Gene Austin
Analyst · Deutsche Bank
Thank you Jim and thanks to all of you for joining us on our call today. Eighteen months ago I seized the reins of Bazaarvoice. Our business predictability was not strong, our client satisfaction low and we lacked a plan in product development. Since that time we've worked tirelessly to right the ship in client’s satisfaction, reintegrate innovation products in both products and services and drive stronger operational cadence throughout the business. All while we managed our way to the divestiture of the competitor and unique terms of the stipulation order handed down by the department of justice. All of you have demonstrated a lot of patience in a company that has been through more than its fair share of unusual circumstances. I can tell you that I personally have felt your pain and appreciate that many of you remain believers in the Bazaarvoice store. I'm confident your patience will be rewarded. Our hard work is paying off. I see green shoots of progress on many fronts. Our customers are happier. Today more than ever before, I see changeable evidence that clients satisfaction has improved. It is showing up in surveys, conversations and reports from the field. And as we all know happier clients buy more and renew at higher rates. The mix of our new products is healthy and new product penetration improves both bookings performance and client retention. For the second quarter in a row our mix of bookings from new offerings as a percent of total product bookings exceeded 25%. Our company is transforming into the role of consumer generated content experts giving our clients various solutions to put the most powerful marketing content, the voice of the consumer to work for their business. Next, we are returning to a normal competitive environment. The DOJ stipulation requiring us to release our clients from their contract without penalty, should they move to PowerReviews expired on July 8, for the majority of our clients. As a result we are seeing a much more normal competitive environment unfold, where we expect to win and retain our clients due to our strong line-up of solutions, services and overall value. Internationally, we have spent a good two years of investing in our people and products to succeed. And this is the year I believe we can see the type of performance we need from both Europe and Asia Pacific. While our first quarter internationally was weaker than we expected. I do expect better results going forward. Finally, we see significant value in our shopper data. As you know over 625 million unique in-market shoppers engage with the content provided by our solutions each and every month. As such we are now able to construct segments such as big screen TV shoppers, or Pet Food shoppers. We are now testing the efficacy of our data versus data from other sources and while it is early our first test results were very positive. I will expand on this later in my comments. These green shoots obviously did not come over night. They are the result of our over 800 employees focusing on the basics. Our client health and satisfaction and building solutions that make a difference, while not letting unique circumstances around the settlement with a DOJ deter. Let me now talk specifically to our first quarter of 2016. Bazaarvoice executed well in the first quarter. From the financial perspective revenue of 48.9 million exceeded the high end of our guidance range. During the quarter I was pleased with our overall performance in our SaaS business, while our advertising revenues came in softer than expected due to weakness in our programmatic business. Adjusted EBITDA loss of 3.3 million was also better than our guidance as we remained focused on achieving adjusted EBITDA profitability for the full year. We continue to push the pace of innovation and launched a new offerings, Spotlights during the quarter. With Spotlights our clients have the opportunity to enhance their SCO performance at the category level were most searches takes place. Overall, we are seeing good traction with our new consumer generated content offerings. While we experienced elevated dollar churn in the first quarter primarily due to the unique competitive environment were pleased our overall churn results came in better than we had anticipated and sequentially down from the prior quarter. While we estimate less than one quarter of the dollar value of our contracts are still subject to the stipulation, we expect dollar churn to significantly improve in the second quarter. Given the progress we've made on clients satisfaction I remain optimistic about the direction of dollar churn as the year unfolds. I'm pleased with the earlier reception of our new offerings and their impact on our competitive differentiation. One new client added during the first quarter is a specialty retailer that had previously been a client of PowerReviews. This retailer choose Bazaarvoice based on our ability to provide a fully-integrated solution for ratings and reviews coupled with Social Content Curations. In addition, they saw the opportunity to increase both the breadth and depth of consumer generated content on their website through our Brand Invite program allowing them to recruit brands to answer shopper questions or respond to reviews directly on their Web site. When our offerings were coupled with our strong commitment to client services, we had a solution that made a switch to Bazaarvoice very compelling. A year ago, our small and medium business team or SMB was focused on logo acquisition. During Q3 of last year we made the decision to shift our compensation toward booking’s value to emphasize larger, more profitable clients. As a result we have seen an uptick of over 25% in ASP's for clients acquired in SMB and expected the number of clients both acquired and launched in the first quarter declined compared on a year-over-year basis. We expect both of these trends to continue. Overall bookings for the first quarter were on track with our internal expectations, but we continue to see opportunities from proving both the consistency of our sales execution and overall productivity. North America, paced by our commercial and SMB teams delivered a nice quarter, while Europe and Asia Pacific had slower starts to the year. As I mentioned earlier, I do believe our international teams are poised for good FY'16 in terms of bookings. One organizational change is that Kelly Connery, our Chief Revenue Officer will be leaving Bazaarvoice. The sales organization will report directly to me while we complete our search for our new CRO. I want to thank Kelly for his many contributions to Bazaarvoice and wish him well in his future endeavors. Our next wave of growth is dependent upon our ability to successfully evolve our go-to-market strategy to a provider of consumer-generated content solutions inclusive of our emerging advertising business. I see this as a great opportunity to find the right sales leader to be the catalyst and driving force of that change. It is exciting to see how far we've come to reinvent our business. From our origins as a leader in ratings and reviews for brands and retailers we've added additional products and services like Curations, Local Sampling and now Spotlights to provide an unparalleled portfolio versus our competition. We are fortunate to have over 1,300 retailers and brands as active clients and through the power of our Brand Invite and Syndication services we have created a large dynamic network of active shoppers. Like any network the more it grows, the more valuable it becomes for all parties involved; retailers, brands and shoppers. Our network is the foundation of our future and here are some statistics which speak to its size and scale. Over 625 million active shoppers each month, 71 billion impressions in the first quarter, an increase of approximately 16% year-over-year, hundreds of thousands of reviews syndicated daily across the network, over a 100% year-over-year growth in syndication relationships within the network. The total number of brands and retailers now totals more than 5,500, thanks in large part to our Brand Invite program. As our network grows, not only do we have more opportunity to expand our SaaS based solutions, but we believe we have a very compelling opportunity to help brands and retailers reach in-market shoppers. We call this initiative Shopper Marketing and while we're early, we are optimistic about the opportunity. Shopper Marketing allows brands to reach a particular segment of shoppers with the right content at the right time whether that be in a digital display ad on a desktop or as part of their in-store experience with product promotions and purchase recommendations served directly to their mobile devices. We've made very good progress in building our pool of shopper data with a number of important retailers and brands. As I mentioned earlier we're running tests on how differentiated our first party data is when compared to commonly used ad-targeting sources. And so far we're very pleased with the results. Each quarter we see more progress in shopper marketing and we continue to be excited about the possibilities. In summary, the first quarter was a good start to the year. Our investments remained focus on four things, improving client satisfaction and retention, driving continued traction of our new product offerings, accelerating our efforts with our Shopper Marketing initiatives and improving our sales execution in productivity. I often use the word transformation to describe the journey we are on, transforming Bazaarvoice from a provider of ratings and reviews to a company that provides solutions for brands and retailers that helped them leverage the most powerful marketing in the world, the voice of the consumer. We believe in our future and look forward to reporting our progress to you over the course of the year. I will now turn the call over to Jim.