Michael O’Donnell: Yes, I’ll start. Thanks, Laura. It’s Mike. I think we shared a little bit about this last quarter, but Intuit is launching a small business-focused retail media network. It’s called SMB Media Labs. This allows advertisers to target customers of QuickBooks across kind of various media properties. VIZIO is the exclusive connected TV partner of that, right? It’s really valuable data for us to reach small businesses. We can augment kind of our best-in-class TV data with Intuit’s high-fidelity data sets. This should continue to help us expand our partnerships in Telco, in travel, as well as newer categories, essentially like Fintech and workplace services. I think also partnering with Intuit helps put us into retail marketing discussions, as you know, is a rapidly growing portion of the ad market. We’re pretty excited to be the exclusive partner with them.
Adam Townsend: Laura, it’s Adam. On the EBITDA side, there are a couple things in the quarter to think about for this quarter. I mean, we have some glad that we over-delivered, and it came in certainly ahead of our expectations, which is a good thing. To your question about non-recurring, I did comment about the benefit from capitalized software development costs. That was something that came up during the quarter. It was about $3 million of benefit to the quarter, and that will not repeat sort of going forward. That’s one consideration. For the quarter in general, we’re really pleased with the advertising strength, and particularly the strength on the home screen. We were bracing what challenges the media entertainment space.
We guided pretty conservatively, making sure that we would capture the fact that those strikes were still underway. And while some of those were resolved, there’s still a lot of hesitation in the market. The actor strike could still be going on until just this week. And we were really pleased with the demand that still came in. And so that comes at a high. That consider a much higher margin. That helped bolster, if you look at the Platform+ margin particularly, you see a higher than we would have normally thought or higher within our guidance range expectation there. For Q4, now Q4 is definitely, it’s a higher promotion type of period. It is the holiday season, right? We’ve got a number of very attractive pricing out in the market to be competitive during this seasonally strong period for consumers.
So that’s part of it. That’s what’s in our expectation around the guidance, so that’s why you see it on a down basis, because it is a higher promotion period. We will be leaning into that. It’s a great time to be driving growth and active accounts around the holidays and the usual consumer demand that picks up at that time. So we try to factor all that in.
Laura Martin: Thanks very much.
William Wang: Thanks.
Michael Marks: Thanks Laura. Operator, we will take the next question.
Operator: We will take our next question from Ben Swinburne with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.
Ben Swinburne: Hey, good afternoon. Two questions. One, any help thinking about how the upfront went and how that might be impacting the fourth quarter advertising outlook into next year? And then secondly, I think, Adam, you mentioned you guys are targeting larger screen formats going forward given the higher engagement. I think I heard that right. If that’s true, what are the sort of financial implications of that in terms of either investment levels or your relationship with retailers and shelf space, the competitive dynamics at that higher end, anything you can share to help us think about what that means would be helpful? Thank you.
Michael O’Donnell: Yes, Mike, I’ll take the upfront question. I think then, as you know, upfront have been kind of slow for everyone. But from our standpoint, we’re up year-over-year already today in terms of commitments. I think we’ve seen increased commitments in categories like CPG, QSR, Pharma. And while I would say some of the larger upfront market has slowed this year, that’s kind of put us in a much better position of strength. Thanks to our first party data solutions, especially in the scatter market. So while we are up year-over-year on the upfronts, we’re seeing the scatter market is really strong right now. We talked about having 66 net new advertisers this past quarter. A majority of those came through scatter.
So our goal is always to ensure we have kind of a healthy baseline of committed dollars coming out of the upfront cycle. And we can close healthy upfronts with major agencies and brand partners, and then still kind of grow our scatter dollars throughout over the course of the year, adding more of these net new brands to our platform. So our expectation is heading into next year is that we will grow the upfront and with that healthy baseline. And we expect to grow significantly as we improve even more and more in the scatter market.
Adam Townsend: Yes, Ben. And on the other question, we really like that larger screen size part of the market. I mean, our data supports the higher engagement and therefore the longer and better higher customer lifetime value of those units. There’s no doubt, as I mentioned, that if you look at our metrics, we’re starting to see already some of the improvement in the quality and engagement metrics by the outpacing growth in streaming. Larger units, which tend to be the main screen in the home, are going to significantly outperform in terms of time spent streaming, which gives us a better opportunity to serve more ads and monetize home screen engagement and drive overall ARPU. As I mentioned in the prepared remarks, our larger screens, which tend to be those main screens in the home, actually deliver an ARPU that’s 30% higher than the smaller units.
It’s obviously in the blended 3155 ARPU that we reported this quarter, but that subset or that cohort is certainly delivering much greater economic values. So we need to think about how we position. We’ve got great products in the market with great reviews around it. That helps drive consumer demand and interest. We work with our retailers very closely, those partnerships, to have attractive pricing and merchandising support. And so there is an element of leaning into that strategy that we know will drive much greater long-term value over time.
