Michael Barrett
Analyst · SIG. Please go ahead
Thank you, Nick. It’s been an exciting three months for us since our last call. The digital advertising market has continued its strong recovery from the impacts of COVID. To recovery is clearly visible in our Q2 revenue ex TAC across all formats and channels, which combined were up 79% on a pro forma basis. These results are very strong, even when considering easier comparisons from COVID in Q2 last year. I’ll first cover some quick performance highlights. CTV revenue ex TAC grew 108% on a pro forma basis, with both legacy Magnite and SpotX platforms each delivering growth over 100%. OLV is display also show very strong revenue ex TAC pro forma with growth of over 60% each, indicating broad strength in our business aided by a strengthening economic recovery. Adjusted EBITDA margins ex TAC came in at 32% in Q2, and we generated $24 million in operating free cash flow in Q2, which we define as adjusted EBITDA, less CapEx. This quarter was transformative for Magnite. Specifically with the closing of two strategic M&A deals SpotX and SpringServe, which expanded our addressable market added video ad serving to our product offering significantly enhanced our product development and engineering capabilities, all of which contribute to greater CTV scale in revenue growth expansion. I want to provide some insights on what our combined scale, value proposition and growth opportunities look like going forward. As viewers continue to consume media content via streaming services and platforms, many media and content owners are creating content and services for the CTV market. And we are in a great position to provide them with the only independent end-to-end monetization platform. To be clear, we define CTV as large screen immersive TV advertising, and do not include streaming TV across other devices like mobile, tablet and desktop. We have significantly widened and strengthened the customer segments we serve across device OEMs, such as Roku and Samsung virtual multi channel video programming distributors or MVPDs, such as Sling and Hulu, digital first platforms such as Pluto and Tubi, and of course, broadcasters, such as Discovery and Fox. We lots of meaningfully expanded our service offering to touch more inventory and transaction types. In our CTV revenue includes not only programmatic auction, but also fees for private and direct-sold deals, managed service revenue, ad serving fees, and value added service fees. With the traditional TV upfront season recently concluded, I’d like to clear up confusion regarding how we participate in these upfronts. Direct-sold and upfront refers to who is doing the selling, but direct and upfront deals increasingly include programmatic media spend commitments, because buyers and sellers want to realize the workflow efficiencies and targeting gains that programmatic provides. So, how do we participate in upfronts and direct-sold CTV? First through private marketplaces, where our platform serves as the pipes that connect buyers and sellers. As you may recall, a substantial majority of our CTV revenue comes from PMPs. In supporting PMPs, our textures as a self-service productivity and workflow tool to efficiently execute CTV campaigns. We also participate in direct-sold inventory through our managed service business, which provides demand facilitation and serves as a great onboarding source to get buyers into the programmatic ecosystem. And finally, with CTV ad serving, which comes by way of the SpringServe acquisition. We now have significant scale in CTV even in these early days of its adoption, as we expect well over 40 million in quarterly CTV revenue, ex TAC in Q3, which, if you step back is greater than what our total company revenue was in Q3 2019. And we are now enabling every part of the buying process direct, upfront and programmatic through our technology solutions into our managed service offering. We participate in all growth categories of CTV. On the identity front, we saw Google push out the elimination of third-party cookies in Chrome until the end of 2023. We continue to believe that first-party publisher segments collected in a privacy compliant manner will be the future of identity solutions, and that SSPs will be a driving force behind this transition. However, the Google decision provides the industry with more time to transition and focus on advancement and adoption of alternative audience solutions. We also saw a further adoption of IDFA removal with iOS updates this quarter. We observed some shift from iOS to Android and spend lower, but better than expected CPMs for iOS Soft touch [ph] and limited impact overall ad spend. I’ll now shift to highlight the strategic value in opportunity created by our addition of an ad server. This is a very strategic piece for us to better serve current and future customers. Ad serving in its most basic form is a key utility function for CTV publishers to manage forecasts and execute their campaigns, whether programmatic or direct. This is a key technology piece that market leaders like FreeWheel and Google have bundled with their SSP to create an efficiency advantage and better compete in the market versus other SSPs or ad server only competitors. We’ve talked before about how important it is to be a full stack independent partner to serve the open web in third-party CTV publishers, in this critical piece of tech allows us to offer a viable independent end-to-end solution. Ad serving adds significantly to our CTV value proposition. Specifically ad serving as required by all CTV market participants, OEMs, broadcasters and OTT only platforms and for all types of inventory upfront, direct or programmatic. Having a tightly integrated ad server allows for the dynamic allocation of programmatic and non-programmatic inventory to provide a holistic yield management solution for publishers, that addresses a specific set of customers that want an integrated ad server and SSP solution from one partner, especially new entrance with no legacy tech or desire to build it. It allows us to cross sell ad serving to all of our SSP customers. And from a technical standpoint, it provides greater efficiency and performance versus third-party ad server integrations, which leads to better monetization for publishers. Switching gears are SpotX in SpringServe integration efforts have been progressing well. Specifically related to SpotX, our senior leadership structure has been finalized. Our go-to-market teams have been put in place. The dev and product teams are combined. And we are ahead of plan for first year cost synergies. We’re also pleased with plans to consolidate our two CTV platforms appropriately under the leadership of Allen Dove, our Chief Technology Officer and Adam Soroca, our Chief Product officer. Lastly, we are excited to serve customers as a more comprehensive scaled, independent and powerful company to accelerate the growth of programmatic within the already attractive and rapidly growing CTV market. We look forward to our investor Analyst Day, which is planned to be virtual on September 15. With that, I will hand things over to David, who will go into greater detail regarding financial performance and expectations.