Conference Transcript - FLNT 2026-03-10

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the iAccessAlpha Virtual Best Ideas Spring Investment Conference 2026. Our next presenting company is Fluent Inc. If you would like to ask a question during the webcast, you may do so at any point during the presentation by clicking the Ask Question button on the left side of your screen. Type your question into the box and click Send. I'd now like to turn the floor over to today's host, Mr. Don Patrick, CEO, and Mr. Ryan Perfitt, CFO of Fluent Inc. Gentlemen, please go ahead.

Donald Patrick, CEO

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

Operator

It is considered the third transformative wave. Apologies, ladies and gentlemen.

Operator

We appear to have lost our speakers momentarily. One moment, please, while we try to reconnect.

Operator

Once again, ladies and gentlemen, one moment, please, while we reconnect our speakers.

Donald Patrick, CEO

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

Operator

Apologies, ladies and gentlemen.

Operator

One moment, please. We appear to have lost our speakers again. We shall try and reconnect. One moment, please. Apologies, ladies and gentlemen. Once again, we are trying to reconnect our speakers. Please have patience, and we shall try and reconnect.

Operator

Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we appear to have our speakers back with us momentarily.

Donald Patrick, CEO

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

Ryan Perfit, CFO

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

Donald Patrick, CEO

So we've talked about Commerce Media and how exciting it is um you know it really um it's really you know just last year was 50 billion um estimated and it met and it's estimated from a market perspective to double by 2027 so there's a lot of great tailwinds in this business as we as it as people move not only budgets from non-digital to to commerce but also budgets that are moving within digital um platforms like search and display and paid social towards commerce media. So there is a lot of great headwinds that we position ourselves in. I mentioned in three short years, we've been able to build the business with $105 million annual run rate business, which we doubled last year. And we expect to have very high double digit growth opportunities to grow again in 2020, 2026. So we are sitting in the great part of the market. We built a differentiated brand, and we expect this growth to continue to move forward aggressively. Next slide really just gives you a highlight of some of the partners that we work with that we're proud to be partners. You know, our opportunity and how we grow is that we enter into a vertical. We build out our case studies, which is based on driving superior results than any of our competitors, and then we drive deep into that vertical. So we started in 2023 on the retail side. You can see great names like Dick's Sporting Goods and Michaels and Belk and Barnes & Noble and Authentic. We got into ticketing and grocery and also some restaurants, and we will do the same thing. Our growth here is really about getting into a vertical, building out that case study and expertise, and then driving the sales strategy into those verticals. So when we talk about our ability to grow high double-digit growth, it's in the current verticals that we are in. There are significant opportunities beyond those verticals. We just got into travel with our first win, which is Wyndham Hotels, in January this year. We will get into fintech and lifestyle and home services as we go. There's significant an opportunity well beyond 2026 and 2027 to continue to grow this forward. And, you know, if you take a step back across all of commerce media, this shows sort of a flow of a consumer coming onto a website. They come onto the website, they shop, they put things in their shopping cart, they check out, then they post checkout, and then there's CRM after you purchase something. Our Fluid Commerce Media Solution obviously is in that dark blue box called Post Checkout. It is the most relevant and most important piece of that piece because, as I mentioned, you're a consumer. Your credit card is out and you purchased something. And obviously, you have to make sure that the consumer experience is relevant and meaningful. We've established our credibility there and our brand. We are now starting to look into other opportunities, specifically around CRM and loyalty and also in checkout. So we think that the growth within post-checkout is significant, and we think that as we start, as our partners are starting to ask us to move into other areas, into CRM, into pre-checkout, there are significant growth opportunities to continue to grow well beyond 28 and 29 here. And just a quick point, and we'll get a little bit into why we're so excited around why we deliver superior results, but our secret sauce really comes down to that legacy owned and operated business that we built over 15 years. We've been working with consumers. We understand how to make it meaningful, how to connect them to the right brand at the right time. And as I mentioned, a very extremely valuable proprietary first-party data asset that we have. So when we come into it, you know, when we work with our partners, obviously we bring a wealth of experience around how to deal with consumer experience, how to make it meaningful and relevant to that consumer at that point in time, and how to drive a more superior results both for our partners and the consumer and for the advertisers. So that owned and operated business, although financially has been in decline because of the FTC settlement and the uncompetitive playing field that we're able to compete in, it is the reason why it's growing, why commerce media is growing so fast. And we are de-emphasizing this as a financial play and more as an ability to continue to accelerate our competitive moat within commerce media. Yeah.

Operator

And if you talk just specifically around, you know, I know AI is incredibly exciting opportunity for all companies right now.

Donald Patrick, CEO

And the amount of acceleration that's going on on pretty much a daily basis is opening up tremendous opportunities for cost efficiencies and growth and and and acceleration. We have had AI embedded into our commerce media solution since the beginning, both in terms of how do you identify the right consumer, how do you then determine their purchasing behavior, and then also how do you help convert and serve the right ad at the right time to them. So we've been early adopter on the AI side in our solution. Obviously, the fuel of that AI is that proprietary first-party data. So having all those models built off that first-party data is our competitive mode. So I'll get into a couple of quick case studies here on why we're so excited about commerce media and why we think things work so well. The first one is just on a partner side, like what we talked about, Dick's Sporting Goods. This is a different company leading a crafts retailer. It was coming from a competitor, the largest competitor in the market. They were making a number of changes in their business and wanted a more innovative and a more, you know, company that would work with them. You can see the results on the right. Not only did we improve conversions for the consumer on both an app and a web basis, the biggest important thing is on the bottom line, there was 25% additional revenue per session. So compared to our competitor on an apples-by-apples basis, we were able to drive significant increased revenue to that partner because of our proprietary data, our proprietary ad serving, and our approach to consumer experience. So this is something why we feel so emboldened on how fast we are growing and where we'll grow. I think we're sort of running out of time here. This is a quick example of an advertiser aside. This is a pet food company that was looking to scale aggressively. This tells you the power of this model in terms of ability to scale aggressively for an advertiser. So they came to us. They were looking to grow their business, and in a very short time frame, we were able to have 500% conversion lift over eight months, and more importantly, 10x the growth of a media investment by staying at their cost per acquisition target. So this model is not only relevant for that partner and the consumer, but we can scale aggressively for new advertisers coming into it. So I'll wrap up real quickly and then hopefully answer questions. We are at, you know, we made a strategic pivot. We built a phenomenal differentiated brand in commerce media, which is around driving better results. We are now, you know, aggressively accelerating that, and we believe that the business will get back to double-digit revenue growth on a consolidated basis on aggregate continuing businesses. We will get our margins will be improving, and we'll be improving profit along the way. So and there's this is really the beginning stages we have phenomenal opportunity in front of us to not only move from and grow post transaction but other things across the media commerce media landscape. So I will answer any questions that you guys have now but thank you for sticking through our technical difficulties here. So the one question here is what are the key drivers behind commerce media solutions becoming the primary growth. and I think we touched on that a little bit if the key a if we're in a growth market and it's accelerating aggressively but for fluent specifically it's around that first party data asset and our ability to better identify who that consumer is and make it a more relevant ad so the the consumer is is more satisfied it gets it gets a significant offer that they they find valuable, and then on top of it, the advertiser is connected to a very valuable consumer that has higher lifetime value. We talked about what KPIs investors should be looking for to confirm the demand. I think it's going to be around, A, we on a quarterly basis talk about annual revenue run rate for our new partners that are coming on, and it's also around that growth rate of the high double digits year over year, which will be driving that business. We have talked at a high level about other areas in which we're driving things outside of post-transaction like loyalty, and we've also talked about pre-check. You'll be hearing a lot more about that later on this year as we test and learn and scale those new solutions. There's another question around what types of enterprise or advertisers are adopting this platform the fastest, in which verticals are showing the strongest ROI? It's a great question. The earliest people that got into this, the commerce media from a vertical perspective, have been retail. If you think about Amazon and Walmart, those are the ones that really started this channel up in early 2020, and then a lot of enterprise clients have come on from a retail side. ticketing has come on restaurants but you're starting to see it's still very early days most estimates is that post transaction has penetration of a roughly 30% and they obviously believe that other verticals will continue to get into commerce media and the exciting parts of part of this I know we are out of time I'm gonna address the margin that'd be great so the

Ryan Perfit, CFO

So legacy O&O business, in that business, we buy media and we take the risk on that media. And then it's up to us to monetize that through our owned and operated properties. You know, we've managed to margin, but that over time, the margin is compressed there. And ultimately, you know, we're currently seeing in the low 20s in terms of the gross margin on the owned and operated business. Where commerce media differs is that we are not taking media risk on the media or we're not taking risk of media inventory risk.

Donald Patrick, CEO

We have a rev share with the partners there generally.

Ryan Perfit, CFO

So what we do is we kind of lock in a media margin of approximately 35 to 40 percent with those partners. Now, we may offer some early-term incentives or make guarantees, and that's why margins haven't been as high as 35%, 40% on that business. But because we can kind of lock in the margins there and not take the inventory risk, we do expect that business over time, that the margins will trend up into the high 20s, potentially low 30s by the time we get to 2027. at it. So essentially, you know, we do expect a differentiator there. It's not currently being seen because we're investing into new placements and into growth with new partners, but we do expect commerce media to operate at a higher margin over time.

Operator

Any other questions here that I think that's it? Yep, that's great.

Donald Patrick, CEO

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

Operator

Thank you. That concludes Fluent Inc.'s presentation, and you may now disconnect. Please consult the conference agenda for the next presenting company.