Gregory Raifman
Analyst · Kerry Rice with Needham. Your line is open
Thank you, Frank. As Frank just outlined, we had another strong quarter on Q2 and I’m proud of our team’s efforts, focus and strong execution that led to our impressive results. Before I turn to our performance in the quarter, I would like to share a few key trends that will have a significant impact on the growth of our industry. First, as the IAB announced last week in its Annual Programmatic Revenue report, the landscaper advertising automation is going rapidly. Total U.S. revenue related to the automation of advertisings passed $10 billion in 2014, comprising more than 20% of the total U.S. internet advertising market last year. Perhaps more significantly, programmatic revenue made up approximately half of all U.S. display related advertising in 2014. In short, automation is driving the growth of the global advertising market place. Second, the IAB is also forecasting strong future growth in new areas of the automated advertising space, mainly guaranteed orders and the area Rubicon Project has invested in aggressively, resulting in our current position of market leadership. In addition, IDC expects the overall orders market to grow to $52 billion world-wide by 2019 representing a cagier of 61%. And third, all signs point to continued surgeon growth in the mobile market place during the next several years. According to IDC, world-wide programmatic ad spending in mobile is expected to growth at a cagier of 95% through 2018. And importantly, our investment have also established us in a position of leadership as an independent provider of mobile automation technology. We anticipated these trends and invested in both developing innovative technology organically as well as acquiring leading technology capabilities to further support our growth objectives and position us for long-term success. I will now turn my comments to our performance in the second quarter. Given the trends we are seeing in the business, I will focus my remarks on four key growth drivers. A rapidly growing mobile business, our orders business, our unified buyer cloud including Chango and our Seller Cloud business which continues to achieve strong results. First let me turn to our mobile business. Our investors have frequently asked us about mobile, and until recently we have not focused much discussion on this part of our business. Those of you who have followed our company know that we prefer to focus on delivering results in the market place before telling our future objectives. Therefore, we were thrilled to take the raps of our mobile story last month, as we highlighted our booming business that is outpacing the growth of the industry. Since early 2013, our mobile business has grown at a triple digit growth rate across mobile operating systems such as IOS and Android and across both in App and mobile web inventory. Approximately two years ago when we began making significant investments in mobile, it represented just 3% of our total managed review. In the second quarter of 2015, mobile was 22% of managed revenue, up from 20% in Q1. Considering our growth trajectory, we expect to generate more than $200 million in mobile managed revenue this year. Against this impressive growth curve, we believe Rubicon Project is now the world’s largest independent advertising automation solution for buying and selling inventory on mobile. One growth driver in Q2 was the on-boarding of our new relationship with xAd, the global location market place. Rubicon Project is now powering xAd’s leading location based mobile private market places. The company enables nearly 1 million advertisers to reach 300 million unique devices each month. The ahead of platform for xAd Dan Hight had this to say about our capabilities, “We have a great partner, Rubicon Project. Their orders platform allows xAd to make location advertising easy and accessible to programmatic buyers globally at scale. Our customers both brands and agencies have seen measurable performance using our location private market place based on the real places people visit every day, such as, grocery stores, restaurants and fast-food.” In the second quarter, we also launched support from mobile native ad formats on our exchange. This important milestone represents the first time an independent mobile exchange is positioned to automate the buying and selling of mobile native ads at scale. Additionally, significant adoption of our mobile capabilities by a large install-based has been a key driver of our success. More than 70% of our seller clients in the U.S. comScore 1,000 is Rubicon Project’s cross platform capabilities to monetize our inventory across both desktop display and mobile ad units. Our proven cross platform capabilities extend across all ad units and inventory types. In fact, we believe Rubicon Project is the only independent company today that can automate the entire advertising ecosystem for buyers and sellers including all inventory types, such as guaranteed and non-guaranteed orders, RTB and static and across all ad units, such as display, video and native, and across all channels such as mobile web apps and desktop. In addition to being asked about mobile, we are often asked about video, an ad unit that offers exciting future growth potential and particularly on mobile devices since mobile video is the fastest growing segment of video advertising. With video, a key industry challenge has been the very limited supply of quality inventory available throughout exchanges. Importantly, our investments combined with industry trends position us to capture a much greater share of the video opportunity in the coming years. We believe the future of video advertising will be conducted through the orders environment in both the mobile and desktop channels. Consequently our investments in orders and mobile position us to benefit significantly from expected future growth of video inventory to become available in our fast growing orders and mobile businesses. Next I would like to talk to you about orders. Orders also continue to be a fast growing source of managed revenue, including in mobile, where orders growth is especially strong. Since mobile app developers typically do not have a direct sales force, mobile offers exciting potential for order automation as app developers embrace our technology to monetize their premium audiences. We expect continued strong growth in mobile orders in future quarters. We also continue to have success scale in our new guaranteed orders offering that automates the buying and selling of visual advertising on a fully reserve basis. In Q2, once again we significantly expanded our seller based on the guaranteed orders platform and made excellent progress working with our agency and holding company partners and brands directly to drive increase buyer spend. These efforts drove orders to 17% of our total managed revenue in Q2, up sequentially from 15% last quarter. We are exceptionally well positioned for success in orders as a early technology innovations offer the most comprehensive orders automation platform available, including guaranteed and non-guaranteed orders in the integrated solution. Now let’s talk about our newly integrated buyer cloud business which includes Chango. First and foremost, I’ve been thoroughly impressed by the efforts of our unified buyer cloud team, including our new team members from the Chango acquisition. The combined team’s expertise in buyer capabilities and deep knowledge of intent marketing are every bit as strong as had hoped. After the acquisition closed in late April, we began implementing our strategic integration plan to align our pre-existing buyer cloud business with our newly acquired Chango team. Now I’m pleased to report that we completed the integration of Chango into our buyer cloud in Q2, nearly six months ahead of schedule. The earlier than planned integration is already delivering the wheel tangible benefit on both the top and bottom line. In fact, their combined buyer cloud business exceeded our revenue expectations for the second quarter as our team remained focused on executing throughout the integration period during Q2. Accordingly, 90 days into the acquisition, we couldn’t be happier with our Chango integration and combine buyer cloud performance. The unified buyer team is already realizing synergies selling our expanded capabilities to a now much broader set of agency and brand advertiser relationships. Our buyer capabilities are beginning to resonate with leading brand advertisers that have broad programmatic expertise in-house. As we began the second half of the year, we remained committed to invest for growth in our buyer business and especially in the areas of orders and mobile. Last but not least, we continue to execute very well in our seller cloud business. Turning to our seller business globally, we meaningfully grew our seller relationships particularly in guaranteed orders where we continue to focus our efforts. Recent wins for our new guaranteed orders offering include eBay, Daily Mail, The Economist, The Guardian, Immediate Media Co, Trinity Mirror, and Viacom. I’ve note currently two of our largest 10 seller clients on mobile app platforms further demonstrating our cross platform capabilities and increased business moment in mobile specifically. I’m also pleased to report that during Q2 we launched an exciting new seller product that builds upon the Shiny Ads technology, we acquired and successfully integrated last fall. [Indiscernible] guaranteed orders offering had provide significant ROI by allowing sellers to generate incremental revenue from advertisers at almost zero incremental cost or efforts for the seller. Weather.com is a great example of a seller cloud client that has built a considerable business from the offering. The PP of local for weather.com, Ryan Davis recently said, “Rubicon Project self seller is incredibly scalable for us. It’s become a very important part of our business and a very fast growing one with infinite potential. There is no way we could do what we’re doing without it.” Now I will wrap up with a few comments on our commitment to inventory quality for the benefit of all buyers and sellers in our market place. As we announced earlier this year, I joined the board of TAG, the Trustworthy Accountability Group, may first of its kind industry collation leaving the efforts to counter ad supported piracy, malware and other critical challenges in the digital communication supply chain. And just last week, we announced as Rubicon Project is joining collaborative effort with Google, Facebook, Yahoo and other leaders in a global initiative designed to combat illegitimate advertising traffic originating from data centers. These efforts underscore a long standing commitment to ensure the development of the safe, high quality, well lead advertising market place. In summary, I’m pleased with our team’s execution during the second quarter. At the mid way point in 2015 we’ve already accomplished a great deal and we continue to work hard to position the company for the tremendous opportunity ahead. And with that, I will turn it over to Todd for a review of the financials. Here is Todd.