Lyft, Inc. (NASDAQ:LYFT) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

You talked about Media. Again, we can go more to detail about that. I am sure maybe later in the conversation, we will also talk about AI and some of the opportunities that gives us. But I don’t think we feel at all constrained with ideas on that there are strong growth drivers, and I will say this because otherwise, Erin will raise our eyebrows at me. We feel like we have got the right cost position to do this. We do not have to hire a much more people or do much more things like that. We have got a great, great team that’s doing amazing work. We just have to continue to focus on customers and driving more leverage on the platform.

Erin Brewer: And Eric, as it relates to your question on Q4 adjusted EBITDA margins as a percentage of gross bookings. What I would say are tailwinds as you think about this sequentially quarter-over-quarter, we talk about the health of our marketplace. That has definitely been a tailwind for us. It continues to improve and we will continue to do so in our estimates here in the fourth quarter. And we have got revenue going up in the fourth quarter and operating expenses staying flat. So there’s some leverage there. And then as it relates to the headwind, that is primarily reflecting that are the increases we are expecting from our recent insurance contract renewals will fully flow through cost of revenue beginning at the start of the fourth quarter.

Eric Sheridan: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from Benjamin Black from Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open.

Benjamin Black: Good evening. Thanks for the questions, Perhaps one on Lyft Media. So can you dig a little bit into sort of what the early takeaways have been? Where do you see the need to invest more to grow that business on the infrastructure side, sales force side, sort of more products. I really would be great to hear sort of how big you think the advertising business could become over sort of the medium- to long-term. And then one on sort of contra revenue, so your competitor obviously spoke about favorable supply tailwinds, which is supporting lower contra. I am curious to hear how you are thinking about your current sort of driver incentive levels, how far we have been seeing a normalization here and is there anything you can do or work from an operational standpoint that could structurally lower driver incentive spend per trip? Thank you.

David Risher: Yeah. Benjamin, I will take the first and Erin will take the second. It will be another tag team. So, yeah, let’s talk media for a second, because it’s such an interesting opportunity and we will start super big picture. Today, if you are a brand and you are trying to come up with a new way to sort of speak with your customers, gosh, the online world has gotten a little bit small for you. You can buy Google AdWords and they will charge you for that and you can do some stuff on Meta, for example. But if you really want to go over your customer, you are probably not as excited about Twitter anymore, sorry, editorial comment there. But anyway, so these are the things that kind of brands are looking at. And yeah, we know that our younger generations are super brand focused and very responsive to brands.

So people are looking for new areas. Now TikTok, of course, is doing a lot of work there and they are having a huge amount of success. But if you think about the experience that a rider has when they open up the app, they start to look for a ride. What have they told us? They have told us not only where they are going from, but where they are going to. And then they have effectively told us that they are going to spend 5 minutes, 6 minutes, 7 minutes, 8 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes in a sort of captive situation in a place where they are not got a lot going on aside from just kind of looking at the car window. So we have four products that we use and I will go through them super briefly. So first, we have got the in-app ads. In-app ads start literally as you request a ride and you go through what we call a ride matching screen, which might take 15 seconds to 30 seconds or so.

We are serving on about 70% of those requests right now, we are serving in-app ads. And our goal there is that those ads be relevant and interesting, right? We are not interested in a credit experience. In fact, exactly the opposite. What we are seeing is very high credit rate. We are not going to talk about the numbers just yet, but they have been really nice to see. And we are also seeing something very interesting and what we were hoping for, but weren’t necessarily expecting was the cancellation rates tend to go down. In other words, as people have something else to do besides sit around and kind of wait they actually spend time interacting with that ad rather than canceling the ride. So that’s super exciting for us. It’s a win-win.

Then you get in the car. Now in the car, two things happen. Number one, you still got the app on your phone and people maybe to a surprising degree to check the app as they are headed to their destination, so that gives us another ad service. But also increasingly, we are putting tablets in cars. We have got about 8,000 screens right now in cars that spread across 14 markets. And what they do is they give us the opportunity, of course, for the ride, they can map their progress to their destination and they can give the driver a tip and these other sorts of things. But we also have advertising there. Apple has been a very strong advertiser there as an example and they react, right? They are liking what they are seeing and we can understand why when we look at the data.