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

Patrick Elliott: Thanks, John. I’ll take the first one, and I’ll turn it over to Jim to talk about Direct Access. Yes, as we think through guidance for the year, as I mentioned, Q1 and as you know, Q1 is our smallest quarter — so our EBITDA is definitely impacted by the fact that revenue in the quarter is smaller. Our business model does have a fair amount of operating leverage in it. So, as we go throughout the year and experience higher order revenue, you will see EBITDA expand. We’ve guided to essentially breakeven EBITDA in Q1, but do see EBITDA for the full year coming in between 16% to 19% of adjusted gross profit. We have — we maintain a lot of flexibility in our cost structure. And depending on the macro environment, we’re definitely going to be opportunistic and aggressive on managing towards profitability as we have demonstrated in our history at this point.

James Lawson: Yes. On the Direct Access side, we feel the key there to progress is a couple of things. One is we continue to sign up new customers. We have a number of net new buyers, new budgets. These are budgets and buyers that we would not have that access to when we were a purely managed partner or a managed company. We’re leveraging a lot of the long-tenured strong accounts that we’ve had over the years based on performance, and we’re educating them about the ability to take adherent and to open up different budgets so that we can be a self-service partner and a managed partner or if they want to transition and invest in the infrastructure needed to set up a trading team internally, then we’re there to support them. And we can give them a level of support, frankly, that other DSDs can’t give — so we’re the perfect partner for agencies looking to make the transition from managed to sell.

And we have a platform that is built, frankly, to drive performance. So, we think that Direct Access is an incredible opportunity. It’s going to open up more than 50% of the programmatic market that in the past was not available to us. We’re happy that we converted all of our beta clients. Our direct access beta clients are all now active customers. We didn’t lose any of them. We got a lot of great feedback from them. And one of the reasons for our UI investment is because we realized that even though like a lot of our engineers and a lot of our super users are super smart and they are really invested in the nuances and the complicated tools that we have that for this to scale, the way we want it to scale, there needs to be a lot of streamlined optimizations and automations implemented into the UI UX.

So those – that work is ongoing, and we’re very excited about bringing that to market in 2023. And in conjunction with that, we’re having conversations, frankly, with bigger media buyers. And I think the UI, the front end that’s more kind of modern and industry standard and frankly, bringing something new into this market because operationalizing predictive scoring, individual impressions over 1 million a second and the complicated optimizers in terms of pacing in terms of pricing, in terms of performance. Getting that activated and operationalized by a self-service user required a little more engineering than a platform that, frankly, is just targeting user IDs. So couldn’t be more excited about where we sit, I wish the market was a little nicer.

But at the end of the day, you take what you get in those markets and we’re positive cash flow, no debt. We have what we need to succeed here, and we’re going to put our heads down into the work.

John Blackledge: That’s great. Thanks for the update.

Patrick Elliott: Thanks, John.

James Lawson: Thank you, John.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from Andrew Boone with JMP Securities.