Sprout Social, Inc. (SPT) Q2 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Thank you for standing by. My name is Rebecca, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Sprout Social 2nd Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Alex Kurtz, Vice President of Investor Relations Corporate Development. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and welcome to Sprout Social's second quarter 2025 earnings call. We will be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after the market closed today and have also released an updated investor presentation, which can be found on our website. With me are Sprout Social's CEO, Ryan Barreto, and CFO, Joe DelPretto. Today's call will contain forward-looking statements which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking. These include, among others, statements concerning our expected future financial performance, including our Q3 and 2025 outlook and business plans and objectives, and can be identified by words such as expect anticipate intend plan believe seek opportunity or will these statements reflect our views as of today only and should not be relied upon as representing our views at any subsequent date and we do not undertake any duty to update these statements forward-looking statements address matters that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially for discussion of these risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2024, as well as our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended June 30, 2025 to be filed with the SEC. During the call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures which are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. Definitions of these non-GAAP financial measures, along with the reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are included in our second quarter earnings release, which has been furnished to the SEC and is available on our website at investors.sproutsocial.com. With that, let me turn the call over to Ryan. Ryan?

Thank you, Alex, and welcome to our second quarter earnings call for fiscal 2025. We reported second quarter results with revenue of $111.8 million, representing year-over-year growth of 12%, and non-GAAP operating margin expansion of almost 400 basis points. Our current remaining performance obligations, which reached 251.6 million, represented 18% year-over-year growth. Our go-to-market delivered another solid quarter with 18% growth in the 50K and above ARR customer cohort. We landed strategic wins with global brands like Honda, Cigna, Kimberly-Clark, Authentic Brands Group, LaCroix, Smuckers, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and Texas Tech. These customers demonstrate our continued execution and strategic fit with the most socially sophisticated enterprise customers. During the quarter, Sprout continued to earn industry recognition. We secured 164 leader badges and g2's latest reports with top rankings in enterprise social media suites analytics and customer service across north america emea and apac we also earned trust radius 2025 top rated awards in eight categories including social media marketing audience intelligence and online reputation management reinforcing the meaningful business outcomes our customers achieve with Sprout. Additionally, we received Silver for Best Influencer Marketing Platform at the Global Influencer Marketing Awards and a Silver Shorty Award in the Micro Influencer Strategy category for our own innovative influencer strategy that turned Sprout's listening data into thought leadership and helped shape industry conversations. Today, I'm excited to begin by discussing our recent acquisition of Newswip, a leader in AI-powered predictive media intelligence. Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, Newswip was a privately held company with approximately 70 employees, and we couldn't be more excited to welcome the team to Sprout. Newswip has become a mission-critical tool for some of the largest global brands, media companies, and agencies for crisis management, real-time media monitoring, research, and strategy. Strategic customers such as nissan the associated press a fortune 50 media company two fortune 50 technology companies and a fortune 100 consumer beverage company all rely on newswhip for real-time monitoring of news articles social posts and other media related to their brand products and their competitors i want to outline our strategic rationale for acquiring newswhip and why we see this as a pivotal milestone that combined with our existing product roadmap will drive unique crisis management trend detection, and AI offerings from Sprout over the next several years. First, Newswhip's AI-powered predictive media intelligence can help identify which stories and narratives are about to go viral. This has become mission-critical for brands as news stories can quickly escalate across various social media platforms. Newswhip provides three core values, real-time alerts and predictive analysis, key insights into emerging trends and conversations and sophisticated ai alerting capabilities that are leveraged by crisis management teams and the c-suite over time we expect to enable early crisis detection from newswhip to seamlessly flow to customer care teams working in the sprout platform creating a truly differentiated end-to-end experience which transforms insights into action we also believe integrating newswhip's capabilities with sprouts listing products and its extensive social interaction data will create a comprehensive 360-degree view of social and media ecosystems. Together, we will combine predictive media intelligence with agile social action to drive impactful earned, owned, and paid media strategies. This integrated approach will enable real-time trend detection, targeted engagement, and clear ROI reporting, delivering measurable outcomes for businesses. During the second quarter, Newswhip launched its AI agents, which have garnered strong interest among Newswhip's larger customers, with over 70% of brand customers leveraging them in just over a month. Newswhip's AI agents proactively scan global news and social data, identifying stories and themes gaining momentum before they peak, and giving brands the strategic edge to own the narrative. With the massive volumes these brands have to manage, these agents are designed to separate the signal from the noise and to drive clear efficiency for practitioners, while also ensuring they never miss a critical moment. Newswhip will enable Sprout to enter the mission-critical PR and crisis monitoring space with a new offering. These are potentially new buyers for Sprout, both new logos to Sprout, as well as growth opportunities within our existing customers. And in both cases, these are often groups of longstanding dedicated budgets. We're incredibly excited to discuss Newswhip's capabilities with them in the coming weeks and months. While there is some minimal customer overlap, we believe Sprout's full go-to-market distribution will accelerate these opportunities. We also believe that Newswhip can further strengthen our gross retention goals among larger enterprise customers, given its stickiness with crisis management teams. Newswhip has built an impressive list of top-tier customers over the last 10 years, with contract sizes often at the higher end of Sprout's customer TCV range. Finally, we are thrilled about the future impact we expect the Newswhip team members will have at Sprout. This agile team has built a must-have tool for some of the biggest brands, and we've been really impressed with the Newswhip engineering talent shaping the future of AI-driven, real-time media monitoring. I'm also pleased to share that Newswhip's co-founder and CEO, Paul Quigley, will step into the role of general manager for our listening business, overseeing both Newswip and Sprout's listening products. Paul is a great executive and will be a tremendous asset in leading this critical part of our business moving forward. Before handing the call to Joe, let me briefly take you through some customer wins and our four key growth drivers that include winning the enterprise, driving customer health and adoption, expanding our partnership and ecosystem, and driving improved account penetration. To win the enterprise, we intend to expand the pipeline, close more 50K-plus deals, and accelerate adoption with a product roadmap built for enterprise needs. Let's start with the key product releases in the quarter. For influencer marketing, we reimagined our influencer marketing platform, now featuring a refreshed design and advanced AI-driven capabilities. As social media becomes central to brand discovery, influencer marketing is an increasingly important strategy to drive ROI. Key updates include AI-powered natural language discovery for search, driving more authentic and impactful activations, a customizable brand safety solution to align creators with brand values, and a new creator vetting feature that drastically reduces time spent in discovery so brands can refocus on their more strategic creative tasks. In Care, we introduce innovations for proactive customer engagement through enhanced efficiency and smarter workflows. With the introduction of queues, care teams can easily organize high volumes of inbound customer interactions by urgency, topic, or customer segment, significantly reducing response times and ensuring critical conversations receive immediate attention. Additionally, new bot integrations and AI enhancements automate routine interactions, proactively resolve customer issues, and free up care agents to focus on higher-value tasks. These innovations mean faster resolution times with increased agent productivity and more tailored and effective support for customers, ultimately cultivating greater customer satisfaction and loyalty. Social media has become central to product discovery and purchasing, which means brands must deliver fast, personalized social care across platforms or risk losing vital customer trust in business. In fact, 73% of consumers say they will buy from a competitor if a brand doesn't reply to them on social. While reactive support is expected, the new innovations in Care by Sprout empowers brands to deliver proactive care, turning positive interactions into business assets that build loyalty and attract new customers. For governance, we enhanced brand safety and customer data handling with the launch of our new product, Guardian by Sprout Social. Guardian supercharges social customer care and social media management with innovative AI-driven tools that reduce brand risk, helping our customers securely and confidently handle their customer data. Guardian is a huge asset for security-conscious and highly regulated industries, providing features like blocked words, data masking, and secure forms. We're also pleased to share several strategic enterprise wins this quarter. The first win was a seven-figure new business deal with a global brand management company, consolidating their marketing care and customer experience under one tech stack. with premier success listening and premium analytics that can unify social strategy across 50 plus brands ensuring consistent governance and workflows they can also boost efficiency with powerful and intuitive reporting tools while reducing costs and complexity by consolidating the social management publishing and analytics into our single platform the next story we want to highlight is an almost 900k expansion deal with a global health technology company that switched from a competitor due to its overly complex workflows. They were seeking a seamless care agent workflow with our service cloud integration. With Sprout, this company can amplify its brand messaging with over 60 publishers and 15,000 advocates, expanding reach and boosting brand awareness. Sprout also enables real-time insights for deep customer behavioral analysis. Our service cloud integration allows them to manage 90,000 customer support requests per month to increase customer satisfaction. They can also safely host data in the EU in a compliant manner which is critical in a highly regulated industry. This final customer story is a 360k expansion win highlighting the growth opportunities that exist within our customer base. This Fortune 500 global healthcare company, already a seven-figure spread customer for marketing care and customer experience, expanded to include listening, premium analytics, influencer marketing, and employee advocacy. They are now able to unify social efforts globally for consistent brand messaging worldwide and to elevate brand reputation by tracking sentiment, uncovering key drivers of perception, and benchmarking against competitors in real time. Our second growth driver is a sharper focus on customer health, onboarding, and adoption to maximize long-term value. This quarter, we introduced two new support offerings, Accelerated Support and Accelerated Support Plus, while also enhancing our existing Premier Success Lite offering. Features include two-hour response times and access to a dedicated customer experience specialist. Since launch, these offerings have gained strong traction, driving new deals and significant interest across our Premier Support suite. Our third driver is our continued investment in our partnerships with strong global partners that bring Sprout into strategic accounts and expand our reach into some of the largest digital marketing budgets we continue to ramp our partnership activities through the first half of 2025 as we mentioned last quarter our social network technical integrations and go-to-market partnerships provide what we believe is a lasting competitive advantage in the market as we move into the second half of the year we'll be expanding our partnerships and capabilities across key networks including publishing reporting and listening capabilities with blue sky engagement and reporting with reddit listening with tick tock and building out personal profile reporting with LinkedIn. Our fourth growth driver focuses on deepening customer engagement through use case expansion and premium modules, with our sales team seeking to drive greater value across both new and existing customers. Expanding our trust and compliance offerings at Sprout has been a key priority. As I mentioned earlier, this past quarter we launched Guardian, a solution enabling our customers to securely manage their data while still personalizing interactions and enhancing brand safety. We've seen strong interest across highly regulated industries, especially healthcare and financial services, closing our first deal within just a couple weeks of launch. We're even seeing demand from less regulated industries as organizations increasingly recognize the inherent value of having these capabilities readily available. The acquisition of Newswhip will significantly enhance our AI, listening, and care capabilities, enabling us to expand use cases and elevate our premium module offerings. We're excited to share more in Q3 as we begin introducing Newswhip to our customers. In closing, I'd like to revisit our discussion last quarter of social search and the undeniable long-term trends we see playing out and how the Newswhip acquisition ties into this theme. As traditional search continues to trend toward zero-click with AI, Current content strategies face headwinds with traffic changing in real time. We know nearly half of Gen Z starts product discovery on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, and over 80% of consumers say social is a top channel for product discovery. Organic website traffic is declining, while paid search costs are rising. Social has become the new front door for discovery, but most brands aren't optimizing for it, or they're not getting there first. Our ability to drive discovery on social platforms is critical and translates into AI search, where platforms like Reddit increasingly contribute to source content, and in traditional search, where both Reddit and Instagram index on the first page of Google's search results. Social media's authenticity, immediacy, and community-driven nature fill the gap as search behaviors shift, offering businesses stronger ROI outcomes. Sprout helps brands win in the new era of discovery. Our publishing tools are designed to optimize every post for maximum visibility using keyword-rich titles, platform-specific formatting, and built-in guidance for hashtags, alt text, and timing to help ensure nothing gets missed in social search and brands can reclaim lost organic traffic. And now Newswhip, in our view, is the perfect addition to this strategy as Sprout will enable global brands with a greater ability to recognize real-time and predictive trends powered by AI agents. These innovations will help marketers know exactly what content they should be creating to benefit from social search momentum, as well as by issues before they arise, with differentiated solutions for crisis management. We believe the future of this category will be defined by real-time data and intelligence, extensible platforms, and trusted AI. That's the foundation we're building at Spread, and we're excited about where it's taking us. And with that, I'll turn it over to Joe to run through the financials. Joe?

Thanks, Ryan. I'll now run through our financial results and guidance. Our second quarter results were highlighted by a quarterly non-GAAP operating margin of 9.2 percent, up nearly 400 basis points from the year-ago period. We generated 5.2 million in non-GAAP free cash flow during the quarter, up 2.7 million from our non-GAAP free cash flow in 2Q24, an increase of 110% on a year-on-year basis, and on a trailing 12-month basis, non-gap free cash flow is up 4x. We remain committed to growing operating leverage on a fiscal year basis. On to a summary of the quarter. Total revenue for the second quarter was $111.8 million, representing 12% year-over-year growth. Subscription revenue was $111.1 million, up 13% year-over-year. The number of customers contributing more than $10,000 in ARR grew 6% from a year ago. The number of customers contributing more than $50,000 in ARR grew 18% from a year ago. Q2 ACV was $15,321 of 14% year-over-year. As Ryan discussed earlier, our strategy to drive ACB growth remains focused on shifting to a higher enterprise mix and strengthening premium module attach rates such as influencer marketing and customer care. RPO totaled $347.0 million, down from $360.2 million, exiting Q1, and up 18% year-over-year. We expect to recognize 72%, or $251.6 million, of total RPO as revenue over the next 12 months, implying a CRPO growth rate of 18% year-over-year. Non-GAAP operating income totaled $10.3 million, which was ahead of the high end of our outlook. This was up from $5.3 million a year ago and equates to a non-GAAP operating margin of 9.2%. We're pleased that our progress here demonstrates our focus on continued growth in our margin profile. Before moving on to guidance, a few quick comments about our acquisition of NewsWhip. We acquired Newswhip for a cash consideration of $55 million, with an additional $10 million in potential cash earnouts that are structured over the next two years. We financed the acquisition with our credit revolver in cash and believe this was an efficient use of capital as our products address the needs of our customers, and we believe the combined solution is a highly differentiated offering. Looking ahead, we're increasing our full-year revenue guidance, primarily reflecting the early contribution from Newswhip. We've seen strong early interest from new and existing enterprise customers, including new conversations with globally recognized brands that underscore the strategic value of this acquisition. We believe this early traction is a strong signal to the opportunity ahead and reinforces the differentiation we believe Sprout is building. That said, we're early in the integration. While the course-prout business continues to perform in line with the expectations we set at the start of the year, we affect some near-term pressure on rep productivity as we train teams, align our go-to-market motion, and support customers through a more expansive conversation around listening and Newswhip. There's only five months of revenue contribution remaining this year. As we are just starting to operate the Newswhip business, given the closing last week, we've taken a measured approach to modeling the impact. Lastly, while a part of the acquisition, NewZoap was expected to be an approximately break-even business in the back half of the year on a standalone basis. We're pleased that we were still able to raise our non-GAAP operating income outlook while absorbing the associated cost. Now on to guidance. For the third quarter of fiscal 2025, we expect revenue in a range of $114.4 million to $115.2 million. We expect non-GAAP operating income in the range of $9.3 million to $10.3 million. We expect a non-GAAP net income per share of between $0.15 and $0.16. This assumes approximately $59.0 million weighted average basic shares of common stock outstanding. For the full year 2025, we are raising our guidance from the prior quarter and now expect revenue in a range of $452.9 million to $455.9 million. We're also raising our non-GAAP operating income guidance and expect it to be in the range of $43.1 million to $45.1 million. We expect non-GAAP net income per share between $0.71 and $0.75, assuming approximately $58.7 million weighted average basic shares of common stock outstanding. We look forward to continuing to innovate and create more opportunities for our customers to grow with us. We appreciate your interest in Sprout Social. And with that, Ryan, Alex, and I are happy to take any of your questions. Operator?

At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. And your first question comes to the line of Arjun, Bartia, with William Blair. Your line is open.

Yep, perfect. Thank you so much. Appreciate you guys taking the question here. Maybe to start out with, just if you can zoom out and just take a step back for a second. I'd be very curious to hear just how you would characterize the core business as it stands today. And then I have a follow-up after that.

Hey, Arjun. Thanks for the question. Yeah, just in terms of the business, we've been really pleased with the progress that we've been seeing and incredibly proud of the effort from the team. The business has been performing really well and tracking the plan that we laid out to all of you at the beginning of the year. We've had some great wins this quarter. Cigna, Authentic Brands, Honda, Smuckers, Department of Transportation were a few that we had shared in the prepared remarks. and we grew both the 10k and 50k customer accounts quarter over quarter on top of that our 50k trailing 12-month revenue cohort is growing greater than 30 which just shows the the enterprise execution on the retention and renewal side the performance has been really strong we've seen steady improvement in gross revenue retention year over year and we're seeing continued momentum some with our teams and closing more annual multi-year deals, which will contribute to retention and certainly gives us better visibility in the business. And then finally, from a non-GAAP operating margin, we're up nearly 400 basis points, which I think really speaks to the execution and the operating discipline that we have in the business. So everything considered, we're feeling really good about where the business is as we head into the back half.

All right. Perfect. Very And then just as a follow-up, as I'm looking at the guidance, can you just give us a sense of what the impact of NewSwip is and what you've incorporated into the guidance here?

Yeah, thanks, RJ. This is Joe. I'll jump in on this one. And thanks for the question. You know, maybe let me walk you through how we approach the guidance in total. And I think that would be most helpful to address the question you're asking. I think first, you know, our core business came in totally ahead in Q2 and continues to track to the plan we laid out to you at the start of the year. You know, we have assumed a change in the broader demand environment and we flowed through a modest portion of the Q2 beat into our updated full-year guide to reflect that. You know, for the news with business, we're projecting that to contribute approximately $2.5 million over the final five months of the year. And And you've got to remember with any small tuck-in acquisition, you want to take a prudent approach looking ahead. We just closed the acquisition last week. There are still natural unknowns around renewal rate, pipeline conversion, and other business fundamentals we need to consider. So as a result, we're taking a very measured approach with our guidance. And, you know, we're still early, but we believe this really sets us up to lead in an area that's becoming increasingly important to our customers and to the market. And we're really excited about this acquisition.

Thanks, Arjun. Next question, please.

Your next question comes to the line of Scott Berg with Needham. Your line is open.

This is Ron Morelli on for Scott Berg. Thanks for taking the question. Just to double clear on the Newsweb acquisition, can you just touch on, you know, the timeline to integration of the teams and products? And you noted some, you know, positive momentum with enterprise conversations so far. Any other feedback from customers just regarding the, you know, this acquisition of the capability being added to the suite?

Yeah, thanks, Rob. I appreciate it. We're digging in, as Joe said. We're about a week in. The teams are chugging along already. We've been working on a bunch of all-hands with the teams, and I actually just did an all-hands with the News 15 yesterday and a company all-hands last week. We've been getting the CRMs together and aligning everything and working really closely on the go-to-market strategies. We've also just seen a number of conversations already in the first week, So lots of progress being made on the integration. In terms of product integration pieces, those will develop over the next probably a few quarters or so, but the teams are working in the background. Obviously, as you mentioned on the call, Paul, the co-founder, is now the GM of our listening business, and will be really working closely with the rest of the team there. And then from a customer perspective, you know, one, I'd just say the teams are internally are incredibly excited about the opportunity to share the value of the Newswith product to our customers. We've seen this as a mission-critical solution for PR communications professionals and the ability to have them drive actual initial feedback. And, again, it's only been a week. It's been strong. And I encourage all of you to take a look at the Newswith website. You'll get a great sense. got it that's helpful uh thank you and then last quarter there was a reference to the launch of a multi-product campaign i understand it might still be early days but have you seen any benefit from this effort resulting in expansions with existing customers or larger lands with new and you started jumping new customer artists since this has launched thanks yeah thanks yeah i mean i i will say it's been a massive focus for our team across both the product organization and go to market um we've been seeing healthy pipeline being created there clearly uh newswip has been a big contributor to that and will be in as we go forward i mentioned guardian on the call as well another great example of a product that we launched in the quarter um so i think lots of progress happening right now but uh nothing else to add and there's the progress along the way thanks for the question Thanks, Rob. Next question, please.

Your next question comes to the line of Adam Hotkiss with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks so much for taking the questions. I guess, you know, I think we've heard from some of your peers, and I think you had mentioned it, the growing cost of advertising, particularly if you're a smaller business. And, you know, I'd be curious if that is resonating with your customers when you talk to them about the value of social as a channel, and if you're seeing any mix shift in the way that brands are thinking about their advertising strategies. It really feels like that that's really ticked up in the last couple of quarters, so I'm just curious if that's impacted you and your deals at all.

Yeah, I appreciate the question, Adam. It ties a lot to the final piece of my prepared remarks as I got into the idea of social search. We are certainly seeing customers talking a lot about the fact that they've seen pretty significant disruption to the things that they counted on in the past, specifically around search engine optimization and search engine marketing. And certainly we're in this world right now where the cost per click from a lot of these things has increased significantly and people are clicking less. So our customers are definitely looking for more help and how do they show up in the right places where discovery is happening? And we're seeing more and more of that happening on social. You reclaim some of the lost traffic and performance in places like social. And so if you think about what our platform does, it really helps customers figure out the right times to post it to their audience, gives you analytics on both your paid and organic so that you can really double down on the things that are working. And clearly in this environment, that's something that's really, really critical. So I'd say that it's been a material part of the conversations.

Okay, that's really helpful. Thanks, Ryan. And then just on the RPO and the CRPO dynamic, I noticed that step down sequentially, I think you mentioned it, and RPO, I think, was even below Q4 levels. Is that just churn at the low end of the market or anything else to call out there? Seasonality would be helpful.

Thank you. yeah adam i i think really what it's attributed to the last thing you said there was which is the seasonality uh part of the business so as we move more up market over the last couple of years a lot of our bigger renewals and the larger deals were signing in q3 and q4 and so what you'll see is you know in the back half of this year you'll see that those dollars start to kick up um in the next couple of quarters you feel pretty good about how we'll exit the year um in 2025 as it relates those metrics so we feel good about the momentum there it's the seasonality that you called out okay thanks so much joe thanks adam next question please your next question comes from the line of

parker lane with stifle your line is now open yeah hey guys this is jack mcshanon for parker thanks for checking the question um so i wanted to touch on the macro obviously there's been a of geopolitical headlines this quarter. So I'd be curious to hear how both the pipeline was impacted by the noisy macro and how renewal conversations have been impacted as well. Thanks.

Thanks, Jack. Appreciate the question. I'll start off on the pipeline side of it. Yeah, clearly we're still in the same demand environment. I wouldn't call out anything that's materially changed for us this quarter from the last previous quarters uh you know for us it's definitely leaning into the value prop similar to some uh my feedback on the last question to adam a lot of this for customers right now is this is this is an important part of the work that they're doing whether it's discovery and making sure that they're getting their customers in the front door or thinking about how they respond to their customers um we're certainly leaning in more but I feel really good about what I'm seeing.

And as a follow-up, I'd be curious to touch on the customer care use case and the demand in this segment.

Yeah, no, I appreciate it. Care continues to be a really important use case for our customers. We shared a few stories today, just highlighting with really large customers how they're leveraging care. You know, one specifically was an example of a customer that moved over to us, a global health tech company that moved over to use the service cloud integration i mean this customer is literally managing 90 000 customer support requests every single month and they're able to execute on that with that we've built with with salesforce so uh it's continued to be a really important part of the strategy clearly our customers are doing it directly in our product or they get the benefit of leveraging integrations like the service cloud but more and more we're seeing customers showing up on social as a place that they want to be served, and their expectations when they show up on social.

Next question comes from the line of Surrender Thighed with Jeffries. Your line is open.

Thank you. Can you maybe talk a little bit about just kind of the sales of some of the premium modules and the attach rates that you referenced as part of the strategy? Does an environment like this make it a little bit more difficult? I mean, it feels like things haven't really changed a lot in the last few quarters, but, you know, there just seems to be a lot of noise out there and we're hearing different things from different channels.

Yeah, I appreciate the question. Yeah, I alluded to it a little bit before, but I've been proud of what I'm seeing from the team in terms of creating this multi-product pipeline. But the product teams have been working hard in the background here. We've talked through a few of the use cases that we have. We've added Guardian, our trust and compliance products this past quarter. Obviously, Newslook is another addition there. I think this is just really important for us because what it means is it allows our sales team to show up to customers with a variety of different problems that we can solve for a customer base. Clearly, the demand environment hasn't, to your point, changed over the last number of quarters, but that's why it's even more important for us to be able to really serve customers depending on where they are. So, you know, we've got customers coming in where they've got high volumes asking our, we've got other customers who are seeing significant disruption and it's a really important thing for them. So these are some of the examples, but, you know, I think the last piece I'll leave you with is that a lot of headroom and opportunity for us to sell our products, both from a new business perspective to land bigger, as well as from a current company.

Obviously, the international business, international clients a little bit. Any color on the trends there? I didn't see the QO yet, so just any color that you can provide there on some of those numbers and trends.

Yeah, I appreciate it. You're right. International is still a smaller part of our business, but we feel really strongly about that market opportunity there and the teams that we have on the ground. Our distribution teams are still relatively small compared to the U.S., but we're seeing good progress in terms of just as far as the mix. for international, you know, Q1 to Q2, it hasn't changed materially.

So when you see the Q come out, the ratio of international revenue versus – so no major shift there.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Matt VanVellet with Cantor. Your line is open.

Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. I guess when you look at where the Newswhip technology fits in in the current product platform. Curious if this was sort of a discovered either gap or just a greater extension of the listening platform. Were you getting into situations where people were trying to push listening into other use cases and you just needed more functionalities? Curious, I guess, if you could elaborate a little more on where it overlaps or complements the listening platform.

Yeah, I appreciate the question, Matt. It is an excellent compliment for us. You know, one of the things that we really appreciated about the Newsweb team is what they do is really, really tied to a lot of our future product roadmap. And maybe the best way to think about this is we see it as really strengthening our overall approach to the market and really differentiating us against our closest competitors. You know, if you think about the spread listening, spread listening is really about deep analysis and longer-term understanding of social conversations and share a voice and brand sentiment. It's ideal for brands when they're trying to understand the why behind historical trends and insights. NewsWhip is the command center for real-time action. It's built for speed and high stakes. It's helping today's teams figure out this. And it's giving them these proactive real-time models.

Well, and then, Joe, you mentioned Newswhip was on pace to be break-even for the second half. Is that still incorporated in the guidance, or is there some additional expenses related to integration, maybe speeding up anything they had in the works? I guess, what's the second-half impact or the next five months' impact of Newswhip on the operating income guidance?

Yeah, no, the guidance – good question, Matt. The guidance contemplated that they would be break-even for the rest of the year. there shouldn't be any incremental expense or any other expenses that we're incurring that's kind of an all-in when it comes to guidance and then i think you know over the longer term we definitely believe there's a lot of leverage that can come out of that business we think about putting that product in our sales team and the distribution we can get you know over you know the more fixed costs that they have right now i think we feel good about the ability to drive more leverage sprout overall coming out of time great thank you thanks matt next question please your next question comes from the line of jackson adder with key bank capital markets your line is open great good evening guys thanks for taking our

questions um the first one is in the core business ryan you've mentioned a bunch of times about uh trying to capitalize on the struggles of organic and paid search and and switching things over to um to social so i'm just curious you guys you know especially with new sales leadership are you running any particular sales plays or uh special incentives or something to really kind of capitalize on this the beginning of this possible mega shift thanks yeah thanks for the question um i think the biggest thing to highlight is we've definitely been enabling the team on the value props behind this is the things that we can do to help customers in social search but

also in AI search and traditional search and so a lot of this is just being rep enablement and then obviously customer communication you know if we think about it and I mentioned some of this in the prepared remarks you know we're seeing more and more especially in Gen Z of consumers showing up in social searching in places like TikTok and YouTube and Reddit before they're going to traditional search. And so you showing up in the right place matters a ton, which your customers need to do. We also know that performing really well on social ties into how content is being presented in AI search. So the better you do in social means that you will perform better in AI search. And then finally, we're seeing more and more of these relationships happening between social and traditional search for things like Reddit and Instagram or indexing on the first page. So again, if you're performing really well in social, you will have a byproduct field stream impact of performing better on traditional search as well. So for us, all of these things are things that we're enabling the team on to be able to have those.

Okay. All right. Got it. And then quick follow-up. I think it was you who mentioned your prepared remarks that, you know, with any acquisition, there's always like the potential for some disruption as you, you know, train and kind of, you know, add things to the plate of the salespeople. To an outsider, though, I hear Newswhip's capabilities, and I think pretty similar to what, you know, the salespeople were already pitching, right, as far as like a value proposition.

So I'm just curious, is there something specific that you'll be adding to people's plates, or is this just, you know, this is the business of acquisitions and things get a little noisy when you're integrating things thanks yeah you know well first i'll say we're one week in i think the the biggest thing that i'd highlight is and it's actually tied up in your question there um it's it's enablement on making sure that we can perfectly articulate what i shared in an earlier question here around the differences between listening our core listing product and newsworth and how they fit together both for our internal teams and then certainly for for customers so there's enablement there's things that come with any integration here but we're off to the races on that we had an all-hands call last friday the revenue team kicked off on monday um so we're deep in that already and i think to your point these things are so close and so complementary and we also in many of our customer accounts we have folks from the pr and media and comms teams who are in our core platform so these are also people that we in many cases should know inside the organization and have an opportunity to now go and share more about this new solution.

Okay, that makes sense. Thank you. Thanks, Jackson. Next question, please.

Your next question comes from the line of Rob Oliver with Bard. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks, guys. Good afternoon. I had two, Ryan, first for you. I just wanted to ask about the influencer marketing portion of the business. Seems like, you know, still a lot of interest in the market around it, a lot of buzz around the potential impact of authentic AI or AI there. You guys obviously made a pretty strong talk in acquisition a couple of years ago, and you're not breaking that out anymore, but just wanted to get a sense for how that's doing and how when you come in for those renewals for perhaps customers that don't have it, how those negotiations are going. And then I had a quick follow-up for Joe.

Yeah, thanks, Rob. Appreciate it. We feel really good about the opportunity for influencer marketing, the artist formerly known as Tagger. You know, the team, I shared a little bit on that, I don't have a pair of remarks there, but the product teams have just been cranking in terms of some of the advancements that we've done there. There's been some really nice AI enhancements in the way that we think about creator discovery for our customers. We've been doing a lot actually from a brand safety perspective. As you might imagine, as these large brands are leaning in and trying to figure out the right creators, they need to make sure that these creators perfectly fit their brand and that there's no risk. And so that's something that we've also just really built into the platform that has added a ton of value. And then just creator vetting to make it much easier for our customers to figure out how to build their strategy and how to add the right creators. So a lot of automation workflow and tools built into all of that. It continues to be a really nice wedge for us to go into accounts that might be vended for social media management. But this is a great way to land with a differentiated product and then leverage that to go back and be able to sell more to that customer later on. So continued progress there and feeling good about the opportunity in front of us. Last thing I'll say is inside some of the earlier questions around if you're having disruption, we've seen that influencer marketing is returning a five to six X on the dollars in. And so this has been a really great opportunity.

Appreciate that. And then, Joe, just one for you. You know, a lot of questions, obviously, on News Whip, but I guess more broadly speaking, you guys are doing some product investments. I know you've been working on the go-to-market on the enterprise and sales side, pace of innovation, just, you know, not asking you guys the next year or anything. I just wanted to think about how you're thinking about balancing all of those and the potential for more tuck-in acquisitions onto your platform with potential continued margin expansion. Thanks.

Yeah, Rob, thanks for the question. I think, you know, consistent with what we've shown over the last couple of years and, you know, what we've kind of guided to this year, which is, no, you can expect a couple hundred basis points of margin improvement, you know, year over year, and I don't see that changing in the near term. And that's regardless of, like, what our growth rate is and what we're doing. I think we've got this commitment that, hey, we believe that we can manage this business in a very responsible manner in any type of condition, and we want to make sure continue to drive that margin in the business so you know we're not we're not moving off of that commitment to drive margin on the euro view rate okay helpful to hear thank you guys very much all right thanks rob next question please your next question comes to the line of ramo lynchow with barclays your line is open thanks for squeezing me um ryan uh one for you like with all the changes in the industry where people you know customers have to think about surge you have to think about social, you know, think about, like, what do we do through LLMs?

How does pipeline conversation change for you as you kind of engage with customers in terms of, like, number of conversations, but also, like, size of potential deals?

Thanks, Remo.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, there's certainly a lot that our customers have to be thinking about. I mean, I think the biggest thing here just goes back to making sure that we are perfectly tuned into the biggest problems for these customers. And that is so dependent, obviously, on the key stakeholders we're getting in front of. If you're in front of a marketing audience, they're absolutely thinking about how AI is impacting search, how their SEO and SEM may not be working as well, how their website traffic may not be working as well. And so we're thinking a lot about social as the front door and trying to figure out how can we help them show up in the right places, drive awareness, get a better return on that spend. Other customers might be seeing just a significant amount of demand changing channels from their call center or website and they've got to figure out how to manage that demand like that example, the 90,000 cases that we're managing. So a lot of this just comes down to making sure that our teams are really doing a lot of discovery to understand where the biggest problem sets are and that we're leading into those solutions and then and then time backing a lot of and then at one uh follow up for joe like if you think news with with kind of more ai usage etc is there any like and you talked about break even uh already but like is there anything we should be aware of in terms of

growth margin implications uh from i i assume they use gpus etc that i that we need to consider thank you no raymo we feel pretty good about we did a lot of work during diligence on the tech side to understand the scalability of their platform and that was one of the the real positives and one of the one of the big checks the boxes for our cto was that the way they built the back-end infrastructure and how this is scaling with the ai considered and so we feel pretty good ramo that there's not going to be any major change in the in the cost structure of that business atmosphere okay perfect thank you thanks ramo next question please your final question comes

the line of David Hines with Catacord Genewichi. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Ryan, two questions on Newswhip. So I get your positioning as kind of command center for real-time action. That makes a lot of sense. I did hear you say, does Newswhip give you access to media sources that previously weren't being captured by the listening offering?

Yeah, DJ, it does. It does.

Can you elaborate? Like, what are those?

Yeah, I mean, think about pretty much any of the media sources out there that we'd be consuming and looking at all the articles. The value prop of their platform, it takes a little bit of a different angle than we've taken on our listing, right? Like, our listing is more deep brand sentiment. Our customers use it from a research perspective. They're going back and looking at trends. News with full angle is consuming all the news and media and publications out there, identifying articles that are being created, and then figuring out where there's gravity around those articles and what's trending. And this matters a lot for our customers because these articles can, as we've seen news breaking many different places over the last few weeks, months, and years, these things can turn into real viral moments that are either good or bad, right? Like on the good side, it could end up creating a lot of demand. If you're a product company, on the bad side, it can create a lot of crisis management. And so they're looking at those media articles and then figuring out where there's gravity around them in places like social to allow those PR and comms teams to figure out where they should be leaning in.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, got it.

And then in a second, the follow-up to that, like what's the price point for Newswip? I know it's an enterprise product, but like how much are people spending on it?

Yeah, it's an enterprise product. It's multiples bigger than our average deal size. If you go to their customer case studies, you'll see a lot of large enterprises that are working with them. It fits really nicely into our enterprise segment, but we think that we'll see some opportunities there, certainly with agencies and mid-market as well.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. I will now turn the call back over to Ryan Berredo for closing remarks. thank you very much operator and thanks for joining us tonight and for the thoughtful questions i want to end by thanking our team for their continued dedication and effort i'm really grateful for all you do for our customers and for our business uh we look forward to spending more time with the rest of you later over the next quarter and we will talk to you soon have a great