Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to Viant's third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. My name is Kelsey and I will be your operator today. Before I hand the call over to the Viant leadership team, I'd like to go over just a few housekeeping notes for the program. As a reminder, this webinar is being recorded, and after the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you plan to ask a question, please ensure you set your Zoom name to display your full name and firm. Now, if you'd like to ask a question during this time, please use the Raise Hand function located at the bottom of your screen. We thank you for your attendance today, and I will now turn things over to Sondra Magness with Viant Technology. Sondra, over to you.
Thank you, Kelsey. Good afternoon, and welcome to Viant Technology's third quarter 2022 financial results conference call. On the call today are Tim Vanderhook, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Chris Vanderhook, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, and Larry Madden, Chief Financial Officer. I'd like to remind you that we will make forward-looking statements on our call today that are based on assumptions and subject to future events, risks, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. We undertake no obligation to update these statements except as required by law. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements and our entire safe harbor statement, please refer to the news release issued today, as well as the risks and uncertainties described in our registration statement on Form 10-K and other filings with the SEC.
During today's call, we will also present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures, are included in the news release we issued today and in our filings with the SEC. I would now like to turn the call over to Tim Vanderhook, Chief Executive Officer of Viant. Tim?
Thank you, everyone, for joining us for our third quarter earnings call. We posted good operating results in the third quarter amidst the challenging environment. Total advertiser spend on our platform grew 19% year-over-year, ahead of market ad spend growth rates as we continue to gain share in the digital advertising market. In the third quarter, revenue was $48.8 million, a decrease of 4% versus the prior year period, and contribution ex-TAC was $32.1 million, a decrease of 6% versus the prior year period. Once again, advertiser spend on the platform was up significantly on a year-over-year basis, and existing customers continue to transition their spend from fixed price contracts to master services agreements, paying based on a percent of spend.
This dynamic creates a drag on revenue and contribution ex-TAC in the near term, but we expect that drag to subside in 2023. Our Adelphic DSP continues to resonate in the market as a leading self-service platform to plan, buy, and measure digital advertising across channels. We continue to expand customer relationships as many choose to consolidate their ad spend into our platform. Adelphic gives buyers the ability to programmatically access publisher inventory, saving them time and money. We allow buyers to target valued customers based on a variety of criteria and interests that are relevant to the customer. This results in a higher ROI for the buyer. Most importantly, we provide detailed reporting on campaign performance. This helps the buyer to assess the effectiveness of the campaign and make any necessary adjustments.
These benefits are even more necessary in challenging economic times as buyers look to boost the return on their advertising investments. Before turning the call over to Chris, I want to take a moment to address what we are seeing across the macroeconomic landscape. While the growth in advertising spend we saw on our platform in Q3 was strong, we saw a deceleration of advertising spend throughout the quarter, and it is continuing into Q4. Specifically, deceleration in bellwether categories like retail has been significant, and we will provide more detail on this slowing growth later in the call. Our company is nimble and able to quickly pivot as needed. This has been a crucial benefit during these uncertain times, allowing us to stay ahead of the curve and adapt as necessary.
We delivered a 3% reduction in non-GAAP operating expenses in the third quarter compared to the previous quarter, and we will continue to make changes to our product priorities so the company is in position to generate positive EBITDA in 2023. While we continue to adjust our costs to be more in line with the economic outlook, we continue to see strong long-term tailwinds. I would like to remind everyone of the three big tailwinds that have Viant poised for future growth. First, people still prefer to watch their favorite movies and TV shows through streaming applications. With large companies like Disney and Netflix releasing even more ad-supported content, we expect the growth rates for Connected TV to be significant in the future. Marketers will continue to shift more of their budgets away from traditional TV in favor of streaming.
The addressability of Connected TV enables marketers to achieve higher ROI than linear television. We see ourselves as a beneficiary of the more than $60 billion still to be shifted to programmatic over the next five years. Next up is emerging channels. We have always focused on emerging channels as they are the green shoots to large future tailwinds. Connected TV used to be an emerging channel for us, but it is now one of our largest channels. The next two big emerging channels are streaming audio and in-game advertising. Streaming audio has become the go-to method for listeners to consume music, books, and podcasts. There is a significant opportunity for marketers to take advantage of programmatic buying in this very fast-growing and important channel.
Although streaming audio only makes up 6% of total spend across our platform today, its addressability and measurability are almost identical to Connected TV. The growth rates of streaming audio over the past year show that it definitely has the potential to be a game changer in the industry as advertisers better understand how best to incorporate audio into their media plans. As for the in-game advertising opportunity, this sector of the industry is moving quickly with new ad formats and ways to place ads programmatically. Viant recently announced that we are the first DSP to offer our customers programmatic access to buy ads inside of Minecraft, reaching millions of highly engaged users who spend hours in this unique environment.
This entertainment form may be relatively new to programmatic advertising, but it has already gathered a large fan base, resulting in many potential future possibilities for the digital advertising industry. Last, our focus on building measurement and performance-based ad buying capabilities provides for long-term view on our strategy ahead remains as strong as ever. I'll now turn things over to Chris to discuss some key strategic updates across the business. Chris?
Thanks, Tim. In the third quarter, we continued to expand our capabilities and partnerships, bringing more value to our customers while building out one of the leading self-service platforms on the market today. We continue to see marketers and their agencies seeking independent omni-channel DSP that is positioned as the DSP with the strongest measurement capabilities. A point of differentiation that brings strong tailwinds of untapped spending behind it. Over the last year, we have seen strong new customer wins, with the number of active customers increasing 10% year-over-year. Additionally, spend per active customer increased 18% over the same period. As advertisers experience strong campaign performance, they continue to consolidate their spending with Viant across all channels. The vast majority of Viant customers spend through two or more channels, with an increasing number spending across more than three channels.
In Q3, we saw strong year-over-year growth in advertiser spend across our largest channels. Connected TV growth accelerated from 2% in Q2 to 13% in Q3, and audio grew 51%. Audio now represents 6% of total advertiser spend and is now on a growth trajectory to what we saw similar to a few years ago with Connected TV. We also saw strong growth of 25% across mobile and desktop. The fact that we are omni-channel, meaning Connected TV, desktop, mobile, audio, digital out-of-home, and in-game, is a major benefit to advertisers given the uncertainty in the economy. It means that we can give them greater flexibility to shift budgets that drive the highest ROI, a benefit that is not present in many walled gardens.
Open Web programmatic platforms that operate across all channels will be the beneficiaries of the spending fallout from walled gardens. I'd also like to comment on the macro environment with respect to spending on our platform. We saw strong growth in the third quarter in categories such as travel and financial services. We recorded record growth in political advertising spend in Q3, although I would caveat that by saying this category represents a small percentage of overall advertiser spend on our platform, but gives us confidence to continue to focus on growing this category in future periods. Although we had strong year-over-year growth in spend of 19% in the quarter, we did experience a slowdown in certain verticals.
We continue to see lower than normal spending in verticals like automotive and CPG, but we also saw our fastest-growing category, retail, begin to show signs of softness in Q3 that is now extending into Q4. Amid the backdrop of the slowdown in spending, we have been staying close to our customers. We are continuing to see greater focus by clients around measurement, which ultimately means they want performance-based results from their ad spending. These factors are narrowing our product roadmap focus as we move into next year. One of our biggest product priorities will be to continue our industry-leading work in measurement. A substantial number of our customers rely on our unique measurement capabilities to drive campaign performance. As performance-based buying increases throughout a recession, our platform leadership and measurement will allow us to consolidate more spend.
As campaign performance continues to be a top priority for advertisers, we continue to invest in products utilizing machine learning and artificial intelligence that further improve campaign performance in an automated fashion. Our clients are seeing a lot of success in Adelphic with these products. This will not only drive more spending on our software, but it will save our customers time and money. I've talked previously about our focus on building automation within our software as a core differentiator, and this area is an important component of that. On the partnership front, we recently announced an integration with Snowflake that will allow any Snowflake customer to match their customer data with our Household ID. Many advertisers, data companies, and content owners are hosting their data with Snowflake.
As less data is available in the industry, interoperability with companies like Snowflake will allow for content owners to easily authenticate their users to allow for addressable advertising to be measured. This will be a big win for content owners and advertisers as the industry moves towards responsibly delivering addressable advertising while eliminating reliance on Apple and Google. Lastly, I'm extremely proud of the industry-wide recognition of our category leadership. We're once again named as the leader in demand side platforms by G2 in their fall 2022 grid report. Additionally, this quarter, G2 also recognized Viant as a leader in their enterprise grid report for cross-channel advertising. This third-party validation based on the strength of our self-service platform for omnichannel advertising stems directly from the value we provide to customers.
The platform advances we are focused on today will help set us up as we move forward for sustainable long-term growth and ongoing market share gains. We are an independent buy-side platform that is well-positioned in the market with a fully self-service solution, industry-leading integrations across all channels, and a leading measurement offering. Let me now turn things over to our CFO, Larry Madden, to discuss our financials. Larry?
Thanks, Chris, and thank you everyone for joining us today. Before I begin, I'd like to remind everyone that we have posted a presentation to our investor relations website with supplemental financial information to accompany today's presentation. As Tim mentioned, we are pleased with the level of advertiser spend across our platform in Q3, especially considering the current state of the economy. Advertiser spend across our platform increased 19% in the quarter over the prior year period, reflecting continued market share gains. Both revenue and EBITDA were within our guidance for the quarter. This afternoon, I will be discussing some of the highlights of our Q3 performance, the key financial and operational drivers during the quarter, and our current expectations for Q4.
In terms of top-line metrics for the third quarter, as I said, advertiser spend across our platform increased 19% over the prior year period and 1% over the prior quarter. On a year-to-date basis through September, advertiser spend has increased 30% from the prior year. In the third quarter, revenue was $48.8 million, a decrease of 4% versus the prior year and 5% versus the prior quarter. Contribution ex-TAC was $32.1 million, a decrease of 6% versus the prior year period and an increase of 1% over the prior quarter. As a reminder, revenue from our percent-of-spend pricing option is recorded after deducting traffic acquisition costs or TAC, whereas fixed price revenue is recorded before deducting TAC.
Therefore, as the percentage of spend pricing option continues to make up a larger part of our advertiser spend mix relative to the prior year period, we will have a near-term drag on our revenue and contribution ex-TAC growth rates. While the impact of this mix shift has negatively impacted revenue and contribution ex-TAC growth rates in 2022 relative to advertiser spend growth rates, we have seen such growth rates begin to converge over the last two quarters, and we expect that trend to continue to improve as we move forward and the impact of the mix shift becomes less significant. As we mentioned on our last earnings call, beginning mid Q2, some customers began reducing their normal spending levels due to the adverse macroeconomic environment. This trend continued throughout Q3 with year-over-year growth rates decelerating throughout the quarter.
The pullback has been especially pronounced across our fixed price pricing option, which tends to be less resilient during challenging macroeconomic times. Conversely, our percent-of-spend pricing option has demonstrated much greater resiliency as evidenced by our customers continuing to adopt and increase their spend using this pricing option. The growth in spend on the platform in 2022 continues to be driven by new and existing customers expanding their use of our platform through our percent-of-spend pricing option. Increasing customer adoption of our percent-of-spend pricing option has always been our goal as we believe it creates a deeper relationship with our customers and provides for more consistent, predictable, long-term value creation. We believe that the lifetime value of a customer using our percent-of-spend pricing option is significantly greater than that of a fixed price customer.
As percent-of-spend customers ramp spend over time, they consolidate budgets on our platform, leading to higher retention rates. In Q3, customers using our percent-of-spend pricing option on average nearly 3 x that of customers using our fixed price pricing option. non-GAAP operating expenses, which is defined as the difference between contribution ex-TAC and EBITDA, totaled $33.9 million in the quarter, representing a year-over-year increase of 23% and a quarter-over-quarter decrease of 3%. The year-over-year increase is the result of investments we made over the last 18 months to enhance our product capabilities and expand our sales and technology teams. We have been investing to scale the business, accelerate growth and drive market share gains. However, as Tim discussed, given worsening macroeconomic conditions, we significantly slowed the pace of investment in Q3 and reduced non-GAAP operating expenses in the quarter by 3% versus Q2.
For the quarter, we generated adjusted EBITDA of -$1.8 million, which was in line with our expectations. For the quarter, our non-GAAP net loss, which excludes stock-based compensation, totaled -$4.4 million and non-GAAP loss per diluted share of Class A common stock was -$0.06 for the quarter. From a liquidity perspective, we ended the quarter with $200 million in cash, $229 million of positive working capital and no debt. With that, I'll now turn to our guidance for Q4. Many of our advertisers are navigating a challenging environment with higher inflation and weakening consumer demand, which creates a volatile demand environment. Given this uncertainty, we believe there could be a wider range of outcomes for Q4, which is reflected in our guidance.
The pullback in advertiser spend we experienced in Q3 due to the worsening macroeconomic climate is continuing in Q4. Since June, we have seen year-over-year growth rates in advertiser spend decelerate each month, with spend across our fixed price pricing option actually declining over that period. As I said, fixed price tends to be less resilient during adverse macroeconomic times as compared to percent of spend. Additionally, Q4 is being negatively impacted by a challenging fixed price comp in Q4 of last year. In Q4 of 2021, we did exceptionally well in the jobs and employment customer vertical across fixed price. These customers spent significantly to close out 2021 in an effort to capitalize on the heightened demand for labor.
In 2022, customers across this vertical have significantly reduced spending across the board as the labor market has cooled, with many companies either freezing hiring or announcing layoffs. As Chris mentioned, growth across our largest customer vertical, retail, also slowed significantly in Q3 as a result of the challenging macroeconomic environment. That trend has continued into Q4, and we now expect spend across our retail vertical to decline in Q4. Based on these factors, we expect advertiser spend to decline in Q4 between 11% and 20% year-over-year. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, we expect advertiser spend to increase between 1% and 11% over Q3 levels, which is well below the normal seasonal uptick we typically see in Q4. For Q4, we expect revenue in the range of $52 million-$57 million, which represents a year-over-year decline of 31%-37%.
The pronounced decline in revenue is due to expected declines across our fixed price pricing option due to the factors discussed, partially offset by continued growth across our percent of spend pricing option. The expected year-over-year decline in revenue across our jobs and employment customer vertical is driving about half of the total expected revenue decline at the midpoint of our guidance for Q4. The good news is that we do not expect potential continued weakness across jobs and employment vertical to have a material impact on 2023, as spend throughout 2022 across this vertical was de minimis due to the challenges in the labor market. Contribution ex-TAC is expected to be in the range of $32 million to $35.5 million for Q4, which represents a year-over-year decline of 27%-34%. Importantly, in Q4, Contribution ex-TAC is expected to decline less than revenue.
This is being driven by the increased mix of spend across the percent of spend model versus fixed price versus the prior year. This is a trend we expect to continue going forward as fixed price becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of total spend. In Q4, we also expect advertiser spend growth rates and contribution ex-TAC growth rates to further converge as fixed price continues to represent a smaller share of the total mix. Another trend we expect to continue as we move into 2023. In terms of non-GAAP operating expenses for Q4, we now expect a range of $33.5 million-$34.5 million, which represents a year-over-year increase of 8%-11%, and a quarter-over-quarter change of -1% to +2%.
As we mentioned, given the ongoing challenges that the economy may pose, we are positioned to deliver positive EBITDA for the year. Finally, we expect EBITDA in the range of -$1.5 million to $1 million in Q4. In closing, while inflation, supply chain shortages, and higher interest rates, among other factors, are contributing to a difficult market and certainly represent a near-term headwind, we remain confident in our ability to deliver long-term top line growth and EBITDA expansion. We believe our points of differentiation will enable us to successfully capitalize on the market opportunity in front of us. We are confident that our strong balance sheet and disciplined cost management during these challenging times will enable us to weather this economic storm and come out the other side even stronger. That concludes our prepared remarks today.
Great. Thank you so much, Larry.
With that, I will now turn it back over to the operator to open the video for questions.
Please use the Raise Your Hand feature located at the bottom of your screen to indicate that you do have a question. Our first question will come from Laura Martin with Needham & Company. Laura, please go ahead. Laura, you are currently muted. If you'll go ahead and
Oh.
Yeah.
There you go. I got it. Okay. Sorry.
No problem.
Technology. I'm still working on my phone. Okay, I got two. The first one is, one of the great things about your ID tracking has been a Household ID. One of the things we're hearing from D.C. is that what the regulators may go after next is ISP privacy. Would that affect your Household ID or is your Household ID not dependent on ISP data in the home?
Our Household ID is not dependent on ISP data in the home, so I don't believe it would have any impact.
Fantastic answer. Okay, great. The other thing is, I just wanna make sure I understand the guidance. We're gonna go from 19% growth in Q3 to negative eleven to negative.
That's correct.
What was the cause for the 90 day period?
Well, as Larry mentioned, we've seen continual deceleration continue to worsen. I think that retail spending, we are expecting to decelerate.
You guys are canceling their ad campaigns, is what that means for fourth quarter?
Yeah. I think you're just not seeing the holiday, you know, the bump in holiday spending that you always see. You can see, you know, it. We're just not really seeing it into the fourth quarter. Predominantly in retail, that's the big drag, and that's where we've been doing extremely well. Sort of been our fastest growing category. Yeah, we just really haven't seen a lot of it show up in the fourth quarter.
Okay. Thanks, guys.
One point on that, just to be clear, it's not that we lost any of those customers or anything like that. We just haven't seen the increase in spending.
I would add one thing as well. I mean, we're seeing it more on the fixed price side of the business. Percentage of spend side continues to grow. We expect it to grow in Q4. We expect it to grow at faster than the market, and we expect that to continue going forward. Now, percentage of spend is by far the majority of our spend, but the impact to fixed price is particularly negative on the revenue growth and the ex-TAC growth.
Thank you.
Thanks, Laura.
We'll move on to Andrew Boone with JMP.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to touch on that last point in terms of thinking about holding on to these clients through the downturn. Can you guys talk about what you're doing there to just make sure that whether this is six months, a year, you know, a few weeks, that they're there on the other side of this?
Yeah. The first thing I would say is that we're certainly seeing a greater focus, as I spoke about earlier, around performance-based campaigns as opposed to, you know, more brand-based campaigns. We see a shift going on there. We think we excel there. And I know that if I specifically think within retail, but this really reaches more broadly than just retail. We're doing really well there. What I'll say, though, is how long it lasts. You know, I can't predict. Most of this is, you know, nearly all of this is macro, so I can't predict when that lets up.
What I'll say is about an open web platform that is in all these channels or is omnichannel like we are. It gives them the optionality to continue to shift their spending with the same company and the same software to get the highest ROI. Why is that important? Single channel companies, so like some of the walled gardens are strictly mobile app. If they stop performing in that mobile app or particular operating system, they pull the budget. Our system is set up, and you're seeing it when I talk about the customers are buying in three or more channels, which is incredible, and it shows you how they can easily shift spends. The platform does that in an automated way for them to reach whatever ROI goals that they have. I'm not worried about losing these customers at all.
I don't think that's a factor. I would say demand in consumer.
Yeah. Go to the deck. Yeah. How's it going? In terms of hardening the platform more clients.
Yeah. Well, look, we invested in our sales force substantially, leading up to this point, and I think they're out, pounding the pavement to find the different categories of advertisers that are looking for programmatic advertising or a demand-side platform that's out there. Most are currently utilizing a DSP, and we're having active conversations with them regularly. I think in terms of diversification, I know or revenue concentration, Larry, do we have any concentration?
No, not at all. Retail still is our largest, even though it is declining at this point. We group our verticals pretty broadly. There's no one vertical that's more than 17% of our total spend.
What I will say is in terms of diversification, Andrew. I'm just reading in a question a little bit. On the jobs and employment, as Larry stated, there's no material impact on that on us on a go-forward basis. There was a big heavy up in that category towards the end of last year. That category has largely dried up, you know, understandably. Outside of that, I will say that we've constantly broke a lot of new categories. Every few years, there's a new category of advertising that pops up or becomes, you know, large. You know, I'll give you an example, like in the casino and online gaming space. We've done extremely well there.
That was a category that largely didn't exist a few years ago. We mobilized pretty quickly around that. As typical recessions go, some categories are down and new ones pop up, and we're usually pretty quick to attack those.
One more, and then I will pass it on. You guys highlighted EBITDA in 2023. Clearly, you've made significant investments in the sales force over the last kind of year. Can you just talk about your priorities in terms of investments that you guys wanna maintain or continue to focus on as we think about EBITDA profitability for 2023?
Yeah.
Thanks so much.
I think we're gonna remain opportunistic around, you know, our priorities will be around product and engineering. Although, you know, what I will say is we're not gonna spend like crazy there. We're gonna be measured, but we know that there's great talent in the market, and it is a great opportunity to pick up that talent. We have a great product roadmap as well that we're really confident in. Just overall, what we will say is that we're gonna be measured around our cost next year. Regardless of what happens in the economy, we're gonna set up going into the year that we'll deliver positive EBITDA in 2023.
Thanks, guys.
As a reminder to the audience, please use the Raise Hand feature located at the bottom of your screen to indicate you have a question. We will now hear from Maria Ripps with Canaccord Genuity.
Hi, Maria.
Yep. Thank you so much for taking my question. I just wanted to extend on the last question around verticals, and my apologies if this was already covered. We're hearing about very early signs of recovery in the auto vertical. Is that something that you are sort of seeing on your end, and could this be sort of an area of upside over the next couple of quarters?
Well, on automotive.
I can
Go ahead, Larry.
I was gonna say, I can take that. That as you know, we've talked about it a lot, that vertical has been down probably eight quarters at this point. It represents a relatively small percentage of the total. But we are actually seeing signs in Q4, interestingly enough, of that starting to turn to the positive.
Great. Thank you so much. That's all I have.
We'll now hear from Andrew Marok with Raymond James.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions. You've spoken towards this point, I think, a little bit previously in the Q&A session, but just to the extent that the reduced spend outlook is the result of companies either shutting down ad spend or pulling back on ad spend more broadly or just kind of consolidating the number of partners that they're working with. Just trying to think of, you know, the differences between those two scenarios and how easy it would be to reacquire that business once either spend or the relationships came back.
Yeah. That's a good question. Thanks, Andrew. No, I don't. In our case, it's not that we've lost those customers or they've shut down, you know, spending entirely with the exception what I would say of this jobs vertical. Again, I don't. We haven't lost those customers. It's just due to the environment that they have really nosedived a lot of the spend there. What I will say is, yes, to your point, we're fully confident we still have those clients. They're still in our software. And it's more of a deceleration of spend, but we're fully confident that when that spend comes back, it will be in our software.
Yeah. Just to remind everyone, this is the benefit of programmatic advertising. It's the flexibility to pause budgets when your business needs to pause budgets, but programmatic advertising is the first to turn back on as soon as they're ready to reaccelerate. We've seen this cycle many, many times, and I'm sure this is just a lull while they're fixing their own business, and the programmatic advertising will be the first button that they push to turn back on.
Got it. Thank you. One more, if I could. Reading through the slide deck, it looks like you're reiterating your intentions for $500 million in revenue by 2025 and 35% EBITDA margins. I guess in light of the tough conditions now, and assuming that maybe lasts into early 2023, can you kind of just draw that line for us and how the thinking around the trajectory of that has changed? Thank you.
Yeah. I mean, based on when we look at our current customers, the cohorts and the expected growth with expected new customer acquisition, I think where that could go awry if new customer acquisition has a hiccup in the first half of 2023, maybe in the outer cohorts. As we see it, though, we believe we have the customers on the platform, and the scaling of those cohorts is continuing as planned. We talked about the percent of spend business model still doing very well, and we're winning customers, and they're consolidating more spend. I don't see any need that puts risk to that 2025 number in my mind. Chris, anything else?
That's good.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you.
Great. How about Jason Kreyer has the next question.
Okay. Sorry about that. Wanna talk about the cadence of Q3 to Q4 just from a channel perspective. You highlighted in Q3 the re-acceleration of CTV and audio. As you go into Q4, are you still seeing?
Yeah. I mean, we didn't give any guide around that. Hi, Jason. I'd have to get back to you on those splits. I mean, I think what we're seeing is that really we are seeing an uptick. If you look at our guide, we are seeing an uptick from Q3 overall, but I would expect it to be largely consistent with what we saw in Q3. I don't have a split for you right now on where we are in the quarter. Our guide, you know, admittedly was a little bit wider than we normally would give. Part of that is just we're seeing such a late planning cycle, very similar to coming out of COVID.
There was a real late planning cycle coming out of COVID, really for the balance of 2020. We're seeing that again. We still think that. I know speaking with some clients, they're still, you know, budgeting up in the air even for December, which typically you don't see. It's already largely planned by this point. Tough for me to give you a read on that, but just off the top, I would say I would expect it to be largely consistent.
Broadly, we've seen brand advertising budgets, you know, give way to performance advertising budgets, and I think that's the overarching shift that most advertisers have right now. Larry?
I was just gonna get a little bit more specific. It is in fact kind of consistent across the channels with Q4 growth, albeit a relatively small percentage of the total.
Larry, maybe stick with you just on the pricing models. You know, when a customer that 60 model to convert them or 2% spend or is that on the quarter?
Yeah. I think it's more kind of reducing those budgets and/or pausing some of those budgets as some mention. We're always pushing clients. It really depends where they are in their kind of programmatic life cycle in terms of whether they have the trading capabilities, et cetera, advise clients about converting. That doesn't change. We will keep doing that in tough times.
Hear from Chris Kuntarich.
Hi. Can you hear me okay?
Yeah.
Chris Kuntarich. Just trying to understand the details behind the down 20% in 4Q. Would it be in a negative spend than October? Just curious how it would be.
Larry, do you wanna take that?
Yeah. I mean, firstly, in terms of kind of where we are, obviously over five months, each month. We're seeing that in November, then November is going down a bit more than October went down. As I said, the impact of that is certainly an uncertainty out there. We're just being pragmatic in terms of the quarter, just to, you know, have a good sense of what's gonna happen. But
And the wider made sense. Kind of tier two, tier three type of verticals, the long tail for you that you're seeing in a couple of these verticals: retail, jobs, travel.
Retail.
Yes.
Oh, I just lost my train of thought.
If that makes sense.
Well, certainly.
Just maybe stepping back to just thinking about 2023 about like scenarios for you to return to double-digit type margins for next year. What would you
I think as we look at, I would just say what we were thinking at the start of the year, and we kind of will stay ahead of the curve. In terms of just overall operating expenses, they are very much under management's control. There's not a thing that we feel like we have to keep spending on to be able to achieve growth in the future. It's more about just managing through this, you know, mid- to near-term hiccup.
That does conclude our question session for today.
That's it. Thanks for joining the call. We'll see you next year.
Great. Thank you so much, Chris Vanderhook. Everyone, we thank you so much for joining us today. Again, this does conclude today's earnings call. We thank you all for your participation and look forward to seeing you next earnings. Happy holidays, everyone.