Good morning, everyone. Before we begin the official remarks, I will read the cautionary note regarding forward-looking information. Certain information to be discussed during this call contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including, among others, statements concerning the Company's 2021 objectives, the Company's strategy to achieve those objectives, as well as statements with respect to management's beliefs, plans, estimates, and intentions, and similar statements concerning anticipated future events, results, circumstances, performance, or expectations that are not historical facts.
Such forward-looking statements reflects management's current beliefs and are based on information currently available to management and are subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. Please refer to the cautionary statements and the risk factors identified in our filings with SEDAR for a more detailed explanation of the inherent risks and uncertainties that could affect such forward-looking statements. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Tal Hayek, the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of AcuityAds, to update you on the operations of the business.
Happy birthday, illumin.
Happy birthday, illumin. illumin is so young, but already started changing the world of advertising. It gives the ability for advertisers to plan and execute on a consumer journey just like they always dreamed they can, but now they can actually do it. I'd like to thank the Acuity family for designing and creating such an amazing concept, and to all our partners, customers, investors for being along the journey with us. Thank you, everyone. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Acuity's Q3 investor presentation.
Wow, I can't believe it's been a year since we launched illumin. illumin is changing the world of advertising, and it certainly changed the way Acuity is. I'm so proud of the Acuity family for delivering such an amazing quarter of growth for illumin, which is up 42% sequentially from Q2 to $7.4 million. This is the fourth quarter of illumin, and look at the runway that we're already seeing it. Thank you from the bottom of my heart to the Acuity family for delivering this amazing growth. Q3, we have seen a modest growth. Yes, it was less than we expected, the growth. I can tell you there's a few reasons why.
One, it's partly due to the legacy client experiencing some supply chain issues. Needless to say, when clients are experiencing shortage of product, they're pushing advertising less on a temporary basis until they get the supply sources back in play. We've seen a number of customers, of existing customers doing that, and then a number of potential customers that are excited about future integration are just slowing down their plans. We all know this is a temporary issue, and it will come back, big time, and that problem is gonna be solved.
The other thing is, we've been focusing since the launch of illumin on tier one brands. Well, tier one brands has a longer sales cycle, and we're happy about the long sales cycle because it means deeper integrations and much, much better relationship with those brands in the long run. We're gonna go into that, a little bit more in the future. We are continuing to be super focused on illumin, and we're very happy with the progress that we're seeing so far. I have to say, and I tell to everybody at Acuity, in the last year, in the past 12 months, we've done amazing things that we've never done before.
One , we IPO to the Nasdaq, we strengthened our balance sheet, and the most important part is we launched illumin. illumin, not only that it's changing the world, it's giving us a differentiator that we've never seen before. It gives us the ability to have the kind of conversations with the type of brands that are in our pipelines that we've never seen before. I do believe that this company is its best position it's ever been, and we now have the ability to think long-term. I wanna share the way we think about the market. Really, there's three segments that we're looking at the market.
There's the enterprise segment, there's the mid-market, and there's the small to medium-sized business market. Let's start with the enterprise. Enterprise is what we've been focusing on since we launched illumin. We're having tons of conversations with the enterprise brands, and they're loving it. In fact, we have many of them that are using the system today, mostly testing it for much bigger integrations in the future. We expected the sales cycle to be long, but it's proving to be even longer than we expected, and I do believe it's gonna start hitting next year sometime.
In our pipeline, we have eight auto manufacturers that are talking to us for, you know, for deeper integration. That's not a big surprise, 'cause auto is one of those things that you think consumer journey, and you start thinking that way before the purchase happens. That's a brilliant place. We have a very large insurance there. We have a home improvement retailer in there. All those are great customers that are in our pipeline. Again, do believe some of those integrations will happen next year. Mid-market. Mid-market is interesting. Mid-market is what's driving the revenue of Acuity today.
Or illumin, I would say, today. Mid-market are still large brands, but not as large as the Fortune 1000 brands, and they're more flexible and they move faster and they try the illumin, and they've seen the success of illumin, and they're increasing their spend on illumin. We're turning a little bit more attention to them as well, so we can see even bigger growth from that market. I'd like to share some examples of those mid-market companies. There was an e-commerce company that started using illumin in Q1 of this year. They spent $22,000. They liked it so much that in Q3, they spent $152,000.
A clothing retailer that spent only $5,000 in Q1 spent $175,000 in Q3. A large auto manufacturer started with $98,000, and then in last quarter spent $216,000 on this. A healthcare company that spent $194,000 in Q1 spent $648,000 in Q3. Purina, which we're vocal about before, spent $49,000 in Q1 and $169,000 in Q3. As you can see, it's working. They try it, they really like it. They see the ability to control the consumer journey, to have the conversation with their consumers, and then they see the insights and the learning they get from it.
All that with the fact that it's very easy to use, very intuitive, brings them back for more, and spending more and more and more, and we expect that trend to continue. Then there's the small medium-sized businesses. Let me be a little bit more precise about it. For me, it's more the small businesses like the pizza stores that wanna log in and spend $500 a month to target a five mile radius around their store. Let me tell you something, this is a complete wide open space when it comes to programmatic. Nobody's doing it well.
Why? Because it's extremely complex to run programmatic today. Illumin has the best chance of infiltrating that. Why? Because Illumin is easy to use, intuitive, and it takes only a few minutes to set up a campaign. Adding a few extra tools to it, like a creation tool, payment system, and a few other small integration and simplification, will make it very ready for that market. I'm very excited about this market. We don't have the right infrastructure in the organization today to execute on it, but on our strategic roadmap, we are very much including and bringing innovation to this segment to the market.
We are also focusing on the business operation as we're enhancing our executive team to make sure we have the right focus and alignment. Two new additions to the family. We brought in a new COO, one that will help us tie the whole organization together, all the big projects that we're doing and bring it together, and help all the departments succeed as well. You know, that's something that's very important as we're preparing for mega growth in the future, and it's something that I believe we were lacking. The second innovation we brought in is a chief empowerment officer, which I believe is so important in this time.
Generally speaking, not Acuity, but in all industries, we've seen many people working from home. We've seen many people disconnect from one another. We've seen global crisis when it comes to labor. We've seen more and more problems with emotional strength of people. This is something that also happens at Acuity. You know, it's harder and harder to connect the team as a family. I think we're doing it better than most, but there's still a lot of work to be done there, and we brought in a Chief Empowerment Officer strictly for that reason. It's already proving itself to have very positive impact.
I'm very proud that Acuity is investing in the emotional power of people, and that will pay back tremendously for the business in the future. I can tell you that we are now turning our attention to hypergrowth. Starting next year, that's our attention. We're working on many different elements that are related to it, but obviously it all has to do with illumin. I can tell you, the founders of Acuity, the executive of Acuity, and the rest of the family members of Acuity did not create illumin to do $50 million in revenue or $100 million or $200 million.
We created illumin to take over the world of advertising and to do a lot more than that. This is what we're focusing on, and we believe that this is coming in the next few years. Well, let's drill down a little bit more on Q3 results. We delivered $27.5 million in revenue. That's up 5.4% year-over-year. When you look at it on a constant currency basis, which is important to look at it that way because most of our revenues are in US dollars, most of our cost is in US dollars, but we are reporting in Canadian dollars, so sometimes there's a disconnect.
When you look at it that way, we're at 11.3% year-over-year growth. Still not where we wanna be, but needless to say, we talked about what some of the reasons why we're seeing lower growth, and we do believe it's a temporary situation. We've done phenomenal on a EBITDA basis, so we now deliver CAD 22.2 million in LTM EBITDA. Obviously, keep improving the financial situations of the company into the future and more money in the bank account.
We have over $100 million in the bank account. Increases our possibility for investment in different areas. CTV, another great place to concentrate on because we do believe it's a major growth factor into the future. We're seeing 220% growth in Q3 over Q3 of last year, and we predict that CTV is gonna continue being a major growth. illumin revenue, again, 42% up sequentially. Again, another mega growth quarter on a sequential basis to $7.4 million, just to show you how customers really, really loving the product. The clients that we have on illumin, we now have 49 clients on illumin.
At the end of Q3, we had about 40 at the end of Q2, and we have 26 tier 1 clients versus 17 tier 1 clients that we had at the end of Q2. We're adding more clients. The clients are spending more. Very good recipe for the future. We have completely different segments across the board. You know, we have media, we have politics, we have healthcare, consumer products, retail, tech, electronics, manufacturing, the whole gamut. Again, illumin is a platform that could work on any type of industry.
Naturally, the industry that are spending more online is where we're gonna see the most strength on, but it could really work on anything. The majority of the illumin revenue is still coming from new businesses, new logos to AcuityAds. Again, opened up a lot of doors for us with companies that would never speak to us before, and that's what we're seeing. Next year, sometimes we will start turning our focus on bringing our legacy clients into illumin. At the end of next year, I don't want to have the legacy product in play anymore. We're continuing to see very strong growth in the pipeline.
In fact, we're seeing more and more demos. We're seeing more and more requests, inbound requests coming into the system on a regular basis, and our team is very busy on filling those. Tier one clients talk to us all the time about it. We are the experts in the consumer journey today. We're very happy to be in that state and looking really excited about what we see in the future on the illumin side. Just to reiterate, we launched illumin Q4 of last year. $1.5 million in revenue, and Q1 was $3.2 million, Q2 was $5.2 million, and then Q3, $7.4 million.
That's a major achievement, even without the major brands signing like multi-year deals with us, which we do believe that's coming next year. A few weeks ago, we demoed the illumin product to sell-side analysts. They asked for it. We thought it was a great idea. Why? Because our sales team is not using so much PowerPoint anymore when they go in to make a sale. They're demoing the product. As soon as they demo the product, people get really excited.
We showed it to the analysts and they got really excited and they started to understand the difference between the legacy system and the illumin system. We wanted to show at least a snippet of that to you guys today. I mean, we're not gonna take a lot of time. It's gonna be a very short and precise demo, but we have the longer version if you like to see it on our website, on our YouTube channel, and you're welcome to go and see it more and you're always welcome to request your own demo. We'll be happy to do it for you. Max is going to do the demo for us. Thank you, Max, for joining us. Please take it away.
Hey, guys. Let's take a look here at the illumin journey canvas, which is designed to mimic the whiteboard that lives in your branch conference rooms. We have a problem in the ecosystem where it takes a vast amount of machines/vendors and human talent to really get a clear picture into what's happening along the consumer journey. Brands need a DMP, a DSP, a multi-touch attribution platform, consumer data platform, and an illumin is designed to be the control center to really help you understand the consumer journey through a singular screen of understanding.
We're gonna look at an example for F-150, and what you'll notice here is we are audience agnostic. If I were to click here, we have a library of audiences that you can buy, just like The Trade Desk, MediaMath, Amobee. We all have the same third-party audiences and exchanges and SSPs in terms of inventory for the most part. That's table stakes. The idea is you've spent thousands of dollars as a brand or agency to figure out who is the right target for your audience, and you wanna be able to reach those users.
Our machine allows you to take back control of how you message these users in a unified way across the entire consumer journey versus building your campaign on a whiteboard, sending it to all these different partners for execution, then actually trying to judge performance in silos and using machines to tie it all back together. What I always ask prospects is, Wouldn't it make more sense that it was connected from the start? The answer, of course, is of course it would, right? We've got a true cross-funnel journey.
We've got awareness, then we go over here to engagement, and then we've got conversion. What you'll also notice is we have the ability to customize the marketing goal at each stage of the funnel. Once again, I'll zoom in. Here for F-150, the actual goal is awareness. The machine is gonna go after users who we think could be good life stage targets for F-150 but don't have a tremendous amount of brand equity yet. We're trying to build brand equity by serving media here.
Now, as the same user continues to have increased brand equity from the media we're serving, they would then transition over here to engagement, where we've changed the goal to a cost per click goal. Here, now we're looking at how likely is this consumer to engage with the competitive differentiators, exclusive features, or the driving comfort of the F-150 versus the Silverado. As we continue to build engagement and equity with this user, the user then transitions into the conversion stage. As a marketer, I can again change the goal. Here we have a CPA or a ROAS goal.
Now how likely is this consumer after bringing them through the rest of the funnel, how likely are they now to sign up for a test drive or build out an F-150 on the website or research financing or some sort of low funnel action? The point is we can hit your lower funnel goal, your mid-funnel goal, and then your awareness goal. Now we can go back to F-150 and say, "Hey, by the way, it costs X to drive this audience of NFL fans from unaware of a need to scheduling a test drive with F-150 versus your DIY target, versus your power sports target, versus your contractor target," right?
This is something that would be extremely difficult to figure out if you didn't have a connected journey. Big picture, we're valuing a user, matching them to a path, and then dynamically inserting them into the journey with the ultimate goal of fast-tracking users who don't need bloated communication and getting better at nurturing users who need equity built. This is what we do, and this is the illumin journey canvas.
As you can see, the uniqueness of illumin is self-explanatory. Thank you, Max, for sharing this with us. We will now go to Tatiana, our interim CFO, to share some Q3 financials.
Thank you, Tal. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. I want to first mention that I look forward to working with Tal and the rest of the team in the interim CFO role. During the third quarter, we continued to see rapid adoption of our illumin platform, helping to drive year-over-year total company revenue and EBITDA growth. illumin revenue and pipeline growth exceeded our internal expectations again for the quarter. This growth continued to be driven in large part by substantial inbound interest in the platform from tier one brands.
We remain very excited about illumin growth prospects and believe it's still in the early stage of realizing its full and long-term potential. With this backdrop, I will now review our third quarter financial results on the next slide. Total revenue in the third quarter was CAD 27.5 million, a 5.4% increase compared to CAD 26.1 million in Q3 2020. As a reminder, with close to 70% of our revenue derived in the U.S., a stronger Canadian dollar understates our true growth. On a constant currency basis, revenue increased 11.3% year-over-year.
illumin revenue in the quarter totaled CAD 7.4 million, a 42% sequential increase compared to CAD 5.2 million in Q2 2021. I think it's quite telling that we continue to see such strong sequential growth from illumin despite supply chain related headwinds from some of our legacy customers who have delayed advertising spend related to this issue. Gross profit or net revenue was CAD 14.3 million in Q3 2021, compared to CAD 13.5 million in Q3 2020, an increase of 5.4% year-over-year. Our gross profit margin was 51.9% in Q3 2021, which was in line with Q3 2020.
Operating expenses in third quarter 2021 totaled CAD 12.5 million compared to CAD 12 million in the same period in 2020. Operating expenses as a percentage of revenue was 45.5%, down from 46.2% in the same period last year. This sales growth and strong operating leverage led to adjusted EBITDA of CAD 4.4 million in Q3 2021, up 9.5% from CAD 4 million in Q3 2020. For the third quarter of 2021, we reported net income of $3.4 million compared to $0.9 million for the same period in 2020, an increase of 265%. Turning to our nine-month results on the next slide.
Total revenue was $85.2 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2021. A 22% year-over-year increase compared to $69.8 million during the related period in 2020. It's important to know, during the first nine months of 2021, revenue from illumin totaled $15.8 million, which is well ahead of what our initial expectations were at the beginning of the year. Gross profit on net revenue for the nine months ended September 30, 2021 was $44.4 million, a 24% increase compared to $35.8 million during the prior year period.
Our gross margin for the first nine months of 2021 was 52.1% compared to 51.3% for the same period last year. Operating expenses for the nine months ended September 30, 2021 totaled $37.9 million compared to $35.4 million for the same period in 2020. Operating expenses as percentage of revenue for the first nine months of this year was 44.5%, down from 50.7% for the same period last year. Adjusted EBITDA totaled $14.4 million for the first nine months of 2021, an 80.5% increase from $8 million during the same period in 2020.
This considerable year-over-year increase was primarily due to our higher net revenue, including illumin revenue and the strong operating leverage I previously mentioned. Net income in the first 9 months of 2021 totaled $8.1 million, compared to the net loss of $0.5 million for the same period last year. This year-over-year increase was due to the factors I discussed earlier. Turning to our balance sheet. You can see our cash balance stood at $100.3 million, a sharp increase from $22.6 million at December 31, 2020.
This reflects both our strong cash flow generation during the first nine months of 2021 and proceeds from our $57.5 million cross-border public offering in the United States and Canada during second quarter, including our uplisting to the Nasdaq Capital Market. In line with our growth strategy and strong operating leverage we've been able to achieve, we continue to generate solid adjusted EBITDA growth.
As you can see here, on a trailing 12 months basis, as of September 30, 2021, I'm pleased to report that we generated adjusted EBITDA of CAD 22.2 million, an increase of 58.8% over the same period in 2020. Lastly, I will provide a quick update on our capital structure. As of September 30, 2021, AcuityAds had 60.6 million common shares outstanding and 63.7 million fully diluted shares outstanding. With that, I will pass it back over to Tal for concluding remarks.
Thank you, Tatiana. Well, just as we're closing and before we go to Q&A, I like to reiterate some of the things we started with. I'm so proud of the illumin team for delivering such another great quarter of illumin growth, 42% up in revenue to $7.4 million. In the past year, we IPO on the Nasdaq. We strengthened our balance sheet to the point that we have over $100 million in the bank account. Most importantly, we launched illumin, which is the big differentiator we get in the market today.
We continue to be super focused on the illumin side, very happy with the progress, and I do believe that the company is its best position it's ever been. We have the ability to think long-term, something we couldn't do before. We had to sometimes think about the short-term implication. Now, we have the luxury and the ability to think long-term. On the three segments that we talked about, the enterprise side, the mid-market side, and the small to medium-sized market, all those things that we'll be focusing on the future as well.
That we're, you know, focusing on the business operation and how to strengthen, enhance the business operation. We brought in a few new C-levels that we're totally excited about. Our COO and his chief empowerment officer already creating big impact within the org, and we're very excited about the future of that as well. I can honestly say we are now turning our attention to hypergrowth starting next year. We do believe we're gonna see that, and we're implementing a number of strategic plan in place in order to achieve it.
Mostly organic growth, but we're still working on the M&A side. We still wanna do an M&A deal. We're looking at many deals across the board on regular basis, and I do believe that there's something that will come along that we're gonna like and execute on. I'll say it again. We did not create illumin to be 30 or 40 or 50 or 100 or 200 million dollars in revenue. Our aspiration is much, much higher than that. I wanna say again, happy birthday to illumin. With a first year in business on a run rate of close to $30 million, we can all just imagine what you're going to do next. Thank you, everyone. Now, let's go to Q&A.
Thank you, Tal. Thank you, Tatiana. Just a reminder to our analysts to please use the raise hand function if you do have a question. Our first question comes from Aravinda at Canaccord. Aravinda, you'll be on mute, and if you could please turn your video on, that would be great.
Good morning, Tal. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for my question, and, congrats on the traction on illumin so far. A few questions from me, Tal. I wanted to first of all flesh out the global supply chain impact. Obviously, it's impacted large number of companies in the broader space. Can you sort of frame that impact for us a little bit when you think about Q3 and going into Q4? Is it predominantly focused on the auto sector, or are you seeing that, sort of splattered across a few spaces? Maybe just touch on your exposure to those sectors.
Yeah. Look, I think it's across the board. We have one client that scaled back spend of CAD 1 million just in Q3 alone. Not because they're not happy, not because they can't sell the product, just that they had a supply chain issue. Auto has been affected by it and a number of others, and I also believe that number of the ones in the pipelines that are just waiting to have product in order to convert. As we all know, it's a temporary solution or situation. We don't know. I personally don't know how long is this situation gonna last, but I imagine it's gonna get resolved sooner rather than later.
Excellent. Thank you for that. I know this is sort of a headline issue in this space. You know, some of the initiatives by Apple alongside the iOS 15 release, all the little components from Private Relay to Mail Privacy Protection, different levels of impact, I know, on different companies. I wanted to hear your thoughts on how you think it affects the programmatic space at large, and then obviously more specifically, Acuity.
I think it mostly affects the programmatic space when it comes to companies who are doing in-app advertising. We do some of that, but we don't do a lot of that. It's a very, very small part of what we do. It's not really going to affect AcuityAds in a big way. I also think in-app advertising is something that we can develop in the future too, so it's also an opportunity for us to grow into that as well. Yeah, clearly you're seeing companies who are depending on the in-app advertising, mostly using the device ID information that comes from there, are affected by it. I wanna say that at the end of the day, if the advertiser.
If the advertisers are not gonna be paying for the content, we're gonna have an issue. One way or another, the advertisers are gonna have to find a way to pay for the content, even when it comes to in-app advertising. I think it's an evolution that's going to happen fairly quickly back into it.
Excellent. Thank you, Tal. Last question from me. In terms of Q4 tracking, I know that the supply chain issues are still a factor, but I know you've alluded to in the press release that you're starting to see more traction on the pandemic-affected sectors, the travel, the leisure, retail, et cetera. How material is that traction, and how can it kind of, you know, can it potentially sort of offset some of the headwinds we're talking about?
First of all, our focus is still illumin, and illumin, I believe we're gonna get great traction on. We're having great traction on Q4 and beyond, of course. You have to understand, that's the focus of the company. Almost everyone is selling illumin, and the tech team and the product team and the strategy team and the marketing, everybody's doing illumin, right? That's our focus, and we're very happy about where that is going. The managed old legacy business, we always knew we're gonna start reducing it. It's going to be.
Like, we're going to make it disappear by the end of next year anyway, so our focus is really to increase the illumin side, but doing it in a way that the revenue of illumin is strong enough and bigger than the legacy business before we let that go. Therefore, there's not gonna be any effect on revenue. Yeah, the travel industry is kind of starting to come back. We're seeing more revenue coming out of there. Still not close to where we've seen it before the pandemic. Great signs and as we move forward, more and more, I believe, is gonna come back. We're still gonna probably have some supply chain issue in Q4.
You know, generally speaking, I would say this: We're gonna see growth from last year Q4 to this year Q4, okay? I don't think it's gonna be the growth that we want to see, but you know, we might surprise, but there's going to be growth. There's gonna be major growth on the illumin side. We're really focusing all our attention on mega growth the next year, so we're investing a lot. Up to now, we were all about EBITDA and doing everything we're doing with the same expenses. Next year, well, we're starting now into next year to invest a lot in marketing and sales.
More salespeople, more marketing, more support people, more people on the product side as well, obviously, so we can move faster on that. We have the luxury to think long term and to think, "Okay, how do we bring this to take over the world of advertising like we want to?" We're making that investment into it. We will probably give up some of the EBITDA numbers that we've seen up to now in order to achieve that mega growth next year and beyond.
Okay. Absolutely. Thanks so much, Tal. All the best.
Thank you.
Thank you, Aravinda. Our next question comes from Laura Martin at Needham. Laura, you can go ahead when you are ready.
Hi there.
Hi.
Hi. A couple from me. Of your self-service line item this year, I think you said that illumin was $7.4 million out of the $8.2 million in the most recent quarter. My question is in the prior year, you were showing $7.3 million of self-service that since illumin didn't exist last year, I was wondering why. Like, can you remind us what is that last year basically went to $600,000 this year?
Yeah. The last year, when we look at our self-serve revenue was the legacy self-serve system that we had. That one is being phased off and, in order for illumin to grow. We also had some clients on that system that were related to the affected industry. But in general, most of the illumin revenue that we're seeing, self-serve or not, are, I think over 67% are from completely new logo to the company.
Okay. One of the things you've talked about in the past is you're hoping to convert some of your managed service revenue down into the self-service line. Is that happening?
Well, we're not doing it yet. We're gonna do that next year. Even when it comes to managed service on the illumin side, it's not exactly completely managed service. It's almost like self-serve with a lot of support. We have our team, our enterprise team supporting in the back end and helping customers achieve what they're doing. They're pushing a lot of the buttons for them, but then within six months or so, we are expecting them to move into self-serve. Not all of them will. Some of them still wanna stay in managed, but yeah, that's the idea. Next year.
Okay. CTV, you said it grew 220%. Could you just give us the number that CTV achieved in the quarter? Is it sitting in managed service or self-service, the CTV?
It's both. I don't have the breakdown between the two. I would say it's starting to approach, just under 10% at this point, so it's becoming more meaningful number.
Out of the gross profit number 14, you think it's?
Out of the gross revenues
Yeah.
It's not 10% yet, but it's starting to approach 10%.
Okay. That's good number. Okay, great. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
No problem.
Thank you, Laura. Our next question will come from Darren at ROTH. Darren, you can go ahead when you are ready. Darren, are you on the line here?
I am. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can. Thank you.
We can't see you, but go ahead with the voice.
Okay. I guess I'm a black box. That's fine. Anyways, three questions. Hi, Tal. First, the clients you talked about that grew from 1 Q to 3 Q, were those mostly mid-market or any of those tier 1 ?
Mostly mid-market. There's two of them that are tier one, but most of them are mid-markets.
As a generality, are you seeing that trend of customers that have come on in Q1 increasing spend in aggregate to Q3?
Yes, definitely. That's why I showed the examples of quite a few of them. But yeah, that's what we're seeing. People are liking what they're seeing, and they're spending more and more every quarter. That's the trend that we expect to continue. Also that's one of the reason why we're refocusing the sales team more on the mid-market side because we're seeing immediate results there. Obviously we're gonna still spend time on the enterprise side and work on converting the bigger deals that will pay off in the long run, but in the meanwhile, we still wanna bring in that mega growth.
Got it. That's helpful. On the supply chain, you talked about legacy customers, but I'd be remiss not to ask, like, is supply chain having any impact in the sales cycle with some of your bigger illumin clients, maybe some that are in e-commerce or you know, you talked about a kind of a home goods retailer? Just kinda curious if that's pushing out kinda any kind of revenue potential into 2022.
I mean, auto is a big part of the pipeline. Very serious conversation. Very tight conversation with the big automakers. Yeah, obviously they have supply chain issues, and we do believe it's going to push the decision to next year. I think it's pretty clear that if they don't have the product to sell, they're gonna advertise less. When they do, they will come back and advertise big time.
On your twitter account, I noticed yesterday you had a tweet talking about potential integration with Shopify in the fourth quarter. I'm just kinda curious if you could expand more on that.
We're talking about the small, medium-sized businesses, and we're talking about multiple type of, you know, one to many types of integrations. That could be one of them. I'm not gonna speak specifically about that one, but there's a multiple type of these kind of relationships that we can create in order to achieve that, because selling to the small businesses to medium business is not a sales force selling it out.
It's more like either one to many or e-commerce types of offers that people come to the site and sign on their own, and it's obviously very small amounts of money per month, but it's many, many of them. I'm excited about that side of the market. I can say we don't really have a proper strategy into that yet because we're working on it. We will share it once we have a better idea.
Great. Thanks, Tal.
You're welcome. Thank you.
Thank you, Darren. Our next question comes from Vince Valentini at TD. Vince, you can go ahead when you are ready.
No.
Vince, if you could mute your screen and just use the phone, that would remove the echo.
Yeah. Okay. Can you hear me now?
Now we can't hear you.
Oh, there we go. Is that better?
Yeah, it's a little bit echoey, but let's try.
You know what, why don't we come back to Vince? We'll ask our next question in the meantime. Vince, I'm gonna remove you here, and we will try you again momentarily. Our next question comes from Kevin at Desjardins.
Hi, Kevin.
Kevin, you are on mute.
Hi there. You can hear me now, right?
Yes.
I'm gonna leave my camera off. I'm having some issues with the lag in the computer. I just have a couple questions. I wanna go back to the supply chain impact that you saw in the quarter. You alluded to one client at least had $1 million in Q3 alone. You grew 11% constant currency in the quarter. Is there a way to think about what you would have grown, you know, excluding some of these impacts? Then number two, related to that, these supply chain issues, I think, started creeping up more towards the end of Q3. You know, how much more dramatic might the impact be, you know, in Q4?
I guess what I'm trying to get at is the, you know, your thoughts on, or I guess as to, you know, where, you know, what the magnitude of the, you know, shift is. Because I think we know this is all shifting in revenue into future quarters, but just trying to get a handle on what the impacts might be, you know, to quantify them.
It's really hard to say what the exact impact from a—I mean, it's a combination of existing business and business that was about to sign and didn't sign yet, so it's going into future revenue. I would say, I'm sure it was probably a few million dollars in Q3. In Q4, again, it's hard to guess at this point. I think it's better just to kind of say, okay, how is things in here going in Q4? They're going fantastic from an illumin standpoint, and they're going good from an overall revenue standpoint. We're still gonna see growth, but we would have liked to see much higher growth in Q4. We do believe the mega growth is gonna happen next year.
On that mega growth, you know, enterprise will be a focus. Thanks for the description on the three different buckets. I know my notes here, Enterprise, illumin, having a lot of conversations, lots of testing going on. There you talked about supply chain also being an issue here, but I think on top of that, you talked about there being a little bit longer of a cycle. Is there something else that's driving that, the lengthening in that cycle, or is that strictly based on supply chain, you know, impacts?
No. I would say that we also learned through the process that selling to enterprise is a completely different animal than selling to what we're used to selling on the media side. When you sell to enterprise, you need different type of a sales department, people who are used to selling SaaS and they're selling to dozens of people within an organization in order to get the deal done. It could take a year, it could take more than a year to do it, and you have to have more integration with internal systems and a whole bunch of other things that we're learning throughout the time. All that.
Yeah, some of them will sign up without any of that, but there definitely needs to be more expertise from our side when it comes to doing that. We're bringing that expertise aboard. That's part of what we're investing in, as I said before, into the org. We will have more of that, more of the integration into internal systems that they're asking for, at the same time bringing in the quick revenues from the mid-market. All that is a part of what we're doing.
You talked about some of that sales cycle, you know, lengthening has resulted in a pushing out of some of that enterprise sale in the, in the next year. Are you talking, you know, stuff going from Q4 into Q1 or to Q2, or, you know, how do we think about where you're seeing those deals that you thought might have been coming sooner, sort of, you know, landing next year?
I would say that again. This is something new for us, and I don't, I really prefer not to speculate, and we will share the information when we have it. I think some will happen hopefully in the first half of the year, but again, it's going through the cycles, understanding it, bringing them in, sometimes building some components for them that they would like us to build, sometimes doing more testing for a longer period of time. I think it's best not to speculate on that until such time that we bring some of those in. Once we do, we will share it. We will learn from it. We will bring more in.
In the meantime, a huge market on the mid-size market that we're helping customers get into this game, and they're very happy, and they're spending more and more every quarter. We're adding more and more of them every quarter, too.
I can appreciate that. Maybe just to switch gears then on to maybe that, the more mid-market. Self-service growth reported was 12%, maybe on a constant currency basis, closer to 17%. I wanted to go back to the thoughts around illumin. It was my understanding that those illumin numbers, that they're not self-serve. I mean, is it not that the illumin number is still predominantly a managed service? Or am I not correct there? i.e., the $7 million, was that all self-service?
No. The illumin dollars are not all self-serve. It's split. I don't have the exact number of the split between them, but you're right, the majority of it is still what we call it hybrid, call it a white glove service, when we're helping the customers push some of the buttons. Some of it is self-serve as well. The self-serve number we're reporting is an aggregate of all self-serve, illumin and legacy.
Got it. That, that's some. You know, I think on a constant currency basis, that's, you know, like I said, 17%, maybe a bit higher than that organic growth. What's driving that then? You know, bigger deal size, more customers coming on board, broadening out? Is it all of the above? Just, I think that was a good number in the quarter.
Yeah. I mean, it's all illumin self-serve coming in. They're spending. The illumin dollars they're spending on self-serve are naturally higher spend per client. They're seeing great results of the spending more.
Okay. Okay, thanks, Tal. I'll pass the line.
You're welcome.
Thank you, Kevin. Our final question will come from Rob Goff at Echelon. Rob, you can go ahead when you are ready.
Thank you very much. Can you hear me, Tal?
Yeah. We can see you.
Sorry about that part. You, you've talked to the growth of illumin. You've talked to the growth of CTV. Could you perhaps talk through the overlapping growth, i.e., what is illumin doing to drive the CTV business as well?
Very good question. CTV is an integral part of the illumin campaigns in general. The majority of illumin campaigns have a component of CTV in them. Now, there's a big advantage of using CTV on illumin versus on any other DSP. When you run other DSPs, you usually run a standalone and you evaluate on its own, and it's hard to evaluate the results of CTV. When you run it on illumin, you have the ability, and most people love that part, to run you know, two paths, one with CTV, one without the CTV.
You see the effect of running that type of upper funnel campaign on CTV on the lower funnel on the conversion side by just comparing those two and looking at the insights of those two. Most advertisers are electing to do CTV campaign as a part of their journey. I personally think if you're gonna do a journey, if it's going to be a proper journey with awareness, engagement and conversion, the awareness piece should be very, heavily, concentrated on video. Part of it is gonna be CTV. Very big bonus that you can actually evaluate how it's working.
Okay. Thank you. You talked in the enterprise that you were in discussions with eight automotive companies, a healthcare company. When you look at the enterprise bucket, are these typically, like, CAD 1 million annual budgets, or how should we look at it in terms of financial prospects?
We're looking at the Fortune 1000 brands.
Okay. How would you see the prevalence of million-dollar accounts looking ahead when you're seeing the enterprise bucket?
For me, every time we will convert one of those enterprise to be what I call like a proper integration, it's you know for me it's my number in my mind is at least $10 million a year in revenue. That's what we're trying to achieve when we're going after those enterprise accounts. $1 million accounts, we have many already. It doesn't have to be an enterprise client for that. We have some enterprise clients that are over $1 million. I mean, we have many enterprise and non-enterprise clients that are over $1 million a year accounts.
Okay. If I could, when you're sitting on $100 million of cash and growing every day, could you talk to the cadence of acquisitions and whether or not you might consider share repurchase as a really attractive use of funds given where your share price is in particular?
The share I was actually starting to think about it recently, and the question is, well, what's more valuable to bring in, you know, other organizations into us and develop the illumin side faster, add more components to it and add more revenue to this financial model that is beautiful and accretive. At this point, I think it makes more sense to save the money for the acquisitions because I think we can do so much with it. Yeah, that's what we're thinking about from an acquisition standpoint. Look, we're talking to multiple companies almost every week.
I would say valuation expectations are still fairly high, but they're coming down. We're seeing some companies who we think we can do work with or we can combine with and do a good job. You know, we're very picky about what we're gonna bring in. It has to be something that adds value to illumin, accretive from a financial standpoint. We're gonna stay disciplined on it. I believe we're gonna do it. Eventually, it's going to happen.
Thank you, and good luck.
Thank you.
Thank you, Rob. Thank you, Tal. Tal, it is now 9:30, so that's all the time we have allocated for today. If you'd like to provide any last remarks, we can close up shop here.
Thank you, Corey, and thanks everyone for joining us today. We really appreciate your support. I know for some of the retail investors, there's been some frustrations as our stock price used to be higher then went down. I wanna say that, first of all, we absolutely do not control the stock price. We have no desire to control the stock price. What we are here is to execute on the business plan, and I believe the investment of AcuityAds is not somebody who wants to invest in one quarter or two quarters, three quarters.
AcuityAds is the kind of company that launched illumin, is going to change the world. Over the medium to long run, I do believe that there's gonna be a big payback. I appreciate all the support throughout the years and to the new shareholders. Of course, big thank you to the AcuityAds family for delivering yet another big quarter. Thank you, everyone. Have a great day.
Thank you.