Super League Enterprise, Inc. (SLE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Super League's Non-Deal Roadshow. A slide presentation is accompanying today's webcast, which is available in Super League's Investor Relations website at ir.superleague.com. This conference is being recorded, and the replay can also be accessed on the company's IR website. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I'd like to caution listeners that comments made by management during this call may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable security laws. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties, and actual results could differ from those projected in any forward-looking statements due to numerous factors. For a description of these risks and uncertainties, please see Super League's regulatory filings available on SEDAR and EDGAR. Super League undertakes no obligation to revise or otherwise update any statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this call. I would like to turn the floor over to Ms. Ann Hand, Chairman and CEO at Super League and Mr. Clayton Haynes, Chief Financial Officer. You may proceed.

Well, good morning, everyone, and thank you so much for joining our virtual roadshow. I have to tell you, on a personal level, I've never been more excited about the company and our opportunity here in front of us. This has been a labor of love, as you can imagine, 7 years in the making. And what we've created now, the tech and the capability, is something that is really the leadership edge of where the Internet is going, what we call the immersive web. So I'm excited to share my current views with Clayton here today and also to take your questions. Look, we've gone through some tough market times here, and the company is just getting stronger and stronger by the day. And I really believe that we're at an inflection point where as we see the small cap markets start to turn around that we are one of those great companies really poised for growth. So with that, we will kick off. So just first of all, high level, what is Super League? Well, we're a leading strategically integrated publisher and creator of games and experiences across the world's largest immersive digital platforms. What do I mean by that? Well, I'm in many ways talking about those house digital platforms like Roblox and Minecraft and Fortnite, but also where the Web3 digital platforms are increasingly starting to push into Sandbox, Decentraland. And as you'll see, these aren't really about just gaming. These are really about virtual twins or virtual twin world that can be created as well to really change the way a brand shows up in the digital world the same way they try to in a physical world as they engage the next generation of consumers. Now as usual, we always have to go through our forward-looking statements. But if we jump into some of the highlights of the company. First of all, the company is at the forefront, as I said, of really the immersive web. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about the capability backbone we've built and why we believe that we have an ability to move way beyond just the current gaming platforms we're in. We continue to generate over 1 billion monthly impressions, reaching over 100 million monthly active players or users. That's an astounding amount of unique reach per month and more than enough opportunity for us to really have another step change move in our revenue growth. Increasingly, and been augmented by some of the organic and inorganic growth that we've done, we have become kind of a gold standard or that one-stop shop for brands. And so we think that's a distinctive position that we put ourselves in to be a place for people to come to seen as the experts in helping brands kind of move into this next generation of digital strategy for their company. The real kind of simple kind of buckets of what we do, we create immersive experiences and worlds. We have a suite of proprietary media ad products that drive traffic to those worlds and experiences. And all of that is supported by a set of creator tools and analytics and a creator economy. All of these platforms are about democratizing the ability to make virtual worlds and experiences, and we have collected a suite of several hundred creators or developers who help us further augment that reach and deliver those exciting programs for brands. Now we have had step change growth, right? We went from $2 million in 2020 to $11 million in 2021 to $20 million in 2022, right? And we're really proud of that growth. And we see this year as another step change revenue growth. But I would tell you that, that's just about the business that we're in right now today. And if we really try to optimize just the business of in-game advertising alone, we believe there's no reason this company can't do $100 million, $200 million in revenue. But there's more happening, as I said. This is really about the transition that right now the Internet is going through. And the fact that we now have tools and platforms that are allowing digital content to be much more interactive, customized, personalized, sticky. So how did that really happen? Well, first of all, it happened because screens have changed. I mean, they changed a lot, and our expectations of what screens can do have changed. Now often what I say to investors or brands is, look, if Web3 is a little too daunting, if you're thinking a lot about Facebook's Meta and meta being that we're going to live our world in completely immersive environments and headsets all day and never have human contact that is not what Super League in all of its hopes on. What we're talking about is just the way the technology has changed right now. So let's start with simple examples. If you've seen a 4K TV, you know that you don't have to have a headset on to feel like you were at that football game or in that concept. That's what I'm talking about screen expectations. Without headsets already, we want all of our interactions to be much more personalized and again, customized. So we're just talking about a natural evolution that's happened. And a lot of it has been spurred by social media that, again, allow anybody to be a content creator and allowed for there to be real-time interaction with that content. What we're talking about now is the next generation of that. I often say to brands. Think of this as just the next phase of social media or social digital interaction. But again, there's -- it's so much more dynamic and exciting. So what are some of the facts around it? Well, first of all, we've known for years. I mean, really since the inception of the company that gaming was already bigger than TV than the film box office. That was before the pandemic, right? So the pandemic only further fueled it. But also the definition of what is gaming, right? Because gaming isn't what it was when I was a kid. Most of the games today, especially on these virtual world platforms, it's much more about socializing and creation. It's not really about points and winners and losers and leader boards. And so really, it's much more about a digital playground or cold to stack. And that's why you're seeing the explosion in gaming revenues because the definition of that has become much wider than what we thought of as traditional video gaming, call it, 10, 15 years ago. But you can't dispute too that it's where the audience has moved. I talk a lot to Global Heads of Media of companies like Mattel and others. And they can see it, right? They can see that the digital audience that they were been trying to reach and successfully reaching for the most part across social media for the last 10 years. Now remember, 15 years ago, they were reaching them in older media ways like TV and radio and print. But is that shifted to social and traditional digital marketing, it's shifting again because there's this new wedge that's emerged, and it's all of these people hanging out in these digital again, immersive worlds or platforms. And so the audience has moved, but their ad dollars haven't caught up. So I would say that the prediction that the in-game advertising or immersive media market will be a $56 billion market by 2024, is a very narrow definition of the opportunity that we have in front of us. And so it's not just that you need to move there because the audience is there. I heard a stat recently that even surprised me that the average under 18 player or just in general, social media user is an immersive world is about 7.5 hours a week to about 5.5 hours a week of traditional social media. So again, the -- it's just an extension of social media, but it has that great stickiness to it. But also that under 30 consumers on their cell phones, only second to consuming video content, they are consuming immersive world experiences. And so why? Well, it's more exciting and interactive and personalized for the user. But why do brands need to be there? Well, because when you bring your brand into those immersive worlds, the performance is much higher. So the engagement rate increases by over 200% when a brand is in that type of a personalized immersive world and as well conversion rates are higher. So it performs better than traditional digital marketing, which right now, frankly, is going through with ad-blocking technology and other challenges is going through a real issue where they're not delivering the types of performance they were delivering 5, 10 years ago, and we're poised to be at the kind of next wave of where advertising is going. So while our routes start in open gaming, and we love those open gaming platforms, we're remiss to even call the company Super League Gaming. We're not a gaming company. Our future is again in building out what components of the next generation of the Internet. So 3 core things that we do. So first of all, again, just to break it down really simply, we published custom worlds and experiences. So a world could be a dedicated world like what we've done for Yas Island, Abu Dhabi, which I'll take you through a little video tour at the end of today's chat before we go into Q&A or we can create experiences inside existing game worlds, much like what we did with Barbie and her Dreamhouse, which I'll take you through a case study there. The second leg of what we do is marketing solutions. So what does that mean? Those are those media products. Those are the products we have that really help brands and advertisers achieve their core end year campaign objectives that are, again, augment the custom worlds and experiences because that's where they're building brand awareness and loyalty, and we're at that top of the funnel kind of marketing objectives. And then again, the third leg are those tools and services for our creator and builder partners, of which we're a creator and builder as well. So visually, I always think this kind of helps a little bit. So imagine we've created this technology and capability backbone of those 3 components that I just listed out. So how did we manage to reach over 100 million unique players so fast really? When you think about it 18 months ago, we were reaching just a couple of million unique a month. So how are we able to advance that growth and that reach so fast? Well, because of that creator tool or a set of incentives, what it means is that imagine in a way that, that backbone we've built is a sun in a universe or solar system. Well, we -- through those creator tools, we were able to get people who create many games or worlds inside these existing platforms like Roblox and Minecraft to plug their server of their world in and by plugging their planet into our sun or our solar system, we now have several hundred universes or planets connected into that solar system or universe. And so that's a pretty powerful network that we've created. And again, if you add up all the inhabitants of all of those worlds, that's how we get to those 100 million unique players a month that we reach right now. But the exciting thing is, is that sun or that backbone we've built, we're already proving that we can take elements of it and apply it to other 2D and 3D virtual world platforms. And so again, success right now is sitting inside a couple of very specific gaming platforms. but we already are working in improving that we can take brands into other metaverse or call them virtual world platforms and really create a multi-verse strategy for them. Think about that multi-verse. It's no different than if you were a big brand out there, Nike, you wouldn't have an Instagram account and not have a TikTok account, right? You wouldn't just have an Instagram account for a month and then turn it off and then have one again next year for a month. It is a persistent strategy and is a multichannel strategy. And now as we talk about this next generation being in environments that are much more interactive with the users are targeting, where we have a capability to bring and create that multi-verse or multiple virtual world channel strategy to brands. So let's talk about Barbie. It's always fun to talk about Barbie. This is probably one of my favorite campaigns. And I played with Barbie's as a kid, but I mean, it met a lot, maybe too because for me, as a user, I felt some affinity, a beautiful affinity to the brand. But also it was a game that I really have fun playing on a personal level. And so that was different, right, that I wanted to get into Barbie DreamHouse and Explorer. So in this case, Mattel came to us celebrating the 60th anniversary of Barbie DreamHouse. And so the first objective was to recreate Barbie DreamHouse inside one of our existing mini game worlds, right? So in this case, we chose a game world that is a beautiful, very exciting game with a massive audience already in the game that really looks like a cityscape or a neighborhood. And when you walk through that game world on any kind of day or occasion, there could be a ferrous wheel, a pet shop, all kinds of different activities. And it's for you and your decision as a player, as you traverse through the landscape of this kind of boundless fun cityscape to decide where you want to go and what you want to do. Well, for the month of October, often the distance was a beautiful pink mansion. And inside where all kinds of things you could do to engage and talk to Barbie. She had her own 3D Avatar or player. Other Barbie's as well, Barbie characters were in the house, and you could swim in the pool, you could try on clothes on the second floor, you could DJ on the roof deck, all kinds of fun engaging ways for you to really, again, kind of build deeper affinity and loyalty to the different Barbie products and brands. In the course of the month of October, we had 60 million visits to the DreamHouse. Now keep in mind, again, that we are pushing the DreamHouse in front of people's face when you join that game world. It is your decision to traverse along the landscape and make a decision if you want to go in. Just like when you're driving down the street, a billboard doesn't jump in front of your car, right? It's your decision whether you want to engage. So in this instance, we were able to create that kind of visitation and excitement in part because we've built a really compelling fun experience that drove people to want to go and play in Barbie's DreamHouse. But equally, we were able to use some of those very innovative media products that we have to promote and drive people to want to visit. So what am I talking about there? Well, those same 3D characters, those Barbies, that we had hanging out inside the DreamHouse that you could go and talk to and have a chat with, we've baked them into the landscape of other games, too, maybe in a game that looks more like Central Park Barbie was hanging out on a park bench or standing under a tree. And you could go over and talk to Barbie. And if you were interested, she could talk to you about the DreamHouse party and get you excited to want to go visit the other game world where we have this Barbie DreamHouse activity going. So that's the power of the great experience, coupled with the very clever media products is when you put those things together, you can really deliver off-the-charts ROI. In this case, over the course of the month of October, Mattel paid us about $700,000 in total, $400,000 for the Barbie experience, about $300,000 for a Polly Pocket world. Again, we were able to deliver this type of step change type of deliverables and ROI in a really engaging, exciting way and drive excitement about the 60th anniversary. We do a lot to Paramount. Paramount is one of our investors from when we were private. We were able to attract a lot of great strategic during that time, Cinemark Theaters, Logitech as well, large sports team owners. We also have notable investors like Sony Ventures and Evolution Media, which I can talk about a little bit more as well. But Paramount is really from the early on understood that most of their youth properties, Nickelodeon, that what are those kids doing when they're not watching Nickelodeon? They're gaming. And so we've been able to consistently year-on-year deliver some really exciting programs now across the wider Paramount family. So not just Nickelodeon products, but also we do a lot with MTV. We recreated the MTV VMA red carpet, where you could go in and you could vote in a virtual world for your favorite MTV VMA Awards. We were able to recreate some fun kind of MTV game shows as well in these metaverse experiences. So we continue to do a lot and if you can imagine, I mean, Paramount sits on a massive library of brands and powerful IP. In this instance, we want to promote a new SpongeBob related show, Patrick Star. And so what we did is we built an undersea water world adventure inside one of our existing games. So in this case, you could go under see underneath an island and you could play with all kinds of SpongeBob related iconography and unlock different prices as you work through this different kind of underwater maze. And just 2 weeks alone, if you added up all the hours of gameplay that occurred in that undersea adventure that we created, it equated to 164 years of total gameplay time. So again, consistently, we're able to deliver really impressive results for brands. And then this is a new fun one. And this actually, I think, really embodies the way that we're starting to prove that we're not just here to deliver an end game objective. We're not just here to even just deliver a short-term campaign objective. We can actually really drive and measure in a real way. I think this is the silver bullet here for the work we do, a tangible impact on the physical P&L. So in this case, we did a couple of programs for Chipotle last October, a Halloween promotion, where we created a Chipotle restaurant that was a maze. And if you went through that restaurant maze and you unlocked and found the secret word, which was burrito, you could use that word in store on the Chipotle app to actually get a free burrito. At the same time for National Burrito Day we -- there was a burrito builder game that you could play and you could make and wrap and deliver burritos in the game. And as well in that game, there was the opportunity to get in real life Burritos and Burrito Bucks to drive you for both Chipotle app downloads and as well to drive you to foot traffic in store as well to make that conversion. So just some really compelling stats there. The Burrito [ Halloween Maze ] had almost 9 million visits to the experience. And if you look at it from a PR impression point of view, is close to 5 billion impressions for the Burrito promotion. If you total up the 2 promotions, we ended up giving out 130,000 free burritos but more importantly, once we tapped out of the max on the Burrito giveaway, then players still got $5 gift cards. So we didn't stop at max out. We kept finding through Chipotle support ways to keep driving more and more performance. The average player time in the Burrito builder game was 14 minutes, which is about 2x the amount of time people spend typically inside the Chipotle store. So that's, again, pretty deep engagement. And then you could take your Chipotle merchandise on your digital Avatar and you could run around and take it into other game worlds. And if you add up the amount of hours that people were in other game worlds with their Chipotle merchandise on advertising Chipotle, like a walking billboard in many ways. It represented about 100 million hours of players out there promoting their Chipotle experience to other players in other worlds. The most important stat to me of all on this is the way that these 2 programs enabled a massive conversion for digital app downloads and sales. And so the Burrito promotion ended up being the highest digital app download day of all time for Chipotle. What we've heard anecdotally is that these companies are willing to pay $20, $25 to get somebody to download an app like the McDonald's or digital or Chipotle app on your phone. And so the exciting thing here is we were able to deliver their highest app download day and do it at a fraction of that cost. So that ability to convert somebody into an app user to convert them into physical foot traffic in the store is really the crux of the exciting kinds of conversations we're now having about brands about ways we can go far beyond just digital marketing objectives for their companies. And then we work with a ton of great brands, right? I mean, I talk a lot about the fact that our repeat percentage is high. It continues to be high quarter-on-quarter, and I've been talking about it really for the last couple of years that we always are seeing in that 70% to 80% repeat range. So once a brand comes and puts money to work for us and they start to understand and get educated on this channel, they come back and they put more money to work. Now in some ways, though, what kind of should happen is that as we continue to diversify our verticals increasingly more, we might see that repeat percentage drop down, not in the absolute dollars that we're getting from that vertical or that brand. But just the fact now that we're distributed across so many verticals and brands, it's almost inevitable. In fact, it's pretty astonishing. If you look at it last year, we served 85 brands. I mean that's a lot of brands. In the early days of the company, our cores were entertainment and toys. It was what you'd expect, right, because we have such sizable reach with under 18. So it's the Netflixes, the Universals, the Disneys always coming back, and we started to become a go-to for any child family-friendly entertainment release that they were putting out there, we became a part of that campaign objective. And if you look just across those categories, toys as well, Mattel, Moose Toys and others, Spin Master, what you could see was if you added up all their spend last year, each campaign could have looked anywhere from $20,000 to $150,000 or in the case of Mattel, Barbie and Poly were $700,000. But if you added up all their spend across all their campaigns, we had 8 or so of these customers that were in that $1 million to $2 million range with us. But again, it was chopped up into a lot of different types of campaigns. So the first thing that's shifting with those existing verticals is we're able to go back to them now and say, do you even realize you spent that much with us? And actually, just like you shouldn't turn on and off your Instagram channel, this should be a persistent virtual bill border channel for you. So instead of Universal, for example, us turning on a world for Minions, turning it off, turning something back on for the next release. What have we kept a persistent world that we could reskin for you? And again, just make it a permanent channel for you just the same way that you do in social media and out-of-home and in other examples of traditional media. So first, we have the continued depth we're making in the great verticals that we've been in for some time. But then equally, what's happening is, again, diversification of those verticals. So automotive, financial services, we've done stuff with State Farm, a lot in fashion, really exciting things happening in fashion. Fashion and cosmetics makes so much sense. We're currently doing a great program for L'Oréal and Urban Decay. It's because those are the most obvious places or verticals where you can kind of push the boundaries a little bit of trying things out on your digital cell before you buy or try it in your physical cells. The big purchases that are made for the most part inside these virtual worlds, especially in games like roadblocks are people reskinning themselves, changing their hair style, their clothing, their makeup. And so those are really great like fun experimental test beds where people can experiment with their digital cells and then get interested in those products to bring them into their physical world as well and build Affinity that same way. So we're continuing to see that fashion, cosmetics, we're doing a lot as of late with Procter & Gamble CPG, a lot in the food categories, Kellogg's and others. We're excited to see that continued diversification. So the 3 ways we make money. So traditionally, 80% of our revenues last year were from what we will call these innovative advertising products and building these immersive worlds. So again, building Barbie DreamHouse, the media buy as well to drive traffic to it. Increasingly, you're going to see us talk about the building of the world's publishing and content. We're going to break that out and put a little bit of a brighter light on it because we're not just building temporary or pop-up worlds, we're now increasingly building dedicated world. As I said earlier that notion of having a persistent world that we can rotate campaigns or other marketing objectives through. So in the instance where we are creating a bespoke world, and we are running and operating and optimizing that world in a persistent way for these brands and IP partners, we're going to call that our publishing arm or business because that's really what it is and shine a brighter light on it. So while bucket #1 has really been the core, if you think back to that center backbone analogy, that has been us just taking those 100 million uniques and just continually improving our performance at converting those that reach into dollars and objectives for brands and advertisers. Increasingly, you're going to see bucket #3 become exciting and a little bit more in some ways of the future of the company because if we're running a persistent, consistent world for somebody, it's not just going to be in the case of use the Mattel example, $400 or $700,000 for a 30-day program. If we're running a 12-month program, then obviously, those are going to be $3 million, $5 multimillion dollar deals. So that's going to change the company a lot, Bucket 3 because what it means is, is that we aren't going to look subject to the seasonality and the throes of a traditional ad model. Right now, the majority of our revenues land in late 3Q and for the most part, 4Q, right? And we followed that same seasonality spread always, right? That's kind of been kind of the fade a bit of being in an ad-based model. But we want to smooth those revenues out. We want to be able to be able to forecast those revenues and in some ways, take away what some of the overhang is of having an ad model or the risk of it. And the more that we are being asked to run persistent channels or worlds, all of a sudden, you don't need to serve 85 brands to do $20 million or $40 million in revenue, right? You could deliver that with 10 brands. And at the same time, again, from an investor and for us, it's much more of something that you can start to get some comfort around on predictability and again, smoothing out that seasonality effect. Now that said, bucket 2 is our direct-to-consumer business. And that represented last year about $3 million of our $20 million. And I do think for this year as well, it's not going to be a large percentage or portion of our total revenue pie, but it has great potential. So we already have small ownership stakes in a variety of games, and then we fully own and operate a handful of game worlds like Mineville and Minehut. When we operate those worlds, we participate in that direct-to-consumer monetization. And again, that has a recurring nature to it, a predictability to it and really nice margins as well. You're looking at 50% to 80% margins depending on where those worlds are being operated and that kind of economic structure. So we -- you should continue to see us continue to build out our direct-to-consumer reach. What's kind of natural and nice here, if you can imagine, it kind of visually is the more that we're running persistent worlds for others and for ourselves, it means that now we control more of the full economy, right? So if we're running a persistent world for others or ourselves like the Yas Island example, then it means that not only do we control the end user, we control that first-party data. So again, the transition of the company from building out a tech and capability backbone that we're applying today to those 2D powerhouse platforms that exist today that have been around for 10 years. You don't need a VR headset. It's where kids are, but then starting to show how we can apply it multi-verse across other digital platforms, again, already doing it today. And then on top of it, controlling more of that in note because that's when we fully control more of the economy and data, and that changes, again, the nature of the company because now we deliver persistent channels for others. We deliver persistent channels and own that in note for ourselves and all of a sudden, that is not a heavily ad-dependent business. So what are our leverage points? Well, the first one is, I've talked a lot about the pipeline and the diversity of the pipeline. But it is important to note that our deal sizes continue to grow. Again, 2 years ago, if we won a $30,000 to $50,000 deal, we were ringing the bell at the office. Today, it's typical that most of the deals in our pipeline are 6-figure deals. I think on the last earning calls, I said that about 36 of the 58 deals we were pursuing in the pipeline were 6 figures. And then if you looked at the subset of those 36 about 7 or 8 of them were 7-figure deals. So increasingly, it's the kind of the rules of advertising. With scale, you can increasingly take a larger and larger share of advertisers' wallet. So our pipeline is already proving that, right? Deal sizes are getting bigger. We continue to have strong win rates and repeat rates. And again, the notion that we have served well over 100 brands over the last few years alone, 85 last year is really kind of an exciting trend line for the company. But again, keep in mind, as we move into more persistent worlds and programs, those deal sizes are only inevitably going to get larger. So that's leverage point #1. It's just take the reach we have and just sell more of it, convert more of those eyeballs and sell bigger programs. How do we do that? Well, the second leverage point is that 50% of that reach we have is international. We have a domestic direct sales team. So we need for someone else or ourselves to sell all those international audience reach. Well, I don't want to spin up and nor does Clayton teams in each of those. We've been doing the hard work to lean our P&L out. We've taken about 35% of the cost out of the company since June of last year on a full run rate basis. I mean we've never had a more targeted focused company that is only investing in the products where we see not just profitability in the near term, but also the real growth match, right? So something is a nice little profitable business, but it's not going to support the big growth. We put it on the back burner. Those were the decisions we had to make when investors said, keep growing your top line and I need profitability faster. So we stripped a lot of cost out. Well, in doing so, we think that we adopted a really great strategy for what do we do with all that international reach? Well, look, let's find partners. Let's find people who already are existing in those other markets that already have the Rolodex, the brand relationships. So we're talking about some of the top like ad agencies, Venetas who's so strong in the U.K. and Europe, working with Nickelodeon sales team and other sales teams, people who are already putting together packages for big brands that could cut across tons of channels. It could have a TV component out of home, an audio component like iHeart. And that what they're doing is they're selling, they're supplementing those packages with our products. So again, why not? As long as we set those floor CPMs right and try to protect our margins, why not let someone else's P&L do the heavy lifting? Last year and it was really a newly instituted strategy, this notion of creating this international sales partner channel for us. So we have explored to come up the learning curve. They're selling stuff they've never sold before. It still delivered about $3 million of our $20 million in revenue last year. If we can do that in a year where we're really onboarding people and still trying to optimize that network of partners then that tells me there's no reason this can't be worth up to $10 million even of our revenue goals this year. And so we're really excited about, we think, a very shareholder and company friendly way we figured out how to expand our international reach and monetize all that great reach we have, but do it in a way that keeps our P&L nice and lean. And then the third leverage point I've already talked about, but it's just so important because it's our future is this notion of taking everything we've built that looks, again, like it's more of a media advertising model and using that tech to start to really prove that we can create persistent channels and worlds for others and ourselves. And here's the good news. I'm not talking about fantasy here. The Yas Island example is a perfect example of that. This was announced back in October that we are partnering with Abu Dhabi to create virtual twin world, their very successful in real life recreational island called Yas Island. Why do they want to create those worlds? Well, if you look at a static website for yasisland.com, it's going to be hard to get as excited about riding on the world's fastest roller coaster or what if you actually went to that dot-com or that in-game experience, and you've got to write it yourself, right? And so for them, it's not about just always in a nice side project, we're going to make a game for a world. It is actually a core part of their marketing strategy to attract the interest of both young generations and their parents to visit the virtual world and then want to convert in real life. I will tell you virtual tourism has become one of the most interesting new verticals for us because it makes perfect sense and as soon as we started the Yas Island work, we found that we started to get a reputation and had a lot of different companies starting or tourism locations, starting to reach out to us and say, I need that. I need a way you can maybe visit Myrtle Beach and play on our golf courses before you come and visit in real life. So it's been a really interesting opportunity. And you could argue just working on virtual tourism alone could more than underpin our objectives. That's why that relationship we announced with LandVault was so important. LandVault conserves themselves a digital construction company, building out again virtual worlds, and they were doing a lot in Dubai. We were doing a lot in Abu Dhabi, very complementary Web 2 and 3 tech capability that only enhances what we can go out to the market together. And so that partnership, which the market really liked, we got a lot of volume in the aftermarket with that announcement. The excitement is because, again, if you just look at the GCC alone and the kind of money that is being put right now into Web 2 and 3, there is a massive amount of opportunity. And we figured with LandVault, we're 1 plus 1 equals 5. So why not go after GCC together. And so with that, before we go into Q&A, since we're ending on Yas Island, I will go ahead and allow them to take a quick little video tour of Yas Island. So you can just start to see the types of experiences we can create. So again, Yas Island is one of the largest tourism destinations in all of Abu Dhabi. Think of it as like a leisure space. hotels, all kinds of entertainment experiences, but it's also creative space at Warner Bros. has an office there. So sports and entertainment have also turned it into a bit of a creative tank location. Again, I mentioned it has the fastest roller coaster in the world, but equally some other exciting kind of aspects. Etihad Park is a giant stadium for all kinds of different performances, sports and entertainment. And then you have the home of Abu Dhabi's Formula 1 gram free. So again, this is a demo that we've created to show our partners the layout of the world and how we've been able to create this virtual twin of the experience. Now just imagine when you're in that world playing with thousands of other people and you're racing around the track and getting a full experience on your own. So with that, we'll move to Q&A.

Great. Thank you, Ann. We will start the Q&A session for investors and analysts. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Mr. Scott Buck from H.C. Wainwright.

I know the company has some longer-term revenue targets out there. Can you talk a little bit about whether you can reach those targets organically or whether you'll need a little help from M&A and maybe what the M&A environment looks like currently?

Yes. So we did talk about the fact in the last earnings call that we felt that we had a path to being a $100 million company over the course of the next 3 years top line. Now do we have the opportunity with just the reach we have today, if we continue to improve sales force effectiveness, continue to build out further our international network of resellers and continue to develop more of these persistent worlds I've talked about? We do. We could just focus on that. Now the landscape is changing so fast that I would say that I wouldn't want to rest my laurels just on what we have. I think because we're in such a leading position, I want to be sure that we stay ahead. Now the good news is, from an M&A perspective, we don't have to be out there making wild bets, right, in part because the public and private markets are so depressed right now, as we know, it means that there's a lot of distressed companies out there. And so we have many companies reach out to us. I would say we've engaged in 15-plus conversations on the M&A front over the last year. And again, they're kind of coming to us in many cases. What we tried to do is be very judicious. And the -- because we know that right now, cash is king and that we really need to make sure that anything we look at, we really have to have proof that there's a business right there to be had and to be monetized right now that ideally, it's accretive and that we put very little cash to work in the acquisition. I do think the Melon acquisition was just a perfect example of that. It kind of hit it on all fronts. So Melon was sitting here locally in L.A., about a 10-person or so Roblox game development studio, we knew them well. We already have started working with them kind of going after packages or programs together. And so there was, first of all, just a really easy kind of fit about just the ability to integrate. I would say the integration was done in a week. I mean it's just about as easy as you could get, right? And the other important thing is that when we looked at their pipeline. They were doing work with Chipotle. They were doing work with Mattel and American Girl with Mattel. Very complementary programs. But also the CEO, Josh, is just a very rich history in the music industry here. And so he had some very exciting things in the pipeline that were really around the vertical of music. We did a concert last year for Samsung doing a virtual concert. We've done the virtual, as I said, in TV experiences. But we think alone just again, virtual concerts alone or virtual interactions with your favorite or up-and-coming bands is a really interesting opportunity. And we saw that there was a lot of exciting stuff happening in their pipeline. But again, we looked at the team, we looked at the synergies off the bat, their cost structure and said, we can digest this. It will be accretive out of the gate. And also, it does help margins. Because sometimes when we reach our capacity internally and building out game experience or worlds, we have to turn to partners. And so in those cases, we're taking a lower margin because we're sharing that margin. So by upping our capacity significantly in the creation of temporal and persistent game worlds and experiences that improves our margin profile because typically, the game experience margin profile is lower than some of the other margin profile lines. And so we like that. I think investors, if we can follow that judicious approach, my gut is that they would want us to continue to explore smart tuck-in M&A because we're hopefully at a point where the capital markets are going to start to see the light at the end of the tunnel because there is so much distressed assets out there. And we've managed to survive and to continue to grow a model with a ton of market forces against us. So I think we do have a reputation in the greater ecosystem we play in as kind of punching above our weight with the types of brands that we're able to track the kind of dollars they're willing to entrust into our one-stop shop. And so I think all of that proof point really means that we should focus on the inorganic as well. As I said at the start, though, Scott, and I've talked to you about it before, the difference for me is that something shifted over the last year where I didn't think we were just trying to build a nice little profitable company anymore. And when I say little, it's all relative. But the opportunity in front of us and where the Internet is already gone. And again, you don't need a VR headset to know that you're expecting the dot-com experience you have as a brand, it's got to look different. If you look at most of these big brand company websites, their websites look like they're from the year 2005. And yet the tech is already there that they can feel more immersive and experiential the way that the Yas Island example and other examples we've gone through pop. So I'm just super excited about driving the company at $100 million in revenues and frankly, going beyond and taking that leadership position in the immersive web.

And my second question, you guys raised some capital recently. I'm just curious what kind of runway that gives you? And could it get you to the point where you're generating consistent positive adjusted EBITDA.

Yes. So as we talked about on previous calls, our current monthly cash burn rate is in that current $1.3 million range or so. As Ann mentioned, starting in mid-2022, we embarked upon a fairly comprehensive cost reduction and optimization exercise, resulting in approximately 35% reduction in costs going forward on a full year run rate basis. Based on those forecasts and assumptions that we've been using, we do believe that our blended full year 2023 monthly cash burn will be closer to that $1 million range as we see the effects of seasonality impact the bottom line and working capital in the second half of the year and the impact of recent cost cuts on the remainder of the year, but they're starting to see the beginnings of breakeven in late 2023, early 2024. However, we do believe that it will be proving to bolster our balance sheet a bit more to facilitate ongoing working capital needs and to have the capital to fund potential opportunistic and accretive M&A, as Ann mentioned. And of course, we'll look to continue to do so in a thoughtful shareholder-friendly ways.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Mr. Jack Vander from Maxim Group.

I have 2 questions for you. I'll start with the first one. Can you just maybe speak -- I saw your press release from the other week. Can you maybe speak to how much of the content creation you're involved with is utilizing some form of AI or artificial intelligence? And then just how do you see the utilization of AI and use cases developing over the next 12 months, next 3 years, kind of a loaded question there, but is at the forefront of everyone's mind, I believe.

Yes. No. I mean it is exciting technology, and I'll tell you how it applies to us. and why it's important for also the new revenue streams, new creator tools and the margin opportunity. So right now, the ways that we see AI supporting us today and in the near term is the way that we can use it to create content faster, smarter, better, right? So whether we're talking about viewing content like in the press announcement because we do have a content studio that doesn't just make gameplay experiences. They make gaming-centric viewing content as well. That's always a big part of a lot of the programs we deliver to advertisers. Samsung doesn't want us to just create a concert experience. They want other people who are playing Roblox to be able to watch it as well, right? So you have to create that live stream or that compelling content view as well. So not only are we able to spin up content and programs using AI that just mean less manual content time. So that's important because again, less COGS, higher margin on those programs. But where I think it goes from just being an efficiency play to really kind of being an exciting dimension of that third leg of our capability, which are those creator tools we've talked about is increasingly, we're seeing some tech starting to build out there that allows people to co-create worlds. So imagine if you were a brand than you said, "I want you to reinvent Nikeland or showing me what Barbie's DreamHouse of the future looks like. Imagine the ways that you could tap into your loyal fan communities for that co-creation or use AI plus some of your best kind of creators or loyal fans to kind of supplement their capability and kind of creating these types of virtual worlds experiences. It's really not that different than what social media did, right? Social media gave everyone the tools to become their own TikTok star, if they want it. Virtual World gaming platforms like Roblox and Minecraft put the tools in everyone's hands to say, you make the game world. You make the experience, you can do that. And I think AI will only further supplement the exciting ways that you can create worlds faster, create worlds that are much richer in the kind of depth and excitement and again, I see it as a positive for the company. I know that it's a topic that kind of scares people. We're not in the position where we're dealing in many cases today with under 18 gamers. We've always been COPA compliant and get safe certified, and the brand has always stood for that. So we were known as a safe channel for brands and parent-friendly, but there are ways we can smartly use AI to create better experiences or richer content faster or better, and that should help margin and also the quality of what we deliver. I think it's early days to be honest, Jack. I think that we're just starting to scratch the surface of how to use it in a positive way. But so far, our test and use cases, hence that announcement that we made have been extremely positive.

Great. And then maybe just a follow-up, a separate topic. On the first quarter '23 earnings call back in May, you had mentioned that advertisers are coming back along with the demand. Can you maybe just provide a general update on overall advertising demand and what you're experiencing.

Yes. No, I'm glad you followed up on that one. Yes, I did. I think you and I talked about it after the last earnings call, too, because obviously, Q1, it's not so much that we have big programs canceled on us, right? But what was interesting in Q1 was that we saw that advertisers or the brands that we work with most closely. And by the way, I've sat in their chairs before when I ran the brand and marketing at BP. So you are usually locking in your annual budget still in January, right? It doesn't really work that way as companies that you have it all locked in before December 31, and that starting the first day of the new year, you're up and running. But I will say that we -- what we were hearing is things like, you know what, we're going to take our time to lock in. We might not lock until end of February. And I think that with everyone just holding back and saying, let's just see what the Fed does, let's look for more information on recessional impacts. Like I just think people were feeling cautious and other parts of their company were holding back. So the marketing team is going to hold back too. So what I talked about is that we did feel like in 2Q, the RFP started to pick up. and the pipeline, like we could see the new deals coming in. And so I was able to say, hey, look, I'm feeling pretty comfortable that I think we can get to $5 million. I think that, that's a reasonable number for us in Q2, and that was when we were about 2 months through already. And so I continue to see that kind of strength in the pipeline. And I think investors and hopefully, the analysts, too, will be happy to see that while the ad World in general continues to feel a little distressed, right, in Q2. I think it's a great proof point for us to have a strong Q2 and show that we are a little bit more resilient. And we're resilient because we are the next wave of where ad dollars need to go and brands don't understand this new channel. So it's about education, but once they understand it, and they know that's where their audience already is, they need to continue to move those dollars. So I think that our -- the types of investments that we attract from brands are the things that are less likely to get chopped the when the company is going through a little bit of like recessional fear. I think they're going to go and shop those traditional digital marketing budgets, which are already underperforming as so many of these media managers have told us. So I believe that we're kind of sitting a little more at the top of the heap and a little more protected. And I think that's why we've seen Q2 as well prove to be kind of bouncing back pretty nice and strong.

We shall proceed to address the questions that have been submitted in advance through the dedicated landing page for this event. In terms of different -- the first question, in terms of different sources of revenue, add direct-to-consumer and content, how do you expect the weighting of each of those to grow? Will they be equal over time? And what are the margin profiles for each?

Yes. So a little bit I alluded to that earlier, but I think you're going to continue to see that direct-to-consumer is going to represent a small percentage that kind of 5% to 10% range this year. And then what you're going to see is the rest of that distribution is going to be split between our innovative ad products and are publishing kind of experiences. And the difference will be that increasingly more of those publishing experiences aren't just going to be temporal, 3-day experiences. They're going to be more equivalent to the Yas Island experience and others were running persistent programs. So inevitably, publishing in content, if you want to say that the split between media and experience last year was kind of 60-40, we'd like to see that turn. And we'd like to see the publishing and persistent experiences be the largest. This year, they'll probably continue to be about even. But I think starting next year, you'll see that publishing and content will be our leading revenue category. Again, that's where we have the opportunity to control that end node and that full user experience. So it inevitably has the potential to have some direct-to-consumer spin-off as well from it. And so over time, I do believe that publishing and content will be our strongest performing revenue. But equally, that we'll see some nice balance in direct-to-consumers growing. Again, not so much this year in a material way. But over the course of the next couple of years, some better balance between media and direct-to-consumer. Again, direct-to-consumer is good because the margin profile is higher. And then it's really allowing our media products instead of being our dominant revenue stream, which again has that seasonality impact to it. It becomes a nice important revenue stream that augments the work we do in publishing and augments the way that we further drive traffic to monetize direct-to-consumer, but it's not the full core and therefore, we're not having that same seasonality.

The next question is, recent filings show significant sales by a top shareholder in Super League, TPG. Over the past few weeks, given the size of their position and this trend, can you provide any clarity on why they are selling?

Yes. So it's a good question. So I think for some of our investors that I've spoken to over the last couple of weeks, perhaps they didn't realize that TPG controls those shares. So I want to first just give context on how and why. So when we made one of our acquisitions over the last few years, specifically Mobcrush, which was us further augmenting building out our sales team and our influencer strategy because we do sell a lot of advertising dollars through influencer deals as well. When we merged with Mobcrush and brought them in, Mobcrush dominant shareholder at the time was a company called Evolution Media fund. And that was a CAA-TPG fund. That fund has kind of since been kind of the fund that initiated that set of investments many years ago in Mobcrush has since been wound down, just like any private equity fund, they have lives on them, right? And that's like an 8- to 10-year fund that's sitting out there. So I talked to our Champion at Evolution every few months. Very excited about the company and how well we've grown. But what's happened is in TPG, what they're doing is they're just looking at it and saying, hey, well, this fund is gone. It's over. Now it's great that we've got this little diamond in the rock now called Super League that acquired one of our companies in the fund but the rest of the funds are -- it's over. And so what's happened is I've reached out the TPG a week or 2 ago and said, hey, we are exactly the kind of company you want in your wider portfolio. So the first conversations I had was some of the capital markets folks. And I just told them up the company, they don't know. We're a drop in the bucket, right, to TPG. And then what happened is they then said, you need to talk to -- you need a new business owner basically. They've got massive Internet digital marketing verticals that we're just not being hosted by. And so I have a call later today with the gentleman to really talk to them about where can we go? Because I do believe and I know it just from the conversations we're having, the way people reach out and are excited by this space, and they can see the ecosystem and they don't see a lot of dominant players, right? And I do think there are opportunities as proven by some of our smaller M&A for bigger roll-ups. And I think Super League is sitting in this really prime position. And because I talked to private equity people who kind of when I throw out that hypothesis, don't look at me like I'm crazy, I think it's important that we have a large shareholder who really knows who we are. And we were kind of trapped a little bit talking primarily to our CAA at Evolution folks and now is really our big opportunity to go out and let them know who we are and to change the nature of that conversation. The truth is none of them their selling should not scare investors because all it is, is as anyone knows, they're a massive machine. They have a fund that was winding down 2 years ago. We knew that. That's not a surprise. It happens every day in those big machines. It's just now that we've moved into a transaction space, and we need to get ourselves back into a place to host the company. And I think that can lead to not just exciting commercial opportunities, but again, potentially new forms potentially of investment that could really scale this company much faster. So I'm excited to have the opportunity to just speak very openly with a wider group of investors about it because this isn't a bad thing. This is a door just potentially just got kicked open. So that's my goal.

The next question is, after the Melon acquisition, how much do you see acquisitions playing a part in Super League's growth moving forward?

Yes, I think I covered this with Scott's question. So just to be in the interest of time, why don't we go ahead and move to the next question.

Sure. The next question is, any update on the partnership with LandVault and how things are progressing that you can speak to?

Yes. So I did allude to a little bit of that during the slide presentation. But yes, LandVault, again, there aren't many of us who are sitting on this edge of immersive web but winning real business right now at it. So we're doing this significant work in Abu Dhabi. They are doing significant work in Dubai, and that's just the beginning of the opportunity for wider GCC. And again, they have a very interesting set of existing Web3 creator and monetization tools inside their current tech and have a very interesting product road map. And it's -- again, it's complementary. And so there's a lot of small M&A opportunities and small commercial partnership opportunities. But I'd say LandVault is a really good example of -- and then there's kind of some drop the mic moves. And I think LandVault and Super League and a commercial partnership, as I said earlier, I think if we just focused on virtual tourism alone, GCC, there's just tons of money being put to work there. And there really is no other pairing that has the experience and the proven tech the way when you put those 2 powerhouses together.

The last question is, from a sales perspective, are there any particular industries or verticals that you target, session or entertainment, for example?

Yes. And we talked about this a little bit, too. What I'd like to just say though, in closing with the questions, what you really need to think about is, I talked about how fashion and cosmetics are perfect areas because the whole point of being in these virtual worlds is that you get to create a digital expression of your real self and you get to test the boundaries of that self-expression. And the first way you do that is in how you dress yourself up, right? And so those are the perfect types of brands and categories to create a digital experience that then translates into a physical conversion as well. And look, it's not that different than the Chipotle Burrito Builder. You make a fun burrito in real life and then you go into the store and it makes you maybe kind of try some new things with your burrito selection. But certainly, fashion and those types of areas, we think, are these just easy verticals. You're already seeing it. Tommy Hilfiger has a multi-verse strategy. They get it that they need to be not just in one of these platforms, multiple platforms, and it's just the new marketing channel. And again, no different than in an Instagram account. I am, though, what I would want people to really try as much as you can to kind of pull up high and realizes is that anything in your world that has a physical experience, a soccer game, going to a great museum, going to a concert, as we mentioned, going on a vacation, taking a class, every one of those things that's in your physical life can have and should have a virtual twin. And so I think you're going to be excited by some announcements that we have coming up here in the next 30 days or so. So we'll just continue to, I think, open up both brands and investors' minds a bit about the fact that everything can and should have a virtual twin in a positive way. Why can't anyone take a great class from some of the best professors in the world. Why can't anyone attend a fantastic Broadway play. These are the types of ways that I think will continue to open people's minds about again, that this isn't really about gaming. This is about changing the way that brands and IP can engage with consumers to build a relationship with them digitally that then converts into a physical relationship as well. And you need both because kids these days, they don't see a difference between their digital life and their physical life. It's them. And if you want to reach them and really build that kind of brand conversion and crossover, you need to reach them right where they are, and that's the way you're going to drive them into a future kind of additional relationship with them. But again, whether it's sports, music, education, fashion, art design, health and wellness, think as big as you can, any of those categories right now have an opportunity to explore how virtual immersive worlds can augment their physical strategies.

Great. I would like to turn the call over to Ms. Ann Hand, Chairman, CEO.

Well, thank you all for joining us today. Thank you for being patient in these markets, for being engaged in our story and just know that Super League is all about creating positive inclusive brand experiences. The DNA of the company is based on being transparent and doing the right thing, frankly. And so again, as one investor said, the market isn't your falling, but it's your problem. Clayton and I have really heated those words, and we recognize that this is a tough time for investors and for all small cap companies. But if you can hang in there with us, we're here and please don't hesitate to reach out to myself or Clayton or to MZ our IR team because what we want to do is just continue to just have an open conversation as we ride out again, hopefully, what is the worst of this valley that we've been through. And I think, frankly, we all deserve a little sunshine over the next 6 to 12 months. So thank you.

Thank you. Super League's virtual Non-Deal Roadshow has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.