AdTheorent Holding Company Inc
NASDAQ:ADTH
Earnings Call Analysis
Q4-2023 Analysis
AdTheorent Holding Company Inc
In the period under review, AdTheorent demonstrated robust business performance, featuring revenue growth and the exploitation of competitive advantages in a rapidly evolving digital advertising landscape. For the fourth quarter, the company's revenue surged to $59.7 million, marking a 15% year-over-year growth rate, which is exemplary of its accelerating growth. Additionally, this translates into a $13.6 million adjusted EBITDA, with a 34% margin and a 35% year-over-year growth, denoting significant improvement in operational efficiency.
Key drivers of growth include the self-service revenue which skyrocketed by 136% annually and AdTheorent Health revenue which grew 89% relative to the previous year. This performance reflects not only the company's ability to bring in and retain larger media customers and its successful expansion into global markets but also underscores the robustness and attractiveness of the AdTheorent platform for its customers.
Innovations like AdTheorent Predictive Audiences led to a 29% sequential increase in active campaigns. The company's cutting-edge, performance-oriented CTV offering continues to attract advertisers, capitalizing on the increasing demand for Connected TV and the broader shift from traditional advertising methods to programmatic, internet-based models.
The impending industry-wide deprecation of cookies represents a significant opportunity for AdTheorent. Google's phase-out of cookies from Chrome is seen not as a challenge but as a reaffirmation of AdTheorent's unique value proposition, given its reliance on machine learning rather than cookies for targeting. With this shift, the company envisions expanding its competitive edge and bringing new innovations to the market, strengthening its role as a leader in the post-cookie era of digital advertising.
The company closed the reviewed period with $170.8 million in annual revenue, marking a 2.8% growth rate from the previous year. This includes an 11.8% increase in revenue per active customer and an adjusted gross profit that totaled $111.2 million or 65.1% of revenue, thereby exceeding projected margins. Looking ahead, AdTheorent anticipates an impressive revenue range of $188 million to $195 million for 2024, aiming for a growth midpoint of 12% from 2023. Adjusted gross profit is expected to range between 64% and 65% of revenue, with an EBITDA margin forecasted to be between 20% and 25% of adjusted gross profit.
You don't have any saved screeners yet
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to AdTheorent's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that this conference is being recorded.I would now like to turn the conference over to your first speaker, David DeStefano, Investor Relations. David, please go ahead.
Good afternoon, and welcome to AdTheorent's fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings call. We will be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after the market closed today. With me today are AdTheorent's Chief Executive Officer, Jim Lawson; and Chief Financial Officer, Patrick Elliott.Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that today's conference call will include forward-looking statements based on the company's current expectations. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially. For a discussion of factors that could affect our future financial results and business, please refer to the disclosure in today's earnings release and our other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All of today's statements are based upon information available to us today, and we assume no obligation to update any such statements, except as required by law.We will also refer to both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures during the call. You can find the reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP measures included in our press release posted to the Investor Relations section of our website at www.adtheorent.com. All of our non-revenue financial measures we discuss today are non-GAAP unless we state otherwise.With that, let me turn the call over to Jim.
Thank you, David, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our fourth quarter 2023 earnings call. During today's call, I will discuss our high-level results for the fourth quarter and the full year 2023, provide a progress update on our key areas of investment and finish up with a discussion about our exciting product innovation plans, including how we expect AdTheorent's machine learning platform to benefit from Google's cookie deprecation and other regulatory pressures and market dynamics, which just disfavor ID focused ad targeting.I'm pleased to report that in the fourth quarter, we generated revenue, adjusted gross profit and adjusted EBITDA above the high end of our outlook ranges. Our differentiated machine learning approach to scoring ad impressions, which delivers consistent best-in-class return on ad spend for our customers, continues to generate heightened interest and engagement, leading to greater spend on our platform.In the fourth quarter, we generated $59.7 million in revenue, a 15% year-over-year growth rate. This accelerated growth, combined with prudent cost management drove significant operating leverage, yielding $13.6 million of adjusted EBITDA, a 34% margin and 35% growth year-over-year.Once again, we outperformed in our high-priority growth vectors, including self-service AdTheorent Health, which saw revenue growth of 89% in Q4 and our predictive audience products, all of which continue to see robust customer adoption.Over the past year, we have meaningfully accelerated our growth trajectory by layering these incremental innovations on top of our highly differentiated ML-powered DSP. As a reminder, we have been productizing and operationalizing advanced machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence since early 2012. Now with the macro picture that appears to be in the beginning stages of stabilization and a greater technological lead in algorithm-based programmatic ad targeting, we look to the future confident in our ability to drive durable growth. I'll now discuss each of these growth pillars in more detail.First, on self-service. As I've stated in prior calls, developing and scaling our self-service platform is helping AdTheorent more fully monetize the industry's most sophisticated ad decisioning engine. Momentum continued to build in Q4, with self-service revenue up 136% year-over-year, driven by record activity, impressions served and platform spend. Overall revenue contribution remains relatively small, but our self-service delivery platform is already opening doors and attracting and retaining larger media buying customers.In particular, we are excited to note that several large media buyers adopted our self-service platform in the fourth quarter. In addition, two global holding companies completed platform evaluations and signed post evaluation platform agreements in the first quarter and a third holdco evaluation is in progress.Adding the self-service delivery model enables us to generate the same outstanding campaign results regardless of how customers choose to transact on the platform, keeping customers on the platform longer as our independent agency customer base grows and their internal ad buying and campaign management capabilities evolve, we can seamlessly include self-service as a component. These customers still access our managed service and creative resources as needed, translating to higher overall spend on the AdTheorent platform. And with larger global holding companies, our self-service offering is an exciting driver of meaningful revenue growth as those customers scale their use of the platform.Second, I'd like to talk about our progress with AdTheorent Health. Despite being our largest industry offering, Q4 at AdTheorent Health revenue grew 89% year-over-year as a number of industry cross currents and AdTheorent innovations accelerated demand. Nowhere is the need for a powerful and privacy-forward demand-side partner more acute than in the highly regulated healthcare industry.Many AdTheorent Health customers are subject to stringent privacy regulations with tight restrictions on the use of personal data, driving them towards AdTheorent over-ID dependent DSPs. Because our algorithms score and serve ad impressions based on statistical insights and probabilities and not individualized user data, we believe we represent the future of healthcare programmatic advertising.On our Q3 call, we discussed strong early demand for trials and demos using our Health Audience Builder product or HABi. These and subsequent demos have converted into increased demand and incremental revenue. We are confident we will continue to gain share within the large and growing healthcare advertising space as other generalist DSPs lack our domain expertise, privacy benefits and advanced machine learning capabilities.Moving to AdTheorent Predictive Audiences. We are thrilled with the market validation we have witnessed since the launch of these innovative solutions in late 2022. Advertisers continue to adopt our proprietary ID independent methodology for audience creation, citing the superior results we deliver without the need to license expensive third-party audiences and our ability to expand their reach beyond traditional ID-based segment populations, which are the focus of other platforms.In Q4, we saw another record increase in attach rates for Predictive Audiences with 85 active campaigns running AdTheorent Predictive Audiences, a 29% sequential increase from the 66 active campaigns in Q3. Strong demand and customer uptake trends are driven by our ability to demonstrate repeatedly an uplift in campaign performance versus third-party audiences and our ability to perform in a transparent and privacy conscious manner.To cite one example, in a campaign for a national wine brand, our custom Predictive Audiences sought to reach consumers aged 21 plus with a high likelihood of visiting wine and liquor stores, as well as a high likelihood of browsing wine and cooking websites and publications. The campaign drove an 18% sales lift with 49% of buyers being new to the brand or category and a 5x return on ad spend for the brand as measured by an independent third party.AdTheorent Predictive Audiences deliver better ROI for customers and drive greater adoption of our platform, which in turn drove greater profitability in Q4. We believe significant runway remains as we drive higher adoption across our advertiser base over time.Finally, I would like to discuss our enthusiasm around CTV and this foundation for growth that we have established in this important market opportunity. Our differentiated performance-oriented CTV offering continues to resonate with advertisers, driving higher demand. As previewed with third quarter earnings, in Q4, we introduced a normalized network and channel taxonomy for targeting, reporting and modeling. This is important because there is no standardization in CTV content data across publishers. In other words, the data received by DSPs from publishers is fragmented and messy. By leveraging our proprietary approach to analyzing and normalizing this content data, the vast majority of our live television impressions have a targetable and reportable network and channel. This has created a scalable solution for CTV buyers seeking a more precise way of ensuring that ads are adjacent to the desired content.Network and channel data is also leveraged in our machine learning modeling adding valuable signals for our custom models to maximize performance. Our ability to utilize advanced machine learning and impression scoring capabilities on CTV to deliver a transparent and granular solution is industry-leading and advertisers are leaning in.CTV momentum remains strong within self-service with advertiser count up 87% compared to the third quarter of 2023, driving 12% sequential growth of CTV advertisers. As the demand composition shifts towards self-service, however, revenue is recognized more heavily on a net basis. While this is pressuring near-term CTV revenue, which was down 12.5% year-over-year, we believe overall CTV growth will reaccelerate as we continue to enhance our CTV solutions and as advertisers continue to ramp up spend.Moving to outlook. In 2024, we plan to build on our notable progress in 2023. Despite a mixed environment and pressure on ad budgets, we returned to meaningful growth in the second half of the year. We also remain very profitable despite high levels of investment behind initiatives that will drive growth in 2024 and beyond.The broader economy remains mixed, but we are engaged and active with larger customers, and we are encouraged by what we are seeing relative to 2024 budgets and customer planning. Also, as we have discussed in the past, a major industry development, cookie deprecation will reinforce AdTheorent's value proposition in 2024.I'd like to update investors on recent events and how AdTheorent is positioned to benefit from these cross currents. At the beginning of January, Google officially began eliminating cookies from the Chrome browser. As of last month, cookies are now restricted for 1% of Chrome users and the remaining 99% will be eliminated by the end of the third quarter. This isn't new news, but the reality of cookie deprecation and other concerns around privacy are going to force advertisers to reevaluate their approach to targeting consumers.As noted in the January Wall Street Journal article, many advertisers still aren't ready for this change, showing that industry media buying behaviors have yet to shift despite the imminent deadline to do so. For AdTheorent, this is a huge opportunity. We have a clear view of the post-cookie future, including how our machine learning systems will leverage Google's ABIs and aggregate data exchanges as part of the post cookie privacy framework, and we've been active with our customers preparing for the opportunity.As we have discussed, AdTheorent is immune to cookie deprecation because unlike other DSPs, we are data agnostic. And in our 12-year history, we have never relied on cookies for targeting. We've always used machine learning algorithms and statistical models, which draw inferences from patterns and data to score ad impressions. We are not in the ID targeting business.Other demand-side platforms have historically used cookie-based IDs and are now scrambling to backfill with other even less effective and scale challenged alternate user IDs. As cookies are phased out over the next few quarters, AdTheorent's competitive moat and superior value proposition will naturally expand versus other solutions in the market.Before I conclude, I want to highlight a few meaningful innovations that we plan to bring to market over the next four quarters. First, as I mentioned, we are excited by the opportunity to lead digital advertisers into the post-cookie world, and our tech product and data science teams are hard at work configuring our machine learning systems to leverage Google APIs and aggregate data exchanges as part of the post-cookie privacy framework.Second, in parallel with our introduction into market of a custom health version of our platform, we are excited to be incorporating generative AI and large language models into HABi, our Health Audience Builder, to facilitate user health audience research and creation using this advanced AI functionality, nonexperts can explore complex health and patient data to develop audience algorithms for ad campaigns.Third, as we work to enhance our video and CTV offering, we are excited to be incorporating video transcription data into our performance modeling, extracting keywords from video creative transcripts, introducing such additional contextual signals will make our CTV and video campaigns more data-driven.Fourth, we expect significant business upside from our enhanced UI/UX rollout across our health and nonhealth lines of business. So our teams remain highly focused there. And finally, before turning the call over to Patrick, I am pleased to note that we received more industry recognition for our work elevating the state of programmatic advertising across the open Internet. Frost & Sullivan, a 63-year-old business consulting and market research firm, named AdTheorent a leader in the Frost Radar for Demand-Side Platforms. The Frost Radar evaluated the top 13 DSPs and AdTheorent was ranked #3 in innovation, trailing just two much larger competitors.I would like to conclude my remarks by acknowledging the AdTheorent team whose expertise, dedication and resilience enabled us to finish 2023 and open 2024 on a high note with great optimism for what is to come.Now, I'll turn the call over to Patrick.
Thanks, Jim. Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us today. As Jim mentioned, we are thrilled to report a robust Q4 performance, exceeding the high end of our revenue, AGP margin and adjusted EBITDA margin outlook. We are confident in AdTheorent's potential to sustain its growth momentum, which began in the second half of 2023.We are proud to announce record-breaking quarterly and full year revenue. We ended the year with a very strong Q4 with revenue reaching $59.7 million, surpassing our guidance range of $55 million to $57 million and marking a 15.2% year-over-year growth. As we discussed on our previous call, we pointed to an inflection point for our business starting with record pipeline generation in Q2, which converted to revenue growth in Q3 of this year, and the pipeline generation and revenue growth momentum we saw in Q3 accelerated into Q4. The demand across our key growth pillars contributed significantly to this achievement.Notably, our self-service platform saw a remarkable 136% revenue growth year-over-year. And AdTheorent Health, our largest verticalized solution experienced an 89% year-over-year increase. In the fourth quarter, our adjusted gross profit, defined as GAAP revenue less traffic acquisition costs was $39.9 million, representing 66.9% of revenue, above our margin guidance of at least 64% of revenue. This compares to 65.2% of revenue in the same period of the prior year. This increase in AGP percentage was primarily driven by the increased adoption of our algorithmic Predictive Audience solutions, particularly within AdTheorent Health.Non-GAAP operating expenses, excluding stock-based compensation, depreciation and amortization and onetime items, totaled $46 million, up from $41.7 million last year, mainly due to increased tax related to higher revenue. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $13.6 million, up $3.5 million or 34.8% compared to Q4 2022, exceeding the high end of our outlook range of $10 million to $11.5 million.Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 34.2% for the quarter, up from 30% last year, reflecting strong cost discipline and AGP performance and higher revenue. The company's continued strong profitability demonstrates both our operating leverage and agility amidst an ever-changing market landscape.For the full year, we reported $170.8 million in revenue, a 2.8% growth rate versus 2022, achieving our growth outlook set at the beginning of the year. Despite spend consolidation trends in the industry, our average revenue per active customer increased by 11.8%, indicating successful engagements with larger brand and agency customers. We continue to execute on our strategic growth initiatives to increase the value our platform delivers to our customers and to take advantage of an expanding addressable market, driven by shifts from traditional forms of advertising to programmatic advertising on the open Internet and from linear to connected TV.Our ID independent AdTheorent Health and Predictive Audience products and our self-service offering continue to be core drivers of the acceleration in our business, recording record highs. Additionally, platform spend for CTV also reached all-time highs.Full year adjusted gross profit totaled $111.2 million or 65.1% of revenue exceeding the high end of our AGP margin outlook. As expected, our AGP margins were consistent with historical results. Operating expenses, excluding stock-based compensation, depreciation and amortization and onetime items increased $4.8 million or 3.4% from the previous year, primarily due to higher TAC, hosting expenses and platform data costs.During the year, we also realized approximately $2 million in savings across G&A, primarily across professional services and insurance costs and managed total compensation expense for the entire company to be flat versus the prior year. As a result, adjusted EBITDA for the year was $22.2 million, a 19.9% margin against adjusted gross profit, exceeding expectations and 400 basis points lower than full year 2022. We were able to drive top line growth while investing in the business to better position us for growth.Moving to our balance sheet and cash flow. We closed out the year with $70.3 million in cash and cash equivalents. Our free cash flow for the year was negative $2.5 million, mainly due to the early termination of a large vendor contract we resolved in December for $6.3 million, the timing of collections on fourth quarter revenue and overpayment of cash taxes. We anticipate reversing the timing of collections and cash taxes trends in the first half of 2024. We continue to have a strong capital structure with no debt and ample liquidity.Looking ahead to 2024, we expect and are already pacing towards accelerated annual growth. For the full year 2024, we expect revenue to be in the range of $188 million to $195 million, which represents 12% growth at the midpoint versus 2023. We anticipate adjusted gross profit to be between 64% and 65% of revenue compared to 65.1% in 2023 and adjusted EBITDA margin to be between 20% and 25% of adjusted gross profit compared to 19.9% in 2023. Revenue growth and margin expansion will both accelerate as we progress through the year.As we pivot through this period of reaccelerating growth and EBITDA margin expansion, we have decided to shift toward an annual guidance model. This will align our reporting framework with our investment strategy and allow us to make strategic investments without the constraints of quarterly time lines. Our investments are clearly working, and this shift will help ensure we're always placing our resources where they'll generate the most value for our stakeholders.In summary, we are pleased with our financial performance in 2023 and the growth momentum we are already driving in 2024. We're excited about the opportunities ahead in 2024 and beyond. Thank you. At this time, we would like to transition to the Q&A session moderated by the operator.
Thank you. [Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Maria Ripps at Canaccord Genuity.
Great. Congrats on the strong results. So you talked about expanding partnerships with two global holding companies with another one in progress. Can you just talk about how meaningful this could be for your platform going forward? And whether you see sort of a tendency among these holding companies to increase their spend with their advertising partners over time?
Maria, thank you for the question. Yes, we have, as communicated in prior calls, really been focusing on trying to generate business deals with large media buyers where we can have sustained revenue growth over a long period of time. We're quite excited to be at the table and signing not only a valuation agreements, but post evaluation agreement, advertising service agreements with some of the largest media buyers in the world.So we're very excited to be there. It's been a long process in building our platform and getting it to the point where we are able to deliver these types of contracts. So we're really excited to scale those opportunities post contract because, yes, we believe huge opportunities exist in these customers.
Great. And then secondly, I think last quarter, you talked about several CTV partnerships that have expanded your AVOD inventory on the platform. Can you maybe talk about whether that's driving incremental advertising demand?And then maybe more broadly, how do you see sort of CTV spend growing on the platform sort of adjusting for this mix shift that you're going through relative to the broader industry trends.
Thank you, Maria. We have been very focused on making sure that our CTV offering is differentiated and best-in-class. We're early innings in the scaling of our CTV relative to the opportunity. What we've seen is in the early years of AdTheorent, we were mostly a managed services platform. As we deliver more customers into the self-service business, we find that many of them are CTV heavy. CTV is a more expensive medium and you see more self-service executions across CTV. So we see more net revenue recognition for our CTV customers.At the end of the day, we believe that we are so early in this opportunity that we don't really care about that. At the end of the day, our objective is to get media flowing through the platform. Our focus primarily to date has been on the product, making sure we have the best publisher integration, the best data driven methods of targeting and the best reporting capabilities and products.We're at that point now where we think a go-to-market, reenergizing our go-to-market, making a number of investments in that area, making some strategic partnerships in that area could be quite valuable in getting our scale back to CTV. We didn't grow our CTV revenue in 2023, but we grew our advertisers by 30%, and we believe that the growth in revenue will follow.
We'll move next to Laura Martin at Needham.
I have three also. So let's do self-service first. What I'm interested in your self-service was up 136%, but it's still a small percent of total revenue. My question is, what do these self-service customers require on the cost side from you guys to service them compared to when you were doing managed service?
Thank you, Laura. Appreciate the question. I think at the end of the day, the self-service customer is looking for a platform that gives them access to the best-in-class inventory and an ability to efficiently drive the best results that they can get, more media working for their investment and better return on ad spend.Our platform has been designed to be an extremely efficient platform. We filter out a lot of noise. We filter out a lot of inventory that is not value added to the customer. We put more media to work than other DSPs. And I think that at the end of the day, that is what most self-service customers are looking for. They're looking for a platform or engine that allows them to execute media campaigns that deliver results.And I think our algorithmic approach to both KPI performance where we can generate outstanding KPI results when we go head-to-head with other customers -- sorry, other DSPs. And frankly, that's the #1 way we win business is going to head-to-head with other DSPs and outperforming. So I think performance is key. As far as cost, we have the best price optimizers out of any DSP in our view, where we can find high-value impressions and, therefore, drive conversions at a cost lower than other DSPs.
Okay. Cool. And then I was -- a second question for you, Jim, is road maps. So about a year ago, you were going [ AdTheorent ] Health has really done exactly what you projected on the timeframe you projected. A year ago, you were going to go next to financial services and insurance, where again, they are very direct privacy rules, and that sort of made sense to investors. But then last quarter, you were talking about travel. So can you give us an update this quarter of where you go next after healthcare? What's on the road map?
Thank you, Laura. Great question. We continue to believe that the financial services vertical, banking, financial services and insurance is a big opportunity for our business. In the market environment that we have been in over the last couple of years with interest rates, one of our larger clients was engaged in auto finance, and there were challenges in the automotive vertical.There were a number of headwinds facing the customer base that we had in the financial services vertical. We remain optimistic about that vertical because of our ability to drive the campaigns in a privacy-forward manner, for example, in compliance with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the Fair Housing Act. We don't use prohibited basis variables in our models, a number of other really important and valuable things for financial services marketers and especially in the area of credit extension products. So we are very, very bullish about financial services, but you also have to be mindful of the macro and the industry and the conditions that you're in.So travel is exciting for us. We actually had a very strong -- we have a strong kind of start to the year in travel. We have our Predictive Audiences, our CTV, our creative services that we offer and a number of the studies and measurement programs that we offer customers such as destination sales lift, a number of the new data investments and partnerships that we've made give us a very customized travel vertical. It's not just the product, it's also the go-to-market.We have a leader in our organization who is driving great results across travel. We're bringing in another -- a number of new members to our travel team. We're making a number of incentive changes and a number of go-to-market enhancements to our travel vertical. So we feel very optimistic that in 2023 -- I'm sorry, 2024, travel will be one of the success stories that we'll talk about in the year wrap-up call.
Okay. Super helpful. Okay. Patrick, one for you. What the heck is going on with accounts receivable? So I have free cash flow, meaning cash from ops down $13 million and accounts receivable up $15 million. Is it just this pivot to large clients, they're slow payers because this is a lot of sort of tax on AdTheorent to add $15 million year-over-year in accounts receivable. What's going on there?
Yes. Thanks, Laura. Yes, your -- part of your -- your answer, I guess, is already true that we are pivoting to larger customers, and that is part of the dynamic here. Another part of the dynamic, though, is in Q4, a lot of the revenue did come in and get billed in December. And so the timing of such AR balances just were not collected before the end of the year. So that is really driving the two things driving that increase.
And that was different than last year somehow. So we didn't see that seasonality in the last year fourth quarter?
The dynamic of -- in 2022, we had less fourth quarter incrementals come in, whereas in '23, that really did help drive our Q4 performance. And also, due to the timing and like I said in December, it just -- it drove that dynamic for increased AR at the end of the year.
Okay. Cool. But you think this is structural because as we move towards bigger clients, they pay slower. So this is going to be the growth of your revenue line you believe will be a higher [ tax ] in '24 to your working capital line through the accounts receivable. This is a structural trend you think?
Yes. I mean I think that there is truth to that. I mean, I'd point out that our working capital did improve $7 million year-over-year at the end of the year. And so that will translate into cash flow and improved cash flow in 2024. It just happened to be the timing of such at the end of the year, and we'll manage our way through that and get this working capital converted into cash this year.
Thanks, guys. Great numbers. Congratulations.
We'll move next to Matt Condon at Citizens JMP.
Great. Maybe just on cookie deprecation. Can you just talk about has there been a change in your conversations that you are having with advertisers, if they gear up for the deprecation of cookies in the back half of the year?
Yeah. Thank you for the question. One of our favorite topics. Absolutely, 100%. This is a topic on everybody's mind. We highlighted in our prepared remarks that despite the fact that the deprecation of cookies is here, a number of advertisers are behind in their planning. We've done our own research and we've talked to advertisers in the market about their interest and their preparations for the post-cookie world.And the types of ML solutions, impression scoring, using statistics and not an ID-focused approach is actually the #1 response we get when we talk to customers about what the post-cookie world looks like. We couldn't be more excited about that opportunity. We have been doing this since 2012. This is not a new reaction or pivot or backfill endeavor for AdTheorent. This is AdTheorent.We have been working on impression scoring and believe that it's preferable to user profiling and ID retargeting, and we're super excited to be able to engage with customers who maybe have a greater sense of urgency around this topic than they have in prior months and quarters. So yes, we're quite excited about it. These conversations continue, and we believe that in 2024, that enthusiasm will show up in the results.
That's great. And then, Jim, you also mentioned just the early stages of just a stabilization of the macro. Can you maybe just talk about just the linearity of demand throughout the quarter and maybe what you're seeing so far in 1Q that's giving you that confidence? Thank you.
Sure. We feel good. We feel like the macro has stabilized to a large degree. In the beginning of the year, a number of our larger customers got off to a slower start in terms of budget, completion and finalization and communication of campaign starts. So we had a little bit of a slow start in January from some of our accounts. But as the quarter has progressed, the momentum has increased. So we feel good about where we're headed.But I would say that at the beginning of the year, I think there was a little bit of a budget -- a delay in budgeting and finalizing of budgets from a number of customers. I don't think that was unique to AdTheorent from our understanding that was consistent with a number of companies in our business or industry rather.
If I could just add to that, that you asked about our linearity. I think our booked revenue and our pipeline levels are both higher at this point of the year than they were last year at this time, which support our fiscal year guidance range that we've provided in the prepared remarks.
We'll take our next question from Dan Kurnos at The Benchmark Company.
Great. That is a very solid way to end the year guys. Jim, maybe just talk about the timing of the UI/UX rollout. I know it was just one of the initiatives that you mentioned, but I will tell you that we've been seeing, let's call it, simplification for -- not to insult the agencies of some of these platforms and interfaces. And I'm just kind of curious if you're doing an integration work on the back end or if there anything -- if there's anything else that's kind of driving your optimism around that adding to growth as we've heard from others doing similar processes this year?
Thank you, Dan. That's an outstanding question. And it very much lines up with our focus on making our platform easier from the perspective of a nonexpert user. There are a lot of experts out there in the industry, but there's also a number of media buying users that would benefit from a more streamlined interface that makes more decisions for the user. That's not to say we're dumbing down our platform or removing functionality that's not what we're doing, but we are making some decisions, default decisions and more streamlined decisioning.And some more just conformity, if you will, to an industry standard that's evolved among DSPs for a number of things within the platform. I think the collective result there will be easier adoption, shorter training times, a lower period between contract execution and first campaign launch. That's something that we focus on a lot, and we feel like a number of the changes that we're making are going to help in that regard.We're also quite excited, as I mentioned in our prepared remarks about some of the generative AI advancements and contributions that we're making to our number of features of our platform, such as the Health Audience Builder, where you don't need to be, for example, an expert in all of the different specific health diagnosis or treatment names by their exact names. You can speak in a more plain English manner and our large language models and generative AI that we're incorporating into HABi will assist users in creating the audiences.And again, these are algorithmic audiences. These are not ID-based audiences. They are not look-alike audiences. These are algorithmic audiences based on statistics from aggregated data. So we think that, that makes algorithmic targeting and algorithmic audience creation more attainable and usable for nonexpert traders.
Got it. That's really helpful, Jim. And then just on a -- from a bigger picture perspective, obviously, you guys have top line momentum. I guess, Jim, as a follow-on to what I just asked, what's your willingness to reinvest this year, not just in improving the platform, but whether it's initiatives like new product builds or -- and we haven't talked about going after international, which sounds like it's recovering, just what's kind of your willingness to reinvest in the platform this year? And do you have the kind of medium to longer-term sustainable growth targets in mind at this point?
Yes. Thank you, Dan. We are -- we've been in a constant state of investment on this platform for years. I mean we could invest, frankly, a lot more. We think that our product and tech road map, it could be -- it's 5 years long right now. We could accelerate many things. Obviously, we're trying to balance short-term and near-term performance with long-term differentiation and superiority in our marketplace, and we want to make sure that we can extend our advantage on machine learning-based impression scoring and not forfeit any of that advantage and lead that we have.But you're hitting on kind of the challenge as a small public company that we would love to make investments today for a number of initiatives. So we have to make choices. And we've made a number of choices to be focused, while at the same time delivering fantastic outcomes and financial results for our shareholders.
Yes. Dan, this is Patrick. I'll just add that from an investment perspective, we don't see our CapEx, our capitalized software expenditures increasing materially from 2023. We expect that to be relatively consistent, but it will depend on top-end performance and how much momentum -- further momentum we're seeing and how that will enable us to invest more. So what I'm saying is that our investment decisions are in light of our performance, and we will monitor that as we go through the year.
Got it. Can I -- if I could sneak a real quick third one in, just TAC was really efficient in Q4. And you guys have guided to, let's call it, AGP, I guess, of sort of 64.5%, which would be a step up from the Q4 level. I know there's mix, but if you could give us any kind of incremental granularity around why Q4 AGP was so strong and just why some of those benefits aren't necessarily flowing through to the year? That would be helpful.
Yes, Dan. In Q4, we -- our good AGP margin performance was driven by the adoption of our AdTheorent Predictive Audiences solution, which replaced third-party costs with an internal solution, which increases the amount of margin dollars flowing through.Sometimes that's harder for us to predict in real time. And so we saw a fair amount of that coming through in Q4, which was upside to our guidance. But we do think that a 64% to 65% level, which is kind of historically consistent with the last 2 years of our -- of what we realized is prudent to budget for as we think through the future.
Got it. All right. Super helpful. I appreciate it.
We'll go next to Michael Kupinski at Noble Capital Markets.
Congratulations. I was wondering, can you give us an update on the strategic partnership you have with Hero Media? If you could just kind of give us an update on how HERO One is performing against your expectations?
Thank you for the question, Michael. We love our partnership with Hero. We view this as a horizontal opportunity to provide unique capabilities to our customers who are seeking to reach multicultural audiences across the spectrum. We think that our AdTheorent Predictive Audience products enable a lot of customization in that area.Hero has been fantastic in market, getting us opportunities with some very exciting brands and agencies. So that is progressing along quite nicely, and we will provide -- we expect the Hero multicultural horizontal, again, not a vertical, but a horizontal, we expect that to tap into budgets intended for multicultural budgets within a number of different verticals across our business. And we think that, that's going to drive a portion of our growth in 2024. So we're excited to see that show up in the results, but it's early.So they actually drove a number of exciting deals in the fourth quarter, which we're excited about. They contributed to that positive end to the year. And I'm very confident that as the year progresses, the Hero partnership is going to be a big part of our success.
Got you. And then I'm always looking for what could go wrong. So I know that you've been configuring your systems for the post-cookie world. But is there a chance that Google implements some technology that renders some of that work problematic for you, maybe for them for you to use with their systems? Are those of aggregate data exchanges?
Yes. Well, I mean we've been actively working with Google and with the Google Privacy Sandbox and the post-cookie framework, we're in the [ lead ] there. Our tech teams are doing testing with the APIs. We are iterating with Google, and we have a clear line of sight into what that's going to look like.And from where we sit, it's a positive story. It's a story of replacing a cookie, which is an inherently individualized piece of information with more aggregated data that, again, that's more important for us anyway.So when we optimize buying media, when we optimize buying media impressions, what we do is we look for high indexing attributes that are present. And when those high-indexing attributes are present that are driving conversions, we try to find other impressions that look like that. So we're not looking for IDs.So the depreciation of the cookie doesn't impact our modeling. Our ability to get information back from Google so that we know when we drive a conversion that we can have aggregated data about all the conversions we're driving, that's what we need. And we're pleased to see that, that's what we're getting from that post-cookie framework. So no, I mean it's early -- it's still early. Only 1% of Chrome cookies have been deprecated. There's a lot of work to be done. But I think we have the right team to do that work, and I think we have an advantage and a head start, frankly.
Yeah. Thanks for the color there. Last question, given your healthy balance sheet, any M&A that you might be looking for to enhance your growth? Can you just give us your thoughts there?
We're always looking for great opportunities. We've been heads down on -- we've never acquired technology. We've never acquired anything. I mean we've built everything homegrown. We're a relatively small business, 300 employees. We definitely can see a role for targeted M&A and other strategic type combinations as being a part of our future. There are a lot of good arguments for that. On a day-to-day basis, we're focusing on executing against our product and tech road map and driving our financial outcomes that position our company for strength and give us opportunities. But absolutely, I think the types of opportunities you're mentioning are exciting and something we're definitely looking at closely.
Great. That's all I have. Congratulations again.
Thank you, Michael. We appreciate it.
And there are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference over to Jim Lawson for closing remarks.
Thank you, everybody, for being here today. We had a great finish to 2023. We've reached an inflection point in our business. In '23, growth accelerated, going from 9% in the third quarter to 15% in the fourth quarter. We hit our targets that we set at the beginning of the year. Growth came from our strategic investments, which are paying off self-service, predictive audience solutions, health. Our customers are spending more on average up 12% in 2023. This growth is translating into great profit with 34% EBITDA margins in Q4.In closing, I would be remiss to not thank the AdTheorent team for continuing to execute at such a high level. Our momentum is continuing into 2024, and we look forward to speaking with investors again very soon.
And this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.