Fluent, Inc. ($FLNT)

Good day, and welcome to the iAccess Alpha Virtual Best Ideas Spring Investment Conference 2026. Our next presenting company is Fluent, Inc. [Operator Instructions] I'd now like to turn the floor over to today's host, Mr. Don Patrick, CEO; and Mr. Ryan Perfit, CFO of Fluent, Inc. Gentlemen, please go ahead.

Thank you very much. We're excited to be here, and thank you for joining us today, where we will walk through a quick overview of Fluent and then look forward to any questions that you might have around our business. At the highest level, Fluent is a customer acquisition company that drives new consumers to world-class brands. We have a solution in the Commerce Media space that not only drives significant new consumers to our brands, but also unlocks a brand new incremental revenue stream for our partners. Best way to give you an example of our solution is to just -- is walk through what one is. If you went on the DICK'S Sporting Goods site and you were purchasing -- if you're purchasing sneakers and you're checking out, you can see on the left-hand side of the slide, after you fill out your credit card information, after you fill out your shipping information, before you get the confirmation page from DICK's, there will be an ad that will overlay that will say congratulations because of this purchase and you are now eligible to win and sign up for Disney+, could be Hulu Streaming Services, could be free shipping, et cetera. And that would then connect you to Disney+ and then get you to sign up for that offer. I'm sure many people have seen that in their shopping experiences, especially around the holidays. So that is our solution. We have started that in -- really in the early part of 2023 and have been significantly growing that throughout the time frame. I'll take a step back and just talk about Commerce Media specifically, and then I'll get into more detail of Fluent and why we are so excited about this opportunity and our differentiation in the marketplace. So Commerce Media is really bursted onto the digital advertising stream in the early 2020s. It is considered the third transformative way... [Technical Difficulty]

Apologies, ladies and gentlemen. We appear to have lost our speakers momentarily. One moment please, where we'll try to reconnect. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, one moment please, while we reconnect our speakers.

Okay. We are back. Sorry for that mix up, but we got disconnected from the conference. I'm not sure where we got disconnected, but I was starting off that obviously Fluent is, at the highest level, a digital performance management company, focused on customer acquisition for world-class brands. Our new solution allows us to participate in the fastest-growing part of digital advertising called Commerce Media and unlocks brand new incremental revenue streams for our partners. The slide we have up here, I'm going to get a little bit into Commerce Media first and why it's so exciting, and then I'll break it down into Fluent and where -- why Fluent is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this. So Commerce Media is considered the third transformative wave across digital advertising. The first was search with Google. Second was paid social with Meta. It really addresses 3 fundamental problems that exist in digital advertising that we've been chasing for close to 20 years. The first is what I'll call first-party data. If you're on a Meta site or if you're on Google, most of the targeting there is based on segmentation. They put you in between this age and that age, your income is estimated between this range, et cetera. So the targeting is based on the best information they have on a nondirect basis. On Commerce Media, the consumer is coming on to the website, and in that website you most likely have been there before, you're a rewards member. There's a lot more, what they call, first-party data specific to you, which allows us to get as close to one-to-one marketing that exist anywhere in digital advertising. So if you are a -- if someone comes on and purchases those sneakers like I gave example, DICK'S Sporting Goods, where I purchase the sneakers, I will get a certain ad based on who I am... [Technical Difficulty]

Apologies, ladies and gentlemen. One moment, please, we appear to have lost or speakers again. We shall try and reconnect. One moment, please. Apologies. Ladies and gentlemen. Once again, we are trying to reconnect our speakers. Please have patience and we shall try and reconnect. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, we appear to have our speakers back with us momentarily.

Okay. We're back for the third time. Sorry, so much for the technical difficulties here. We were talking about the advantages of Commerce Media compared to other digital advertising channels. The first is a more targeted one-to-one marketing, which is pretty much the nirvana that everyone has been running after for 20 years. How do I make sure that I get the right offer and the right -- with the right promotion to the right person at the right time. Second is that there's headwinds in digital advertising around privacy, both from a data privacy perspective and consumer privacy. The consumer is willingly coming out of the commerce sites. You determine as a consumer where to go and what you're looking at. There's no enticement or incentive to do that. So it really avoids all of the digital headwinds around compliance and -- from both the data and a consumer privacy issue. And the third is probably the most important is that it's considered a plus and improves the consumer experience. So as you come on to DICK'S Sporting Goods, you buy those sneakers, as the example I gave you. We then sign up for Disney+. That's obviously a consumer experience that is positive and it enhances that relationship that you have with your commerce partner and makes you more likely to come back to those sites. So that's why commerce is growing so aggressively, right? Commerce Media is growing so aggressively right now. We have some stats later on that we'll talk about how dramatic that is and getting up to close to $100 billion in opportunity from a market perspective. The benefits for Fluent as a business model are significant. It's -- our technology is integrated into our commerce partners. So it is a sticky relationship from a technology perspective. Contracts tend to be 2 to 5 years long. There's a favorable rev share. So it's a rev share model where we share the revenue with that partner. And it's very predictable. When we bring a new partner on, we know what sort of traffic they have to their commerce sites. We know the seasonality of that. We know when they run sales, et cetera. So we are able to be able to operate in a very efficient way. If you go to the next slide, I'll just give you an example of how the model works. So the example I gave you in the beginning around DICK'S Sporting Goods, that would be the media partner on the left and the advertiser was Disney+, the example I gave you earlier. Our value proposition for the advertisers are quite significant for someone like Disney+. We are connecting them to the most valuable consumer that exists anywhere in digital advertising. You were not a consumer that's looking or searching for something or reacting to an ad. You have your credit card out, you're ready to purchase, and if we can make it a relevant offer to you personally, there is a highly likelihood that you'll consume and purchase something again, and you'll be a long-standing -- your lifetime value will be very high for that advertiser. So that's why advertisers are incredibly excited about this vertical or this channel. And on the media side, it's even a better value proposition. So in the example of Disney, if they paid Fluent $100 to be connected to a consumer who clicks on their display ad in a commerce site, we typically will give $60 to the DICK's Sporting Goods, Fluent will take $40 so that margin is fixed throughout the time frame of our contract with them. And for an average retailer that does 15 million transactions a year, you can be bringing incrementally between $3 million to $6 million more to your bottom line as a retailer, and that is without any additional cost. You don't have shipping, you don't have cost of sales. It's a very incremental large revenue stream that is now available to those media partners. And our flywheel, as you can see here, is the more media partners we add on to our platform and our network, the more advertisers we bring on, which continues to drive that flywheel and our growth. So now let's take a step a little bit deeper into why Fluent is positioned well in this marketplace, and why we feel so strongly about it. Fluent has been around for 15 years. We've started out by driving consumers to our own websites and then connecting those consumers off our website to the same world-class companies like Disney, Apple, AARP, Walmart, et cetera. We grew that business on a compounded average growth rate of double digits for 13 of those years, primarily by driving higher quality to those advertisers. So as consumers came on to our sites, we were able to collect first-party data on them, understand what was relevant to them and build a very proprietary first-party data asset. We have hundreds of millions of U.S. consumers, and we have billions of campaign information. So we know how people react to offers. We know the difference between a 35-year-old male that sits in Massachusetts versus a 35-year-old male that sits in Nebraska and how they will react differently to offers and to campaigns and to drive better conversions. In early 2023, we pivoted our business aggressively. Our legacy business, we settled an FTC settlement without -- with a very small nominal fine, but they required us to have significant regulations that were beyond what the current industry has. So we were on an uncompetitive playing field. And what we did was we took all those core assets of that legacy business, that first-party data, the deep understanding of how to drive consumer experiences, and we drove that into the commerce business. That commerce was exploding at the time. We started up from scratch in early 2023. And and we are now at $105 million annual run rate business in less than 3 years -- or at 3 years, and we've also built a significant differentiated brand where we can see significant growth moving forward. That new business, we doubled that commerce business from '25 to -- from '24 to '25. We continue to see high double digits growth going into '26 from 2025. And that will return Fluent to a double-digit growth -- consolidated growth company with improving margins and improving operating profit. Ryan, do you want to give the next slide just on our financials?

Yes. We briefly touched on this here, talking about the consolidated revenue growth from 2016 through 2022, the FTC settlement and changed the way our O&O business, our legacy business operated at that point. That's when we got into Commerce Media Solutions. And it was growing in the background. So you don't see it in the numbers here where we've had a decline from '22 to '23, '23 to '24 and '24 to '25, but we were building the business in the background. So in 2025 is when Commerce Media Solutions became a meaningful part of our business and we'll show the data on the next slide, but it's grown at nearly triple digits from '23 to '24 and from '24 to '25 it grew at, I guess, the nearly triple digits there. It grew more than that in '24 and is now over 50% of our business in Q4, and we expect it to be over 50% of our business going forward. We also -- we went through a process of kind of looking at our expense -- our operating expenses and looking for more efficiencies there, cut costs down from '23 to '24 and from '24 to '25 and find ourselves in a good position to make material improvements on our adjusted EBITDA in 2025 and expect that to take a significant jump up from where it was in 2025 to 2026. This shows the growth of the Commerce Media business. So you can see here, it was not particularly meaningful in early 2023. We see -- there is seasonality in this. So when you get to Q4 of 2023, it took a very big jump up. And then as we head into the new year, it steps back down in Q1, but we saw growth continued kind of quarter-on-quarter until we get to Q4. Again, see a big jump in Q4 of '24 and following that up with huge growth again in Q4 of 2025, which is 101% growth on prior year. And you can see, as a percentage of total revenue, this has gone from -- this is just Q4 '23, '24, and '25, from 10% to 26% to 56%. So becoming the large part of our business. We'll -- as I mentioned before, we'll maintain above 50% going forward is our expectation. This is strong, sustainable revenue growth. It just wasn't big enough as a percentage of our total revenue to make a difference. But as Don mentioned, we expect this to drive us back to double-digit growth if you look at continuing operations in 2026.

So we've talked about Commerce Media and how exciting it is. It really -- it's really -- just last year, it was $50 billion estimated and it's estimated from a market perspective to double by 2027. So there's a lot of great tailwinds in this business as we -- as people move, not only budgets from nondigital to commerce, but also budgets that are moving within digital platforms like search and display and paid social towards Commerce Media. So there is a lot of great headwinds that we position ourselves in. I mentioned, in 3 short years, we've been able to build the business with $105 million annual run rate business, which we doubled last year, and we expect to have very high double-digit growth opportunities to grow again in 2026. So we are sitting in a great part of the market. We built a differentiated brand, and we expect this growth to continue to move forward aggressively. Next slide really just gives you a highlight of some of the partners that we work with, that we're proud to be partners. We -- our opportunity and how we grow is that we enter into a vertical. We build out our case studies, which drives -- which is based on driving superior results than any of our competitors. And then we drive deep into that vertical. So we started in 2023 on the retail side. You can see great names like DICK'S Sporting Goods and Michaels and Belk and Barnes & Noble and Authentic. We've got into ticketing and grocery and also some restaurants, and we will do the same thing. Our growth here is really about getting into a vertical, building out that case study and expertise and then driving the sales strategy into those verticals. So when we talk about our ability to tie -- to grow high double-digit growth, it's in the current verticals that we are in. There are significant opportunities beyond those verticals. We just got into travel with our first win, which is Wyndham Hotels in January this year. We will get into fintech and lifestyle and home services as we go. There's significant opportunity well beyond 2026 and 2027 to continue to grow this forward. And if you take a step back across all of Commerce Media, this shows sort of a flow of a consumer coming onto a website. They come on to the website, they shop, they put things in the shopping cart, they check out then they post-checkout and then there's CRM after you purchase something. Our Fluent Commerce Media Solution, obviously, is in that dark blue box called post-checkout. It is the most relevant and most important piece of that piece because, as I mentioned, you're a consumer, your credit card is out and you purchased something. And obviously, you have to make sure that the consumer experience is relevant and meaningful. We've established our credibility there and our brand. We are now starting to look into other opportunities, specifically around CRM and loyalty and also in checkout. So we think that the growth within post-checkout is significant. And we think that as we start -- as our partners are starting to ask us to move into other areas, into CRM, into pre-checkout, there are significant growth opportunities to continue to grow well beyond '28 and '29 here. And just a quick point on our -- and we'll get a little bit into why we're so excited around why we deliver superior results. But our secret sauce really comes down to that legacy owned and operated business that we built over 15 years. We've been working with consumers. We understand how to make it meaningful, how to connect them to the right brand at the right time. And as I mentioned, a very extremely valuable proprietary first-party data asset that we have. So when we come into -- when we work with our partners, obviously, we bring a wealth of experience around how to deal with consumer experience, how to make it meaningful and relevant to that consumer at that point in time and how to drive a more superior results, both for our partners and the consumer and for the advertisers. So that owned and operated business, although financially has been in decline because of the FTC settlement and the uncompetitive playing field that we're able to compete in, it is the reason why it's growing, why Commerce Media is growing so fast. And we are deemphasizing this as a financial play and more as an ability to continue to accelerate our competitive moat within Commerce Media. And if you talk just specifically around AI, I know AI is an incredibly exciting opportunity for all companies right now. And the amount of acceleration that's going on, on pretty much a daily basis is opening up tremendous opportunities for cost efficiencies and growth and acceleration. We have had AI embedded into our Commerce Media Solutions since the beginning, both in terms of how do you identify the right consumer, how do you then determine their purchasing behavior? And then also, how do you help convert and serve the right ad at the right time to them? So we've been early adopter on the AI side in our solution. Obviously, the fuel of that AI is that proprietary first-party data. So having that -- all those models built off that first-party data is our competitive moat. So I'll get into a couple of quick case studies here on why we're so excited about Commerce Media and why we think things work so well. The first one is just on the partner side, like what we talked about DICK'S Sporting Goods. This is a different company, a leading crafts retailer. It was coming from a competitor, the largest competitor in the market. They were making a number of changes to their business and wanted a more innovative and a more -- a company that would work with them. You can see the results on the right. Not only did we improve conversions for the consumer on both an app and a web basis, the biggest important thing is on the bottom line. There was 25% additional revenue per session. So compared to our competitor, for -- on an apples-to-apples basis, we were able to drive significant increased revenue to that partner because of our proprietary data, our proprietary ad serving and our approach to the consumer experience. So this is something why we feel so embolden on how fast we are growing and where we'll grow. I think we're sort of running out of time here. This is a quick example of an advertiser side. This is a pet food company that was looking to scale aggressively. This tells you the power of this model in terms of ability to scale aggressively for an advertiser. So they came to us, they were looking for -- to grow their business, and in a very short time frame, we were able to have 500% conversion lift over 8 months, and more importantly, 10x the growth of the media investment by staying at their cost per acquisition target. So this model is not only relevant for that partner and the consumer, but we can scale aggressively for new advertisers coming into it. So I'll wrap up real quickly and then hopefully to answer questions. We are at -- we made a strategic pivot. We've built a phenomenal differentiated brand in Commerce Media, which is around driving better results. We are now aggressively accelerating that, and we believe that the business will get back to double-digit revenue growth on a consolidated basis on aggregate continuing businesses. We will get -- our margins will be improving and we'll be improving profit along the way. So -- and this is really the beginning stages. We have phenomenal opportunity in front of us to not only move from -- and grow post transaction, but other things across the media -- Commerce Media landscape. So I will answer any questions that you guys have now, but thank you for sticking through our technical difficulties here.

So one question here is what are the key drivers behind Commerce Media Solutions becoming the primary growth? And I think we touched on that a little bit. The key -- a, we're in a growth market, and it's accelerating aggressively. But for Fluent specifically, it's around that first-party data asset and our ability to better identify who that consumer is and make it a more relevant ad. So the consumer is more satisfied against a significant offer that they find valuable. And then on top of it, the advertiser is connected to a very valuable consumer that has higher lifetime value. We talked about what KPIs investors should be looking for to confirm the demand. I think it's going to be around; a, we, on a quarterly basis, talk about annual revenue run rate for our new partners that are coming on, and it's also around that growth rate of the high double digits year-over-year, which will be driving that business. We have talked at a high level about other areas in which we're driving things outside the post transaction like loyalty, and we've also talked about precheck. You'll be hearing a lot more about that later on this year as we test and learn and scale those new solutions. Another question around what types of enterprise or advertisers are adopting this platform the fastest, and which verticals are showing the strongest ROI? It's a great question. The earliest people that got into this, the Commerce Media from a vertical perspective, have been retail. If you think about Amazon and Walmart, those are the ones that really started this channel up in early 2020. And then a lot of enterprise clients have come on from a retail side. Ticketing has come on, restaurants, but you're starting to see -- it's still very early days. Most estimates is that post transaction has penetration of roughly 30%, and they obviously believe that other verticals will continue to get into Commerce Media and the exciting part of this. I know we are out of time.

[indiscernible] we go a couple of minutes over to address the margin.

That would be great.

So the legacy O&O business, in that business, we buy media, and we take the risk on that media and then it's up to us to monetize that through our owned and operated properties. We've managed to margin, but that over time, the margin is compressed there. And ultimately, we're currently seeing in the low 20s in terms of the gross margin on the owned and operated business. Where Commerce Media differs is that we are not taking media risk on the media or we're not taking risk on the media inventory risk. We have a rev share with the partners there generally. So what we do is we kind of lock in a media margin of approximately 35% to 40% with those partners. Now we may offer some early term incentives or make guarantees and that's why margins haven't been as high as 35%, 40% on that business. But because we can kind of lock in the margins there and not take the inventory risk, we do expect that business over time that the margins will trend up into the high 20s, potentially low 30s by the time we get to 2027. So essentially, we do expect the differentiator there. It's not currently being seen because we're investing into new placements and into growth with new partners, but we do expect Commerce Media to operate at a higher margin over time.

Great. Any other questions here that...

I think that's it.

Yes. That's great. Thank you so much for attending here. Again, apologize for the technical snafus, but look forward to continuing the dialogue with you. Thank you for your time today.

Thank you. That concludes Fluent Inc.'s presentation, and you may now disconnect.