Hello, and welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. On behalf of OTC Markets, we're very pleased you joined us for our quarterly small-cap growth conference. Our first live presentation of the day is from illumin Holdings. illumin Holdings is an ad tech company that provides marketers a powerful solution for digital advertising across all ad formats. Please note attendees may submit questions and view a presenter's availability for meetings by clicking "Questions" and "Book Meeting" in the top toolbar. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome Simon Cairns. He's the Chief Executive Officer. And Elliot Muchnik, he's the Chief Financial Officer of illumin Holdings, which trades on the OTCQB Venture Market under the symbol ILLMF and on the TSX under the symbol ILLM. Welcome, Simon and Elliot. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. I hope everybody is well on this winter day. I'm here to tell you about the turnaround story that is underway at illumin. I do appreciate your time. I will briefly walk through our company and sort of what's been going on the last several months and where we're heading. I'll also put our operations in context of the industry. Lastly, I'll take a few questions. Just as we begin, perhaps a little bit of triangulation to help you. Based in Toronto, Miami, and Barcelona in terms of offices, we are a—I’ll tell you all about our platform in half a sec—but fundamentally, a little less than 51 million shares outstanding. We have a market cap of about $140 million. Our last share price as of a few days ago was $2.77 a share. In terms of balance sheet, we have nil debt and a little over $51 million in cash as of last reported. In terms of ownership, insiders own about 23% of the business today. Last note is that our last reported quarter was our Q3, our nine months, which was at the end of September. I will be using the last public information then. Our Q4 and year-end results come out in mid-March. I will highlight that as well. Just to give you some triangulation, great balance sheet, nice market cap, good turnaround in the share price. It is a bit of a turnaround story that is beginning to emerge. Last but not least, our next quarter will be out on March 14. Let's begin. I'm sure you've all read end-to-end the disclaimer and the forward-looking statements. I appreciate you for your dedication. As we move forward, let me just briefly explain who we are. End-to-end, illumin is a proprietary enterprise-grade, very high-speed, very large-scale advertising technology platform. Fundamentally, what we do is we connect advertisers who want to use digital channels to reach new customers with publishers who capture the audiences and the attention of those very customers. In our case, we connect Procter & Gamble, Toyota, or Turkish Airlines as an example through our platform and enable them to seek and find their next customer from various publishers, including places like ESPN or perhaps news sites like CNN or FOX. We play in a $300 billion marketplace. It is a very large market. For the sake of simplification of everybody's understanding, the market is sort of divided into four hefty chunks. Three of them are walled gardens. In other words, they have captured audiences, and they have their own tools. This would be Meta. This would be also, say, Google Ads end-to-end. A few other large-scale players, including, for example, Amazon and their DSP technology, their demand-side platform technology. The last section is what's called the open internet or the open web. That is the quadrant that we at illumin play in. This is sort of large-scale internet across a variety of sites and venues, including a variety of digital channels. Do not just think about web pages and websites, but also things like podcasts and Spotify, for example. That is the open internet. For the sake of conversation, you can say that each one of those quadrants represents roughly 25% of the market space. Over the last decade, the walled gardens have grown nicely, but the open internet is now on a resurgence and coming back. That is largely due to a combination of a diversity of channels and, quite frankly, very good unit economics for advertisers and publishers. We support this space through three solutions. Our most traditional and long-standing is called Managed Services. This is where we work with ad agencies and advertisers to help them deploy their advertising campaigns across the open internet and a variety of channels. It is a little less than half of our annual revenue, 49%. It is a very nice 50% gross margin. More recently, we have developed a Self-Service solution. This is a more Self-Service solution of our Managed Services. Naturally, as you do more of the work on your own, we have a slightly different revenue and gross margin profile. It's about 28% of our revenue, 35% gross margin. Thirdly, and a little bit inversely, we have a third solution, which is what we call Exchange or also on the brand side, illumin X. Instead of going from advertisers through the illumin platform to publishers, this is a bit of the reverse. This is an Exchange product that searches out and finds publishers who have inventory who want to find and seek advertisers. We go from the sort of bottom up to the top through an Exchange service. This is 23% of our revenue with a typical gross margin profile of about 35%. The company has been around for more than a decade and has a very solid reputation for quality and great service and delivery. In fact, that's probably our hallmark. We've won several awards along the way, including Best at Support or Best at Performance, Market Leader. It has a very good reputation with advertisers and publishers alike. In the recent past, there's been a bit of a challenge market and also a challenging transition. This is probably fundamentally the reason why we are here today together. It's the reason why we're here. It's almost certainly the reason why you're here. Over the last three years, the company did correctly foresee that there would be a shift in the marketplace where maybe those advertisers wanted to take more control of optimizing their advertising campaigns, and they would take it a bit more in-house. They would need a Self-Service product. We created a great Self-Service product. The transition, to be honest, was difficult because on one hand, we ended up with a really great growth story in itself, but we sort of lost some traction on our Managed Services side. Our Managed Services business, quite frankly, was very popular with customers. We put a very difficult message in the marketplace, which fundamentally was that managed was dead. This created an enormous challenge for customers. They still liked the Managed Services product. It created a challenge for staff. A lot of people worked here and worked on Managed Services, and they were wondering if they had a job. It was definitely a difficult message for investors to hear. The stock had risen nicely as a good quality business, but then began to fall away quite rapidly, as you see on the right side of your screen, when the company transitioned towards self. It ended up with largely a three-year flat revenue story and a declining EBITDA story. As a result, the stock went with it. In April 2024, a little less than a year ago, a management change was voluntarily initiated. I came in as CEO, and I brought a few people with me as well. First and foremost, I'll just briefly start on the right. A really great leadership team here. We added in a new leader in marketing, Bridget Westerholz. I brought her to the company primarily because she had experience with both working and leading inside advertising agencies and also leading and running brands, the actual advertisers. That's our two customer segments. She had direct experience in both. She really knew a lot about the programmatic advertising space. We had worked together in the past, and she had a very good track record. She added her team and has sort of taken up all of our marketing. We also replaced our Chief Revenue Officer. I brought in Liz Ritzcovan based in the greater New York City area. Liz comes from a long list of very proven sort of brands on both advertising and publishing. She's familiar with enterprise selling, customer relationships, building performing teams, managing metrics, and really encouraging a strong sort of sales force. She's come to the company as well. My own story is fundamentally the street sees me as a turnaround guy. My last two times out as CEO, two times ago was a turnaround story on the top line. It took a $100 million business, in other words, very similar size to illumin in terms of revenue. That business had been making no EBITDA and not growing. Three years later, we grew from $160 million in revenue to $1 billion in revenue. Our EBITDA line went from zero to 28%. It became a cash cow for the private equity team that owns the business. It was a very successful turnaround, and we did a lot more with the customers we had. I really liked that story and that experience. The last time I was out as CEO was a bottom-line turnaround. Again, a $100 million business. Again, very similar size to illumin. This business had a track record for losing money. It had a three-year trend of losing $20 million on $100 million in sales, then $28 million on $100 million in sales. The year that I came in, it was trending towards losing $48 million on $100 million in sales, to which in my interview, I made the joke, "I didn't even think that was possible." The key takeaway is in 18 months, we went from trending to losing $48 million in sales to breaking even on $100 million in sales. Flat sales, but we rebuilt the business and rebuilt the customer experience. We got a long way in terms of brand rep with the customer. In 18 months, we went from losing $48 million to breaking even. It was a heck of a turnaround and a great story. I think for me and the team, it was a really sort of compelling experience. Now I come to illumin. I think that illumin is a really great place to be. I really like the team here. I just think that maybe there were some missteps in the transition from managed to self. I see a phenomenal opportunity. What have we done so far? I should say that the executive is supported by a seasoned board, including Sheldon Pollack. Some of you might know him. Great track record. The founding CEO is now a member of the board, Tal Hayek. You'll see him there as the second sort of pitcher. What have we done sort of in a quick nine months together as a team? I'm seeing a very nice revitalization of the business. First and foremost, let's go back to our bread and butter, that managed service, that traditional business that we said was maybe dead. First things first is we went back to the marketplace and we listened to the customer. We said, "You know, maybe self will replace managed over time." For right now, we think that there's still a lot of demand for a managed service business, a white glove assisted service. Our customers responded to that and said, "Yeah, we agree. We are curious. We like your Self-Service product. We still want support in our Managed Services side." Advertising agencies in particular trend a little bit more towards that managed service side. First things first is we stopped the bleed. There were sort of three years of decline in managed, especially when we told everybody that we no longer were going to offer it. We re-entered the marketplace, told our customers that we still have this competency. It's great. We first of all flattened the bleed, then we flattened out the business. In Q3, we saw for the first time in a couple of years, 3% growth year- over- year in our managed s ervice business, which was, quite frankly, a wonderful surprise after three years of telling everybody that we were moving away from it to sort of within the span of just a few months return to a very mild growth story. Sequentially, it was up 24%. That's very encouraging for me as an operator. I'm always looking for trends. The way I think about managed is this is a good business that can help us with cash flow and great margin and good customer relationships. We shouldn't think of it as dead. We should think of it as a way to support our customers. The market will tell us when or if this side of the business declines and gets taken up by self. For now, we do see good demand. The second thing we've seen is we continue to see, though, a very good trend in our Self-Service. It's not necessarily coming at the expense of our Managed Services. Self is actually bringing new customers into the illumin orbit. It is opening us up to more and more brands. In Q3, we saw a 64% growth in our Self-Service side business. I really like that as a trend story. Year- on- year, on a nine-month basis, up 101%. In terms of our operating stances, we want to invest in self. We want to figure out how do we make this product super compelling because it's not enough just to replace the value that you had in managed. It's even better if we can go one step further in a self environment. We've done a few things, including launching a guided service. Instead of being a pure Self-Service, we've taken some of the best of managed and we put it inside the self product to help people really get started more easily. That's great for us because it's a good margin profile and it creates better stickiness. We've also launched some partnerships with Disney, for example, in terms of premium inventory. That's a great brand validation of our product. We're also launching some features that aren't available anywhere else in the market, like, for example, Programmatic Guaranteed, which is a type of deal structure that advertisers and publishers like more and more. Essentially, it's like a closed market which we then help them publish. Lastly, in terms of illumin Exchange, this is the publishers seeking advertisers, that third piece. When I came in as CEO, this is sort of a piece of the business that wasn't really marketed at all. To be honest, most investors may be not even aware of it. It was just sort of there as a nascent part of the business. But it's 23% of our revenue, and it does have a nice gross margin profile. While our focus is on firstly stemming the bleed on managed and maybe turning that towards a mild growth story and then really sort of focusing on making sure that self will be successful, I consider us on Exchange to be opportunistic. As opportunities come towards us, we will execute on them. We have a great product. We have a great team that supports that great product. We should make it available to the marketplace, but our focus is on managed and self. We remain opportunistic on Exchange, and we have seen a nice trending upwards year- on- year in the second half of 2024 related to that demand from publishers seeking advertisers. Fourth thing is the management team. We placed a very close keen eye on EBITDA. There is no point in us returning to a growth story without also bringing some EBITDA with it. I think that's something that you, the audience, would very much want to hear. After sort of challenging several quarters and some losses, you'll see sort of a general pattern here where we do see a nice return to sort of good EBITDA performance. My sort of overarching thinking as an operator when it comes to EBITDA right now is I like what I see in terms of us moving from negative to positive. I would love to see the EBITDA margin to be higher than it is. First things first is I want to get that self product to a greater level of user adoption and stickiness. I want us to get more leads from our new marketing team to sort of really drive a catapult of velocity. When we sort of reach that higher plateau, I think that we will be in a position to maybe figure out how we can get better leverage out of the platform. Our focus for 2025 is to not increase our operating expenses and not increase our development, but instead to sort of keep them at the level that they are, perfect the product, get better at marketing, get better at selling. We seem to be strong trend line towards that already, and then quickly come back towards then figuring out how do we drive EBITDA. We have a keen eye on EBITDA for sure. In terms of nine months disclosed revenue, we see a nice trend line going from negative six and negative 12 to our last reported quarter, a plus 23%. As a CEO, I'm looking for not just a great quarter, but I'm looking for patterns. I would insist that as investors, you're probably looking for the same. Similar story on the EBITDA side. Tough road to hoe for a bit, and then suddenly a good quick return. Just in the last quarter, $1.8 million EBITDA, I think a really nice sort of trend line is emerging there. It's starting to show up in our stock, which is great. This actually is a screenshot of our over-the-counter, our OTC listing as opposed to our TSX listing. Showing $1.88. You saw on the first slide, I said $2.47. That's the difference between the two listings. Putting our business in context, I really like the advertising marketplace. It's a bellwether to sort of the near-term future of the economy. All the major analysts across the board show the marketplace growing at roughly 15%. It's growing across a variety of channels and by a variety of means. I love that as a CEO. That positions us well to sort of take advantage of that. Growth is coming from a variety of sources, whether that's just GDP growth or better user performance. We see better budgets coming out of advertisers across the board. It's a nice split of where the growth is coming from. If I relate that growth back to illumin, what I really like are a couple of key highlights. The first one is CTV. What the heck is CTV? CTV stands for Connected TV. Think of your old linear television advertising. It was a big part of the advertising space pre-digital. All that sort of ad spend is now coming into digital channels as more and more content gets consumed across, say, networks like Netflix or Amazon Prime, for example. There's a lot more advertising showing up there. Most analysts predict that CTV will consume a third to a half of the total sort of TV spend. Digital is now on the rise. Stifel and other more aggressive analysts actually have that number as much higher. I love it because it's a great growth channel for us. We're already taking advantage of that. We've seen a really nice sharp rise when we position ourselves as a great provider of CTV options. We layered in a series of partnerships in 2024, including NBC Universal, Disney, and Paramount. Advertisers love the fact that we have reached these specific, unique, and valuable audiences. Another area for great growth is in display ads. This is the ads sort of on the open internet. Again, we refocused our self platform in particular to sort of be better user experience, make it easier for customers. They love this sort of thing. We are seeing a really nice uptick already in our display ads. Thirdly, we are exploring an opportunity to run an entirely new space, which is with retail media. Retail media is this very interesting space where essentially retailers out there, think brick-and-mortar retailers, for example, have all these captured audiences. How do they connect that to demand gen? They are becoming a new audience for us. There are very few platforms in the space that are enabled or have the technology end-to-end to take advantage of this space. We do. We want to explore that as possibly an entirely new market segment. It's new and emerging, but we have the right tools and we're in place. We're employing a little bit of courage to sort of reach into a new marketplace. In terms of strategic advantages, what I would note is that most of the industry runs on really sort of difficult user experiences for advertisers and publishers. Think of really complex Excel sheets when you want to run all your advertising. We have, in a way, unlocked an entirely new user experience, what we call the journey. Think of it as drag and drop, but more importantly, think of it as fully integrated channels. Whether you want to go across any channel from a podcast to open web, we have that ability all in one user interface. This simplification is part of the reason why we're seeing such great traction in our self product. It's bringing us new customers. It's bringing us great growth. As I said, 100% year- on- year up on a nine-month reported basis. This user experience, this fully integrated channel piece is a very interesting strategic advantage. No one else really has it. Also, to be honest, it's not really in the interest of others. They're typically more focused on one or two channels, whereas we are positioning ourselves as a true omnichannel solution. That drag and drop is a really interesting experience. Most importantly, in the end, results matter. We are very well- positioned to deliver incremental results. Last sort of strategic note before I sign off, we're also the only provider that can reach inside those walled gardens. We've gone on various partnerships, most notably recently with Meta. We launched Meta last year, where, yes, as an advertiser, you can deploy your ad spend inside the Meta walled garden and get results as you reach Facebook customers, for example. You can also deploy that exact same spend through our tools and other channels like, say, a Spotify or a display ad or audio podcast of some kind. What we find in tests when you deploy the same ad spend through illumin and reach on Meta is that we can generate anywhere from a 15%-40% better ROI for those advertisers than using Meta's own tools. This, in my opinion, is a very interesting catalyst. It is upon us as a management team to prove this out across more than one ad channel. This is where we will be heavily focused over the years, to prove this out across a variety of channels. If so, that could add a lot of enterprise value to the business. I really like it from a customer point of view. Meta wins, customer wins, and we win. I like that a lot. Last note for me is to sort of roughly look for a couple of hallmarks from us. First and foremost, our Q4 numbers come out on March 14. That will be our next release. Our main focus is on driving self-performance in 2025, but look for us to sort of see some mild hold or even mild improvement in Managed Services. As I said earlier, on that Exchange or that publisher side business, we will remain opportunistic until I see a better pattern, and we may want to make a bigger commitment. You will see us make more product and walled garden announcements. Lastly, we have a keen eye on EBITDA. Do not forget, last but not least, we have that great balance sheet, $51 million in cash, next to no debt. We will look to be opportunistic in adding in customer bases and sales in different ways after we prove out some core patterns of our own growth. That is my present presentation for today. I have five minutes for Q&A. Let me just see what we have. First question comes from Brian Langus. Where do you see your business in three to five years? We have about 60%-70% of our business comes in the U.S., 30% international. LATAM and Canada look sort of our main spaces, a bit in the EU. In three to five years, first and foremost, I still see the U.S. as our biggest marketplace, but I see us adding more value, not just in the open web, but also through those walled garden partnerships and more inventory partnerships like the NBC Universal. That is the first bucket. I see more and more of that. I am bullish on the U.S. market. I think there is a lot of optimism in the short term. I think in terms of the overall unit economics over the next couple of years, I am bullish on the U.S. market. Second to that, I see us more mature in LATAM and international. We have gotten into these spaces. We have got some good revenue. We have got some good partnerships. We are working with some phenomenal brands, which is great. The international markets adopt self at a different rate. Probably look to leverage a bit more of the Managed Services in the short term, maybe some more self over time. More importantly, think of our products as a portfolio when it comes to international customers. I think there will have a wider interest in a series of products as opposed to one or two. That is sort of how I see us over the next three to five years. Lastly, using that balance sheet in a responsible way, consistently contributing cash, but finding ways to grow inordinately, most likely through acquiring customer bases. For example, a Managed Services provider who is competitive to us but needs a Self-Service product in their segment. I think that that would be a nice way to go. Jesus Sanchez, will this deck be distributed? As far as I know, yes, but I will leave that to the OTC administrators to get back to you on that. Kevin McBean, could I address competitive threats? In terms of competitive threats, I see on the macro level, will spending revert to really being just walled gardens and the open internet maybe shrink a little bit? I do not see that as a threat, but it is nonetheless. Those are some pretty big brands with some pretty big advertising reach. You can never take your eye off of that. How do we mitigate that? We level up our quality so that we are a good fish that swims next to those mighty sharks. That is sort of the way I see that. Other competitive threat is I do see there are a fair number of sort of very ordinary providers who have historically maybe ridden off some of the buoyancy in the marketplace. They're largely fading away. It is important for us, again, to level up our quality so that we are brand differentiated from any sort of deprecation they may provide in the marketplace. Gordon Hodge writes, how do you differentiate illumin from Trade Desk competitively and who are other major competitors? Trade Desk is a leading titan in the space for sure. They do, to be frank, very similar things to us. They primarily focus only on the biggest brands, the biggest advertisers out there. As a simple example, they have a minimum $5 million spend to sort of use their platform. We have a lot more flexibility. We're chasing the challenger brands. We're chasing the challenger agencies because we ourselves, as a turnaround story, are becoming a challenger brand in our own right. It sort of seems to align internally and externally. That is sort of our focus there. We are well differentiated from them. For certain, again, huge titan, can't beat them. Awesome management team, great product. Let them keep that top-upper space. Let us come in as a challenger brand. Again, it just gives us more—there's a fair amount of greenfield for us to play that they're just fundamentally not interested in. Let me see if I can grab a few others under here. Paul Delcaso, apologies if I said your name incorrectly. Given the competitive landscape of AI-driven digital advertising, how does illumin differentiate itself from major players like Google and The Trade Desk? What roles does AI play in maintaining this momentum? Actually, I failed to mention this, but our entire platform, which is proprietary in-house, we built machine learning and AI from day one. You maybe saw that I highlighted that our platform unlocks additional conversion that cannot be found elsewhere. That is all driven by machine learning and AI. We have a phenomenal level of AI that helps us sort of really focus on getting better results for the customers. When I came in here as CEO, my very first question was, prove it to me that we are as good or better than the super titans in this space in terms of being able to hit the bid, execute the trade in that sense, and deliver machine learning and AI on top of that to get better reporting and results. Every single time we ran a blind test using third tools, it came back as we're as good or better than anybody else in the space. We're just the best story you've never heard. At 10:29, I might be at time. I see Paul's question appears twice in my chat box. Oh, there's a Paul Svets: our different approaches opening up new customers, areas, TAM change. The market's growing. We're marketing ourselves differently. We only had one message in the marketplace, which was essentially try our self product. Now we're much more tactical in the short term, which is like we've got great answers for CTV. We've got great answers if you want to grow in CPG, Consumer Packaged Goods. We've got new partnerships that help you in retail media, for example. We're a little bit more tactical on how we're marketing. That's bringing in leads. That's driving customer adoption. At the same time, we're changing how we're selling and we're increasing our spend per customer. That's sort of where we're focused in terms of a different approach from us. I think I'm at time, so I'm just conscious of that. I show 10:30 on my clock. I believe the procedure is if you have additional questions—oh, I should just throw this on the screen. There's our contact information. If you have additional questions, you can reach out to Steve Hosein directly. He coordinates everything for us. Happy to sort of jump on a follow-on call at a coordinated time and date. Just as a reminder, our Q4 is March 14, so we will probably work around and after that just for good governance. I think that's it for me.