Q2 2024 Fluent Inc Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Donald Patrick; Chief Executive Officer; Fluent Inc

Ryan Perfit; Interim Chief Financial Officer; Fluent Inc

Maria Ripps; Analyst; Canaccord Genuity LLC

James Goss; Analyst; Barrington Research Associates, Inc.

Bill Dezellem; Analyst; Tieton Capital Management LLC

Presentation

Operator

Good afternoon, and welcome. Thank you for joining us to discuss our second quarter 2024 earnings results. With me today are Fluent's CEO, Don Patrick; Interim CFO, Ryan Perfit; and Chief Strategy Officer, Ryan Schulke.
Our call today will begin with comments from Don and Ryan Perfit followed by a question-and-answer session. I would like to remind you that this call is being recorded, live recorded and webcast. A replay of the event will be available following the call on our website. To access the website, please visit our Investor Relations page on our website at www.fluentco.com.
Before we begin, I would like to advise listeners that certain information discussed by management during this conference call will contain forward-looking statements covered under the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any forward-looking statements made during this call speak only as of the date hereof.
Actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied by our forward-looking statements due to risks and uncertainties associated with the company's business. These statements may be identified by words such as expect, planned, projects, could, will, estimates and other words of similar meaning.
The company undertakes no obligation to update the information provided on this call. For a discussion of the risks and uncertainties associated with Fluent's business, we encourage you to review the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the company's most recent annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q.
During the call, management will also present certain non-GAAP financial information relating to media margin, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net income. Management evaluates the financial performance of our business on a variety of indicators, including these non-GAAP metrics. The definitions of these metrics and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the earnings press release issued earlier today.
With that, I am pleased to introduce Fluent's CEO, Don Patrick. You may begin.

Donald Patrick

Good afternoon. Thank you all for joining our call today. I'm here together with Ryan Schulke, our Chief Strategy Officer and Company co-founder; and Ryan Perfit, our Interim Chief Financial Officer. I'll start today with some brief comments regarding our strategic initiatives and progress in the second quarter.
On the strategic front, we are highly energized by the progress we continue to make in our strategic growth plan with the continued stabilization of our owned and operated marketplace in business pivot to our new higher margin syndicated performance marketplaces.
We believe we've reached an inflection point in our transition, which is exciting as this progress provides a clear strategic and financial validation of our longer-term growth agenda with our early second half performance metrics.
Since the launch of our syndicated performance marketplace in late 2022, our strategy and investments have been focused on shifting our business mix into long-term growth markets where our differentiated position will allow us to deliver Fluent's margins that are accretive to the core.
And we've successfully delivered sequential improvements in both revenue and gross profit in our performance marketplaces each and every quarter since. Our momentum is accelerating, and we remain confident that we will reach the initial stage of Fluent's financial rebound.
To that end, we expect to deliver single-digit consolidated year over year growth in Q3 and then accelerate with consolidated double-digit year over year growth in Q4. And in 2025, as our business mix continues to shift into the performance marketplaces, a momentum should build and we anticipate a strong year of consolidated year over year double digit growth.
While we see our performance marketplace platform is stickier, it tends to have longer and more sophisticated sales cycle than our own in our operated marketplace. But once we sign a new partner, there's a corresponding positive predictability of the business as we can project the impact on our growth agenda and our financials with a higher level of certainty based on the mutually agreed upon executional timelines.
We'll detail this further next quarter when we're at liberty to speak more about the specific brand partners. Bottom line, we have major brands enthusiastically endorsing our performance marketplace strategies and those new partnerships will go live and hit the stat pages subsequent quarters, Q3, Q4 and into fiscal year 2025 as we align against executional tactics and timelines.
So let's talk about the tough news regarding our Q2 financial performance. Revenue of $58.7 million represents 11% decline versus Q1 2024. Our media margin of $15.7 million was a decrease of 29.3% versus Q1 2024 and adjusted EBITDA of negative $4.5 million represents a negative 7.7% on revenue.
Our lower-than-expected Q2 quarterly results were primarily driven by two underlying financial trends and an increase in unauthorized third-party activity in our ACA business that necessitated a Q2 adjustments. The results generated from our owned and operated marketplace reflect the lingering impact of our post FTC settlement transition, including our exiting businesses, we felt were no longer strategically relevant.
Although Q2 results in our owned and operated marketplaces show continued revenue and margin declines. Importantly, we saw marketplace stabilization by the end of the second quarter. That has continued into Q3, indicated we are beginning to fully cycle the businesses we've exited and should it finalize this transition in the second half.
Owned and operated marketplace revenue and media margin declines were partially offset by the continued acceleration of our new syndicated performance marketplaces. Performance of our growth year over year continues to shift the mix into our strategic growth agenda and establish a differentiated market position.
Our results were exacerbated by unauthorized third-party activity impacting our ACA vertical in our call solutions business. Recently, unauthorized switching of the agency of record, AOR on insurance policies dramatically increase, adversely affecting the entire ACA industry.
Once the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, CMS became aware, they changed the system for switching AORs, largely eliminating the practice. However, the new system did not penalize the prior unauthorized activity hampering our ability to recover our losses or cost effectively operate the business in the short term.
This also necessitated a $3.1 million write-down of accounts receivable with an equal offset to revenue media margin and adjusted EBITDA in Q2. While this non-recurring write-down had negatively impacted our Q2 results, we see this as having no additional negative impact to our financials or our future growth agenda.
Absent the write-down, our overall financial performance remains consistent with the roadmap we've laid out in previous calls. However, somewhat masked in our financials is that we are on plan in growing our performance marketplaces.
That momentum, combined with the stabilization of our owned and operated marketplaces is a reflection of our evolving market mix. We remain confident in our ability to accelerate revenue and profit growth in the second half of 2024 when compared to last year's numbers.
I'd like to now take the time to provide some deeper insight into our growth agenda. So you can get a clear picture on why we're so excited by the differentiated market position we are creating.
Our syndicated performance marketplaces represent the tip of the spear in our strategic growth agenda as we accelerate the Fluent brand into very large, high-growth dynamic markets where we can unleash our core owned and operated grounded capabilities, providing us with unique competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Our performance marketplace's revenue growth is on plan. And as we continue to build on that momentum, we anticipate accelerating year-over-year growth through the end of 2024 and beyond.
Equally exciting is that our gross margin in that business is growing faster than revenue with ample room for additional improvements. You can see why we're so enthusiastic about our performance marketplace growth strategy as we lean into this opportunity and drive enhanced operating efficiencies across the Fluent enterprise.
In Q3, our focus is on expanding our market share through continued growth in our syndicated performance marketplaces while positioning the Fluent enterprise to return consolidated year-over-year growth that we believe will accelerate sequentially through the back half of the year.
Now some additional insight regarding our ad flow business, the anchors or syndicated performance marketplace platform, where proof of concept result leaves us with even more strategic optimism. Adflow is our media solution we launched in the large and rapidly growing commerce media market.
Market as currently valued at over $50 billion expected to reach $150 billion by 2030. Presently 43% of US brands have commerce media budgets, and that's expected to increase to 75% by 2025. Our foundational Adflow strategies continue to show year-over-year revenue growth as planned driven by new partner wins, which are enabled by our leveraging our proprietary technology, machine learning and data platform capabilities that have yielded excellent results.
Furthermore, since May, we've added new brand partners that will increase our growth trend line markedly as we were expanding into very attractive grocery, quick-serve restaurant and travel verticals. We are excited by these results along with the increasing momentum of the Adflow platform represents a new growth opportunity for world-class brands to reach consumers seeking high quality engagements at the optimal purchase moment.
We'll speak more to this in future quarters, but we also see a significant leading edge loyalty based opportunity to expand and enhance Adflow's strategic impact in adjacent marketplace that we believe will further differentiate Fluent from our competitive set and our partners are already validating our unique market position based on their enthusiastic feedback.
Headlining, we are now working with commerce partners beyond post transactions to enhance consumer engagement, retention and loyalty across our partners' commerce platforms. In Q2, we launched our innovative loyalty solution with select partners, leveraging our deep knowledge of our owned and operated marketplaces in Adflow's commerce media in order to provide next-generation loyalty solution with incomparable economic value proposition to advertisers and partners alike.
This is a powerful and unique strategic combination. A marriage of our owned and operated leadership position, coupled with insights that are proprietary from Fluent while leveraging our credibility, we are earning with our Adflow platform as a launching point into a relevant early-stage marketplace.
Based on what our partners are sharing with us and as they aggressively lean in, we believe this is another large growth opportunity that is right in our sweet spot. Both Adflow and our loyalty retention solutions provide Fluent a unique brand position and a significant growth opportunity in the large and growing commerce media industry,
More importantly, expands our strategic value proposition to world-class partners beyond customer acquisition as we expand quality consumer engagements across the entire marketing funnel. We are excited by our progress here, and we'll provide more detail in future earnings releases.
In our core solutions business, after consistent historical growth, our Q2 revenue declined year over year due mostly to current and future regulatory changes. By the end of Q2 we adjusted to the upcoming regulatory changes by proactively building the compliance solution that we believe offers better quality for our partners.
We believe we are now positioned well for our partners' second half call solutions demand and future growth remains on the horizon. In our ACA business, although it is a high sequential growth opportunity, we are closely evaluating the ongoing changes to the centers of Medicaid and Medicare services and pausing this initiative to ensure that Fluent can continue to differentiate ourselves within a highly fragmented market, more so given all the growth since available to us.
Despite headwinds in call solutions business during the quarter, our performance marketplaces had a solid first half 2024 evidence by Adflow's strategic and financial market acceptance and execution, and we anticipate revenue growth in this market and accelerating momentum heading into the later half this year.
By the end of Q2, we achieved two critically important milestones in our strategic pivot. First, we stabilized our owned and operated marketplace. Second, stability in our owned and operated marketplace provides a springboard into higher quality, consumer engagement syndicated performance marketplaces where we're building our competitive advantages and where we continue to accelerate based on the very positive results in these parts of the business.
We are quite enthusiastic regarding the strategic and financial roles that our performance marketplaces are playing in our long-term growth agenda because they already are delivering higher margins in our owned and operated marketplaces.
Moving forward, we are confident that we will continue to accelerate revenue growth from our performance marketplaces. We believe the corresponding impact should help Fluent achieving year over year consolidated single digit growth in Q3 and double-digit growth in Q4.
Importantly, and in parallel, as we enhance our market position, we are confident that we'll be in growing our total gross profit more rapidly than our revenue over time. And with this strategic and financial year-end momentum, we believe Fluent is well on course to deliver consolidated double-digit revenue and gross profit growth in fiscal year 2025.
And with that, I'll turn to Ryan Perfit to provide more detail on our financial results.