Lynne Laube
Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is now open
Thanks, Kirk, and thank you to everyone for joining us on our second quarter 2020 earnings conference call. First, we want to provide an update on the effects of COVID-19 on our business. Cardlytics is doing its part to help ensure the health and safety of our employees and our community. Our employees are working from home and we are evaluating opening our offices to them on a voluntary basis later this year. That said, we're monitoring current events and will adapt depending on the severity of the virus going forward. This is still a difficult time as an advertising business. While we saw signs of increased spend in the U.S. throughout the quarter, consumer spending in the U.K. and some of our key verticals, especially travel and dining, is still dramatically reduced year-over-year. Billings in these areas are down in a similar way. We are also continuously monitoring spend data to make sure we're prepared, as a company, for a potential second wave. Considering the impact of COVID-19, we delivered second quarter results that were in line with the internal forecast. We also saw month-over-month increases in absolute dollars throughout the quarter in all three metrics. Here are some of the numbers. Total billings for the second quarter were $39.5 million, down 46% year-over-year. Total revenue, which is equal to billings net of consumer incentive, was $28.2 million, a decline of 42%; and adjusted contribution was $12.4 million, down 43% year-over-year. Despite the unprecedented environment and the short-term impact to our results, we remain optimistic for the future. We continue to believe that our key long-term priorities of increasing the number of marketers working with us, bringing our solutions to new industries, evolving the Cardlytics platform and demonstrating operating leverage in our business are fully achievable. Our clients are still facing severe swings in spend both up and down and our three-pronged strategy; Rise, Retain and Return discussed on the Q1's earnings call is continuing to produce positive results. Interestingly, we've seen some clients move from Rise to Retain over the past few months. One example is with an online grocer who we helped in Q1 as their sales rose. By sharing custom weekly reports in Q2, Cardlytics helped them quantify the competitive share of wallet loss they were experiencing with those same new customers, particularly, among the heaviest customer segments. Our data uncovered that the most frequent customers were making approximately 50% of their online grocery transactions at other online competitors. These insights motivated our client to invest more aggressively in our platform for the second half of 2020. We also had a new Rise client so impressed with our results that they signed the longest advertising contract in Cardlytics history. This quarter we want to provide several new metrics to help investors understand engagement and the advertising spend potential on the platform. This includes quarterly data on monthly average log in days, offer activation rates across verticals and campaign spend ratios across verticals. We believe this information shows that users are engaged with the platform and that we have significant headroom for revenue growth as we gain access to larger advertising budgets. You can find these metrics in the supplemental presentation located on our Investor Relations website. We continue to rapidly evolve and innovate our platforms. Today, we're really excited to announce that we're externally testing our new self-service platform with several advertisers and agency partners. This self-service ad platform allows campaigns to be created in less than two minutes and is the first step in democratizing the Cardlytics advertising opportunity for all marketers and agencies big and small. Together with our first partner Horizon Media, we launched Lynn's Chocolate as the first advertiser and campaign through the new platform. Horizon is the largest independent agency in the world and this partnership paves the way for many more of their clients to now have access to Cardlytics and our premium channel. Additionally, together with VaynerMedia another large and fast-growing agency partner, we've launched a client under their management. Their agency representative noted that the tool had "Snap-like simplicity, but Google-level quality." Finally direct clients like Forever 21 are also testing the self-service platform to execute campaigns across our channel and scale their business. We're excited about the strides we've made and we see great opportunity for mutual benefit for our clients, direct or agencies. In addition to product advancements, we're continuing to make investments in the right people to lead our organization into the future. Jessica Jensen, CMO of OpenTable and an experienced executive who's worked at several leading digital platforms has recently joined our Board of Directors. And we've hired Farrell Hudzik and Pete Davies to lead our bank team and sales strategy and operation teams, respectively. We look forward to the impact each of these talented leaders will have on our platform. Moving to the bank side of our business. In Q2, we completed our Wells Fargo launch and surpassed 150 million FI MAUs. We believe this scale places us on equal footing with other major U.S. advertising platforms and provides a highly differentiated solution for marketers. We're extremely proud of our team for its work on Wells Fargo. Further, our launch preparations with U.S. Bank are going as planned and we expect to launch them with our version one of the new user experience in the first half of 2021. On a final note, I want to address the events that have caused massive local and national protests over the past few months. Cardlytics as a company stands in unison with all people of color. We have a number of new company goals to support employees in the community including an initiative to run campaigns to support minority-owned businesses. We will continue engaging with our employees and our communities of color to learn how we can best support them. With that, I will turn it over to Andy.