All right. Thanks, everybody, for joining us, and welcome to the 20th Annual KeyBanc Capital Markets Emerging Technology Summit. My name's Jackson Ader, Enterprise Software Analyst here at KeyBanc, and we are thrilled to have Zeta Global. We've got a whole cadre of people from Zeta Global joining us. So I will let Loveen, Neej, and Chris introduce themselves, talk a little bit about Zeta Global, just a very brief intro. I have a bunch of questions prepped, but we will certainly be pinging you guys, so be thinking of questions that you have for these guys, and I promise I won't forget. But please, yeah, Chris, if you want to start, or whomever wants to start, give a brief intro, and then we'll go from there.
Chris Greiner, Company CFO, looking forward to speaking with everybody.
Hi, everyone. Neej Gore, the Company's Chief Data Officer. I've been here for about seven years at Zeta.
Loveen Advani. I run FP&A at Zeta.
I saw some announcements yesterday at a competitor conference. I assume you brought some news to our conference, too. We're not playing favorites here, right? But can we just introduce kind of Zeta? Give us a, Neej, if you want to do it. It sounds like Chris volunteered you to give us an overview.
I will do it. So if you're familiar or less familiar with marketing, since the beginning of time, marketers have three challenges. They need to acquire new customers, they need to grow customer value, and they need to retain their customers for longer. We work with about 44%, give or take, of the Fortune 100, and many more customers beyond that, but generally large consumer enterprises. And we help them with those three challenges: acquisition, growth, and retention. The way we do that is a unique model. It's a convergence model. So we believe in the future of marketing, and that future involves the idea of MarTech and AdTech coming together so you can operate within one platform.
And within our platform, which is called the Zeta Marketing Platform, we have built in an identity and signal and intelligence asset that looks very similar to what we'd find with a walled garden, like a Google or a Facebook. But we make that available to omnichannel marketing. And this is a one-of-one value proposition for marketing that has not existed before. And it's the reason that we've picked up so much momentum across all of those lanes: acquire, grow, and retain over the last few years.
Great. Can we just level set what you guys have just recently announced? Just for everybody's education, Zeta has put out kind of medium-term targets, three, four years out. They just put out new 2028 targets in addition to their 2025 guidance. So Chris, do you mind just kind of setting the stage? Give us the high-level stats there.
Yeah, I think Loveen and I both began our careers at IBM helping build their first long-term model. And I've found it to be an incredible way to drive accountability, but an interlock between internal management and shareholders. And it's one thing to just throw a target out there and say you're going to get to some levels of revenue profitability and free cash flow generation. I think it's another when you give the street the same metrics externally that you build your models on internally and drive your business to every day and every week.
For us, the first plan was to get to at least $1 billion in revenue by 2025, which we got there a year early, at least $200 million in EBITDA, which we'll effectively get there on a trailing 12-month basis next quarter, and $110 million in free cash flow, all based upon growing scaled customers at a certain rate, growing their spend at a certain rate, having net revenue retention of a certain rate, a mix of our business, which drives long-term profitability, and then a certain number of quota carriers that ultimately back up to increasing sales productivity. The next model is more of the same. So the 2028 model that Jackson mentioned says that we get to at least $2.1 billion in revenue. So it took us 16 years to get to our first $1 billion. It'll take us four years to get to, or less, our next $1 billion.
See, there's something for you, Jackson.
Thank you.
It implies a 20% organic growth rate, which for Zeta, that would put our company over an eight-year period of growing over 20% each year, as well as it has a component of significant adjusted EBITDA margin expansion, getting from 20%-25% at least by 2025, and getting to an at least 16% free cash flow margin. So that type of rarefied era of execution, obviously, we've been a beat-and-raise company ever since we went public, I think creates a unique asset value, not reflected in the share price today, but we can talk about that.
OK. You hit your 2025 targets early, as you mentioned. What were some of the drivers that led to that, and then the question is, OK, 2028, are some of the things that allowed you to hit 2025 early, are they repeatable? Are we just going to have to hope that there are other catalysts coming in 2027 that are unforeseen? How do we get there?
Our approach has been to build not just the next year's guide, but the next long-term model, all tied to we can get there at the low end of every metric that we provide. So in the case of the first model, where we did better than what we originally guided was we added more customers at a faster rate than what the model called for. The model, when it first started, set around mid-single-digit customer growth. We then updated that for between 8% and 12%. If you look back, we've been adding customers at roughly a 15% growth rate. We also built it on the ARPU growth dimension. The model originally called for 8%-12%. We've been growing, again, closer to mid-teens. We took up the next model to 12%-16% ARPU growth annually.
We've set the customer count growth in the next model between 4% and 8%. As I sit here today, there's probably more upside that can be delivered from faster ARPU growth. I think we've got the customer count in a good spot, taking into account this unique dimension, and Neej can talk about it in a bit around growing with agencies, so one of our fastest growing segments of our business is with the large agency holdcos, in addition with independent agencies, and I think that's kind of on the come, but with the large agency holdco, they'll only count as one scaled customer, even though across all five, we're working with 100 brands.
When we adjusted our scaled customer count growth, that was part of our calculus, recognizing that we'd had this disconnect between brands and customers that we didn't frankly foresee when we first went public.
Neej, do you want to talk about the agency opportunity? Why did it take Zeta so long to kind of crack in? And now that you have, what's that growth trajectory look like?
So I've been at Zeta for seven years. I think it wasn't on our radar, really, in the beginning when we first started. So about 2020, 2021, we started to make more of a push into agencies. We had made some acquisitions. We had bought some assets that were distressed, and we had repurposed them for our agency business. Since that time, there's two models that have really emerged. One is our go-to-market with holdcos. So there's eight meaningful holdcos in the world. We work with the top five. Those are expanding dramatically quarter over quarter. Generally, and we get the question a lot, like, why would a holdco work with you if they have their own assets internally? The reality is that their assets don't really map to what we do. We typically are tackling the holdco's hardest problems.
In many cases, we start with social and then expand into direct channels like programmatic display and CTV. But it's a combination of our data and our intelligence that helps to make those campaign programs successful, so that model is scaling. I think on average, we have about 20 brands under each holdco today. That model is getting bigger, and then the other model, which looks much more like a direct-to-enterprise sale, is when we sell into mid-market agencies, and so they're buying us, and they're white-labeling our platform because they want to be competitive with data and intelligence and software as they go up against holdcos, or they're trying to do more with the brands that they work with. And they would generally cover more ground than just acquisition. In many cases, they're also providing retention marketing or growth marketing to their brand clients.
Those mid-tier agencies have thousands of customers sometimes. It's not like they're smaller opportunities. It's just they're not roll-ups of many agencies under one parent.
Do they buy differently than your traditional customer? I know that they land typically with kind of more of the advertising model. But what is it that would be different in terms of upselling those customers to upselling your traditional enterprise customers?
Yeah, so if you're buying for the growth or retention lane, you're usually entering Zeta through an RFP process that could be six to nine months. One thing we've started to do is we've started to launch a new go-to-market motion that we were testing last year called One Zeta, and that is to expose our enterprises to our entire spectrum of products earlier in the buy cycle. So it provides us with meaningful leverage when we can go to an enterprise and say, we can lower your total cost of ownership, we can give you higher return on ad spend through one platform that allows you to acquire, grow, and retain. It can take point solutions out of the mix. On the agency side, they're typically entering through POCs, and so they'll start with one or multiple.
And then their rate of adoption goes from expanding use cases within the brands they're working with, as well as expanding to new brands. So it just happens a lot faster.
What happens faster? An agency says, we've got this proof of concept proven out for brand A, and now we'll roll it out to B, C, and D, or we've got this proof of concept with brand A, and now we're going to add a marketing piece to it or another channel to it, right? What happens faster?
It depends on the agency. Some agencies are better at the second model you mentioned, and some are better at the first. The holdcos are typically adding brands more quickly than they're adding use cases. The mid-tier agencies are typically adding use cases more quickly than they're adding brands. That's what we see on average.
OK. How big is that opportunity? If you want to talk like TAM or.
You can measure it different ways. But let's say there's eight large global holdcos. We work with the five largest that have the majority of scope here in the United States. The other three are more international-based. So I think we could get to them. But we'll probably break into even faster in these mid-tier independent agencies. There's 1,000 of those. There's more than 1,000, but probably the ones that are in our sweet spot in terms of what they're spending on and their deployment of media is 1,000 that we could go after. We're in like the tens of numbers of those today.
The number of brands that Zeta works with today, their aggregate marketing spend annually is probably about $100 billion. We just crossed $1 billion in revenue. You can imagine we get about 1% today. For us, it's super meaningful to go from 1% to 2% to 3%. It's not that far of a stretch once we have our sales motion in place and expanding. I mean, yeah, I mean the move from one to two or more is certainly something we are focusing on right now.
Is that feasible? Are there other platforms that have 3%, 4%, 5% of their total ad platform? Right?
Yeah, they do.
But will you run into any pricing pressure as you gain more of their wallet? Or is it linear?
There are different categories of where spend goes. There is typically the software spend. There is the consumption spend that is tied to the acquisition of new customers, and then there are big budgets that go to linear TV, as an example. Today, we have no platform that services linear TV. But in all the other areas where digital spend is happening, we have a solution for those marketers that they can move capabilities over to us.
Do you have to hire a certain kind of salesperson to go after these that are different from your traditional enterprise sales quota carrying reps that you already have on the platform?
So we have those reps, and we have our sales organized by really customer function, acquisition, growth, retention today. The new model we've launched as of this year, and you may have seen the announcement that we brought in Ed See, who is a partner at McKinsey for their CMO practice. I lovingly call him our CMO whisperer. But Ed has really been brought in to lead this One Zeta initiative, which is really around getting customers, really our most important customers, to start doing multiple use cases with us and take that 1% up meaningfully for that customer set.
Yeah. We have some interesting slides that kind of back to your earlier question of what drove that first Zeta 2025 plan and the ARPU expansion. That was mostly on the backs of adding channels.
So when we first went public with our go-to-market motion of adding channels, we had around 1.2 channels per scaled customer. Today, we're knocking on the door of three. And that will continue to go up and to the right. But the bigger opportunity we have within our base is less than 15% of our 520-plus scaled customers use Zeta for more than one use case. Now, each one of our use cases is a significant scale, growing north of 25% year over year. But to Neej's point, what we haven't yet done to this point is go-to-market with a One Zeta, one converged all three use cases. The revenue leverage associated with adding a use case is around three to five times that of adding a channel. So it's a true unlock and greenfield for us on something they're already spending on today.
What's the revenue upside from adding a channel?
It kind of depends on the volume of push-through, but by way of example.
Generally, yeah.
One of the largest U.S. auto insurers, you've probably interacted somehow with them digitally today, let alone this week, started with a $50,000 pilot in 2019, scaled to using Zeta to acquire new policy owners. Went from a $50,000 pilot to $10 million in about 18 months just using email as the primary channel. Grew to mid-20s of millions of dollars by adding programmatic video display in year two and three and connected TV, and this year, using those three channels and adding one more use case, will be in the tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars a year, so it depends on the throughput you move through the pipe, but adding use cases, that factor of going from mid-20s to well, well higher.
The beautiful part is once you have the Zeta Marketing Platform, you're already set up to use new channels. You're also set up to expand to new use cases. So for us, the customer is already enabled the right way.
I mean, there has to be cost to this, right? Nothing's free. So is the cost of doing One Zeta that maybe the initial land takes longer, like a sales cycle takes longer than it did under the old model?
I think I'll outline an answer in a second. I think the first thing is One Zeta starts with the customer knowing the points of differentiation at the point of sale, so as opposed to just selling in a marketing automation suite, the customer will know that we also provide a CDP. We also have media solutions. They might not get to them immediately, but some of the enterprises are eager to do all three out of the gate, and we're not trying to slow the sale down, but we're trying to create essentially an unfair advantage in market, so when they compare us to another vendor, they're going to say, well, Zeta can do all of these things. This other vendor is only doing one of them or two of them, and so that positions us differently for the relationship moving forward.
Yeah.
Our sellers' time to first sale, at least in this class, we think of them as every 12 months is a class, is around four to five months. And what we did not want to do is have One Zeta create mayhem by having a bunch of sellers, as Neej mentioned, they're organized by use case, retain, grow, and acquire, and go start crossing each other's lanes. The beauty of the One Zeta is we started in 2024 with 10 accounts. It was mostly existing customers and some in our pipeline that we felt like had the right organizational structure to make the decision, the propensity, and the process to buy. This year, in 2025, there's two to three dozen accounts.
We're not necessarily opening up to everything to the 527 scaled customers right now, but trying to be very selective so we don't slow down existing sales processes and really kind of make it a magnifier than something that subtracts from the revenue.
Go ahead. Did you want to add something?
No.
Data acquisition has been in the, I guess I'll call it, local news for Zeta over the last few months. So can we just talk about data privacy, data acquisition, all the things that have been top of mind for people? You hosted the Zeta Data Day, right, or whatever it was in December. So can we talk about your sources and top of funnel for how you actually get to have a Zeta ID on hundreds of millions of people?
Sure. So the first thing I will say in reference to the short report is I've probably been on 100-plus customer meetings since the report came out. We didn't lose a single customer. In many cases, it actually reminded customers of why they selected Zeta and the advantages we have. So it actually opened up new doors. But you can tell from the Q4 execution that our team was laser-focused on getting the quarter done, scaling customers. But really, customers put us through a much more rigorous approach than we were being transparent with the investment community previously. And the data summit was supposed to highlight some of that. Our data has been pieced together very carefully over a number of years. I think the most important thing to remember is that in this future landscape, you need to be in the path of the consumer.
So if you're getting data through a third party or you're licensing it, but you're not having a consumer touchpoint, you are at risk. A lot of our data in motion comes from two sources. The majority of it comes from either Disqus, which is a tool for publishers, really the long tail, about 5 million publishers use Disqus. And it provides them with an engagement solution. So what is the value exchange? The consumer gets free content. The publisher monetizes and drives engagement. And Zeta gets data. And we get to be included in the terms of service. We also acquired LiveIntent. LiveIntent's the other side of the publishing world. They work with a Comscore 1,000. And I use the publishing term loosely. Think about Sam's Club and Groupon. So New York Times, Washington Post.
So very similar dynamic where the consumer gets access to free content or subsidized content. The publisher's driving engagement and monetization. Zeta's embedded in the terms of service. And we can see activity. We have other sources of data. We've also built and acquired technology assets, which give us access to things like the bid stream. That's the auction logs that take place on the internet. We have our own MTA services that deploy email. So we can see activity between our services and downstream ISPs. So there's no technology company out there that has the same collection of assets in MarTech and also has directly in the path of the consumer, really.
I have a follow-up on that, but if anybody has any questions, let me ask this question. And then I'll come to the audience, so if you've got something, be thinking of it. LiveIntent, I guess I'm very surprised, or I was surprised during the data summit, that it was, I think, your number two source, and if you ranked the priority, right?
It depends on the type of data.
OK. But either way, call it whatever number you want. I was just surprised that it ranked so highly in terms of the data sourcing, given it was just a recent acquisition. But you had a previous relationship with them. So can you just explain to me why that is?
So we classify data into three types. There's identity data, which represents the unit of a person. There's signal data, which represents the unit of what you're trying to do next. Think about how Google knows when you're searching, what you're trying to do. Or if Google Analytics is installed on a website, they're tracking information about what you're doing. That's signal data. And there's identifier data in terms of how you would reach somebody. So LiveIntent was a source for us in identity and signals primarily. We had been partnered with them for probably three to four years. We had a subset of the data coming into our graph. But by doing the acquisition, we brought in really the entire corpus of data. It's entirely integrated now. We've shut off some of their other partners that we found to be competitive.
So we've created some advantage for ourselves in that way as well. And it continues to be a really vibrant source of data for us, yeah, with some of the world's leading publishers.
I want to get to the stock. But any quick questions from the audience at this time?
Maybe you can talk about the forensics that we did on this topic.
Yeah. So just really quickly closing out, it's one thing when this community knows about short reports. It's kind of a sick rite of passage, if you will, as a public company. Most short reports will pick on something around data and something on the accounting side. It's one thing for a company to vehemently say, this is all not true, blah, blah, blah. What we did was we took the step in recommending to our audit committee, which they agreed with, was to go reach out to the premier forensic accounting firm to go look at, in this case, a short report was identifying what they observed or alleged was round-tripping between customers who are also vendors, which is Zeta uses Amazon for infrastructure services. Amazon, we sell through their Connected TV. So relationships like that.
In every single circumstance, the forensic accounting team, in addition with internal controls and Deloitte, who's our auditor, went through and looked at every single one of those transactions. And the report that came back to the audit committee only reinforced the strengths of Zeta's procedures and processes. We did the same thing with the websites and the data practices that were brought into question in the short report by hiring the premier Washington, D.C.-based data and privacy firm, who also found those allegations to be without merit. That being said, the ultimate proof point is, what does your audit say? And you can imagine when this short report came out in November, which is right when your year-end audit is kicking off, what the antennas look like of your auditors, in this case, Deloitte.
Our audit came through with a perfectly clean, which means zero significant deficiencies, is what gets reported to the audit committee, but not publicly, zero of those. Zero material weaknesses, which does get disclosed publicly, none of those, as clean of an audit as you can have, and that's my expectation, by the way, every year, so it's nothing different, but it should address and put to rest firmly that Zeta is doing the right things the right way and has been doing things the right way.
What did you announce yesterday relative to the stock?
So feedback on the stock and the results was hard to find anything, frankly, in the results that wasn't great. I mean, it's my perspective, but I kind of got that feedback as well from the street. The guide we spent some time talking through helped us understand the optics of growing 30% when you remove political candidate revenue and you remove acquisition revenue from LiveIntent down to 21%. The walk there is super simple. In 2024, three of our verticals grew hyper fast that we're just not going to assume do the same in 2025. They could, but we're not going to assume that.
What are those three?
Meaning, yep. So let's start with the 30% growth rate. Insurance as a vertical, which is one of our larger, not our largest verticals, grew 130% year over year in 2024. Now, that was off of a seasonally weak 2023 for insurance industry-specific reasons. Our assumption in 2025 is that growth goes from 130% to 20%-25%. So line in the sand could be better, but that's our assumption. That assumption creates a four-point headwind year over year. So 30 now becomes 26% growth. The second vertical is automotive. Automotive in 2024, again, off of a favorable easy comp in 2023, grew 40% year over year. I think in the setting of inflation, in the setting of tariffs, we're not going to assume it does that again. Instead, our model assumes 15%-20%. So now you're at about a three-point headwind from the automotive vertical.
We work with the majority of the OEM manufacturers globally, and then third, advocacy. Advocacy obviously has higher levels of spend in election years and non-election years. In 2024, we had $36 million of advocacy revenue. Our assumption is it's somewhere between 20% and 25%. And that's about a point and a half. So we've spent some time going through that walk, and then the other feedback, non-kind of P&L forecast, was around dilution, stock-based comp, and incentivization and management. And we've always had a target of 3% to 4% dilution. We've never put a when we get there on it. We said in 2025, we'll significantly go down year over year from 2024 levels. So think in that maybe 4% to 6% range, and in 2026, getting to our target of 3% to 4%. That obviously lowers SBC, grow much lower than free cash flow.
We're going to also change how management is incentivized. Most of the PSUs that came into dilution in 2024 were awarded back two, three years ago when the stock price was in the single digits. Today, what we announce going forward is that management won't begin to get a share of equity until that stock starts somewhere in the 30s. And then there's opportunities to get more as it gets in the 40s and the 50s. And then lastly, we would be very aggressive in our existing $100 million share repurchase program, especially where Zeta is trading today. Put it very simply, you cannot find an asset of Zeta scale of the years and years and years of 30% CAGR and revenue growth of the last four years producing over $130 million of free cash flow at trading what we're trading at.
So that is the single best use of cash right now is to return equity back to shareholders.
OK. It's a great place to end it. Yeah. Thank you, guys.
Thank you, sir.
Thanks.
Thank you.