Good to go? Awesome. All righty. Thanks everyone for joining us at day one of the Morgan Stanley TMT Conference. My name's Keith Weiss. I'm on the software research team here at Morgan Stanley. Super excited to be joined by the Zeta Global team, David Steinberg, CEO, Chris Greiner, CFO. Hey, guys. Great to see you. Thank you. Great to see you, Keith. Thank you for having us. Thanks for being here. Yeah. It's great to be here. Awesome. A quick disclosure statement before we get started. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website, morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. Awesome. With that, thanks guys for being here. Great to see you. Great to see you. Maybe for investors that are newer to the Zeta story, just provide a quick overview of the business. Relatively complex. Maybe talk to who the end customer is. What about the Zeta portfolio lets you kind of uniquely straddle both marketing and advertising, and maybe just why the business model is differentiated relative to some of the legacy martech players that we all know. We only have 34 minutes. That's like a long answer. Make it quick. You challenge this. I was gonna say I try, Chris. Let me start by saying Zeta has built a software and proprietary data cloud platform that helps very large enterprises more cost efficiently manage their customer acquisition, customer retention, customer monetization. 51% of the Fortune 100 and 24% of the Fortune 500 use the Zeta Marketing Platform today. That is not an aspirational number. That is the number that we work with. What we traditionally do is by combining everything a marketer needs into one user interface with one reporting infrastructure, we're able to deliver a substantially superior ROI. A recent Forrester survey, or report I should say, showed that for every dollar spent on the Zeta Marketing Platform, we return 600% on their ad spend as it relates to return. I think that's 100% - 200% better than our next closest competitor. Awesome. Maybe just to hit on kind of the AI debate at the top, right? This is the question that's on all of investors' minds, whether AI is representing a threat to the industry, a transformational opportunity for legacy kind of vendors here. Maybe, you know, Zeta's been building AI into its platform for a number of years. You're doing a lot on the innovation front with Athena, which we'll get into. Maybe just high level, like where do you see Zeta positioned on the AI threat versus opportunity spectrum? I think kind of the key question is what gives you confidence in the durability of the moat going forward, just given how fast the kind of technology is advancing. Yeah. I mean, obviously there's this new, what I would call silly narrative that large language models are gonna disintermediate all enterprise software. You know, I guess I joke at sort of the silly Wall Street narrative du jour. There tends to be one every year or two. As it relates to Zeta, we have three massive moats in our business. First and foremost, we have $552 million active people who are opted in in our data cloud today with an average of five to seven thousand data elements per person. Our first-party tracking pixel sits on one trillion pages of content and ingests trillions and trillions of proprietary marketing signals that synthesize to a deterministic individual that we have never and would never share with any large language model. Second, in order for our clients to operate with us, which include some of the largest companies in the world, as I've said, 51% of the Fortune 100, we take 100% of their first-party data. We ingest it into a Customer Data Platform. We merge our data with it to enrich it. I don't see any of the Fortune 500 companies delivering their first-party data to large language models anytime in years to come. Third, we have a 600% ROI today. Our clients don't look at us as an expense to be disintermediated. They look at us as a revenue source. We are a revenue centre for their businesses, and we are driving meaningful growth into their businesses. Fourth and final answer... Sorry. Fourth and final answer is working with a Fortune 500 customer, Keith, very difficult from an onboarding and management perspective. You have to get through their data security groups, data privacy, procurement, legal, accounting, CIO, CTO, CMO. That is a very difficult skill set to build that we have really become experts at over the years, and it took us a very, very long time to get there. Data, return on investment, and the ability to operate inside of very large enterprises is a massive moat to our business. I'll finish by saying we do believe that the large language models are gonna massively benefit our business. You know, as I like to say, I started my first company at 21 years old in 1991. I was the youngest person in the room for the first 20 years I ran businesses. I am now universally the oldest guy in any room I walk into. There are some exceptions, but the reality is that... Teasing a friend. The reality is that when you think about it, I lived through the mobile era that was gonna destroy technology. I lived through the dot-com era where, you know, the internet was gonna destroy Walmart and JPMorgan Chase. I lived through the beginning of cloud computing, which everybody said you're simply gonna put applications on top of Snowflake or Databricks or AWS, and enterprise software is no longer gonna exist. The difference between the winners and the losers, from my vantage point, has always been the ability to create intelligence. Companies that create intelligence and outcomes that adopt these new technologies, as you said, we adopted artificial intelligence in 2017. We started working with it back then. When we went public in June of 2021, our banner on the side of the New York Stock Exchange said, "Data plus AI equals intent." Everybody was asking me, "Who's Al, and why is he in charge of our data strategy?" That's how sort of far back we go in AI. You know, we've announced a major partnership with OpenAI, where we're using them to be the voice foundation and the conversational super agent inside of Athena, but it's all our models, it's all our data that's training it. We use Anthropic inside of our engineering team. In fact, our engineering team today is 125% more productive than it was just 12 months ago. It delivers 150% increment, but 25% of it, you have to Q&A out. Right? But the net 125 is very, very strong. We use Microsoft tools. We use Git. You know, we're sort of using everybody across the board to drive productivity, and I think that this is gonna be a renaissance for Zeta. Yeah. Yeah. Great context. I guess, Chris, wanna just kinda bring you in and think about how this translates to the model. Q4 results, very strong last week, growing 28% on a normalized organic basis, guiding to 26, kind of sustaining that 20% growth again. I wanted to ask in the context of how you kind of laid out a framework at your Investor Day late last year, durability, predictability, and profitability of your growth. I thought that was a very thoughtful framework. It's kind of the qualities that investors are looking for. Maybe just talk through how you kind of exemplified that in 2025 and how you're thinking about it going forward. Yeah. You know, we used to have a metric of how many straight years we were growing over 20. We've now added the three straight years of growing over 30 on the top line. It's actually 28% even organically on a compound basis. ... over a multi-year period. I think the ability to show that our market's growing, call it roughly 10%, we're growing 2 to 3 times that consistently, so that puts us in a durable take share position. On the predictability of our business, I mean, it's one thing to beat and raise 'cause you could do that through setting low expectations and/or low expectations. ... then doing kind of okay. We set growth every year to at least 20%. As you said, we surpass it by giving ourselves that typical, which we disclose, a typical 2-5 points of buffer. We try to demonstrate through our track record how predictable our business is, but we also give the metrics that allow us to be predictive in our models to investors. Over 90% of our revenue comes from customers that have been with us over a year. We show investors how those cohorts behave over almost now five year period, so that, you know, you can do the same level of modeling that we do internally. On the profitability side, it was record-adjusted EBITDA, which is great. As a company, we've more and more anchored to free cash flow. It was record free cash flow margins and a turning point in the company getting to positive GAAP EPS, not just for the quarter, but then being able to project it forward for 2026 as getting to at least $0.02-$0.04 of positive EPS. I think that's just kind of us running from here. At some point, people will start to give us credit for visibility, right? We've been public for 18 quarters. We've beat our guidance and raised guidance 18 consecutive quarters. We're obviously we have at least some level of visibility into the business. Yep. Yeah. Definitely we'll dig into some of those points that you brought up, Chris. One of the other ways we kind of look at the share gain is by wallet share within your customers. Often talk about kind of addressing 1% of the available marketing advertising wallet today, with potential to kind of drive that up. What are the key strategic initiatives? We kind of talked to the impressive ROAS, but anything else that you can kind of highlight on the strategic initiative side to drive that up? Yeah. To be clear, our 603 global enterprise clients spent $100 million on marketing last year. We had 1.3% of that wallet share. Put us to about $1.3 billion in revenue last year. We're projecting $1.755 billion this year, up from the $1.3 last year. You know, our clients are growing about 10% a year. You would say that grows to about 1.6%-1.7% of wallet share. Our long-term goal is to get to 10% of wallet share or build a $10 billion a year business with a 30% operating margin and 75%+ of that flowing to free cash flow. We're not gonna do that over the next few weeks, we do think we're gonna do that over the next number of years. What we're seeing is that the higher we drive the return on investment, the greater the percentage of budget that our clients move to us. I think the next step function in return on investment is going to be the launch of Athena. Athena, which is our conversational super intelligent agent, say that three times fast, is really a conversational voice platform that allows you to manage the Zeta Marketing Platform. If you think about it, we've built an F-22 fighter jet at Zeta, but our average client knows how to fly a Cessna. They're flying that Cessna, and they're returning 600%, but they're not using anywhere near the capabilities of the fighter jet. Athena is going to be our client's co-pilot in managing the fighter jet. You'll be able to say to Athena-Athena, I'd like to create 2 million incremental customers this quarter. I'd like to simultaneously lower my cost to create a customer by an average of 7%. What new datasets am I not accessing that I should access to do that? What new channels can we experiment to get there? Not only will Athena speak back to the client, it'll change the entire user interface to show the answers. By the way, there's great demos of this on our website if you wanna see it. The clients that are already using it in beta are seeing a substantially higher return on ad spend than the 600% we're showing. The best quote I was given that it has totally and completely revolutionized their workflow. You know, the ability to speak in a conversational way with a platform, have it answer you, have that interface then change the platform, be able to say, "Yes, Athena, I like those new datasets. I like that channel. Let's start the activation, but I don't wanna start with $10 million. I'd like to start with $500,000, and I have to be out of the office for the rest of the day. Could you email me hourly with the return on investment so I can track it remotely, and we can make sure it's staying on track before I expand this?" That's all available in version one of Athena, which will be generally available by the end of this quarter. Awesome. Maybe taking a step back and thinking about the data asset that feeds a lot of this ROAS goodness, very robust proprietary database. Maybe talk us through what having this database does for you, how is it compiled, and then, you know, when we think about the breadth of the dataset, definitely very wide, but when we think about the depth of it, right, how do you guys think about the need to kind of go out and acquire more data? Do you feel like you have enough to keep delivering that insight? First of all, our data cloud, which has 552 million globally people opted in, 242 million in the United States, we touch 2 billion people a quarter. We just don't track them because they're not opted in. We do see some of their data from a modeling perspective. We have 20 different platforms that plug into publishers, that we partner with the publishers. We give them software that makes them more profitable, allows them better interaction with their end users, allows their end users to share their data out and drive large volumes of traffic to the publishers. In exchange, they put our first-party tracking pixel on every page they host, they host our JavaScript on every page, and then a host of other things that we do. What I would tell you is today, we have pretty much every credit card transaction, we have all of their psychographic, all of their demographic, all of their web behaviors, searches, are all synthesizing in for those 552 million people. As it relates to is it enough? You know, listen, some data isn't valuable until seven years later. Some data is worthless in 10 seconds. The more data we can ingest, the more powerful the models can be. Because we never share our data with any large language model ever, it's proprietary to us, and it's a major moat to our business. What I would say as well is whenever we look at an acquisition, when we think about buying companies, you know, we've bought 18 companies in 18 years. I'd say it's highly probable there'll be a nineteenth. You know, we look at datasets, and we look at what's there. When you think about the most recent acquisition of Marigold, where we picked up some unbelievable enterprise assets, you picked up Cheetah Digital, you picked up Selligent, you picked up Sailthru. I'd say the most valuable is the loyalty program, where many Fortune 500 customers are currently using us for loyalty. That is now, Keith Weiss, giving us SKU-level transaction data to train our models on. My entire goal is to continue to drive a greater ROI. My goal is to get to a order of magnitude ROI for our clients, 1,000%. I believe we can do that over the next couple of years as it relates to our datasets, the evolution of our internal AI, partnering with third-party AI partners, and I think Athena will be the tip of the spear. Maybe talk a little bit about the two platforms that you have to activate this data, direct, integrated, maybe talk a little bit about channel expansion. I wanna be clear. We have one platform, just so you know. You asked the right question, we have one platform. Yes. We have one user interface, one reporting infrastructure. The SEC mandated that we report it in two separate segments. One we call on our platform, one is our integrated platform. Our integrated platform is mostly our partnership with Meta and others, where we match the Zeta ID to the Meta ID. I don't know really anybody else in our industry who does that. Listen, Meta takes a disproportionate percentage of the revenue, as they should, which makes us even more valuable to them. As it relates to how we sell it, I would tell you that when we started with our agency holdco clients, they didn't have a solution for seamlessly managing their social media marketing. Most of the competitors in the programmatic space, you know, they're just focused on the open web, and they're all trying to figure out Connected TV. We came at it with a fully integrated solution that included social, mobile, display, online video, messaging, and Connected TV. When a client activates through us using our data and our setup tools to a third party, you know, walled garden that we partner with. We count that as integrated, whereas on-platform, it's going directly through us to the publisher. Right. I think the kind of next set up for why Athena can be so interesting is when we start to think about the cohort progression, right? That Chris, you were talking about really. Maybe when you are thinking about the use case expansion, with your customers, what are you seeing there? You talked to an 80% kind of increase in incremental use case, expansion on Q4. Maybe what's driving that strength and the use case adoption? Yeah, it's interesting. Outcomes, better outcomes, we just conducted our most recent NPS survey, and what the survey comes out almost indisputably is the more our customers use what's available on the platform, whether that's more channels or more use cases or more of our data, the happier they are. Our ability, and I think it was seen through our Net Revenue Retention rate of 120%, which was coming off a prior year record of 114%, is a good indication, reflection of that usage, that happiness, that loyalty of the customer. What's been driving that, to your point, for most part, up until 2024 was channel expansion. We were getting an average of call it three channels per scaled customer. This year, 2025, I should say, was the year in which we saw an inflection point in use case adoption. That's important to our financial model because when customers use more than one of our use cases, they spend roughly five times more. That could be going from retention to grow or retention to acquire or any different direction. We are now at a point where in the most recent quarter, 80% growth in number of use cases greater than one, which reflects almost a quarter of our total customer base, and that's up from call it 13% of our customer base using more than one use case a year ago. I think for us, No, go ahead. ... the one data sales motion, which, you know, we're organized. All sellers can sell any channel, if you will, on the truck, but we do have them organized by use cases. That's how our customers, for the most part, organize. They have existing customer set of technologies and people, and new customer acquisition set of technologies and people focused on that. We have a thin layer of, think about it as fighter pilots that sit above all those use cases that are very strategically going at existing customers and then product and market to where we see we can add immediate value by getting them to use more than one use case. If you, if you think about it, when a client uses us for customer acquisition and then chooses to add retention, the data from acquisition informs retention. The data from retention informs monetization, which then both of those inform acquisition. The return on investment, not just return on ad spend, the return on investment goes up exponentially when you use us for all three, which is why they spend 500% more. We actually discovered this almost by accident when we looked inside of the NPS score one year ago, and we said, "Wow, we better get it, get behind this." We brought in a gentleman named Ed Tsyitee, who ran the Chief Marketing Officer practice for McKinsey. Very difficult to get a practice leader out of McKinsey, we brought him in. His technical title is chief growth officer, but I call him chief data officer. He's doing two things. First, they're going in and they're doing this. This 80% lift in customers who use us for multiple use cases was not an accident. What's more important than that, Keith, is I believe Athena is going to be the tip of the spear for multi-use case. Let's go back to what we were talking about earlier. Now we've completed how we're gonna add two million customers at a 7% discount, yada, yada. Athena can then literally pivot and say, "By the way, did you know one million of your existing customers are currently doing research with your competitors' products and thinking about churning? Would you like to save them?" That's how you go from one use case to two automatically, because we're tracking all the data. Awesome. Yeah, that's helpful. Maybe for a little bit of context around the actual technology of Athena, right? How would you characterize the evolution from ZOE, which was previously the kind of innovation engine here, and then into what's kind of fundamentally different about Athena? Starting to get at, you know, what's really interesting from the use case perspective, maybe Chris, if you could kind of just talk to monetization. If you kind of look at historical precedents, there was pretty material uplift for ZOE usage, and so kind of how are you thinking about the difference? Why don't I start with the technology and how it works, and I'll turn it over to you to give the percentages on ZOE return. What I would say first and foremost is when you look at the fighter jet that we bought, it is so complex. Like, it's not just us. It's tech companies. We get so excited about building our platform, and we put every feature in it and every function in it. We think it's amazing, and then clients get in front of them like, "What the hell do I do with this?" We're a product of that, right? We found that clients are using a small percentage of what our platform can do because that's what they know how to do. The concept of sending out a learning and development group to train these people how to use the entire platform, when this is what they do an hour a day, they're not doing it 100 hours a day, right? Well, not possible, but, you know, somebody will tease me later for that. The bottom line is that by adding the voice enablement that can also control the platform. It's going to open up all of the datasets and use cases and channels that they don't currently use. Today, all of our AI is internally built. You've got, you know, large language models out there. You've got small language models out there. I sort of jokingly say we build mid-size language models, where we're looking at trillions of data points, but we don't need to ingest the entire internet to decide if this individual's gonna get a credit card and will credit approve for our client's credit card, right? When you think about Athena, she is native to the application layer for the Zeta Marketing Platform. If she wasn't, she couldn't control it. Like, you couldn't have an API in and out and have that work. It has to be native. We're using OpenAI's voice enablement platform, which is the best in the world, to make her truly conversational. The other thing that's gonna happen in V2 is you'll be able to access her as a Zeta client inside of your ChatGPT app, inside of your phone. It's gonna be native going both ways, and I think that's gonna be an incredible uplift to return on investment to get from that 600% - 1,000%. Chris? The intent from the very first version, if you will, of Athena, which was a Zeta Opportunity Engine, or ZOE, was to make life easier for our customers to use more of the platform. There was so much data and intelligence to be extracted, but it was sometimes hard to navigate. ZOE made that discovery process faster and easier. Athena now kind of hypercharges that. We wanted to understand our intent was to make life easier, which meant you use more channels, more use cases. Was that actually happening on the platform? We took a sample of customers in the dozens that had ZOE's capabilities, and then we looked at over a month, six months, nine months, twelve months, beyond a year, of what was their change in ARPU over that period of time, those that had ZOE but weren't using it, and those that had ZOE and were using it. We found there was a 2 to 3 times greater ARPU on those earliest adopters of ZOE than those were not using it. As we begin to kinda have the fun with numbers on what Athena could generate, it's, you know, you, you kinda start at a base level of two, and you can really model up because Athena has really made it, you know, a multiplier easier to navigate the platform. To be clear, at this point, we've included a de minimis amount of Athena increment into the projections for this year because it goes generally available, you know, by definition, we're saying the end of the quarter, but it's now by the end of the month, right? We're in March, and we're very, very much on track for that. I feel highly confident. You know, the reality is that we'll have to see. What we're doing is we're gonna launch her. We're actually birthing Athena, sort of like the birth of Venus. We're gonna have the birth of, of Athena. We'll see if we can pull off a Botticellian event. Ha ha ha. The reality is that, when she comes out, we've got a full learning and development package that we're gonna be rolling out with it to all of our clients, and we'll start with our top 30 customers, and we'll physically go visit them with the learning and development group to start getting everybody up to speed. Listen, if they adopt it quickly and they see higher return on investment, I think it's highly probable that they will spend more than we're budgeting. Right. Wanted to zoom out a little bit to some of the bigger picture kind of industry buying, patterns that you're seeing from customers. The RFP, stats that you guys threw out continue to be- Yeah. very, very interesting. Well, it'll be up 100%. Right. Maybe, like, anything particular in the competitive dynamic that's driving that, any differences in kind of win rates that you're seeing over the past few quarters, and then not just kind of more RFP wins, but larger ones? Kind of what's driving that? You know what's been interesting is for many years, we got RFPs, but you could tell they were literally written by the incumbent, right? Like the incumbent sitting in the room writing the RFP so they cannot lose it, right? Because this might be a Salesforce shop, or it might be an Adobe shop, or it might be an Oracle shop, and they're not gonna not be those shops. By writing the RFP, those large enterprises probably have a rule they have to go out every three years or every five years or so on and so forth. That's changed. For the first time, I would say the vast majority of the RFPs we're receiving, the companies are willing to bifurcate marketing cloud from the core products of the larger software companies. I think a lot of that is because their architectures at this point go back, most cases, 15 years. You know, you're still talking about ExactTarget responses to Neol ane here. What happens is you can't integrate AI into the platform. You could talk about Agent Force from now until you're blue in the face, but it doesn't make any difference if it doesn't really work, right? Salesforce's marketing cloud shrunk last quarter. That was their results. We're not interpreting them. That's what they said. Adobe and Oracle don't break it out, but I don't know what they're doing. What I would tell you is the architecture that we have built has data, and AI is native to the application layer. When our competitors put AI on their platform, you have to step out of the platform to an AI algorithm, do a query. The algorithm has to do a data dip into a data repository back to the algorithm to create intelligence, and then it informs the marketing cloud what to do. That latency destroys return on investment because AI and data. We launched a whole new platform in 2021. That literally we can process thousands of data points in milliseconds and decide, should this person see this ad, get this message, or get this Connected TV ad? That is creating this 600% return on investment. I want to be very clear, guys like Salesforce, Oracle, and Adobe are some of the greatest companies in the world. Their core products are best of breed. I don't even think they have meaningful competitors yet in their core products. Their marketing clouds are now the side hustle to their side hustle, and they're just not getting the investment. They would have to re-architect the entire thing, which they could, at some point, choose to do, but then none of them own any first-party data. They're just using their clients' data to train the algorithms. We are very, very focused on this sort of one plus one equals four as it relates to our clients' data plus our data. Not only are you seeing 100% increment in RFP volume, which we talked about, I think we're seeing RFPs we're gonna win at a greater percentage than we've ever won before. Yeah. I think one of the most compelling data points from the print was how balanced from a vertical perspective was. Nine of the top 10 kind of growing over 20%. I guess, are there any key areas from a vertical perspective that you're thinking could be delivering outsized share gains? Anywhere specifically you're thinking about for 2026? You know, it's continued to strike us positively that the verticals that are closest to consumer discretionary, which are the brands that have to kinda get the most ROI for their dollars invested, were our best-performing verticals again. They grew over very strong comps in the year prior. One vertical that I'd call out because we've been intentional on incremental investment, not just in people, but healthcare is one that you absolutely cannot have a generalist on. You must have a domain expertise in healthcare. By the way, across health plans, across health systems, et c. But we've also been intentional in finding partnerships around data there. That was a vertical that did not grow 20% in 2024. That did grow over 20% in 2025 that we're optimistic about. I would just say one of the things we decided when we sort of pivoted this business in 2017 into what it is today was we wanted to operate across every vertical, right? We effectively operate against 15 different verticals that I... You know, I'm not sure what percentage of GDP those 15 make up, but I know the top three make up half, so it's gotta be a disproportionate percentage. What I would say is we're very well-balanced. Well, usually there's a year where a couple of the verticals are flat, a couple of the verticals are growing a little bit, a couple of the verticals are skyrocketing growth. The last couple of years, we've seen really solid growth from, you know, over 10 of our verticals in pretty much every quarter. You know, it's been interesting, even some of the verticals that their industries have been challenged, they're moving more budget to us than ever before because they need the higher return on investment. The guys who are skyrocketing are doing the same thing 'cause they wanna supercharge the growth. It's been great. I would tell you, Keith, I believe based on the business we've built, the assets we control, we have the people, the technology, and the data to continue to be a +20% organic growth company for many, many years to come. Yeah. You know, you're not just growing well, but you're expanding margins as well. Maybe with the last few minutes, just talk about kind of the key leverage drivers and how you're thinking about balancing AI investment with still expanding margins? I'll start and let you turn it over. Let me just start by saying a lot of the investments we made in AI, we made from 2017 - 2021. Everybody's now trying to catch up at 3,000% more cost per item. We were able to get in before the prices really skyrocketed. A lot of people after our call said, "Well, if you're really delivering 600% return on investment, why are you not raising price?" To me, what a lot of people don't understand is the 40% approximate of our business that's utilization fees, we effectively buy the marketing for our clients, and it transitions through our platform. We decide what the margin is there. Do we wanna manage it to growth, or do we wanna manage it to profitability? I believe that over the next few years, we will surpass 1,000% return on investment to our clients, and I believe we'll be able to keep all of the margin that exists above that, which will start to drive meaningful increment to gross margin. Chris, I didn't leave you much time, but I'm sorry. I'll go super fast. We've created a model to where we don't have to sacrifice growth or profitability or vice versa. We give as much, truly, as much investment we can to the innovation team. We try to be as smart in how many people and who we hire on the marketing and sales side. The secret sauce is everything else in the middle should be zero. Yep. We're not there, but that allows us to really refine, get efficiency in the middle, over invest in the ends, and that's resulted in great growth and profitability. Yep. By the way, we've grown the business, I think, on a three or this will be the fourth year of a compounded +30% growth rate, greater than a 50% EBITDA. Last year, we grew free cash flow by 78%. Yeah, I feel like we're doing a good job managing to that. Very impressive. Awesome. We'll leave it there. Thanks so much, guys. Thank you, Keith. Appreciate it.