Q2 2023 AdTheorent Holding Company Inc Earnings Call
Okay.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to at the year and second quarter 2023 earnings call.
At this time, all participants are in listen only mode.
After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session.
Be advised that this conference is being recorded.
I would now like to turn the conference over to your first Speaker, David Distefano Investor Relations. David. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, and welcome to <unk> second quarter 2023 earnings call.
We will be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after the market closed today with me today are Ed threats, Chief Executive Officer, Jim Wilson, and Chief Financial Officer, Patrick Kelly.
Before we begin I'd like to remind you that today's conference call will include forward looking statements based on the company's current expectations.
These forward looking statements are subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties and our actual results may differ materially.
For a discussion of factors that could affect our future financial results and business. Please refer to the disclosure in today's earnings release, and our other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
All of these statements are made based upon information available to us today, and we assume no obligation to update any such statements except as required by law.
We will also refer to both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. During the call you can find the reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP measures included in our press release posted to the Investor Relations section of our website at Www Dot add Derrick.
Dot com.
All of our non revenue financial measures. We discussed today are non-GAAP , unless we state otherwise with that let me turn the call over to Jim.
Thank you David and thank you to everyone joining our second quarter 2023 earnings call.
Today I'll discuss our high level results for the second quarter provide a progress update on our areas of investment and discuss a couple of important industry themes.
I will then turn the call over to Patrick who will provide a more detailed look at results and provide guidance for the third quarter and full year 2023.
Our continued good work in the second quarter positions add Darren for a return to year over year growth in Q3 and keeps us on track for achieving our full year goals Patrick.
Patrick will discuss this.
In more detail shortly.
Market enthusiasm for our offerings is growing as a result of our team's hard work developing the most highly differentiated privacy forward and performance driving machine learning platform for advertising.
To share a few notable data points.
In the second quarter as forecasted we saw some temporary softness in AD budgets from a few customers, but we are encouraged by the new advertisers scaling revenue on our platform on.
On a year over year basis add Darren health Advertiser count is 36% higher the number of advertisers running CTV on our platform is 66% higher in addition users of our self service platform or direct access.
Our scaling at a robust pace in.
In Q2, we saw 75% sequential revenue growth and acceleration from 19% sequential revenue growth in Q1.
[noise] predictive audiences and health audiences are driving adoption during.
During the COVID-19 campaigns leveraged health audiences.
The additional campaigns utilized predictive audiences and verticals Besides health looking.
Looking to Q3 in the second half of the year, our highly differentiated machine learning solutions are driving increased demand and adoption levels.
Turning us for a return to sustainable growth.
On a year over year basis as of the end of July .
Second half booked revenue is seven 5% higher.
Second half pipeline is 36% higher.
And of that a materially higher percentage is at the contracting stage, especially so within our health vertical, giving us greater visibility and <unk>.
Confidence.
Much of the second half momentum is driven by strong demand across our health vertical CTV AD audience products and self service customer adoption and growth.
Our patient deliberate and innovation first approach to the immense market opportunity is working.
The results will reflect this as we move into the second half. We are confident we can capture a growing share of programmatic ad budgets by delivering.
<unk> consistently superior campaign performance.
Florian cutting edge machine learning and data products and vertical AD solutions, and leading the industry and data flexibility and transparency.
Independents and pricing transparency.
Along those lines, we continue to prioritize investments in high ROI opportunities.
Across several newer and growing revenue streams, our self service platform, our add Darren health offering.
Our predictive or algorithm based audience offerings.
And CTV.
These focused investments are working.
Quick comments about each before moving on to some emerging industry themes that further validate how we are approaching the market.
On our self service platform, we continued to see enthusiastic early adoption from media buyers, who want to use the industry's best programmatic brain on a self service basis.
Overall Q2 was our most active quarter to date for self service.
On a sequential basis impressions were up 92%.
Revenue was up 75% and advertiser count was up 49% retention is strong pipeline continues to grow customer satisfaction is high and we are confident momentum will continue.
We are even winning back prior customers, who love to add Darren performance, but needed a self service solution.
Now we offer a self service option and the industry's best performance, which is gaining us new opportunities at an exciting pace.
We continue to see strong progress and out there in health, which includes customers across pharma health care retail pharmacies, OTC outpatient care continued health care education and health care recruiting.
Health is an important beachhead for add Darrin and we have a strong competitive moat since generalists DSP peers lack our custom health solutions and our ability to drive advertiser value, while complying with stringent privacy laws.
And industry best practices.
These advantages and our ability to drive <unk> outcomes health advertisers care about are driving rapid customer adoption.
In Q2, we had 19 campaigns leveraging health audiences and 25 are already booked to run in Q3.
For example, one health customer built and deployed and add Darrin health audience to reach patients suffering from a mental health condition is.
Campaign advertising of prescription drug outperformed the client benchmark across all metrics.
Using a 40% more efficient cost per diagnosis, 62% more efficient cost per qualified visit.
And 33% more efficient cost per treatment in.
In addition, health campaigns typically run for one year, increasing the predictability of our revenue stream.
Looking ahead, we continue to innovate, including our exciting self service DSP for health.
This highly specialized offering which puts happy and other health specific advertising tools.
Hands of self service users remains on track to launch in Q3.
This innovative market advancement premise on the power of machine learning will give us even greater opportunity to win market share within the $18 billion health advertising opportunity.
We are confident this momentum will accelerate.
Turning to add their predictive audiences, we are pleased with momentum across other verticals, where like health our primary sourced.
Independent data and transparent and efficient workflow for audience creation and activation sets us apart from other media buying platforms.
Customer adoption of our algorithmic audiences remains strong and we are driving excellent performance for.
For example in a number of recent head to head tests.
At their predictive audience has outperformed third party audiences.
Across a variety of verticals, increasing our data targeting revenue in each and driving excellent results for advertisers, including.
55% more efficient CPA for an auto brand campaign.
A 244% increase in engagement rate for a CPG brand.
A 21% increase in video completion rate for a travel destination.
363% increase in click through rate for a state department of Health campaign.
Additionally, we received valuable third party validation for our new add Derek predictive audience products.
<unk> <unk> data quality certification.
Based on our superior capabilities in areas, including consent and compliance.
Ada sourcing transparency and performance.
This certification provides independent data quality verification easing media buyers data vetting burden and distinguishing us as a high quality provider in the industry and.
In addition at there and also earned the top ranking.
Among peer play Dsp's and neutropenia in Q2 data privacy scores report.
Further strengthening our position as a machine learning focused industry leader.
Finally, we continue to ramp our specialized performance CTV business across our platform.
Our CTV offering wins, because we offer a unique product that deliver superior return on AD spend advanced attribution strict privacy protections and seamless omnichannel coordination.
No other programmatic platform offers better outcomes based CTV capabilities during.
During the quarter this was particularly impactful to our self service platform where.
Where we saw CTV revenue increased 97% versus the first quarter of 2023.
We've also won a number of new and important deals because of our live addressable TV product, which launched in late may and allows buyers to target.
<unk> premium inventory across online cable apps.
Our NL based models for targeting pricing and optimization facilitate smarter media buying and our real world measurement proves the effectiveness and ROI.
Throughout all of these investment areas innovation remains at the core of our strategy looking to Q3, we are expanding our contextual signals and natural language processing capabilities by deploying adherent themes into our models, which will revolutionize the way we categorize web content.
At their teams use language models instead of human defined categories to sort web pages based on their actual content.
Classification, more unbiased effective and efficient.
This groundbreaking edition to our platform further enhances our market, leading AI features and optimizes content delivery based on topical relevance and all of our CPA models.
Proving performance without relying on it.
Now I would like to talk about a few industry trends and dynamics that we believe validate our work as a pioneer in advanced machine learning.
The first theme relates to programmatic waste.
A recent study by the association of National advertisers that examined transparency in the programmatic media supply chain.
It provides useful practical context for the specific value add solutions provide which others in the industry lack.
According to the IEA report, 23% of the $88 billion spent globally on the open web programmatic advertising is lost due to waste in the supply chain.
<unk> platform uniquely addresses challenges cited by the ALJ report.
By applying advanced machine learning techniques, and a flexible and transparent manner driving exceptional real life business outcomes for our customers.
While delivering price efficiency, almost double that of peers and controlled head to head tests. We do this in a few ways first we tackle the data deficit advertisers face by leveraging our ml approach to curate and augment programmatic signals.
Providing rich data other dst's cannot.
Put another way using ml, our media buying is enhanced by our superior knowledge and insights about available publisher supply.
Second we avoid low value risky AD placements that drive meaningless clicks by adhering to ALJ recommendations running campaigns on an approved list of high quality sites and using highly advanced real time anti fraud techniques.
Finally, our core platform thesis and data approach prioritizes delivering superior return on AD spend measured by business outcomes, such as new sales or store visits by evaluating millions of impressions per second bidding only on those that drive favorable results at <unk>.
Maximizing cost efficiencies through our advanced cost optimize yours.
Second in light of the attention being paid to generative AI tools.
It is important to address how we are unique.
Unlike some companies scrambling to bolt on AI products or layer in AI veneer on top of less innovative offerings.
<unk> has an 11 year head start developing and consistently enhancing.
A purpose built machine learning platform with a singular focus of maximizing the performance impact of every advertising dollar deployed by our customers.
The billions of AD impressions available for purchase in any given micro second.
Our AML tools find the ones that drive sales customer visits form fills prescription lift lifetime value or whatever business goal or API, our customers care about.
While we believe the broad generic white labeled to AI tools have their place they can't compete with a proprietary customized product with ml at its foundation is.
Additionally, the performance of statistics based ml models will only be as good as the data feeding the decisioning engine with our ml based approach to scoring and optimizing AD impressions, we have invested heavily and curated augmenting and normalizing the programmatic signals used by our algorithms and <unk>.
It is challenging to assemble high quality actionable data without relying on third party cookies.
No other DSP can match the combination of privacy and performance embedded in our DNA from the very beginning so while the current enthusiasm around AI brings a lot of noise into the market. We believe it provides a unique opportunity for us to demonstrate our unparalleled value to our brand and agency partner.
<unk>.
In one recent example regarding a campaign for an international airline partner.
Our predictive targeting drove the most efficient cost per action.
For online travel bookings and the best return on AD spend across 17 campaign partners.
Including a 42% more efficient CPA and a 61% higher return on AD spend as compared to a very large diversified technology company.
Results like these helped us expand our share of wallet with extremely large advertisers.
Finally the.
The industry is waking up to the reality of a post cookie world and what that means Google has confirmed that cookies will be deprecated from the chrome browser starting in Q1 2024 and completely retired by the end of the year.
Despite this many companies continue to rely on cookie based solutions or consider I'd based replacement solutions, which has universally low customer adoption and our president and only a small fraction of programmatic bid requests. Meanwhile, we continue to perfect the solution, which replaces <unk>.
With the power of annual base does this nickel, scoring shining and needed rate later value transparency and privacy advancement into programmatic media buying.
Building on our privacy first and ml focused approach to digital advertising, we are engaged with the chrome privacy sandbox initiatives to support this easing out of third party cookies.
In short through these API focused initiatives, Google will make available to advertisers certain aggregated data, which advertisers can use for pacing optimization and reporting.
These data signals will connect easily and naturally to add Darren its existing data pipes. As we currently have approximately 1000 data attributes available for our ml models.
As the industry transitions to a post cookie era at there it will emerge as a front runner embracing <unk> independence, and the power and value of.
Ml based media buying Decisioning focus on alternative data signals, such as contextual content natural language processing and behavioral patterns.
So in conclusion, we are happy with our progress in Q2 and continued strength in areas of investment such as self service, our health care vertical our predictive audience offerings and CTV.
And as always we're making steady and significant progress in our efforts to improve platform based return on AD spend for customers, which is what drives adoption of AD <unk> DSP and revenue growth.
Since 2012, we have used ml to solve real world problems that advertisers care about it is not marketing spin. It is core to everything we have built over the last 11 years and to what we continue to build that work is accelerating and more and more advertisers are taking notice we are confident.
And our ability to continue delivering exceptional results for our customers.
Turning to growth in the second half and driving long term value for our investors.
Thank you for your support and confidence in the add their team now I will turn it over to Patrick.
Thanks, Jim and good afternoon, everyone. We are pleased to deliver Q2 results largely in line with expectations set during our prior call the.
The quarter's adjusted EBITDA surpassed our outlook and we are confident in achieving our full year goals for 2023.
In the second quarter, our revenue was $37 6 million or <unk>.
Increase of $4 9 million or 11, 5% compared to the second quarter of the previous year.
As expected when we provided our outlook on the last call.
This decline was largely a result of the ongoing macroeconomic pressures that have impacted budgets and led to uncertainties in advertising campaign timing and size over the past 12 months.
Additionally, we saw lower than expected budgets in the quarter from a small number of retail and health care customers and delays in the timing of certain campaigns driving revenue $1 million below our expectations.
Despite the slower pace of spend the number of health advertisers increased during the quarter and as we entered Q3, we are in an exceptionally strong position overall.
As of the current point in the quarter, our bookings for the second half exceed the second half of 2022 and.
And we have a growing pipeline with more advanced and committed opportunities.
During Q2, the demand for our self service offering remained exceptionally high we delivered substantial growth in self service revenue, which increased by 75% sequentially in Q2 compared to 19% sequentially in Q1.
Additionally, there was 92% growth in impressions served and a 49% increase in advertiser count from Q1 to Q2.
PT revenue also continued to grow.
Particularly within our self service platform.
As Jim mentioned self service CTV revenue experienced 97% sequential growth from the first quarter.
These results demonstrate the strong performance and positive trends in our self service and CTV offerings as those offerings continue to become a higher percent of our overall revenue mix.
Turning now to expenses.
In the second quarter, our adjusted gross profit calculated as GAAP revenue less traffic acquisition costs was $24 million or 64% of revenue, which aligns with our projected outlook and consistent with Q1 results.
This percentage is lower compared to the same period in the previous year.
Was 66, 7% of revenue.
The decrease in AGP margin can be attributed to two factors.
First we offer an introductory services at competitive pricing to encourage adoption among first time customers.
Second there was a change in the mix of services across device types, particularly in CTV, which carries premium media inventory costs.
Total GAAP operating expenses were $38 $3 million in the second quarter down $2 9 million or 7% from Q2 2022.
The reduction in operating expenses was driven by lower equity based compensation.
Traffic acquisition costs, and insurance premiums offset by increases in data infrastructure hosting and travel.
Stock compensation expense in the second quarter was $1 9 million showing a decrease.
Kris of $2 million or 52% compared to the $3 9 million recorded in Q2 2022.
Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $3 3 million.
Down $4 million compared to the second quarter of 2022.
Primarily due to the declines in year over year revenue and AGP offset by lower operating expenses.
Consistent with our track record of cost discipline and commitment to prioritizing profitability, we once again exceeded our quarterly EBITDA outlook.
Moving to cash flow.
We used $2 $3 million of free cash flow in the quarter compared to a use of $300000 in Q2 of last year year.
Year to date, we have generated $600000 in free cash flow versus $1 8 million for the first six months in the last year.
Consistent with Q1, we had an increase in capitalized software costs associated with our product and platform initiatives.
Capitalized software development costs have increased $1 $2 million year to date.
We exited Q2 with a strong cash and liquidity position.
At the end of the second quarter, we had $73 $1 million in cash versus $72 6 million at the end of 2022.
We have no debt on the balance sheet.
But continue to have access to $40 million on our revolving credit facility.
Regarding our outlook for the full year 2023, we are reaffirming the previously provided projections for revenue and adjusted EBITDA.
For the full year, we continue to expect revenue to grow year over year.
Adjusted gross profit to be between 64% and 65% of revenue and adjusted EBITDA to be within 16% and 19% of adjusted gross profit.
We anticipate revenue growth in the second half of the year driven by strong demand for our new products across various verticals.
The progress in our key investment areas, including at their in house and audience build our products and CTV and self service offerings are driving improved visibility and outlook for the second half of the year.
Our forecast assumes no significant changes in the macroeconomic environment and we continue to expect the quarterly seasonal revenue composition to look more like 2021% in 2022.
And although Q2 revenue was below our internal expectations by approximately $1 million. We are encouraged by the positive trends in bookings in our pipeline opportunities.
At this point in the year, our pace for bookings in the second half exceeds the same time last year up nearly 8% year over year and our pipeline shows strong double digit growth with four opportunities in advanced stages.
These indicators support our confidence in achieving our full year outlook.
For Q3, we expect revenue to be between $39 million and $42 million.
Representing 8% growth at the midpoint compared to Q3 2022.
The adjusted gross profit for Q3 is expected to be consistent with the first half of 2023 at around 64% of revenue.
We anticipate adjusted EBITDA to be between $3 million and $4 5 million for the third quarter.
In summary.
We are encouraged by the many growth opportunities that lie ahead for out there.
Across our key growth pillars, we see enthusiasm from brands and agencies and the sales pipeline has never been better.
The business continues to track towards our longer term goals and we remain confident in our ability to achieve our full year outlook.
At this time, we would like to transition to the Q&A session moderated by the operator.
Thank you the floor is now open for your questions to ask a question at this time. Please press Star then the number one on your telephone keypad.
You'll be provided the opportunity to ask one question and one for your follow up question.
We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster.
Okay.
Your first question comes from the line.
Of Laura Martin with Needham.
Your line is open.
Great. Thank you very much so when you talked about connected TV revenues being up 97% quarter over quarter on a self service basis.
Curious is that lower funnel are they using it for are you are they also using upper funnel.
A full funnel product do you find or is it still being your startup lower funnel, which is your traditional base.
Thank you Laura for that question, we're really happy to see the adoption of our CTV product.
We believe that we bring a.
Next level of performance to CTV.
And the deals that we're winning and have been very much focused on driving outcomes using CTV as part of a full funnel solution. We have a number of products and capabilities. As you know that are designed to use ml to drive outcomes.
Our CTV product is part of that in a full funnel capacity you can leverage a lot of data we've invested a lot in the content.
Jack metadata on the CTV side on the publisher side, so that our algorithms are able to effectively utilize data in CTV to drive better performance outcomes. So yes. We are we are winning a lot of deals on the CTV side, because we are elevating the CTV landscape by providing a performer.
Aspect to it as part of a full funnel solution for customers.
Super Helpful. And then my second question is.
If I heard this right it looks like your self service growth is up 75%, but actually total revenue for the enterprise was down.
So my question is is it cannibalistic or you're just taking money from the higher take rate full service and putting in a self service, which has a lower take rate. That's my second question.
Thank you Laura.
Yes.
We knew we were going to have some softness in the second quarter, when we guided last last quarter.
Driven by a number of softer budgets from a number of our customers.
We are seeing incredible adoption across the self service customer base.
Also seeing strong adoption across our managed customer base. There are a number of timing challenges that occur in any quarter I think over the longer term the trend lines with positive we're not seeing cannibalization I think actually the one add Darren approach, where we're going into the marketplace with a platform and that platform solves proud.
<unk> said uses ml to be.
Be inefficient driver of conversion activity for customers. We can find the right impressions that drive business outcomes think sales think visits et cetera.
And whether the customer wants to transact on self service or whether they want to transact on a managed basis is up to them and we've actually seen it go both ways. This quarter. We saw a number of self service opportunities asked us for managed support because they had layoffs or they had.
Staffing challenges and we were able to step in and help them with that and even provide creative.
A number of our self service customers have raised their hand, and said can you provide creative services and the answer has been yes. So we love having a full service solution. Our original business was was a managed business, but we're really happy to be driving such incremental demand. Another 50, 60% of the market is buying self service. So we don't see cannibalization.
<unk>, we just see a really big opportunity.
Thank you very much I appreciate it thanks.
Thank you Laura.
Our next questions comes from the line of Andrew Boone with JMP Securities. Your line is open.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions.
I'd like to better understand the softness in tier two so understood a few campaigns come off but given the fact that you guys are rois focused and more performance based.
Why why are customers turning off campaigns, just helps us understand the softness as we think about the revenue visibility going forward.
Yes, thanks for the question Andrew.
Yes.
When when we have one or two or three customers.
Pause due to whether it's budget cuts or whether there are.
Unique events in their business, such as an FDA approval or a strike or what have you the.
Loss of 1 million to $3 million in business in the quarter can impact our results at the size of our business.
Our focus obviously is on the longer term, it's on driving value for customers driving more customers onto the platform driving revenue from those customers over the longer term, but.
We believe that we have a strategy, we're executing that is going to return us to steady profitable growth.
And yes, there have been in the near term there can be some variances towards the longer growth trajectory that we see we're guiding towards a second half that's going to return us to growth we're guiding towards at the midpoint.
Sure.
Third quarter will be the highest third quarter and add Darren history in terms of revenue we have a lot of very specific data that we that we see regarding customer adoption regarding pipeline high probability pipeline bookings at this point year over year, and we are very encouraged the new customers and help the new custom.
And self service to new customers across our audience product there driving that demand and we're very excited about.
Where we're headed at the strategy that we implemented we've done a number of things over the last four quarters. We invested in these products because we believe they will drive customer adoption and revenue growth and we are excited to be at a point to say that those results are going to start showing up in our financial results in the third quarter.
You're pretty much walked into my next question. So as we think about.
So on a go forward basis.
AD market is maybe up kind of mid to high single digits in terms of digital advertising.
How do we think about you guys in terms of a sustainable growth rate right. So understood the kind of high single digit guidance for back half of the year, but how do we start to think about this going forward as we build kind of a model out.
Four or five years. Thank you so much.
Yes, Thank you Andrew.
We're very excited about the future I think one of the reasons why.
We have implemented our strategy is because we identified gaps in a market a very big market and we invested to fill those gaps with highly differentiated products.
Our algorithm based.
Independent audience targeting platform solution, including a specialized health version.
Our advanced <unk> self service platform.
More than doubles our Tam.
And market about a year.
In may after beta, it's a longer sales cycle, but the good news right now is that we're a lot further along in that sales cycle, our highly specialized health DSP, which we formally launched in the third quarter and the early adopters and the early tests have been extremely positive. So we think we're going to return to a really strong level of.
Growth, we're very excited to see the adoption that we've seen from our self service from our health audiences from our non health audiences from CTV and we just think it's going to drive steady long term growth for this business.
Great. Thank you Jim.
Thank you Andrew.
And we do have our last question comes from the line of John Ryan.
Powers Your line is open.
Great Hey, so Jim you're talking about the trends you were talking about the ALJ report. So why is that so important to add Darren at this point.
Thank you for that question I think the the.
<unk> issued this report in June and the June report highlighted a number of inefficiencies across open web programmatic advertising and as most people know the open web is comprised of digital web and App properties as distinguished from the so-called walled garden proper.
Thanks, meta tictoc et cetera.
Open web is great.
Is it growing place for advertisers to engage with consumers $88 billion opportunity and many believe many marketers. Many brands believe it is a valuable alternative to walled garden user profiling, it's been abusive you've read about it and there are a number of drawbacks to those approaches the IV based.
User profiling based advertising approaches of the past, but the report also outlines a number of open web programmatic inefficiencies, which are impeded return on AD spend for many advertisers using the open web programmatic.
And as we've been saying the same exact thing for years.
But there are certain common industry practices, which benefit a handful of AD tech vendors more than the advertisers themselves and for more than 11 years, we have been designing a statistics powered and ml power DSP that puts advertisers first focuses on measurable business goals such as return on Ad spend.
Cost per action and we when we examine the <unk> report and and we believe that it is a useful very useful context to evaluate the adherent business.
And how it is additive and different in this market and we also believe that brands.
And agencies, which prioritize brand ROI are taking notice of this and this.
This is helping us move forward not necessarily the ALJ report, but the content of the ALJ report, which really underscores the value prop and the problems that add there just trying to solve in programmatic.
The ALJ report highlights these inefficiencies around which we have built over 11 years valuable platform and machine learning tools, and we believe that we deliver for advertisers.
The true benefit and value from open web programmatic advertising and I would encourage you and anyone listening to read our blog posts on our website, which responds to each of the A&H key findings in this programmatic report about programmatic.
But thank you. Thank you for that question I appreciate the opportunity to talk about that topic.
Yeah. Thanks, Jeff Hey, one more quick question, you were talking about chrome and deprecating cookies, starting in the first quarter 'twenty four.
Are you seeing more.
Prospects talk about that or is it kind of quiet at this point.
A ton more I think the there was this stick your head in the sand aspect to it when Google started pushing back on their deadlines. They have recently reaffirmed the deadline is a year away and the privacy sandbox has opened the door.
In other words this set of replacement tools, Google has opened up for advertisers and marketers to begin working with the cookies going away and CRO and I think it behooves advertisers and marketers to patent strategy, we think consulting with our customers in a very.
And a very.
And a very deep and.
Thoughtful way to help them navigate this and the good news for US is we don't need cookies, we don't need.
<unk>, we don't need user profiles, we don't need user Ids were scoring impressions based on statistics, we've invested a lot in the programmatic bid stream and augmenting that data strength and making sure that we have a lot of data to score programmatic publisher opportunities. So that we can know whether theyre going to drive outcomes for our customer.
That is the business that we are in and you take away the cookie that helped us.
Great. Thanks, so much.
Thanks for that question.
Our next question comes from the line of Maria <unk> with Canaccord.
Your line is open.
Great. Thanks, so much for taking my question I have just one.
So as your self serve product is expanding how does your approach to sales and maybe go to market strategy is sort of a change as a result, and where do you see opportunities for efficiency going forward on that front.
Thanks for the question Maria.
The number one change.
We are most excited about with regard to bringing our self service offering to market is that our entire sales team is now selling a holistic solution. We are now.
No longer selling a <unk> solution, we are selling a solution to the entire marketplace.
Many advertisers.
And agencies.
<unk> a technology platform that they can use because they have traders and they have infrastructure. They have personnel infrastructure to utilize that and they build businesses around media buying.
And a year ago, we were not able to sell into those opportunities and many of them are very very large opportunities.
Our entire sales team is now selling one add darrin, we're selling our platform, we're not we're not selling.
One off solutions. This is the add Darren platform that we're selling and you can transact whoever you want so I think that's the number one thing that we're most excited about when it comes to the go to market strategy I think we have a fantastic.
Fantastic team, we have a very long tenured team.
Our sales team.
Team our strategists.
Our analysts we have an incredibly smart gifted group of people here that are working hard with customers.
To solve their problems and I think our go to market strategy is on point, we've made some adjustments here and there to to make sure that we are efficient we have never been more efficient than we are now when we look at our AGP per employee it's very strong we expect that to continue.
And as the customer demand increases as growth returns in the third quarter and in the fourth quarter for the full year.
We think that we have a lot of things to talk about in the coming quarters.
Great. Thank you so much for the color.
Thank you Mariana.
Again, if you would like to ask a question press star.
This is the number one on your telephone keypad.
There are no further questions at this time, Mr. Lawson I'll turn the call back over to you.
Thank you.
In closing.
Our work in the second quarter and prior quarters sets the stage for a return to meaningful revenue growth in the second half of 2023.
Our positive outlook is substantiated by strong quarter to date bookings.
Growing late stage pipeline impressive results across each of our areas of investment and an overwhelmingly positive response from early customers and prospects.
Regarding our first of its kind self service health DSP that formally launches in the third quarter also the industry's growing interest in AI in area, where we hold a decade plus track record of development and leadership shines a bright light on our many competitive advantages.
Antigens.
Which we've worked hard to expand each quarter we.
We have never been more optimistic about our business I am privileged to work with our smart steadfast and dedicated team and we all look forward to sharing our progress with you in the weeks and months ahead. Thank you.
Yeah.
Ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's conference call you may now disconnect.
[music].
Okay.
[music].
Okay.