All right, so I think in the interest of time, we're gonna let everybody get settled, and thanks everyone for joining. It's my pleasure to welcome the team to the stage from MediaAlpha. We've got Steve Yi, CEO; Pat Thompson, CFO. We, as a team, just recently initiated on MediaAlpha, so this is the first time we're hosting MediaAlpha here at the conference this year. Guys, thanks so much for being part of the conference. Thank you. Good to be here. Steve, let's start with you. You know, what I always like to do, especially with companies that are here for the first time, is to give you an opportunity to level set folks. You know, can you provide an overview of the platform you're building? What are you trying to build and unlock in terms of opportunity for the company over the long term? Yeah, absolutely. So I think if you're new to our business, the best way to think about where we sit is really at the intersection of insurance and customer acquisition, or internet advertising customer acquisition. So what we've built with our platform and our marketplace is a network of hundreds of publisher sites where people are shopping for insurance. Our biggest category is auto insurance. And then we're allowing the major carriers within the space, Progressive, Geico, Allstate, et cetera, to reach these consumers at the point of purchase or near the point of purchase. And so, so an example would be a publisher that we work with called Insurify or Insurance Zebra, two different publishers where people are shopping for auto insurance. They're like the Kayak of auto insurance. So consumers will go to those sites, shop for insurance, put in all their information related to the policy that they're looking to acquire, you know, whether they're a homeowner or not, number of cars that they have, et cetera. And then, in response to that search, with all the data, what we're allowing is Progressive and Allstate and Geico, and the big carriers, to reach those consumers, bidding the precise amount based on the expected lifetime value of that consumer. And so the reason it's such a compelling market opportunity is two: One is that within the insurance industry, the insurance industry spends countless billions in distribution, and that distribution spend typically, and historically, has gone to brokers in the form of broker commission or agent commission. And the seismic shift that's happening is really that economics going, going from offline broker sales, right, into advertising spend as more carriers start to embrace direct-to-consumer advertising. This is most notably happening within the auto insurance space, where direct-to-consumer carriers, like Progressive and Geico, have really gained a ton of market share at the expense of traditional agent-based carriers. And so what you're seeing is the entire industry waking up to this opportunity and really starting to make a big shift from agent-based distribution to direct to consumer. And where we sit, we stand to be one of the direct beneficiaries of that. I don't know, Pat, if you wanted to add anything? Pat has nothing. We're good. Okay. Okay. Yeah, good. Okay, no, I think that's a great way to set us up. But I, I do wanna come back to something you've been going through more recently, 'cause when you talk to technology investors, some of them don't have an insurance background. Why don't you provide a little bit of an overview of what you've been through over the more recent past? 'Cause there's been a cyclical downturn in the property and casualty insurance market over the last several years, and you're now in the midst of a bit of a recovery cycle. How should people be thinking about what you've been through and the transition we're going through to, hopefully, a recovery cycle of the space? Yeah, it's been quite a few years since we went public. If you don't know the property and casualty or the personal lines, property and casualty insurance, it's basically auto and homeowners. It's a cyclical industry. It moves to a different cycle than most other industries, and it typically doesn't move to a business cycle, it moves to an underwriting cycle. What happened at the tail end of COVID is that there was an underwriting cycle that the entire industry fell into because of rising claims costs. The reason that there were rising claims costs was that there was supply chain-related inflation, right, at the back end of the pandemic. There were labor shortages, and so costs to repair cars, based on both those factors, went up pretty dramatically, like 40%-50% on average. And so, when this happens, car insurance companies need to raise rates, otherwise they're losing money, right? Not quite that simple, because it takes oftentimes a year, a year and a half, for car insurance companies to get their rates to the point where they're actually restoring underwriting profitability, because they need to get these rate increases approved by 50 insurance commissioners' offices. And so what tends to happen during these periods is that these carriers, as they're getting their rates increased and restoring underwriting profitability, they tend to pull back on advertising spend and marketing spend. And so during the second half of COVID, right, when pandemic-related factors really led to sort of, you know, historical claim cost inflation of, again, 40%-50%, which the industry hadn't seen for, you know, 30-40 years, it took a while for the industry to restore profitability, and during that time, they essentially stopped advertising or dramatically pulled back on advertising. And so, you know, entering into 2024, largely, the industry's restored profitability. They're not all there yet. Certainly, you know, carriers like Progressive and Allstate that you've heard about, have restored profitability, and they're really starting to step on the gas. And so you're seeing a big inflection point at the beginning of this year with insurance advertising spends starting to go up pretty dramatically. Okay, that's clear. Moving on from that topic, Steve, I wanna stick with you for maybe one more- Okay. And we've got to bring Pat into the conversation. The other conversation we've been having with investors since we've initiated on the name is just a better understanding of the competitive landscape. So who do you compete with for a dollar in the end market? What do you see as the competitive strengths and differentiators for MediaAlpha? Talk a little bit about that landscape for those who may be a little bit less familiar with it. Yeah, sure. So, so the publicly traded companies, I think, were QuinStreet, EverQuote, and LendingTree. So we compete with those companies, who are in the broader insurance lead generation space for advertising dollars from carriers. And so, if you're, if you're following these companies, you'll see that we're several times larger than them in terms of just the carrier spend that's in our marketplace. And that's exactly the reason, is because we are a marketplace of hundreds of publishers, who are out there, actually have insurance shopping on their site or happening in the personal finance apps, like Credit Karma is one of our major publishers. And so I would say that the big differentiator between us and the other publicly traded companies is that we work with hundreds of public insurance publishers in order to actually aggregate all of the insurance shopping activity, again, on price comparison sites, on carrier sites, and personal finance apps, and on lead generation sites, and allow insurance carriers to really access all of that inventory through one marketplace, which is us. If you compare us to an EverQuote or a LendingTree, you can think about them as essentially just being lead generators. They have a network of thousands of insurance agents that they're selling leads to, as well as the carriers that they're selling clicks to, but they're all doing it by marketing and driving traffic to their lead generation site, which is EverQuote.com or LendingTree.com. Okay. Yeah, I would probably just add one thing to what Steve said there, which is, I think Steve talked about our direct competitive set, and then we have an indirect competitive set, which is, you know, kind of who we're fighting for marketing dollars from a carrier. And so I think, you know, as you think about carriers, they've got a couple of budgets of distribution spend, where the first will be, and Steve touched on this earlier, it'll be agent and broker commissions. The second piece will be TV advertising, and the third will be other performance marketing channels like Google. And, you know, I think on, you know, on us relative to them, our big differentiator is the transparency and the targetability that we offer them. And so I think, you know, when you're advertising on TV, who are you getting? You're getting everybody that's watching that particular show. If you're advertising in Google, who are you getting? Whoever typed in that keyword. Our channel and our platform is unbelievably data-rich, where we get, you know, 30-40 pieces of information on a consumer that are directly relevant to the pricing decision by the carrier and the attractiveness of the customer to the carrier. And so, you know, for instance, the three of us up on this stage probably actually look pretty similar, which is like, you know, we're all within, you know, five or ten years age of each other, you know, incomes are, you know, probably not crazy far off, but we all live in different places. We all have... You know, I know Steve has teenage drivers in the house. I don't. You know, we all have different cars, you know, we all have slightly different credit scores, you know, et cetera. And all of these things get to make us, you know, very different customers in terms of attractiveness to carriers, and thus worth very different amounts. And so that target ability is hugely powerful because a carrier might go: "I love people in Washington, but I don't like people in California or New York." And so great, they can target me and ignore those guys. And so that is a big differentiator for us and something that in a kind of rapidly growing market, is a real differentiator because the carriers can invest heavily to get the exact types of customers they want. Okay, clear. Thank you, Pat. Hey, Pat, maybe sticking with you, I want to talk a little bit about mix of the business. On the demand side, what's the current mix of advertisers, and how might that evolve over time? And similarly, on the supply side, what's your current and potential future optimal mix of publishers- Yeah ... that you'd like to have on the platform? Yeah, and I would say on the advertiser side, you know, for us, particularly within the P&C vertical, for us, it's very carrier-centric for us. And, you know, it'll be the league table for auto insurance carriers is, you know, relatively top-heavy, where the top 10 carriers have 70%-80% market share. And so, you know, we've got, you know, a degree of concentration there with some big carriers, and we had last quarter, two 10% revenue contributors in our overall mix. And so, you know, there is some concentration there, but it's not extreme by any stretch. On the publisher side, the business for us is, you know, really focused on kind of four different types of publishers that are all meaningful contributors to our overall mix. And, the first would be financial apps, which I think Steve touched on, and you can think of Credit Karma as being an example of that. The second would be price comparison sites, so folks like Insurify, and we had a recent press release on them, and they're endeavoring to be the Kayak of insurance shopping. Third would be carriers themselves, and so you can think of somebody like The General there, which is The General, a non-standard carrier focused on kind of the lower end of the market. And so if you know somebody who's you know a premium or preferred customer comes in, The General is you know they have a rate, but you know folks like us probably aren't likely to choose them, and so they'll place ads to be able to monetize and recoup some of their marketing cost. The fourth will be traditional kind of lead generators, and so you know some of the public competitors Steve mentioned, we do a bit of that for our own account as well, and there are a number of you know smaller businesses that do that, but we've got a very diversified publisher mix. Okay. Steve, I want to bring it back to you. Mm-hmm. We talked a little bit about the near-term cyclical trends, and you alluded a little bit to the secular tailwinds of where the insurance industry is headed in terms of how they spend their marketing dollars. Talk a little bit about sustained growth over the long term, and how you feel you're positioned to capitalize on certain secular themes within the broader insurance industry. Yeah, I think I touched on one of them, which is just the just how early innings we are in the shift of the overall insurance industry from offline, you know, broker and agent-based distribution, and paying commissions as a primary distribution cost, to actually going direct to consumer and replacing a lot of that broker commissions that are being paid out. Again, like, you know, I think by some estimate, like $100 billion+ a year, right, in terms of broker commissions that are being paid out. And replacing that with advertising spend as more and more insurance carriers start to, and more insurance sectors start to adopt a direct-to-consumer model. And so within auto insurance, it's, you know, it's the sector that was early to adopt direct to consumer. And I say that relatively speaking, 'cause I recognize it is 2024, and there's still a lot of carriers, like State Farm. You still can't buy a policy on StateFarm.com. And so I think I would say within auto insurance, which is our, again, our biggest sector right now, we're still in the fourth or fifth inning in terms of the direct-to-consumer adoption, right? The transition that you're seeing Allstate making from being a captive carrier and selling insurance policies just through Allstate dot. Just through Allstate agents, to now spending, having at least a third of their policies now being sold through Allstate.com and building a direct business that way. You know, that's a transition that, you know, companies like American Family and State Farm, and a number of other carriers still have yet to make, right? And so we believe that that secular trend towards adding strong direct-to-consumer capabilities, which will mean a much increased investment in internet advertising dollars, has still yet to happen to a large degree with many carriers, even within the top 10 carriers within the auto insurance space. I think looking beyond that, what we anticipate is that other insurance sectors will follow suit. So I think you know the second insurance vertical that we're in is health insurance. And really within that, you have Medicare Advantage, which is a big sector into itself. It's a $500 billion insurance sector, where you have big players like UnitedHealthcare, Humana, et cetera, who I think are really in the very early innings of adopting direct-to-consumer technology. There, what we see the long-term opportunity being is really being a technology partner with companies like that, to help them develop the online enrollment and conversion capabilities, just because of the capabilities that they bring to the space, you know, are somewhere maybe 10 or 15 years behind that of what you've seen from a typical auto insurance carrier, and so what we look forward to is really expanding within other insurance categories like Medicare Advantage, potentially small business, commercial insurance, to create similar marketplaces as these industries all make their shift to adding more direct-to-consumer distribution capabilities, and in those cases, actually leveraging the experience that we have, you know, within the auto insurance sector to help become much more of a technology partner to these companies. Okay. Sorry to jump in there. No, no, go ahead. The stat that I found so powerful when I joined MediaAlpha three years ago, and that I still think is a super powerful and persuasive one, is that about a quarter of all working marketing spend in the insurance industry is spent online. And you compare that to the U.S. economy, it's about two-thirds of working media spend is spent online, and two-thirds of media consumption is online. And so, you know, what is that now 25% number gonna be three years from now, five years from now, ten years from now? Like, I can't tell you exactly, but it's gonna be a lot higher than it is today. And so we clearly have the wind at our back for the foreseeable future. Okay. Pat, sticking with you, maybe talk a little bit about another mixed question, but how does your 1 P, O&O site business fit into your long-term strategy, and what's the current mix between third-party marketplace and first party? And what do you see as an optimal mix going forward? Yeah ... for the business? Yeah, so our mix is about 85% third party, about 15% first party. And so that first party business is us marketing in Google, Facebook, for our own account. So we drive it to our own websites, ask the consumers a series of questions, on a form, and ultimately, you know, monetize it the same way we would, on the third-party side. And so, you know, I think that business is, you know, it's interesting, one, because it's slightly higher margin, and two, you know, we think it is strategic because it really gives us. It It lets us see how it feels to be a publisher on our platform. And I know that, you know, a number of the features we've developed for publishers, we actually developed for our O&O business. You know, it allows us to also be a fertile test bed for things where, you know, we'll test stuff that we think could be interesting to partners on our own business, and start to go like: Hey, does this make sense? Yes or no? And so it is a strategic portion of the business. It's something we've, you know, invested to have perform over time. You know, I would say the percentage of the business that's been O&O is, you know, probably gonna continue to fall a bit over the course of this year. Like, I wouldn't doubt it, you know, goes down to, you know, it's 15% now, wouldn't doubt it ends the year, you know, something like 10%. You know, I think that, you know, it is growing, you know, and we're eager to play there, but we don't ever see ourselves as having that be like a majority of the business, because partnerships are at the core of our business, and it is where we are focused. So, Pat, sticking with you, how do you put in the long-term opportunity with respect to the health insurance segment? How might evolving regulation impact growth over the medium term? Yeah. So the health insurance business is an interesting one because it's, you know, I would say it's probably actually really three separate businesses or two separate businesses for us, where there's the Medicare Advantage business and then Under- 65. And within Under-65, there's two separate businesses there. There's ACA plans and non-ACA plans. And, you know, each of these, you know, areas is impacted by, you know, kind of policy decisions and quite frankly, like, the party that's in the White House and controls Congress. And, you know, I think the Under-65 component would be an oversimplification, but Democrats are pro-ACA, Republicans are anti-ACA. And we've kind of seen with political regime change that the winds will blow in one direction versus the other, but we've successfully navigated those over time and have done, you know, well over time, regardless of the administration. You know, Medicare Advantage is one where, you know, I think there is clearly broad bipartisan support for the program, but there are, you know, constantly changes made to reimbursement rates, star ratings, et cetera, that can have, you know, some impact around the margin. But once again, we've successfully navigated those over time. As we think about the longer term here, and Steve touched on this earlier, if auto insurance is in the fourth or fifth inning of moving online, health insurance is, you know, in the first inning or, you know, warming up before the game, throwing the ball around the diamond. And so, you know, we think that there's, you know, gonna be a lot of opportunity on the health side, in the Medicare side, to have that business move online. You know, particularly on the Medicare side, is, you know, retirees aging into that product are much more kind of internet-enabled than, you know, some of the older folks. And so we're, you know, very excited to partner with our carrier partners and help to move that business online, and we think that over the long term, that there's a lot of opportunity there for us. Okay. Moving beyond P&C and health, how do you think about other areas beyond those two in terms of expanding into other categories? What are some of the characteristics you look at when you're analyzing new market verticals, things like life, travel, et cetera? Yeah, and I would say, you know, for us, P&C and health are 1 A and 1 B in terms of priority. Life is, you know, it's probably third, and, you know, and then there's everything else that's, you know, somewhere below third. And I would say that, you know, we, as a company, we're focused on insurance, and we think that the biggest opportunity for us is helping our carrier partners as they transition, you know, more and more to an online experience and as consumers look to shop there. And, you know, they're big markets, they're complicated markets, they're specific markets, and they're markets where we have, you know, a lot of pieces in place in terms of relationships, and so, you know, we're focused there for growth. I think we've got, you know, some other businesses that we entered at varying points historically, you know, travel and, personal finance, you know, kind of mortgage. They're a pretty small portion of the mix. They're profitable for us today, and they're not areas where we're investing very heavily, but, you know, we see ourselves as an insurance marketing company. Okay. So we've talked a lot about where the... what's been built on the platform, what's evolving, where you want to go longer term. Maybe put a finer point on it for us. What are your key strategic priorities with respect to investing in the business? And against that investment cadence, how do you guys as a company think about balancing growth investments against continuing to deliver on margin leverage? Yeah, and the efficiency is in our DNA as a company, and it's we had 137, I believe, employees at the end of Q2. And, you know, it's kind of remarkable the size of the business that we're able to drive with so few people, and it's, you know, it kind of, you know, has been embedded in the culture from the start. And so, you know, kind of being frugal, running efficiently, you know, having people wear multiple hats is, you know, it is what we do as a company, and it is what we will always do as a company. And so, you know, we're delivering quite a bit of leverage right now. We're also investing in capabilities. As I think about the business there are, you know, kind of broadly speaking, you know, three groups of people. One will be, you know, true overhead functions. So you think about, you know, finance, HR, legal, things like that, and, you know, we're getting a lot of leverage there. The second will be stuff that's semi-variable, and so you can think of sales and account management as being an example of that, which is, as the business is growing, you know, very steeply, we need to add, but not dollar for dollar on it, because, you know, if an account doubles in size, you need more resource on it, but not twice as many. And then the third piece is where the strategic long-term unlock comes, which is gonna be on the tech product analytics side, and that's an area – those are areas where, you know, investment doesn't pay off in the short term. It's like we could hire a new developer, and we're not getting an ROI in the first six, nine months. But we do get great ROI over a three and five-year period, and so, you know, we've historically invested heavily there. You know, we've been hiring there, and we're, you know, excited to continue to invest there because that's ultimately what drives the long-term success of the business. So maybe last one for you, Pat, and sort of building on that answer. So that's the investments in the core business. Bring it back to a broader capital allocation philosophy. Yeah. So you've got investments in the business, maybe the potential to do M&A and speed up some of those go-to-market strategies, and also the potential to return capital to shareholders. What's the current philosophy? How should we think about that? Yeah, and, you know, I would say the as a company, we are a business that, you know, that generates, you know, that should generate a lot of cash. And so, you know, for us, we've got, you know, Adjusted EBITDA, we have essentially zero CapEx. I think last year it was $100,000. Overall, we don't capitalize any software development expense, and we don't have. We're fully in the cloud, so there's no servers or anything like that. Historically, over time, the business has been a, you know, minimal net working capital business. You know, it's flat to a little bit of working capital, and so, you know, we should generate a lot of cash. The, you know, capital deployment piece for us, near term, it's building up the cash balance/reducing net debt. We've got a little bit drawn on the revolver, and we've got mandatory amortization every year on the term loan, so we'll be doing that. You know, I think beyond that, we are major shareholders in the company, and we're all about driving long-term returns to shareholders. You know, obviously, investing in growth, whether it's organic or inorganic, you know, comes first, and to the extent, you know, we don't see great opportunities to do that, you know, over time, we're very open to returning capital to shareholders. Okay. We've got a few minutes left. Steve, I want to bring you into the conversation- Sure. To sort of close us out. We typically try to end these things with sort of a forward-looking bend. So maybe a two-parter for you. You know, when you look ahead over the next twelve, eighteen months, what are your key priorities and the milestones you'd like to achieve for this business, looking forward, both as a platform, as a company? And when you talk to investors, are there any emerging themes or dynamics around the business or the industry that you think remain relatively underappreciated or unfocused on by investors? Right. I'd say that, I mean, you know, really what we're focused on is really working with the industry, particularly within the auto insurance industry, as it, you know, makes it through what will be this historical recovery from a historically down period. And so I think we're already seeing, you know, growth that we were not quite expecting, you know, last year, right? And so the first year of the recovery, the first half year of the recovery has been, you know, unexpected on the high side. And so our team is completely focused on working with these carriers as they start to, you know, ramp up their marketing spend again and really step on the gas. Because I think the market's gonna come back in unpredictable ways, and so we need to be ready as we work with our carrier partners and major carrier partners as they come back into a growth mindset into what's called the soft market cycle. And so now I think really what I think remains somewhat underappreciated is really the story between us and what differentiates us versus our publicly traded comparable companies, most notably EverQuote and LendingTree, who really focus on generating leads from their owned and operated site, right? We've talked about that a lot. And the fact that our marketplace of working with hundreds of publishers really enables us to scale up very quickly to meet the demands of our large carrier partners. And the ability for us to really grow, you know, grow exponentially in some cases, right, the carrier spend, and be able to absorb that through our marketplace model, I think is something that really still remains a bit underappreciated. But what you've seen over the last, you know, six months is that we've outgrown our publicly traded comparable companies, you know, by two to four X because of this model that we have of working with carriers, being highly levered to direct carrier spend, and the ability of our marketplace of hundreds of publishers like Credit Karma, Insurance Zebra, Insurify, the 40 carriers that we work with to help them monetize their non-converting shoppers on their sites. The ability of this marketplace of publishers to really scale up, you know, in connection with the demands of what is a very cyclical P&C industry, I think, is something that I'd, you know, we talk about over and over again with different investors. So I don't know, Pat, if you have anything to add to that. I think you covered it. All right. Okay. Why don't we leave it there? Thank you. First of all, thank you for the opportunity to have the conversation. I appreciate it, yeah. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Pat. Please join me in thanking the team for being part of the conference this year. Thanks, Eric.