Mark Locke
Analyst · Jed Kelly from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead
Good morning and thank you for joining us today. We are thrilled to announce Genius’ growth is accelerating at an unprecedented level and we have delivered another strong quarter with record revenues growing over 70% year-on-year. On today’s call, in addition to updating you on our performance in the quarter, I’d like to focus on three key updates. First, we will provide quantitative detail on the recently announced agreements with our sportsbook partners. Off the back of our exclusive NFL contract, we structured mutually beneficial partnerships, which fueled industry-wide growth and accelerate our journey to meeting long-term targets. Second, we plan to formally frame the size of the market opportunity for our media and engagement business. On our previous earnings calls, we have outlined our differential fan engagement solutions and now we hope to round it out by articulating the total addressable market and our place in it. Third, we will discuss our vision for the future and highlight some of the incredible opportunities that we have in front of us. We are excited to share the work we have done and the areas of investment that will enable Genius to continue to fulfill its place as the technology leader in the sports ecosystem. I will cover each of these topics in more detail shortly. But first, I’d like to quickly recap on some of the highlights from the third quarter. We are very excited about the progress we have made since our last call and this quarter’s strong results reflect our team’s continued execution. First, we reported record revenue of $69.1 million in the third quarter. This represents another quarter of strong revenue growth increasing by over 70% year-on-year driven by well balanced growth across all business segments, while adjusted EBITDA is broadly breakeven. As we have mentioned in the past, our core business strategy lies in our approach to official data and our deep longstanding partnerships with leagues and federations worldwide. This quarter alone, we signed over 30 new rights deals with leagues as global and varied as Kazakhstan Football Federation, Canadian Soccer Premier League, China Super League, Croatian Basketball Federation, Israeli Volleyball Association, Drone Racing League, International Pool Association, Swedish Basketball Federation, and a personal favorite of mine, Professional Pickleball Association, I could go on. Each new league partnership expands the breadth and depth of our coverage of high-quality events and supports our customers’ provision of content around the clock. As Q3, our leading rights portfolio includes 192,000 events under official rights, of which over 120,000 are exclusive. We are the leading technology provider to leagues and federations around the world. As an example, we recently announced that Second Spectrum was appointed the exclusive official tracking data provider of Danish Superliga and 1st Division. The Second Spectrum’s cutting-edge technology, Genius will be able to provide Danish football fans with transformative new statistics, including player speeds, acceleration, deceleration, shot velocity, particle mobility and expected goals. These insights will be made readily available across multiple platforms, combining tracking data, visualizations, augmented reality and customizable graphics to deliver truly immersive fan experiences. This demonstrates our successful integration of recent acquisitions and our unique ability to create value across the sports and entertainment ecosystem. We have also continued to leverage our exclusive NFL partnership to build upon our key sportsbook relationships. These agreements enable us to provide a full range of official sportsbook content and fan engagement solutions to help our customers better engage and monetize their users. While we are still in the early stages our NFL partnership, we are very excited about the vision to enhance the value of NFL’s content and re-imagine the way the sports is consumed. As we’ll discuss in more detail shortly, our recently announced deals serve as a brilliant foundation to achieve our longer term ambitions. In addition to the key sportsbook announcements, we have also announced our first team-based partnership with the Philadelphia Eagles, where we’ll deliver real-time betting odds to drive fan engagement in Lincoln Financial Field sports betting lounges. A fundamental part of our NFL partnership is to provide innovative platforms for teams to engage with legalized sports betting. And so we are excited about this new development. Additionally, as part of our disciplined M&A strategy, we remain focused on the efficient integration of newly acquired businesses. For example, Spirable helped companies like Hennessy, Pringles and Heineken increase brand awareness with sports fans through deeply personalized dynamic video content. The Spirable technology allows brands to automatically deliver custom-tailored data-driven content to sports fans in real-time, which we look forward to rolling out to an even wider range of partners as part of our broader Genius platform. Additionally, using FanHub’s platform, we launched new free-to-play experiences for partners across different verticals, including sports leagues, sports betting clients, and even brands outside of sports betting, such as Jersey Mike’s and Buffalo Wild Wings. With leading technologies like Spirable and FanHub, Genius has broadened the options available to a wide range of customers who are seeking to connect with a sports audience in a purposeful and efficient way. With the commercial progress we have made this quarter and the positive global sports betting market backdrop, we are raising our 2021 revenue guidance to a range of $257 million to $262 million, equating to over 70% year-on-year growth. Nick will cover the financial aspects in more detail shortly. A core focus of the business this quarter was to structure commercial agreements with our sportsbook partners to include the NFL offering. As many of you know, our partnership with the NFL is far more innovative than any other rights deal in the market and differentiated from the NFL’s previous rights deals with its incumbent. We are extremely happy with the commercial deal we have made, so wanted to provide a bit more detail on our success. These are all encompassing strategic deals that include a full suite of products. Let me give you an example of a typical deal that exemplifies how we are engaging with U.S. sportsbooks. They typically include an absolute commitment to us Genius’ data where we own the official rights, streaming, outsource manage trading, and other value-add technology services, our commitment to advertising spend across our media products, including FanHub and Spirable and an average 3-year term, providing a perfect balance between short-term visibility and medium-term flexibility as the market evolves. The NFL agreement has only increased our opportunity to successfully expand our commercial partnerships to include our all encompassing suite of solutions. As we are partially through our first NFL season, we are happy to provide more color on the specific NFL component of these wide-ranging deals. To start, over 97% of NFL bets placed in the United States are powered by Genius Sports. We have agreed commercial terms that properly reflect the value of our premium data. While our contracts include a full range of products, if we were to isolate specifics around NFL, our take rate of pre-match gaming is in line with our current global blended average, while our in-play take rate is a weighted average in excess of our stated goal of 5%. This sets Genius off to benefit from both the growth of the NFL sports betting market and the continued shift to in-play betting. It’s worth noting that the elements of the deal structure will vary by contract, but we often structure our deals to limit our downside exposure by creating minimum revenue guarantee floors, which allow us to reduce some of the inherent volatility. So in periods with lower holds and significant promotional spend, like we have seen recently, these deal structures give our revenues some protection. Overall, these commercial agreements support an accelerated path to our long-term target of an average of 5% take rate of global gaming revenue. Lastly, our customers have committed to spending an initial minimum of $125 million across our media products, including FanHub and Spirable over the average of the 3-year terms. However, we have seen so much success that certain major customers will spend their entire first year’s commitment within the first 4 months of the contract. The majority of these commitments come from customers we were already working with and they have therefore had the confidence to trust Genius in the long-term. Thanks to excellent results that we have delivered to-date. This confidence is proven by DraftKings making Genius their preferred programmatic partner and BetMGM making Genius their exclusive programmatic partner. As a reminder, Genius was named the NFL’s exclusive sports betting and I-Gaming advertising partner, a new component of our rights deal that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the market and is completely unique to our capabilities. This gives us access to the NFL’s audience and select digital advertising inventory that when combined with our live data and deep understanding of sports fans, puts us in a unique position to drive better return on our partner’s customer acquisition spend. Again, the breadth and depth of agreements we have reached are exactly what we envisaged when we have first structured such an equally innovative and wide-ranging NFL partnership. So, we touched on the committed advertising spend through our NFL deals. And now, we would like to provide more detail on the market opportunity and the key growth levers for our business. Our media business provides services that extend beyond just sports and betting and allow us to capture share of digital marketing budgets across a range of customers representing an entirely new addressable market. We see our addressable opportunity as the $60 billion global digital sports advertising market. Now, this is obviously highly competitive and includes search engines, traditional ad agencies and other solutions developed in-house. However, we believe that our unique access to the data in inventory through our exclusive lead partnerships leads to a differentiated offering with high rates of return for our customers. That said based on our penetration to-date, predominantly with sportsbook customers, we believe a market share of 75 to 100 bps is achievable in the long-term for the entire digital sports advertising market. In order to reach this long-term market share and the $500 million revenue opportunity it represents, we believe we will need to broaden and diversify our media customer base. Our advertising solutions are valuable to any brand seeking to connect with sports audience using contextually relevant data-driven content. For that reason, we believe our media customer base today represents a fraction of what it can become. Whilst it is most certainly early innings, this is a business that has doubled year-over-year. We have made strides in diversifying our customer base to include brands outside of sports betting that are interested in leveraging our unique access to sports audiences, live data and content distribution capabilities. I would like to conclude my remarks by clearly defining our vision for the future. Our goal is to create a business that takes a slice of every sports related transaction globally, whether that’s a bet, a ticket sale, a live stream, a purchase of a hotdog in a stadium, or a Jersey sale, Genius exists to provide the technology platform that both powers these transactions and enables true global fan monetization. The investments we have made both organically and through Second Spectrum, FanHub and Spirable have created the world’s leading sports technology platform. Nothing in the market comes close to what we have and we are miles ahead of our competition. As a result of that, the commercial conversation that we are having with our existing partners, such as the NFL have taken on an entirely new meaning, not a single conversation with a league or federation goes by without discussing the massive opportunities for them to tap into our vision and cutting-edge unique technology services that only we can deliver. Therefore, we have defined a more aggressive investment roadmap that will enable us to continue to put clear water between us and the rest of the industry through our truly differentiated cutting-edge technology platform. This strategy will not only deliver the world’s greatest integrated solution, but also give us a phenomenal advantage in our negotiations with leagues. They will strengthen our long-term positioning and reduce the risk of rights inflation. To reiterate, one of the main reasons that the NFL chose to partner with us was because of the shared vision around our technology capabilities. This shared vision is now coming to life as we are beginning to deliver on it. We have absolutely no doubt if we invest now, this vision can be delivered to every league and every fan worldwide. This is such a unique opportunity that we simply must take advantage of it. Therefore, we plan to reinvest heavily in the business to continue delivering on our vision and strengthening our competitive advantage. And with that, I will now turn to Nick to discuss our financial results and outlook in more detail.