Zeta Global CFO on how the marketing company is beating the competition

Chris Greiner, Zeta Global CFO, joins Yahoo Finance to discuss the company’s revenue growth and the marketing environment amid the pandemic.

Video Transcript

- Zeta Global has reported second quarter earnings and reported record revenue for the quarter, which topped $106 million. Now that's a growth rate of 39% year over year. But results were mixed as the company did report greater than expected losses.

Let's bring in Chris Greiner, Zeta Global's CFO. Chris, great to have you back here with us. So we saw this big pop on revenue growth. But that is, of course compared to a year that was during a pandemic. So we have seen a lot of pretty big pops year over year from some of the companies that have been reporting so far. Can this revenue growth really be maintained into next year as we come out of this pandemic?

CHRIS GREINER: It's good to be here. The answer is, yes, in short. What excited us most about our quarter and you mentioned the growth was 39%, our adjusted EPS growth was over 106%. On the top line, what we produced was very balanced. So there wasn't one or two things that saved the day.

When you think about our growth, US growth was 39%, international grew 33%. Half of our revenue growth came from new customers. The other half from existing customers, setting a record net revenue retention rate. Our scale customers, which make up 96% of our revenue, that we define over $100,000 per year, Our scaled and super scaled customers both grew in count and in their average revenue per. So for us it was broad based. And I think most importantly for our investors is replicable into the future.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Hey, Chris, Brian Cheung here. So when it comes to the business of marketing, obviously, you play a big role in helping companies, clients, form media plans and creative strategy. What's kind of unique about this reopening economy when it comes to what your clients are looking for, right? I mean it's difficult to say where the eyeballs might be right now.

Are people going inside with Delta? Are they going outside? Where can you catch them? So I guess how do you kind of advise and work through the business strategy and what seems to be a different type of marketing environment now than, say it was three months ago?

CHRIS GREINER: Hey, Brian, yeah. You're exactly right. What happened coming out of COVID is that marketers in particular, wanted to have all in one place, a partner they could work with that had patented AI, first party data that they could take their first party data, marry it up and get new insights from it.

And then in that same place in orchestration capability set up omnichannel activation methodologies that allow them to reach their end consumers at the right place at the right time. No other company can offer what Zeta does. It's why we're winning today, that combination of the sum of Zeta parts are patented AI, one of the largest first party data sets in the world, and our omnichannel capabilities is what's driving customers to want to work with Zeta.

It's why we're not just beating our competition. We're able to displace them as well. And that's something that's new coming out of COVID, lowering the total cost of marketing dollars spent on the platform and in turn driving differentiated ROI for our customers.

- Now, Chris, when it comes to marketing, we continue to see a little bit of a battle, almost this push and pull between personalization but also privacy. And at least when it comes to a lot of the platforms, social media I'm thinking of off the top of my head, there's a lot of headwinds that are going to be coming in the form of regulation, particularly around privacy issues. Do you see that perhaps weighing on Zeta Global going forward?

CHRIS GREINER: What's unique about Zeta Global is that we've been ahead of that. Philosophically, we built one of the world's largest data sets off of permission [? opt in ?] data, which means that we don't rely on the third party cookie. Changes to [INAUDIBLE] do not affect our business model.

All of our data being opted in, permission based, that gives us a unique ability to not just be probabilistic, in where we help our customers identify their end consumers, but to be deterministic. And again, we do that in the setting of an ever evolving increasing privacy environment. In fact, if you look at all the regulations that have happened over a number of years from GDPR to CCPA, our data set is actually expanded, and not surprisingly, our revenue has grown with that data expansion.

- All right Zeta Global's Chief Financial Officer, Chris Greiner. Thanks so much for joining us today.