Kind of the tail end of the second half of day one of the TIMT conference. Matt Swanson, software AdT ech analyst here at RBC, super excited to have Zeta Global with us. We have Chris Greiner, CFO, and Winnie Shen, EVP, Data, Cloud, and Applications. Thank you guys so much for having us.
Thank you.
So, I guess we'll just lead right off with it. So addressing the news and the headlines last week, you reported earnings, but you also had to deal with a short report. And the company released a response to some of the accusations in the report. For investors who haven't gotten the chance to see, you know, the report or the response, do you want to just start off by addressing kind of the elephant in the room?
Yeah, we've been busy.
Thank you. Thank you for coming, by the way.
Oh, I'm kidding. This is like, this is what you have to do.
Yeah.
Right? You got to lean in right now. So we will have a number of even more fulsome responses, in fact, tomorrow, a more complete rebuttal to the accusations made that are false and misleading. But today is not the time to go roll around in the mud, right? I think you got to be fact-based. You take huge positives from this opportunity, which is there were questions raised on the accounting ethics of the company, which are, thankfully for us, extraordinarily easy to disprove. And there'll be a press release tomorrow even making that further clear. And then there's questions raised on Zeta's data practices and why we win, why we are so successful, why we beat our competition revolves around data. So you take opportunities like this where there's been clearly questions raised and not enough of a grasp by the investor of what we do.
And now you take the opportunity to say, you know what, we're going to go many, many, many steps further to go make it so this can't happen again. So what do you do? You release very clear fact-based statements disproving what's been alleged. You hold multiple investor conferences like this, one-on-ones, as many as you can. Tomorrow we're holding one hosted by William Blair, who will ask questions straight down the list of what's in the short report with a chance for the company's executives and experts, not just Chris and the CEO, Chair of our audit committee, our Chief Data Officer, our Chief Privacy Officer, counsel. Have the leaders speak directly to what's been alleged and the company's view of the facts. And then you have an investor day, which we're going to announce tomorrow.
That'll be in the first two weeks of December, closer to the second week than the first week, where you cover what's been most loudly requested, and I think this is like spot on by investors, spot on, which is we have talked about all of the sources of Zeta's data, what makes the identity graph as robust and as deep and as wide as it is, but we haven't talked to the degree of think about it through the dimensionality of identities, of identifiers, and of signals, so if you picture in your mind's eye this column, these sets of columns against the rows of all the different properties we own on a proprietary basis and what contributes to each one of those, as well as through our partner ecosystem, and go multiple layers deeper on how that data is sourced.
The next issue that was raised was around our collection efforts, around consent, which is not frankly something we've spent a lot of time on because we haven't made the assumption we didn't need to. We just assumed people knew that we did things the right way, which we do, legally and compliant. But now you go into the depths of how that data is pulled in, how that consent is captured, how that consent is verified. That's step two of what we'll go through in depth at this investor day style event. Step three is let's not lose sight of what makes us great, which is our data and our software drives outcomes that can't be matched by our competitors. So what we do well we'll bring back into frame. We'll show our typical product and data cloud demonstrations, multiple use cases. You've seen it before.
Many investors have seen it before. That'll be the third leg. And then the fourth leg, which is also very relevant to the short report, is compliance and the regulatory environment. The data regulatory environment is not static. It's been evolving from GDPR to CCPA to CPRA. It is going to keep evolving. It's important to hear from Zeta how we have continued to stay compliant, where we anticipate regulation going, because that's a constant cadence of the company, and how we can further evolve so that we stay in step with the regulatory environment. The learning of this is despite the gross overstatement of some of these properties that have brought into question that do business the legally compliant way, there's a degree to which is the juice worth the squeeze. There's been an enormous destruction of value, far more than there should have been.
It's logical to question, is there a long tail on these properties that you should think about differently in how you operate them? So for us, it's hugely disappointing that this happened because there's incredible momentum in the business. Nothing has changed structurally about Zeta. Our customer conversations, we work through our list of top customers. Not a single customer has changed their spend with Zeta. There was one that was highly sophisticated, deep in the realm of data that said, "Let's pause. Let's sit down together. Let's go through your response and how you operate." They sent us a letter back saying, "We've certified this. We agree with you. Go run again." That was about a 12-hour period of time. That's been the only customer so far. We're hyper-tuned to others. We're having conversations. The sales pipeline is a big focus of ours.
But right now, this is a period to lean in, be more transparent, be reflective. But we're going to keep executing. At the end of the day, what's gotten Zeta to where it is today is 13 straight quarters of beating estimates, five straight years with 20% or better revenue growth. There hasn't been a quarter since we've been public that we haven't expanded adjusted EBITDA margin year to year. We've already said we're very comfortable with where 2025 consensus sits for revenue, for adjusted EBITDA, free cash flow. And we have the further tailwind of being able to go in February and talk about the next long-term model that we, by the way, the first one we effectively achieved a year early. So I feel like let's be responsive, but let's also not lose sight of executing and executing for our customers.
I lost my mic.
My strap.
You guys can all go home now. No, that was very helpful. And I think from the analyst community, we appreciate the transparency. We appreciate the fact that you're actively showing that you think the stock is undervalued by participating in share repurchase than the announcement yesterday. And then I think the third piece that you're addressing is the idea that you see the rebuttal. You understand that this is what it's not. But to your question, if people are still asking, well, what is the right answer then? And it sounds like that's what's coming now.
That's right.
Transitioning back to the business. So I think Amazon's kind of entry and then rapid growth in advertising really opened a lot of enterprises' eyes to just what the power of their data was. And for those newer to Zeta, can you just kind of frame up your position in the market and how customers utilize your services? And then that Amazon idea, like how is that driving some new momentum in the market?
Yeah, there's structurally, there's really three forces that are driving CMOs and CTOs towards platforms like Zeta. Part one is there's a much broader replacement cycle. How do I as a CMO, how do I as a CTO drive simplification and cost takeout in what's become a proliferation of features and point solutions in my marketing technology stack? Where Zeta can address that in a unique way is give you an out-of-the-box data cloud that you can take all of your first-party data and bring into it and then drive activation off of it. We can provide you with, in that same platform, the orchestration and automation platform to run all your marketing through, and without leaving the platform, keep the fidelity of an audience and activate through an omnichannel set of properties that is proprietary and owned by Zeta. You don't have to leave the network.
That drives significant vendor consolidation. Think eight to 12 in the course of collapsing vendors across data, orchestration, and activation. That's part one of what's driving the market. Part two is how do I harness the power of generative AI to drive efficiency in my portfolio by having real-world use cases to apply for my marketing teams? And I'm sure Winnie today can talk about how we've taken the most prominent uses of our platform and created automations off of them. We call them AI agents. But to your point, personalization is crucial. How do I, as an enterprise brand, think of what I have in-house that I know about my consumers as an asset of mine, something I can monetize that creates value for shareholders, but also for my customers?
They're using that knowledge base and that awareness to then go find first-party partners to take their data, blend it into an ecosystem, and take a universe that's known to them, but then also uncover unknown people, unknown prospects for their products, and I think that is driving growth in Zeta, all three of those forces of fact.
And when we think about driving growth in Zeta, you just mentioned that with the Q4, we're going to get a 25 guide, but we're also going to get a new long-term guidance. So the previous long-term guidance, and the model is kind of made up of two variables: scaled customer, scaled customer ARPU. How do you think about the drivers of those two variables for both next year, but then also as you start to think about a long-term model?
You know, it's interesting. And there's, you know, you're right on the primary drivers. We also talk about what we want our net revenue retention rate to be. So how much of our growth should come from existing customers each year, how much from new. Our model has always been half and half, right? So 110 to 115 is our net revenue retention goal. We talk about quota carriers because sales productivity is a key element, and then the mix of the business as a proxy for gross margin. But on the two elements of how fast I should be adding scaled customers and then how rapidly I should be growing their spend, what we're starting to begin to see is a shift towards finally really tapping into the wallet share opportunity that we knew was there, but we've really started to break into and force.
And the best way to look at that is our model for growing scaled customers year over year, and this has been the case since our investor day a year ago when we updated and increased growth rates, is between 8% and 12% more scaled customers year over year per quarter. This last quarter, we grew by 8%. It was higher on a brand basis, but let's just stick to the customer count. On the ARPU side, it's the same growth rate goal, 8%- 12% expansion of ARPU year over year. However, ARPU grew 33%. In the prior quarter, it grew 23%. Prior quarter for that, it grew at the higher end of that model. Now, if you pull out political candidate contribution out of that 33%, you're still in the mid-20s.
So we've clearly seen a step up in the amount of revenue growth we can drive from expanding wallet share. As I sit here today, I don't know why that changes, because it's being driven by a breadth of different actions by the customer. If you think about what drives our expansion in Zeta, we're running bigger and bigger audiences and taking more and more data. That drives the subscription part of our revenue base, which is roughly 50% of Zeta. What has driven the consumption part is really three forces. You have channels, customers, I should say, adding channels. A couple of years ago, the average scaled customer used little over one channel per. Today, we're right on the door of three channels per. In fact, we're starting to make meaningful inroads in customers using four more channels.
The channel is, once I've used Zeta's data, I've put it through an orchestration and automation, where are the best places that Zeta's software is telling me to go reach that end consumer? Where are they most likely to be responsive? Email, mobile, programmatic, CTV, audio podcasting, all digital channels that we own natively. Part two in how we've been growing and what we think can continue is much broader adoption of multi-use cases. For an extended period of time, we'd have two or one of three, or it was rare to have three of three use cases growing consistently 20% or better or 30% or better. The last couple of quarters, we've seen that 20% plus, even 30% growth from several of the use cases. We offer the ability to retain your existing customers, to grow your existing customers, and then acquire new customers.
And then the third leg of why this ARPU growth has been strong and certainly has the potential to continue is around the access and tapping of the agency opportunity, which is a newer buyer at scale of Zeta's capabilities in the last, call it 12-15 months. Here, we're not only starting to work with more agencies, but agencies are awarding Zeta the brands that they're working with to go help them be successful marketers, and they're starting at much bigger average price points.
And when we're thinking about where your budget comes from, there's always this question: is it marketing or is it advertising? How do you think your customers think about that distinction? And then does it really matter at the end of the day? Is it about $1 in, $1.20 out, regardless where it goes?
Sure, absolutely. So I think we actually sit at the convergence of MarTech and AdTech. So for anyone less familiar, MarTech side is what traditionally we talk about as owned media, your CDP, your ESP, the growth and retention channels. The AdTech side primarily being more paid media, kind of DSPs, the acquisition side. And more and more of the conversations that we're having is actually on both sides of those benefits being collapsed into one. Anecdotally, I had a conversation a week or two ago with a QSR brand. Started on the AdTech side. We're just trying to acquire new customers for them. And the deeper we got into the conversation, we found a lot of key gaps in their own tech stack. So we can drive as many net new customers for them as possible.
Once they enter their CRM, it would be a really disconnected experience for them because their MarTech side was not set up for success. So that conversation transformed to a primarily kind of advertising type of conversation into a MarTech plus AdTech conversation. And these are the types of conversations we're seeing more and more so, especially as teams are slimmer, they have to do more things, be able to adapt to both sides. And truly, I think at the end of it all, it is what you kind of talked about earlier. It's the true return on investment where you can take that learning that you had from acquiring that person to how you're going to grow and retain them and not lose that and ultimately create better customer experiences, but also a better return on investment.
And then, maybe switching to competition. And I want to ask this in two different ways. Because Chris, you were talking about displacements. So that's part of the conversation is who you're displacing. But in terms of who someone would be evaluating Zeta against to come in for that same opportunity, if you just kind of think of competition, those two buckets.
Yeah, one of the many things I like about our go-to-market model is we don't have to enter through one door to win. And a lot of the times that door is an RFP. And RFPs can take a long time. And you can lose winnable deals and find out 10 months later you've lost. And then you've lost a lot of traction in the market. You've used a valuable sales resource. The best way to think about, and by the way, we compete and we win our fair share of RFPs. In fact, our RFP volume is up 60% year over year off the back of some recent analyst reports and Zeta Live. But more of the volume, what we close in deals comes from pilots and proof of concepts.
If you think about the technology stack of a CMO, I buy an enormous amount of data and I buy products, many products like CDPs to manage that data. I have a marketing hub that's my legacy cloud or my marketing cloud, and then I have activation partners. Where Zeta can come in is on either side. So we can lead with our CDP, leverage Zeta's Data Cloud to begin with, explore audiences without the benefit of having any of your data inside our ecosystem. That then leads to, well, what if I bring in my data? Well, the answer is it becomes significantly enriched in terms of insights. You go from a universe of who are my existing customers to who are my existing customers and my prospects in one view. That's door number one we can enter into.
Door number two we can enter into is, if you will, a spoke in the system where we'll say we'll use our data to develop a strategy for which channels we know your customers are most likely to respond to. Give us a share of your programmatic. Give us a share of your CTV. Give us a share of your email. And then what that can lead to is if you know this much about me, what if I take my data and bring it to your ecosystem and now you're my orchestration? Those RFPs and proof of concepts are $50K-$150K. They take a far shorter amount of time to close. And the psyche of a sales rep, not to get too deep into that, is you need to win. Win breeds more winning.
Our deals, our reps in their first year, the class of 2023, we think of them in cohorts that way, are closing their first deals by month four. The class before them was closing deals in months five and six. The class before that around month nine. So I think we've created a nice science around this, but it's an engine that's high volume, high velocity.
You were just talking about the customer data platform. It seems like a really strategic position within the customer. Could you talk about the competitive moat that a CDP offers and then also the cross-sell opportunity that kind of comes off of that central area?
Yeah, absolutely. So data and our identity graph is the core of our business. The intelligence and the activation that Chris talked about is only as good as the input data that you receive. So there is a reason why most brands have two and a half CDPs, because they are, as Chris mentioned earlier, point solution. They're able to do bits and pieces for different brands, whereas our CDP does it all. It not only does the simplest things like data aggregation, but it does individual and household resolution. It also does the most complex things like reaching digitally disconnected and anonymous prospect visitors. And so that's kind of like the foundation.
I was actually having a conversation with one of our sales reps where her comment was she was talking to a brand and that brand said there's a competitor that says they can do everything that we can do on the CDP side, but they can't do measurement. Both her and I were like, well, if they can do everything we can do, why can't they do measurement? We dug in a little bit further. We found that this is more on the DSP side of the business. They weren't able to measure on that side. I gave her a couple of key questions to ask to then kind of uncover what is actually missing here. What we found is that they don't have a digital ID in their identity graph. What does that mean? They don't actually have their own DSP.
They use a third-party partner to then push that audience over to a DSP, and that partner is doing the measurement for them. What's different about Zeta is that we have our own digital ID. We have our own DSP, and as Chris mentioned earlier, we retain that individual across all the channels. We then engage them, so instead of being able to have these different point solutions that don't actually do all these things, we now have the ability to really follow that individual, deterministically measure them as well, and I took that information, as well as actually a lot of questions that I get from the analyst side, to actually create an identity battle card. Here are all the very nuanced questions that you want to ask to actually identify if they have a true CDP and where we can help support.
But then tied to that then foundation, as Chris mentioned earlier, we're then enriching with thousands of attributes and signals to figure out how we can better help them acquire, grow, retain, and deterministically then activating and measuring against those audiences. And it's truly the combination of those three, the identity, the intelligence, and the activation together that creates the moat that we have today.
And then kind of thinking more about core value proposition. So we've been hearing more and more this year about CMOs seeing pressure from CFOs in terms of being able to prove the efficacy of their spend. If you think about that dynamic from Zeta customers, or maybe even just from the single dashboard across advertising and marketing, how important is it now to be able to both deliver metrics, but also the usability of metrics?
For sure. So in almost every conversation that we have with clients, measurement comes up. And if they don't bring it up and we ask them that question, is measurement an issue? Almost everyone says absolutely. They might have their own measurement solutions in place, but they're really looking for something a little bit more holistic. And I think measurement is also getting harder to do as well. So we already have really strong and robust omnichannel measurement solutions. We're not only doing it for the media that we're driving for them. We're also working with brands to do it across all of the vendors that they're working with so that they have a more holistic view on every dollar that they're spending. But we're also trying to then challenge and help solve the most complex things to measure.
For example, some of the brands that we talk to, they're struggling to showcase and show the value of their product level or lower funnel strategies and that impact on higher funnel or brand awareness strategies and vice versa. Created Brand- to-D emand dashboard that looks at those people that are exposed to one versus another or the combination of them and what's the impact on engagement as well as actual conversion. Similarly, we look at what we call like TV to digital. linear TV, typically where you get exposed to like commercials on broadcast, cable, satellite type of commercials, we typically haven't been able to measure. That's an area of weakness typically.
We're actually able to see who is exposed to your linear TV ad and then take that further down to see what's that impact of having that linear TV ad, being able to re-engage those individuals as well. Some of our clients actually, instead of brand overall strategy, they take the linear TV as their brand overall. More recently, we've been playing around more with sponsorships. Thinking about if you're sponsored at, let's say, at this conference or a trade show or even at like a football game and you're a sponsor on those boards, you're spending a lot of money and what's the return on your investment been very iffy of like what it is. We can see who attended these types of events. We can see who's actually exposed to it on linear TV.
They watch that game, use that to measure, but re-engage as well. So like every dollar is very much still scrutinized. And I think it fortunately and unfortunately for some, I think fortunate for us, is continuing to get more complex or continuing to create these different nuances to help address stickiest and most challenging types of measurement.
That's extremely helpful. We have a really full room here. Are there any questions from the audience? One? One? All right. Back to me then. So again, we kind of talked about the two variable model. When we're thinking about the land and expand flywheel, what are your primary investments to drive both sides of that model?
We have, one could argue, underinvested in marketing as ironic as that is. We are, so area number one, we can invest more in brand awareness. We've made inroads on Zeta Who a year and a half, two years ago. The biggest impediment we faced in RFPs was getting through that first wave. We just were not well known enough. We're moving past that. But I think there's still more we can do on creating more brand. We've taken the Zeta Live concept and we're now bringing it into micro cities. In fact, our next one's in Chicago in a couple of weeks. There's more we can do there. The other input is obviously investing in sales. But what's attractive about that land, expand, extend, and many of you may be seeing the materials on the supplemental deck and our website, we have a progression of cohorting of customers.
So, those that are in their first year with Zeta, the average revenue—this is a slide that's produced every year, annually. You can see multiple years of it. It looks consistent with what I'll describe, which is around $600K-$700K of average revenue per spend in that first year. Remember, most of those are starting as called $50K-$150K of pilot. There's then a one to three year cohort where we see the average revenue per double for more than $1.2 million at $1.3 million this last year. There's a three plus year cohort that then goes beyond $2 million in average revenue spend. Again, that's expanding the number of data sets we're working with, expanding the number of audiences we're running, adding channels, adding use cases. It's driving that kind of flywheel of land, expand, extend.
I think the most interesting metric for me is when I look at our total customer set, they spend around $100 billion in marketing. If you just take round up on the midpoint of this year's guidance, call it a billion, it's $0.9 billion. I'm not saying it's a billion, but just for round numbers, we're 1% of that total spend of our existing customers. But you could see it even in a more magnified way when you look at the annual spend of our $100K-$1 million scaled customers. These are all large mid-markets, large agencies, large enterprises that are spending hundreds of millions to billions in marketing. Their spend on average for the year is $400K. Whereas the 144 super scaled customers that spend over $1 million with us, their average annualized spend is over $5 million.
So if we were to only harvest those $100K- $1 million and bring them to simply where the average is for the spend of a super scaled customer, you can make a good living off of that for a number of years. We're not going to do that. Half our model comes from base, half from new. But it's a really, that's why we're so focused on this land, expand, extend, and why we've created sales force of hunters that land pilots, farmers that then grow the account.
When we're thinking about the investments needed to expand revenue growth, you've hit rule of 50 for consecutive quarters, rule of 60 with political in this most recent quarter. Yeah. How are you thinking about balancing growth and profitability?
I think the biggest misnomer for investors and maybe even people that sit in my seat, but my biggest learnings for being a CFO is I used to be a chief product officer of a public company and ran sales at a public company. So I know where value is created by creating the best product in the market and by having an efficient sales force to sell it. Everything else in the middle, you just got to automate it, right, and make it more efficient. Which means that if you think about it in that algorithm, how do you place the investments of the business, what we call closer to code, where product is actually being created, more engineers, more programmers, and where product's being sold, more sales reps, higher value marketing?
You don't need to sacrifice growth and profitability if you do both of those smartly and well, which is, I think, again, back to kind of earlier commentary, your track record speaks for itself. We have five straight years of 20% or better growth, just as many years of expanding adjusted EBITDA margins, just as many years of creating more and more free cash flow. I don't think there's anything that has to be sacrificed in the next long-term model that doesn't keep doing more of the same.
And then the way we typically like to end these is for both of you, what's the thing that you're most excited about at Zeta over the next five years?
Oh boy. You know, well, our intelligence solution is only launched in 2020. The way it's developed has really evolved. But I think we are at a spot to kind of reset to the next evolution of our data cloud and the solutions that we're delivering. All the foundations are already there. Now we want to tackle the most complex problems that nobody else is able to solve. And I think that's what really excites me. We've really set up ourselves nicely, especially with LiveIntent as well to the next evolution of our data.
Yeah, I think, you know, why did you rob banks? That's where the money is, right? So why did, you know, Zeta spin up around the marketing ecosystem? There's a lot of money deployed to marketing. But where this company and what this company could be is an enterprise intelligence system. When you look at the vastness of Zeta's data, you look at the Zeta Economic Index as an example, which is able to draw insights around consumer intent and interest rather than a rearview looking metric of the economy and health of the economy and sentiment of the consumer. Think about what we can do for an enterprise well beyond the marketing use case.
So we work with a hotel chain that started off working with Zeta on the marketing use case, now uses our data set to decide where to build new properties and where to take down existing ones. So I think that's an exciting, you know, much bigger vision of what we can be, but not losing sight of we got to just keep doing 90 days at a time and be able to do it well.
All right, well, this has been great, and we all look forward to your upcoming events and the Data Summit in December.
Thank you.