All right, why don't we go ahead and get started? I know people are still filing in since it's the first session of the morning, but welcome again to the Raymond James 45th Annual Institutional Investors Conference. We're thrilled to have with us today Perion Network, and presenting for a short presentation will be Chief Financial Officer Maoz Sigron. After that, we will go through a little Q&A. So Maoz, over to you.
Thank you, Andrew. Good morning to all of you. Happy to be here today. My name, as Andrew says, is Maoz. I am Perion's CFO from 2018. Joined the company in 2017, so know the company very well. We'll start with the presentation, and then we will go with the Q&A. Let's first start with who we are and what we are doing. We are actually connecting between advertisers and consumers with advanced technology, with data and AI capabilities. Advertising is a challenging market, and technology is exactly the solution. We have the right technology in order to help advertisers to get exactly what they need and the consumer to get also what they need. I will share more data during the presentation. We have just a great view about what we are doing. We have assets on the demand and on the supply side.
We are playing on both sides. Here you can see the journey of someone that starts the day at the morning (this is a good day because it starts at 7:00 A.M.) and with a coffee, and they end the day at 7:00 P.M. at home. Again, as I said before, this is a great day when you start the day and when you end the day. The touchpoint here over the day is the element that is critical. We are all over the places. We can take the consumer from morning to evening with different touchpoints in order to make sure that the advertiser gets exactly what they need. With our ability to target and with the data that we have, we can be very accurate with the way we are running our campaign. So we ended the quarter with, let's start with the CTV.
The CTV grew by 56% year-over-year, amazing number. We have here a campaign that I will, again, the presentation is available. You can see the campaign. I don't want to spend all our time for the video that are part of the presentation. CTV is growing, growing, growing fast. Part of the unique solution we have with the CTV is first the fact that we are charging more than $30 CPM for the CTV, which allows us to be very selective. First, with the supply, we have unique supply. We can be very selective. Second, we have the data. We know to target very good, as I said before. We have a creative system and platform that knows to create endless permutation for a specific campaign based on the weather, based on the location, based on what exactly the advertisers are looking for.
We are combining all our ability, all the things together. This is part of the reason why you see the CTV business growing very fast. Moving also, another example, another great example of the CTV is the Pause Ads. This is another great example of how we are adjusting ourselves, how we are using technology in order to be very selective with the campaign that we are running. Here we have. It's called, as I said before, Pause Ads, that when you are actually looking on something, a series or movie, and you pause, then there is now a time that you're in front of the TV, and you have actually a moment when you can serve ads. This is exactly what we are doing here with the QR Code.
We can actually also move people from awareness, what we're calling this is top of the funnel, to the bottom of the funnel, which is the performance. And if you are scanning the code here, you can actually get into the cart, and you can order or you can find exactly what you are looking for. The partnership here with DirecTV is a great example of combination between supply source and technology and with the demand access as we have. Part of what we did over the last few years is our ability to identify the area where there is a unique opportunity. Retail, as you know, is a huge market. Their main business and their main advantage is not technology.
Part of what we did together with Kroger and Albertsons during the last two years is to make sure that we are actually taking all the technology capabilities we have, using their data, offline and online data, combining together and actually getting to a great result. You can see the result of the retail: 114% year-over-year growth in 2023. The original plan was $30 million in 2023. We ended with $50 million in 2023. This is amazing. And the reason for that is just our ability to take all the assets that we have, all the capabilities, and to translate into opportunity. You can see the market that is going fast. 2024, we're talking about almost $60 billion. So this is a huge market and more to come.
And this is something that we started in 2021, growing very fast and part of our growth drivers for the next few years. Another great example of innovation and AI is the Wave. We launched the Wave in the last few months. This is something that—let's want that you will hear it. Let me try to do it. Okay. So unfortunately, this is not working here, but you can see it in the presentation. But what you see here is actually a campaign that we did with Pep Boys. The campaign is a campaign that we did that is a partnership with Spotify and others. And the idea here is that this is a dynamic audio that, with the AI, it's actually you listen to the audio, and it sounds like a person, but this is not a person.
This is a machine that knows to generate the right one per: location, per weather, per the content, and other segmentation that we are adding to our model. This is a great example of how we are taking the capabilities that we have and translating into a business opportunity. This is not yet significant. You can see here the campaign result: 117% incremental sales lift. This is 2.4 visits rate lift when we are doing apples to apples. Again, taking technology and translating to a business opportunity. Although this is just the beginning, but also here we have a great opportunity. I will not take the time for this one. The last one that I want to focus on with the use case that I want to share with you is the digital out-of-home. We acquired Hivestack at the beginning of December last year, December 2023.
We here signed a deal with one of the most important supply sources in Brazil, Eletromidia, with more than 60,000 screens all over the country. This is a great supply source. Together, we have another footprint in South America, in addition to what we already have in the US and Canada and APAC and EMEA. This is very much go with our retail strategy because digital out-of-home is something that is very much helping us with the retail solution. The way to drive people to store, to the retail stores, is the digital out-of-home. This is a great opportunity for us for synergy. We will, I believe, talk about this also more later. But this is something that is relatively new. We started with the digital out-of-home initiative at the beginning of 2023 to explore, to see that there is something here that is really interesting.
We are definitely here with the M&A that we did and more to come with geo-expansion and other synergy that we have with the other assets that we have. We see here also a huge potential. This is a campaign that Hivestack did with Helena Rubinstein. This is maybe let me let's try to run the video. Great.
Marketers face challenges when planning, executing, and evaluating online-to-offline campaigns that are consistent and measurable. Feeling the need to bridge this gap, Helena Rubinstein strategically leveraged programmatic decision-making.
So we have here a campaign of digital out-of-home in this case that we are actually taking the creative, taking all the information, and translating into in this case, this is a local, but in most of the cases, this is a global campaign that you can run all over the places because we have access to supply all over the place. Once we have this kind of campaigns that are in this case, as I said before, is a local, but it immediately can translate to a global, we can take our ability and translate to amazing results. You can see the uplift in foot traffic that this is 3 times, and the uplift in new customer recruitment of 231%.
So from the advertiser point of view, the connection between the investment that he is doing to the result of the campaign is very clear, and there is no question. We are not trying to be all over. We are very much focusing on the journey of the consumer. Where are you? In the morning, you are with your mobile. After that, you are going to your desktop. After that, you are moving to your tablet for a meeting, and then you're moving out to a meeting, and then you have the screens out there. We are trying to make sure that when you are moving all the day, we can make sure that we're getting your attention and we are delivering the campaign. So this is another example. I will run here relatively quickly just to the maybe and then we will move to the questions.
So we are starting the year with a guidance that on a pro forma basis, it's 10% on the revenue and the EBITDA. When we talk about reported, the revenue is 17% year-over-year, and the EBITDA is 6% year-over-year. This is actually the first year that Hivestack is part of our numbers. And this is the acquisition, as I said before, was at the end of the year. So 2024, we have Hivestack in full force. And this is a transition year to do the implementation, to do the integration with the other assets that we have. And we're definitely expecting a very good year and very happy with this acquisition and the combination of Perion and the other assets that we have.
All right. Great. Thank you, Maoz. So that is the overview of the company. For those of you who aren't familiar maybe with Perion's reporting structure, the revenue lines are divided into search and everything else. What you saw in the presentation was largely the everything else bucket, the kind of display and other advertising segment. Maoz, we do still get a lot of questions from investors on the search business. It's about 40% of revenue. Can you give us kind of a status update on your relationship with Microsoft Bing and where we are in terms of the current deal, how important that agreement is, and thoughts on potential renewals?
Okay. Thank you for that. So yes, as we said and as Andrew said, 40%-45% from our business is search. If I need to give you an example, this is exactly what Apple did with Google. Actually, as you know, the default search engine we have on our iPhone is Google, Google paying billions of dollars every year, more than $20 billion, in order to be part of it and to be there. And this is exactly what we are doing with Microsoft Bing. We are distributing Microsoft Bing search engine, which is in the last, let's say, year exactly, once they announced the partnership and the investment with OpenAI, this is part of their product and part of the reason why Microsoft Bing became more popular. And this is part of the great result we have.
We ended the quarter with 33% year-over-year on the revenue. This is growing very fast, and we are very happy with the result. About the relationship with Microsoft Bing, we are working with Microsoft Bing from 2010. This is almost 15 years. We know them very well. They know us very well. We are very happy with the relationship. We feel very comfortable with the next negotiation that's going to start around, let's say, June or July. As you can see from the numbers that I just shared and the pacing of this business, we are going fast, and we have a better position for the negotiation. There is no rush. We will get to the point when we will need to start to negotiate. I believe that, as it was in the last cases, it will renew around November, December.
We don't see any reason it will not renew, and we are very happy with their partnership. Part of the advantage with having and doing business with Microsoft Advertising, which is not only Microsoft Bing, is to have access to all Bing and all Microsoft Advertising. There are many opportunities that are under discussion, and we'll see a huge potential also from this partnership. Another maybe important note here is that we are not working only with Microsoft Bing. We are working also with some others in order to explore and find the new opportunities for the search business. But this is definitely a very healthy business, and we are very happy with the results.
Tal Jacobson, newly the CEO, he was previously the head of the search unit. I would imagine that's a good person to have in the CEO seat as you're entering this renewal cycle.
Definitely. Tal joined in 2018, and he knows the search business very well. As we said, he was the one that was responsible for the success of the last renewal that was for four years with better terms. He was the one that was responsible for the growth, for the amazing growth that we did in the search. And he is the one that, together with his team, is going to lead the renewal process that's going to start, as I said before, the middle of the year.
Great. And I'd like to go back to that slide or talk about that slide where you showed the cross-consumer journey from 7:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. Well, first off, I wish my days would end at 7:00 P.M. But to the extent.
I agree with you.
I mean, you just have an opportunity to show me more ads than. Can you talk a little bit about, given that you have such broad advertising format coverage, how you can maybe switch between formats based on the dynamics of the market to achieve your kind of highest ROI for your advertising clients?
We have an amazing team that builds a platform that is, in a way, agnostic to the format that we are running. We know how to identify the opportunities, and the ability to scale in a minute is very much our ability to be almost all over. This is the example, as I said before, with the audio and another example. Part of what is unique with Perion is that we are not trying to be DSP. We are not trying to be SSP. We are trying to be the technology at the middle that will connect the dots between the demand and the supply and, with advanced technology, be able to give the advertiser exactly what we need because the campaign is not ending with a CTV. The campaign is not ending with digital out-of-home.
Any other example that I will give you, this is just one touchpoint. But if you want to close the loop and really to move people to store or to move people to purchase something, at the end of the day, you need to see the full picture and the journey over the day. This is exactly what we are showing you.
I think you touched on that a bit in your 4Q results presentation where maybe online video was a little bit down, but CTV, retail media, quite strong. We've seen a lot of industry growth in those two latter segments. I think, is that just kind of indicative of the ways that you can shift around that spend in order to achieve those objectives?
Yes. This is a great point, I think, for the discussion. Our ability to identify the opportunities is definitely part of the shift that we did at the beginning of the third quarter from video to display. We found video less attractive for the advertiser and also from a margin point of view. And we just moved part of the spend to display units. And this is part of our technology and part of our ability to identify the opportunity and to move the dollars where it's really first, make money, and second, definitely answer the advertiser needs.
Great. Would love to touch on CTV. Obviously, you gave a little overview in the presentation of some of the things that you've been working on. But now everybody in the digital ad ecosystem is trying to play in the CTV environment. What are some of the key differentiators that Perion has? I saw the pause ad format, the interactive CTV format that you've talked about in the past. But what really sets Perion apart in what's becoming an increasingly crowded ecosystem?
So I think the CTV is really. We can. I'm very happy with the numbers. But again, in my view, tomorrow, it can be something else. And we see the reason why CTV is so attractive and working and growing is related to a bigger trend of shift of budget from linear to connected TV, which is something that we noticed as others a few years ago. And if you have all what you need, you can benefit definitely from this trend. The advantage or the asset that we bring to the table is, first, our technology that knows how to take data and AI and to translate into endless permutation for campaigns. So this is not only important to run CTV. There are many companies that are doing CTV. The question is, what are you doing with the CTV?
The question is, why are we charging more than $30 for CTV? The reason for that is our ability to be very accurate with our targeting, with our ability to get exactly to the audience that we need. We are not saving money. As we are charging, as I said before, a lot, we have the money to spend. We can invest in supply, and this is important, in lucrative supply. Second, we have the ability to create creative that is very much relevant for the audience and to be dynamic and to share with women something that is not exactly the same as men. And we can change the ads, perr the location, and per the weather. So we're taking the format. The format is just the base. This is just, let's say, the start point.
But if you are flexible and your technology is robust, you can do much more than that. And this is exactly what we are doing. But again, in my view, CTV is growing. You can see the numbers. It's growing more than 20% when we're talking about the market. And it will keep and maybe more than that in the year to come. But this is more than that. This is behind the scenes and our ability to be very accurate with the way how we are running this campaign.
Great. And then on retail media, kind of the other hot space in digital advertising, which you spoke about during the presentation, can you talk about how you are working with retailers to help them activate their data? That's the key unlock of retail media, right? They have all this shopper data, in many cases, logged-in users as a part of rewards or loyalty program. Where are you really driving the value for the retailers?
Thank you for that. By the way, it all started with Amazon that, at some point, understood that they have data that nobody has. And they can leverage this data to build all their advertising business, which is today a significant part of their business. And this is exactly what happened to the retail. They understand that they have the data. They have the membership club data. They have the loyalty. They have everything about us. They know exactly what we are buying. They know what we're doing online, and they know exactly what we're doing offline. But they don't have the technology. They have all what they need, right, for the traditional business, but what they are doing next, how they are really growing their business, and what is the new opportunity for them as well. They cannot do it with Amazon with a clear reason.
They are looking for a tech solution. We started this journey with Albertsons, with a partnership and with a test case. Now we're doing it also with Kroger. We and they are very happy with the result. We actually use all our capabilities from our creative capabilities, our data that we have from the other campaigns that we are running, our supply access all over the places, including out of the U.S. We are, together with them, taking the data, the offline and the online data, and knowing how to run the campaign very accurately to make sure that if you are a father or a mother or a boy, you will not get campaigns that are not effective. We want to make sure that if I am having ads, this is a relevant one and relevant for you.
Then this is not a surprise why you're clicking more on the ads, why you are responding to the ads, because this is relevant for you. This is not kind of a spray-and-pray approach. This is not our approach. This is something that they are very happy with. We see here a huge potential. We started with them. Today, we are not sharing the number of retail customers, but I can tell you that it is a significant number. We are doing it more and more and very happy with the results.
Spray and pray is how I play Call of Duty. It's not for advertising. So you've announced plans to get deeper into those AI-powered capabilities. And Wave, the digital audio format, was kind of exemplary of that. I have heard the advertisements coming from Wave. You can't tell the difference. It is a very natural voice, natural rhythm kind of ad format. But what has been that advertiser reception to Wave so far in early days? And how has that informed your go-forward product development path for other AI products?
First, I really recommend to all of you take 1 minute. Just go to this slide. You will not believe how real it is. But this is not real. This is, I think, technology. It's a bit scary, right, to all of us. But this is the case. This is technology. This is the power of technology, the ability to use the technology in order to make campaigns that are more scalable. Easily, we can do endless permutation, 1,000, 10,000, 1,000,000, depending on geographic and whatever, right, or channels or content. Or if this is Spotify One, if this is other, maybe something else. For the advertiser, this is like a gift, right, because normally, you need to pay maybe to people here in the U.S., I don't know, let's say, $50,000-$60,000, maybe in other places, lower than that.
But this is very technical and very annoying. And it's not scale, right? You need to have humans that will record again and again, one after one. This is not effective. This is not how you scale business. This is not how you're building the future. And this is exactly the future, to be able, with a machine, to create endless permutation. Sorry. And for the advertiser, this is exactly what they are looking for. They are looking for innovation. They are looking for something that is different. They are also exhausted from all the things that are actually the same and not giving any real result. So this is definitely something that we are very proud of. And the AI is something that we are not, I think that, relatively to a company around our space, we are using AI for the technology, for the core of the technology.
We are not selling AI. We are not an AI company. But our technology, AI, embedded in this. And the reason for that is because data is all. And this is something that connects directly to the AI and the ability to create this kind of wonderful campaign.
Great. Then I wanted to touch quickly on the Hivestack acquisition, getting into the digital out-of-home format. Those digital billboards and placards and things like that. How have you been able to leverage the other components of your platform to expand the Hivestack business, keeping in mind, of course, that it's early days? And how do you see the potential for expansion into other parts of the digital ad ecosystem that you don't touch as a result of some of your recent M&A activity?
So Hivestack, I must tell you, we are working very hard to find the right audience. The last acquisition we did was October 2021 with Vidazoo. It took us time to find a new one, more than two years, as you can understand. First, we find digital out-of-home as interesting and growing vertical. Our ability to connect Hivestack to the other assets of Perion all over the places and to enjoy from Hivestack position globally in order to expand Perion together, this is one plus one is three and not two. We can do more together. We are just starting the integration. I can tell you that part of what you see in the guidance of 2023 is the synergy dollar.
After one month, we already have more than $10 million that is part of the guidance that is synergy dollars because we know exactly what Hivestack can do with the asset that Perion has before the acquisition and what they have that we can use to leverage their relationship, their technology, their geo in order to build something bigger together. Digital out-of-home is really just the beginning. In 2025, we're talking about 25 billion digital out-of-home. Now, today, programmatic out-of-home is a few percent, okay? It's almost nothing. It's really almost nothing. We're talking about open web. This is 90%. So this shift from 25%, more or less, where we're expecting to be in, let's say, in 2024, at some point, it will get to the 90% of the open web, right? This is the case. This is exactly what we are doing together with Hivestack.
We are moving people from the digital, from a screen that maybe one minute before, it was print. Now, this is digital. And we are moving them. And we are part of the process. And with our technology, we are helping them to be programmatic. This is exactly what we are doing with them, and very happy with the results so far.
One last one that I hope I can squeeze in. We have about 60 seconds. You've historically been busy in the M&A markets as your main use of capital, but recently just announced a $50 million buyback program. So kind of what went into that decision for capital use? And what should we infer from your M&A intentions as a result of that?
So for years, I would say, people ask why we are not doing buyback. And we say that we have better use of our money. We are going to do M&A. Our ability to consolidate, to be part of the consolidation of this market is there. And we want to enjoy from the cash that we have in order to give the unlocked value is amazing. And there is a huge potential from M&A. But the stock today is definitely undervalued. And we believe that $50 million is not an amount that will limit our M&A plan and desire to keep and consolidate assets around our space and to take this business to the next phase. M&A is the strategy. M&A is the growth strategy. And this is part of our plan for the future in order to take Perion to the $1 billion.
And then, of course, more than that, this is the way. Buyback is right for the time. For now, we see it as a good use of our money. We have a great opportunity. The stock is relatively cheap. And we see here opportunity. And this is why we did it.
Well, thank you. I'm sure there are still a lot of questions still outstanding. To the extent that you have them, we will be hosting our breakout session in Cordova 5 immediately following this. In the meantime, it just falls to me to say, Maoz, thank you for presenting today. Really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me. Thank you all.