Zeta Global NYSE: ZETA executives outlined the company’s strategy to consolidate marketing technology tools, expand adoption of its artificial intelligence products and pursue joint-selling opportunities through partnerships during KeyBanc’s Technology Leadership Forum in Park City, Utah.
Chris Greiner, Zeta Global’s chief financial officer, said the company primarily serves large enterprises across all 15 industry verticals. Its top 10 verticals represent about 90% of revenue, with no concentration in one or two sectors, he said. Greiner added that eight of its top 10 verticals grew more than 20% in the prior quarter.
Zeta’s platform is designed to support marketers’ efforts to retain customers, increase wallet share among existing customers and acquire new customers across digital channels. Greiner said the company can typically replace eight to 12 vendors during an initial implementation, positioning Zeta as a consolidation point for brands managing numerous marketing point solutions.
Data Cloud and Athena Adoption
Will Margiloff, Zeta’s chief growth officer and vice chairman, said the company’s data asset is the largest open-web, non-walled-garden dataset. He said the data can help customers enrich their understanding of existing consumers and identify prospective customers with attributes similar to their best customers.
The company has also introduced Athena, a conversational AI interface intended to make Zeta’s platform easier for marketers to use. Greiner said customers had previously found the breadth of Zeta’s platform potentially intimidating, even as they recognized the value of its data and capabilities.
About 140 to 150 days after Athena became generally available, 40% of Zeta’s approximately 200 “super scaled” customers, or those generating more than $1 million in annual revenue, were monthly active users, Greiner said. He added that 83% of those customers’ platform interactions were conversational.
Greiner said conversational usage has led to the creation of more audiences and campaigns, which could support subsequent usage revenue when clients activate campaigns through channels such as connected television, email, mobile, audio and social media.
Margiloff said Athena could reduce the implementation hurdle historically associated with marketing technology, allowing users to interact with the platform without needing to be technical specialists.
Agency and Palantir Opportunities
Zeta is also using its platform and data to deepen relationships with marketing agency holding companies, according to Margiloff. He said agencies can use Zeta’s Data Cloud not only to serve their existing marketer clients, but also to develop more informed pitches for prospective clients. If agencies win those clients, they may then use Zeta’s platform to support the business, he said.
Greiner also discussed Zeta’s partnership with Palantir Technologies and its Foundry platform. The relationship includes joint revenue and customer-count goals, he said, and Zeta has identified a pipeline of existing U.S. commercial Palantir customers that spend more than $1 billion on marketing. Greiner characterized that opportunity as incremental to Zeta.
He described Palantir’s role as helping enterprises create a machine-readable “digital twin” of data within their operations, while Zeta provides intelligence about customers and prospects outside an organization’s walls. The initial joint use cases are expected to focus on intelligence and Data Cloud utilization, which Greiner said would be analytics-based, higher-margin revenue.
Over time, he said the relationship could potentially develop media-related applications that help customers act on insights through programmatic advertising, email and other channels, though such uses are not currently planned.
Growth, Profitability and Capital Allocation
Greiner said Zeta’s revenue consists of approximately 60% recurring revenue, including data-cloud licensing, marketing-platform subscriptions and contractual minimum usage commitments. The remaining 40% is largely generated through annual price-times-quantity contracts for channel usage.
The company raised its third-quarter organic-growth outlook to about 23.5%, excluding political candidate revenue, Greiner said. He cited pipeline visibility, a 60% increase in pipeline growth, sales productivity improvements and larger deals as factors supporting the outlook. Deals won during the quarter increased in size by 40%, while the size of deals in the pipeline rose 25%, he said.
Greiner said Zeta raised full-year revenue guidance by $33 million and free-cash-flow guidance by $20 million. He attributed margin expansion to efficiencies in research and development, sales and marketing, and general and administrative spending, along with lower capital expenditures as a percentage of revenue.
The company is continuing to hire engineering specialists through Zeta Labs and add quota-carrying sales staff, though at a slower rate than in prior years, Greiner said. He also said Zeta expects stock-based compensation as a percentage of revenue to continue declining and reported year-to-date dilution of 0.1%.
On capital allocation, Greiner said there are no imminent acquisitions in the pipeline despite Zeta’s refinanced $1 billion debt facility. He said the company views share repurchases as attractive and has modeled using at least 50% of quarterly cash generation for buybacks, while averaging closer to 60% to 70%.
Executives said AI adoption could strengthen customer retention rather than create disintermediation risk. Greiner said Zeta customers adopting its AI tools are growing about four times faster than customers that have not yet adopted them, while AI-adopting clients also have the highest net revenue retention. He added that customer relationships have extended from roughly 48 months to more than 56 months.
About Zeta Global (NYSE:ZETA)
Zeta Global, founded in 2007 and headquartered in New York City, is a leading data-driven marketing technology company. The firm's mission centers on helping brands acquire, grow and retain customers through a unified customer lifecycle management platform. Over the years, Zeta Global has built a reputation for leveraging big data and predictive analytics to power digital marketing programs across multiple channels.
At the core of Zeta's offering is the Zeta Marketing Platform, which combines identity resolution, audience insights and real-time engagement capabilities.
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