broadly generate revenue, of course, from two sources. So we've talked about advertising revenue, which consists of both direct and automated auction sales or programmatic, and then, separately, the AAA game distribution, which we also in the past referred to as e-commerce. In Q1 2024, advertising platform revenue was EUR 89.2 million. That's an increase of 31% as compared to Q1 of last year of EUR 68 million. And in Q1 2024, our direct sales contributed approximately 70% of our platform advertising revenue, as compared to approximately 65% same quarter last year, with the balance, of course, provided by the automated auction sales.
The successful integration of the recent Hawk acquisition contributed EUR 16.4 million of revenue in Q1 2024, as compared to pre-acquisition revenue last year, of course, of EUR 10.4 million for the same period. Sticking with Q1 2024, our AAA Game Distribution business generated revenue of EUR 19.2 million, as compared to EUR 21.3 million same quarter last year. That's a decrease of approximately 9.9%. That's largely due to fewer high-profile AAA game releases in Q1 2024, as compared to the same quarter last year. AAA Game Distribution revenue represented approximately 17.7% of the total platform revenue, as compared to approximately 23.9% same quarter last year.
Turning now to the premium game segment, and as an introduction, I'd like to note that the presented financial performance on these slides excludes contributions of the social cards portfolio that we sold in August last year. On that basis, the premium game segment generated revenue of EUR 11.3 million in Q1 of 2024, as compared to EUR 12.2 million in the same quarter last year. That's a decrease of 7.4%. That was mainly due to the sale of Woozworld, which is one of our smaller social community brands, to its management at the start of this year. That had about EUR 500,000 of revenue in Q1 of 2023, and also other management actions on the remaining portfolio.
At the same time, Adjusted EBITDA came in at about EUR 0.8 million or EUR 800,000 in Q1 of 2024. That compares to about EUR 1.6 million, same period last year. So that's a decrease of 50%. That's mainly driven by the social casino portfolio and a shift in new user generation to mobile in both our own environment as well as those through our white label partners. We believe that has higher growth potential over time, but also a higher transaction cost as compared to web. Overall, though, we do believe that these operational changes will be beneficial for the segment going forward.
Looking closer at the operational KPIs for Premium Games, the average time in game per day increased by 14.5% in Q1 to 87 minutes per day, as compared to the same period last year. We think that's due to improved in-game sales, mechanics, features, and events. The average daily active users decreased by about 19%, mainly due to lower user acquisition spend and an increased focus on greater engagement with higher-paying users. The average revenue, as a result, per daily active user increased by approximately 7.7% this quarter as compared to Q1 of last year. And again, we think that's due to improved spending in the social casino and Metaverse titles due to improved in-game sales, mechanics, features, and events.
Turning to our financial framework, we continued to show resilient performance over the last 12 months and are pleased with our strong revenue and Adjusted EBITDA performance in Q1 of 2024. We've demonstrated continued progress in the delivery of our platform strategy, including, in particular, steadily improving contributions from our direct sales teams, as well as further progress in the ongoing consolidation and integration of previous acquisitions and in our cost optimization programs. The benefits of those strategies being implemented, I think, can be seen in the improvement in the Adjusted EBITDA margin for the group. That now stands at 8.2% for Q1, as compared to 7.7% the same period last year, with that improvement being delivered, of course, while losing the contribution from the Social Card Games portfolio that we divested last year.
On cash flow from operating activities, that stood in Q1 2024 at EUR 1.7 million, while our net interest-bearing debt stood at EUR 158.3 million as at the end of the quarter. Taking all of our updates and the market context into account, we're pleased to maintain our guidance for the full year 2024, and indeed in the medium term. As a reminder, for full year 2024, we expect our full year revenue to be in the range of approximately EUR 540 million-EUR 560 million, and our Adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of approximately EUR 75 million-EUR 80 million. In the medium term, we expect annual top-line growth to be around 10% and our Adjusted EBITDA margins to be in the range of 14%-16%.
So overall, an encouraging quarter to start the year. We believe we have a platform that's well-positioned to continue its growth in the rest of 2024. Before I move on to the final slide, I would like to also take this opportunity to introduce you all to Julie Duong Ferat. After completing 2 years as CFO at Azerion, I'll be pleased to take on a new role as Chief Investment Officer, with a focus on external growth opportunities and related funding, and that include deeper engagement with investors. As part of this transition, we're delighted to confirm that with effect from the end of June 2024, Julie has agreed to become Azerion's new CFO.
Julie's effectively been my deputy and our Vice President of Finance throughout my time as CFO, and I'm absolutely delighted with her promotion and, of course, to introduce her to you now. So Julie, who's also on, would you like to just say a few words?
Yeah. Thank you, Ben, and good afternoon, everybody. Perhaps if I may, a few words to present me. Basically, I've been VP Finance at Azerion for the last 4 years and working closely with Ben for the last 2 years. I joined the group as part of the acquisition of the French listed company, AdUX, in 2018, where I was the CFO after a career as an auditor at KPMG. So I would like to really thank you, Ben, for creating such a strong finance team, and I'm really looking forward to taking the reins over the next few weeks.
Great. Thanks, Julie. And many, many congratulations also on your promotion to the executive committee. So turning to the final slide, and a quick conclusion on the key highlights. So look, we continue to grow strongly in Q1, resulting in total revenue for the quarter of just under EUR 120 million. The revenue from the platform segment grew strongly at 21%, with revenue from advertising growing over 31% as compared to the same quarter in 2023. Our Adjusted EBITDA grew by 150% this quarter as compared to the same quarter last year. We've made significant progress in integrating Hawk into our platform and have received very positive feedback from our demand-side clients, and we're very excited actually by the progress that we've made in delivering our product and technology roadmaps.
So with that, I'd like to now open up the lines to any questions, that you may have. So, operator, please go ahead and open up the lines.
Okay, so we'll now move into our Q&A session. For those of you who are joining us via Zoom, if you would like to ask a question at this time, please raise your hand by clicking Raise Hand at the bottom of your Zoom window. Once called upon, please unmute your audio to ask your question. For those of you watching on the webcast, if you'd like to send a question through, please type it in the Ask a Question tab at the right-hand side of the player. So I'll just give a few moments to raise hands. Okay, so we've got our first question from Thomas Singlehurst from Citi. If you'd like to unmute yourself and ask your question.
Yeah, thank you for taking the question. It's Tom here from Citi. Really appreciate it. I would love to get a sense of, firstly, the integration process at Hawk. I mean, that's obviously gone phenomenally well in a fairly short period of time. There is... You know, I suppose the first part of that question is, you know, is substantively everything now sort of flowing through Hawk from a sort of media buying perspective? And then, I suppose, you know, what's the sort of medium-term, sort of sum-up plan now that Hawk is that sort of sole point of focus? That was the first question. If you want to do them sort of one by one.
Yeah. Sebastiaan here. Tom, thanks for that question. Yes, we have... In the case of Hawk, it's been a super successful short-term integration, and the integration basically meant joining up on the technology, meaning we integrate the teams with our existing tech team, and they work hard to integrate, let's say, the two platforms at the places where, you know, in a priority, where it makes the quickest sense. So we've been integrating the DSP with the SSP, of course, that we already have. That means that the demand from Hawk flows seamlessly into Improve. But Hawk also has had its own integrations with, for instance, the digital out-of-home business, and there, for instance, we were able to quickly open up those opportunities towards the sales in many different markets.
So, suddenly, our sales teams were able to buy digital out-of-home seamlessly through the Hawk interface. So it was both integration on, let's say, the upwards funnel towards the sales, opening up new opportunities for the sales teams in many markets, as it was downstream, basically connecting the technologies to each other and harmonizing the teams and the development efforts. To your second part of your question, is that completely finished? No. There's more to do to integrate the technologies and to make both systems work on all the aspects of different ad channels together easily.
Of course, also on the market side, there's always gonna be more opportunity to use Hawk as the buying interface in markets, and especially to integrate in Hawk all of the advertising capabilities that we had in the other systems, and to make it one single system that everything is bought from. Yeah, there's still opportunities there, and we're gonna use the time this year to increasingly move things into Hawk and connect the two systems.
Perfect. Very clear. Second question. I mean, just thinking about the market at large, I mean, that first quarter revenue performance is clearly very impressive in the context of what we were expecting, and there's clearly, you know, a decent bump from that Hawk integration. I mean, I'm interested in whether the sort of broader market is a headwind or a tailwind at present. And then for the balance of this year, I mean, we've obviously got the Euros and the Olympics. I presume those factors will provide something of a tailwind, as the year progresses.
Yeah. Thanks, Tom. [inaudible] and I... I'll start, and then Ben speaking, and then I'll hand over to Seb. So look, first of all, as you say, I think a strong performance in Q1, and if you look at the peers, you have really quite a wide range. I can't remember such a wide range for a long time, actually, with some competitors actually contracting revenue double digits or 10, 11%, and others sort of around where we are, high teens. So it feels at the moment, at least, that our performance is right up there, upper quartile alongside the peers, at least on the data that I can see.
In terms of the sort of market conditions, look, probably the outlook, it feels a bit more positive than perhaps in Q4, but it still remains, of course, at a macroeconomic level, a pretty uncertain environment. So I think it's certainly too early to sort of say that we have significant tailwinds for the rest of the year. But I think we do have some positive foundations that we can see in Q1, sort of continuing, at least, in terms of the engagement that we're having with customers, for the next quarter, as it were. I think on your observations, there are, of course, a number of particular recurring events, every four years or so.
So we've got the, as you said, you know, you've got the Euros, and you've got the Olympics. I think the sort of general view is what that can do is concentrate or bring forward budget that might otherwise be deployed later in the year. But at the same time, you know, I think there is still caution on the side of advertising clients. They are still tending to, I think, deploy budgets a little bit later in the timetable than would perhaps have been the case in more easier economic conditions. So I think you have to fight still for important clients, budget, and mindshare. I think the team are doing a good job on doing that, and those events should give us opportunities to drive engagement, particularly given the nature of the platform that we have.
So cautiously optimistic, I think, but I think we must be realistic. It's still a challenging macroeconomic environment out there. Seb, is there anything you'd like to add to that?
Yeah, so first, I, I totally agree. So if you, if you have an advertiser's budget for the year, they will not increase it due to these events, but they will be more tactical about when they deploy the money. So this is, yeah, it's both an opportunity, and at the same time, it might phase things out of expected other mar- months. So I think that that's totally, totally true. And I think the other important thing is that in this market, even if it's a bit of a cautious situation, the total addressable market for us is still so much bigger than we are ourselves, that the reason for growth or decline is not necessarily the microeconomics, but it's, it's... If you have the right product, then there's still a lot of room to improve, and I think that's also part of our Q1 results here.
Very, very clear. I've got two more, if it's okay. The first one is the delay to cookie deprecation. Just wondering whether that had any impact, or does that have any impact on the sort of full year outlook and trends to your mind, or is that just one of those things where actually, in practice, it's not that important?
No. So, I think we need to be ready for it. And if you are, then, at some point, it doesn't matter when it happens. So before it happens, you work in a certain way. After it happens, you work in a new way, and I think the whole market has been preparing through all kinds of identity solutions, contextual advertising, et cetera, to be ready for it. I think everybody's also slowly moving to these new ways of buying, and then at some point, it becomes a little bit, almost irrelevant, whether the cookie deprecates. And then on top of it, we are investing also heavily in these new channels, like digital out-of-home, connected TV, and audio, which also have a base assumption of less reliance on these kind of cookie identifiers.
So all in all, I think the future will probably be totally cookie-less, but yeah, the stuff that comes in their place is already being deployed and used by many people. So I don't think the delay is necessarily affecting any projections.
Perfect. And then the final one, this is a bit sort of left field, but I'll ask it anyway. We've recently done a big piece of work on retail media as a market... and there's an opportunity. I'm just interested in whether, you know, as far as I know, I don't think you've got any sort of major sort of retail media sort of capabilities within the context of this sort of full-service ad tech offering and platform offering. I mean, is it-- is that something that you think could be interestingly sort of in the medium term, or is that a distinct other area that is sort of separate and adjacent to what you're doing?
No, it is, it is interesting. It's, it's though, I'm a little bit careful about the – we have the, metaverse and the AI awards, and then, within the context of advertising and retail media plays a, not a similar role, but it has a bit of a vagueness about it. If you are a very big e-tailer, then, there are an obvious, few ways that you can use your whole, environment also as an advertising platform. Obviously, if you're, let's say, Amazon, then your homepage will also carry ads rather than just the, the search box for products. So that, that's an obvious, lot of visitors and a big opportunity for advertising.
But I think what's increasingly happening is that you're co-sponsoring, for instance, if you buy this laundry detergent, then you get like I don't know, Coca-Cola for the half price or something. These kind of bundle advertising opportunities are more into the retail media space. The last part there is, if you get an email that says, "Thank you for buying your shoes at Zalando," for instance, that email could contain an ad saying, "Okay, if you were interested in these shoes, then this might also be interesting." Now, if you add these three core things of retail media up, then it's not necessarily something super new. It's a combination of the existing technologies and advertising that you can just use to offer a bespoke solution for big e-tailers.
And we are working with, we are one ourselves, basically with our Voidu and e-commerce platform, so we're doing it ourselves. But I don't think we call it out as a specific new segment because we are taking it also as, well, not traditional advertising, but we use all of our existing products to help these e-tailers do better. And so it's an interesting new, let's say, list of clients that we can target and publishers that we can work with, but we're not calling it out as a separate division or something.
That's very clear. Really appreciate it. Thank you.
Okay, that's great.
Thanks for all those, Tom. That's much, much appreciated. Operator, who next?
Yep, just a reminder, if you're in the Zoom room, you can press the Raise Hand button at the bottom of the screen to raise your hand, and I can see we've got call-in listeners. So if you're joined by phone, you can press star nine to raise your hand and star six to unmute once you've been called upon. Okay, so we've got the number called. Our next question comes from the phone number. Please unmute your line by pressing star six. Introduce your name and company, and ask your question. You can just press star six to unmute yourself, and you can introduce your name and company and ask your question. Thank you.
Good morning. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Very good. This is Wim Gille from ABN AMRO. Thanks for the presentation. I got two questions. First of all, if I look at the gross profit margin, and I fully understand that there is a not an IFRS let's say number, and that there's still internal discussions going around how to present it, but if I look at revenue minus cost of goods sold, you basically see that the gross profit margin has been declining quite significantly in Q4 and in Q1 as well.
And I'm acutely aware that there's a lot of moving parts there, but can you give us a bit more insight into, let's say, the margins of Hawk versus Youda Games, and potential other impacts that are impacting this margin, and whether or not we have reached the bottom or whether we should see a further deterioration in that gross profit margin in the coming quarters? And the second is a bit of a follow-up on the cookieless environment thing. Can you give a broad indication for us, based on how far you have the insights, what percentage of your advertising revenues is driven by cookie environments and cookieless environments, such as contextual marketing, out-of-home, audio, et cetera? Thanks.
Great, thanks, Wim. I'll take the first, and then Seb will take the second. So, look, you're quite right. The business has really undertaken quite a significant change in mix over the last year, which does have impacts on gross margin, while you effectively reestablish the equilibrium of the new business mix. So to pick up those points individually. So first of all, as you rightly point out, the Social Card Games portfolio came out of our business mix in Q4 of last year, at the end of Q3. You know, that was a Premium Games offering, and carries a margin very similar actually to the more pure play,
... in-app games companies that you'll be familiar with, where margins can be north of 30% at the Adjusted EBITDA level. So that obviously has quite a, quite an impact when you're at the top end of the of the P&L. At the same time, our e-commerce business, now called AAA Game Distribution, has grown significantly. And as you point out, because of the nature of that business, which is all about the distribution of keys, accessing these AAA and large independent games, that typically comes at a lower margin than the business that sits in between the two, which is called the advertising business. So, you'll get quite a profound change in margin, to your, to your point, as that mix unwinds and then stabilizes.
Then in the meantime, we've obviously been working hard, to drive the advertising revenue, and those three things have all moved. As you, as you can see, the mix between direct and automated, auction sales has, has again, changed quite dramatically over the last year. So all of those three things have quite an impact, to your point, on gross margins. I do think, that we are getting to the point where those effects should now be, relatively normalized, and therefore, I'm hoping that there'll be, a few quarters now of what I would then call actually, more comparative data. And as soon as we can get to that place, then I am keen on this as a metric, to your point, Wim.
But what I didn't want to do, and we talked about it as a management team, and whether it's right to use it yet as a KPI internally, and we don't yet, is end up having to give you one number, five lines of explanation, by which point the whole point has been lost in terms of a metric. So we're gonna keep an eye on it. The business mix is clear. I do think we are more or less at a point where from now on, that mix is relatively normalized, and I do hope to come back to you later on in the year once I feel that we've got comparative data that will make sense to you. So perhaps on to the second question, Seb.
Yep. Still thinking about your margin. But on the second question, let me refresh my mind for a second. Wim, what were we-
It was essentially the business, cookie-less versus not.
Yeah. So that's, I think, interestingly, it sounds a bit, semantic, but if you think, you asked what's driving... How much has been driven by cookie, and how much has been driven by contextual? I think the, the important part of that answer, and I will, I will explain it further, is that our revenue is not driven by either. So the advertising revenue that we get from, for instance, Nike, Nike says: "I want to reach the right audience, to sell, these new Michael Jordan shoes," for instance. And so they don't care about, cookies or, any contextual. They just want to make sure that the audience that they reach is the right audience.
Now, in effect, behind the scenes, if you want, or in the machine room, people use different ways to then execute that Nike campaign to be exactly what Nike expects from it. And so in the old days, cookies were used to recognize the audience and to deliver the campaign against that particular audience. And in the new times, you will have more contextual, saying, "Okay, if you're looking at these shoes on an e-commerce site," to Tom's previous point on retail, or whether you're re-reading about Michael Jordan or those kind of things, that will establish a higher chance of you being in the right audience, and therefore, the delivery then moves into that contextual kind of delivery.
Or, what also happens a lot now is that people are anonymizing datasets, for instance, from Nike themselves, saying, "Okay, I know a few million people that have bought my shoes, so if I can find these people back online, that's great," but we cannot do it with cookies anymore. So they create a sandbox of data, start comparing, identifiers across platforms. But there's all kinds of ways that you can sort of find alternatives to using cookies. But in the end, the driver is not the technology, certainly not in our business. We're not selling an identity service or this particular machine to, to reach people. We are selling the service of reaching the right audience to Nike. So it's, it... Hopefully, that answers both.
So the cookie and non-cookie doesn't drive any revenue, but of course, you see an increasing amount constantly of, let's say, non-cookie-related delivery happening in our whole company.
Thanks for let's say the context around let's say this topic. And the reason why I'm asking you, and I fully understand that you are agnostic with respect to whether an audience is identified by a cookie or not, which I think makes sense. But it's just for my understanding to get a bit of a gauge on where the shift in the industry is, and I'm not- I don't need a kind of a behind the comma actual number, but I just want to have, like, directionally a feeling of where the industry is in terms of
Right.
that shift. And the reason why I'm asking is, if for whatever reason, the drive towards a cookieless environment should deteriorate the quality of the identification of the audiences, that might have an impact on online advertising overall. So that's more the reason behind my question.
Yep, got it.
If you could give us a bit gut feeling on where we are in this transition, then-
Absolutely.
Also know what's at risk.
Important then for you to also know is that the number I'm gonna explain to you doesn't really mean an industry trend or standard, but in our case, it's about 50/50 right now, that we are no longer for 50%, we're already no longer counting on cookies. But why am I sort of doing this disclaimer in the beginning? If you think about one of the moves that we made with Hawk is into digital out of home. So that means we are showing the ad on Amsterdam Central Station on one of the train tracks, for instance. Now, you can imagine that that delivery already, so almost implicitly doesn't allow for cookies, because you don't know who's walking around on that train station around those screens, right?
So the whole move towards these new channels, like digital out of home or connected TVs, is already born without cookies, you could say. And we're moving more and more money into that direction as well. So both on track to move away from cookies and also into digital channels that are inherently cookie-less.
Perfect. Thank you very much.
Thank you. There are no, there are no further verbal questions at this time, so I now hand back to Ben Davey for written questions.
Thank you very much. And, as ever, we've got some written questions on that have come up on screen as well. So, perhaps if I just go through those. The first question is: Are there any more benefits to come from the integration? So, so look, I'll pick that one up. We've obviously, I think, started to see quite a significant proportion of the benefits from last year in those Q1 results. But as you can see from some of the slides we talked about today, we've kept going in Q1, and there will be inevitably a little bit of a lag effect of those appearing in our numbers.
So, I think there will be some continued benefits from integration, and, and of course, you know, we still have more work to do. You know, I think we envisage further consolidation and integration work, obviously in Q2, and some of that might stretch into Q3, but, like, it is very much now into the taper of the work that we need to do, absent, obviously, any, any new activities, externally. So, definitely good progress and a, and a little bit more, I think, to come, and, and obviously, the teams are still working on all the areas that I talked about a little bit earlier on. The next question, probably, one I think for you, Seb. Does the Eniro deal mean that you'll be focusing more on SME businesses?
Yeah, good question. The answer is yes. We specifically did the Eniro deal because they're also working with these almost over 50,000 SME businesses in the Nordics, and what they're providing for these companies is marketing services. This means the florist on the corner of the street wants to be known in their area, and their current way to do this is both to be listed in these yellow and white pages and to do local marketing with Facebook and Google AdWords, for instance. Now, in this particular package, we could play a role making sure, to my example, to Wim, just a few minutes ago, that if you're around the florist on the train station, then it would be very interesting for them to show ads on the train station, right?
So it's, it's a very logical way to integrate these smaller businesses into our platform. But for that, we will need to, at Tom's point, seamless integration of all of the elements of the platform to almost deliver this without any, let's say, intervention of people on our side, because they're small budgets, so you need to execute them very easily into these local markets. So yes, it's a very interesting target for us because it's a, it's a big market in Europe. SMEs are massive, so it's super important.
It's a big opportunity, and at the same time for us, it also shows us, let's say, the North Star or where our platform needs to be, because doing it well for these SME businesses means our whole platform is seamlessly connected to each other and executing also small budgets.
Yeah. Yeah, look, very much agree. I think it's a very interesting market for us to be looking at hard. Okay, thanks, Seb. Final question is: What's your outlook for M&A? So look, I'll take that one. It's a very interesting market. One of the things that we've seen, and I think it's partly a result of, you know, relatively volatile market conditions of the last 12 months or so, is we do see real interest and opportunity in building on our strategic partnerships, both on the demand and supply side of the network, of which, of course, Eniro is a great example. But also, if you think back, Hawk were a great team who we've been working with in the industry for quite a while.
We increased the business flows between our organizations and, obviously, eventually came to the conclusion that it was a very good idea for us to come together more substantially. We continue to see those types of opportunities coming to us and some fantastic companies that we would like to do more business with. If you remember, we answered the question in three buckets. We have enterprise deals, which is where we're just doing commercial partnerships, but just bigger ones with both advertisers, their agencies, and publishers. We do work very hard on those quarter to quarter, and we see the same opportunities looking through Q2 and Q3 as we've spoken about for a while.
We have strategic partnerships where we support those with a minority stake, Eniro, of course, being the most recent example, but we've done a number of others in the past. That gives us a level of influence, but not control, and generally is appropriate where there's just that extra level of depth to the commercial partnership that both sides feel is appropriate. We see lots of opportunities there. Then M&A, so outright acquisitions, again, we do see opportunities being created by the market environment. What we've always said there is we're gonna keep in careful balance, of course, the use of our internal cash, the use of our available debt facilities, and periodically, conversations with the equity investors and equity markets as well.
And, so we do see some real opportunities in 2024, and we'll be working obviously with all of those stakeholders to work out the, the best opportunities and the best funding mix to go after them. And of course, in part, that will be a focus of my new role, once Julie and I have transitioned. But certainly a very interesting, second half of the market, of the year ahead, for the market, I think. Okay, I think that's it on those questions as well. So look, thank you very much, everyone, for joining. As ever, we really appreciate you taking the time to join us. If anyone would like follow-ups afterwards, please do contact the IR teams. With that, I'll hand back to the, operator, and thank you very much for hosting.
Thank you very much.