Looks like we are starting to get everyone to filter in. Trust everybody found the location okay, and you had a chance to get your coffee and your breakfast. Well, first, on behalf of myself and Zeta, welcome to our first investor day. I was joking yesterday with David Steinberg, tomorrow is like our Super Bowl, and I made the comment: "Well, today is kind of like our Ryder Cup, 'cause, you know, it's not every year." And he said, "Well, I think we should do this every year." So I was like, "No, we cannot do this every year." To light a match, and all of you have matches in front of you, we are not gonna light all these, 'cause when I tested this out, it did not set off the sprinklers. But if you've lit a match before, it takes friction.
Once that match is lit, you've got fuel. Today is an opportunity for Zeta to be able to build a better understanding with investors on what we do, our position in the market, why we win, its differentiation, to understand our evolving perspective on topics ranging from governance to M&A, to more clarity into the financial metrics that power our business. The friction up until this point has really been created from an absence of information, until today. Today, we plan to take each one of those points of friction head-on, and in doing so, demonstrate why today's friction is tomorrow's fuel for Zeta. We built our agenda with that intent. We'll start off the first part of the day focused on the replacement cycle, and in particular, how it's elevating Zeta's value proposition in the market.
We'll dive deep into our data and our AI to demonstrate how providing better enterprise intelligence creates better customer outcomes. You'll hear from a customer, and you'll hear from an analyst on how they are seeing this unfold in their universe. Then we'll shift gears a bit. We'll do a number of deep dives on topics ranging from stock-based compensation and dilution to numerous new financial metrics in our business. While most of the day will be focused on addressing points of friction, what I don't wanna overlook is our execution, which has been a fuel since going public.
In fact, if you take into consideration the Russell 3000 and the roughly 330 public technology companies that fit inside it, just three, besides Zeta, have grown revenues at least 20% and, not or, grown adjusted EBITDA margins every quarter, year-over-year, for at least two straight years. Now, that's great, but it cannot be a trapdoor for Zeta to rationalize things. It can't be a trapdoor for us to look backwards. We are going to look forwards today. So while we've made a lot of progress, what's clear to us is that there is a lot more to do and a lot more to learn from. That's the purpose of today.
To be a beat and raise company is one thing, but as investors and analysts, you need to be able to understand clearly what we do, our position in the market, and why we win. That is the first part of today. To be pacing to beat your long-term targets is great, but as investors and analysts, you wanna know how predictable that performance is and how sustainable that performance is. We're gonna share with you a number of new metrics today that demonstrate that. To be named a category leader in marketing technology is credentializing with customers, but it's innovation that continues to drive sustained leadership in the market. Chris and Neej today will talk about the areas we're moving into and how they extend our leadership position. You've heard us talk about the Zeta Who hurdle.
It's still there, it's getting better, but we still have to nail why Zeta early upfront. The customer's perspective and the industry analyst perspective will be interesting to you as to how we're doing that today in the market. And then in a moment, Steve Gerber, as he takes you through the replacement cycle, he's gonna have a chance to talk about how we're in such early days with our partnership ecosystems. The vast majority of our revenue today is done on a direct basis. Breaking into the systems integrator ecosystem, breaking into and adding more value chain partners is a big part of future go-to-market catalyst for Zeta. So with that, let's kick things off with the replacement cycle, and it's my pleasure to introduce to you our President and our Chief Operating Officer, Steve Gerber.
Thank you, Chris. Delighted to be here. I did a practice run up those steps about 7 times, so I think I nailed it. So I... As Chris said, I'm the President and Chief Operating Officer at Zeta. I have been here for 14 years, almost from the beginning, and have played a key role in making the company who we are today. But I'm even more excited about being part of setting the vision for who we will be tomorrow. I've been in the digital industry for more than 25 years, almost from the beginning, and I can say with confidence that macro forces are colliding with microeconomics to bring about a time of great change. And that's what I'm gonna cover today, is really setting the context for the marketplace in which we compete. It is changing.
I'm gonna start by talking a little bit about our primary focus, which is on our customer, the modern CMO. So I think it's important to level set, that marketing, the act of targeting, persuading, and driving desired behavior from a consumer, is hard, and it's getting harder. Marketing is a combination of art and science. People have been trying to dial up the science ever since AOL became a phenomenon, again, more than 25 years ago. Billions of dollars have been invested to make marketing more predictable, more scalable, more repeatable. It hasn't always worked, particularly with the primacy of personal devices, the explosion of marketing messages, and the avalanche of data that's been created. Marketing is harder than ever, and CEOs are demanding more from the marketing investment.
59% of CMOs say that they are under pressure to prove that marketing is delivering a return on investment. What's worse, 55% of CMOs say they lack the tools and technologies to be able to do that. Marketing is hard. Marketing is also at a crossroads as a discipline, and also the modern CMO is part of the C-suite. The boardroom conversations may differ in tone, but they don't differ in direction. The fundamental question that is being asked of the CMO is: Do we make our existing ecosystem better, all of these investments that have been made, or do we move down a different path? The catalyst for this conversation isn't AI, it isn't the macro environment, it's this. The consumer has fundamentally changed. We call it the connected consumer. Someone who's always on, following, filtering, sharing, ignoring.
We are in an attention economy, and the battle for the attention of the connected consumer is one in which legacy brands are losing, and they are trying to battle with the tools of yesterday. As we think about how to engage with the connected consumer, who wants to be known, wants to be engaged, and ultimately wants to be delighted, whether that's around rewards or surprises or other ways that make them closer to the brand. The consumer as an individual is the North Star that's driving marketing today. It's often expressed as this term, personalization at scale. Because so many companies talk about it, you probably believe that many companies do this. The reality is they do not. If the situation is marketing getting harder and consumers being harder and harder to reach, this is the complication.
The complication is this personalization gap, that more than 3/4 of consumers are expecting personalization, but only 15% of companies think they do it well. This is the fundamental problem that we're solving. Marketers can't deliver what consumers want, and CMOs know it. Seven of eight say they can't do this, and the core issue is this. I talked about the avalanche of data, and we'll talk about this a bit later. But data is abundant, but intelligence is scarce. Marketers know more about the what than ever before, but they know less about the why, and most importantly, they don't know how.
They don't know how to translate insights into action so that they can develop scalable, repeatable programs that can demonstrate to the CEO and their boards that the marketing investment that's made is moving the needle from a top-line and from a bottom-line perspective. More data, less intelligence, lower impact marketing is the doom loop that many enterprises find themselves in. It's always the last mile. But big problems lead to big changes. We believe we're entering a new paradigm. So as I said, I've been at this for a long time. 25 years ago was the first era of digital-powered marketing technology. This was more about scale and speed and the unique economics of the internet, as companies began to embrace digital marketing. It then moved into something that was more API-powered, as there was better connectivity within an enterprise, but also across different systems.
The era we are exiting is this, workflow-powered, which came about, about nine years ago. There were companies like ExactTarget, Neolane, Responsys. Today they're known as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud, Oracle Marketing Cloud. These were all focused on the notion of giving the marketer more control. It was about operational efficiency. It was about journey building. It was about marketer in control, as opposed to the notion of consumer in control. It was about how to get more output from the resources that existed. It was all about operational efficiency. We believe we're moving to a new era, one that we call intelligence-powered.... We believe it's just beginning. It's important to note that this is more than an upgrade, it's a new operating system. This is a new way of playing the game. It's moving from, as I said, efficiency to business growth.
This is the focus on effectiveness. It's moving from program journeys, a junior marketer typing in what they think a consumer wants, versus knowing what a consumer wants. This notion of signal-driven experiences, from human to machine, making the decisions based on what they actually know, and turning that knowledge into intelligence, and intelligence into actions. It's from looking at only half of the interactions with consumers, just owned channels or owned touch points, to omni-channel, inclusive of paid media touch points. It's moving from looking backwards, rearview mirror reporting, to predictive analytics, not just what someone has done, but what will they do? It's moving from a reliance on services, the SI channel, to connect disparity.
Best of breed is disparate systems, and there are even disparate systems in so-called marketing clouds, which tend to be more containers than a single console to drive the right behavior from a consumer. And it's moving to technology that fuels unity, single platforms or partners that are built to connect. The consumer is the catalyst for this transformation. AI is an accelerant, and AI is making intelligence at the forefront, and Zeta is already there. So our intelligence power technology delivers personalization at scale. Our intelligence engine is based on two big bets that we made seven years ago. David will say that we started talking about AI seven or eight years ago, not seven or eight months ago, and it was based on these bets. We doubled down on proprietary data that expanded and fortified our Identity Graph and created a signal graph across the internet.
But we didn't stop there. We also rearchitected our data foundation so that we can move fastest, faster than anyone, from data collection to intent detection. So knowing who they are and what they're going to do, is how you know someone, engage someone, delight someone. Knowing those things is also how you close this personalization gap that is pervasive across enterprises. The intelligence engine is the brains of the Zeta Marketing Platform. It is unique to Zeta, and today it is already delivering better experiences for consumers and better outcomes for brands. This is not an intelligent clicker. But I wanna make clear, this is still the early innings. I had said that this new era began in 2022. Each of the eras, approximately eight years. But actionable intelligence requires a new foundation.
It requires data transformation, and so the work to modernize data infrastructure has been the primary focus of investment as enterprises seek to close the personalization gap. So Snowflake and Databricks are the next generation data warehouses, and this, this growth represents from small businesses, mid-sized businesses, but more than 500 of the most data-intensive and marketing-intensive enterprises. So a modern data infrastructure is necessary for enterprises to win in this intelligence-powered era, but it's not sufficient to close the personalization gap. A new set of applications is required, and Zeta's marketing platform is positioned to capture more than our fair share. So Zeta is the only company that has the assets and capabilities to empower enterprises to achieve the full potential of the promise of data transformation. We are one of one. Legacy solutions that are pointed at yesterday aren't good enough anymore.
Next generation solutions, some of which have modern data architectures, aren't ready for the scale that enterprises require. This is why Snowflake has been such an important partner of ours. They see this too. This is why AWS made us the only marketing cloud, the first marketing cloud, that's in their marketplace. This is why AWS is coming to us to work together on AI-powered solutions. We are one of one in this new era. Now, a question that I am often asked by industry analysts or financial analysts is: I didn't even hear of you until, maybe it was a week ago, a year ago, but till recently, isn't it hard to compete with these big tech brands? And we believe that in this new era, that question is inverted, that we have the assets and capabilities. This was supposed to be dramatic.
Or to invert that question, how do we make it hard for them to compete with us? And we are doing that. So an important point as we talk about this, it's not just about share shift, it's share shift in a growing market. The intelligence-powered replacement cycle expands our addressable market, and I'm going to take a few moments to talk about that. So data transformation and AI, as we call it, intelligence-powered, is disrupting the ecosystem. We are seeing convergence of sectors that were once considered separate. We are seeing system integrators having to reinvent themselves. Those who have made bets on the last era are beginning to lift their heads up and look at different types of solutions, and in an age of AI, reinventing what they're doing.
We're also seeing value chain compression, where companies that may have been competitors in the past might partner today. We're seeing that this notion of intelligence creates a common thread or a connective tissue between multiple companies, because that's what enterprises want, because ultimately they need to deliver what consumers want. If I did this, like, behind my back, maybe it would work. So the intelligence-powered era, as I said, is breaking boundaries. We're back to the core components here of identity, who they are. Signals, which get synthesized into intent, what they're going to do next. And then omni-channel engagement, how do you deliver personalization at scale at every single touch point? So the common components there get translated across data, media, and technology. At the center of all of those is what we call intelligence-powered marketing.
So when I talked about breaking boundaries, it's intelligence-powered marketing that is changing how enterprises think about reaching, engaging, and driving desired behavior from consumers, and then building systems that allow them to continue to do that again and again. It covers both the MarTech industry today, at a $19 billion TAM and growing at about 14%-15% per year. It also includes what we consider intelligence-powered media. It's about a third of what is the broader paid media ecosystem. It's much of what is digital today, but the way that we think about it is, it's taking a lot of the tools and technologies that used to be behind walled gardens and making that available more broadly, more broadly across all touch points, those that are controlled by marketers, what we call owned channels, as well as into paid channels.
So this is the size of the opportunity for Zeta. We believe that over the next three years, there's about $6 billion in replacement cycle coming from legacy solutions. Those aren't just the big marketing clouds, those are other companies that their former parents even gave up on. There's still lots of spend that's going through companies that have been spun off. We also see the broader MarTech industry evolving. A lot of the first generation CDPs are similar to those next generation solutions that just aren't enterprise ready, and enterprises are realizing that. The other market that we are poised to go after is this notion of intelligence-powered media. That's because our customer, the modern CMO, does not distinguish between where they meet their customer or where to find that next customer. Our market has expanded.
So the big question then, and what we will touch on as I turn this over to my colleagues, Chris and Nij, is how can we capitalize on the replacement cycle to expand our market share in an expanded market? So I'm going to talk through the key growth drivers to accelerate our market share expansion. We believe that during this replacement cycle, we can 2x-3x our market share growth, again, of a larger market. Two of the drivers are ones that we've talked about. We believe we have an opportunity to accelerate our land through strengthening our brand and our brand presence, sharpening the differentiation, not just of our product, but also of our messaging, and greater productivity from our hunters, those who are going after new logos. We also think there's an opportunity to supersize our expand and our extend.
We've invested more into what we call our farmers, who we really think are hunters on the farm, as they get closer to the modern CMO and demonstrate how what we are delivering to them can be used across multiple use cases. The flywheel for us is how we get more and more data from them, to turn into more and more intelligence from them, to drive more and more better outcomes for them, which then leads to more use cases, more channels, more workloads that go through us. And we've got partners now to help push this forward. We've talked a lot about some of our value chain partners, and we'll talk about some of them today. But Snowflake, which is one that we made a bet on in 2019 before anyone knew who Snowflake was.
We are one of the first applications in their new marketplace. If you think of that as an operating system, we believe that our intelligence application is the killer app. It's the Spotify of that, and it's just one of the, the many apps that are coming in. And we see that as a wedge that introduces our intelligence to their customers, and then that serves as a bridge to bring them on into our expand and extend, and taking us through our flywheel. We're looking to scale that even more. I had noted AWS, and there are others that are currently part of our value chain. As Chris said, the SI channel, where we're on a conversion path with them, we are having more and more productive SI channel conversations than I would have ever imagined a year ago.
We have staffed that team, we're expanding that team, and companies that we thought would be targets for 2025 are targets for Q4 of this year. We believe the market is coming to us. So as I conclude my section and turn it over to Christian Monberg and Neej Gore, just wanna focus on some of the key takeaways of what I've described. So first of all, we are at the early innings of this shift. These are things that you may not even find talking to one or two CMOs or people in procurement as you're doing channel checks. This is something you really need to zoom out to see what's going on and to see the different pieces that are being put in place. This is a paradigm shift. The game is changing.
The second is that the combination of data modernization and AI has disrupted the value chain, and it's expanded our addressable market to $83 billion, and that's in 2023. Both of these are double-digit growers as a market. Lastly is, why us? We made a bet seven years ago to build out intelligence as the core of our platform, and the intelligence engine does have this potential to create a flywheel that embeds our platform, expands our ecosystem, and powers accelerated growth through this replacement cycle. Thank you.
We get to sit down. Steve warmed up the stage for us. Hello, everybody. Thanks for giving us time today. Neej and I work really closely together. We'll talk a lot about how we don't disintermediate data and technology. We've both been here for six years. Zeta bought a company that we had started a long time ago, really focused at the intersection of AI and data, and all the things that come with that, like new data access patterns. So we'll get a little bit nerdy during this, this section and talk about the technology we're building, the solutions we're building, but we'll also talk a lot about how the business is growing. Neej, you want to introduce yourself?
Absolutely. Good morning, everyone. My name is Neej Gore. I'm Zeta's Chief Data Officer. I've met many of you on calls or investor meetings, so it's good to see so many faces that are recognizable here. And as Chris mentioned, I've been at Zeta for six years. Chris and I have had the pleasure of working together for 11 years, and I've been in digital marketing for about 20 years. So, you know, a lot of the content we'll present to you today is the legacy of lots of the work that we've done together, and Zeta has really been the culmination of that work, and you'll see what our future looks like as well today as we go forward. So, as Steve had mentioned... If the slide will click forward for me. Let's try this again. Okay, here we go.
The age of intelligence is upon us here. So much of what we'll talk about today is how intelligence is impacting our customers, but how it's also impacting us internally at Zeta and what we're doing to take advantage of this era. We think that we have a great competitive advantage. If you look to the future, the promise of marketing intelligence is very, very clear. We've seen it in movies. Everyone has seen this movie on the left. This is Minority Report. When Tom Cruise is walking through the mall, he's getting personalized marketing. Other movies, like Back to the Future and Her, and Ready Player One, have demonstrated all these use cases for personalized marketing in the future.
So this, this notion of predictive experiences, this notion of the ideal customer experience, it's coming, and we've seen it demonstrated in pop culture, and whether we like it or not, it's gonna be here before we know it. A really important change in the marketing ecosystem versus where we were about ten years ago, is that the marketer focus has changed from this idea of data, and I need all the data I can procure, to this notion of intelligence, right? The questions that marketers want to answer, like the ones I've highlighted in yellow, are the most important things that they're caring about. As they think about acquisition, retention, and growth, they need intelligence-powered solutions to differentiate themselves from their peer groups. So it's not enough to have a lot of data anymore.
It's not enough to say, "I have the most data." It's much more important in today's world to say, "I have the intelligence to make the right decisions across the consumer lifecycle." So that's been a very, very important change. In Zeta's model, we do two things very well. So if you think of the castle wall here being the boundaries of an enterprise. We are really working to improve the intelligence that an enterprise can get from within their four walls. Now, we're not alone in this. There are lots of MarTech companies that are focused on this endeavor. Where we start to separate ourselves from the pack is to start to focus on the intelligence that exists outside of the four walls. So intelligence about the customers, the prospects, the market, and the competitors. What can you tell a brand about their business that they don't know already?
That intelligence can come from outside the four walls, and we're virtually the only company in MarTech that provides this as a native experience within our platform. We'll show you a few examples of this today, but it's really that outside the four walls intelligence, which is creating space between us and the competitive set. We also have an intelligence model that's creating leverage in the market. So as I mentioned, we're one of a kind in the sense of providing intelligence outside the four walls. We also, as you, many of you know, have our own data asset internally. The data asset covers about 235 million Americans that we see monthly, and that data asset allows us to create intelligence across acquisition, growth, and retention solutions directly from the platform.
And that data asset is multi-sourced, so none of the data sources that feed into it are actually providing more than one-third of the value. So it's really leverage, leveraged across multiple sources for us. And while we want to be fully interoperable with the ecosystem, our data can only be activated through our channels. It's a decision we made very early on, and that enables customers to keep coming back to us and to keep growing with us, because intelligence, again, fuels their growth, and that intelligence is, in part, being powered by the data that we give them and the intelligence that we provide to them. So if you think of a customer, and here's an example of Denise, the idea is to create these four vectors of intelligence, right?
Some of the things you're seeing on the left, like she visited a home goods store, she's a heavy streaming customer, she's a small business owner. This is the fodder that creates intelligence across customers, prospects, competitors, and market. The way this comes to life is things like in meeting number one, where we have the ability to walk into a brand, and we can tell them things about their competitive landscape that they don't already know. This is an example for a telecom customer. We can go into things like the age of devices that your customers may or may not have in their graph, or the number of children in the household, or their ability to service their credit on a monthly basis. So these are all the types of intelligence pieces that really fuel the idea of campaigns.
In this case, in telecom, everyone has a cell phone in their pocket, so conquesting becomes very important. Knowing who's eligible to actually change their plan or maybe upsell or grow their plan is a very important metric. Another idea would be the notion of actually providing this convergence view between customers and prospects. So again, CMOs are starting to converge on AdTech and MarTech coming together because the data layer, the data warehouse layer, has come together for them. And so the ability to take recommended actions for customers and prospects directly in one view and make them actionable within the platform, is providing tremendous value to our customers and giving us leverage in the market as well. So the mindset of the CMO has changed, and our solutions have reflected that, and this is just one of the examples of that.
So a couple of key takeaways to think about as we enter this brave new world of intelligence. The first is that enterprises really want to understand their blind spots. This is a core priority for CMOs today. Access to data reporting and measurement all needs to be in one place. I often talk about an example of a retailer, and what they wanted to do was measure the efficacy of audio, CTV, and display as it related to new audiences they wanted to drive to stores to make sales. This is a very, very complicated problem for a CMO to solve on their own. They'd have to cobble together technologies. It would take months to get the data flows right. This is a solution that we can provide to that CMO out of the box with data. We synthesize our own audiences. We launch on our own channels.
We can measure the efficacy of those channels, and then we can tell them which channel delivered what kind of performance for optimizations coming down the pike for them, and then we can implement those optimizations. The third bullet here is really around generative AI, and Chris is going to take us deep into what we're doing in the generative AI world, how we think we're positioned against the competitive set, and how we think it's going to really change marketing in a meaningful way in the, in the years to come. With that, let me pass it to Chris.
Thank you, Neej. So intelligence is where we hang our hat. It's opportunity for marketers to learn more about their brands than they ever had before. Getting to intelligence is hard. We have proprietary data. We've got a unified platform where you can access that intelligence. And not to be overlooked, we've got expertise. We've been doing this for a long time, and it's hard. I'm going to talk about some of those challenges shortly. All right, so 100% of the customers that I talk with have a technology strategy problem. Specifically, they've got a data strategy problem. A lot of them try to solve that by getting all their data in one place, and you'll hear a lot about Snowflake and Databricks. "We got all our data into Snowflake," and that's great, but it doesn't win you any prizes.
It doesn't help you talk to your customer any better. It just gets everything in one place. You need to add Identity Graph. You need to add AI. I spoke earlier about those access patterns, like getting the AI out of the system in real time. It's hard. It takes years to build this stuff. The way we've solved for that is taking a one-platform approach, and identity, intelligence, and experiences is the way that we talk about our one platform. You can think about them as the three layers of our platform, but it's all sewn from the... or it's all pulled from the same tapestry.... Identity and data leads to intelligence. Intelligence leads to better experiences.
These core beliefs we set forth six years ago, five years ago now, and we still use the same slide because it drives our ethos and how we build technology. Inside of these three layers, we have nine core modules and dozens of submodules. Those modules can be turned off and on for our customers. So when they show up with a stack, say they've got a point-of-sale solution, they've got some BI tools, maybe a data warehouse, we can very easily wrap around their stack. This is a big deal. There are competitors we have in the space, big competitors, that are only gonna replace a stack. They're gonna come in and say, "We want everything." Zeta, we're able to come in with a wedge through intelligence, through email, through media, even forecasting, because these represent holes.
Once we start working with them, they see how their stacks can expand and solve more use cases inside their organization, and it happens time and time again. RFP process will come in. They'll say, "I need email." We'll start with email, and within one meeting, they'll say, "Oh, gosh, we need a CDP as well." I wanna double-click into intelligence. Steve talked briefly about our intelligence engine and the outcomes we get from intelligence. Generative AI is hot. Everybody's talking about it. ChatGPT, I think, launched late last year in November, and they're great tools. We've all used them. We've tried to rewrite some brief or article we're working on or some report. It's pretty good. It tends to lose a little bit of our voice, and it's definitely not actionable.
I can ask ChatGPT what the best next sci-fi book for me to read is, but it's not gonna add it to my Kindle for me, and it's certainly not gonna read it for me. So we need to connect the GenAI tools that have come out with the jobs to be done to make it actionable, and that's really where we focus the intelligence engine in the first half, well, the first part of this year since February, when we kicked this off, and we've made amazing strides. The way we did that is we asked some core questions of our team. We all got together in Palo Alto in California, and I said, "Guys, how are we gonna accomplish what we need to with generative AI toolset?" First thing we had to solve for was domain.
So this is teaching generative AI about the domain of the brand that it's interacting with. For us, that would mean everything from, like, the content people are interacting with to the actual analytics and reports that are coming out of engagements. Second, we needed to teach it about provenance, and provenance is a big deal. Very nuanced, but where that data came from, the actual source of it, has to be part of what the generative AI tools are building. Because if you don't have access to that root data, you can't take a action on it, right? GenAI is really good at aggregating intelligence, but if you asked it what page in the book it got that language when it rewrote your story in Thoreau's voice, it would never know. Marketers need access to that identity, to that core piece of data.
And the last piece is the action framework. In fact, this is one patent that I'm really excited about. These actions and the agents that take action, agentic frameworks, is what allows Zeta to propel itself into doing work for marketers. There's a lot of people out there that are celebrating GenAI, and they're slapping some GenAI tool on the side of their platform. They did a hackathon on a weekend, and somebody built something cool, and they say, "Oh, we've got GenAI now." It needs to be stitched into that fabric. It has to be part of your data layer. It has to pull all of that forward into the experiences layer. So this is an example of how it came together.
You know, we've got a drawing that we submit to the patent application, and I tried to simplify it so that you could actually read it on a slide. So a marketer comes to us. We have ZOE, which is Zeta Opportunity Engine, and that agent, which is the blue icon, has access to domain, provenance, and action. It's actually a big action framework. One of the first things we did was we said, "Well, you know, there's great tools out there, a bunch of industry LLMs," and we want to stand on the shoulders of Google and Meta and OpenAI and all these other companies, but we had to give them domain, provenance, and action as well.
What we found is that for a lot of the jobs to be done, you don't need to be able to rewrite the answer as Thoreau did. In fact, you need to do something much more nuanced. Like when somebody asks a question, "Tell me my highest LTV user, lifetime value users," we need to infer things like, well, what date range do they mean? And so building smaller LLMs that are specifically trained and tuned by Zeta with access to that domain, provenance, and action, gave us a framework. So when somebody comes in and asks ZOE, we've got a bunch of agents in the background that are working on a variety of different queries to databases for analytics and attribution, maybe do a creative service to actually put together a creative campaign for our customer. This is deep tech. There's no fast path to this.
We're rolling it out slowly. We've got an AI council that is made up of our customers that review everything from designs to beta to fully developed solutions. That's led to a lot of patents, which are a great way of celebrating, but it's also led to a lot of IP that becomes part of our expertise, and that expertise grows. In the last year, we've changed around the way that we build and deliver technology into pods, and the expertise doesn't live just in one pod. It's part of all the pods that deliver value to our customers. So I'll show you a few examples, and they're set up with these prompts. So what if every marketing experience felt human? What if you had a UI where you could just ask questions, any question? How do I onboard my data?
How do I create a better campaign? Can you create a media plan for my back-to-school campaign? So we've created a UI in ZOE, in the platform that's universally available. Second, if you had a team to help creating content, would you be a more effective marketer? And the answer is absolutely. If you had all those agents working on your side, you would. So the Intelligent Composer is a way that Zeta will generate a starting point of creative for all your campaigns, but it does it inside the editor. The big gap here is that people don't trust AI enough, but if you could give them a starting point, just like all of us have used ChatGPT to start an article or a piece we're working on or a memo, we wanna do the same thing with creative tools.
Optimization needs to be always on, but optimization historically has been limited to a very small subsection of AI capabilities, like optimizing for bid rates in a DSP. We wanted to make sure that optimization was about the opportunities in front of customers. So Neej talked about the various vectors in which we can provide intelligence to our customers. We're going to sew those into things like experience builders and make recommended actions based off of always-on optimization in the background. Customer risk has become a CMO problem. Sorry, customer data risk has become a CMO problem. Years ago, it was a CIO problem. Years before that, nobody was really paying attention to customer data at all.
We want to acknowledge that and give CMO tools, and so the governance tools that we've laid into the platform are now something that CIOs and CMOs can come to together. During COVID, there was a market change. CIOs were more involved in the CMO buying decision. Before that, I think you could go buy a marketing tool, like you go buy Salesforce, and you use it to drive your marketing. Nobody cared. But then tools like Snowflake and Databricks and others came along, and CIOs were like, "Wait, I got all the data right here." The way you use the data, it turns out you need governance on it. If you detect PII, you have to say, you've got, which is personally identifiable information, it's protected. Say, "You've got PII here. Do not syndicate it anywhere.
Don't send it to your partner, don't onboard it with somebody because you're gonna break some laws." And the last one is, what if we could explore analytics conversationally? The number of customers that I've talked to that have, like, a team of database engineers to run analytics queries. Last year at Town Hall, sorry, at Zeta Live, I was talking to a marketer, CMO at a company, and he said, "Chris," they had just purchased Zeta. "Chris, I've got eight data engineers that work on Unica to build audiences and ask questions. What do I do with them now?" And it's a real question. You know, you don't wanna fire good people. You've got to retrain them. You've got to help them understand the business differently. But you also need to let that knowledge escape the control of a few.
Knowledge needs to be pervasive. So, we do this to simplify the complexity of sophisticated marketing. Every marketer wants to do big things, and every marketer is hamstrung by the tools in front of them. I say this often, my wife works in marketing, and she often says, "Oh, man, I just wish the data existed." It does exist. Data's coming out of our watches and our fridges. There's data everywhere. What she really means is she can't get access to it, and we wanna pull all that together so that it's available in an intelligent manner for marketers. So, we've established that intelligence opens doors for us. I wanna speak briefly about total cost of ownership, because our customers, they get really excited about new opportunities through intelligence, but a buying decision has to go through procurement.
It's about dollars and cents. So depending on who you listen to, Gartner ran a report, they said the average enterprise has 26 different marketing tools inside their four walls, which is bonkers. How are you gonna train a team on 26 tools? Much less, how is that gonna be efficient? With Zeta, we consolidate those. You no longer have to buy a separate SMS provider and a CDP. And not only do we consolidate it, we help you get more value to the investments you've made. If you've bought Snowflake, we're gonna make that data available to marketers to take action. So not only does total cost of technology evaporate, redundancy of tools like segmentation interfaces that allow you to build audiences, those get consolidated, but training gets easier too. Everybody can use a simple platform. Steve talked about this earlier.
I wanna give a little more body to it. Legacy solutions aren't good enough. They didn't take the time, the courage, or make the investment to stitch together their various assets. They bought a bunch of technologies over the years. They did a good job running those as business units inside the organization, and these are titans of companies. What had to happen is somebody had to go build a modern architecture. The next gen players are really impressive, and as a technologist and a business person, I look at them and I say, "Wow, you guys are onto it. You're on the right path." But they're very isolated in use cases, and we've already established there is an era of consolidation that's happening right now. Zeta sits in the middle, and we solve challenges for CIOs and CMOs that are happening in the background.
You talk to lots of businesses and brands. These are four amazing companies that are taking the world by storm and growing very fast right now. For you to thrive in an economy that's based on data, you have to have data-aware products and platforms. So, Neej, I hand over to you to share an example.
Thank you. So total cost of ownership has two vectors to it. One is reducing cost, and the other one is providing a path to faster revenue. So this is a national retailer. We entered their ecosystem by way of RFP for an ESP. So it's an email service platform. We quickly demonstrated our ability to provide intelligence that basically powered their ESP and identity resolution, and that expanded to a CDP opportunity, a customer data platform opportunity for us. That same intelligence exposed media opportunity for them. In this case, it was around competitive prospecting in local markets, and that created access to media channels and a media opportunity for us, all within the same platform. They didn't need to onboard their data again. They didn't need to move their data to a different system. They could simply turn those channels on.
Those media programs launched across channels, they were optimized, and that's led to more media dollars for us. So what's really happening here is two things, as I mentioned. There's a revenue opportunity being created for the actual retailer. That's in the blue. We're automating campaigns across paid and owned through one single platform. We're actioning on optimizations through one single platform. We're leveraging intelligence through one single platform. Those are all drivers of revenue, and then we're also helping them on the cost side. So we're integrating with their existing CIO investments. We're reducing the latency and hops between the data. It's a very important part that drives to efficiency, and we're creating a holistic view of identity across the entire consumer life cycle.
So again, the ability to provide these in a single platform, these are the drivers of total cost of ownership to bring it down in the modern landscape, and this is natively baked into the way our platform operates. So a couple key takeaways from a TCO perspective. Centralized identity. In the last few years, we've seen so much focus on first-party data and identity. Enterprises need to be able to centralize that in one platform, be able to deliver media across all channels based on that identity and based on your first-party data. And last but not least, and Chris alluded to this, create a world where the CIO and the CMO are 100% aligned in their technology decisions. This is something that you can do because they've aligned on Snowflake or Databricks.
You need to provide an application layer on top of that, that makes the data accessible and usable, downstream. Now, total cost of ownership is amazing, but at Zeta, we're also very focused on areas of investment moving forward. So we're gonna show you a couple different models of things that we've done in the last year that are really making waves within the company and in the market at large. So one model that you'll hear a lot about later when Tina comes to stage with one of our clients, Tombras, is this idea of platforming media. So creating an intelligence foundation for agencies that service thousands of customers, all through the Zeta Marketing Platform, allowing agencies to win more business through a platformed environment.
This has never existed before, and it changes the dynamic of how sticky we can be and how much growth we can drive for an agency, and that leads to downstream conversions for the customers that they service. This is a big model. You'll hear a lot about this in an upcoming session today. The second one is around vertical clouds. So this idea of making the ZMP, the Zeta Marketing Platform, specific to verticals and really empowering the data in specific vertical use cases that matter. These are the ones we're focused on. I mentioned agency already. Automotive, retail, fintech, insurance, and healthcare are all coming. So these are gonna be purpose-built versions of our Zeta Marketing Platform that apply to market sectors, and the ones that we primarily service. The third one is really, we were the first native marketing application in the Snowflake marketplace.
So we brought our intelligence through a native app into the Snowflake environment, so their customers that may not be using Zeta can be exposed to our intelligence, and this can be a door opener for us. It could be a door opener into our ESP, it could be a door opener into our media solutions, it could be a door opener into our CDP. So again, making the intelligence available natively within their environment, so Snowflake customers, as an example, can see the benefits of Zeta, and they can start to think about how to action on consumers as an introduction to the Zeta world. Pass it to Chris.
Thanks. So Neej has been talking about how we capture that expanded TAM that Steve went through earlier. One of the areas that Steve already mentioned, Neej already mentioned, was the agency platform. Incredibly excited about that. We're seeing great early traction with it. The other area is mobile. And, you know, listen, I work in product and engineering. I think we've got a great platform, and if you look at the industry analysts, the Forrester and IDCs of the world, they're gonna tell you the same. But we have areas we need to improve on. Mobile is one of them. We have good mobile capabilities today. I see a mobile replacement cycle for enterprises that aren't getting their needs met right now.
They ended up going out and working with a channel partner, somebody that does mobile really well, but it just isn't adequately working with their workflows. So there's an efficiency play. We're seeing the early signs of this, and thankfully, Chris and Steve recently cleared our investment in this pod that we're building right now. Intelligent content management, we talked about it earlier. This is another area of investment. At the end of the day, we can sell a big business growing platform, and there's going to be marketing managers that need to work on that. Content is central to all marketing campaigns, and with generative AI and the activation tools we have, we're positioned really well to provide marketers with unique tools. System integrators, we talked about this earlier.
It turns out system integrators also need a bunch of infrastructure to make themselves successful. Everything from onboarding to onboarding them to understand our business, to data tools. So I spoke earlier about ZOE. ZOE actually understands how to onboard a system integrator now, which is really cool. It means you can have a conversational onboarding, but you also need to make data tools like clean rooms and onboarding UIs to help those system integrators do the work without any help from us. Then, scale. So Zeta wins deals today based on scale. We've got enterprise scale that beats our competitors, and I can sit down with any technologist for any of the companies we work with and walk through why it scales. We are anticipating 500% more volume through our platform in 2024, which is a bonkers number.
If any of you have worked in technology or have friends that have, you talk about, well, how do you grow 500%? There's non-trivial challenges with it. In concert with that, we've launched a FinOps program so that we can do it efficiently. Everything in the platform is tagged. We understand where every cost comes from. This has been a big undertaking that's taking a week, a year for us, but allows us to make much more data-driven decisions and where we create investments, where we go and refine parts of our scaling infrastructure. So in closing, this Arthur C. Clarke quote is great and gets to the marrow of trying to create simple solutions that delight our customers.
I'm really proud of the work that Neej and I and the rest of the team have done over the years, and in my 20 years of working in technology, have never been more excited about the potential of where our business is going than I am today.
Perfect. We're gonna do a quick Q&A, so start thinking of the questions. We're gonna bring Steve back up, and we'll do several Q&A throughout the day. So if you don't get to your question now, we'll have more opportunity later. Sorry. Arjun?
Thank you. Arjun Bhatia from William Blair. So maybe we'll go back to the top, Steve. You talked about the replacement cycle, and I think, you both touched on it as well, that the legacy players are having trouble responding. What, what do you think is really limiting them? Is it tech debt, or are there other kind of, factors at play? I guess I'm trying to get to, what can their response be, and where is Zeta kind of already playing defense against a potential response from the legacy, legacy clouds?
I'll answer from a tech perspective, briefly. So each player is a little bit different in the challenges that are in front of them. And I'm not gonna pick on specific brands right now. I'll put it in two categories. One is it takes a lot of time to go through and consolidate platforms, and consolidation, saving money on this stuff is part of it. To eradicate hundreds of millions dollars in investments and go build new technology underneath them, even getting access to the talent that can do that, is not a move that's gonna be very popular. It's gonna take years to do, and the cost is very high. The second piece is, some of these players, they've been on top for too long, and you can talk to marketers about this.
My sister just called me, and she said, "Hey, I talked with one of the players. They want $600,000 to do a pilot, and it's gonna take six months. Is that right?" And I said, "No, they should do it for free, and it should take six days." They had the courage to go in to a publicly traded company and say, "Guys, I want $600,000 to prove to you that I can do what you've already asked, and it's gonna take 6 months to do it." That's not very confidence-inspiring. I talked about expertise a few times today.
There's a lot to be said for cultural norms inside organizations, and you have new players like Zeta that are innovative and curious and ready to partner and do it on the terms that are expected by the industry, and you have legacy players that are arrogant and not quite ready.
Arjun, I'd also say there's one other very important thing. There's generally a capability gap in the market, and when I say that, what I mean is, this convergence of advertising channels and marketing channels into one platform, there are just very few companies that can do that, you know, within the same platform. And the idea of bringing intelligence to actually fuel the way that campaign programs would run, that's also very limited in the market. So part of it is business model, part of it is what Chris alluded to, and I think Steve probably has more insight as well.
So I don't want to belabor the one question, but I think this is everything from innovator's dilemma. This is history rhyming, if not repeating. But you've also lost all the people that made the businesses what they were, and these became more financial engines than marketing engines. And as they put pieces together that just didn't fit and they weren't designed to be fit, they became a cross-sell motion as opposed to jobs to be done, as Chris said. So some of them might turn it around. You know, you also have to say, "I believe in something different," and you have to recognize that there was an error, which is generally done through M&A and sort of moving into a different direction, as we've seen from several of these.
I will end with: we are customer-focused, customer-obsessed, not competitor-obsessed. We wanna make sure that we stay ahead, but the way that we stay ahead is by focusing on our customer, which is the modern CMO. Thanks.
Ryan MacDonald, Needham . From a customer perspective, obviously, there's this... I appreciate the replacement cycle and it's going to happen, but it seems like even in a lot of your customer use cases, that you get into an RFP and the original scope, it evolves, and you just, the customer discover sort of new use cases, new opportunities. What needs to happen, and maybe it's the vertical use cases, but what needs to happen where the RFPs start out with that transformational change versus sort of getting it to you out of one use case and learning what you should be doing here?
... So great question, and it's something that we talk about a lot. I think, you know, going back to what our growth drivers are, and really understanding how we can play a role at the top of the funnel of making the replacement cycle better known. But back to the areas, we're in the early innings here, and so you don't have a lot of intelligence-powered acolytes or advocates within companies. Our best RFPs are when someone goes from one company that's been transformed by Zeta into another.
So this is not dissimilar to what happened in the last replacement cycle, where you began to have CMOs and VPs of marketing that were influencing procurement, that there needed to be a better way. We needed to be able to build journeys, and we can't do that on Unica, right? So we're still in the early stages, but I think that's where you start to put gasoline on the fire when this becomes the default mindset.
In 2022, I saw zero RFPs that were past a starting point in a maturity curve, so zero sophisticated RFPs. In 2023, I saw three, and I think in 2024, we're gonna be moving closer to maybe 20% or 25% of them. The wave's starting, and it's why that first conversation is so easy. It's like, we opened up the door, and it's beautiful outside, and they're like, "Look at the sky. This is great. I want more of it." It's a really easy selling motion. They're just not ready for it. That'll change.
In our workflows with customers through the RFP process, we will highlight intelligence very early because we know that that separates us from every other vendor in the deal. So, it's part of our sales motion. When we get through the paperwork, it becomes part of the demo, and that gets revealed to them very quickly, and that starts getting the wheels moving.
Hey, Dan Reagan from Canaccord. Can you just double-click on the mobile opportunity? You know, what's changing there? What does Zeta need to do, and does the competitive set change at all?
What's changed there is, going back, call it five years, some window, companies had to get into mobile. There were a few major players in the space. And the thing with mobile is it's not just a delivery channel, it's also a way you kind of collect data, and it has a little bit to do with identity graphs. And a couple of those companies rose to the top. Problem with them is they're not really enterprise ready. They're not ready to deal with how complicated data can be, not ready to deal with the changing identity landscape. And so they've been running all of their marketing on this one platform, and then they're running their mobile through another platform. Those things need to converge. The market today doesn't have a mobile leader with enterprise chops, full stop.
Zeta has strong mobile capabilities, but got to be honest with ourselves, we are not the leader that we can be. Generative AI has also changed the future of conversational mobile interactions. So it's the coexistence of those two investments that's going to make us a leader. We work in pods, as I said earlier. They invest what needs to be done, we just need to invest in the pod and get the product to market. The good news is, all that data and identity pipeline that needed to exist is 100% native to the way we built the platform from the ground up. So for us, it's really easy to have fresh sprouts there.
I think it's fair to say some of those newer platforms are from yesterday's era as well. So the same forces that we've talked about that are affecting the enterprise across the broader marketing platform or marketing cloud are zeroing in on mobile. Back to the modern CMO does not want to distinguish between platforms. They want to deliver personalized experiences across every touch point at scale.
Yeah, and I'll share a quick tidbit. We were on a call two weeks ago, companies running an RFP. They selected one of the major mobile-first marketing platforms out there. They were with them for a year. They never got live. They just didn't get the enterprise support they needed. And we're gonna see more and more of this in 2024, and we'll have, as I said, we've got a solution to market today. Our solution will get better and better throughout 2024.
All right, we'll take one more, and then we're gonna, we're gonna move to the next section, so.
This is [Eman Ghovanloo] from Barclays. You mentioned that converting the SI channel is a key part of your market share expansion. Can you just elaborate where that stands today and maybe what percentage of revenue you expect to become over time?
We're not getting into some of the revenue, but it's again very early innings. We just started that this year, and as I was saying, we built out a three-year plan, and the culmination of that was a set of SIs that you would know. And we've found them coming to us. So the motions are happening faster, the conversations are deeper than we would have expected. We're you know pursuing all you know three primary sales motions with them.
One is a referral basis, the second is a co-sell basis, and then the third, which is being built out, is more of the traditional SI operating on you know selling in and operating our platform, which is newer for us, which is an evolution of our value proposition and go-to-market as well. We look to that as being an accelerator of growth and a driver for that 2x-3x market share over the course of the replacement cycle.
Do you believe that the SIs are coming to you because customers are asking about data functionality? Is that the reasoning?
I think it's a combination of factors. But back to the core premise that today's technology or yesterday's technology is not solving the today problem. They're seeing that as well. So their customers are the CIOs or sometimes the CMOs, and they know that they have that personalization gap, so they are looking more broadly at the marketplace. SIs are also trying to be more client-focused and less vendor-focused. You know, moving away from a practice around a particular vendor to trying to have better solutions for their customers. And so they look at us as part of that set of solutions.
Got it. Thank you.
Neej, anything to add?
I think that's a great answer.
All right. I think just in the interest of time, gentlemen, thank you. We're going to move on to the next section, so, I appreciate it.
Thanks, everybody.
So now we're going to bring on stage Tina McCain, who's the Executive Vice President of Client Partnerships, and she has an exciting partnership that, you know, we've alluded to on conference calls, so I'll let her do the rest of the introductions. Tina?
Well, hi, everyone. Again, I'm Tina McCain, EVP of Client Partnerships here at Zeta Global, and I am thrilled to be on stage today to talk to you a little bit about an exciting new partnership that we have with Tombras. For those of you not familiar with Tombras, Tombras is an independent agency that is in Knoxville, Tennessee. They were founded in 1946 as a creative agency, but actually, they're a full-service agency today and one of the largest in the U.S. So while I would say they highly value creative, they've been very innovative, and they take a very data-driven approach to ROI for their customers.
And a couple awards, because they won many, but I would say Tombras was named by Fast Company, excuse me, most innovative company in the world, and Ad Age has put Tombras on the A-List for two years in a row. So I would also just like to mention that there's a lot of similarities in the DNA between Tombras and Zeta, and that's one of the reasons that I'm very excited to talk a little bit deeper about that. Okay, so let's... Oops, I talk with my hands, so we're going to see how this goes. Okay, so, I'm honored to be on stage here with Alejandro Fuenmayor . Hopefully, I did that okay. Great. And then Alex Potts. So let me start with Al.
Al is the EVP and so, of Social and Programmatic at Tombras, where he oversees innovative, award-winning digital media practice. With over 13 years of experience in the industry, he specializes in, in melding data science and disruptive, bleeding-edge technology to drive meaningful business outcomes for his clients. And then here I have, Alex, and Alex is the SVP of Programmatic Investment and Ad Technologies. Alex is a digital expert who sits at the intersection of strategy, activation, and technologies to drive client and agency success at Tombras. Thank you to both of you for, for being here with us. I guess we'll go ahead and start. Alex and Al, you know, first question, can you start by discussing what business challenges you were facing and how Zeta is helping you address those challenges?
Yeah, absolutely. So I think COVID was a really interesting point, and prior to that, a lot of brands, we were kind of seeing either in-housing or segmentation when it comes to agencies, right? You had a paid search, a creative agency, on and on and on. And since COVID, we've seen a pretty significant paradigm shift, because a lot of those marketing departments shrunk, right? And at the end of the day, what agents, what brands were starting to look for in agencies wasn't just a buying partner, a creative agency, but also, like, almost a consultancy. Yeah, we hear it all the time, like, the biggest gripe a client could ever have is: You don't understand our business enough, right?
I think what we're trying to do is bring more understanding to the competitive set, to the audience, to their overarching business, to them and internally. But automating that and expanding that out to everyone at the agency, everyone that is on each brand, is becoming harder and harder, right? And we really needed a partner that was able to come in and kind of bring that to the forefront of what we're doing, but at the same time, at a lower overarching cost. And I'm sure we'll get into kind of our deal structure in a minute, but that was kind of the overarching precipice of our partnership.
And I think to expand on that, the other big sort of pressing challenge that we had that we wanted to solve is our positioning is connecting data plus creativity for business results. So unlike a lot of agencies, our goal usually is a business outcome, whether it's, you know, a revenue goal, a lead generation goal, franchise depth kind of thing. So we had to work around a lot of creative solutions to find things that we just didn't have a solution for in the industry.
Like a lot of data science solutions were just bespoke, custom-made. We had to spend a lot of internal resources just make it, reinventing the wheel every six months to sort of, like, stay ahead of the game. We're innovating really quickly. Zeta has really helped us sort of, like, take our foot off the gas there, so we can focus on the strategic growth and have those solutions be already made and working perfectly.
Great, and I would also extend that I think it's allowed you to work on new business opportunities as well. We'll probably get into that as well, but I think this, identity and intelligence is winning, in the marketplace, and we've been very excited to be right beside you, you know, along the way to help you grow.
No, I think that's an important call-out, though. Like, there is also an arms race definitely happening when it comes to intelligence for agencies that we had to be a part of as well.
Great. Okay, so before you were co-branding the Zeta Marketing Platform, what were you using for data and intelligence?
Pretty much anything that was readily available. I mean, as everyone knows, data is expensive, and margins for agencies are becoming thinner and thinner. So at the end of the day, whether it was, we obviously partner with Nielsen and have their entire suite, so ad intel. But from there, it was really any publicly available data that we were able to mine through our data science team or just had readily, readily available to us.
Yeah, and I think other than that, we have deep partnerships with Google, obviously. So there's a lot of internal resources that we're able to provide. I think the big challenge there had always been not being interoperable, right? Like, the stuff you get from Nielsen, the stuff you get from Google might say philosophically the same thing, but you can't really activate on it. And there really wasn't the intelligence piece there. It was more of a matter of providing enough data to, again, once again, our data science team internally trying to figure out how do we use it, how do we mold it into something useful.
I think the actionability that you kind of just brought up is so imperative and important. Like, there's a lack of connectivity between the insights that you're able to garner typically, and the ability to actually activate on those insights. And that was important to add as well.
Well, and I remember in the early days, Alex, one of our first demos, I think you were very impressed by all the visualization as well. It just really seemed to, to simplify that, too, not to put words in your mouth, but I, I just remember that being the initial reaction.
No, I mean, simplicity is, like, imperative, right? This isn't just a partnership for, like, our leadership team. This is something that we have operationalized across 450 employees, and so the ability to simplify everything and make it as actionable as possible and still at the same time, easy to use, is so imperative.
Absolutely. Okay, so what other platforms did you evaluate other than Zeta for this solution?
So initially, it wasn't necessarily platforms, but overarching datasets. Like, we were contemplating potentially building this out ourselves. What we quickly learned is it takes hundreds and hundreds of engineers and a lot of overarching time to have anything close to what we wanted and needed. So that became kind of a non sequitur, a non-starter.
And I think a part of it was also a natural evolution, where what we thought we wanted and what we thought we needed from Zeta at the beginning was very different from what we ultimately ended up creating. It's almost like the metaphor of the blue sky. It was like: Hey, we're really just looking for a way to get data sort of consolidated and actualized. And then we said, "Oh, but there's so much more we can do." And suddenly it became... Even though we weren't necessarily looking at Zeta for a bunch of other functions, it became easier for us to say, "Hey, do we really need to be doubling down on, like, the Salesforce people? Do we really need to be doubling down on other things that are, like, just naturally gonna work better if we integrate it?
I think that's a really important point. Like, at the end of the day, it's really, really hard for any marketing platform to come into a brand or an agency because, like, the use cases are so unique and different. I think that's one of the things that we've loved about this partnership is, like, dynamicism and pliability. Like, we have. It's not. We're not one brand. We have 30 clients that now leverage the overarching platform and the ability to be dynamic for and personalized, not just for the consumers, but for each individual client, so imperative and important as well.
Yeah, and as I was listening earlier today, and we were talking about lengthy RFP processes and, you know, how that kind of works from a marketer standpoint, we were able to skip the RFP process. It was a really great wedge, and, you know, we just went right into, "Wow, how do we partner together?" And, to your point, it's really been a one-to-many solution, where we can offer a broader set of solutions to your clients as well.
Yeah, I think that's where you guys are really, really lucky. Like, I, I have a feeling whenever you go to an agency or a brand, it, it's not getting them to say, "Yes," it's, it's making sure they don't say, "No," right? Because at the end of the day, this is a, a platform and a piece of technology that every single brand already knows they need. It's just how do they kind of apply it to their overarching business? Do they get CIO approval, CTO approval, CFO approval to kind of integrate it?
Well, and Alex and Al, we appreciate you being a client advocate because you really, you allow us to go right to so many of your clients and again, skip another RFP process and, you know, really find those use cases. So that's one of the things we're very excited about with this partnership, too.
Yeah, and, like, that's obviously a huge benefit for you guys, but for us as well, right?
Yeah.
Every client. We don't want to be in the customer data space with our clients, as almost every mid- and small-sized agency doesn't want to be in, most traded agencies as well. Like, but at the same time, like, the more overarching platforms they're using that are disparate from our capabilities and our activation points are a negative for us, right? Because we either need to find a way to manually apply them or they're just disparate, right?
And when it came to Zeta, it's not just the ability for us to leverage you guys for paid media, but to have a partner that our clients can leverage for earned media and customer data capabilities as well. Because at the end of the day, like, when we're trying, every agency is trying to win clients and keep clients, right? What we've seen this partnership to be as of now, and that we expect it to grow into, is the kind of ability for us to be as sticky as possible with our clients.
Obviously, applying and being able to garner and apply intelligence for our paid media, but also Zeta is a huge piece of our overarching infrastructure that our clients are, and you guys have seen it already with a couple of RFPs, but our clients are already buying into because there is a simplicity of, oh, well, we have this, this CDP, this ESP, this SMS platform that our agency can action off of and have the capability to integrate into their paid media efforts. And that's allowed us to obviously leverage you guys, or our clients leverage you guys for CRM, ESP, SMS, CDP, but, like, that's a benefit to us as well because it becomes harder and harder for them to leave.
To leave, right, and find some additional revenue streams for you as well. It's just something we've been talking about.... So, okay, so what are the key terms of the partnership? Contract length, minimums, technology, et cetera. What would you like to share in that regard?
So I actually think the most important thing is kind of counterintuitive to our partnership, but it was length from this. This is something that we've pulled into our overarching agency pitch. You, I mean, you guys know, but you're a big part of every piece of technology that we are building and have built. And with that said, like, it wasn't. We didn't want it to be short. We have a three-year contract, right? Probably, like, I think that agencies a lot of the time have focused too much on: How do we get a piece of a piece of tech or a capability for an individual brand? But when you're actually getting a piece of technology that you're integrating into your entire agency infrastructure, like, this is something that we needed to be able to leverage.
We need to know that we're going to have a partnership two, three, four, five years from now. And obviously, we've seen a lot of partnerships when it comes to product enhancements, product expansion, but, like, length was super, super imperative to us because-
Well, we've always appreciated that you saw Zeta as the solution to get you there quicker. You know, instead of having to build and, you know, and also you're part of our roadmap as well. You know, we love that you're bringing a lot of feedback to us as, you know, we're continuing to grow, especially as generative AI becomes a big part of this, too. I really love that you bring creative and data together, which I think is going to be really great for the generative AI that's coming, too.
And that's one we're really excited to for as well. Like, what we've always seen is there's always, like, immense separation in, in any products where you're focused solely on media, and it becomes hard to operate as an agency that is... I mean, I would say 70% of our clients are not just media, they're creative analytics. And to be able to integrate a tool that allows us to properly and effectively activate, not just on media, but integrate creative, integrate analytics, integrate data visualization, is obviously very, very important to us.
So great. Okay, so do we have time for one more question or?
Yeah.
One more? Okay. So how are your customers reacting to Tombras' new capabilities powered by Zeta? You know, I mean, I know we're months in, but is there any early, early feedback in that regard?
To start off with our current clients, I would say, obsessed and impressed. Every client-
...for the function in the sense that, you know, it really touches both on the technology and to the operational side, as we look at this thing. But I think, Gerry, it'd be good. I mean, when you look at the largest challenges that are facing for the CMOs today, where would you see it?
Yeah, so as just said the word, that it's very complicated to get a function that manages operating marketing, unlike accounting. No business does marketing the same way, even if they're in the same industry and they compete head-to-head with each other. One of the big challenges, as we've seen, I've been an industry analyst at IDC, covering this market since 2010, and we've seen, you know, really, that was the start of the big digital transformation of marketing. Along the way, in the last, you know, 5 years or so, we've also seen, as you suggested, kind of a practice transformation as from a concept of marketing to a concept of customer experience management across all the interactions that a customer has with a brand.
Marketing and all the other front-office functions need to be connected together so that all the different signals from the ad, you know, from the first ad impression all the way through, you know, call center interactions and finance interactions, the data follows the customer around the enterprise. It's very interesting talking to marketers today about infrastructure modernization. They're looking to replace older systems that don't support that concept of a connected set of interconnected systems interacting with the customer. There isn't a very good... The data infrastructure is usually a mess because over the last 10 years, companies put in systems to manage social marketing, they put in systems to manage email, they put in systems to manage advertising, and each system was kind of like its own stack.
What we're trying to do in today's environment to manage this concept of a customer experience holistically, is to essentially tilt those departmental stacks on their side. What we really want to see is a set of services for data compliance and governance, and analytics and intelligence, that can serve all the various engagement functions that are happening within and beyond marketing. It's really the stack of data, intelligence, and engagement. You know, those are the three big core functions of the infrastructure. When we start talking to marketers, it was very interesting to hear the question about the RFPs.
That's kind of symbolic of the fact that buyers are still a little bit behind this concept of, "Well, I just have a CDP problem, or I just have an email problem, or I just have a data problem." The reality is, they're all interconnected. As we talk about this replacement cycle stuff, which we can talk a little bit more about, it's not just, you know, it's replacement and rationalization. I just don't want to do 1-for-1 replacements. I want to do 2-for-1, 3-for-1, 5-for-1, right? I wanna, and I wanna have a more cohesive platform on which all this stuff is inherently interoperable, right?
So when you talk, when you look at the Oracles and Salesforces and Adobes of the world, who built these very complicated, customer experience platform product portfolios, they're all on different code bases. And one of the things we hear about from some of those customers is, "You know, it's more. It's easier for me to connect, you know, you know, vendor X to vendor Y than it is from vendor X to vendor X, you know, solutions." All that's starting to change as the infrastructure services are getting more sophisticated and being seen more as enterprise services, as opposed to just a departmental data payload that's going into a social media campaign.
We want to make sure that data comes back to a shared, data resource that can be reactivated the next time that customer shows up on our YouTube channel or our TikTok channel, or our website, or our commerce site, or even ends up in our call center. We want to make sure the data, it, you know, participates in an enterprise data ecosystem that keeps up with the customer and enables a sustainable level of differentiated customer service throughout the relationship.
Yeah. I, I'll tell you, it's, it's interesting. One thing you talked about is that sort of the enterprise players. I mean, if you look at the investment of the enterprise players and when they acquired that technology, I mean, you're, you're going back a considerable amount of time.
Decade, yeah.
Yeah. Easily a decade on some of those things-
That's right.
Some of them a little longer. So when you think about, you know, the big enterprise players that are out there offering these sort of technology sets, I mean, they're fighting through the technical debt of what is now integrating technology that is 10 years old, versus, you know, people like us who have come in, where we have replatformed in recent history. Like, we have we are on new tech. Like, it is the... It's leveraging Snowflake, it's leveraging all of the capabilities, and they play a little bit of catch-up for these things.
You know, I just say it's funny, we, we hear the same thing as they, as they approach it. You know, there's a, there's a math that we go when you go talk to the big guys. You say, "Well, think about every SKU you have to buy on every piece of software as you go to approach it, and every time you have a new piece of software and a new SKU, you then have to hire an SI to plug those two things together." And so the math gets pretty big, pretty rapidly, as they think about the integration, you know, of, of those sort of technologies. So on a... I mean, just, just on that notion, we think about sort of the replacement cycle.
As Steve talked about, you touched on it a little bit, you know, what's it... You know, as you talk to organizations, as they're looking at sort of going through this replacement cycle, what's it look like for the enterprise, the ones that already have sort of enterprise, the legacy solutions in it, or do they have internal sort of point solutions that they have? Like, what do you think sort of the view as these people are sort of replacing or approaching this sort of replacement sort of cycle to?
Yeah, I think we're starting to see a bit of a change in terms of buyer behavior from the kind of decades-old best-of-breed model, where it's just buy the best shiny-bright shiny object for whatever particular task automation issue you're trying to solve at the engagement layer, and then figure it out from there. You know, and then we're starting to change into this idea that, okay, we now understand these things all are connected, not only just horizontally across the front office, but we also want the deeper connection between systems that are the engagement layer needs to be inherently connected to the intelligence layer, which is inherently connected to the data layer. And each of those, particularly the data layer, you know, there's not going to be any one ring that rules them all by any means.
but within each area, there needs to be a common data resource for all of the different interactions that are going to be handled by, in this case, marketing. And once we have that, then we can sort of pass off based on brand and regulatory policy to other functions in the area or in our business, right? And I think the question about the other kind of legacy players, leaders in the industry, those are all not only is there a technology fragmentation that's inherited by the customer base, there's also a go-to-market fragmentation that's inherited by the customer, by the market.
If you think, Oracle is kind of my poster child for this, my whipping boy, if you will, because, you know, they bought about 13 different social media and marketing, and advertising type solutions over a decade ago. You know, rightfully so, they didn't really want the, you know, typical Oracle salesperson to start trying to talk to the CMO. That was a good decision. So as a result, they kind of ran each of those properties as an independent business unit. But that meant they all had their own sales teams, their own marketing messages, and it was like this massive portfolio of technology that was never really communicated in a holistic way to the customer. How does it all come together? How does all this stuff come together?
How is the whole greater than the sum of the parts? They still haven't solved that, right? There's Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle, have these massive technology portfolios. They're still having a hard time articulating the collective value of all those things. What they've discovered is that it really does start at the data layer. So we're starting to see selling from the data layer up, you know, automating from the data layer up. And I think in a lot of cases, brands are trying to, if they haven't built this stuff from the data layer up, which almost nobody has, trying to make it all function as if it were. And I think that's a really critical capability. If you can come in with a data platform and intelligence platform, that starts to make all this stuff work together.
Because when you move from a marketing mindset to a customer experience mindset, you're actually solving for a very different set of problems. In marketing, traditionally, you're solving for a little context. I want to make sure the social media interaction goes as best as possible, and I want to make sure this little website, you know, is optimized for this particular visit. You know, that all works very well. It's like each little cog in the wheel is getting faster. But with customer experience, what we're really trying to solve for is continuity, and that is a broad problem set that is within and beyond marketing, and it requires all this other infrastructural work to be kind of rethought from a single departmental idea to a much broader data set.
So there's very few companies in the world that can deliver the the data, the intelligence, and the engagement layers of the needs for a modern marketer. And in particular, with the data, most of the technology that other competitors provide to their to brands is about data management. It's not actually the data, it's just an empty database, right? And then, you know, once you have these massive data sets, for the average marketer or line of business person, you know, being presented with a petabyte and zettabyte resource, it's kind of like walking into Home Depot in the dark. Like, it's an overwhelming amount of SKUs. You're not really sure where to find anything. You're not sure how to describe what you're looking for. You're not even sure how to find what you're looking for, right?
You need the intelligence to do that work for you, because you might find that in any particular use case, I've got, you know, eight or nine out of maybe 15 customer attributes available to me that optimize this decisioning, and maybe I'm functioning in 74%-78% accuracy with this solution. But if AI can look at the whole customer data set and start picking out attributes from anywhere in the enterprise, particularly the transition from advertising, to marketing, to commerce, now I can start to improve that personalization at scale concept. So I'm starting to make decisions that are 80+%, 85%, 91% more accurate. And those improvements as you go from acquisition to qualification, to cart value, or transaction value, lifetime value, they're additive for brands.
Every time you raise the accuracy and performance of each one of those stages of customer development, it amplifies the next stage. So there's a lot of revenue possibility, potential here for brands to accelerate. And I think it is, you know, behooves, it's just sort of on the vendors to help pre-present a set, a portfolio of use cases, and that's broader than the initial ask from the customer, so that they know, okay, we're going to hit these 12 points of pain, but maybe we've got several dozen more use cases that we're going to use to drive value realization out of the system.
From the vendor's point of view, it's like, present the use case roadmap and then deliver the technology that allows us to accelerate down that roadmap faster than we would with a competitive or multi-vendor kind of DIY integration environment. That is going to be much more of a heavy lift and slow us down.
Yeah, I, it, it's interesting. I mean, I think I make, you know, Christian Monberg cringe every time I say this relative to it, but it is, it's a little bit of the fact that, you know, technology, at the end of the day, is a bit of a commodity, right? Without the data and how you sort of handle some of these pieces.
Certainly email. Sending email-
Yeah, certainly email.
The engagement layer stuff is starting to become more commoditized.
Yeah. And so it's always a, you know, as we sort of approach it, which is the fact that, you know, you can deliver the execution platform, but if you're not, you know, you don't necessarily have the insights or you have the data sort of tied to those things. You know, one of the key reasons why those are delivered in the platform as part of it, you know, as like, you know, from the, the Tombras guys were talking about, you know, and sort of how it powers the, the business that's in there. It's, it becomes it, it's as important as the feature and function set as it is, you know, when we sort of deliver to that platform side.
So just on the competitive side, or competitive side a little bit, is we think we move out of the enterprise players, and we move into some of the other sort of more modern players that are out there today. Like, what's your view on sort of how that side of the market sort of looks today?
Yeah, it's interesting. I think, you know, we've seen some successful strategies from players like Braze and Iterable, and those guys kind of coming in with the mobile wedge. I think, that's a, symptomatic of, you know, some of these older platforms from the major players not really being mobile first. They kind of have mobile as a bolt-on or an add-on, certainly an afterthought. Braze has done a great job of using that to, to get into, those relationships. We have, you know, if you think about engagement, intelligence, and data, you have all kinds of companies coming at this marketing, problem-solving from different technical and market legacies. So they have a bunch of data players coming in, talked about, Databricks and Snowflake. AWS is doing a lot of very interesting things.
I think that, you know, they've got these foundational models like the clean rooms and the call center even, that can be API'd out of their infrastructure. So there's gonna be a lot of disruption happening at the hyperscaler level. I think brands are looking forward to building out these. Sort of it relieves the engineering that has to happen up stack to make all this data, data, distributed data management stuff work. When you get into marketing, the reason why you need an extra layer, at least on top of those solutions, is because you have real-time interaction use cases that you cannot really move the data fast enough. You've got, like, you know, 20-30 milliseconds of time between a click and a screen refresh to deliver the new experience to the customer.
So you've got to have an intermediary layer on top of those infrastructures. But I think there's still a lot of noise in the market, especially around generative AI. And so I think we're gonna find that you're going to continue to have to do a lot of work when you meet with customers to educate them on specifically why the platform approach is, you know, basically obviates the need for XYZ number of other solutions. And the economics and the operational environment, the training and the onboarding, and the time to production is much faster. I like the idea, the question about the proof of concepts.
I think we're finding that a lot of companies are using those very effectively to outmaneuver the larger major players that do take a long time and wanna charge money sometimes for just a proof of concept. And we're hearing from companies that can come in and do those proof of concepts in 2-4 weeks, generally with no charge or some sort of additive charge into the contract, should it take place, have a huge advantage, so in the trenches with the customers buying this cycle.
Yeah, I mean, I know it's true, like, for us, it's about two weeks to launch a proof of concept.
Yeah.
We call them sandboxes, as they go out there-
Right.
Allow customers to sort of experience the platform and go through that. And as you said, the larger players bring in an SI in order to build sort of a sandbox or a POC, as they call it, and there's costs, you know, not necessarily all contained within those things. So it's true. Just to go into one piece. I think one is we'll touch data just one more time here.
I know we've talked about it a little bit in there, but I think you have a very interesting perspective on data relative to the brand as you sort of talk about which is always probably one of my favorite quotes coming from you on there. So it's always good. I think that, but also to go from that, you know, from data and its importance, but also how do we sort of talk about it from a privacy compliance- As we think about sort of the impact to sort of the marketing technology pieces that are out there?
Yeah. So one of my mantras that I'm using with our CMO clients is this idea that if you really follow the logical, you know, of how personalization at scale takes place and the technology stack required to run it, you think all the way down to the root, and you get to the data, you realize, fundamentally, data is your brand. Your data infrastructure is your brand. It's going to determine how seamlessly you are able to connect and how well you can sustain that continuity for customers across multiple interaction environments. And this, we've all experienced these things, where we go from one channel to another, and now we've got to kind of restate or we're starting from scratch with the brand, right? And that's always been on the customer, but it slows everything down, right?
Because the customer is the only source of context from one point of interaction to the other, it just slows things down. So I think we're gonna see, as was alluded to earlier, I think Chris was mentioning this idea that, you know, we had, like, zero RFPs that were, you know, in kind of broader context and understanding, "Yep, we have to solve multiple problems with this project," to the ideal of three, and we're gonna see more and more and more of these RFPs change as the market becomes, and marketers and CMOs become more aware of the fact that it's a bottoms-up-...
propositions, and that requires a data solution on an intelligence, an intelligence solution, and generally speaking, a much lighter weight environment for engagement, which we were just talking about, is primarily a commodity at this point in the game. It's very hard to do any kind of differentiation at the engagement level. In fact, for marketing and technology in general, you might, you know, after 10 or 15 years, this is a mature market. Even though you've got to continue the engineering curve in order to sustain parity and have whatever incremental differentiations you might be able to achieve, temporarily. Actually, go-to-market is going to be a much bigger lever for market share. So I think that Zeta's focus now on building out the partner relationships is huge.
That's going to be a big signal to watch and to see how those partnership relationships develop and how much share of practice you can get out of those commitments from those big SIs, consultancies, agencies. You know, they're all kind of competing for the same business with the SaaS vendors in some cases. So, yeah, I think Zeta has a unique capability to communicate the idea of lower weight engagement investment, much higher level of intelligence and data services, data management, and data services coming into the solution right from the get-go. That the customer, the CMO, does not have to solve three or four or five subsequent problems after deploying an engagement solution, right?
Very good. I think that's, I think it's we're going to go into questions now. I think we're gonna actually bring-- we're bringing the other group up also. Is that what it is?
Yeah. Matt, Gerry, thank you very much.
Yep.
Why don't we get Al, Alex, and Tina come back, and we got about 20 minutes for Q&A, and then we'll have a break, so.
Slide the chairs down.
Dan Reagan again from Canaccord. This one's for Gerry. Which of the legacy marketing clouds is furthest along in thinking about the data intelligence and activate, activation integrations? And then, you know, what is the most important thing that they need to do to get it right? You know, my sense is that Adobe is the one to watch, but I'd love to get your perspective.
Yeah, good question. They're all, I think, conceptually on board with this idea, that they've, they've been ahead of their buyers in with respect to the data layer. Salesforce, in particular, has said, "Look, you know, our core account strategy is to own the data layer. But how much of that data layer can we manage? Because that then facilitates our ability to then start talking to other buying centers in the enterprise." So that, that's true for everybody, right? The more the data layer you own, the easier it is to start selling into new buying centers, whether it's advertising or marketing. Sometimes those are in separate budgets, and even the CMOs are organizations, there can be many different budgets. And it's this concept of, like, can you follow the data?
Can you follow the use case roadmap outside of your current buying center to expand your account count, right? So, they've all got CDPs. Now, let's pick on Salesforce for a minute again, because I was just at Dreamforce. You know, with respect to their data strategy, those of you who are familiar with Salesforce or those of you who haven't, are not familiar with them, you may... Well, you've seen their attempts to launch this CDP product, which has happened every year for the last four years. They've renamed the product, they've re-engineered it, and it's kind of a mess, to be honest with you. They're getting there. The data cloud solution that they announced at Dreamforce this year is actually the CDP they should have built all along.
But it's interesting that, you know, it's an example of how marketing can influence market perception, because they take what is essentially a weakness, like, we didn't engineer this thing right four years ago, we didn't engineer it the right way three years ago, we didn't engineer it or even define it right two years ago, and now we finally kind of got it right. So that was a lot of, you know, multi-years of engineering weakness with respect to a full-blown CDP solution. But they, because they change the name of the product every single year, you know, it gets them, it allows them to do different, you know, restructure contracts. It's a different SKU.
That also, from a marketing point of view, takes what was a technical weakness and makes it look like a market advantage, like it looks like innovation, when it's really just catch up. So it's a—they're a hard company to market against. All of our clients struggle with that because they massively over-index on their SG&A, you know, investments, as we've all heard. So I think between Adobe and Salesforce, those are kind of the two leaders, but there's lots of opportunity for other vendors to come in with a much stronger platform play when it's not, you know, marketing stack by acquisition, aka, you know, it's sort of fragmentation by design, right?
Hey, Chris Quintero from Morgan Stanley. I think this one's for Alex, Alejandro. You talked about 30 of your clients kind of leveraging the, the Zeta platform. So just curious how you think about scalability and addressability across your entire client base, and, and, you know, would be helpful to kind of get, you know, what is generally your, your client size?
... Yeah, I think I can take that. We have about, from the media side, about 50 clients. They vary in size. I think that the majority of them are spending between, I would say, probably $10 million-$30 million a year. We have some of them are much on the higher end, and we have a couple are on the smaller end. I think from a scalability perspective, the biggest-- there's two pieces in here, right? It's like we are still, since the partnership is very early, we're still sort of like deploying it internally, so there's still a little bit of education as to like, how does the platform work, how to get you to the best of its advantage for all our teams.
So right now, Alex is doing a lot of, a lot of touring personally to get everybody onboarded. But then secondly, I do think that for some clients, especially the more complicated clients, have a lot of LOBs, a lot of like stakeholders on their side, there is also some education that has to happen for them to be able to adapt the platform to its full strengths. I think that we've had a really easy time with the, sort of like very hierarchical clients that have one CMO, that's the decision maker, that gets it, awesome. But when you begin to bring in, you know, the CIOs and then all the players, merchandising, e-com, they're, that becomes a little bit slower.
I don't see any giant obstacles once you disagree in terms of like long-term scalability, but I just think it's a matter of perfecting that process and I think getting up and running quicker.
Yeah, it's almost advantageous for us to operationalize it across all of our client base, right? Like, it, as an agency, like, integrates any larger agency or enterprise-level product, like, it, we need to operationalize it. We can't have, like, a disparate use case for individual clients.
What about Aaron?
Thanks for your time today. I have a question for both Gerry and for the Tombras guys. I was wondering if you could give us your perspective on Zeta's brand awareness and how it's evolved. Maybe, Gerry, you could talk about, since you've been covering it, how it's changed. And then Tombras guys, how many of your clients knew of Zeta when you've signed this partnership and took it out to them, and how is that changing?
Yeah. So, my perception is that, you know, there's been a whole host of companies that have, they've kind of come behind the Salesforce, Adobe, you know, Oracle, kind of triumvirate of the industry. And I think as the data layer issues and the concept of a single platform environment, you know, a code base that was actually inherently built to support all this stuff, as opposed to a mishmash of a whole bunch of others, is a huge branding opportunity for Zeta and others who are built on platforms. And so I think, as I was suggesting earlier, I think it's harder and harder to just engineer strategies and the ability to build a product in which partners can actually articulate the IP they're bringing into a particular client or industry, a really big deal.
I think, you know, creating a use case maps that are surfaced right in product, creating measures that enable the marketing or the operational team using the environment, can not just measure TCO, but they can actually attach TCO to business performance and getting a metricing system that articulates the value of the whole system. You know, these are all, I think, opportunities across the industry that have not been very well developed or articulated in product or even in marketing. So, there's definitely more greenfield ahead of Zeta in terms of brand building.
I think there's an enormous amount of momentum for this idea that there is a new generation, a new tranche of solutions coming to market that are less expensive, less of a engineering lift than some of the traditional major legacy players.
Yeah, I think that we see something very similar. I think that two things: One, I think that the brand awareness of Zeta has really evolved in the past, like, 12 months. We even have clients who used Zeta in the past and did not realize how many features and, like, how many things they had available now that we're onboarding them onto it. And I think that the biggest, so like, as it grows, I think the biggest question mark that's still available as an opportunity to answer is: What is Zeta exactly as a brand? I think a lot of clients are knowing it based on the solutions they need. They're like, "Well, that's a CDP company, or that's like a managed service company," instead of having, like, a really clear vision of what Zeta is comprehensively.
I think that as the solution becomes more comprehensive and as we can speak to it better, we are seeing that it is becoming clearer for those who we speak to, and I think that needs to be the broader conversation in the industry.
Yeah, I would also add that the acquisitions that Zeta has just naturally made have given them a lot of, like, organic publicity, especially in a time where just ad tech, MarTech acquisitions are happening less and less.
I think this will be primarily for Gerry, but I would be curious if the Tombras team had anything to add as well. You mentioned data as a kind of, you know, it's becoming the foundation of the CMO buying cycle. Can you talk about how first-party versus third-party data and the perception of that is changing in the CMO's organization? And then, as it relates to Zeta, how do CMOs view Zeta's data set? Is it first party, is it third party? And maybe talk about a little bit of the differentiation as well.
Yeah, it's a great question. Obviously, there's been a, you know, among the many different operational and practice shifts in the market, first-party data is a big deal now, as we are now hearing the deprecation of third-party cookies from Google is supposed to be 100% by the end of next year. We'll see if that actually happens. I think there's probably a lot of financial engineering that has to happen in addition to getting rid of the third-party cookies. So, you know, we'll see how long that lingers. But the...
Yeah, the first-party data challenge is huge because it's apparent, it's clear that interactions that are informed by mostly first and zero-party data, the zero-party data being the stuff that the customer explicitly declares to you, like in a survey or a form or something, as opposed to scraping out of the session, the web session or the mobile session, enhances and actually improves the performance of those personalization interactions, right? So you get a lift. And now the question is really how well do brands understand their data environment? How much zero first, second, and party data is actually in the dataset? Very few brands have a really good understanding of that.
Then there's, as I talked about with metrics, how are the data payloads, the proportion of zero-, first-, and third-party data in the data payloads for various interactions that we're running in marketing, and how does that performance change? So can we measure it? Can we show the incremental improvement for higher levels of zero- and first-party data? And can we govern the rest of the data sourcing effectively so that the line-of-business people in marketing can trust the infrastructure to provide an operationally safe environment for them to do their queries and do their intelligence and build their audiences and actually execute, right? And they haven't violated something by using a PII signal from somewhere they shouldn't have used, but there's nothing in the system to help them understand that.
So there's a lot to this concept of transitioning to first party data and articulating the value of that to the enterprise. There are certain industries like CPG, where it's a huge problem because there's very little first party data. And so, you know, I think that makes a huge value proposition for the idea of a data service that's coming with the platform, right? So, I guess in summary, first party data is a very big deal. It's clearly got the attention of CMOs. I think it's all part and parcel of this concept of how do we enhance and accelerate the sophistication of our data infrastructure, and not only just technically, but operationally, and how do we metric it?
You know, all those things come together to, I think, advantage the idea of a combined solution where I'm taking the data, the intelligence, and the engagement, and I can take out three or four or more systems from my infrastructure.
All right, any last questions? Otherwise, we're actually right on time, so we'll probably head to a break. But, Gerry, Matt, Tina, Al, Alex, thank you very much for your time. Hopefully, that was helpful this morning. Again, we got about 10- minutes for a break, and we'll be back here with David and Chris. So, [crosstalk]
Okay. Well, thank you for, from me to my team and for our customers, and from Gerry, from IDC, for the first part of the day. Now we get to get into even more fun stuff. Get your spreadsheets out, your pencils. We're gonna get into a range of topics. David's gonna handle the first set of deep dives. We'll introduce Steve Vine in a bit, who heads up our—he's our general counsel and heads up corporate M&A, to talk about M&A in a bit more detail, and then I'll come up and do some of the more financial metrics. But what I'd love to do is be able to introduce, I think many of you know, David A. Steinberg, our Chairman, Co-Founder, and CEO. David?
Thank you, Chris. I appreciate it. This is the sticky clicker?
Yes.
Well... So, you know, we've tried to put together a pretty comprehensive day today, and I think Chris and Scott and Madison and the team have really done an exceptional job. As I look at this week, it is hard not to reflect on where we came from. You know, we started this business, John and I, 16 years ago, on the premise that point solutions were not going to be what marketers needed, and feel like this journey has been really interesting. Like many entrepreneurs, I've had many highs and many lows. This is my sixth company. Sold four, have taken two public, and have had, you know, ups and downs, like a lot of people.
For me, I've learned more from my failures than I've learned from my successes, and I feel like as I look back on my personal career, you know, making sure that you bring in the world's greatest human capital and let them do their jobs, is one of the single most important things that I've learned as an entrepreneur. I joke, when I was a 21-year-old entrepreneur, I started my first company, and I was absolutely sure I knew how to do every single job in that company better than everybody else. By the time I was 35, I couldn't do it all myself, but I still thought I could do it better, and I'd sort of peek and peer and so on and so forth.
As an old CEO, at 54, I now know that I've got people who can do their jobs substantially better than I can, and I think this day really evidences that. We've brought in some of the world's best people, and it really is a mission-critical component of building a great company as an entrepreneur. That understanding that you don't know it all, and you can bring great people in. What I've also found is, if you do not do that, if you don't let them do their jobs, they won't stay. I think one of the other interesting things I've learned, almost more than anything else, is the people who often get you to where you are, are not always the people who can take you where you want to go.
If you look at our senior executive team, it's an incredible team, and some of the team have been around forever. Yes, I'm looking at you, Steve Gerber. Some have come midway. Yes, I'm looking at you, Steve Vine. And then others are newer to the team, like Chris and Scott and others. So what we're always looking at is not just do we have great people, but do we have the people who can take us where we wanna go? And as I think about the evolution of our business, and one of the questions that comes up a lot is really our brand. What's the evolution of the brand? Where are you? How are you thinking about the brand? And it's something that we are incredibly focused on today. Years ago, I would tell you it was not something we were focused on.
We were focused on building game-changing tech, which I do think is a massive competitive advantage for us from a technical perspective. In addition to having the world's best first-party data set that can be accessed outside of a walled garden, we need people to know who we are. We need more at-bats, right? So we talked on our last earnings call that our RFP volumes were at records. Our pipeline was at a record. That continues. We continue to see record pipelines. We continue to see record RFPs. The statistic I am most proud of in our sales motion is the fact that we have won over 50% of the engagements or RFPs we have been invited to participate in over the last year. To put it in perspective, greater than 12 competitors have shown up to each of those RFPs that we've won over half of.
We need more at-bats because we want to continue to accelerate our growth, and we feel like driving our brand will be mission-critical to that. So what is the biggest thing? Well, you're sitting at it, Zeta Live. So when we launched Zeta Live three years ago, I think there were 40 or 50 of us in a room. We were 10 feet apart. We were trying to figure out how to navigate COVID, and I think we had a few hundred people online. Yesterday, we crossed over 10,000 people who will be attending Zeta Live this year. We had to increase the capacity at the New York Times Center, which involved buying substantially more food, which is obviously where their margin is. Not sure why. And we had to increase our capacity rates with our streaming vendor.
We'll be streaming both stages at once this year, which is also pretty cool, and over 40 different press outlets will be attending tomorrow. I'm sure that the fact that People magazine asked for two credentials has to do with Chris Greiner, not Seth Rogen. But at the end of the day, we are investing heavily from a time and an energy perspective, and money, to build the Zeta brand. Why? Because we want to continue to grow. Now, as you think about our business, one of the topics that comes up a lot is stock-based compensation. I'm sure none of you have ever thought about this, but it's something that comes up frequently.
One of the things I like to focus on as we think about bringing investors in, is that the vast majority of the stock-based compensation that you see running through our balance sheet, over half has come from pre-IPO issuances. So let me explain to you how we did things slightly differently from other companies and, and why it's created, I think, some confusion. When we went public, we had already been in business for over 13 years. We had issued large amounts of equity over that 13 years to employees for retention purposes and motivational purposes. Technically, all of that stock, the vast majority, say 80%-85% of it, should have vested that day. Now, that would have been great for our earnings because you could have flushed everything in one day, like a lot of companies used to do. Everything would have expensed.
It would have looked like a very large loss for 24 hours, and then it would have rolled off the balance sheet. But one of the things I learned the hard way in my last organization was, it would have probably led to a mass exodus of our senior employees. So what we did with our board of directors, who pushed a lot of this on us, at least I tell my team that, is we took all of that stock, and we rolled it over a four year vest. Why? Retention. We wanted to keep our senior people. We didn't want people getting through the lockup and, and dealing with. The other problem we would have had, is if those shares vested on the day of the IPO, according to 409A, they would have been taxable to all of our employees that day.
We would have had to sell a tremendous amount of stock on behalf of our employees just to cover the taxable event, or many of our senior managers could have ended up in bankruptcy. Not a good recipe for happy people, right? So by rolling that over four years, it's sort of expensed in. Now, if you look post-IPO, we continue to focus on using stock-based compensation to retain employees. All of this stock is issued with a four year vest. Now, you can also understand that strategically, we've made a couple of decisions. One, we're gonna begin to use more PSUs and less restricted units as it relates to management, because we want management to even be more aligned with our shareholders. All of those PSUs are granted, not in the money, just so we're all on the same page.
We would have to drive an average stock price of 25%, that's average, don't kill me later if I'm off by a few points, just to get to a quarter of a PSU. So we're talking about today, I think our top PSU issuance hits at $35 a share. Just to put that math out there. And I do think, just to say, that our goal, and we've been using sort of a dilution rate, I think this says between 4.5% and 4.6%. We see that coming down as well. So the goal is to get that down to closer or less than 3% from an exhaust rate perspective. And I also want to remind you that exhaust rate vests over the next four years. It's not vesting at once. So it will roll off at some point.
This is something that we want you to know. We heard you loud and clear on this. It's something that we need to lower, and we are very, very focused on that. So when you think about the future, which slide I went to, too early, you're looking at moving also to options, which is not something we've used in the past. So instead of just using RSUs, we're moving to options for some employees and a combination. For management, we're gonna be moving from a senior perspective to a much greater percentage of PSUs, which will not be in the money, as I said. So we're really thinking of PSUs on two planes. One is driving the stock price, which everybody wants at the end of the day, and two, we're really focused on operational metrics of the business.
So, you know, listen, we talk a lot about our Zeta 2025 plan. We talk a lot about it. I'm sure Chris and the team will spend the vast majority of the day showing you metrics on how we would have to materially slow our growth to just hit that level. But I'm already thinking with Steve Gerber, what's our 2030 plan? And you'll see operational metrics in the 2030 plan, where we will try to tie management into the operational KPIs and success of the business, in addition to driving share price over a five-year period of time, from 2025 to 2030. So this is not something we're rolling out this week, but it's something we're very focused on.
One of the other questions that Chris and Scott asked me to address today was our M&A strategy, because, you know, it's funny, I, I think of it as one of our secret powers, one of our superpowers. We've done, in my opinion, incredibly well as it relates to M&A, but I think one of the challenges is when we switched from private company to a public company, people look at the trailing twelve months of revenue and EBITDA as it relates to the acquisitions we are performing or doing, and they're not understanding how quickly we integrate and are able to create massive synergies in these little tuck-in deals. Because and Steve Vine's gonna come up in a few minutes and walk through how we do this and how we think about it.
But what you're really seeing as a public company is you're seeing the duck on top of the water. You're not seeing the feet moving at a million miles a second, which is what we're attempting to do. So we're able to integrate the vast majority of the deals we do within 90-180 days. We're able to take out a large percentage of employees, sometimes on the Zeta side. And we look at this as a meritocracy. We're not an acqui-hirer. We're not that, we're an acquirer. We're not an acquirer who says, "We're keeping our people at all costs, and we're going to fire your people," because this might not sound incredibly empathetic, but often their people are better than ours in certain functions, and we want to keep the best people.
The key is to make sure that the synergies are recognized. One of the things I've also learned, and really messed me up at my last company, was we used to look at M&A as part of the operating function of the company, meaning I would have to go to Steve Gerber and say, "Steve, I need you to stop doing your job. Go look at this M&A deal and shepherd it all the way through." Well, what you find is they mess up both components of their jobs. Now, Steve could probably do both, but the truth of the matter is, a normal operating manager would not hit their numbers because they're not focused on their day-to-day business, and they wouldn't be great at M&A. We've actually built a boutique investment bank inside of Zeta. We built it years ago.
It's run by a gentleman named Julio Gil. Julio, who is one of the most amazing guys I know, you know, born in south side of L.A., ended up going to Dartmouth because that was a good school. They really wanted a kid from his school, and they gave him a full ride. Went to Credit Suisse, ended up at Harvard Business School. Then he went over to Starbucks, where he helped to run their corporate development in M&A, and then he went from there to Fortress. Didn't think that was a great place for him, and then we were able to grab him because he wanted to move back to L.A., and we were able to hire him out of our L.A. office. One of the things that's mission-critical to us as a company is having Julios everywhere.
It's having people who are exceptional at what they do at every level of the organization, even though you're not hearing from them often. But in this case, Julio's job, and Steve Vine is going to talk about it in a few minutes, is to work on M&A with his analyst team. And by the time it gets to the operating guys, who we wrap in to make sure it works and it makes sense, they're able to just absorb it. And we already have 10-15 workflows created before the deal even closes. Everything is focused on what are quick wins, what are medium wins, and what are long-term wins, and many of those quick wins are first 30 days. We're very, very good at this, and we're very, very focused on it. Although I want to say very clearly, I don't believe in transformative M&A.
I'm sorry to my banker friends in the room. I believe that what happens when you do transformative M&A is it transforms both companies for the worse. We love tuck-ins. We love the ability to bring great human capital, great data, great technology into our organization, where we believe we can integrate it quickly. And quite frankly, we look at 100 deals to close one. 100. So with that, are we doing Q&A now? We'll do Steve, and then we'll do Q&A. Steven?
Yeah. Do I need this? I have... Can I give this to, some... Thank you, David. Hello, everybody. I'm Steve Vine. I'm Zeta's General Counsel and Head of Corporate Development. I'm here today to talk to you about our strategy and approach for M&A. But first, a brief introduction. I started my career more than 20 years ago doing M&A at a big New York firm. After several years representing VCs, private equity firms, public and private companies, I left to join a technology company. About more than 10 years ago now, I met David Steinberg and Steve Gerber while I was working on the divestiture of a business from my former employer. They did not buy that business. Their offer was not that good, but they did give me a call and asked me to join them, and that offer was exciting.
They had built a very good company with an exciting vision and sky-high ambitions to be the defining marketing platform for the era of data and intelligence. A vision of being a great company. Today, I'll give you a brief introduction of how we think about and execute M&A, our strategic considerations, our valuation considerations, and our process to help you understand why, how, and what we do. I'll also connect that to some of our historic and recent acquisitions to hope you come away with a better understanding of what we have done and what we look to do in the future. At Zeta, our business strategy drives our M&A strategy. When we first look at a target and to do a deal, a key question we always ask is: how do we make one plus one equal four?
To do this, we need a clear understanding of how a target will improve and accelerate our business objectives and connect to our value proposition. How will the target enhance the core pillars of what we do? The scale and fidelity, the uniqueness of our proprietary data, the performance of our software and intelligence, and the reach and sophistication of our omni-channel engagement. While these pillars speak to our business strategy at a relatively high level, we de-develop detailed deal theses underneath each pillar to focus our M&A process on opportunities we believe will have the best fit and the biggest impact. Let's start with data. A target's ability to generate scalable, self-sustaining, opt-in, and permission data and unique signals is often a lens through which we will review an opportunity.
A key point to note is Zeta is not in the business of selling data, and as such, we're generally looking at assets that generate data as a byproduct of their business model rather than as a core source of revenue. Key examples of transactions where data was a core thesis include Disqus in 2017 and ArcaMax in 2022. In both these cases, these were partners whose data we had tested and proven value prior to our acquisition, and they had scalable consumer-facing platforms for data generation that were scalable and high fidelity and compliant. The next pillar of our business strategy, software and intelligence. Every acquisition we do involves software. But when we look at this pillar, we're looking at specific capabilities as the core part of our deal thesis.
Here, we seek opportunities that complement the ZMP, that have the ability to accelerate our turning data into intelligence. We look for incremental capabilities that create opportunity to, for cross-sell and accelerate our product roadmap, products that can be further enhanced and differentiated with Zeta's data and, and intelligence, and vertical or geographic specialization that can help bring our solutions to new client base. While software is part of every deal we do, examples of acquisitions where it was the core thesis include our acquisition of Boomtrain's AI engine in 2017 and the Temnos NLP capabilities we acquired in 2018. Finally, omni-channel engagement. The ability of our customers to engage across channel within the ZMP is an important differentiator for us.
Thus, strengthening existing channels or accelerating expansion into new or under-penetrated channels is another thesis that can drive a transaction. Examples of acquisitions driven by the opportunity to accelerate and expand our omni-channel engagement capabilities include DataMail's ESP in 2012, and Sizmek's DSP in 2019. As David mentioned, a core principle underlying all of these pillars and every acquisition we do is human capital, the people and teams we bring into Zeta. We believe integrating leadership and providing them with a platform for continual growth is pivotal to the success of every deal. Many companies speak to this, but we believe we are truly unique and have a track record to prove it.
Our ranks at both a mid and senior level are filled with long-tenured employees who have joined us through M&A, including many of today's speakers, including Steven Gerber, Christian Monberg, Neej Gore, and Tina McCain. Finally, we are focused on ensuring that our inputs drive our outputs, the KPIs and financial objectives that our investors expect. We look for opportunities that will be incremental to our forecasts and will generate sustainable organic revenue, EBITDA, and free cash flow.
While not every acquisition needs to touch on every KPI, we carefully evaluate every target to ensure that they will be accretive to some and will not create any headwinds. We do this by focusing on a disciplined approach to valuation, structure transactions that properly align incentives, a comprehensive process for due diligence with a well-defined thesis, business case, and integration plans, and a structured, cross-functional approach, results-oriented approach to integration.
Now that we've discussed our strategic and financial objectives, I also want to share a bit about the methodology we use to prioritize deals. Prioritization drives how we think about valuation, and we'll give you some insight into the frequency, size, and other attributes for deals we may consider in the future. I noted earlier that as part of our process, we developed detailed deal theses. Our deal theses are an important component of our process. Theses are developed with our internal business leaders, who become the sponsor and advocate for consideration of any opportunity that falls within that thesis. They are specific and targeted, developed with insights from our customers, partners, and suppliers, and they detail expected synergies and objectives so we can assess targets objectively and develop a detailed execution plan.
Our theses are a roadmap to determine if a target is a good fit, and importantly, to prioritize the impact we expect. Our prioritization maps to these deal categories: disruptive capabilities, accelerating product priorities, and opportunistic. We have not done a deal as a public company that we would categorize as a disruptive capability. These opportunities are likely to be larger. So to be clear, as David said, we would not do a deal that is transformative. A disruptive capability could also be executed through a series of mid-size or small deals, as we have done in the past. For example, to drive development of our Data Cloud, we acquired Boomtrain, Discuss, and Temnos in a short period from 2017 to 2018. By accelerating development of our Data Cloud, we created a disruptive capability that has driven revenue across our entire product portfolio.
Though the direct revenue generated by those companies prior to our acquisition was small, we believe the Data Cloud has become the foundation for much of the revenue growth that Zeta has experienced over the past five years, and that we expect that to continue in the future. In general, our expectation of acquisitions in this category are that they have demonstrated evidence of a scalable go-to-market and long-term revenue growth potential that is complementary and incremental to Zeta's. We expect there to be multiple and significant actionable revenue and margin-enhancing opportunities, and that they will be highly accretive to Zeta's KPIs in twelve months. For these types of transactions, valuations may be more likely to be driven by revenue, given the high value, the focus on high-value technology and the potential to drive future organic revenue.
We also have not yet done a deal as a public company within the category of accelerating priorities. This classification is for opportunities that accelerate our product roadmap or go-to-market. For example, our acquisition of IgnitionOne in 2019 drove acceleration of our already strong programmatic platform. From a financial metrics perspective, we would expect these deals to be accretive through synergies that drive organic improvement to our business within 12 months. For this type of transactions, valuations are more likely driven by EBITDA, given the focus on highly complementary capabilities. While we are always open to evaluating opportunities in these categories, disruptive capabilities and accelerating product priorities, we do not expect to do these every year. We do these deals when the right target at the right value fits the right deal thesis. Opportunistic transactions are the type of acquisitions we do more frequently.
These are investments we make to drive targeted improvements in our business at favorable ROI and highly accretive multiples. Deals in this category are highly targeted to core and overlapping capabilities that integrate quickly and seamlessly and that operate profitably at very accretive valuations. We consider the transactions we've completed since we went public, Apptness, ArcaMax, and WhatCounts, to be in this category, and I'll talk more about them in a moment... Generally, from a financial metrics perspective, opportunistic transactions are expected to be accretive through synergies to gross margin, EBITDA, and free cash flow in nine months or sooner. As David said, in less than 90 days, sometimes. Deals in this category are done at very accretive valuations, targeting single-digit EBITDA multiples. Historically, we have done one to two of these deals per year and would expect to continue at approximately this pace.
While they have been small, we are very happy about the performance of our post-IPO acquisitions. In addition to their strategic value, measured against the pillars I described earlier, these were also important contributors to our financial objectives. These deals were executed at single-digit EBITDA multiples, and once we took ownership, we were able to drive significant multiple improvement through our execution and realization of synergies. These synergies have contributed to our accelerated EBITDA and free cash flow growth by eliminating significant costs and adding infrastructure and capacity that supports new organic revenue. For example, ArcaMax was a significant vendor prior to the acquisition, and owning that platform has allowed us to realize significant and incremental cost savings and do more with the data that platform creates. And WhatCounts delivered email infrastructure and capacity that is supporting new organic revenue at favorable margins.
I hope this helped you understand a little of how we think about M&A, what we've accomplished, and what we may do in the future. We've received feedback from you about providing more visibility and transparency into our M&A activities, and we are committed to doing so. As we execute these deals, I hope this framework will be helpful in providing you with more context for what we do in the future. Thank you.
Thank you, Steve. So whether it's through the daily investor interactions that we have with you all as analysts and investors, or what clearly came through in the Rivel perception study, the points of friction or the most common financial questions that we get, can really be boiled down to three topics, and we'll go through all of these three today. Help us understand what influences scaled customer count growth and ARPU expansion. What is the mix of the business's recurring and reoccurring revenue? And how sustainable are the growth rates and the margin expansion trajectory of the business through now and past 2025? Clearly, up to this point, we haven't answered those as completely as we should have, but I think today is going to go a long way in doing so. Let's first start with unpacking scaled customer count.
Now, as a foundation, I think it's important to understand just how diversified the customer set is. We'll often get the question, "How has Zeta been able to grow at such a healthy rate in the midst of a choppy macro backdrop, and by the way, a tough marketing budget backdrop?" I think one of the answers lies in the pie chart behind me. With such diversification of customers, there's very little concentration. We serve over 15 different industry verticals. 11 out of our top 15 are growing year-over-year. Six out of our top 10 are growing over 20% year-over-year on a trailing 12-month basis. Now, that does not mean we are fully insulated, but what it does mean is we can weather a storm. What would a storm look like?
Well, for example, through the first half of 2023, our top-line revenue growth rate is 25%, and that includes an 8-point revenue growth headwind from the automotive and the insurance vertical combined. Now, it's not just the number of industries that you support, but it's also the quality of the brands that you're working with. Zeta has the privilege, as you saw today, and among other examples, to be working with category leaders. For example, we work with the three largest U.S. telcos, three of the five largest U.S. banks, eight out of the 10 largest automotive manufacturers globally, six out of the 10 largest auto insurers, four out of the seven leading credit card issuers, two out of the three major sports leagues, and the list goes on. But why is that important?
Because it was our experience during COVID and after, that category leaders are the first to lean in and invest in upgrading their marketing technology stack. Second, they invest to grow no matter the macro backdrop. When they do, they're doing so on Zeta's platform. Think back to what you've heard today about our flywheel. It begins with providing better intelligence, which leads to Zeta creating more effective audiences, which then drives a higher customer ROI. That flywheel powers our revenue model. As you can see on the slide in the chart to the left, the longer Zeta's customers are with us, the bigger they become. Because you believe the Zeta Marketing Platform, you lose all of those insights, and with stickiness, is coming increasing revenue visibility.
Over the last trailing twelve months, 92% of Zeta's revenue is with customers that have been with us over a year, and that is a multi-year trend that we see continuing. But I wanna zoom in on one particular cohort because I think it's very important for a number of reasons. First, that one to three year cohort, A, it's growing, and it's growing substantially. If you see back in 2021, that one to three, year cohort had an average revenue per of $900K. Today, it sits at $1.5 million. But why? A more modern platform... The Zeta Marketing Platform was launched in late 2020 and early 2021. These were the first set of scaled customers on the new platform. A better customer engagement model. Also in 2021, was the advent of our hunter-farmer model.
These are the scaled customers that have gone through that sales motion and gotten bigger and a more efficient and effective marketing platform. In the last 18 months, while marketing budgets and spend was being reduced, these are the customers that have increased their spend on the platform, not reduced it. And we're actually working with far more scaled customers than meets the eye. We're conservative in who we count as a scaled customer. For example, if we're working with a very large multi-brand conglomerate or a very large agency, as you saw today, each only counts as one scaled customer. But let's unpack the 425 scaled customers to look at how many unique brands we're working with. 352 are single-brand relationships.
55 out of the 425 scaled customers, we're working with two or three brands, and another 18 of the 425 are working with four or more brands. And mind you, each unique brand still meets the definitional statement of a scaled customer, meaning they've driven at least $100K of trailing twelve-month revenue on the platform. In total, 590 unique brands that we're working with, or 40% more than the 2Q amount of scaled customers that we reported just a couple of months ago. And when you look at it through the lens of sales productivity, it's even more magnified. Here, we're looking at the current trailing twelve-month period against the prior trailing twelve-month period through the lens of quota carriers added, scaled customers added, and unique brands added.
Over the last 12 months, we've added 15 quota carriers, compared to 33 in the prior period. Now, look at the production of that class of sellers relative to the prior. They've added 1.7x more scaled customers and 4.5x more unique brands. Over the last 12 months, 148 unique brands added. But what's really interesting about that 148 is the balance, which I think is something that is very important about Zeta. Of the 148, 76 are associated with adding new customers, and 72 are associated with taking our existing customers and making them bigger. So as we wrap this section and before we go into recurring and reoccurring revenue, three thoughts. We benefit from a diverse customer set and by working with category leaders.
Our customers are growing substantially on the platform, and with that growth, we're getting much better visibility. 92% of our revenue with customers have been with us over a year. We're seeing substantial sales productivity, adding over 148 unique brands in just the last 12 months. Now, revenue mix. Through the first half of 2023, 47% of Zeta's revenue is recurring, and you can see that's actually up from at the time of the IPO. Now, from a growth perspective, recurring revenue, which is defined as software subscription plus minimum usage agreements, over a two year compound annual growth rate, is up 28%. And as you saw from Steve Gerber's TAM slide earlier, how we size that market, that's about 2x faster than the 14% growth rate you saw earlier.
Recurring revenue, which is 53% of revenue on the platform, is growing 24% year-over-year. Going back to that same TAM slide, also 2x faster than the market. Now, there's another way to look at revenue mix. We can look at contract structure. Here, we're going to look at the contract structure of Zeta's 425 scaled customers, and that's an important set because that represents 98% of Zeta's revenue. 15% or 74 out of the 425 scaled customers have a remaining performance obligation, and that fits squarely within the traditional SaaS contract structure. 85% or 351 of our 425 scaled customers in their contracts contain a termination for convenience clause.
That sits outside of traditional contracts that are SaaS in nature, which means you cannot recognize a remaining performance obligation simply for that clause alone. So why would we have such a clause? Well, first, we want to make life easier for our customers to do business with us. We've found that it accelerates the sales cycle in many instances, but it's also the single biggest statement we can make to a customer on our conviction in the platform and the ROI we can generate. So despite having these T for Cs, it's effectively an RPO because of how infrequent we see a termination. Only two scaled customers in the last 12 months have enacted the termination for convenience clause, and when they did, it accounted for less than one annualized revenue. Channel adoption also creates stickiness.
Recall that our go-to-market motion, as you heard from the IDC analyst and from our customers, we want to go in and take out multiple point solutions and demonstrate a better customer ROI. I think it's sometimes perceived that we are only out selling email, or we're only out selling a DSP capability. We have an omni-channel strategy. Recall why on the slide behind me, 2021 was such an inflection point. It was the launch of the Zeta Marketing Platform, a proprietary Data Cloud, a software and AI capability to orchestrate and automate your marketing activities, and native omni-channel experiences. Also, in 2021, the Hunter Farmer model was launched, and you can see how quickly adoption scaled from there. We're landing more channels out of the gate and expanding from there.
If you do the math on the two or more channels on the two-year compound annual growth rate, two or more channel adoption is up 40%. Three or more channel adoption is up 70%. Now, let's look at use cases. Put yourself in the CMO seat. They're making decisions based upon use cases. How am I going to keep and grow my existing customers and acquire new customers? These are the same use cases that Zeta offers on its platform. Here, we're going to look at the use case count growth, as well as revenue growth over that same two-year period since our IPO, to show the progression. The combined use case of grow and retain, count is up 9%, revenue growth is up 36%. On the acquire use case, count is up 22%, the corresponding revenue is up 17%.
One item to keep in note, it's in our experience, through the multiple deals that we're closing, that the acquisition use case is more prone to close through a wedge or a pilot, whereas it could be more common in the grow and retain use case for us to close via an RFP, which tends to be longer term in nature and has initial higher contract value. Tying it back to three thoughts on recurring revenues. We're rapidly growing recurring revenue and reoccurring revenue, 28% and 24% respectively, over a two year CAGR, compound annual growth rate, 2x faster than the market for each component. Recurring revenue mix is improving, visibility is improving, durability of revenue is improving by virtue of how infrequent those termination for convenience clauses are enacted. And channel and use case adoption is scaling rapidly with our customers.
Now, let's spend some time on the Zeta 2025 model and a conversation around cash conversion. You'll recall that in February 2022, we released the first version of Zeta 2025, which was to generate at least $1 billion in revenue, at least $200 million in Adjusted EBITDA, or at least 20% Adjusted EBITDA margins. And this year, we added an at least $110 million of free cash flow. At the time that we announced the model, if you were to project out from 2022- 2025, it required a compound annual growth rate in revenue of 22%. Over the last 12 months, revenue growth is 28%, six points faster. At the time of the announcement, to get to that at least $200 million in Adjusted EBITDA, it required a 33% compound annual growth rate.
Over the last 12 months, we've been growing at 39%, also six points faster. Now, I think it's effective to put out a long-term model. We believe in it deeply. As you heard from David, we'll probably announce another one soon. But to put a win on it is a little harder. But to share the KPIs, the same KPIs that as a finance team, we run to operate the business, to project the business, the same KPIs we give investors and analysts, I think that's another story. We wanted to use the opportunity today, with about 6 quarters under our belt now, to update some of our assumptions. Now, one very, very important point that doesn't come across in the slide, the same level of conservatism we put into the initial KPIs, we're putting into these KPIs. I want that to be well understood. But things change.
On the scaled customer count and ARPU growth front, we're calling for anywhere between 8% and 12% growth annually. On the direct mix front, because of the success we're having in adding agency customers and how we see them scaling, it makes sense to bring the original assumption from 80% down to the mid-70s, which is closer to how we've been running over the last 12 months. We don't see a need, frankly, to change net revenue retention. The model continues to be to have half of our growth come from new customers, half from existing, which means we're holding to the 110%-115%, with the last two years being 112% and 113% net revenue retention.
Then on quota carriers, the last metric from the slide I just presented a couple of quarters ago that talks to the significant increase in sales productivity we're seeing, but also the recognition that partners are going to be a bigger and bigger part of our ecosystem, we don't believe we need to invest as heavily as we originally thought. The original model called for 20%-25% more quota carriers added per year. We now see that being closer to the 15%-20% range of incremental quota carriers added per year. Now, in terms of cash conversion, which was a new element we added to Zeta 2025 this year, we've made great progress since the time of our IPO, but great looks different. Great is getting it... How do you get it into the 60s, into the 70s?
Well, let's first understand what are those drivers from Zeta's Adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow, and it comes into four primary buckets. Capital investment, and you can see capital investment is broken out into PP&E, capitalized software, and data capitalization. The vast majority being cap software and data. Net interest expense and taxes, changes in working capital, and then restructuring, acquisition, and other related charges, which is very small. Now let's talk through what is the path to go from today's 45% to the model of 55%, and then beyond to 65%+ . Let's do it through two different vantage points: the short term and the mid and long term. On the short term, one of the byproducts of the success that we're having with agencies is their days payable outstanding is longer than our enterprise customers.
You can see this from their public filings. Now, Zeta is paid faster than most vendors because we're seen as mission-critical, but it's still longer than our current age of collections. This will not affect our ability to get to the 55%+, but it's an acknowledgment that it's our expectation, and again, learning from other communication missteps, that over the next one to three quarters, this could be a headwind. You'll see it in the public filings, you'll see it in working capital, you'll see it as days sales outstanding stretch, but it begins to normalize as it wraps on itself. Now, over the long term, what propels us to that target and beyond? With the cash that we're generating, we have the ability to retire our long-term debt, to restructure our long-term debt. There's significant leverage with that.
If you follow the filings, you'll see that over the course of the last several quarters, software capitalization on a dollars basis has effectively stayed flat, which means as a percentage of revenue, it's been reducing and it should continue to reduce. And the same holds true for data capitalization. That also, on an EDAR basis, will continue to decline, so that more Adjusted EBITDA the company brings in, drops more and more to the bottom line. Now, let me bring it back to the intent of the day. The intent of the day was to address points of friction. Interestingly enough, one of the fewest questions we get, if any, frankly, is: Are you gonna get to Zeta 2025 or not? So today's intent was not to put a new number out there, to do a new forecast update.
What I will tell you is we're gonna get there early. We're gonna put a when on it, but it's not today's meeting. But I do wanna leave you with two thoughts around next year and the year after. First, we feel great about 2024. If you think about the signings that we've had around our CDP, our marketing cloud, very large email services engagements, as those get implemented, and they're in the implementation phases as we speak, revenue begins to come online in early next year. That's a tailwind. We talked about the headwind that automotive and auto insurance present right now. Auto insurance, in particular, and we work with six out of the 10 largest, and many of them are public, we're beginning to hear from them and see in their public statements, green shoots that 2024 turns more positive.
And then our work within the political environment, we get a lot of tailwinds that draft off of that. So 2024 has a very positive setup for us. And as you heard from David, Zeta doesn't stop in 2025. What is the next model to show that we can continue to be a sustained 20% growth company or better, while continuing to get powerful, Adjusted EBITDA margin expansion? So I'll let you gather your notes. We're gonna do a Q&A with David and I right now, and then I think we've got lunch afterwards for some follow-up questions. But I wanted to thank you for the time. It's a huge investment, we recognize that. I hope it was productive for you, and we're looking forward to now taking your questions. Come on, Scott.
You know I have a bad back.
There he goes. There he goes. Scott's, Scott's PSU.
Right?
Craig Hallum. Wanna go back to David, where you started. So, you know, you're winning half your RFPs despite 12 or more participants in those. Obviously, you want more at-bats. That's, that's the goal here. I mean, so first off, has that competitive set changed in the 12 other participants in the market? And then, you know, what do you do from here to get more of those at-bats? We've heard from, from industry people that Zeta's brand is resonating more, but how do you accelerate that further? What's the next step?
Well, thank you, Jason. I mean, first of all, second, I'll answer your second question first. We're, we're sitting at it, right? So the goal of Zeta Live is to continue to evolve our brand and continue to take the brand to the next level. And, you know, we started this journey, you know, forget about 15, 16 years ago. We really started this journey about six, seven years ago, where we pivoted to what we are today. And we started with this whole sort of Zeta who narrative, which, which really, I think, energized our people when I sort of coined that. And we're just not running into that the way we used to. I mean, people in our industry know who we are.
We might not be a household name yet, but, you know, people have asked me: Why are you bringing together some of the most, you know, brilliant business minds, professors from universities, actors, all of these, you know, influencers? Why are you bringing all those people together? It's really to create thought leadership. It's to make sure people understand that we are a powerhouse as it relates to what we do, and to evolve that brand. So we do get more at-bats, so that people say, "Wow! I know who Zeta is." And it really also came not just from at-bats. Used to be, and I've sat in a lot of meetings. I've been doing this for a long time. I would sit through an entire RFP process.
Those of you who know me know how hard that would be for me with my ADD, and I would be a good boy, and I'd listen, and we'd go through this whole thing, and I would do my part, and, and we'd get through it. And the guy would call us a week later, and he would say, "Your platform's better, you're a better price, but my boss has never heard of you, and I got to go with Salesforce." And I'm not joking. Like, you don't get fired for hiring IBM, right? That's the age-old ad. Now, nowadays, you might, but that's another conversation for another day. The reality of the situation is the evolution of the brand first started, Jason, with getting us to that greater than 50% of wins.
Because now once we get the at-bat, they know who we are, and they're able to trust us. And we are a public company, and they can see our financials, and they know that we're doing well. That's important. As it relates to your first question, I think that it's gonna be really important that we continue to execute. You know, execution is how we're gonna get more at bats, right? So you drive the brand, you win in the marketplace. I can't even begin to tell you how frequently now we get invited into a process. I had dinner with the guy last night, can't talk about it. It's a massive opportunity for us.
Literally, after six, maybe seven bottles of wine, he leaned over to me, he said, "Did you know you guys came into the RFP process when it was effectively closed?" And he said, I said, "You know, how did that happen?" And he said, "Truthfully, I was at a meeting, and the existing vendors couldn't do what we needed to do, and a buddy of mine had just hired you guys.
" And he said, "The reason we hired you, they hired you was because you guys could send the number of messages per minute that no other company in the world could send. So we invited you into the process, and it looks highly probable that this will be a big win for us." But it's just getting your name out there. Winning those RFPs gets you more at bats for other RFPs, and it sort of becomes a bit of a flywheel. So I hope that answers question two and question one.
Thanks. Dan Reagan from Canaccord. So Zeta 25 implies about 12% free cash flow margins as a baseline. How do you think about the terminal free cash flow margin for Zeta as the business continues to scale? And can you talk about the key levers to get there as well?
Yeah, I, I think it goes up. I think we talked about some of those on the slide, Dan. So when I think about making our way through the short-term agency headwind, which is, you know, one, two, maybe three quarters, but beyond that, with the cash we're generating, that's expensive. That's a significant lever for us. We have had favorable working capital changes, right? Than what we're currently expecting. But when we think about what we're amortizing in terms of software right now, and if you go back and you look, that's basically held flat on a dollars basis, and revenue is growing much faster, that will continue to bend down. Data capitalization, which is still gonna be there, but as a percentage of revenue, should also get bent down.
So I think for every, you know, $1 of revenue we're bringing in, it's not unheard of that, you know, 40% EBITDA could drop and then, you know, an increasingly higher rate to free cash flow. I think that's probably a bigger element of Zeta, you know, next, whatever's beyond, you know, 2025. But for now, we see those margins continue to decline. We'll get to that 55% at least margin for 2025, but I think we've got enough levers beyond that to get into the 60, as we look even more longer term.
And it's funny because one of the things people say to me all the time is: How do you use your balance sheet for growth? Because we, we have a pretty strong balance sheet. I mean, and I don't know the exact metrics, but we're, we're below one as it relates to net debt. We, on any given day, have, you know, over $100 million cash on hand, and we're using some of that to buy back stock, and we're using some of that to, to, increase our cash balance.
When you look at our agency business, that'll help us accelerate growth. So even if the DSOs slide out a quarter or two, which they pay us 100% on the dollar, we've-- they've never missed a payment, it's probably the single best use of our balance sheet. And by the way, within 90-180 days of that acceleration, it normalizes because they're just paying you into that next quarter, and then you see it actually begin to go up.
Hi, this is Matt Bullock from BofA, asking a question on behalf of Koji Ikeda. My question is on ZOE. Can you remind us what the monetization strategy is for the product? Is it embedded in the platform, sold as a separate SKU or as a premium add-on? And secondly, what's the best metric for us to look at in order to gauge the generative AI adoption progress?
So right now, ZOE is contemplated to be an addition to the existing Zeta Marketing Platform. So what... You know, you don't just get to sit around and win, right? You've got to innovate, and there's been a tremendous amount of talk about large language models and small language models. I think of Zeta as a mid-sized language model. And, you know, not to create more complication, but when you think about that, we're able to ingest the vast majority of the internet every moment of every day through our Data Cloud. We're able to then synthesize that into a consumer CDP and layer their first-party data, matched to our first-party data, into that model. So to put in perspective, our mid-sized language model could be looking at a trillion different data points... But it's still not technically a large language model because we never share the data out.
One of the things that I spend a lot of my time with is our enterprise clients, right? And they don't want to share their data to large language models. They don't want it going back out into the environment because they need to make sure their data stays private and stays safe. And that's why these mid-language models are mission-critical to our win. Now, today, ZOE is effectively your own data scientist living inside of our platform. You can say, "ZOE, tell me my most valuable audience set." You can say, "ZOE, tell me where I should invest the next $10 million for marketing." All of that lives there. That being said, we do contemplate rolling a premium ZOE out down the road that can continue to disintermediate and take out some of their most expensive employees.
I'm sure all of you employ or work with data scientists and understand the cost behind that. ZOE begins to become your own personal data scientist. So I think ZOE helps us win and stay cutting edge today as it relates to generative. You know, one of the things we say is, you know, I know a lot of people have been talking about AI for seven to 10 months. We've been talking about it for seven to 10 years. So it's something that we're all in on. We have a meaningful patent portfolio behind it, and I think it'll be one of the reasons we continue to win at greater than 50% of RFPs.
All right, thanks. I want to maybe just go back to the, to the agencies, a little bit. It seems like, yeah, there will be a little bit of near-term, maybe fluctuation in some of the metrics. But can you just maybe help us understand why that's strategic and why this is the right time to go deeper into the, into the agency channel? Because it seems like it's a big initiative.
Ten years ago, I gave a speech on how the ad agencies would not exist. Might have been the wrongest thing I've ever said. You know, they are exceptional at helping very large organizations to deploy massive amounts of capital with very few people at a low percentage point today. It has become mission-critical to most large enterprises. So I woke up and realized I was wrong, right? So sometimes you do that. The vast majority of marketing budgets globally continue to be controlled by large agency holding companies. So our ability to work with organizations like Commerce, where we help level the playing field between them and the other large agencies, where they might not own their own data, they might not be able to afford to build the software necessary to compete with the very large agency holding companies, is one strategy.
The other strategy is many of the agency holding corporations are not able to deliver on what they promise as it relates to data and deployment, activation, software management. We're able to step in there and help them as well. So, you know, we've talked for a while, Arjun, as you know, about adding an agency business. It just happens to be growing a little faster than we expected, which, and I want to be clear, it's not metrics changing.
They just pay a little slower, and you'll see a working capital shift, probably one quarter, maybe, maybe maximum two, and it's going to be slight. Let's be clear, we will continue to generate meaningful free cash flow. We will continue to use that to buy back shares and build our cash balance. You might see a slight lowering percentage-wise of what that looks like as those agency holding companies scale.
One thing, agent, Arjun, if you recall the slide that talked about the addition of 148 unique brands, the expansion we had with agencies is part of that. So one of the examples we gave, I think it was a couple of quarters ago, why this is so strategic to us, the access to so many more brands that we're not having the privilege to work with today. You'll recall, one of our first large agency customers back in COVID was around $3 million a year in revenue and maybe one or two brands inside of it. Today, it's an over $20 million relationship, and there's dozens of brands inside of it. So, it's a really neat opportunity for us to be additive to the agency, but have access to entirely more brands than we otherwise could get to market with.
Great. Thanks. Zach Cummins from B. Riley. I guess just digging a little bit deeper onto that agency opportunity, can you speak to the approach to getting into the door with some of these agencies? I mean, with that in mind, that some have their own data asset that they're trying to monetize. So just curious of how you get into the door and continue to expand upon that.
Well, Zach, it's good to see you. We haven't seen you since last week, but... Listen, I sort of joke that a lot of these industries, I grew up and have been a technologist all my life. I started in the wireless industry. It was something I was very focused on. I then moved into data, you know, analytics and sort of expanded to what we are today. And I've, I sort of was originally shocked by the amount of this industry as it relates to agencies that is driven by wine and steak. And for those of you who know me, you know that I love wine and I love steak, so that's right up my power alley. I think that's how you initially get in the door, Zach.
But, but the truth of the matter is, most of the agency holding companies, even the ones that have their own datasets, don't have the type of first-party data we control. They're also not building their own technology. They're licensing technology. So whether they're working with The Trade Desk or they're working with Google, it is not unusual for them to go out to third parties for technology, and it's not unusual for them to go out to third parties for data. We just happen to be the only organization that puts all of that into one place. And as I think as the IDC guy talked about, it's very differentiated. Most organizations silo. They have a silo of data, they have a silo of tech, they have a silo of vendors, as they think about the marketing technology landscape.
We're one of the very few that puts everything into one place. And for the agency holding companies, the truth of the matter is, we're more than happy to private brand to them. Like, they can take their 8%, we'll take the net 92%. I mean, our gross margins are actually still great, and it's a really, really good business for us, as Chris has talked about, to expand into brands. So I think it started with me understanding I was wrong. It then expanded into building out a team, and you've got the dream team back there, sitting in the back with Will Margiloff and Jed Hartman, both of which, who are, you know, 20 years in servicing the agency ecosystem. We brought Will in, Will brought his team in, which is a team that does nothing but focus on agencies.
On the other side, you have the other dream team with Tina, who focuses on mid-market and direct to enterprise as it relates. But and, and the future of where commerce is and, and what we're doing with them. But the next stage was bring the right people in to do the job, who had those 20-year relationships with the people who had grown up in the agencies. And, you know, then it involved going to Cannes Lions and, and doing a lot of that stuff, which, which we've been doing. So you see Zeta Live, it's our biggest event, but we now have a presence at all of these different events that, that are important. And it's about dinners, it's about relationships, and it's about having better data and better technology when you go in to be a vendor to these clients.
Hi, Ryan MacDonald, Needham. Chris, we talked about this, I think, quite a bit, in terms of ARPU expansion and what the levers are driving. In the updated assumptions, I guess, where do you see the most opportunity for upside of driving that ARPU, whether it's continued use case expansion or... I know we talk a lot about channel expansion as well, but what do you think drives the most upside to where you're targeting today?
I think there's three elements, and it's stayed consistent now for a while. If you think about ARPU expansion, in the customers we're working with, let's say we're working with two channels initially, we can keep making those channels, if you will, bigger and bigger and bigger, and flow more data and more activation and engagement through them. That's one driver, and I think that will continue to be one of the bigger. And then the other, as you saw on the slide earlier, is broader channel adoption. So you saw some, that we have five or more channels now installed. So the two biggest being, taking what we're already working with and doing more work through them, as long as the ROI supports it, adding more omni-channels based upon what's native on our platform.
Then third, still the biggest lever, but where we have the biggest opportunity, is getting those dual-use cases going. We talked about how the brands are making decisions based upon, "I want to keep and grow my existing customers, and I want to acquire new customers." We have a big opportunity. We offer all three. All three have over $100 million of revenue, all growing double digits, but how do we get them to do more than just one use case with us? And that's our biggest opportunity, but I think the most immediate are the first two.
I've got a follow-up question on the ARPU as well, particularly looking at the slide with the cohorts. The three-year-plus cohort has been flat. I imagine some of that has been the auto insurance vertical. So could you give us any color as to how much that has maybe dampened that this year, since it's 8% headwind overall? And as that one to three vertical cohort matures further, what is the upside to that last vertical cohort?
Yeah, so you've got—you're exactly right, Will. You've got two factors. First, you have those that have now graduated beyond three years and were lower than the overall average of the three-plus. You have some that moved in. But the bigger reason, and it probably wouldn't even have shown up in the last two quarters, where our ARPU growth has been 10%, in prior quarters was mid- to high-teens. We would be in the mid- to high—we'd be in the high teens, if not for the auto vertical and the larger customers that we work with sitting in that three-year-plus category.
By the way, that's why we work across 17 different verticals, right? We were still able to grow 25% in a quarter, where we had an 8% headwind, against putting out to Wall Street, you know, 18%-19%. So we think about this stuff as we think about our business, and operating through multiple verticals, you know, is very helpful. Now, you'll also start to wrap around some of that going into next year, where we're now seeing them start to come back, and that should go from being a headwind to eventually being a tailwind.
Do you think that the 3+ cohort will, over the next couple of years, start to grow at double-digit rates?
I do.
Yeah.
I do. Yep.
This is Pete Newton with Barclays. David, Chris, thanks for taking the question. More on a macro side, really pleased to hear the 2024 confidence and the 2025 update. What are you seeing in terms of fluctuations of customer marketing budgets? And then are you seeing any preferences for SMS, email, push, as things could be a little bit tighter right now?
Yeah. So it's interesting, we get asked this question a lot because, you know, there's this whole narrative that goes back, like, 50 years, that the first and easiest thing for a company to cut is marketing, right? So you go into a choppy time, everybody kills marketing, right? First people they probably take out back and shoot are the consultants, then the marketers, right? We're just not seeing that. We're seeing companies continue to spend more. You're actually seeing it in the results of large agency holding companies like Publicis and like Omnicom, that are seeing meaningful growth in their business. And that type of stuff is what we're seeing from a macro perspective. Now, there's choppiness. What one of the big things I'm seeing more than anything is marketing efficiency focus, which, as you can imagine, is great for us, right?
Because our entire pitch to our wedge products is we can help you lower your cost to create customers by up to 50%. Why wouldn't you test that? It's allowing us to accelerate our growth, and it's allowing us to grow faster, because even though the marketing budgets are not getting cut from our vantage point, they are getting more efficient. They're looking at their yield curves on marketing and saying: How do we take the lowest cohort yield out and double down on the highest cohort yield or test new things? That's where I think you're seeing some of our outsized growth.
Thank you. Two for me, please. So the-
You need four. You've already asked two. I'm just kidding.
...four for me. I'm trying to keep Madison from walking around-
I'm teasing.
So the record RFP pipeline, how has channel partner activity influenced that? Like, where that pipeline's at today versus what it was a year ago. And then the second one, Chris, we've talked a lot about agencies. We know that when you onboard agencies, that comes in at a lower mix of ZMP, you've been able to scale that up over time. We haven't seen that impact gross margins. So as that ZMP mix scales up over time, should that be a tailwind for gross margins the next several quarters?
You want the second part first?
Sure. You're right, Jason. So in the example I gave earlier, in that customer that went from $3 million to $20 million over a couple of years in revenue, the mix of how much they were using Zeta's data and Zeta's channels went from 7% to 76%, which is basically where our corporate average is. And that has a very nice, you know, gross margin accretion element to it. I think we've done some great things.
Kudos to our enterprise operations teams, the efficiency teams within our COGS universe of Zeta, to be able to buffer that near-term headwind associated with that mix evolution that's going to happen. But as we think about Zeta and beyond, and why Zeta doesn't stop in 2025, one of the many levers we have to go beyond 20% Adjusted EBITDA margins is the continued expansion of gross margins, and that would be a big element of it, correct?
Our long-term gross margin target has always been 70%. Like, that's where we wanna get. We're seeing some headwinds, but we have been able to offset it, which is how we're keeping it constant. To answer your first question second, you know, we're seeing the relationships that we've already created with Snowflake and AWS, where we are the first native marketing application layer inside of Snowflake. And when you think about Snowflake, they're an incredible company.
Their biggest value to the enterprise is allowing them to put all of their data into one place, right? So it used to be you would have customer acquisition data, you'd have CRM data, you'd have loyalty data, you'd have your call centers data, you'd have finances data. It's all over the place. Snowflake gives you a repository to put everything into one place, but Snowflake doesn't make it actionable.
So the relationship between Snowflake and Zeta, and by the way, they are one of the premier sponsors of Zeta Live this year. One of the really cool things was, we've now gotten big enough that we can go charge people, to be sponsors of Zeta Live. And you'll look at the sponsors list, it's pretty cool to have them on there as one of the premier sponsors. And I think a big part of that is they see us as the ability to then activate that data, whether it's through a CRM module or it's through an activation module inside of Snowflake, which is a differentiator for them, but it gives them added value. We're also seeing meaningful upside in our relationship with AWS. I think Steve went to the customer advisory board meeting.
I'm pretty sure they're a sponsor as well, but don't, don't quote me on that one. But the reality is that AWS has been an incredible partner. Another circumstance where you're able to move all of your information to the cloud, but it's hard to make it actionable, right? So using the ZMP allows them to make it actionable. We're now working very actively with a number of professional services firms. How do we incorporate into them to make them channel partners? And one of the problems we've always had is when you look at our competitors, you know, I joke, we have, we have some small competitors, right, Chris? Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe, SAP. The challenge with their platforms is, they actually can't implement them for you.
They're very big, they're very cumbersome, and when you look at that, you need to bring Merkle in, or you need to bring an Accenture or another third party to build on top of it. Why do those third parties love that? Because they can build multimillion-dollar deliverables on top of those platforms. So what we've done is we've, you know, we've taken a page out of Sun Tzu, and we're trying to fight where they're not.
We're building really cool analytics packages that they can sell on a recurring basis to their clients on top of our deliverable, because it doesn't require a lot of heavy lifting. But we have some incredible data that we can give to these guys that can allow them to build great product on top of it. And-- It's really, I think it's gonna be a meaningful part of how we continue to grow at the rates that we're used to growing, going forward.
All right, any other questions? Going once. All right, one programming note, and I'll turn it over to you two for final remarks. So there'll be lunch available right after this. We have several executives available, many who you saw earlier today, a few who you haven't. So I encourage you to continue the dialogue. Find us, we're all happy to chat. And I hope this was additive for you today. So please continue. Like I said, stick around for lunch and, and we'd love to continue the dialogue. Chris, David?
No, go ahead. No, I'm. You're gonna have Chris the rest of the day. Yeah. So I've gotta get over to our Super Bowl. I joke this is Chris's Super Bowl today, and my Super Bowl tomorrow. I told them it was Ryder Cup, 'cause it's not every year. I think we should do it every year. But that's neither here nor there. Bottom line, we'll discuss it at another time. Listen, we built an incredible company with incredible people, and we're doing the best we can as we've transitioned from a private company to a public company in what is a very turbulent time. We see that we've made mistakes around transparency, around sharing information, about simplifying the story, about what's recurring versus reoccurring, and all of those things.
One of the things you will learn from this team, if you truly get to know us, is we're willing to learn from our mistakes, and that's what today is a result of. So we appreciate your taking the time to be here. We appreciate your support of our organization, and we look forward to many, many years of a good relationship together. Thank you, everybody. See you all at lunch.