Our research on mid-cap internet stocks for Wells Fargo. I'm very pleased to be joined by Scott Howe, CEO of LiveRamp; and Drew Borst, IR. Scott, maybe you just jump into it. I think over the last few years, the strategy at LiveRamp has been dictated by Google's plan to deprecate third-party cookies on Chrome, the ramifications that would have on online identity. Obviously, a few months ago, Google announced a change in their plans, and we don't know exactly what third-party cookie availability is going to look like next year, but in some way, there will be cookies available, and that's a big departure versus what we thought previously. How do you think about realigning the product strategy and the go-to-market message, given that major shift in the industry? Yeah. I mean, first off, when I think about our strategy, Google is tangential to it. They're an important player. But our strategy isn't cookies or non-cookies. And I'll start with what we see in the landscape and then how it affects our strategy. So landscape-wise, the last 20 years have proved that if you have data, you make smarter decisions, and you message your customers better, and you deliver better customer experiences. So everyone wants data. The problem is not everyone has data. And so there's an opportunity for companies to collaborate with one another and use one another's data selectively and activate it at the places that matter. To us, that is a classic network business. It's not unlike building power grids or building the telecom grid. This is building the fundamental network infrastructure to enable data to work effectively in the economy. Now, Google's a piece of that because cookies dictated how data could be transferred. So when they announced that they were going to deprecate cookies, and then they changed their mind, that influences our strategy. But our strategy has always been build the collaboration network. So sign up all the great companies in the world who have good data and make sure that we activate all of the great destinations, including Google, including Meta, including Trade Desk, including all the CTV providers, increasingly including AI providers where you can utilize data effectively. So Google certainly changes how we deliver, how we make those connections. But I think over the last five years since Google first announced, what almost every company on the planet has realized is that cookies are a very bad technology. If you were designing things from scratch for how to make data communicate across places, you'd never start with cookies. So over the last five years, nearly every major advertiser has built its own CRM, first-party data program. Every single one of the Comscore 50 publishers now requires authentication that includes all of the CTV publishers, all of the walled gardens. Already, more than 50% of the internet is non-cookieable. And so cookies are really the last gasp domain of programmatic. So increasingly, they're becoming immaterial to us. We'll support cookies as long as they exist. And when they don't exist, we'll support that too. Yeah. So maybe you could help us understand Ramp Up, your kind of user conference, industry conferences in February. So it's not too far away at this point. I think. We'll come, right? I will be there. It won't be my first. I will be there. It won't be my first time either. Last year, I think a lot of the focus was on PAIR ecosystem changes. How would you characterize the focus in 2025? If you could give us a little bit of a preview. So, first off, RampUp. It is always the very end of February, kind of last couple of days of February. It will be there this year again. It's in San Francisco. We are going to have an Investor Day at the start of RampUp. And so anybody who wants to attend that, you're welcome. We're going to unpack kind of network economics, where we're going, provide a slightly longer runway on kind of our forward-looking visibility. So all kinds of good stuff. And then importantly, because there's a couple thousand clients and partners there, it's the best place ever to do due diligence, not only on just LiveRamp, but on the industry, because all of our clients and partners will be there. And that's pretty much every other stock that any of you in the room might invest in in the sector. So, mega theme this year, it will be around kind of the next leg data collaboration. So, call it data collaboration at scale. And I think what you'll hear from us at RampUp, I do a keynote. But the rest of the two days are all clients and partners on stage. It's not LiveRamp at all. But what you're going to hear from the folks that are already leaning in to attend and speak, number one, I think what you'll hear is, hey, we're still in the early stages of what is going to be just like the air we breathe. We're not even going to think about this in 10, 20 years. Every company on the planet is going to be doing pretty extensive data collaboration. But the first thing you'll hear from our partners is start with the easy stuff. People like Meta, Google will be there. They'll talk about, hey, here's basic stuff you can do to accelerate your addressability, to improve your measurement, great stuff you can do with all the major CTV providers. I think the other thing that you're going to hear is, hey, collaboration isn't about me and you. It's about three of us or four of us. You'll remember the last earnings call, I shared a case study. It was Albertsons, Mondelēz, and Pinterest, three companies collaborating. In that case, each of the three companies brought something really unique to the collaboration. Albertsons brought store scanner information and their legacy CRM loyalty database. They knew who would buy Triscuit crackers and whether they actually consummated the purchase. Mondelēz brought a big budget for Triscuit crackers, but they had no idea how to find their customers because they don't have any data. Pinterest brought reach to the equation. The combination of those three companies all doing interesting things allowed Mondelēz to spend money to target an audience that bought Triscuit crackers or people we thought would buy Triscuit based on Albertsons' data. Pinterest provided all the ad impressions. Albertsons was able to say, did it actually result in a physical in-store purchase? Three companies collaborating. I think that's going to become the norm, three or more. In this case, Mondelēz unlocked something they never see. I mean, who buys Triscuit crackers anymore? Apparently, a lot of people because it generated 19% lift in ROI and 16% more users to Triscuit, which is like a big deal if you're a packaged goods company. You're going to see stuff like that, real heavy emphasis on case studies. Because again, we're in the early innings of data collaboration going to become pervasive. Everyone's going to do it but right now, all of our clients say, hey, I love this. How do I scale it? How do I get going faster? How do I become more sophisticated? Lots of case studies, lots of examples. In October, you had a major product release and update to the data collaboration platform. I think the message to the market was the ease of use for the product, the time to market with new insights is going to be greatly improved, so that's like the message at a high level. Could you maybe provide us with one or two functional examples of specific ways or specific improvements that you made? Yeah. So if I think about, let me speak both about what we've released and then also give a glimmer into what's next. So when you think about the enhancements to the product, like any tech company, the day you stop innovating is the day you start dying, right? Because clients always want bigger, better, faster, cheaper. They always want progress. And in our case, what they really want from us right now is a new category they're excited about, but they want greater ease of use. So a few examples. In today's regulatory environment, most companies are trying to use what they have first. So they're trying to spin up identity using their own first party. In the past, they'd have to hire a company like Acxiom, which I know well, obviously, or Experian or someone like that to come and spend months combing through their data and doing hygiene. As a result of this release, we made it really easy for companies to do what they would have had to hire out and take months to do and probably millions of dollars. It now takes three hours because we're using machine learning, AI, and it just happens almost immediately where we can stand up an identity with good algorithmic logic behind it. A second example would be on our back-end infrastructure. Kind of everything that's underneath the hood, clients don't usually see it, but they feel it. We made a number of enhancements to kind of our processing power. For example, we have a client, a big drug company. They have more rows of records than there are people on the planet, and so every time they update, every time they want to do a big file ingestion, it was taking not just hours. It would take a week, and we have reduced the time of data ingestion by making the pipes bigger and the processing speed faster. We're using a company called SingleStore to help us with that as well. It's reduced the processing time by over 95%, so it made something that was slow to something that was lightning fast. We've rolled that out for our biggest customers, like our power users, and then over time, we'll roll that out every place, and then a final thing that we did in the latest platform release is everybody but everyone says the same thing, which is, it is great, but how do I get started quicker? What we heard from all of the retailers, all of the packaged goods companies is that I don't want to, if you're a packaged goods company, I don't want to go look at reports, a different report for Roundel, a different report for Walmart. They're all viewing things in their own world. And on the other side, what we heard from the retailers is, I don't want to build custom stuff for P&G and then have to turn around and build it again for Unilever. So we just met with a bunch of them, and we standardized based on what they wanted, created some standardized queries and reports such that someone can get up and running really quick, probably get 80% of what they want with some standardized templates and data queries, and then they can customize later on. So all kinds of good stuff. There's something for every one of our clients there. Going forward, I think our focus a little bit shifts away from just kind of the under-the-hood technology things. What we're really excited about are just more use cases, and so at the end of the day, unlike a lot of software companies where it's about their product and making their product better and better and better, we do that, but the real value to our product is the network. We're like O'Hare Airport. Why do you want to go to O'Hare? Because it can take you to any other city in the world. We're like the phone system. Why do you want a phone, well, it's because I can call everybody else on the planet. We're like the road system. Why do you need a road system? Because it allows you to travel to every other city in the state. And so, for us, it's about wiring up more and more nodes, people who have data, publishers, CTV providers, advertisers, nodes, and then activating as many edges between all of them as possible, the connections between all these big companies and destinations such that you can get on the network and do interesting data stuff with anybody. So it's not software as much as it is a network powered by software. And so building out the network always makes the product more and more valuable. And I read all your stuff, and I think like a lot of people, you're always kind of skeptical of, hey, do they have a competitive advantage? And I'll tell you, I think we do. And it's not in the software. Any big company could duplicate our software in a couple of years. They could spend a lot, throw a lot of money at it. It's the network. It is the scale advantage of that. And so when Snowflake goes into someone and they become one of our biggest channels, their salespeople might say, oh, you don't need anybody else. But our clients always say, but yeah, we need LiveRamp. Because if I want to activate on Meta, if I want to activate on Disney+, if I want to activate on Netflix, if I want to partner with Walmart or I want to partner with Amazon, well, don't you need all the connectivity? Don't you need the network around the software? And the answer is yes. And that's what we provide, which is a super strong defensible scale advantage. And that is what everybody derives the value from at the end of the day. It's not how you use the software or the look and feel. That's important. It's what can you do with your data? That's what matters. And that's why I like our positioning long term. There's always ups and downs in our growth rate. But if you look at us, we're consistently a double-digit grower, and we're consistently on a slow ramp to Rule of 40. Every year, we improve by a couple hundred basis points. This year, we joined the Rule of 30 club, and we are so not happy by stopping there. We're going to become a Rule of 40 company, a true Rule of 40. And then we're not going to stop there. We want to become a Rule of 50 company someday. Got it. You know, historically, the solutions have mostly been leveraged by large advertisers. I think as of the last fiscal quarter, you had 885 direct customers, and then there's smaller customers serviced by resellers and middlemen type business models. Is the platform easy to use enough now post the October launch where you could start targeting or going after kind of the middle market business, the smaller customers? Yeah, it's interesting. So I was sitting through even the next phase of what we're going to release the other day. I said, well, this is really good. It's kind of V3, and everybody else, I mean, if there is anybody else, they're still at V0 or V1, but it's terrible. And I'm not afraid to say that. It's so much better than anything that's ever been, but it's like, have you ever gone back? I mean, we all have really good laptops now. Imagine what life was like when you had that really crummy Apple IIc or whatever, whatever that terrible computer was that you had in grade school that didn't have a color display and didn't have any processing power, and you had to stick floppy disks in. That's where we are, and so relative to what folks had, it's like huge advancement. Relative to where we need to be, we're like V3 of V10 because right now, a SQL coder, data analyst could sit down and be like, oh, this is nirvana. But you or me, if we were using the platform and we had to put in Boolean logic or even do the AI streams, it's not intuitive nearly as much as it should be. And in 10 years, this is going to be the data is going to be the air we breathe for businesses. Everyone who wins is going to use data. And we have to make it super easy and super safe and super transparent for not only them to use, but for consumers who probably someday will have data as a property right to plug in and say, how's this company using my data? Am I okay with it? A lot of work still to be done, and that's really fun work. Yep. I want to talk a little bit about Habu, the clean room business that you closed on in January 2024. I think if I think about the biggest difference between Habu's business and your existing clean room business, Safe Haven, I think it's that Habu was a cloud-based solution where Safe Haven was largely on-prem. I guess now that you have kind of the cloud-based solution, have you seen existing customers start to migrate to that? Are they more comfortable leaving their data on-prem? What's changed in regard to the way the customers are delivering the product since the acquisition? Yeah. So the answer is yes to all. You could have asked me any question. There's so many things happening between this asset we purchased, Habu, and kind of our legacy business. You're right. So Habu's like this application layer that kind of surfs across clouds and makes everything interoperable. That's really good. The other thing is if you were to design anything 10 years ago, it would look really different than if you were to design it today. And so with Habu, which is a newer technology, we got a better UI, a better user experience. And so we've kind of combined some of the heavy processing stuff of our legacy technology with a really lightweight application feel of Habu and done that integration such that new clients or existing clients have a better look and feel. Again, V3 of what needs to be 10. It also makes it drop-dead simple to activate new collaboration nodes. So with regards to new collaboration nodes, I mean, I think one of the things that Habu brought is the social media endpoints, right? Like the Pinterest, the Snap, the [audio distortion] Slide Deck, and it's pretty impressive. Have you lit up those new endpoints for existing customers? Are they activating against them today? Is that generating revenue for you this quarter? We have. If you think about our last earnings call, I kind of probably didn't elevate this as much, but I talked about the publisher portal stuff that we were doing as an example. And what that is, is it's setting up different major publishers as collaboration nodes. What that allows folks to do is they can activate with more granularity. They can do data collaboration with the publisher and together get an even better recipe for the audience that they want to message. And they can do some really interesting measurement things, both measurement on the publisher, but also by virtue of using a clean room, measurement like what ad was shown on the publisher versus what was the experience the user had in store, for instance. So the match, not just online, did they see the ad? Did they click on the ad? Did they convert on your website? But did they go to a store and buy something? So that was really good. I talked about spinning up a couple dozen of those and super low price point, just getting started. But I later unpacked. I talked about Disney+, if you'll remember. And Disney+ is a great example of one of those CTV publishers where you start, and it's a pretty low entry point, but now it's a $1+ million client for us. And everybody but everybody wants to do advertising on Disney+. So I literally do. Someone asked me earlier down in the tent, they said, "We've been talking about CTV and the tipping point forever. Are we at the tipping point?" I said, "Yeah, we're past that now. I think we hit the tipping point when Netflix announced an ad model, when we hit COVID and viewership started to shift, when some of the leadership at the major CTV companies got a little bit more tech-savvy. The stuff that's happening with the CTV providers is really cool right now from a data collaboration, from a measurement, from an innovation perspective. Did you anticipate that measurement was going to be a primary use case of the clean rooms? I remember in 2020, the original use case was like, I'm a CPG company and I have no data. And so where do I get the data? I go to a retailer and we exchange in the clean room, right? And now it seems like we're still doing that, but now measurement is a big part of the go-to-market narrative and kind of the investor narrative. Did you anticipate that that was going to be the case four or five years ago? So I'd like to say that I did because remember I helped build a company called aQuantive, and I ran the ad-serving division there for a while, and it was all about measurement. But I'll let you in on a secret. I'm not Steve Jobs. No one is. I'm not Bill Gates. No one is. I don't know what's next. I just listen to what our clients want to do. And I kind of figure that if we build for their needs, if we activate the use cases that they want, we'll succeed. I mean, we work with P&G and Walmart and Amazon and Meta and Google. So I mean, they're smart and they live in it. And so no, I mean, honestly, I didn't see measurement being as big as it's started to be. But I think there's kind of a couple of things that have happened. One is kind of the traditional currencies for television, they're not relevant anymore. And so everybody's talking about retail media networks, for instance, right? And that started out a company like Albertsons said, well, I got people visiting my site. I want to monetize that. I'll layer that into my co-op advertising efforts with my merchants. I'll make a little bit more money. But what they realized is, oh, if everyone is activating on CTV, if they're authenticating, well, Albertsons now has a currency because they have that loyalty database, and so they can advertise on deck. But more importantly, they can extend that off deck. And so if I'm Procter & Gamble and I want to go sell Pantene shampoo, well, hey, a pretty good way to do that is to figure out who is my target through Albertsons, take that audience and buy it on, I don't know, Disney+. And so we're seeing that. And then more importantly, as soon as you start doing that and you're doing that collaboration, then it's natural that you're saying, hey, Albertsons, I'm using your audience. Can you tell me actually, did they actually buy? And so then measurement, bam, it starts to take off. And so people talk about, hey, the two big things right now in media, retail media networks, super high growth, and CTV, super high growth. It's the same drivers, and it's the same thing because those things are coming together. The retailers, and it's not just retail, it's companies like United launching their thing or financial services. They have the audience, and CTV has the destination, so the combination of those things is magical. Now, what does that mean for kind of the old industry stalwarts who provided that intermediation, well, maybe not so good. Yep. Maybe I could ask a question about bookings growth. So revenue outperformed meaningfully in the fiscal second quarter, but I think bookings were still challenged. RPO decelerated to 3% year- over -year, and I think that same metric was 8% growth in the fiscal first quarter and 20% growth exiting 2024. And I think the company's perspective on the slowdown in bookings is that it's kind of cyclical related to some of the macro challenges that the software industry faces. I think the question is, what gives you confidence that that's the reason for the booking slowdown and not something idiosyncratic or specific to LiveRamp's business? Yeah, that's a great question, and Drew, you should jump in here on the RPO aspect of it. But I would tell you, if there were something that was existential here, we would see it in our churn numbers. And from a churn perspective, we're kind of at record good levels right now. We would see it in our net loss because we would be losing to new entrants or something like that. We're not. What we've seen this year, and I don't think we're unique in that, is we have a really good pipeline. We have a lot of people who are saying, hey, I know I need to do this. But we've seen a lengthening of that pipeline. Our conversions are just taking longer, and I'm not sure it was cyclical as much as it was. When I talked to clients, what I heard for the first nine months of the year or so was, oh my gosh, I'm really worried about the economy. This election is going to be an absolute train wreck. It seems like the FTC is attacking me all the time, and this isn't a pro-friendly business environment in the tech space. I'm going to hold off on my budgets. I'm going to wait and see what happens. And so we'll see. I think there's probably a little bit more enthusiasm right now from a business climate perspective. And so we'll see how that plays out in the coming months. I do think we had a kind of additional thing, which is we had a, boy, you go back to January, February, we had clients, people in the industry who were panicked about cookies going away and saying, "Oh God, can you help me? What am I going to do after these cookies go away?" And once Google slowed that down, everybody said, "Well, all right, I'll worry about that next year" because no one but no one wants to make that kind of change right now at the end of the year in kind of the peak quality shopping season. When you look at your pipeline, when you talk to your sales force, do you feel like you have line of sight on bookings bouncing back as of now? Listen, we are seeing better bookings momentum, but I ain't going to call it. I mean, it's yeah. And certainly not for next year. I mean, the beauty of SaaS is that what we do now impacts dramatically our growth rates for next year. So listen, we got to do better. I've always said growth is never linear. I want to be in a position where you can kind of just look at LiveRamp and always dial in double-digit top-line growth. And I think we'll get to a place in the next couple of years where you can pretty much dial in 25%-30% margin growth, boom, Rule of 40 and beyond. But it's never quite linear, and I hate the last couple of quarters of bookings. We got to do better. I'd say that even if we were growing 20%, that's what I tell the sales force. Drew, is there any way you would want to communicate to Scott's point? There's a downstream impact of slower bookings to future revenue performance. Is there a way that you would want to maybe contextualize that or frame that for investors as we start to think about fiscal 2026? He's asking you to give guidance. Yeah. You call it. Look, I think that we have two more quarters left in this fiscal year. We've got to execute to Scott's point, and I think it's a little premature right now to put guidance around FY26 revenue. You asked him if he was going to give guidance, and what he responded was, "Hey, you should come to RampUp. Ramp Up. Yeah, well, we're not that far now. We'll have much better line of sight at that point. But one other thing I'll add is, obviously, the bookings discussion is of paramount importance. That's 80% of our revenue. But let's not forget the marketplace business. And that business, we have less forward visibility on, but there are some secular growth trends that are propelling that growth. That business has been growing high teens to 20% for six consecutive quarters now. And one of the big drivers, which Scott touched on, is what's happening in CTV. What's happening is about 20% of our revenue in the data marketplace is associated with CTV data, data being purchased to help buy build segments that are used in CTV. And I think we all can see the secular trend there, right? You have linear TV ad budgets are moving over to CTV where you can do addressability. We think that that will be a multi-year trend for us and continue to be a wind at our back. I think the other thing that's happening in the data marketplace is one of your large competitors, Oracle, decided they didn't want to be in the business anymore. And so could you maybe contextualize for us how you're thinking about that benefit? Are you starting to see an uptick in RFP user activity as that business has wound down? Yeah. I think, look, we think the revenue up for grabs is probably around $20 million-$25 million. That was the size of Oracle's data marketplace business. We are one of the largest players in this space, and so we're pretty confident that we will get our fair share of that revenue. That's an annual number, just to be clear. In terms of our guidance, we treaded pretty carefully in terms of how much upside we put in for the back half, but they just shut this business down at the end of September. Our team has been focused on this opportunity ever since it was announced in the summer, so you will see a little bit of a benefit in our fiscal second half and beyond, but stay tuned for more details as we kind of see how October and November play out. In our last minute, we can't maybe talk about fiscal 2026 revenue growth, but you have given us a barometer on what margins are going to be 20%-25%, which is, to be fair, a pretty wide range. Could you maybe just help us think through at 25% what happens versus what happens at 20%? What gets you to the top end of that range versus what would cause you to fall to the bottom end? Yeah, I mean, the biggest variable probably obviously is the revenue growth, and that really does explain why it is admittedly a wide range. The incremental fall through rate is tremendous. That's right. One or two extra points of revenue growth at a very high dropdown rate can really swing the numbers. But with that said, we have gone through our expense base pretty carefully, and we think there are some efficiencies that we can wring out of the system, and that will help drive some of the margin improvement. And then also, we have an offshoring program that we're now going on two years that we've been involved with, and we'll get some incremental savings from that. And I think when you put all that together, we wanted to signal to investors that, look, to Scott's point, we're going to keep marching forward on this Rule of 40. At a minimum, we should be able to drive two points of margin under any reasonable revenue growth scenario. Got it. All right. We're up on time, so I think we're going to have to wrap it there. Scott and Drew, really appreciate you making the time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.