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BrightView Holdings, Inc. (BV)

Q2 2014 Earnings Call· Thu, Nov 21, 2013

$12.29

-0.20%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the Bazaarvoice Fiscal Second Quarter 2014 Financial Results Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Mr. Jim Offerdahl, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead, sir.

James R. Offerdahl

Management

Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to today's conference call to discuss Bazaarvoice's financial results for the second fiscal quarter of 2014 ended October 31, 2013. I'm joined today by Stephen Collins, our Chief Executive Officer; and Gene Austin, our President. Following the remarks from Steve and Jim and me, we'll have a question-and-answer session. Please note that we are simultaneously webcasting this call on our Investor Relations website at investors.bazaarvoice.com. The earnings release with our results for the second fiscal quarter of 2014, as well as the release announcing our succession plan, were issued earlier today and are also posted on our Investor Relations website. Please remember that certain statements made during this call, including those concerning the business outlook and guidance, growth plans and opportunities, potential acquisitions, sales execution and our ability to capitalize on our opportunities, are all forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are described in our SEC filings, including the Risk Factor sections of our Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended April 30, 2013, our Form 10-Q for the first fiscal quarter of 2014, and our Form S-1 as filed with the SEC on July 12, 2012, as well as other documents that we may file with the SEC in the future. Should any of the risks or uncertainties materialize or should any of our assumptions prove to be incorrect, actual results could differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied in these forward-looking statements. In addition, forward-looking statements are based on currently available information, and we undertake no duty to update this information. Additional cautionary language regarding these forward-looking statements is further described in today's press releases. Finally, some of the numbers that we will discuss during this call will be presented on a non-GAAP basis. Today's press release, together with the accompanying tables, contains the calculations of these non-GAAP financial measures and a full reconciliation between each non-GAAP measure and its corresponding GAAP measure. I would like now to turn the call over to Stephen.

Stephen R. Collins

Management

Jim, thanks, and to everyone on the call, thanks for joining us today. Let me start by thanking our clients for their business and by thanking all the Bazaarvoice team members around the world for their ongoing hard work and dedication. As you no doubt saw in our press release, I am very gratified today to announce that Gene Austin will succeed me as CEO at the end of the current fiscal quarter ending on January 31, 2014. For me, it has been an honor and a privilege to service the company's CEO since taking over for our Founder, Brett Hurt, back in November of 2012. And I am proud of what the company has accomplished during my tenure. I'd like to thank the Board of Directors and the Bazaarvoice team for the opportunity to lead our company during this period of time. Gene is going to be a tremendous CEO for our company and I was incredibly pleased to have been able to recruit him to Bazaarvoice. Gene had to hit the ground running in May of this year, assuming a huge amount of responsibility and challenge by taking on all the sales, services, marketing and business development functions of the company. With 6 months under his belt and the DOJ trial complete, it is clear that his leadership experience as a Chief Executive and his deep experience in software and SaaS is driving the organization forward, and the board and I are fully aligned on this as the succession plan. Now, Gene and I are going to work closely for the next quarter to complete the transition of all the leadership responsibilities of the company to him. Our key near-term operating objectives that relate to our long-term strategy will remain in focus through this transition and beyond, with…

Eugene Austin

Management

Thank you, Stephen. I really appreciate your kind words and I'm incredibly excited about the opportunity to lead Bazaarvoice moving forward. And I'd also like to thank all of you for attending today's call, as it serves as the beginning of our transition. As most of you know, I joined the company in May of this year, and I have been leading our go-to-market initiatives for the business, including worldwide sales, services, marketing and business development. I've spent much of my time with clients, prospects and partners, understanding the role Bazaarvoice plays in their business and what they want from us in the future. Resoundingly, I'm told that we have made a profound impact on the marketplace by enabling businesses to build richer and more valuable relationships among consumers, retailers and brands. Every review, question and service -- can help with this growth [ph] in the Bazaarvoice network is an opportunity to create experiences built on trust, mutual interest and collaboration. Our capacity to help businesses tap into the most powerful marketing force in the world, the voice of the customer, has made us one of the most powerful engines in the world for generating authentic content. In just the last quarter alone, the content on our network received more than 48 billion impressions and influenced 476 million average monthly unique shoppers who engaged with reviews, questions and answers and other forms of content displayed on our clients' website. We have the honor of working with 283 merchants listed in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide and 44 companies ranked in the Fortune 100. These are clear indications of the value we drive for our clients today and the opportunity that lies ahead by building out our network. In short, I believe Bazaarvoice's best days lie ahead. I would like…

James R. Offerdahl

Management

Thank you, Gene, and thank you to everyone who joined the call today. As a reminder, we are on a fiscal year calendar ending April 30. So today, we're reporting results for the second quarter of fiscal 2014, which ended October 31, 2013, and all accounting periods discussed will be fiscal. Unless otherwise noted in my remarks, I will cover our non-GAAP operating results that correlate with adjusted EBITDA as a measure of operating profitability, including discussions of cost of revenue and operating expenses. Investors should refer to our press release for a complete overview of our financial results, including the reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP operating results, comparative information to prior periods and key operating metrics. I'll first provide commentary on our second quarter 2014 financial performance and will then conclude with our outlook for the third quarter and full fiscal year 2014. As Gene mentioned, we achieved total revenue of $45.5 million in the second quarter, up 18% year-over-year, exceeding the high end of our guidance range. This year-over-year growth rate benefited from our Longboard Media acquisition in the third quarter of fiscal 2013. So on a pro forma basis, our year-over-year growth rate was 15%. We achieved SaaS revenue of $44.2 million, up 15% year-over-year. Net media revenue was $1.3 million, up 29% year-over-year on a pro forma basis. Adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was a loss of $3.1 million, in the range of our guidance of the loss of $2.5 million to $3.5 million. As a percentage of total revenue, our adjusted EBITDA loss improved 340 basis points year-over-year, driven primarily by gaining leverage in operating -- operational efficiencies in our cost of revenue and G&A activities, while at the same time, allowing us to increase investments in R&D and sales and marketing to support…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Greg Dunham with Goldman Sachs.

Gregory Dunham

Analyst

I guess, first off, I've gotten a number of questions from investors as to your succession and just the catalyst behind that decision, as why now? So that's first. And then I do have a question on churn.

Stephen R. Collins

Management

Okay, Greg. It's Stephen. First, I would say that the board and I feel like it's a good time and a really great time to make the change. And we're focused on conducting an orderly succession plan here. So it's a little bit different than when I took over about 1 year ago. I had the opportunity to recruit Gene. He's got extensive CEO experience. I've been able to accomplish a lot of what the board set forth for me to accomplish. And as we proceed into, let's say, the next phase of our growth, Gene's experience and skills are really perfectly adapted to what we have to accomplish. He's already been running 2/3 of the operations of the company for the last 6 months, he and I have had a chance to get to know each other and get up to speed and talk a lot on strategy. And before you know it, we'll be on our FY '15 planning process, about a quarter from now. So we just sat down as a board and felt like this was the right succession plan, and I think it's going to be a smooth transition and great for the company.

Gregory Dunham

Analyst

Okay. And then, I guess, switching gears a little bit. You mentioned that the dollar churn change and then that impacting guidance. I know last quarter, you have the contract renewals that impacted that specific deal. It sounds like this is a little bit more widespread. And I guess, what actually happened that surprised you this quarter on a dollar basis? And outside of change in the incentive plans for net bookings, is there anything else you can do to help improve that dynamics?

Eugene Austin

Management

Yes, Greg, this is Gene. In addition to the one-time large client renegotiation, we did have a number of, more mid-sized organizations that churned. And so I use the term," "spike in churn" for Q2, which I think is a good term for. We expect churn to be lower as the rest of the year unfolds, but let me give you a little bit more color on what happened in Q2. And frankly, I think it's emblematic of what we're working on operationally going forward. I would really break our churn down into 3 large buckets. One is execution by our company and that could be selling too much into the account and account coming back and rightsizing downstream. That could be an implementation that was incomplete. That could be a poor contract. And so many of those, as you want to talk about solutions, many of those are being worked and fixed as we go forward in that we've strengthened our implementation processes, our sales processes, et cetera, to where I think we're executing at a much higher level on that front. The third area -- the second area would be what I would call classic churn you see in any SaaS business, which could be anything from your champion leading the organization and the new person coming in and having to resell and perhaps, they decided to do things a little differently to any other -- to the fact that it's maybe not as good a fit as they thought. So those would be what I would call classic SaaS churn that you see in any SaaS business. And then the third area is a little bit of a dynamic of our market, where we -- when we sell to somebody's large brands, we have brands buying on one side and churning on the other side. They could be because the brand no longer are -- they're being taken back or taken off the shelf, as I would say, or it could be for a variety of different reasons. And we're -- we have plans in place to address that to take some of the noise out of that inter-client churn that we see on occasion. 2 of the 3 are being actively worked, and I think we're going to see much stronger churn results as we go forward. But yes, we did have a spike this quarter.

Operator

Operator

And we'll take our next question from Jennifer Lowe with Morgan Stanley.

Jennifer Swanson Lowe

Analyst · Morgan Stanley.

Maybe just to quickly follow up on Greg's question regarding churn. Two quick questions on that. First, were those -- the customers that were churning, where they switching to competing offerings or were they just going without ratings and reviews, technology reports, communication platform altogether? And then related to that, were those retail brand -- retailers that were churning or were there brands churning?

Eugene Austin

Management

It was largely a mix on how the organizations break down between retailers and brands. And I'm aware of no significant competitive pressure that cause the churn. I mean, I don't have all the details. I know the largest ones that churned were not due to another competitor, but I'm sure there was plenty of competitor influence on some of the churn, so best way to answer that for you. I don't know -- I certainly don't know of any widespread, one competitor taking our business in these accounts.

Jennifer Swanson Lowe

Analyst · Morgan Stanley.

Okay. And one more for me. So in terms of the new customer go live, the 60 go-live growth. Obviously, it was a pretty big improvement from last quarter. I know last quarter there was also some discussion around trying to refine some of the implementation processes to kind of speed up the rate of implementation. So I'm just trying to get a feel for how much of that improvement was related to you improving your implementation processes and potentially working through maybe some backlog of signed customers that still need to go live versus just broader growth in the number of customer signings.

Eugene Austin

Management

I think -- I mean, I think the significant rate is both a reflection of our accelerating sales progress, our sales progress, but also the fact that our services team, engaging with our sales team on better cycle times, cleaner processes, shorter durations of [ph] the overall implementation. We took some serious step-forwards in that area, and I expect that to continue going forward. And those implementations, the type of implementations that our company is embarked on now are the types of implementations, from my 12 years of being in the SaaS business, those are the types of implementations that lead to long-term customer value and lower churn. And those are the types of downstream effects that we expect to see from the way we're implementing customers now.

Jennifer Swanson Lowe

Analyst · Morgan Stanley.

And then just one last one for me. Again, not to beat a dead horse but on the churn issue, it looks like the number of customers churning was fairly consistent with the past. It was really just the size that was a little bit bigger than normally is. Is that a fair characterization or was it necessarily pervasive, it was just a slight number of customers if it's fixed [ph] , the customer number was fairly similar, it was really just a dollar that was different versus past quarters?

Eugene Austin

Management

The way I would characterize it, is we had a number of organizations effectively right-size. So there's still clients at a lot lower level or a lower level. And so in my opinion, that's -- if you're going to have churn, that's the best way to have it because you have the opportunity to go back in and regrow that business.

Operator

Operator

And we'll now take our next question from Nandan Amladi with Deutsche Bank.

Nandan Amladi

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

The first question on revenue from old products versus new products. I know you said early on the global expansion plan is still focused on ratings and reviews, but you also made reference to Connections having grown significantly. Are you happy with the revenue contribution from these new products? And should we expect any changes in the product portfolio as a result of the transition in [ph] leadership?

Stephen R. Collins

Management

Well, Nandan, this is Stephen. We've got several long-term growth bets in play right now. Connections is one of them, as is media. Connections is a network strategy. So the first objective is to get as many brands as we can on that platform and engaging consumers. Now we have a couple of thousand. And as I've talked about in the past, there are tens of thousands of unique brands that have content on our network, but are either small or don't really have a use case for our ratings and reviews platforms. So this is really key for us to expand the market. So we want to continue to nurture that and continue to get thousands of people on that platform and then use that as a channel to launch other new products and also to generate leads for our conversations ratings and reviews platform. Media is one of the other bets that we've got on. And we've got a roadmap, a product roadmap, behind that. We've increased our investment there and put a team on it. We've been signing up some exciting new retailers. That hasn't happened quite as fast as we want so we haven't quite got the inventory that we want. But it still remains a tremendous opportunity and you don't have to look any further from Amazon. But these are the growth drivers, really, in future years, more near-term, as Gene described, I'm going to turn, the rest of this answer over to him. It's about great execution on our core business and very much about global expansion and, of course, I mentioned, we launch officially in Japan. Gene, what would you like to add to that?

Eugene Austin

Management

Nandan, I would say that as you look at this transition from Stephen and myself, it's really a building-block approach. And so the short answer to your question is that I believe the bets and the product plays and the strategy that the company has embarked upon is solid, and that we have an opportunity to really drive results much higher through global expansion and better execution overall. The way I framed the succession plan here is that Stephen has come in and laid the foundation with a new management team. He had to lead, obviously, the company through the DOJ process. But he's also set a vision for how the company continues to evolve. And he's put in place significant opportunities investments that it's my job now to make happen from an execution standpoint and drive the returns that we expect from the business. We all -- we have a very common view of what success is. And we believe that Bazaarvoice has that foundation in place to go forward. The strength of my leadership is around solidifying teams and driving execution, while continuing to foster strategic innovation. And that's why I'm excited about this opportunity. I think we have a real positive and bright future.

Nandan Amladi

Analyst · Deutsche Bank.

And a quick follow-up, if I might. Compensation plan changes. I know, I think it was 2 quarters ago, you had taken the approach of raising the new customer adds; that became an important metric. Also earlier, there was a balance between upsell versus new customers, and you pushed more on the new customer side. Today, you're talking about a net new bookings to get control over churn. Is this actually having a disruptive effect on the salespeople in the near term as they get used to these new metrics?

Eugene Austin

Management

So our sales team definitely has new account acquisition goals. Our leadership team is the team that -- what I mean by leadership, I mean, vice presidents and to some degree, directors, so pervasive across the company, are -- their bonus plan is on net bookings simply because it's my belief that everyone in the company impacts churn. And so I think having a common base of compensation around something that we all can affect, whether it's answering a phone or improving customer satisfaction or fixing bugs, what have you. I mean, that's the way, I think, you really move the needle. And to answer your question, the net bookings change remains in the sales force is definitely have an impact. I think that's showing up in the numbers. And the focus on net bookings in a more pervasive way in our company is, at the same time, making changes happen. We have programs in place to improve customer satisfaction. We've talked about the fact that our implementations are much stronger. We are proactively investing in technology to help us monitor accounts to make sure that they're getting the right value, that they're driving content that we know will lead to success. So the company is on a different level right now as far as attacking the churn challenge. And like I said, I'm very -- I feel very good about the fact that churn will be heading in the right direction as we head into the next several quarters.

Stephen R. Collins

Management

Yes, and then a quick little history. The executive team has always been bonus on net bookings. What we've really done here, this is a total company thing, not just a sales thing. Gene has come in, and really, we've pushed down the net bookings objective as a foundational component of all senior management executives, not just the executive team, to align the whole company. So Gene is to really be commended for putting a laser-like focus in this area.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] We'll go next to Mark Murphy with Piper Jaffray.

Mark R. Murphy

Analyst

So Gene, first of all, congratulations. I'm curious, and I think we're all trying to understand what elements of the business strategy, as laid out by Stephen, do you think you would modify? I mean, I think, clearly, if everything's remaining 100% consistent, there's no reason to make this kind of change. So for example, do you think you'd take any different approach or de-emphasis on the media side? Is there anything you would change with respect to Connections? Did you still intend to grow the quota-carrying sales headcount by 40% this year and so on and so forth?

Eugene Austin

Management

Yes, Mark, I think -- I guess, Stephen and I would dispute your first statement about having to have changed to make this succession plan. And I would tell you that I think Stephen and I fundamentally bring different skills to the business. And the board has openly discuss this with both of us. And I am a 12-year veteran of the SaaS business. We are largely a SaaS company, as we have plans to obviously add to that in a number of different ways. And I think media is a very important investment that we have. I think Connections is a very important investment we have. But when we look ahead and we look at what lie head, my skill sets of a dozen years as an executive in SaaS and you know me, obviously, from my years at Convio, was the best lineup, if you will, of skill sets to put forward for the business, and we all came to that conclusion. Stephen has laid a great foundation. I came here because of the strategy he's deployed and his vision. And I intend to really turn the company into a sound executing organization that is driving significant value, both from our core business on a global basis and the network, as we continue to invest going forward.

Mark R. Murphy

Analyst

Okay. So Gene, Stephen was CEO for about 1 year. And you say he wasn't interim CEO. He was CEO. And I mean, I guess the way you're presenting it is that this is expected and normal and a great timing and everything. Can I just ask how long did you anticipate being CEO?

Stephen R. Collins

Management

This is Stephen. Mark, when I took over as CEO, I had a pretty clear charter to build a management team from top to bottom that was scalable. Now when you take -- I took over under completely different circumstances. This is an orderly succession plan. I went out and recruited Gene, and I chased him hard and I wanted him on board. And it was a real privilege to be able to get someone with public company CEO experience on the management team and turn over a huge portion of the operation immediately. Now when you take over as CEO under the circumstances I took over, I made an open-ended commitment to the board to do whatever it took to build the right management team and ultimately, take us through the DOJ litigation and put in place some initiatives that were long overdue, like expanding in the Asia-Pac region. But I went into this with my mind on doing the right thing for Bazaarvoice for the long-term as a shareholder. And when I recruited Gene, I didn't recruit him and say, "Hey, you're going to be CEO." But we certainly talked about it. And it was very comforting to me personally and to the board that we have a real pro coming to the company here and someone I can rely on. And as we've talked at the board level about what happens next and how to best align the company and drive the company forward, we wanted to be proactive and do the right thing. So you really can't compare the last change to this one. It's quite different. And I'm still CEO until January 31, whatever it's worth. So -- and Gene has been a great partner. We're going to continue to work together. So with all due respect, I think it's a little bit of unfair question. I feel Gene is going to have a great and successful and very long tenure here.

Eugene Austin

Management

Mark, just like we spent many quarters together in my last business, you're going to get to spend many, many quarters with me in this business. So I look forward, too. I'm going to build the best, large independent business I can. I believe in Bazaarvoice. I believe in the employees here. I think the board is -- has been very sound in the way it has gone through this process. So you're stuck with me.

Mark R. Murphy

Analyst

All right. I guess, so far, I'm asking unfair questions or making comments for you...

Eugene Austin

Management

No, you're not. I think it's very fair.

Mark R. Murphy

Analyst

I do appreciate it. And actually, the extra color is very helpful. I just wanted to ask you one more. Just on the growth rate of your ratings and reviews volumes, I think you showed today, it's getting close to 500 billion conversations across your network. And I'm wondering, if you look at the trend in that and think about what Bazaarvoice's market share is of all these ratings and reviews volumes globally or conversations, whatever you want to call it. And if you compare it to the vendors -- excuse me, to all the firms globally that did not use Bazaarvoice, like Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and there are a couple of others. What do you think -- do you think Bazaarvoice is gaining share there? How do you think that, that would stack up just in terms of the trend?

Stephen R. Collins

Management

So, if I may, I don't -- this is Stephen. I don't think that's the right way to look at it because when you're talking about consumer reach, audience reach on the web, there's massive overlap. The terminal value, if you will, is Facebook or Google, at a little over 1 billion uniques around the world. Having close to 0.5 billion uniques simply means that we directly interact with consumers. So there are pixels [ph] on retail and brand sites, we directly interact with nearly 0.5 billion consumers. That's likely to put us in the top 10 of companies in terms of audience reach. Now we're not like Facebook but that's an important metric to determine the impact that we have and the potential value of analytics solution and the potential value of our data. As you know, we don't monetize our unique audience or impressions. We have a SaaS model, okay? But in terms of the underlying value that we drive for our clients and the value, the intrinsic value of the assets that we have to build upon, that's an incredibly important metric because it differentiates us from other players that might have a much smaller audience. But there are many sources of audience. If you want to reach 500 million people, you can do it through Amazon, you can do it, maybe not that many, but you can do it through Facebook. And that's how you should think about that. It means we have a big impact and the value of future solutions can be exponentially higher than what we've created today as we unlock that.

Operator

Operator

And we'll take our next question from Brendan Barnicle of Pacific Crest.

Brendan Barnicle

Analyst

I just wanted to check a couple of things on the model. If the media revs are going to basically double on a reported basis, then am I reading it right that the SaaS revenue's basically going to be flat sequentially, Q3 to Q4, based on that mid-point of the guidance you've given us for Q3 and for the fiscal year?

James R. Offerdahl

Management

Yes, Brendan, this is Jim. I think if you do the math, you will see some sequential increases relatively small, but sequential increases, if you do the math at the mid-point. Again, not, for certain, exactly what you're assuming for Q3 and Q4 for media.

Brendan Barnicle

Analyst

Great. Okay, good. I just want to double check that. And then if we go back to -- we've seen deferred revenue is not the best indication of growth, but it has been trending lower in the last third quarter in a row now. How much of that is related to the churn versus some other factors, like as you're signing up these new customers are they coming in at lower ASP, or it didn't sound like it from the way you gave us, but I'm trying to understand the dynamics around that decline?

James R. Offerdahl

Management

Yes, I would talk about 2 things on our deferred revenue. One is we have a lower mix of annual billings, again, similar to what we had in Q1. Two, the second half here, what I've seen is typically higher annual billings, especially for larger existing clients. For some reason, we typically sign those up in the latter half of our fiscal years. So that's one item. So the lower mix of annual billings, again, was about a $4 million impact. And of course, the Q2 churn spike -- the spike in Q2 of churn, didn't help us any from a billing standpoint. So I would hook it on those 2.

Brendan Barnicle

Analyst

Great. And then, Gene, you made some encouraging comments about balancing out growth and profitability. We had been remodeling some improvement in that for next year. But are you thinking that in fiscal '15, you're trying to target getting to breakeven or profitability?

Eugene Austin

Management

Brendan, I think, at this point, I want to commit to making progress and not really get to any targets just yet. I think we're -- but I do believe we can make measurable improvements there.

Brendan Barnicle

Analyst

Great. And then lastly for me on the media business and with the sort of shortfall there, how much of that is that there has been issues in terms of integrating Longboard Media versus maybe some of the legacy stuff?

Stephen R. Collins

Management

No real -- this is Stephen. No real integration issues. A couple of things. Number one, we certainly would have liked to have been able to get more retailers onboard. But that's proved to be a little harder than expected. They're just slow to adopt. But with that being said, like Staples U.K. and other things, we've had some good wins and have a really good pipeline. It's just taking longer than expected. The other thing that is harder to discern is that -- and this is deliberate, a good trend is we're selling more and more of our retailer's inventory. Longboard didn't just sell Shopper Media, meaning, online retailers, they sold what they call reach on mobile and just sort of general remnant space to bundle together. And that actually came with higher gross margins than our retail partners in many cases, who are also conversations clients. So I've been pushing them to utilize the inventory from our retail clients because that's where the synergy is and to sell less of the other stuff. You can think about it as an integration activity. The results of that, though, is because we report on a net basis and we don't disclose growth, that actually had an effect this last quarter. And -- but it's important that we're servicing our mutual clients here. And so that had an effect. But still, we definitely would like to see more retailers adopting, and I'm excited about some of the ones in the works. And so we feel good about that, and I'm excited about some of the new products there in the pipeline.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] We'll go next to Stephen Ju with Crédit Suisse.

Stephen Ju

Analyst

So looking at your overseas initiatives and especially in the cases of Japan. What is the competitive landscape there like? And is there an entrenched player who you have to unseat in order to take share on the retailer side? And do you think it will be harder slog to bring the brand marketer there on board the platform? And then, secondarily, on the media side, just digging [ph] a little deeper here. So am I correct in thinking that the shortfall on that side is more of a supply-constrained problem with new inventory coming online? But do you think there's an awareness problem on the demand side as well from your advertising clients? And specifically, what is the game plan to get more publishers on the platform? And at what point, in terms of size, whether it's uniques or whatever, other metric you care to measure it by, specifically, do you think you will have to be at this scale to necessarily [ph] to attract the attention of the brand advertisers?

Stephen R. Collins

Management

Yes. So 2 questions I heard. One was Japan and Asia-Pac, and the other was basically supply-and-demand issues with regard to media and the current state of evolution of Shopper Media. So let me address Japan first. So I went over to Tokyo for about a week to launch Bazaarvoice Japan. And I met with all the folks you would have heard of over there. So we have a partner that was in Japan that was actually an acquired partner [ph] relationships from the PowerReviews acquisition. So we have now launch some clients over there. It's also important to note that many of our brand clients are headquartered in Asia-Pac region, Samsung, for example. Procter & Gamble has a major operation in Singapore. So we look at this as a real opportunity to develop more global relationships with our existing clients by having capabilities there. And we've already had and I had a number of great meetings with our existing clients there. Even doing things as simple as translating reviews from some geographies into other languages is important. Competition, it's different. You have players over there who are, like the RocketOns [ph] and things like that, who have review capability. There's more concentration of retail. But we're just figuring out the competitive landscape. But I think it's a very rich opportunity for us and it's great that we're there on the ground. We got a lot of positive reinforcement from being there.

Eugene Austin

Management

Maybe just a real quick comment in Europe. We're a little bit more mature in the European market. The opportunity there is really getting the sales force built, grown and organized for much higher levels of bookings performance. Competitively over there, there are a few Pan-European competitors, mostly though, they're more regional in nature.

Stephen R. Collins

Management

So I think it's great timing. On media, you're exactly right that as this -- as Shopper Media is evolving. There's a 800-pound gorilla, if you will, and that's Amazon right now. They've built a strong Shopper Media business, estimates have that around $1 billion. And so they definitely have the lead. There are other players that are out there starting to sell this. So we do have an issue where there's still an awareness issue with brands about how to buy Shopper Media. The easiest thing to do right this minute is to buy Amazon, for example. And so we're both working that in and we're also continuing to build inventory, so we can meet big enough RFPs. As you know, Stephen, media buyers don't often split RFPs. They might just choose, hey, let's go a 100% with Amazon. And so that's very important for us, the Staples U.K. win was good. We've got some other big publishers, hopefully, in the works. And I think it's just a process that we have to continue to push on and we have to continue to educate retailers about the benefits of Shopper Media and site monetization through media, and we've received no indications that this is going to be an important part of economic model for e-tailers. It's just a matter of when they're going to adopt and getting the critical mass.

Stephen Ju

Analyst

How is the inventory being purchased right now in your platform? And is there a long-term plan to open this for programmatic?

Stephen R. Collins

Management

We've already opened it up to programmatic. We did that this quarter and so the media just started ticking on that. And our future product development initiatives are more programmatic in nature. It was not our intent from the beginning to look at that this as what you might call a rep business or a rep model. We definitely want to pursue programmatic capabilities and to integrate those capabilities with our ratings and reviews content in data. So we have already cross that bridge just starting this quarter.

Operator

Operator

And there are no further questions left in the queue. At this time, I'd like to turn the call back over to management for any closing remarks.

Eugene Austin

Management

Well, thank you all for attending and we look forward to reporting our progress as we go forward. And again, Stephen, thank you for all you've done in Bazaarvoice in your tenure.

Stephen R. Collins

Management

Gene, congratulations. I'm excited and look forward to your leadership. Thank you, everyone. We'll talk to you next quarter.

Eugene Austin

Management

Bye-bye.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference. We appreciate your participation.