Earnings Labs

Zeta Global Holdings Corp. (ZETA)

Q1 2023 Earnings Call· Sun, May 7, 2023

$17.86

-1.30%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Greetings and welcome to the Zeta First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time all participants are in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce you your host Scott Schmitz, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Scott Schmitz

Analyst

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone. And thank you for joining us for Zeta’s first quarter 2023 conference call. Today’s presentation and earnings release are available on Zeta’s Investor Relations website at investors.zetaglobal.com, where you will also find links to our SEC filings, along with other information about Zeta. Joining me on the call today are David Steinberg, Zeta’s Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Chris Greiner, Zeta’s Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I’d like to remind everyone that statements made on this call, as well as in the presentation and earnings release contain forward-looking statements regarding our financial outlook, business plans and objectives and other future events and developments, including statements about the market potential of our products, potential competition and revenues of our products and our goals and strategies. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These risks and uncertainties include those described in the company’s earnings release and other filings with the SEC and speak only as of today’s date. In addition, our discussion today will include references to certain supplemental non-GAAP financial measures, which should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for our GAAP results. We use these non-GAAP measures in managing the business and believe they provide useful information for our investors. Reconciliations of the non-GAAP measures to the corresponding GAAP measures where appropriate can be found in the earnings presentation available on our website, as well as our earnings release and our filings with the SEC. With that, I will now turn the call over to David.

David Steinberg

Analyst

Thank you, Scott. Good afternoon, everyone, and considering the date May the fourth be with you. 2023 is off to a strong start. We continue to execute through a volatile macro backdrop, producing our seventh consecutive quarter ahead of consensus and raising outlook. In the first quarter of 2023 we delivered revenue of $158 million, up 25% year-over-year, with adjusted EBITDA of $24 million, up 28% year-over-year. Our adjusted EBITDA margin of 15.3% expanded 40 basis points year-over-year. Q1 was another proof point in our belief that the market is moving in Zeta's direction. The proliferation of artificial intelligence and data driven insights, combined with the need to do more with less fits squarely within our sweet spot. Our execution against this enormous opportunity continues to drive strong new customer growth. In this volatile market, we continue to see organizations more willing to take risks with new partners and adopt new solutions in order to drive better outcomes. This has resulted in our new scaled customer count growing twice as fast as our Zeta 2025 model. Along these lines, I would like to start out by focusing on three topics that outline how we have achieved and what we believe is a long term sustainable advantage in the marketplace. First, since our founding, we have held steadfast to our vision to reduce marketing complexity, by eliminating point solutions making data actionable, and realizing the promise of more accountability and ROI driven marketing. Second, these guiding principles are bodied in our Zeta marketing platform, or ZMP, which brings together identity, intelligence and activation into a single differentiated platform that delivers better experiences for consumers and better results for brands. And third, the market embrace of our strategy during a time of technological change is evident through multiple Fortune 100 wins. In…

Chris Greiner

Analyst

Thank you, David. And good afternoon, everyone. In the words of the great Yoda, do or do not. There is no try. I'll spare my voice impersonation, but in all seriousness in the first quarter, Zeta did a lot. I'll cover them in three broad categories. First, I'll share what led to our seventh consecutive quarter of beat and race execution, and how we're navigating a challenging macro backdrop. Second, I'll detail what's driving to continued growth in our sales pipeline in RFPs. We'll also cover our strong sales productivity metrics. Third, a walk through our KPIs and how they continue to power revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth rates above what is required to deliver the Zeta 2025 long term model of at least 1 billion in revenue, 200 million in adjusted EBITDA and 110 million in free cash flow. And I'll wrap up with the details of our 10 million increase to full year revenue guidance and the operating leverage contributing to more than a 2 million increase in adjusted EBITDA guidance to 120 million. Okay with that, let's dive in. Our results illustrate the importance of having a diverse customer set and a multi channel use case revenue model. These characteristics certainly contributed to our execution in a more challenging macro environment. To illustrate this, 9 out of our 10 largest industry verticals grew double digits year-to-year, resulting in first quarter revenue of 158 million, up 25% year-to-year. results like this have been consistent from Zeta with eight out of the last nine quarters delivering revenue growth in excess of 20% while simultaneously expanding adjusted EBITDA margins year-over-year for nine straight quarters; that's a track record very hard to replicate, especially in today's environment. This dual focus on near and long term execution is enabling Zeta to stay…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of DJ Hynes with Canaccord. Please proceed with your question.

DJ Hynes

Analyst

Hey, guys, congratulations on the nice quarter. Chris maybe one for you. I want to ask about the scales customer ARPU. I mean, it seems like a slightly larger Q4 to Q1 seasonal dip than we've seen in the past. I'm just curious kind of how that may inform your views on marketing budgets this year. Any implications with respect to thinking about net revenue retention or other metrics?

Chris Greiner

Analyst

Thanks, DJ. I wouldn't read that into it. I think in this case, it was more driven by the high number of growth that we saw in that 100k to 1 million category. So that grew 16% year-over-year in count that was kind of the second straight quarter that it did that. So it's more being influenced by those pilots starting to kind of scale. If you look even within the bands of that 100k to 1 million, most of that growth came in that 100k to 300k cohort. But the super scaled group and cohort as you saw increased seven quarter-over-quarter that was obviously a great rebound from last quarter up 18% On ARPU basis, the revenue up 31. So we're really happy with the scale of customer count. From a net revenue retention, obviously, last year was 112 year for that was 113. You can kind of back into even though it's an annual metric per se that you can back into that the first quarter was even ahead of those rates.

David Steinberg

Analyst

And let me just say, DJ, it's we're not seeing right now any slowdown in the marketing echo system on our end. In fact, what we're seeing is as there's more volatility, there's less friction in new companies moving to us. And we're seeing many of our existing customers moving more budget. Now, you might not have seen all of that evidence in the first quarter. But we're definitely seeing that coming online in our pipeline and as we're growing.

DJ Hynes

Analyst

Yes. Makes sense. Good to hear. Maybe as a follow up, one of the questions I occasionally get from investors looking at Zeta for the first time, is why you guys need 130 sales reps to add roughly 50 net new scale customers per year? And I don't mean that as a slight, I mean, you guys are obviously growing nicely and efficiently. But maybe you could just talk about kind of what's unique in the go to market model that requires this.

David Steinberg

Analyst

I think, first of all, it's important to note that a lot of those people have been added over the last 12 months. So we have been ramping up our salespeople, and one of the metrics we look at is sales productivity per person on how long they've been with us, Chris, you should probably touch on how much more productive people who have been with us for a while versus the percentage of people who have just joined us?

Chris Greiner

Analyst

Yes I'll get to that. [indiscernible]. I'll definitely highlight that. I think DJ, just important to understand that it's a fair question. About half of the sales teams are hunters. And we still see a massive new customer TAM in front of us. We have called little over 400 total skilled customers, there's 10,000, large U.S. enterprises. So about half the sales team's devoted towards hunting, the other half towards farming. Same time, we have 400 skilled customers that average revenue per annualized is a little over 4 million, they should all be many times bigger than that. So we've focused the team's very much on kind of two different areas of the market. In terms of productivity, as David mentioned one of the areas that was really stood out to us this quarter is just how well, those 12 month and beyond tenured reps are performing. These are the reps that went through the first sets of training that when we divide the salesforce into hunters and farmers there, that class that kind of went through that initial wave. I think there's an interesting metric, obviously, our sales and marketing ratio is better year-over-year. There's an interesting metric, I think Barclays puts out around the magic number, which is the change in revenue growth year-over-year, divided by your sales and marketing expense. And if you were to plot that for called the 20 or odd core software companies that are public ours at about 1.3 going off of last year's results is in like the top five. So really happy with the efficiency. But we don't feel like we need to kind of wildly add reps. I mean, in fact, we're, if anything, we feel like we don't need to add as many because of the productivity that we're seeing right now.

DJ Hynes

Analyst

Yes, very helpful, very detailed answers. Thank you, guys.

David Steinberg

Analyst

Thank you, DJ.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Ryan MacDonald with Needham. Please proceed with your question.

Ryan MacDonald

Analyst · Needham. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks for taking my questions. And congrats on a great quarter. David I think there's been a lot of focus from the team about sort of continuing to solve for the Zeta who problem in really trying to sort of continue to drive the brand awareness out there. It sounds like the top of the funnel pipeline metrics are looking pretty attractive. So can you just talk about the progress you're making there? And how that sort of starting to impact things on the win rate side especially in RFPs?

David Steinberg

Analyst · Needham. Please proceed with your question.

Well, thank you, Ryan. And it's funny because I just wrapped up four days at the Milken global conference where I was personally asked to host and moderate the generative AI panel for the entire Milken global conference and host the Chief Marketing Officer panel with the CMOs, Visa, Pepsi, LogicTech and other very, very large organizations. We also hosted a Zeta VIP dinner, and I was invited to so many events I couldn't attend. I did on my Monday morning call, say to the team, no, I'm sorry, my Wednesday management call we might have actually finally solved the Zeta who problem. It was really amazing to me to see how known we were and how many organizations and people were starting to recognize that. I think what we're also seeing is if last quarter, we said we were at record RFPs and record pipelines, quite frankly, we are now well above even that. We are seeing pipelines that we have never seen. We are closing deals with multinational global enterprises that years ago would have probably not displaced as we said, the legacy marketing clouds just because of the brand, most of the legacy marketing clouds In fact, all of them in the case of the transaction we announced today, were dismissed in the first round which we're not just seeing us move up the food chain. We're seeing many of our biggest competitors as they focus on their core businesses. So one of the things I like to talk about. So if you look at the core marketing clouds, or the sort of the legacy marketing clouds, years ago, they bought the assets to build those inside of tech conglomerates. Every one of those conglomerates has now bought something that dwarfs the size of those clouds, the marketing cloud. so it's not even their side hustle anymore. It's now the side hustle to their side hustle And as they think about investment dollars, in a world where they are all cutting jobs, they're all cutting costs, I promise you, they are cutting them the fastest from the side hustle to their side hustle. So we are winning, in that we see Zeta, getting through the “Zeta who” problem, while simultaneously what is traditionally big art been our biggest competitors, they're starting to fall to the wayside, in their marketing clouds, I'm not going to suggest their core businesses are not doing incredibly well and aren't game changing. But we're definitely seeing a big separation between us and them in what we do.

Ryan MacDonald

Analyst · Needham. Please proceed with your question.

That's really great to hear. Maybe just follow up for Chris, I wanted to touch on sort of mix of direct platform revenue. And I apologize if I missed it in your commentary, but you talk about what's driving that mix down and but you're obviously still sort of outperforming on the top line. So I guess the question really is how important is sort of reaching that 80% direct platform mix to Zeta 2025 still today.

Chris Greiner

Analyst · Needham. Please proceed with your question.

It's so important. What we saw this quarter was really a great set of new customer additions and even obviously within that super skilled group as well. It's interesting, when you look at how that mix can be influenced within a quarter, within year within a month. In our case, we added the combination of several new enterprises, but also began to onboard to Zetas platform agencies. And that is has been a big opportunity of ours in our pipeline that's now starting to come through. It's not uncommon for those agencies, in particular, to start off channel or off our direct mix more likely with social. But what's interesting that we put in the script with our existing super skilled customer, the agency that we've had now for a couple of years, we've seen their mix evolved from 7% direct revenue as a percentage of the total to 76% direct revenue as a percentage of their total just over a two year period. So we feel like we've got a really good playbook as we build great omni-channel strategies with them. It's going to continue to mean they do some social, they do some other channel work. But over time, we feel confident we can get them to use Zeta's owned and operated channels, which then drives obviously a higher direct mix and a better gross margin profile.

David Steinberg

Analyst · Needham. Please proceed with your question.

And by the way, we also saw our cost of goods sold come down nicely in our direct which we were able to more than offset anything that would have been on the other side Ryan. So we're really feeling good about this business right now. But like in any business, you're going to have some metrics that vacillate up and down. The biggest problem we have is we on boarded too many new very large clients, which artificially brought the off platform up slightly for one quarter. That's a trade we're definitely willing to make.

Ryan MacDonald

Analyst · Needham. Please proceed with your question.

[indiscernible] the top line metrics keep moving up. So it's great to see you congrats again.

David Steinberg

Analyst · Needham. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks so much.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum. Please proceed with your question.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst · Craig-Hallum. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, this is Cal on here for Jason. Couple from me just first to start, can you kind of talk about the pipeline of opportunities and how that's being influenced by your channel relationships? Just trying to understand if some of those relationships are starting to bear fruit in terms of revenue generation or if most of the leads from the channel are still in the pilot phase?

David Steinberg

Analyst · Craig-Hallum. Please proceed with your question.

So great Question [indiscernible] we are seeing record velocity into our pipeline directly and through our biggest channel partner. I don't think I mean, we obviously it's Snowflake, we do a ton with them. They've been an incredible partner. They are bringing us major customer opportunities and we're lighting up major customer opportunities on their platform coming out of our people. So you hate to say you're winning across the board, but quite frankly, we're really seeing the channel partnerships, primarily with sale, primarily with Snowflake, working very, very well. But simultaneously, we are across the board winning.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst · Craig-Hallum. Please proceed with your question.

Perfect. Thanks. And then just last one for me. you guys really been highlighting AI more lately. And I'm just curious if you can kind of give your vision for utilizing AI within the ZMP and how that can either help you optimize performance, lower cost of operation just kind of where do you see that going?

David Steinberg

Analyst · Craig-Hallum. Please proceed with your question.

So we've been talking about Artificial Intelligence, since it wasn't even artificial intelligence. We started talking about deep learning, machine learning before these large language models really started coming into play. One of the things I think has not been talked about. And as I think I said, when I hosted and moderated the generative AI panel at the Milken conference this week, one of the things that really gets lost is AI is only as good as the data that's put into it. And our ability to incorporate large language models today is quite frankly unparalleled. But in addition to that, we're able to put small language models into place in the form of a CDP that exists between us and our very large enterprise customers. So that CDP where you merge their data and our first party data into an unparalleled data echo system then can learn not just from the large language models that exists outside of Zeta but the small language private models that exist inside of it. The ability to then map that to the greater than 240 million Americans who have opted in to be in our data cloud is really unparalleled. How does that translate into our business performance, we can generally lower a customer's cost to create a customer by greater than 50% quickly. We're able to lower that by up to 90 plus percent in the years to come per customer creation, as the models get smarter and smarter. That is all the incorporation of Artificial Intelligence as it relates to ingesting trillions of open signals, mapping that into hundreds of millions of private signals, using that to build intent based scores on what do individuals intend to do next. And we can consistently remove the customers who are not in market for our enterprise clients products, or won't be approved for them. All of that comes out before they spend money on marketing. So quite frankly, I think one of the reasons we continue to win and one of the reasons you saw our scaled customer count go up by greater than 100% more than we needed to hit our Zeta 2025 model is how effective our artificial intelligence and our data are at creating what people intend to do next.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst · Craig-Hallum. Please proceed with your question.

Perfect. Thank you guys so much.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Elizabeth Porter with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Elizabeth Porter

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Great, yes. I did another quick follow up along kind of the AI side, but more particularly for the agents and the data opportunity engine. It's really interesting technology. So can you just give us a bit more detail on the capabilities kind of what is it augmenting versus replacing? And then how do you see the evolution of these capabilities playing into the top line for the financial model? Is it something that you think could be monetized via a separate SKU? Or is it monetized via taking more shares? Thank you.

David Steinberg

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

First of all, thank you, Elizabeth. I wasn't sure anybody even bothered to read that press release. But I think that first of all, ZOE which is sort of the modernization of customer help, customer support and the ability to allow a CMO or a marketer to ask real world questions and get incredibly accurate answers is going to be a major driver to our business in multiple ways. First of all to describe the product, it is all new, and it is game changing. It is effectively a new AI layer that sits on top of the Zeta marketing platform that's ingesting everything that that enterprise customer is doing inside of their CDP and outside in the global world, because it's ingesting, as I said, large language models can be imported and small language models can be important. It then allows the marketer to say something to ZOE like, what are the most valuable cohorts in my database? Who can I be targeting from an audience perspective for this new product that I'm rolling out. As they look at the integration, and what we're starting to see is chief marketing officers are taking a bigger and bigger ownership of product development inside their enterprises than I've ever seen in my life. Why is that? Because CMOs hate being told, here's a new product go sell it. They're now being asked to participate in the building of new products. ZOE can help them with that. If I build this new product, what percent of my existing customers would like to buy it? And it spits out real world simplistic answers. How does this drive the model? It moves more and more of their marketing onto our platform which drives a greater and greater business relationship for us and them. It also allows us to grow our headcount slower. Because we won't need as many people to be helping with analytics and other services to the enterprise. It can now be handled with effectively humans or bots or intelligence living inside the ZMP that can answer the questions that they would otherwise need to be asking.

Elizabeth Porter

Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Great. Thank you so much.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Richard Baldry with ROTH. Please proceed with your question.

Richard Baldry

Analyst · ROTH. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks. I'm sort of curious if you think that the generative AI will target as most likely or superscalar customers first. And then sort of a side note to that; how much do you think that it could actually help you with cross sale? So when it's giving recommendations or auto piloting will it be able to demonstrate other channels that may not have been adopted whose ROI could be equal or higher, sort of showing them opportunities that they may not be able to access yet? Thanks.

David Steinberg

Analyst · ROTH. Please proceed with your question.

Well, Rich, as usual, I think you nailed both, right. So yes, there is no question that the larger the enterprise, the more the efficiency matters to their bottom line, the more they're going to be willing to adopt generative AI faster. What we're hearing from most companies is they love the concept of the closed generative AI solution in what we call the small model versus the open model. Now, I think we all saw that open AI got hacked for the first time. I'm under the impression another algorithm was just annoyed by how much attention ChatGPT was getting. So they hacked it to get a little attention for themselves. But the truth of the matter is, we still don't understand how the importation of data into ChatGPT is going to be benefiting the collective including large enterprises' competitors. Inside of the generative AI, that Zeta has ZOE were able to keep that as a closed model. It is exclusive to them. It can import the large language information, but it can also keep the small language model tight to them. So we're definitely seeing that faster. Biggest benefit to us, bar none is adding additional channels and adding additional products to these enterprises. Because what we're seeing is as they're using the AI, the AI is able to move them into the most efficient channels. As Chris said, one of the best examples is we have one client who a number of years ago started out 7% of their revenue was on platform. Last quarter. I believe correct me if I'm wrong here, Chris greater than 90% of their revenue was on platform close enough. Bottom line that comes from the AI because it keeps showing them what a better job they can do when on platform fully integrated using our AI and our data as native to the ZMP you're able to then move them into new products that are more profitable to us and more efficient to them.

Richard Baldry

Analyst · ROTH. Please proceed with your question.

Last for me. it'd be you are seeing layoffs from your a lot of would be competitive, we'll call it, presumably there is they let go of their worst people first, but it does leave good people unsettled and unsettled internally. So in an upside growing beaten race scenario, why not pull back a little bit on the profitability side really go after some of the better talent that I would think is more easy to go after these days? Thanks.

David Steinberg

Analyst · ROTH. Please proceed with your question.

Well, you sound like me in my last HR meeting and this is not, I've got to be very, very careful here, right. Because but you would assume an organization would not lay off its top 10% of people in that scenario which is not to say that people laid off we're not incredible individuals who could do a great job organizationally. We are absolutely positively focused on bringing the world's best human capital into Zeta. Generally today, it is coming from the people who are still at these large organizations who are unsettled and nervous. But even more than that Rich, we are recruiting more people, when we go into an RFP again 17 different companies, and we win, the salespeople, the project managers, the high end operating people from those other companies, call us, because people want to work for the people who are winning in today's environment. And we are seeing an incredible opportunity to onboard amazing people. I don't think we're going to pull back on profitability for a whole host of reasons. But as I think we point out, we're raising guidance for Q2, we are raising guidance for the year. I think we have been thoughtful in those numbers in making sure we have the dry powder to add incredible people where we see the opportunity to do it. And we feel very confident that in today's world we can do both.

Richard Baldry

Analyst · ROTH. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks, congrats on a great start to the year.

David Steinberg

Analyst · ROTH. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks, Rich.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line Zach Cummins with B. Riley. Please proceed with your question.

Zach Cummins

Analyst · B. Riley. Please proceed with your question.

Yes. Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. David, can you give us an update on the CTV channel, I know, that's one that's been gaining a lot of traction in the past couple of quarters. So any sort of incremental update there would be appreciated?

David Steinberg

Analyst · B. Riley. Please proceed with your question.

Yes. So we continue to see CTV as one of our fastest growing channels, especially inside of our scaled customers. What we're really seeing is we're seeing by way of example, the highest percentage of our customers ever in the first quarter use the CTV channel. We continue to see what we call connected CTV, where we're using our data cloud and our AI to best target where to run the marketing as a massive differentiator inside of what we're doing there.

Zach Cummins

Analyst · B. Riley. Please proceed with your question.

Got it. And final question for me is just really around incremental details on the pipeline. I mean, it's great to hear that RFP levels and the overall pipeline are still at record levels. I mean, can you give us a sense of where these are being sourced from? Is it typically companies that are using point solutions, or they're not renewing their deals with some of the legacy marketing clouds? Any sort of incremental detail there would be great.

David Steinberg

Analyst · B. Riley. Please proceed with your question.

Yes. I mean, listen, companies are tired of using point solutions. They're expensive. They don't talk. And the expense that most people don't talk about is you have to bring in one of the major professional services companies on multimillion dollar integrations to get them even to speak to each other. Whereas if you use the ZMP, everything exists in one marketplace. The other thing we're seeing is it appears as if we've entered into a major replacement cycle in the marketing cloud ecosystem where a lot of companies started three, four or five years ago with the legacy marketing clouds and it's just not giving them what they need anymore. So they're going out to RFP at a greater rate and quite frankly, our full solution tends to be what they're looking for. Chris, do you want to add to that?

Chris Greiner

Analyst · B. Riley. Please proceed with your question.

I think David the only thing I'd add Zack is, you know, if you look from an industry perspective, where they're coming from, it's the ones that are probably almost right down on a sheet of paper and agree are under the most financial and economic turmoil choosing Zeta because it goes back to David's point earlier on the call of just really needing to be more efficient, but to not have to do that at the sacrifice of growth. And I think that's where Zeta comes in as a really helpful partner.

Zach Cummins

Analyst · B. Riley. Please proceed with your question.

Got it. Well, thanks for answering my questions. And best of luck with the remainder of the quarter.

David Steinberg

Analyst · B. Riley. Please proceed with your question.

Thank you very much Zack.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Arjun Bhatia with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Arjun Bhatia

Analyst · William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, thanks, guys, for taking the questions here. David maybe just continue on the AI theme like obviously, we're living in kind of a rapidly changing paradigm with the rise of generative AI. I'm curious how you think it might change the marketers job and how it might change the CMOS role? And what does that mean for how you sell Zeta, how you deploys Zeta and does that mean, there's any adjustments that you need to make? Obviously, there's a lot of great product announcements that you've made already. But what else do you think might need to change and in your business as we kind of work through this?

David Steinberg

Analyst · William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Yes. I think Arjun that's a great question. I mean, I want to reiterate, I feel like we are where the puck is going, not going to where the puck is going, meaning we as you know, rearchitected the Zeta marketing platform starting about five years ago into what it is today, which has Artificial Intelligence and data as native to the application layer. So to really put some meat on the bones of what that means. If you're running a legacy marketing cloud, and they claim to have Artificial Intelligence, your marketing cloud has to talk to their AI algorithm, which then has to do multiple data dips to pull the proper data in, based on the instructions from that marketing platform to the algorithm and think about how long that takes to make a decision. When you put everything is native to the application layer, it can make real world decisions all at once; really a differentiator. Where I think it's going to continue to change the marketplace is we're going to continue to see, first and foremost, a greater focus on return on investment for marketing than ever before. And once again, in addition to running the generative AI panel at Milken, I also moderated the chief marketing officer panel. And as you can imagine, I made a joke when I came on to the panel, I said, Alright, we're going to now go to a topic that nobody is talking about, completely under the radar getting zero attention, Artificial Intelligence, right. And of course, everybody laughed. But everybody is thinking about how to use this, but not just to use it. I mean, ChatGPT is great. My kids love it. I think it's interesting. But how does it benefit your business and what we're doing is…

Arjun Bhatia

Analyst · William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

That's super helpful and very insightful. I appreciate that. Chris, maybe one for you, obviously we saw some good trends this quarter in the scaled and super scale customers and you had that big deal in retail. I'm curious, just as we look at those metrics, are those new customers coming internally through expansions? Are you starting to see new customer lands in those in those two buckets as well? How should we think about some of those trends playing into the metrics?

Chris Greiner

Analyst · William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Out of the eight new scaled customers that we added quarter-to-quarter six were new to Zeta and then to became scaled. And then even within that existing scaled customers and to the point of moving them from that 100k 2 million cohort to the super scaled a million plus, one of the metrics we talked about in the earnings call that internally we got really excited about was multichannel adoption. So the number of scaled customers now using three or more channels that grew 41% year-over-year. So that was good for us to see that we continue to make some really good traction in building these omni-channel experiences. But we were very happy with the new customer additions we had, as well as what grew from the base perspective.

David Steinberg

Analyst · William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

And Arjun we just continue to see not just record RFPs by number of enterprises, we're seeing deal sizes that are by far the biggest we've ever done.

Arjun Bhatia

Analyst · William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Very interesting. All right, appreciate the color guys and great job on the quarter here.

Operator

Operator

There are no further questions in the queue. I'd like to hand the call back over to David Steinberg for closing remarks.

David Steinberg

Analyst

I continue to be incredibly proud of our Zeta people. We talk a lot about our technology. We talk a lot about our data. We talk a lot about winning in the marketplace. But ultimately, it is our people that drive these results. And we're feeling as good as we possibly can about our business. We feel like even in a volatile environment, we are winning. In many ways, the volatility of the current environment, is helping us because we're seeing less friction from enterprises willing to take a chance on a new vendor. And as we drive our business to our 2025 plan we're really, really excited about where we're going to go for 2030 and after. And we feel like we are incredibly well-positioned and quite frankly, I have never felt as good about where we are as a business as I do sitting here today. So I will finish as I always do by thanking all of our employees, thanking all of our clients, all of our vendors, and all of our shareholders for your belief and our vision and our goal is to continue to win in the marketplace and win together. Thank you very much for taking the time today.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a wonderful day.