For those of you that haven't been with me before, Ygal and covering Citi here at Internet. Really pleased to have LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe with us. Thanks, thanks for joining us, and we've got IR Drew Borst here, too. So, feel free to jump in whenever Scott goes off track. Which is often, so. So let's just start, Scott. So for people that are newer to the LiveRamp story, can you just walk us through, you know, what exactly it is LiveRamp does, you know, how it fits with the ad tech ecosystem, and the broader digital advertising ecosystem? Sure. We're probably one of the bigger companies you've never heard of, but you've heard of all the clients that we work with. And I say that because virtually every big company on the planet is struggling with the opportunity of how to harness the power of data more effectively. They know that if they can capture the right consented data and use it effectively, they can deliver better customer experiences, they can deliver better business ROI, they can unlock better collaboration with their partners and customers. So all good, but practically, it's hard to do. And what LiveRamp does is help companies make it safe and easy to collaborate with data. And there's kind of four different pieces to that, all of which are sold under a single SaaS platform called our Data Collaboration Platform. One is allowing companies to ingest consented data easily and effectively. Oftentimes, it's just their own data. Many times, increasingly, it's the data from their major partners, where, you know, a packaged goods company and their retail partner, for example, a Walmart and a P&G, want to collaborate together. The second thing that we do is we provide a concept of foundational identity. The way to think about data is it's, you know, just a series of rows, and every row is a person. But what my database might show might be different than your database. And so unless you have kind of a Rosetta Stone that can translate across different data sets and help co-mingle data elements, then all you have is two disconnected silos of data. The third piece is turnkey activations. Every place that a customer wants to use their data, a major client wants to use their data. Like, let's take Citi, for instance. Citi is a customer of LiveRamp's, and so they will activate their CRM files on Facebook, on Google, on Trade Desk, on CTV partners like Hulu or Roku, within their email platforms. And all of that flows through LiveRamp's platform to get to those destinations. And then the final thing, which is really important given where the world is going, is we manage all of the permissions and governance. And that's a big deal in a world of heightened data regulations, and it's a big deal when every company is trying to collaborate with dozens of other companies. Each of them needs to know that their data is gonna be maintained according to their permission controls, their requirements, and that that partner can never misappropriate the data. So we do all that with a turnkey platform. 80% of our revenue is SaaS. We think of ourselves as a Rule of 40 company, but we got a ways to go on both of those levers. Slow and steady progress, but still early in the journey. Okay, great. So that's a great overview. Let's kinda dive into some of the key things. So, you guys talked about some mega trends. Yeah ... on your 1Q call. But let's start with the first, with new marketing channels, Retail Media, CTV are two of the big ones. They've been bright spots for you, or they've been bright spots in digital advertising kinda collectively this year. Poised to see strong growth over the next five years. Why is LiveRamp well positioned to serve these markets, and what are you doing to capture that market? I mean, it really speaks to the four criteria I just talked about, the four foundational elements of our platform. You know, there's this concept called Retail Media Networks that has really grown explosively. I think it's the fastest growing element of media. That and CTV, I think, are the two top. Yep. Retail Media Networks have grown so fast because, there's kind of a handful of truths. One is, every company in the world is looking at Amazon and saying: "Wow, they have such a huge competitive advantage. Given all the data that they collect, they can deliver better insights and better customer experiences to their audience. How am I gonna compete with that?" Well, they can't, unless they partner with someone else. And so how can Walmart compete? Well, Walmart can compete by saying: "I'm not gonna just try to do it alone. I'm going to allow my data to be utilized by P&G, and by Coca-Cola, and by Pepsi." And so you get this concept of this Retail Media Network, which is really just data collaboration between the two nodes of the network. On the one hand, the retailer, on the other hand, all of their major merchant partners, and so that's data collaboration. And that's what we do. And, you know, ultimately, that also allows those retailers and those packaged goods partners to deliver better customer experiences, because if you're signing up for a loyalty program or a part of Walmart's CRM system, you're gonna get better offers. You're gonna get better in-store shopping experiences. And what's really interesting here is, like, we've seen explosive growth from Retail Media Networks, but this is a secular trend that is only just starting. Because, like, I've had investors say, "Well, you know, I've heard a lot about Retail Media Networks. When is the growth for that gonna slow?" And the answer is, it's not about Retail Media Networks, it's about a broadened definition. It's Commerce Media Networks, that everyone else in the industry is looking at the success of Retail Media Networks and saying, "Shouldn't I do that?" And so you have the major travel companies, all of whom bring a turnkey... Major airline, you know, they have 150 big travel partners that they've been working with for the last 20 years, and the currency has been miles. Well, no longer. The currency increasingly is gonna be data. And so, you know, Avis and Delta, or American and, and Hertz, you can start to see how sharing data and offering better joint offers is gonna improve the economics of both companies and improve the customer experience. Well, it's a short jump from, like, Commerce Networks to Connected Car Networks. You know, I can't remember which automotive manufacturer it was. Actually, I can. They said, "Hey, we don't think about ourselves in the car business anymore. We're in the information, we're in the data business, because we're realizing our car is just a central point for all of this data." The car just connects you to all the places you wanna go, and why should the revenue be limited to just transportation? It should actually expand to data linkages to all those different destinations. Or, you know, what I'm really excited about, and this gets into a little bit of CTV, which is this other big mega trend, like, who has really rich, permission-based data on their customers? Well, companies like Hulu, or Netflix, or Roku, or Disney+. And they've never been able to use those data repositories effectively. You know, all the information has been kind of monopolized by the buy side. Well, now through data collaboration, the sell side, the destinations, and the buy side can pool together at a moment in time and unlock better outcomes for both sides. So early on in this major secular trend, surfing the wave that is these Retail or Commerce Media Networks, I think that is gonna be so much of what's going on in media and agencies for the next five years. I think you took the excitement around CTV and Retail Media to a whole new level. I didn't know that was possible to do, but I think you did it. Let's go to something that's maybe a little less exciting, but very important, that's cookie deprecation, so- Yeah ... that was the second one you mentioned on the, on the key themes, and so I think Google's still looking at that Q1 2024 timeline. Yeah. Can you talk us about your relationship with Google, you know, the testing process, including PAIR and kind of as it relates to cookie deprecation, how's LiveRamp positioned to benefit from this? Yeah. So I'll tell you, as an investor, if I were looking at stocks, the thing that, you know, I'd often wanna see is what companies are at an inflection point. And I think we're at an inflection point, at LiveRamp, and I say this because for the last three or four years, for many investors, their biggest concern was, "Hey, what happens in a world of no cookies? Is LiveRamp impacted?" And we've said all along, "No, we, we're not." Like, we don't care, what our destination is and what the, the kind of bridge is to that destination, whether it's cookies or, mobile IDs or increasingly authenticated, consented IDs. We're gonna be the ones that are serving as the Rosetta Stone from where data originates to where it goes to be put to use. Well, Google announced, they've confirmed several times now, that they will definitively end cookies, early next year. They'll start the process early next year, finish by the end of 2024. They named three launch partners, LiveRamp is by far the biggest, that will provide a service for them. The way that they're deprecating cookies is, they're introducing a technology called PAIR. Stands for Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation, and it goes back to this concept of a Clean Room, collaboration room. In the future, to advertise on DV360, that's Google's DSP, it is the biggest element on most media plans, other than perhaps Google Search. But to advertise display on DV360, you need to have one of these Clean Room partners.... LiveRamp was one of the first three named. We're the only one, as far as I know, that is live. We have signed up, over, I think 75 is the number I gave in the last earnings call, or maybe 80, but the number's growing all the time. And we have campaigns live. By the time we do our next earnings call, I think we'll be in a position to have published case studies. The initial alpha case studies from this are performing better than client expectations, and notably, the reach is exceeding their expectations. I think this is the way, given the world, privacy regulations and consumer control of their data, this is just the way that all media someday is gonna be bought. Right. And so anybody who starts on DV360, in this very consumer-authenticated way to buy media, you know, can extend that to every other element on their media plan. So I think it's gonna be a huge opportunity, 'cause it will take a risk off the table, that investors have perceived that we don't think is there, but also be a nice growth catalyst for us next year as this really starts to find traction with Google advertisers. Great, let's move to the third one, third theme. So that's, the cloud, the shift to cloud. Yeah. LiveRamp spent the past year kinda re-architecting, you know, your, your product to be embedded it within the cloud environments. You know, talk us through how LiveRamp benefits from the shift to cloud. I've talked about your relationships with Snowflake. That seems to be really interesting. Love to hear more on those dynamics, and just where you might be, you know, as kind of relative to competitors as they're working on data rooms as well. Sure. Well, as you can imagine, in a world where harnessing the value of data is everything, a lot of sophisticated companies are looking at their storage and compute needs. And we've always prided ourselves at LiveRamp being connected to everybody ubiquitously, neutrally, agnostic. And what we've realized is, increasingly, we've always been a GCP shop ourselves. That's who we used for storage and compute. But we realized clients, some use Azure, some use AWS, some use Snowflake, some use Databricks, and so we need to be interoperable with all of the different cloud providers. Now, we've seen that oftentimes when someone starts to use LiveRamp, you know, there's a real explosion in storage and compute. So, you know, our partners in those can realize a pretty meaningful bump in revenue. And you know, clients benefit because they're no longer captive to any single cloud provider. They can work with anyone. So in the last six months, for instance, we announced native integrations with Snowflake. We continue to progress in our partnership with GCP. In fact, I think it was last week, we were named Google's Cloud Partner of the Year. So it was kind of a cool announcement that most may have missed. But you know, AWS, we've done some really interesting things with. For us, like last year, the cloud partner channels did about $10 million for us, so off a pretty small base. That was up from nothing 18-24 months ago. I expect it's gonna be a nice growth driver, but again, off a small base. But if I think about the next five years, you know, one of the things I learned when I got acquired by Microsoft years ago, is I was surprised when I went in, like, how much of their revenue was actually partner-driven. And yet, when I look at LiveRamp, you know, less than 5% of our revenue is partner-driven. It's nothing. I see an opportunity to get that to be much higher, and there are benefits for us when we do that, because then we're not doing all the selling ourselves. It's Google bringing us in, it's Amazon bringing us in, it's Snowflake bringing us in to something that they're already working on, and we're just helping them get across the line. Got it. Excuse me. So I think this is the last, some water. I think this is the last of the themes, and that's GenAI. Yeah. Can you talk us through the potential impacts to the top and bottom line, and what we could see those impacts in the financials? Yeah, I think of, of four things that we talked about, this has probably got the longest pull, but it's a question that I've been getting from investors quite a bit. First, let me say, you know, I think so often investors look at GenAI and say, "Hey, is this another iPhone moment that changes everything?" I believe it is. But I actually think in many respects, it could be the greatest tailwind that, that LiveRamp will have. Because what does GenAI need? A ton of data. Mm. What is the requirement of data about people these days? You better get consent, you better have the right governance in place. In some respects, increased usage of AI embeds LiveRamp even more firmly into the very Fabrick of the ecosystem. Now, you know, how will that manifest itself for LiveRamp? I would say, the kind of classic, using a marketing framework for us, I would say three Ps. One will be in product, where I would expect, all of our own product development, to increasingly use AI. Now, we've been doing some of this for the last three, four years. So for instance, in our Identity Graph, we use machine learning. We've used that for a long time, to make better decisions and have better recognition of customers. A second, important application of Gen AI will be in our partnerships. So you can imagine in a world today where every single one of the major agencies is a client of LiveRamp, how they might work with us different in future. Because I can't imagine a world where, in five years' time, more agency functionality isn't automated through AI. You can imagine, like, precision media buying or dynamic, AI-driven creative. And those are things that agencies and a whole lot of start-ups are just starting to work on. But I think they're all gonna need sources of data, and they're all gonna need to activate those applications at the places that matter, major publishers. And so huge opportunity for us, in those partnerships. And so products, processes, and then I think the third piece is just partnerships that there are a ton of opportunities for us to expand the partnerships we have. You know, when someone buys LiveRamp, they're buying a SaaS product, certainly, but the product itself isn't just a UI or real-time functionality, or anything like that. It's a network. It's you plug in, and it's access to all of this data and all of the places the data can be utilized. And so I see an opportunity for us to really expand our biz dev efforts and find new use cases for folks to use AI technology, and so I'm really excited about it. Though I think this is kind of a three-year poll as opposed to something you'll see immediately. Yeah. Three years at least. Yeah, and it'll take time for the industry to develop- Right. But we're gonna be right in the middle of it, and that's fun. Great. Yeah, data just becomes more important. Okay, so those are the, those are the mega trends. Let's kind of dig into some of these things you, you hit on here. So two of the key products, your Identity Reconciliation, and then your Clean Room product. I've heard a lot about Clean Rooms recently from agencies, obviously a really important product. You know, what, what's the momentum that you're seeing there, and, you know, what is it about these products that advertisers need? And you, you hit on a bunch of it, but I'm sure there's, there's more you can expand on it. Yeah, well, first off, I think they kind of go hand in glove, so to speak. It's peanut butter and jelly, or peanut butter and chocolate, actually. It's better. They're just better together. And so for a long time, like, when you first got to know LiveRamp, we were... I think when we launched, we called ourselves a data onboarder. We helped activate data. Well, you know, very quickly you realize, nah, it's not enough. To be better at that, you have to have identity because, increasingly, identity is the glue that stitches together different disparate data sets. And then this Clean Room functionality has to go with it as well, because so often the whole concept of disparate data sets sitting at, you know, companies that are not owned by the same parent, again, it's the Walmart and P&G example, or it's the American Airlines and the Avis example. I'm making these up, but like, just think about companies that should go together, and as a consumer, if they work together, you would get a better experience. They have to have that Clean Room functionality to protect their data such that it's never misappropriated. And so, you know, we've wrapped it into one tasty snack package. You know, the way we sell our SaaS platform is, you get both those things together. And, you know, when you choose to activate different features, completely up to the client. But what we heard from our clients over time is they didn't wanna buy à la carte, they wanted to buy everything together and have the ability to deploy it when and where they wanted to. Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about identity. So could just start with RampID and what it is. Yeah, so think of RampID as the Rosetta Stone for data. This is a little bit confusing. I'm glad you asked this 'cause I probably get this question more than most others from investors. They say, "Hey, you know, I heard about UID 2.0, or I heard about this thing called Fabrick, and they said, "Don't those compete with you?" And the answer is no. We're in a world where I think we support 120 different identifiers. Facebook needs its own identifier to power its own decisions. Trade Desk has its own identifier called UID 2.0 to power its bidding instructions. Everybody has their own identifier, and that's okay. One of the big beauty companies is launching a beauty ID, and their belief is that every consumer in the world who buys beauty products should have a consented beauty ID that allows them to interoperate with other companies. There'll be traveler IDs. I mean, you can imagine all kinds of things. But for those to talk to one another, there needs to be the equivalent of the power grid, the telephone grid, the data grid, so to speak, and that's RampID. We're the Rosetta Stone that sits underneath all those different identifiers. I often talk about, imagine like you're diving into a pool. Well, Trade Desk is a swim lane, Amazon is a swim lane, Facebook is a swim lane, but LiveRamp is the entire pool, because we connect them all together. Okay, so your RampID, let's just take RampID and UID 2. They're separate, but they kind of work together, so- Yeah, UID rides on top of RampID. Uh huh. We supply a big chunk of their reach. They are a great partner. They're one of our top four destinations that advertisers want to utilize. Facebook, Google, Trade Desk would probably be the top three in no particular order. Okay. You know, super important partner for us. Okay, and these IDs are key in the shift from cookies? Yeah, yeah. Right now, you know, a lot of them still rely on cookies, but ours is a personal identifier, consented identifier. And so we can activate in cookies, we can activate in mobile IDs, we can activate in where we think the world is going, complete authentication. And again- Is- ... 120 different identifiers right on top of them. Complete authentication is logged in hashed emails? Well, I think that's a start. Okay. You know, hashed emails are an easy way for most companies, but in reality, they're probably not as secure as a lot of companies would like. Okay. You know, we would like to see something that is even more pseudonymous than a hashed email ID. RampID is a unique identifier that, as soon as an email or other form of identity is shared, it is destroyed and replaced with something that, if it were ever hacked, is completely unintelligible. Okay, got it. Okay, you've got a number mentioned most of these, number of integrations across the market, including pretty much all the walled gardens. You've got Meta, Google, YouTube- Yeah ... Amazon. How have you gotten these integrations? What's the value proposition you're bringing to the walled gardens and, you know, who tend to not have or maybe be more guarded with their data than- Sure ... the open web? Yeah, I think that's the key, is everybody has something that's valuable, and no one necessarily wants to lose control of that. And so the industry desperately needs an independent, neutral player to help companies work with one another effectively. We don't have bias in media. We're not an agency. We're not a cloud provider. We just bridge them all together. And so we're a threat to no one. It's actually really fun, 'cause I could go to almost any meeting and say, "How can we help?" Because we work with so many companies, and we are neutral and agnostic. But for, you know, a big cloud provider, for instance, or a big publisher, they're gonna work with us because, number one, we bring them demand. And we bring them demand not just in terms of, an interest in buying on a Facebook and Google, but rather data that can be deployed on Facebook and Google to make the purchase more effective and make the interaction with a client more meaningful to that customer. And so, by virtue of us being involved, the advertiser gets a better ROI, the customer gets a better experience, and ultimately, the publisher generates a better ROI. They can, they can charge more, their yield goes up. They charge more for their inventory. Moreover, we also facilitate measurement. So, like, Facebook uses us, through the—they have a Conversion API program, that allows measurement on Facebook. Likewise, we've sat underneath, Google people-based search. If you wanna serve a different copy in your search keywords, like for Citi, for instance, for current cardholders versus prospects, Google will tell you, "Hey, we're happy to help, but you need to have a LiveRamp contract in order to do that." So Google has, I think since our existence, been our biggest source of new client leads. Okay, so kind of that brings me to next question, is just on the competitive landscape. Yeah. You guys do something, feels pretty unique. Are there others out there? Who do you see as your biggest competitor, or is it just someone kind of foregoing what you offer? You know, in that Citi Google example, like- Yeah ... just working directly without. It's the last, and you know, people are gonna think, "that's not real," but it is. 'Cause we do sometimes lose clients, and when we lose clients... And what we do is really sticky. But when we lose clients, they tell us stuff like, "Hey, I feel like I bought a Porsche, but you didn't bother to tell me how to drive stick. You're way too complicated, and all I really do is advertise with Google and Facebook, and so why do I need you?" And for someone who's really small, and all they do is Google and Facebook, they probably don't need us. But most sophisticated advertisers, as an example, have several hundred different line items on their media plan, and so when you get to that level of complexity, you really do need someone like us to help you keep score, to help ensure that your data is safe and utilized appropriately. And for those companies, we are an absolute must-buy. And I, I remember going into the pandemic, one of our travel clients, big hotel chain, said, "Hey, we're gonna cut back. We have to. We're seeing our room rates evaporate. But you're gonna be the last thing turned off, along with the lights, and you're gonna be the first thing turned back on." And sure enough, they slowed spend, and then about five months later, they turned it all back on again. Not only did they turn it on, they basically told all their partners, "You've got to standardize on LiveRamp, because we want to make sure that everything is accountable, and addressable, and measurable, going forward." So, yeah, our real competition is someone saying they're not sophisticated enough to use someone like us. Do we sometimes run into, you know, our big partners occasionally? Sure. Like, our biggest partners, like in the Venn diagram, there's just a little area of overlap, and this is the case that every sales rep in the world says, "Well, you don't need anybody else. You can do it all through us." But as clients start to dig into that, they realize, you know, going back to the peanut butter and chocolate analogy, we are better together. Okay. All right, great. So now let's shift to just how this kind of flows through to the P&L. Yeah. You talked about aspiring to be or viewing yourself as Rule of 40. Not quite there yet. How does all this get you there? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think we've been on a pretty slow, steady journey of increasing our operating profit. I mean, what, three years ago we were losing $50 million plus. Now, you know, we are cash flow positive. We are GAAP profitable. And in part it's 'cause we have great SaaS economics. A disproportionate amount of our incremental revenue drops to the bottom line. You know, as we look forward to the next couple of years, we think we have pretty clear line of sight, even this next year, to generate another 500 basis points of margin improvement. You know, long term, and let's call long term kind of three to five-year time horizon, I'd like our investors to be able to dial in and say, "They're, they're completely steady and predictable," and that looks like 25%-35% operating margins and strong, predictable, double-digit SaaS recurring growth. You know, I'd like to think we're on the track, you know, coming out of the pandemic and on the rebound of getting back to that double-digit growth. We still got some work to do on our operating margins. And that, quite frankly, is probably what gives me the most encouragement as an investor, is that, like, we look in the mirror every day in our company and never like what we see, 'cause we always see the bad. We always see, like, are there opportunities for us to get better? And yes, we think we can get better in selling execution. Yes, we think we can get better with channel partnerships. Yes, we think we can get better in operating margins. Okay, on the margin side, R&D is one of those areas where you got big investment. I think it's about 30% of revenue. What are the key areas where you're investing in? And presumably, that's an area of margin leverage, too. Yeah, I'd say, there's two things that I think about all the time right now. Number one is our cloud integrations. And so I talked, you know, about our native Snowflake integration, our work in deepening our partnership with GCP, with AWS. All that has to become drop-dead simple. Companies that have succeeded in the technology space don't always just have the best technology. Oftentimes, they don't, but they are almost always easy to use. And so everything we do has to be simple and intuitive for the user who's deploying our technology, and that means UI enhancements, platform efficacy, more real time, quicker processing, so there's a whole host of things in terms of cloud. And then the other big piece, particularly as we go into next year and start thinking about, how do we really super scale things like PAIR? Gotta be self-serve. Right. Like, I can't lose clients in future who say, "I don't know how to drive stick." Like, we have to make it so simple for them that they don't need to talk to a person, and we don't need to throw service at the opportunity, but rather it is just turnkey software. And I think that allows us to, you know, scale from the sophisticated advertisers we serve today to more mid-tier, kinda mid-funnel, mid-torso kinda clients that we haven't historically served effectively. Got it. Wanna see if there's any questions from the audience. Take a few. Great, thanks. Steve, can you just talk a little bit more about the implementation of PAIR? You said it starts in early 2024, and, you know, cookies will be deprecated by the end of 2024, and agreed, you're one of three of the largest, you know, of the providers. So give us a little more insight on how you're thinking that might play out. Yeah. I think it's gonna be... Yeah, it's a trust. I feel like I've seen this movie before, and I know how it ends. That doesn't mean I like the plot. And more specifically, I lived through this phenomenon in 1999, 2000, called Y2K, where everybody had to upgrade their computer systems. And there have been others as well, like GDPR more recently, where there was kind of a drop-dead date. It was like, I can't remember the date. It was like 1 January 2019, or something like that, that everyone had to be GDPR compliant. And in both instances, there was a ton of lead time, and people said, "I don't know. This isn't really real." And then, kind of like Thanksgiving, 1 December 2019, panic set in because in both cases, in GDPR and Y2K, companies said: "Oh, my gosh, this is happening. Am I ready?" And right now, I would tell you that if you had five people on stage and said, "Hey, are cookies really gonna be deprecated next year?" You know, half of them, two of them would say, "Yes. Google says they're gonna go away, and I believe Google." And three of them would say, "I don't know. You know, regulators might step in. This is an antitrust issue." And so who knows? But I know that right now, Google is pushing really hard to roll this out, and on the other side, advertisers have been kind of slow to embrace it. The big advertisers are testing. There's a big chunk of mid-tier advertisers saying: "That's not gonna happen. I'm not gonna worry about that." And I think it'll be really interesting in December. I'm predicting, and this is why I think the self-serve piece is gonna be really important. I'm predicting that all of a sudden, everybody's gonna panic and go, "Oh, my gosh, this is the most important thing on my display media plan. It's the biggest place where I'm spending dollars. I'm not ready." And there'll be a wave of adoption and trial. So we need to get out in front of that. Now, Google's helped by saying they've announced a very slow timeline. It starts in Q1, really officially. Right now, it's in alpha. But they'll start to deprecate come next January, and I think they're finished by, like, Q3 of next year, maybe early Q4. So we'll see. I mean, you know, the bet I'm making is that they're gonna go through with it, but I will also say, if they don't, we don't really care, because we'll support cookies as long as cookies exist. Thanks. Alright. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Drew. That's our time. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Thank you. Appreciate that. Thank you.