Scott Howe
Analyst · Wells Fargo. Your line is now open
Thank you, Lauren. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. I would like to spend my portion of the call today, updating you on each of our businesses our LiveRamp Connectivity business, our Audience Solutions data business and our Marketing Services portfolio. I’m pleased with the progress being made in each of our divisions, it feels as each group is focusing on clients, innovation and moving more quickly. Each group can also generate even better performance with continued improvement against their key business challenges. For each division I will share some highlights from the quarter and talk about where we are focused in the second half of the year. First our SaaS or connectivity business. Connectivity had another impressive quarter, highlighted by top line momentum, new customer additions and the launch of Customer Link, the newest product in LiveRamp's suite of open connectivity services. If you turn to Slide 3, I will update you on our key metrics. We signed 50 new connectivity deals in the quarter and added approximately 40 new customers, this was a record number of new client adds in a quarter. Since acquiring LiveRamp in Q2 of last year, we’ve added roughly 180 new customers to the Acxiom client roster. Extrapolating from recent years, we believe this new client bonanza represents more new logos than Acxiom had collectively brought in during the prior decade in marketing services. In total, we exited the quarter with over 250 direct customers using our connectivity solutions, a sequential increase of 19%. Also worth pointing out, if we included indirect customers who’s data we onboard through our reseller partnerships, this number would be multiple higher. We generated approximately $22 million in revenue during the quarter, up from Q1 and up over 65% year-over-year. We exited Q2 with the revenue run rate of roughly $90 million, up from $80 million at the end of Q1. As a reminder, this measure represents our quarter ending subscription ARR plus our trailing 12 month royalties on first party media spend. Please also note that historical periods have been adjusted for the third-party media spend royalties that moved into Audience Solutions. We also continue to build out our partner ecosystem and added over 30 new integration partners in Q2. We are now integrated with roughly 250 marketing platforms and data providers, representing the most expansive network of publishers and marketing technologies in the industry. And lastly, LiveRamp pipes powered $82 million of total gross media spend during the quarter up 22% sequentially and up 122% compared to prior year. On a trailing 12 month basis gross media spend was $268 million, up 20% over last quarter. Well, onboarding and GMS continued their strong growth, we also have been launching new products. For example, during the quarter, LiveRamp successfully launched Customer Link, a new data connectivity service designed to help marketers tie customer data together in a privacy safe way. If onboarding enables data to flow in one direction from the brands to marketing applications then Customer Link leveraging the exact same infrastructure in pipes allows for data to flow in both directions. Customer Link connects campaign and sales data across channels and devices to create a single view of customer activity. Think of Customer Link as the digital AbiliTec, a persistent identifier across both online and offline channels. By tying data sets together at the consumer level, Customer Link enables a people based approach to measurement that yields more accurate insights for better decision making. While there are several companies that claim to be able to do this, our unique approach and expansive partner network, sets us apart and the market is recognizing this as well. Several of the world’s largest brands including companies like American Express and Sony are already using this service to analyze cross-channel campaigns performed closed loop measurement and refine audience models. In addition, more than 25 leading DMPs, DSPs, attribution platform, data providers and measurement service companies have created newer expanded partnerships with LiveRamp to use Customer Link, including Adobe, comScore, MarketShare, MediaMath and Nielsen, to name a few. Similar to Data onboarding, Customer Link is sold on a subscription basis and we have roughly 15 customers using the service today. In summary, Connectivity continues to experience strong momentum, and I am excited by the recent progress. Looking ahead to the rest of the year, we remained focus on ensuring our solutions scales in line with adoption and continuing to deliver exceptional results to our customers and partners. Switching gears now to our Dash or Audience Solutions business. In recent calls, I talked about our belief that Audience Solutions through its historical focus on upselling to our legacy database clients has not captured its fair share of broader industry growth. We believe we are doing things to return this business to a position of continued growth in future years and we continue to make good progress against the initiatives Rick Erwin and his team launched at the beginning of this year. As a reminder, these initiatives included, one building out a very skilled specialist data sales team to supplement our generalist marketing services sales force. Two, expanding distribution to capture demand from areas of the market where we hadn’t previously focused, and three, tightening our procurement and delivery approach to drive operational efficiencies. Let me update you on our progress. During the last quarter, we completed the staffing of our specialist data sales force and while we are still in the process of onboarding and training these individuals, we are already beginning to see signs of this investment is paying off. We added dozens of new customers during the quarter, and closed over $10 million in new bookings. And while we continue to expect headwinds in the second half of the year, I am encouraged by this early progress. We continue to expand distribution to digital channels and added 10 new data services partners in Q2. Our data is now available at more than 50 online and mobile publishers, television operators and ad tech platforms. We also expanded several existing relationships during the quarter and are working with major publishers like Yahoo and Twitter and major mobile advertising companies like 4INFO to build out new and exciting capabilities. Last month, we introduced and patented AbiliTec Household Link, the newest addition to our industry-leading suite of recognition products. Household Link provides clients the ability to identify consumers living together at the same location for both traditional and non-traditional definitions of a household. We launched this product in beta [ph] in early July with five clients from varying industries participating. Today Household Link has achieved mass rates in the mid 98 percentile. And we are continuously making tweaks to improve the performance. And finally, on the cost side, our data procurement and optimization initiatives remain on track. To date, we have completed more than half of these initiatives in our stream results in line with our expectations. For example, manual compilation operations, that required dozens of resources and months to complete are now being serviced by partners to deliver us 20% more data at less than half the cost on a weekly basis. Now, let me talk about marketing services. I spend a lot of time on these calls talking about big wins and connectivity or new data services partnerships. But perhaps the biggest highlight from the quarter is the continued momentum our marketing services team is experiencing with our largest financial services clients. In the last year, we closed multiyear renewals with three of our largest financial services clients, including a landmark contract extension signed in Q2, with a leading credit card issuer. The multiyear renewal, which extends our long-standing relationship is an indication of the importance of what Acxiom does for our clients and offers an emphatic vote of confidence in the value we are providing. As importantly, it is another great example of how we are increasingly solving new and different used cases for our clients. For each of the renewals mentioned, in addition to extending our existing relationship, we are helping these clients expand their digital marketing capabilities, activate their offline assets online and more effectively measure campaign performance across all touch points. Marketing services signed several other key deals during the question as well, including a new, next-gen marketing database contract with a leading marketplace-lending platform. This is another good example of our commitment to innovation within our marketing services business. We talked last year about developing a cloud-based database solution, to meet an emerging demand in the marketplace for more nimble less expensive and easier to use database technologies. This client’s requests lined-up perfectly with that vision, as have a number of others over the last few quarters. In coming quarters, we will talk about several additional product innovations in the pipeline, aimed at providing our customers with more flexibility and more choice. In summary, our audience solutions and marketing services businesses accomplished a lot in Q2 and I’m encouraged by the headway being made. On a trailing 12 month basis, total new bookings for marketing services and audience solutions were flat over the comparable period. However, this number does not capture renewable bookings and Q2 was the largest renewal quarter in Acxiom’s history. That said we must now ensure that this small taste of success fuels a hunger for even stronger future performance. There is still a lot of work to be done over the next several quarters to position these businesses for growth in FY 2017 and beyond, but with continued focus and sound execution, we are making progress. Let me conclude by thanking you all for joining today and for your continued support in our journey. Given the progress we are making, I’m increasingly optimistic about our future and look forward to updating you on our continued progress in coming quarters. I will now turn the call over to Warren.