AdTheorent Holding Company, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADTH) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

So, I think we’ve had really strong consistent loyalty from long-tenured customers, customers that have been with us for 3 years or more, 70% of our revenue in ’22 came from them as Patrick mentioned, we’re also landing and expanding. We’re signing up new customers. Now in this market, a lot of brands are holding on to their budgets a little tighter, and that’s okay. Like we expect that the market, the economy is not the perfect economy. I think everybody knows that. We’ve heard from a number of our public company peers that there’s more of a muted digital ad spend dynamic, but we are completely okay with that. We will invest in the business. We’ll focus on the right things. We have a lean team less than 300 people here. And we think that when the market normalizes, we have a really, really good opportunity to get back to the growth levels that we frankly want and that we expect of ourselves.

But at the same time, our opportunity is so big that we’re not going to make shortsighted decisions based on 1 or 2 quarters, and we’re really focused on the bigger picture.

Maria Ripps: Got it. That’s very helpful. And then secondly, I think last quarter, you called out record monthly pipeline generation in September. Was that one of the factors sort of driving stronger active customers here in Q4? Or any additional color sort of around conversion that you’re able to share? And then maybe more broadly, how have sales cycles sort of been trending here recently?

James Lawson: Yes. The pipeline, we feel good about our pipeline. We do track. We have a lot of detailed metrics that we track internally pipeline is one of them. We feel like there’s a really strong pipeline. Now to the extent that there’s been softness and we see, unfortunately, more softness in the first quarter than we wanted, we’ll have a number of campaigns that will be booked and then they’ll be paused due to a budget cut or maybe an inventory issue with a customer. And then our size, it really hits the results probably in a more pronounced way than it would we were a much bigger company. But the pipeline is strong. I don’t have the data in front of me about the most recent months. But on a year-over-year basis, our pipeline is superior, much greater than it was relative to last year.

We also track things such as our volume-based rate agreements. And we have a number of like 12-month deals with customers, and we try to get those done as soon as possible in the beginning of the year where we give certain incentives, value-added incentives, additional services as well as rate preferred rates for bigger commitments for the full year. And we’re happy to say that we continue to get more and more of those. Typically, the spend on those deals exceeds the amount of the commitment. In 2022, we saw a lot more pressure on budgets from our customers. And that dynamic, I think we attribute to the macro. Our campaign performance is strong, and the reason for clients going with us remains as valid as ever. But at the same time, we’re just trying to be sensitive to the macro environment with our customers.

Maria Ripps: Great. Thank you very much.

James Lawson: Thank you, Maria. We appreciate it.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from John Blackledge with TD Cowen.

John Blackledge: Great, thank you. Two questions. First on the 1Q and the fiscal ’23 EBITDA guide. I think it suggests EBITDA margin expansion over the course of the year. Is that just given the expectation of kind of revenue growing again as we round through the year? Can you kind of walk us through that progression? And then the second question on the Direct Access business. If you can just give us some more color on what we should see the bogeys that you guys might talk about in terms of progress in the Direct Access business in 2023. Thank you.