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 security laws, including, among others, statements concerning the company's 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 and EDGAR 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 Q&A 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.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Tal Hayek, and I'm the Co-founder and CEO of AcuityAds. I'd like to welcome everyone to our Q3 investor presentation. Let's start by thanking the AcuityAds family. The AcuityAds family has delivered in the past two years, an amazing product to market. It's called illumin, and illumin is changing the world of advertising. It would not be possible without the passion, commitment, desire to succeed of everybody in this family. Thank you all for making this happen. The ad industry is changing. We have walled gardens. We have privacy issues. We have line items and gross repetition of ads that do not work anymore. Marketers need journey advertising tools. In fact, marketers think that way. They always did think that way.
They just never had the tools to actually produce it that way on the programmatic side. Illumin is the only tool that solves that huge problem. Illumin is a journey advertising platform, and again, it's the only one of its kind. Imagine you can tailor the message to the consumer depending on where they are on that journey. You can do it in an intuitive system, drag-and-drop system, that you don't need to train for it for hundreds of hours in order to know how to operate it. It saves you time on setup. It saves you time in managing the campaign. Imagine that tool was around, and it is around. It's called illumin, and it's changing the world of advertising. I can tell you one of my favorite parts of my job is sitting in on demos.
When marketers see the illumin demo for the first time, and they cannot sit still in their seat because there's so much excitement. Because again, this is the way that they like to communicate to consumers. They just didn't have the tools to do it up to now. With illumin, it's right there. In Q3, we invested more in illumin. One of the major improvements we've done is we improved the pod path . What does it mean? It means that if a marketer would like to set up a more simple campaign, one that's not a complete journey, but has more like a performance base, we've adopted the system that will be very easy for the marketers to do that. That opens up a whole new market for us for campaigns.
When they do that, they improve the time to set up a campaign by at least 30%, and many times a lot more. You know, we've seen our own internal team preferring to use that over and over again, and obviously the outside self-serve clients as well. We've also been very focused on many things to do with self-serve clients, starting with increasing the number of demos that we do on a regular basis. We've seen over 161% increase in the amount of demos that we do from Q1 to Q3. Our closing rates are higher, and the days it takes us to activate clients from signed contracts to spending on the system is shorter. All that shows us a great formula for the future.
We truly believe that illumin is changing the world of advertising, and we're so excited to be at the forefront of that change. We just started. There's a lot more to do. The product is adopting and innovating on regular basis. Our focus now is truly on the self-serve side from a sales perspective, from a marketing perspective. With that, let's look at some Q3 results. Well, I'm happy to report that this is the first quarter for a while that we're delivering an increase in revenue. We delivered $29 million in revenue, which is up 5.5% year-over-year. The illumin, as a percentage of revenue, is growing aggressively on a quarterly basis. As you can see, it was 36% of revenue last quarter, 46% of revenue this quarter.
We're well above what we thought we're gonna be at this time. As we promised, we're gonna exit the year at more than 50% of the revenue on the illumin side. We're also increasing clients on a regular basis. 94 clients on illumin in Q3 versus 77 that we had in Q2 of this year, or 52 that we had in Q3 of 2021. That's very nice growth that we're seeing. Revenue. $13.2 million of our revenue in Q3 came from illumin. That's up 78% from the year before that. What I tracked very closely, and I think that's a very important part of where we're going, is the illumin self-serve revenue. In Q1, we had half a million dollars, in Q2, $1 million, in Q3, $1.2 million.
Don't let that number fool you. The numbers, the number of demos are going up, the number of closed customers are going up. In fact, in Q3, we had many closed clients that we're gonna start seeing the results in Q4. Our focus is the majority of it is on bringing in new clients, new logo, into the illumin self-serve. The number of client growth, as you can see, 44 clients using illumin self-serve in Q3 versus 31 in Q2. We will see again the results in the revenue side, in Q4. Let's talk about some verticals. We've seen a few verticals that are showing some nice growth. 26% growth, tech software side of things. Pharma health is also about 26% growth, and financial side, close to 38% growth.
Those are some of the verticals that are doing very well under the current condition. With that, I'd like to call on Elliot, our CFO, to share some financial results.
Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for our Q3 earnings call. We are pleased to announce our financial results which demonstrate the continued and rapid adoption of illumin, as shown by the second consecutive quarter of nearly 30% revenue growth for the illumin platform. Our strong and growing pipeline is a direct result of the focus and investment we are making in building out our sales infrastructure, as well as continued product development and marketing presence. In Q3, we experienced sequential and year-over-year revenue growth, both overall and within the key illumin self-serve category, where we had particular success in attracting new clients to the firm. We will continue to capitalize on this demand and support this growth into 2023. It is clear that the current market continues to reflect fears of financial instability as macro uncertainties persist.
While predicting the market or the economy will be even more challenging during this period, but we believe we will see growing revenue as the value and the uniqueness of our illumin platform to advertisers will outweigh the short-term concerns. Our strong balance sheet and liquidity are key to our ability to execute our strategy and to take advantage of inorganic opportunities to accelerate growth in an environment where sector multiples are at an all-time low. We strongly believe that our best path forward is to invest in our future, invest in our people, product and platform, and in our organizational strength. On that note, I'd like to discuss our financial results for Q3.
Our total revenue of CAD 28.9 million, an increase of 2.5% over Q2 of this year of CAD 28.2 million, and an increase of 5.5% from prior year Q3 at CAD 27.5 million. We attribute this growth to our illumin platform, especially the self-serve component, even as the overall spend by our clients was reflecting the high level of uncertainty about current and future economic conditions. Managed service revenue was CAD 28.4 million in Q3 of this year, compared to CAD 19.3 million in the prior Q3 of 2021, an increase of 5%. Our self-serve revenue totaled CAD 8.5 million for Q3, compared to CAD 8.1 million for the same period in 2021, an increase of 5%.
Revenue from illumin rose over 29% from Q2 this year to CAD 13.2 million and 78% versus prior year Q3. Year-to-date, illumin revenue is CAD 31.3 million for the nine-month period ending September thirtieth, up over 97% compared to the same period last year at CAD 15.9 million. Our gross profit or net revenue was CAD 14.8 million in Q3, compared to CAD 14.3 million in Q3 of last year, an increase of 3.5%. Our gross margin in this quarter was 51.3%, compared to 51.9% in Q3 of last year. Our operating expense for Q3 was CAD 16.3 million, compared to CAD 12.5 million for the same period in 2021, an increase of 30%.
This reflects our strategic focus on increasing our product capability and sales and marketing to help drive increased adoption of illumin. These targeted investments have began to show significant traction with client activity and new names and brands, as you heard earlier in Tal's presentation. OpEx is 56% of revenue in this quarter, compared to 45% for the same period in 2021. Our adjusted EBITDA number in Q3 2022 was CAD 1.6 million, compared to CAD 4.4 million for the same period last year. This decrease in adjusted EBITDA was primarily attributable to our growth initiatives that I just discussed earlier. Our net income for Q3 2022 was CAD 2.8 million, compared to net income of CAD 3.4 million in the prior year.
As of September 30, our cash and cash equivalents balance stood at CAD 88.2 million, compared to CAD 102.2 million as of the fiscal year end in 2021. Much of this change is related to our share repurchases made during previous six months. Even with these repurchases, we ended the quarter with a strong balance sheet and ample liquidity to continue further repurchases and seek targeted M&A opportunities to increase our growth trajectory and further our strategic objectives. In the quarter, the company purchased and canceled 1.8 million of its common shares at an average price of CAD 3.23 per share, for a total consideration of CAD 5.9 million. As of November 4th, we have purchased a total of 4.1 million shares for CAD 13 million in total consideration.
This share repurchase activity demonstrates our confidence in our balance sheet as well as our fundamental belief in the company's long-term prospects. As of September 30th, AcuityAds had 61.8 million common shares outstanding on a fully diluted basis. Our insider ownership is at approximately 15% of the 57.1 million issued and outstanding shares. In summary, with our investment in our organizational capabilities and our strong balance sheet, we remain focused on scaling our business and growing our team to create more opportunities and build market share. With illumin now representing 46% of our total top line, it is well on its way to exceeding our stated goal of over half of our top line by the end of the fiscal year.
Our growth, both in sales and new client wins, is proof that our innovative journey advertising platform is changing the game with its amazing simplicity and the deep insights it provides to users. Our growth trajectory includes a continued focus on targeted M&A strategy. We are seeing more aligned valuations in the private market than we have in the past nine months, and we will explore accretive opportunities that fit our synergistic growth plans and build shareholder value. With that, I'd like to pass it over back to Tal for his concluding remarks.
Thank you, Elliot. Well, I'm excited to say that we are on track, as promised, to exit 2022 with over 50% of our revenue in illumin. In fact, I do believe the number is gonna be even higher than that. We're very focused on our self-serve as far as client growth, as far as the amount of demos that we're doing out there for illumin. The conversion rates from demos to closed contracts and the conversion rate from closed contract to activation, all those things are something that we're focused on very heavily. We're also very happy about the progress in general that we see at Acuity. Look, this year was a major year of reorganization.
We've done a lot of work to prepare the company and move it from the startup mode that we've always been in to being a thriving larger organization, and that will show up in the future. I'm very happy about the progress of Acuity. I do believe that Acuity is in the best position it's ever been. We've done a lot of work on reorganization and preparing this company to go to the next level. We're now at a phase that we've done all this work, and it's all about executing and getting more and more clients to adopt illumin. About Q4, I'm very happy to report that I'm expecting Q4 to be the second quarter of growth for us. After a few quarters that we did not see growth and the economic uncertainties out there, I'm very happy about this progress as well.
I believe Acuity is the best investment you can make, and I'd like to thank all of you for joining us today and invite you to our Q&A section.
Thank you, Tal and Elliot. I would remind analysts that if you would like to ask a question to use the Raise Hand function located on the screen. If I could ask that all analysts respect the two-question limit per participant to allow time for everyone. Please wait a moment while we assemble the roster. Tal and Elliot, your first question is going to come from Dan Medina at Needham & Company.
Good morning.
Please wait a moment as he loads. Dan, please go ahead when you're ready.
Morning. Good morning, Tal. Good morning, Elliot. Congratulations on a great quarter.
Yeah.
Thank you.
My question is on your, you know, cost growth strategy going forward, do you see cost growth? Yeah. Just do you see growth? Do you see decline? How would, you know, how do you see the next couple of quarters on, you know, on the cost side?
Yeah. We're actually doing the exercise of the budget for next year. We, as you know, invested already a lot this year, and we think most of the investment is down. It's probably gonna be a little bit more investment happening into next year as well. We're really focused on the illumin self-serve, all the metrics that come from, you know, the top of the funnel, bringing in more demos, getting contracts signed, and then getting those contracts, those customers to sign contract, to start spending on the system. That's been our focus. It's gonna continue being that way.
To make a long story short, I think most of the investment is done, so we're probably gonna see a little bit of expansion on the expenses, but nothing very serious.
Okay. Thank you for that. My last question is that in the past, I think you said that you're basically ad vertical neutral. I just was curious, you know, just going forward, if that, you know, you still see that as the case and what it gives a little bit of a hint as to or, you know, look into, you know, where the strength has been in this current quarter. Just what do you see, you know, for the rest of Q4 and into early 2023 in the ad vertical?
We don't have any vertical concentration that I can speak to. In other words, it's really a wide range. There's no specific concentration that we have. We don't have any client concentration like we used to have in the past as well. There's nothing really to share on that.
Great. Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Daniel Rosenberg at Paradigm Capital. Daniel, please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning, guys.
Hey.
Thanks for taking my question. Congrats on a good quarter, despite the macro backdrop here. My first question was around the self-serve platform. I was curious to hear if you could provide any color on the type of customer that is adopting it, whether it be vertical specific or any targeting that's going on there, as well as any first impressions that you may have had as they're ramping up on utilization.
Yes. I'm really glad you asked because that's everything that we think about these days is illumin self-serve customers. That's been our focus. You may have read in the press release, we brought in a new sales leader in Q3 that I think comes with a lot of experience on the SaaS side, actually as a sales leader at Salesforce for many years. All that in order to kind of change the DNA of the organization from managed to self-serve. As you know, we've been trying to do it for a while, but boy, it's harder than I thought it's going to be. Now we're seeing that it's actually happening.
You know, the focus on the demos, the conversion from demos to contracts, from contracts to clients who are spending on the system. It's generally speaking either the mid-size agencies that we're going after or brands direct that would like to take control of their advertising budget. This is what we're seeing on success. This is what the product is designed for at the moment. I think that even more importantly, people really, really get excited when they see the demos. The feedback, now that we have active users, like hands on keyboard using it on their own, the feedback is tremendous. People are really, really loving. They're giving us good feedback.
Also giving us, you know, things to fix, which we always do. All that is giving us the signal that we're gonna start seeing the compounding effect of revenue. To me, it's not exactly a traditional SaaS model. It's more, I would say more predictable consumption model, but the basis of it is that you don't really lose customers on the and like we do on managed. Therefore, every month you have the revenue that you had the month before. On top of that, you get the revenue of the new clients who signed up, usually the quarter before because it takes a little bit of time on the system.
That gives us the compounding effect that we're gonna see of the self-serve numbers. We see that from a number of clients. We see it from the revenue on it. I can tell you, not all revenue is created equally. You know, this revenue for us is the most valuable and we're right in the middle of that shift. We're seeing that it's happening. We're very, very excited about where it's going.
Thanks. Just one question on capital allocation. Nice to see you guys put the NCIB to use, shares as they're trading here. I'm wondering if you would consider expansion of the NCIB. Obviously, it's a board decision, but just given the way things are, you know, what's the best use of capital for you guys given you have a nice cash balance on the balance sheet?
Yeah. Do you want to take that?
Sure.
Okay.
Well, thanks for that, Dan. For us, this is an important aspect of where we are today. We do wanna balance our need for cash with, first of all, cash preservation and building, also for inorganic opportunities. Yes, I believe that, from the current conditions of the marketplace, this is certainly an attractive opportunity for us to continue with the NCIB. Whether that's going to be expanded beyond our current approved limits, I can't speak to that at this point, but we're certainly continuing to be active.
Thanks for taking my questions.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from Aravinda Galappatthige at Canaccord Genuity.
Hi, good morning, Tal, Elliot. Good to see you. Thanks for taking my questions.
Good.
I wanted to pick up on the comment you made, Tal, about the improvements or the added features to illumin in terms of sort of the pod and sort of the more simplified feature set. Is that aimed at the mid-market more? I mean, does that really open up the mid-market a little bit more to you than maybe originally you would've been looking for enterprise? I wanna make sure I understood that correctly. If so, what kind of feedback are you getting from the largest enterprise level? Are they kind of asking for more features, asking for more capabilities? What's that conversation like?
Yeah. Definitely, it's more meaningful to anybody who's running a campaign that's not a full consumer journey or that. There's many people out there that are using programmatic today to run line item stuff, and they simply wanna use the algorithm to get the results. We have the best algorithm out there, but it was very complicated to put it on illumin. It was easier to put it on our old UI. We came up with a way that illumin kind of assists you doing it. First of all, the results are from an ROI perspective, it's the same as the old system using the same algorithm. Amazing ROI. Second, it saves you a lot of time of setting up the campaign.
You know, it's minimum 30% savings in setting up your campaigns. Then maintaining campaigns, being able to see reports on illumin and things like that, lots of added value. We're getting really good feedback about it from our clients and also from our internal ad ops team that are using it more and more. You know, in the beginning, it was harder for it to get them to use it because it was more complicated to build. Now it's their choice to use it. They want to use it because they save a lot of time on it and it's easier for them to manage it as well. I'd say really good feedback.
Regarding the enterprise, it's still early days, you know, in that side of the fence. The large enterprise clients, it's early days. We're not ahead enough to make conclusions about what's needed. We're seeing the success in the mid-market right now, and this is our focus while we're starting to develop our enterprise strategy properly with Nadeem, who has a lot of experience in it.
Okay. Thanks, Tal. Just a quick question for Elliot. You know, the free cash flow number obviously kind of bounces around a little bit. That's the nature of it. Recognizing that top line is hard to call going forward, given the macro, how would you look to kind of manage cost and, you know, from a free cash flow perspective, do you wanna maybe one part of the thought process to sort of maybe reduce the burn and keep that burn at kind of breakeven level and wherever you have flexibility to spend that on growth? Or is that given the cash balance, that's not much of a consideration? I just wanted to see how you kind of rank that as you consider-
Do you mind if I answer that?
Sure.
I mean, I'll answer it in my way, and then you'll answer it in yours.
Gotcha. Okay.
I wanna say, like, in general, you know, we have invented something that's going to change the world of advertising. We're not interested in optimizing expenses in order to produce a certain amount of EBITDA in order to get the right multiples for it. We're not interested in that. We're interested in really getting the adoption out there, and that's really our focus. While we do that, yes, we don't wanna burn cash. You know, and that's part of our mission to do it without burning cash. The focus in this company is about changing the world. It's not about, you know, what's gonna happen in the next few quarters from a cash burn perspective or from an EBITDA perspective. I'll say we're more sensitive to cash burn.
We don't wanna burn cash, but EBITDA is less important for us for the next few quarters because we really, really do wanna hammer the adoption of illumin self-serve, and that's what we're focusing on, and then we're making the investments in that. Now you can answer your question.
Well, no. Completely aligned, we are not using the cash on our balance sheet as a shield or as a safety net. What we're trying to do is make sure that we're feeding into while we did a lot of investment this year. Going forward, we wanna be exceptionally targeted, and that means sales and marketing and feeding into that advantage that we believe we have in the marketplace. Elsewhere, you will look to make sure that we're very prudent, and it's more about reallocating towards those things that we believe will drive future growth as opposed to just, you know, all systems go. We're very cognizant of the marketplace. You see the macro. You're absolutely right. It's gonna be very challenging predicting revenues going forward with these kind of the signals that are coming at us left and right.
We feel very confident that we have something special. Our revenue, as Tal said earlier in the question, is not the same revenue. We're replacing it with more consistency, and at the same time, we wanna make sure we don't lose that competitive advantage. That's why the investment will continue in a measured way, but we are very, very focused on making sure we're being effective. That's an ongoing effort for sure.
Excellent. Thank you. All the best.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Rob Goff at Echelon Wealth Partners. Rob, please go ahead when you're ready.
Good morning, guys, and thank you very much for taking my question.
Good morning, Rob.
Good morning.
Morning. My question would be on mix, actually a two-part question there. Can you talk to the mix of illumin versus non-illumin revenues, you know, exiting next year or H2 next year? You're talking a lot about this growth of self-serve. Can you talk about what part or what portion of revenues you see self-serve representing actually next year?
Next year, you mean?
Mm-hmm. Yes.
Next year self-serve, we don't have it down. I can tell you that we're going to aggressively grow self-serve sequentially every quarter, and I'm talking about illumin self-serve. Okay. That's the focus of the company today. Again, like bringing in new clients, activating them, getting them to use the system and making sure they don't leave. It's gonna be aggressive growth. I'm not. We're not locked on the numbers just yet. That answers that question. The mix of revenue of illumin next year, we're ahead of schedule. I mean, we told everyone that we will be at the run rate of over 50%. We're very close to it already.
By the end of the year, we're very close to it already, so I think we're gonna be in a higher run rate. It's, you know, the managed stuff is moving. Almost all the new campaigns are starting to run on illumin. It will be fast, and we will sunset the old system next year.
Very good. Could I ask, for perhaps a bit of an update on what you're seeing in the CTV marketplace itself?
Yeah. We're seeing it. It's still an integral part of all illumin campaigns, especially if you're running journey campaigns. It's usually the first part, the awareness piece, is done well with CTV. You know, we're seeing consistent growth in those numbers. We just don't focus on it because we don't believe that this should be the focus of us, where our focus is on the journey, and the algorithm makes decision where it's gonna get the best ROI. And naturally, we see CTV numbers going up.
Very good. Thank you. Good luck.
Thanks, Rob Goff.
Oh, the next question is going to come from Dillon Heslin at Roth Capital Partners. Please wait a moment.
You guys, can you hear me?
Yes.
Hey, thanks for taking my question. Wanted to start with the client mix. Like, with the self-serve 42% sequential growth, how much of that are net new customers to your company versus someone you might have converted from a legacy software?
The majority of it is new logos. We added, in Q3, 13 new customers on the illumin self-service system. That's you know that's the majority of growth you're seeing from that. We may have converted one or two from UI/3, but it wasn't anything significant.
Got it. I mean, like, with your comment that you're gonna sunset the legacy platform, is that still an opportunity to convert those over?
Of course. We're gonna be converting all of them before we sunset.
Gotcha. Thanks. Then as a follow-up, when you talk about four Q still growing, what are some of the puts and takes between the clients you signed in three Q that didn't maybe fully sort of produce revenue in three Q that we're gonna pull into four Q versus some of the seasonal strength that typically happens in four Q and then just the broader ad market softness in certain verticals?
No. I mean, in general, Q3 are existing clients in general. I mean, overall revenue should be higher, which and it is. specifically on illumin self-serve, we signed up 13 new clients in Q3. All those clients that we signed in Q3 are going to spend in Q4. so again, the cohort effect that we're seeing from that is going to be big. all the clients who sign up in Q4 are gonna be spending in Q1. it's about a quarter delay, I would say. it's a combination of seasonality, of course, and the new sign up of new clients.
Great. Thank you.
Yes. Thank you.
Your next question comes from Eric Martinuzzi at Lake Street Capital Markets. Eric, please go ahead when you're ready.
Hi, Eric.
Hey. Question has to do with the growth rate of the company. You posted a 5.5% growth in Q3, and I assume the language is intentionally vague, but I just wanted to get a better feel. Are you assuming a similar growth rate in Q4, kind of a mid-single digit growth rate?
Eric, that's where we don't want to be too exact because we're ourselves not 100%. As you know, we were very bullish on the second part of this year, and we didn't deliver those results like we thought we were going to do. It's a combination of. For me, it's mostly the issue of the investment we make are taking a little bit longer to hit. The reorganization took a little bit longer, you know, especially the latest part of bringing in a team to run the sales team and Tony to run marketing.
Now we have a full team in place in order to deliver what we said we're going to deliver in the second part of the year. At the same time, we don't know for sure. We're in the middle of the quarter. It's looking good, but I think it's much better for us to wait and see until we have more certainty rather than promise things that we may not deliver. You know, we'll be the first ones to say we didn't deliver what we promised for the second part of this year. We've made, you know, a lot of adjustments to the way that we think about it. We learn from it.
We have the right executive team in place in order to do better for the future. You know, it's our job to start over-delivering now. I'm sorry I'm not giving an answer, but it's just.
Okay. No, if you don't know, you don't know. I'm just curious to know, if we shift over to the adjusted EBITDA for the business, you know, we did have revenue growth in Q3, but adjusted EBITDA was down year-over-year.
Yeah.
You know, should we assume the same thing for Q4? If you hit the revenue growth that you're talking about, would we expect adjusted EBITDA to be?
Yes, definitely yes. We increased our cost base for the investments we made, and that hasn't changed, so we will see a lower EBITDA.
Sequentially?
Sequentially, we expect it to be increasing quarter-over-quarter, but year-over-year, we're gonna see a decline for sure because we did put in those investments this time.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Laura Martin at Needham & Company. Laura, please go ahead when you're ready.
Maybe just following up on Eric's question a little bit. Are you still running two sales forces, one for illumin and one for the other? Could we rationalize those over 2023, do you think?
We're now running two sales forces. Illumin is not being sold at all. Sorry. The old system is not being sold at all. Everything that we sell today is Illumin. The separation is maybe between managed and self-serve, but it's still the same team that are selling both. Just the focus now is really moving and we're really moving the DNA of this whole organization to the self-serve, which is something that we've been trying to do for a while, and it's finally happening. We do find that it's the same team with a higher focus on self-serve is getting us the result. We had six new clients in Q2 for Illumin self-serve, 13 new clients in Q3 for self-serve.
The number is higher for even the first half of Q4, and the revenue will start showing up very quickly.
Okay. What's my percentage of self-serve now at the end of the third quarter of total revenue?
The entire self-serve or illumin self-serve?
No, entire. Total.
Don't have that. We don't have that.
We're about a third. The reason it's not even higher is just we had some seasonality with self-serve as we had in other months in Q2, what we had on the travel side.
Okay.
We're at a third.
I'm gonna push you, Tal, then. Somebody else asked this, but I'm gonna push you on this. We're a third now. You're saying everything they're doing is self-serve. By year-end, are you happy with half of the revenue coming from self-serve, or like, should we still expect a third?
I'm focusing on illumin self-serve. What I'm happy with is aggressive growth for illumin self-serve from one quarter to the next. This is what I'm focusing on, and throughout next year as well. We don't really convert the old system UI3 self-serve customers into illumin yet because it's a harder sell. Why? Because people are used to a self-serve system, and they don't like changes. It's really great from a retention point of view because once you get people on it's hard to change them, but it's also you know for us to move our own legacy clients into it's a tougher sell.
We are really, really focusing in, bringing new logos, activating them, and getting them to spend on the illumin self-serve, and not the overall self-serve number that we're looking at. Although sometimes next year, yeah, we will see all those flip into illumin self-serve.
When we started illumin, I wanna say a year and a half ago, one of your big goals was to shut down one of the two parallel platforms and save the money.
Right.
From your comments just now, what you're saying is sort of for all of next year, we're still gonna be running those two same platforms. How much money would it be saving-
I don't think the whole next year. I mean, I think sometimes next year we will shut it down. Probably around mid next year, we'll sunset the old system. You're gonna ask about, I think, expenses that's related to it. We're not gonna see those expenses go away. We're gonna reallocate the resources of the old system into the new system. I mean, we're in hiring mode on the tech side to begin with. As you know, it's hard to hire.
I know those things are about to change now, but it's still like talent on the tech side is still tough, especially the talent that can do, you know, programmatic, the amount of transactions that we do and all that. It's different type of talent that we need to get into. The people that we have are amazing, so we're gonna keep them and reallocate them. You know, kind of remove the time that they spend on the old system.
Okay. I mean, it's taking a lot longer to shut down that old platform than we thought.
Yes.
Like years longer, and so it's sort of.
Yeah. It's absolutely. Our expectations were that we will be able to shut it down sooner, as you and I talked about. Our expectation was that we can move the DNA of the org from managed to self-serve faster. As we talked about, it's proven to be more difficult, but it's happening now. It's happening now. You know, when you have a sales leader that comes from the SaaS side of things that work for Salesforce, for leading a sales team, he's like. That's the kind of DNA change that we needed, and I'm very happy that we finally have it. We will see over the next quarters that those things are happening.
Okay. My second question is on mix. I think of illumin as a full service, like from actual awareness all the way down to performance.
Yeah.
Conversion. My question to you is, we are hearing in the marketplace from some of your competitors that there's been a strong shift away from branding into performance advertising as consumers' demand has weakened. Are you seeing that in your illumin product too, this shift towards performance and away from sort of brand upper funnel?
I would say half of the campaigns we run on illumin are performance because people are used to using programmatic for performance and obviously these are some of our existing clients. The other half are the ones that are looking at it more holistically and understand that you need to take care of the top of the funnel too in order to get your leads into the system, engage them, and then convert them at the bottom of the funnel. You know, we've seen recessions before. People you know are more focused on saving money on their marketing, and then they see the decline in their revenue, and they start focusing on doing that again.
You know, the best way of doing it is on systems that give you positive ROI. Illumin. The focus of illumin is on mostly customers that will do the complete journey. The new feature that we launched this year recently is allowing us to go after that market that's doing just the performance campaigns. It is providing great value for them. We have both. I haven't seen like a major shift in AcuityAds more towards the performance side.
Okay. My last question is on The Trade Desk. They grew revenue 31%, what would you say to an investor who says The Trade Desk is just eating the world? Are you seeing them take your clients? You know, they have such an outsized growth here, and they're so big to start with. Can you talk about industry dynamics and whether you think The Trade Desk just basically eats all the other DSPs, which would include yourself?
I think that we're in a different market today. You know, we're going after the mid-size agencies and the brands direct. We have a product that nobody else has. You know, if you wanna do journey, you cannot do it with any other system. You have to take illumin. For us, it's all about, you know, the illumin adoption, going out, and we have so many marketers that didn't even hear about illumin yet, which is frustrating and also it's a huge opportunity for us to get it to the market properly. This is our focus. Our focus is on illumin. It's completely different than anybody else has out there.
You know, some of the bigger companies or the bigger DSPs out there, they're focusing on the top tier and on the big agencies. Not exactly our focus, so we don't exactly compete head to head at this point. You know, we see other companies in the programmatic space are reporting declines. We're happy that we are still increasing revenue. As we're moving towards more and more the predictable revenue model on self-serve, I believe we're gonna see much higher growth in the future.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Laura. Thank you.
Our final two questions come from Drew McReynolds at RBC Capital Markets. Drew, please go ahead when you're ready.
Yeah. Hi, Tal. Hi, Eli. Can you hear me?
Yeah.
Yes. See you, Drew.
Okay. Okay, awesome. Yeah, nice to see you. Just two final ones for me. First on the M&A side, it does sound like you're incrementally a little bit more optimistic on maybe the opportunities out there. Just remind us thematically some of the pieces that would fit with AcuityAds in terms of the strategic areas you're looking at. The last one just gets back to the adoption of illumin and conversion rates. I guess I'm under the assumption your sales and marketing team is fully ramped up and or almost fully ramped up in full run rate mode. Like, what.
I know you're not gonna probably commit to a conversion rate here, but, like, what is the untapped base of advertisers and agencies you still haven't hit? Do you get 50% conversion, 75%, 25%? Like, we're just trying to kinda see, you know, under the hood on exactly, you know, what your hit rate would be as you sit down with new folks.
I'd say the amount of advertisers and marketers and agencies that we didn't even talk to are in 10s of thousands. It's a huge market, only the US itself. We have a lot to do. I don't think we're fully ramped on the sales side, but we're pretty good. Ramping up a little more there. What do you mean by conversion rate?
Well, just, you know, you talk about how excited advertisers are when they get the demo.
The metrics that we're starting to work on, and we don't have enough experience and consistency, are the number of demos that we have, conversion from demo to contract, conversion from contract to active clients on the system. Those are the things that we're tracking. It's just the numbers are so low to begin with, the baselines and that. It's hard to share them yet because they might not. They might have inconsistency because it's so early on.
Just on the M&A side.
The M&A side, what are we looking for strategically? The main part that we want to add to illumin is to complete more of the consumer journey. The consumer journey doesn't just happen on the programmatic side like we have in illumin today. We wanna add social to it, we want to add search to it, we want to add email marketing to it, influencer marketing to it. A whole bunch of other things that we don't have in it today, that is not programmatic, and it's not gonna work exactly the same, but it's gonna be a great part. Imagine you're an advertiser, now you have to use, you know, you have to log into Facebook and to into YouTube and AdWords and to to illumin to do the programmatic.
If you can all do it all from one system, it's gonna add so much more efficiencies for you. That's strategically what we wanna add to it. We don't really have the expertise in-house to do it. We could build it, but we prefer going out and getting a company that already has all those things established and just plug it into illumin. That's the major focus. Of course, we can also focus on companies who are in the same space as us, that their product is not as strong and you can remove tons of expenses by not competing with the product. That's always something we can do, focus on for size.
Generally for me, it's more exciting to focus on what this company can produce on the organic side, on the self-serve side, on the illumin side. For that, the strategic part is more important on the M&A side.
Got it. Okay, thanks very much. Good one.
Thank you.
Thank you. There are no other questions. Tal, I will hand it back over to you for any final remarks.
Thank you, Zola. Thank you everyone for joining us. I'd like to again thank our investors and the Acuity family and everyone that's involved that made this journey possible. We're really excited about what we're doing with illumin, and specifically illumin self-serve. We believe that the best is yet to come. Thank you everyone, and have a great day.
This now concludes AcuityAds' Q3 financial results video conference call. You may now disconnect.