Nexxen International Ltd. Q1 FY2023 Earnings Call

Welcome to Tremor International's First Quarter conference call for the period ending March 31, 2023. This call is being recorded, and a replay will be available on the Investor Relations section of Tremor's website. I will now turn it over to Billy Eckert, Vice President of Investor Relations, for introductions and the reading of the safe harbor statement. Please proceed.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Tremor International's first quarter ended March 31, 2023 earnings call. With us on today's call are Ofer Druker, Tremor's Chief Executive Officer; and Sagi Niri, the company's Chief Financial Officer. This morning, we issued a press release, which you can access on our website at investor.tremorinternational.com. During today's conference call, we will make forward-looking statements. All statements other than statements of historical fact could be deemed as forward-looking. We've asked caution and reliance on forward-looking statements. These statements include, without limitations, statements and projections regarding our anticipated future financial performance, market opportunity, growth prospects, strategy and financial outlook, and forward-looking views on macroeconomic and industry conditions as well as any other statements concerning the expected development, performance, and market share or competitive performance relating to our products or services. All forward-looking statements are based on information available to us as of the date of this call. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those implied by these forward-looking statements, including unexpected changes in our business or unexpected changes in macroeconomic or industry conditions. More detailed information about these risk factors and additional risk factors are set forth in our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including, but not limited to, those risks and uncertainties listed in the section entitled Risk Factors in our most recent annual report on Form 20-F. Tremor does not intend to update or alter its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law. Additionally, the company's press release and management statements during this conference call will include discussions of certain measures and financial information, IFRS, and non-IFRS terms. We refer you to the company's press release for additional details, including definitions of non-IFRS items and reconciliations of IFRS to non-IFRS results. At this time, it is my pleasure to introduce Ofer Druker, CEO of Tremor International. Ofer, please go ahead.

Thank you, Billy, and welcome to everyone joining us today. I will begin by providing an overview on the progress of our key initiatives as well as on our results and strategy then we'll hand over to our CFO, Sagi Niri, to discuss our financials. We will then open the call for questions. As a reminder, Q1 2023 results reflect the combined performance of Tremor International and Amobee, while Q1 2022 figures do not include results from Amobee. During the first quarter, we made excellent progress executing our strategic vision to combine Tremor International and Amobee to create a horizontally integrative CTV and video focused ad tech platform, fueled by unique and exclusive data that offers a unified comprehensive solution for advertisers and agencies as well as publishers and broadcasters. We believe once the integration is completed, our platform will feature some of the most robust, effective, and differentiated capabilities for both sides of the ecosystem. Shortly after closing the acquisition, we executed an initial efficiency plan over Q3 and Q4 2022 to consolidate our team into one, achieving roughly $60 million total in annualized operating cost savings. In Q1, after evaluating both the Tremor Video and Amobee DSPs, we made a strategic decision to move CTV and video algorithms and capabilities to the Amobee DSP, given its stronger enterprise self-service capabilities and will sunset Tremor Video DSP. We also successfully moved the majority of the managed business over to the Amobee DSP during Q1, giving us enhanced confidence that our plan to largely conclude the technology integration of Amobee by the end of H1 2023 remains on track. We continue to expect total annualized operating cost synergies of approximately $65 million related to the integration, including the previous $50 million we achieved, and we'll continue to seek additional savings opportunities to drive further efficiency. In Q1, we also invested significant and necessary resources and management efforts, making material progress on the combination, integration, and enhancement of our combined sales team. Along those lines, we successfully unified our sales processes and sales platforms in Q1 and provided advanced training to our company team, which we believe better prepares the company for its next phase of growth and its accelerated CTV market share gains. As we mentioned in our call, combining the sales team and processes took longer than initially anticipated. However, we now feel confident in our positioning with customers and prospects following this investment. Amobee customers have recently begun demonstrating increased interest in the company's CTV and video solutions and are increasingly leveraging Unruly for inventory to realize the data and cost advantages of transacting end-to-end. We have also recognized some notable recent improvements in the advertising environment since early Q1 and anticipate continued momentum in advertising demand for the remainder of 2023, particularly in the second half. We feel that we successfully achieved much of the integration heavy lifting mainly over Q4 and Q1, which required significant management team focus. Now with the sales team and processes unified and the advertising markets showing signs of ongoing recovery, we're encouraged by the early signs of momentum. We also believe the advanced tech platform we have created through the acquisition and integration, as well as our recent investment in innovation, strongly prepares us to take a leadership position in the new era of CTV. We believe the CTV advertising ecosystem is poised for a massive boost and accelerated growth as linear TV advertisers increasingly seek to significantly expand their reach into the streaming ecosystem to reach engaged and expanding audiences. We feel from both technology and operational perspectives that we are well situated to work with these advertisers and that our recently released cross-planning tool can enable better incremental reach than most current practices and offerings available in the market. Our progress achieving our technology strategy was recently further underpinned by the launch of our first-to-market cross-platform planning solution, which we are incredibly excited about, as it is a solution the industry has been seeking for years. The technology enables linear advertisers to expand into streaming and CTV, reducing deduplication when presenting across platforms and further enhancing our CTV growth opportunity. This capability strongly positions the company as advertisers and agencies seek solutions that enable them to optimize returns on ad spend and more effectively and efficiently plan and deploy spend across linear TV and CTV to reach desired incremental audiences. We believe our ability to now offer customers linear planning and cross-planning capabilities significantly expands our total addressable market. According to eMarketer, advertisers in the next few years will spend nearly $100 billion annually on advertising in the U.S. for linear TV and CTV. With our new solutions, we feel that we are optimally positioned to capitalize on this enlarged opportunity as we will be able to help customers better navigate the continued expansion of combined linear TV and CTV advertising with solutions equipped to assist them as two platforms converge. Many major broadcasters and agencies are involved in extensive testing of this product, and we are encouraged by early signs that these tools can drive larger deals, increase product adoption, and higher levels of CTV-related activity on our platform. While we are encouraged that the integration of Amobee technology and sales team will help accelerate our future CTV growth, which we have already seen evidence of so far in Q2, we are also pleased to have achieved strong CTV growth during Q1 ahead of this initiative during the fourth. CTV, one of our primary focuses as a business, delivered strong performance during Q1 2023 as we were able to generate CTV revenues of $21.3 million, reflecting year-over-year growth of 34%. Our continued growth and market share gains within CTV are a byproduct of the intentional strategic investment we have made to enhance our product capabilities over the past several years for the benefit of our customers and partners. We continue to feel very strongly that we are well positioned for leadership within the industry, particularly to achieve further growth and share gains within CTV for several reasons. We believe advertisers will continue flowing to CTV and increasingly leverage programmatic solutions and meet expectations for continued growth in the ad-supported content, particularly as broadcasters and advertisers further expand into CTV. This represents trends that we are heavily indexed to and have been increasing our footprint in. For example, CTV revenue reflects 34% of our programming revenue in Q1 2023 versus 27% in Q1 2022. While programmatic revenue reflects 87% of revenue during Q1 2023 compared to 73% in Q1 2022. Additionally, we continue to believe that carriers will increasingly partner with horizontal end-to-end platforms because of their proven ability to better optimize supply paths and provide strong cost and data advantages for customers. As the lines between DSPs and SSPs continue to blur, we feel that we have strong comparative operational advantage versus peers moving towards end-to-end that have operated as one-sided businesses for February. We have deeply rooted and rapidly expanding relationships on both sides of the ecosystem and also believe we have tech advantages as our scaled platform has operated horizontally for several years. We also believe the added capabilities and larger market opportunities gained through Amobee, coupled with the expected benefit from our VIDAA investment, will further enhance our CTV growth opportunity. In the first quarter, we generated contribution ex-TAC of $66.9 million, reflecting a decrease of 6% year-over-year, while contribution ex-TAC decline in Q1, programmatic revenues was $62.5 million in Q1, which reflects 6% year-over-year growth, serving as a strong underlying indicator for our progress. As expected, Q1 was challenging as advertisers, particularly early in the quarter, reduced spending amid continued market pressures. January was a very weak month for advertising. While February and early March were slightly better, late March showed signs of improvement. I'm pleased to report that we have observed significant growth in advertiser activity on our platform to this point in Q2 compared to Q1, and as a result, we expect sequential quarterly and year-to-year growth in contribution ex-TAC and CTV revenue during Q2. We believe this growth will be driven by improved advertising conditions, our recent sales force enhancement, greater anticipated level of CTV-related cross-selling, and increased interest in our combined platform suite of technology planning and data solutions. As a result of the historically weak contribution ex-TAC generated during Q1, we generated an adjusted EBITDA of $8.9 million, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 12% as a percentage of revenue and 13% as a percentage of contribution ex-TAC. As Sagi will touch on later, our end-to-end infrastructure enables significant operating leverage. So, when the advertising environment is weak, shocks to our contribution ex-TAC can have an outsized impact on our profitability. While these margins were historically weak for us, our ability to achieve some degree of profitability amid challenging market conditions in Q1 highlighted the efficiencies, durability, and resiliency of our model and a core reason we intentionally choose to operate horizontally. With that said, we are cautiously optimistic we will achieve significant sequential quarterly growth in profitability and adjusted EBITDA margin expanding during Q2 2023 compared to Q1 2023 amidst the expectation of higher contribution ex-TACs. We are importantly continuing to expand our relationship in CTV, while our partners at VIDAA and Hisense further increase their scale, offering, and reach. For example, we recently announced a partnership with TCL FFALCON. The partnership grants advertising, leveraging Amobee direct access to TCL FFALCON innovative ad units on premium CTV inventory in the TCL channel through Unruly, providing the opportunity to deliver impactful and relevant ads to audiences across the U.S., Europe, and APAC. In addition, as VIDAA, a CTV operating system and streaming platform in which we invested $25 million, continues to grow its distribution, our global exclusive ACR data agreement enabled by our investment is expected to increasingly benefit from. Later this year, we expect VIDAA's reach to grow to a significant enough level of smart TVs in the market that we'll be able to generate revenues from advertisers seeking to leverage this critical and fast-growing global ACR data set for CTV targeting and measurement. This, coupled with our ad monetization exclusivity in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia on VIDAA media gives us optimism for strong future CTV-related revenue opportunities as VIDAA continues to onboard more ad-supported content and as its offerings such as VIDAA story continue to scale. Hisense, which ranked number 2 globally for TV shipments in 2022, also announced it will make NBA League Pass accessible on Hisense TVs in North America, beginning with the 2023-2024 season. Sports-related CTV advertising opportunities are amongst the most desired by advertisers, given significant and consistent viewership. Through our relationship with VIDAA and Hisense, we anticipate potential additional revenue opportunities related to this development as well as future CTV-related sports advertising opportunities. In Q1, we completed our $20 million ordinary share repurchase program, repurchasing approximately 2.5 million ordinary shares, which reflected an investment of £7.3 million or $8.8 million. From March 1, 2022, through March 31, 2023, between our two completed programs, we repurchased roughly 19.4 million ordinary shares or approximately 13% of shares outstanding, reflecting a total investment of approximately £77.3 million or $95 million. We will continue to evaluate initiating a new repurchase program to ensure sales remain at a discounted valuation as well as other capital allocation strategies. During Q1, the company added 45 new actively spending first-time advertiser customers across travel, real estate, financial services vertical, and others. We also added 62 new supply partners, including 49 in the U.S. during Q1, along with a media and award-winning media agency also calendaring as a preferred partner. Finally, as a key milestone in our progress combining and integrating Amobee and Tremor's companies and platform, we will announce our new unified name by the end of this quarter. When we rebrand, we will consolidate all of our brands under one name as we believe this will enhance our commercial focus and better convey the value proposition of our unified sales team platform. With that, it's my pleasure to turn the call over to Sagi.

Thank you, Ofer. Today, I will review highlights and key financial and operational drivers of our Q1 2023 performance, and we'll also discuss our forward-looking guidance. As a reminder, Q1 results reflect the combined performance of Amobee and Tremor International while Q1 2022 results do not include results from Amobee. For the three months ended March 31, 2023, we generated a contribution ex-TAC of $66.9 million compared to $71 million in Q1 2022. Alongside, Q1 adjusted EBITDA of $8.9 million compared to $38.7 million in Q1 2022. As a result, we generated an adjusted margin of 12% on a revenue basis and 13% on a contribution ex-TAC basis during Q1 2023, which compared to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 48% on a revenue basis and 54% on a contribution ex-TAC basis during Q1 2023. We observed significant weakness in the advertising environment during Q1 with the most severe weakness occurring in January and February. This weakness was driven by well-known challenging market conditions that drove uncertainty in advertising demand, with particular softness observed in food business, personal finance, entertainment verticals, and performance-related activities, as well as in mobile advertising. However, since early March, advertisers have been more active on our platform, particularly in CPG, and we've seen encouraging signs of stability, better visibility, and momentum as April was stronger than March and as May has been stronger than April. We are also cautiously optimistic that momentum will continue into the second half of 2023 based on our current visibility. During the first quarter, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin were significantly lower than the historical level, which was driven by the weak environment early in the quarter, our ongoing integration of Amobee, and the nature of our end-to-end infrastructure. Once we nearly complete the integration of Amobee by the end of Q2, we expect to realize positive effects on our sales organization, cost structure, and profitability compared to Q1 and believe we will save on taxes by consolidating the two DSPs into one enhanced class. Additionally, our enhanced horizontal infrastructure will enable a high degree of operating leverage. However, during times of constrained advertising budgets and lower overall spending on advertising, maintaining a high fixed cost infrastructure, like we encountered in Q1, can result in significantly lower profitability. With that said, the great benefit of operating a business with strong operating leverage, particularly on that is very liquid and cash generated, such as ours, is that when advertisers are more actively leveraging the platform and the company is generating higher levels of revenue, most of that added revenue flows through to profitability, enabling us to quickly grow profitability, expand margins, and generate robust cash flow. As I mentioned, we have cautious optimism for Q2 based on the higher level of advertiser activity we've seen across our platform to this point in the quarter, and believe we will be able to generate increased adjusted EBITDA and expand adjusted EBITDA margin in Q2 2023 compared to Q1 2023. Despite the weakness in contribution ex-TAC during the first quarter, we generated record Q1 programmatic revenue of $62.5 million, which reflected 6% year-over-year growth from $59.1 million generated in Q1 2022. Programmatic revenue as a percentage of revenue increased to 87% in Q1 2023 compared to 73% in Q1 2022. These results were boosted by our ongoing focus on programmatic activities as well as the expanded programmatic footprint we gained through Amobee. We believe our increased programmatic footprint will be ongoing norm as we continue to expect to experience growth in programmatic revenue and declines in revenue associated with our performance business for the remainder of 2023. CTV, as Ofer mentioned, continued to be a bright spot as we gained fair market share and achieved strong year-over-year growth. In Q1 2023, we generated CTV revenue of $21.3 million, reflecting a Q1 record and 34% growth compared to $15.8 million in Q1 2022. Video revenue continued to account for a majority of our Q1 2023 programmatic revenue at 75%, which was down from 93% in Q1 2022. This reduction is a byproduct of the ongoing integration of Amobee. When we acquired Amobee, we didn't have as large a footprint in video and CTV at Tremor International. However, we're encouraged by initial signs of our ability to cross-sell our Amobee customers to leverage our robust CTV and video capabilities, including positive signals that several Amobee customers have begun to leverage Unruly for inventory due to the end-to-end platform benefits as opposed to other SSPs. We expect video revenue will increase as a percentage of programmatic revenue beginning later in 2023. Once we complete the integration of Amobee and as the company sales team continues to execute on cross-selling its video capabilities to Amobee customers and attract new customers. Our robust suite of CTV and video solutions, differentiated offerings, and strong partnerships, coupled with streaming services that continue to launch new ad-supported tiers and advertisers increasingly seeking programmatic solutions, particularly within CTV, give us high confidence in our future growth prospects. We also anticipate continued improvement in the advertising environment during this half of this year, while having added scale as a company, more customers with strong cross-selling opportunities, a significantly expanded addressable market, and the ability to service customers holistically and across their entire workflow. Turning to our cash flow. We used $7.9 million in net cash from operating activities during Q1 2023 after generating net cash from operating activities of $16.1 million during Q1 2020. This reduction was largely a byproduct of the weak advertising demand environment earlier in Q1. During the first quarter, we also incurred approximately $5.1 million in one-time severance and retention bonus-related costs associated with the reorganization of Amobee employees into the Tremor International base as the company continues to focus on efficiency and optimizing its combined cost structure. As of March 31, we had $89.1 million net cash as well as $80 million undrawn on our revolving credit facility, providing comfortable liquidity for the ongoing needs of the business. We also generated a non-IFRS diluted loss per ordinary share of $0.03 for Q1 2023 versus non-IFRS diluted earnings per ordinary share of $0.17 in Q1 2022. Finally, I will now turn to our outlook. We continue to expect challenging market conditions to weigh on advertising budgets for the near future, at least through the end of H1 2023, but anticipate improved results throughout the remainder of 2023 compared to 2022 and the early part of 2023. Thus far in Q2 2023, Tremor has experienced stronger advertising demand compared to late 2022 and early 2023. We are cautiously optimistic that the higher level of advertiser activity observed on our platform so far in Q2 will result in sequential quarterly and year-over-year growth in contribution ex-TAC and CTV revenue, as well as sequential quarterly growth in adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin expansion in Q2 versus Q1. Based on current visibility, we expect contribution ex-TAC, CTV revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted EBITDA margin will experience both sequential and year-over-year increases from H1 2023 to H2 2023 as well as from H2 2022 to H2 2023. Additionally, we believe we will experience significant updates in sequential quarterly growth in Q4 2023 versus Q3 2023, as well as significant year-over-year growth in Q4 2023 versus Q4 2022 in contribution ex-TAC, CTV revenue, and adjusted EBITDA, as well as adjusted EBITDA margin expansion over those two periods. While we acknowledge that the challenging market conditions may persist and weigh on advertisers' willingness to spend over the near term, we are confident that we can continue to drive growth and expand profitability for the remainder of 2023 due to several factors. First, we believe that our sales team has made important and necessary changes to unify the team and consolidate processes to focus on driving larger enterprise deals and an increased number of end-to-end platform customers. We also anticipate that the integration of Amobee will essentially be completed by the end of Q2, and that our investment in VIDAA will begin generating revenue later this year. These accomplishments, combined with the expectation for enhanced visibility, increased stability, and an improvement in the advertising demand environment during the second half of 2023, are expected to bode well for Tremor and its shareholders. As such, we are pleased to reiterate our previous guidance for full-year 2023, contribution ex-TAC of approximately $400 million, and full-year 2023 adjusted EBITDA of $140 million to $145 million. Additionally, for full-year 2023, we expect programmatic revenue to reflect approximately 90% of full-year 2023 revenue.

Thank you, Sagi. While 2023 has not been without challenges, it has been an exciting year for us so far, and we are pleased to have continued growing our CTV market share during Q1 while positioning ourselves for continued expansion within CTV for the remainder of the year and beyond. We are also encouraged to see early signs of advertisers increasingly expanding again and have cautious optimism that this momentum will continue during the latter half of 2023. The investments we made to enhance our CTV capabilities and sales organization, we believe have already begun paying off since the end of Q1. We also believe our cross-platform planning is a game-changing technology that will continue to gain further traction with major broadcasters and agencies. Having this unique ability to plan linear and growth platform campaigns puts us at the center of a major conversion in the U.S. TV advertising market. We believe we are now better able to capitalize on these conversions with enhanced scale and sophisticated planning capabilities that benefit our customers. We also believe that operating a horizontal platform places us at the center of the buy and sell side of the ecosystem with significant data that provide advantages for customers with data-driven solutions that optimize returns on ad spending and help them reach desired audiences. As we finalize the integration of Amobee, we are also excited to launch our new unified brand, and for VIDAA and Hisense to continue growing their footprint and distribution all at a time when the advertising market is building renewed momentum. This combination of factors gives us optimism that we are well positioned to become leaders in the new era of CTV and continue growing CTV market share, accelerating contribution growth, and achieving strong profitability for the remainder of 2023. I want to thank our shareholders for their continued support and our employees for their hard work. I look forward to continuing to work together to realize the company's growth prospects. Operator, we will now take questions.

And your first question comes from the line of Matt Swanson from RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Yes. Thanks, guys. So, congratulations, I guess, first on the integration of Amobee. Could you maybe touch on what’s left to do from an integration standpoint in Q2 and maybe what the cost associated with it are roughly on a completion percentage? And then it was also really good to hear about the initial kind of cross-sell success of seeing Amobee customers start to move more towards video. Could you just elaborate a little too on what gives you the confidence that continues in the second half of the year?

Sure. I would take this one. So, from the integration perspective, we basically, as we said, already decided to use the Amobee DSP because of its depth and capabilities around enterprise solutions, which is very important for our future. And what we've done in Tremor International, we basically moved all the algorithms and capabilities that were involved in our DSP related to CTV and video to the Amobee DSP in order to sunset the Tremor DSP to have one powerful DSP. So now we believe that we have a strong and capable omnichannel DSP that we are able to use, which is also an enterprise solution. What is left until the end of the quarter, as we said in the PR and in our message, we have already moved most of our managed activity. And now we are well into the process of moving the remaining third-party clients that are using our DSP to the new DSP, and then by the end of this quarter, we will be able to sunset the Tremor DSP. Apart from this, there is also a minor integration of Amobee’s that will happen until the end of the year. But this is a minor compared to the DSP that we already integrated. The second point that you asked us about the cross-platform activity. So I think it's a great question, and I'll expand on that. What we believe is happening in the market right now is that more advertisers that are used to buying linear TV also want to reach customers or potential customers in the CTV area. And this is a growing force from data that we see; the percentage of reach from CTV and streaming is growing compared to linear. So, people are really open to doing that. In the past, for many years, people were talking about the extension of linear advertisers into CTV and streaming. But I think that now, the time is right. After a few years, customers have changed their habits to consume content on CTV. The second thing is that there is now a lot of content available on streaming and CTV. And the last point is the technology enabling them to do that. What we are offering is the ability to plan their linear TV spending while making sure through our cross-platform technology that if they are interested in buying streaming and CTV, they can do so only with incremental usage and not avoid duplication, which is very meaningful because, as we know, people don’t want to pay twice for the same user. Essentially, they can reduce deduplication and run great incremental targeting on CTV. There’s already significant interest from major broadcasters, brands, and agencies wanting to test this technology, and they've had good success, and we believe it is the future.

Yes, that was a great answer. Super helpful. One other thing you mentioned is that there seems to be increased momentum towards companies. It appears that the distinction between the demand-side platform and the supply-side platform is becoming less clear as more end-to-end solutions are being created. Does this market momentum make it easier for you to convey your value proposition to new customers, given its growing prevalence in the ad tech space?

Of course. We started this process already in 2019. We believe that having an end-to-end solution, which includes all the solutions that advertisers, brands, and publishers need, meaning the DSP, the DMP, the data elements and segments, and the SSP, which enables them to reach the right audiences is very important, not just for clients on both sides, but also for us to keep healthy margins that enable continuous investment in technology and innovation. Recently, we have seen companies move past just specializing on either side, demand or supply, and start enabling their clients and publishers to do both as we do. The advantage we have is that we have been implementing an end-to-end framework for over four years. From a technology perspective, we have a significant advantage, and our integrated solutions have been functional for several years now. We have also added planning tools that are key because better planning leads to better results, especially this year when advertisers want to maximize their ROI. Furthermore, I would like to highlight our unique and exclusive data that we obtained through our agreement with VIDAA, which grants us access to ACR data globally on an exclusive basis for the next few years. As VIDAA continues to grow as a leader in CTV and smart TVs, this will give us access to valuable data for targeting and measurement, which is helpful for all aspects of our operations. Our ecosystem, the platform we've created, is receiving increasing recognition, and our chosen business model is also gaining traction among market participants.

And your next question comes from the line of Laura Martin from Needham. Your line is open.

Hi, good morning, you guys. I've got a couple. So, let's just build on the last point about data. I love the data deal. But my question is, how do you think about what data you use to make your ad products and ad units more valuable? And then how do you think about selling your data to others in a package so you have a data revenue stream? How do you balance those two uses of the exclusive data rights you have with Hisense and VIDAA?

Okay. First of all, ACR data is one of the most effective datasets for targeting users; it provides another layer of knowledge about your potential audiences. Being the only major open web partner with such an agreement enables us to leverage this opportunity and offers unique capabilities. In terms of using this data elsewhere, we will integrate it into our platform and potentially offer it for pricing measurement and targeting. However, we will ensure a connection to our platform, meaning that if we provide data to other DSPs, we will encourage them to buy media on our SSP or use our other tools, which creates a commercial advantage for us. Our aim is to build an ecosystem that allows data usage while encouraging engagement with our platform.

Okay. That's very helpful. I didn't realize it was going to tie back to your platform. And then I wanted to talk about cash usage. So, you have round numbers, $90 million of cash. You lost round numbers, around $8 million and you bought in a bunch of shares. My question is, why buy shares at a time when you're also losing money? Why not pour cash into ensuring that you're back to free cash flow positive?

First of all, Sagi, if you want to comment on that, but we stopped buying shares at this time.

Yes, I'll take that question. Thanks, Laura. First of all, we structured a $95 million share repurchase plan back in 2022, which we concluded through Q1. So, it's ended now, and we are not investing any money in repurchasing our shares anymore. As you noted, we are considering other capital allocation strategies once we regain cash generation. So, for now, we are keeping our cash and will evaluate other alternatives to use funds.

Thanks so much, guys. Thank you.

And your next question comes from the line of Mark Kelley from Stifel. Your line is open.

Great. Thank you very much. Can you help us bridge the gap a little bit on the programmatic segment just a little bit more? How do we get from the 6% growth you just put up in Q1 to get to 31% growth for the full year? I guess you've got a tougher comp in Q4 given Amobee was baked in there. Any help in just in terms of how the programmatic line should play out would be helpful. Thank you.

Okay. Thanks, Mark. I'm not sure exactly what the 31% you are referring to. What we said is that in Q1, our programmatic revenue went up by 6%. It was unfortunately offset by a performance decline. We maintain that until the end of the year, around 90% of our revenues will be generated through programmatic activities, as we previously disclosed that this is our main focus. This is a key metric that we are focused on improving.

Sorry, 31%. If I'm going to use your guidance, so $360 million for the year for programmatic revenue, that would be like 31% growth. My bad.

Yes, so 90% of the $400 million revenue will come from programmatic, which is $360 million. Regarding the growth from 6% in Q1 to 31% for the year, maintaining our guidance at $400 million in total revenue and $140 million to $145 million adjusted EBITDA. We utilize our scale for growth opportunities.

Okay. Got it. You mentioned improved visibility, which comes from your discussions with advertisers and agencies. I'm interested in the changes you've implemented, like having the linear planning tool in-house and the sales reorganization. Are there any other changes that have contributed to your increased visibility compared to the past?

The Amobee programmatic cross-sales, moving more activity in-house has improved our confidence in performance going forward. We are excited now that we've integrated the sales teams and their processes; we feel we have a better understanding of market opportunities. We've also focused management on growth following the integration.

And your next question comes from the line of Andrew Boone from JMP Securities. Your line is open.

Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to start just on the operating leverage that Sagi, you mentioned in your prepared remarks on the business. If I go back to pre-COVID, you guys were more or less in the mid-30s in terms of EBITDA margins. That clearly accelerated through COVID, and now we're probably troughing here. Can you just talk about maybe in a more normalized macro environment where we should expect EBITDA margins to kind of pencil out? Understood the business is bigger with Amobee. But how do we think about a more normalized kind of EBITDA margin environment as we get through this cycle?

Great question, Andrew. We have like a 13% adjusted EBITDA margin in Q1. As you said, the variable nature of scale affects these numbers. We anticipate the adjusted EBITDA margin to increase significantly from Q2 to Q4, possibly reaching around 50% adjusted EBITDA margin by Q4. Of course, we need to factor in the new cost structure with Amobee. The goal is for a yearly adjusted EBITDA margin of around 35%. Looking towards 2024, we expect margins to reach around 40%. Reverting back to 50% will take longer, but we are continuously refining our cost structure.

I have a question that pertains more to the industry. Considering the upcoming deprecation of cookies by Google in the latter half of next year, I understand this may not directly apply to connected TV and video more generally. Could you share your perspective on cross-platform measurement? What strategies are you implementing, and how do you approach measurement attribution when connecting users across various platforms?

No problem, I will take this one, Sagi. We build a platform on our DMP that is integrated with all the identity tools developing in the market since Google announced it would remove cookies. We are working closely with market leaders on that front. Our technology has been set to use and connect to all of these identity tools. The full end-to-end solution allows lower reliance on cookies, so the impending cookie removal will have minimal impact on our operations compared to competitors. We’ve built an integrated platform ready to absorb data from the leading platforms, and the end-to-end solution lowers the need for cookies as we run campaigns effectively.

And your next question comes from the line of Andrew Marok from Raymond James. Your line is open.

Thanks for taking my question. On the Amobee cross-selling tool, you talked about getting traction with buyers that tend to be more on the linear side, but is there an education process or maybe a longer sales cycle that you have to embark on with these traditional linear buyers that makes the ramp-up process longer for them as they start to get into CTV?

Great question. There is an educational component that we need to address, and we are already in this process. However, our clients are aware of the need to expand their campaigns into streaming and CTV. This represents a need that is coming from both our development of this solution and the understanding from broadcasters and brands that they require such a tool to service their clients better. Therefore, we expect the education process will be shorter than expected because the necessity to leverage new technologies is industry-wide. It’s really about integration and creating mutually beneficial processes to take advantage of that.

And your next question comes from the line of Eric Martinuzzi from Lake Street. Your line is open.

Yes. I know you didn't give direct guidance on Q2, but I wanted to dive into that. Right now, we've got a consensus number of $92.4 million on the contribution ex-TAC and an adjusted EBITDA number of $27.6 million, understanding that you expect to have sequential growth in Q2. Are those numbers realistic, or are you trying to tell us that maybe given the macroeconomic conditions, those would be more of a stretch?

We are not providing guidance and did not provide guidance for Q2. The analyst consensus is approximately $92 million in contribution excluding TAC. This is based on estimates from various analysts. We believe we are experiencing strong momentum and a recovery from advertisers, and we expect to perform significantly better than in Q1.

Okay. Well, let me ask it another way. The loading of the year; I think you’ve historically or at least for 2023, you talked about a 40%, 60%; are you stepping away from that front half, back half?

No, I think we are in line with those numbers. Historically, it was between 55 to 60 and 40 to 45 across different tasks. We are not stepping down from here. We anticipated Q1 to be slightly lower due to the long integration and consolidation of the sales team, unifying our offerings and marketing materials. We feel we are in a good place, having managed to conclude this process and are ready to work further.

Okay. And then on the branding effort, do we have any clarity? I know you don't have anything to announce today, but have we narrowed it down to whether it will be the creation of a new brand or doubling down on one of the existing brands?

We are going to announce the new brand by the end of the quarter. It will help us on three levels. First, it will create a stronger connection between our teams, helping them feel part of a bigger organization. Second, it will make it easier for the market to understand our offerings. Lastly, it will assist financial markets in comprehending our strategies, connecting all these acquisitions and innovations over the past few years.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.