Inuvo, Inc. (INUV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Inuvo, Inc. Second Quarter 2024 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. This call is being recorded on Thursday, August 8, 2024. I would now like to turn the conference over to Natalya Rudman of Crescendo Communications. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Joanna, and good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to thank everyone for joining us today for the Inuvo Second Quarter 2024 Shareholder Update Call. Today, Inuvo's Chief Executive Officer, Richard Howe; and Chief Financial Officer, Wally Ruiz, will be your presenters on the call. We would also like to remind our shareholders that we plan to file our 10-Q with the Securities and Exchange Commission this evening. Before we begin, I'm going to review the company's safe harbor statement. The statements in this conference call that are not descriptions of historical facts are forward-looking statements relating to future events, and as such, all forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. When used in this call, the words anticipate, could, enable, estimate, intend, expect, believe, potential, will, should, project and similar expressions as they relate to Inuvo, Inc. are such a forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that all forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, which may cause actual results to differ from those anticipated by Inuvo at this time. In addition, other risks are more fully described in Inuvo's public filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which could be reviewed at www.sec.gov. The company makes no commitment to disclose any revisions to forward-looking statements or any facts, events or circumstances after the date hereof that bear upon forward-looking statements. In addition, today's discussion will include references to non-GAAP measures. The company believes that such information provides an additional measurement and consistent historical comparison of its performance. A reconciliation of the non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is available in today's news release on our website. With that, I'll now turn the call over to CEO, Rich Howe. Please go ahead, Rich.

Thank you, in Natalya, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We are pleased to report that for the quarter ended June 30, 2024, we delivered 9.4% year-over-year growth. For the first half of the year, we've delivered a healthy 23.6% year-over-year growth. And that, of course, is coming off of a very strong second half with 2023, where we also grew 32% year-over-year. The third quarter has also started off strong with unaudited revenue coming in around $7.7 million for the month of July. And that compares to the roughly $5.9 million per month average we experienced throughout the first half of 2024. We also experienced a significant improvement in our adjusted EBITDA within the quarter with a $1.1 million improvement year-over-year and a $2.4 million improvement for the first half as compared to the prior year. Free cash flow has also improved over the first half of 2024 in comparison to last year. Wally will share more details about our second quarter 2024 financial results shortly. We've had strong momentum within existing and new clients, and we've had some wins with our new product -- a newer product sales. And we've had a material and what we believe to be positive event occur across our industry within the second quarter. What I'd like to do now is spend some time discussing these items. Let's begin with the industry. Google, of course, announced a new position on the deprecation of cookies within their Chrome browser this past quarter. For several years now, Google has been developing an alternative technology to replace cookies. This technology has aptly been named, the Privacy Sandbox, unlike Apple, with their Safari browser, Google, whose business is predominantly advertising, has had to satisfy a chorus of constituents that include governments, the ad tech industry, the consumer data industry and various other groups with a vested interest in the cookies survival. Now, it's very likely their efforts to satisfy all these parties have been difficult. And consequently, what they appear to have decided to do now is put the power of making the decision about the cookie in the hands of consumers. As a reminder, the cookie is the way your browser tracks your activity around the Internet and is the means through which consumer data is accessed. Google has not been specific about exactly how they plan to empower consumers. But we believe it will be similar to the way Apple engaged consumers when they wanted to eliminate app tracking. When Apple gave consumers that option to opt out, over 90% of them chose to do so. Consequently, what Inuvo believes is that this is good news for consumer privacy advocates because history has shown that when consumers are given a clear choice regarding the use of their data and the tracking of their activity, they overwhelmingly say, no. The simple reason why this is a good thing for Inuvo is because the majority of our competitors need this cookie ID to decide whether or not to bid on a media placement transaction on behalf of their clients. And of course, Inuvo's AI does not. Within programmatic advertising channels, already 70% of these media transactions no longer contain a persistent cookie ID. And that number includes everyone using Apple Safari browsers, where cookies were blocked, starting in 2020. The remaining 30% is effectively Google Chrome users. And consequently, we fully expect that number to drop very quickly following the informed consumer choice Google plans to give its users. While we have said this before, it's worth mentioning again that Inuvo's audience discovery and targeting AI already outperformed by a wide margin, the best of cookie-based technologies. So we have never required that the cookie disappear. However, it's deprecation and ultimately, obsolescence is a catalyst for industry change that we believe will accelerate demand for Inuvo, given our single biggest obstacle to adoption continues to be the whole incumbents have on clients and the fear those clients have of a change. Let's shift now to products and clients. As we have discussed in the past, Inuvo has developed 2 AI technologies, one for audience discovery and targeting and the other for the measurement of marketing's performance. Now we developed these solutions because we knew these would be the 2 biggest problems facing advertisers as the Internet adapted, to a consumer privacy-based paradigm. Across the industry, we continue to be amazed at just how inaccurate the systems are within corporations for measuring the effectiveness of what for many of these brands is their largest expense line. We frequently observed them using KPIs that incentivize for behavior in their vendors, while inaccurately measuring the influence of the various channels they're using on their business. As has been the case with media targeting, the industry over time has built technology to help companies understand performance. However, that technology has also depended on tracking consumers around the Internet. And as I mentioned earlier, that mechanism is now severely broken and consequently, so are these measurement solutions. This is why we built our predictive media mix modeling capabilities. We have a number of clients now using this technology, including our largest retail client who began doing business with us not only for our audience technology, but also for the capabilities of our media mix technology. This client now uses this capability to measure and optimize the contribution on sales resulting from the dozen or so different marketing channels that they deploy. Unlike existing methods that require a one-to-one consumer mapping of advertising clicks to conversions using the cookie ID, our technology requires nothing other than the actual spend over time within channels alongside the actual business metrics. Using historical data, these very sophisticated machine learning algorithms we've developed can detect patterns that allow the AI to predict the amount of money our clients should spend within each channel. This is an analytic product that strategically positions Inuvo alongside the corner office within our clients. We see demand increasing for this product with a number of high-profile prospects in our pipeline, including a financial services company that is itself already using our audience technology. We see this product strategically once installed within a client also being a catalyst for the adoption and expansion of our audience technology in part because it can accurately predict and contrast the value of our audience technology relative to the other marketing strategies being deployed. While our managed services business continues to drive growth, and we signed up another 3 new agency clients in the quarter. We have also started scaling our self-serve capabilities. Larger agencies, mostly owned by the holding companies have historically not been our target. That has now changed, and we've had a half dozen self-serve clients sign up, including a major technology company and one of the largest car manufacturers in the world. The elegance of this self-serve product lies in its flexibility to empower our clients with the ability to easily model and target audiences without our assistance. It also allows us to more quickly scale certain general audience categories like, say, back-to-school or the Olympics and any one of hundreds of other similar audiences, but perhaps most importantly, the self-serve version of our AI boasts high margins for Inuvo with gross profits ranging from 85% to 95%. So accelerated sales here will drop cash to the bottom line at scale. Across our agencies and brand clients, we outperformed KPIs once again, on average by about 30% in the quarter. And we expect to sign a master services agreement in the third quarter with one of the largest retailers in the world, which will allow media buyers across their enterprise to access our capabilities. We have already been serving this client for one of their private label brands and the success of those efforts has now resulted in this agreement. The client is forecasted to do roughly $2 million this year with the potential to be significantly larger when the MSA is in place. This client has numerous private label brands in their portfolio. And each of those brands are generally limited to using vendors approved by the corporation. In total, it's taken us roughly 1.5 years to become this approved vendor so the bar is high for competition here. Platform relationships continue to be a strong growth and working capital engine for our company. These clients grew roughly 11% in the quarter, and as a group, are scaling as we head into what is typically the strongest advertising quarters of our year. One of our platform clients uses our capabilities in a manner analogous to our self-serve intent key product. And consequently, that revenue is also roughly at 90% margin contribution to the bottom line. As we have mentioned, this relationship only took hold in 2024. And in Q2, it generated over $200,000 of this high margin revenue that flows to the bottom line. I want to also reinforce for our shareholders how important these platform relationships are to our business. Our agency and brand clients require working capital. Our platform clients generate positive working capital. This important distinction is often missed by our shareholders. These receivables, which historically have had low risk, can be bored against to fund working capital growth needs. You will also have noted from our press release that we closed a new $10 million credit facility in the quarter. We use this facility to fund working capital. And while we had an existing $5 million facility in place with another financial institution, that facility had certain constraints that did not meet our needs. We anticipate this new agreement will provide the flexibility we need to continue growing our business. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Wally for a more detailed assessment of our financial performance. Wally?

Thank you, Rich. Good afternoon, everyone. I'll recap the financial results of our second quarter of 2024. As Rich mentioned, Inuvo reported revenue of $18.2 million for the second quarter of this year, and that's compared to $16.7 million for the same period of the prior year. That's a 9.4% increase year-over-year. The higher revenue this quarter was driven by our largest platform client due to the collaborative effort that we initiated in 2023. Strategically, we are focused on scaling revenue from platform clients and signing new midsized agencies and brands directly. In the second quarter of 2024, 83% of our revenue came from platform clients, while 17% came from agencies and brands. That's compared to 79% from platform clients and 21% from agencies and brands in the second quarter of last year. We expect this revenue mix to continue for the remainder of the year. Cost of revenue was $2.9 million in the second quarter of 2024 compared to $2.4 million for the same period of last year. Cost of revenue is primarily composed of media payments we make on behalf of our agency and brand clients and to a lesser extent, payments made to website publishers and app developers that host our advertisements. We reported a gross profit of $15.3 million compared to $14.3 million for the same quarter last year, a $1 million increase on $1.6 million higher revenue. The gross profit margin for the second quarter of 2024 was 84% compared to 85.8% for the same period last year. We expect gross margins to increase in the current quarter. Operating expenses for the second quarter of 2024 totaled $17 million, down from $17.6 million for the same period last year, primarily due to lower compensation and general and administrative expense. Marketing costs were $12.4 million in the second quarter of 2024 compared to $12.1 million in the same quarter last year. Marketing costs increased primarily because of higher media expenses associated with the higher revenue from platform clients. Compensation expense for the second quarter of 2024 was $3 million compared to $3.3 million in the same quarter of the prior year. Compensation expense was lower in the second quarter of 2024 due primarily to lower incentive expense, lower stock-based compensation and lower commission expense. Though the company continues to grow, we've reduced our workforce by 13 positions in the second quarter. Our total employment, both full and part-time was 83 for the second quarter of 2024 compared to 84 in the same quarter of the prior year. At 83 associates, our revenue per associate for the trailing 12 months is over $900,000. That's nearly double that of our nearest competitors. We are confident that we can deliver on our growth plans with the resources we have and we do not expect to add additional resources this year. General and administrative expense for the second quarter of 2024 was $1.5 million compared to $2.3 million in the prior year. General and administrative costs were lower this year, in this year's quarter, primarily due to lower doubtful accounts expense as our collections have improved. Net financing expense was approximately $42,000 in the second quarter of this year compared to an expense of $38,000 in the same quarter last year. The net loss improved in the second quarter of 2024 to $1.7 million or $0.01 per basic and diluted share compared to a net loss of $3.4 million or $0.03 per basic or diluted share for the same period last year. That's a $1.6 million year-over-year improvement. Adjusted EBITDA loss also improved in the second quarter of 2024. It improved to $668,000 that's compared to a loss of $1.8 million for the same period last year. That's an improvement of $1.1 million year-over-year. As of June 30, 2024, we had cash and cash equivalents of $2 million. In addition, in July, as Rich mentioned, we closed a 3-year $10 million asset-based working capital line of credit. At June 30, there was no debt outstanding. Our capital structure is composed of 140 million common shares outstanding, 7 million employee restricted stock units outstanding and 107,000 out-of-the-money warrants. The company has reduced its cash burn by $1.6 million in the first half of 2024 compared to the first half of last year. We expect continued improvement throughout the rest of the year. With that, I'd like to turn the call back over to Rich.

Okay. Thanks, Wally. We had a strong first half, achieving year-over-year growth of roughly 24%. Throughout this period, we have also improved our adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow. With $7.7 million in revenue entering Q3 for July, we are coming into the second half with strong momentum. And second half of the year is almost always the stronger part of our year. Our higher-margin products have started to generate revenue, and we are seeing traction with our predictive media mix modeling product. We are extremely excited about the potential to scale our largest retail client as a result of the master services agreement which is currently being circulated within that client for signature. Our platform relationships continue to scale with significant upside potential remaining within those relationships. And with that, I will turn the call over to the operator to get questions. Joanna?

[Operator Instructions] First question comes from Brian Kinstlinger at Alliance Global Partners.

This is Kevin for Brian. So first question, with Google's announcement regarding cookies and Apple already eliminating cookies, is there an event or an aha moment where -- when a consumer needs to more quickly fund the tools to advertise with products that can operate in a cookie-less environment?

Kevin, can you just clarify the consumer aspect of that, please? And then I'll answer it that you're asking?

Just your customers in general?

So how are they feeling about this maybe? Is that what you're trying to figure out like how our clients reacting to the news from Google?

Yes.

Okay. Yes. So the answer to that is probably not surprising. There's a certain number of them who, I guess, woke up after that announcement from Google and thought, oh, well, so cookies aren't going away. And I wouldn't say that, that was all of them, but probably a majority of them and of course, that's not what's happening. And so a lot of people want that to happen. And certainly, the people that we compete with want that to happen. But that's not what is going to transpire here, which is why we put our own press release on this issue and clarified this issue. Google has been investing in the Privacy Sandbox for many years now and they were very clear about -- in their statement that they're going to continue investing in that and why would you bother doing that if you're not going to do away with cookies anymore. That's the first thing probably one should ask themselves. And the second thing is, they were pretty clear that they were going to move to a consumer -- an informed consumer prompt related to this. Our belief, just with our knowledge of the industry, for why they're moving to this method is because of what I said in my script, it's like Google has this tremendously difficult job to try to satisfy a lot of constituents, and I think they probably found that almost an impossible thing to do. And so the best thing to do in such cases is to try to not satisfy everybody and simply ask the consumer, whether they're not they want to be tracked around the Internet. And the best historical litmus test for such a question is clearly Apple. And as I said in my script, well, and for anybody listening to this call right now, who has an iPhone, we've all been asked this question, and we all answer the same question when it comes up on our phone -- and the answer is no, thank you. So yes, we think it's going to accelerate. As soon as Google finally puts the prompt in front of the Chrome browser users and provided it's the right prompt. I mean the cookies will go away rapidly. There'll always be a certain number of them that will remain in circulation. But we think it's going to accelerate the deprecation, not slow it down.

Could you maybe talk about the demand for IntentKey, both from an existing customer as well as a new logo standpoint? And how much wallet share are you gaining from the budgets of existing customers? And then have you seen any acceleration in the rate of new logo wins?

The pipeline looks healthy. So I can't speak specifically to the size of our pipelines, but we spent quite a bit of time, I don't know, I always say it, upscaling our sales organization over the last year, notably, bringing Barry in, Barry as president in, who, you know, for people who don't know this, was the former Chief Executive Officer of a very successful technology-oriented agency called Media Kitchen. And so he's helped us, if you will, upgrade our policy, our processes and our training. And we're seeing the benefits of that now. The only challenge we have in the sales cycle -- well, I mentioned them in my call script is like the incumbents are really good at trying to change the narrative within our clients. So we're fighting, if I can call it an ignorance associated with the problem being propagated by the incumbents that we're up again. And then, of course, there's just the natural inertia that people don't like change that we have to fight time and time again. So that means that our sales cycles tend to be long. I think I mentioned for the large retail clients, of which we would like to get a lot more like that, by the way, we've been at it at least 1.5 years with them. It was a year before we ever started generating in revenue, and it took another 6 months for us to get us in a place where we can get a faster services agreement signed. But once you get in and you're locked in like that, things can scale quickly.

Great. Last question I have is, are you seeing any benefits of the presidential election in the third quarter? And also as you look to the fourth quarter, which is already seasonally strong. Do you have any thoughts on the impact of the election on that quarter?

As a company, we have done a few -- a very few number of campaigns over the years. But we do have a sort of a view on not going after that business, at least not right now in the evolution of our company. So we try to stay away from politics. Frankly, we don't have the relationships or the context necessary to be able to close that business. And then, of course, there's always the challenge of if you go into that business and you end up doing business with one or the other, you offend half the country and our buyers who we're trying to go after. So we've tried to stay away from it, Kevin. So the answer is no. There should be a zero impact, the election on our business.

The next question comes from Jon Hickman from Ladenburg.

Rich, maybe this is a naive question, but every -- almost every website I visit already asks me if I want cookies or not. So what's Google going to do that's different now than ask me if I want cookies?

Yes. The questions you're getting asked from the website really have a twofold reason behind them. One is it was required to do as part of the GDPR issues, so publishers were forced to have to ask consumers about that. And the second is it allows those websites, the publishers to store your data and keep it for themselves. That's a very different problem, cookie-oriented problem than what Google is going to do. And the difference is the cookies gets set by the browser, Jon, so the browser owns actually assigning an ID to you, irrespective of whatever the publishers do, right? And so that's what this is going to do. They're likely to ask you if they follow the Apple cadence for this, which they may or may not, but I suspect they will do something like what Apple did. They'll probably ask you, do you want to be tracked around the Internet and then when you say -- if you say no to that, then the cookies will be defaulted off for you. And so nobody is going to get an ID for Jon Hickman.

Are they going to just ask me onetime? Or every time I open the browser?

I don't know the answer to that. I don't think anybody knows that. I would suspect strongly that it will be onetime. It doesn't need to be asked every time like a publisher page does. It can be asked once and then just turned off for you. Frankly, you could do it yourself now, right, if you wanted to, right? Just a lot of consumers don't do that because it's not informed, right? And I think that's why I can't speak for Google, and I won't speak for Google. But they're very careful with their language. And so they did use the word an informed consumer choice. So if you use a Chrome browser today, you could go into there and turn off your third-party cookies and then they won't be using them. But it's hard to find. It's like it's buried in settings and what not so consumers, they just don't follow doing it. This is going to, I think, make it front and center and they'll just ask you. And then when you say no, I don't want it, then it will be off.

Okay. Then I have another question. So you mentioned that your performance on your KPI was like 30% better than I guess, the cookie option. So I have a hard time understanding why people are so reluctant. Your customers are so reluctant to go with something that's better, that they can see that's better? Can you elaborate on that?

Yes, sure can. So actually, first thing is the 30% is really just the 30% improvement over the KPI average across all our clients is not necessarily against cookie-based. It's like every quarter or so we -- with our existing clients, they reset our goal. And so that just tells you we continue to outperform the goals our clients are giving us. Historically, though, it has been a good measure of how much better we are than behavioral targeting, but it's not necessarily that. So the answer to the question is, the aversion to change -- the risk aversion to change even when there's a significant financial incentive involved. Very, very difficult thing. It seems particularly the larger the corporation gets for folks to change. And to your questions alone asking me this whole issue of privacy and the implications of it, there are so many companies who have literally their -- the life of their company at stake in this game. And they're telling their clients that this is not a problem or that they have a solution for the problem. And that confuses clients in their decision-making. It protracts a decision by them. And if you think about that in the context of organizations that are already risk averse, it's just obstacles that we have to overcome in our sales cycle, right? So the best -- that's why we think the best thing that can happen for us is just you wake up one morning and they're almost all gone. And then performance starts to decline precipitously. And as a result, they have to change.

Okay. My next question is for Wally. Will you -- your comments about gross margin -- my gross margin comes -- I mean I'm looking at a gross margin of 84%. Is that what you said?

Yes. 84%. That's correct.

And then you said it was going to get better going in the future?

Yes. Yes. Some of the margin is dependent upon the mix of customers that we have. In fact, a lot of it is based on the mix of customers. And it was a little bit lower than we had anticipated based on that mix. And we expect it to start increasing again in the current quarter, Q3.

It's not going to get materially better, though, Jon. Just as a side note, right, which Wally will tell you. I mean, we're already at an extremely high gross margin. So we're talking about a point here or there, right, on this thing.

Okay. So Wally, if you combine marketing expenses with the gross margin line or the cost of revenues, that number was 15.8% this quarter. Can you pontificate about what that number might be going forward?

Sure. Although our expectation -- so it was about 15%. Yes, it will be in that ballpark, plus or minus 0.5%.

Okay. For the rest of the year?

For the rest of the year, possibly. Well, certainly in the current quarter.

Okay. So then last quarter, you guys talked about getting the potential of hitting $100 million revenue kind of run rate or getting close to that this year. Do you have any comments about that this quarter?

I think we gave the July number so people could make this decision for themselves. We never gave guidance that we were going to do $100 million. I think what we've said consistently, Jon, is the $25 million a month -- sorry, a quarter -- revenue number for us is where we return free cash flow positive, which is why we're chasing that number. But of course, we did $74 million last year. So $100 million is not only insignificant leap. So all we can -- since we haven't given guidance, obviously say that we're up 24% year-over-year in the first half and we're entering the second half with a pretty good number in July based on historical trends. We were free cash flow positive in the third quarter of the prior year. So there's a good shot we're going to be again.

[Operator Instructions] Next question comes from Jack Codera at Maxim Group.

Rich, this is Jack Codera in for Jack Vander Aarde. If I could ask about the third-party cookies for a third time and maybe ask about the customer friction in a different way. Is it the strategy to basically wait for the cookies to slowly erode or is it more important to just get your foot in the door with new clients just so they can see how well it works? How do you think it's possible to improve, getting rid of that friction, improve the sales cycle, any color there would be helpful.

I think it's -- at least the way things are playing out for us, Jack, is it's the latter, you said, which is why we've been spending some money on marketing and try to get our brand out there. You probably have seen us on LinkedIn, where we've been doing a lot of work, promotional work to try to get obviously, the CMOs of the biggest companies in the world, understanding this problem better because they literally don't. Well, I shouldn't say all of them, let's just say there's a certain normalized level of ignorance amongst the industry itself. So yes, get in, start delivering results and start getting more of the budget as we do that as our CMO customers and our agency customers start to realize that we have a better performing product that provides them with more insights that makes them ready for the end game, so to speak.

That's helpful. And then one more, if I may. Just speaking on kind of broader market demand. Given your comments on new clients, can you clarify where you expect to see more growth in terms of platform clients versus agencies and brands? Or just in general, do you have any expectation for product mix shift for the remainder of the year and longer term?

We believe both have upside opportunities. So it's not a trade-off. We want both to grow. And other than just the write-out fact that we want growth and if both platforms and agencies and brands will grow, that's good for us. But one of the things I made a point of mentioning on this call that I don't think we've done for quite some time, is to note that there's another strategic reason why platforms is important for a company of our size, companies of our size are always trying to fund their working capital. It's just a consequence of being sub-100 trying to get into the big leagues. And it's often missed by our shareholders that the platform relations we have actually produced positive working capital, which, again, is something we can borrow against to fund the negative working capital that's coming from the more differentiated component of our mix, which is the AI and the IntentKey. So that's an important thing to keep in mind, a very, very important thing to keep in mind from a building a business perspective. The second maybe answer to your question is, we believe the mix, it's kind of 80-20 right now, right? We think that, that mix will optimize down over time, meaning 80 will drop and 20 will rise. And when that does happen, on a net margin basis, which is, I think, one of the questions Jon Hickman was bringing up, we would see an increase. So the net margins that Wally was talking about at 15%, when we can increase the 20% of the 80/20 mix, that net margin number will go up quite significantly actually. So those are kind of the reasons behind what we're doing.

There are no further questions. I will turn the call back to Richard Howe for closing comments.

Okay. Thank you, Joanna. And of course, as always, thank you, everyone, who joined us on the call today, and we appreciate your continued interest in our company.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference for today. We thank you for participating, and we ask that you please disconnect your lines.