Zeta Global at 45th Annual William Blair Conference: Unique Martech Position

On Tuesday, 03 June 2025, Zeta Global Holdings Corp (NYSE:ZETA) presented at the 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference. The company showcased its strategic initiatives, highlighting a robust data-driven approach and a unique all-in-one marketing platform, while also addressing cautious financial guidance for the year’s second half.

Key Takeaways

• Zeta Global differentiates itself with an all-in-one platform for customer acquisition and retention.
• The company leverages data from 240 million U.S. individuals, covering 90-95% of the adult population.
• Forecasted growth for the current year is 23%, with a focus on expanding free cash flow margins.
• Less than 15% of scaled customers use more than one use case, highlighting significant growth potential.
• The agency channel now contributes nearly 20% of revenue, up from a mid-single digit percentage.

Financial Results

• Zeta Global has achieved mid to high 20s organic growth, excluding political contributions, over the past two years.
• The company projects a 23% growth rate for 2025.
• Seven out of the top ten verticals grew over 20% in both Q4 2024 and Q1 2025.
• The agency business has expanded to nearly 20% of total revenue.

Operational Updates

• Zeta’s data cloud encompasses 240 million U.S. individuals.
• Partnerships include all five of the largest holding companies and over 100 brands.
• The average customer utilizes approximately three channels.
• Investments in generative AI aim to enhance marketing efficiency and effectiveness.

Future Outlook

• The "OneZeta" initiative focuses on expanding use cases per customer.
• Generative AI is leveraged to drive consumption and improve client marketing.
• Agency partnerships are expected to continue growing.
• The company plans to increase its sales team by 10-15% annually.

Q&A Highlights

• Changing state regulations may redefine what constitutes a data sale.
• Agencies are transitioning from social media to Zeta’s direct channels.
• Margin expansion has been achieved alongside growth.
• The OneZeta team, led by Chief Growth Officer Ed C., is pivotal in driving use case expansion.

In conclusion, Zeta Global’s presentation at the conference outlined its strategic focus and growth potential. For further details, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference:

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: All right. Perfect. We’ll go ahead and get started. Thanks, for being here. My name is Arjun Bhatia, and I am the research analyst here at William Blair who covers Zeta Global.

For a full list of disclosures, please go to williamblair.com. And it’s a pleasure to have Nizh Gore from Zeta Global, who is the Chief Data Officer, and Chris Greiner, who’s the CFO. Thank you both for being here. Appreciate it.

Chris Greiner, CFO, Zeta Global: Thank you, Art.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: So we’re going to have, I think, a mix of folks in the audience. Maybe the best place to start is to just talk about Zeta a little bit. You’re kind of in this marketing space, but I would say you probably have one of the broadest platforms in marketing that I know of. So talk a little bit about what you do, what’s unique, and what’s the ROI that customers get out of using Zeta.

Chris Greiner, CFO, Zeta Global: Yeah. I’ll start, Nish. Feel free to jump in. And what I’ll do is I’ll put you in our customer seat and how they look at their business every day, which is if you’re a brand and you’re a marketer in particular for the largest brands that are spending hundreds of millions to billions in marketing, those are typical customers. They are trying to acquire new customers.

They are trying to grow their existing customers and keep their existing customers. Those are the different use cases that we serve. For most of our, all of our competitors, they do one or the other. They will either be focused say for the marketing clouds like a Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle, Epsilon on the retention of existing customers. So they will be able to help that brand based upon what that brand’s information is on the four walls that’s inside their business.

Or there are those that are helping those enterprises acquire new customers. Zeta, to your point around this all in one platform, is the only platform that can go to a brand or an agency and be able to tell them not just what we know based upon our data cloud about their existing customers that can then be merged with all of the data they have in house to then further retain or further grow their existing customers but at the same time in the same console, same pane of glass, be able to tell them who are those prospects that look like their best customers that are known to be in market at this moment in time. And from a use case perspective, that’s a very powerful proposition for a marketer. How many of us own a credit card or recently bought a shirt but every single day we’re marketed to as if we’re a first time customer? We are able to create that single view, single identity of a consumer, whether existing customer or prospect of yours.

We do that by bringing to bear three different parts of their technology stack. So this consolidation of technology or this replacement of technology the consolidations of point solutions and features, access to our data cloud, access to be able to automate and orchestrate all of their marketing activities and the ability to digitally engage their consumers, whether it’s through programmatic or through email, through mobile or any different omni channel capability, they can work inside our platform. Oftentimes it’s that lowering of total cost of ownership that gets us in the door, but to your point around ROI, what allows us to not just stay in the door but get measurably and predictably bigger over time is the transparency of our work. Because we start and work with the majority of our marketing activities at the bottom of their funnel, it’s measurable, it’s attributable to our work. And not only do we give them our visibility, meaning we’re not scoring our own homework, they get to score our attribution, but they can do it side by side with what they’re doing outside of Zeta.

And that oftentimes leads to, well, I get a better ROI with Zeta, I’m going to keep pushing more and more in Zeta’s direction. That’s evident in the growth of our cohorts, it’s evident in the growth of our ARPU over time.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: Yep, Okay. That’s a good start. Okay. So the part on ROI is interesting, right? Because in this space, I feel like there’s a more direct tie in to ROI because it’s you’re getting revenue, you’re getting a customer, and you can kind of say, all right, I did this in Zeta, this is what the outcome was.

And that kind of leads to this big market, and that’s why there are so many competitors in the space. Right? You have Salesforce and you have Oracle and you have Adobe on the software kind of side, And then there is, you know, Trade Desk and others on the media side, and then there’s a whole host of agencies that are also trying to do this. Compared to them, what what is what is what are you doing that’s different? Like, in addressing the different use cases, what is it that Zeta does that those players don’t do, and what’s what’s really unique about that?

Nizh Gore, Chief Data Officer, Zeta Global: Yeah. Think that’s and again, taking the lens of a CMO, and I’m Nish, by the way, I’m Zeta’s Chief Data Officer, as Arjun mentioned. If you look through the lens of the CMO, there’s two major trends happening in marketing and advertising today. So the first is that CMOs believe in convergence. In the last ten years, they’ve made investments in Databricks and Snowflake to bring all the data together.

Why do you do that? Because you want to be able to apply AI and machine learning to it. And if you believe in convergence, that means that you need one solution to be able to acquire, grow, and retain off of one canonical dataset. So this is Zeta’s philosophy as well. So that’s number one.

The second thing is that we are believers in the idea of identity based marketing. So what that means, and there’s several companies that believe in identity based marketing, namely the walled gardens like Facebook and Google and Amazon where you can select a group of individuals, you can send them marketing, you can see if they took a desired action, and then you can optimize the result against another group of individuals. No one has brought that approach to the martech landscape before Zeta. There are a litany of companies in the space. They work off of probabilistic models.

They work off of contextual models. But the idea that you want to start with people, market to people, measure people, and then optimize to make those campaign performances improve over time, that’s a function that has existed in walled gardens. We are exposing that same capability to the broader Martech and AdTech ecosystems. So these are two things that are really tailwinds for us as the market moves forward and evolves.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: And so the data is a big part of your edge, right? It kind of fuels the platform. You have a lot of other workflow capabilities as well that are So I think on the data side, believe it’s two forty correct me if I’m wrong two forty million U. S. Individuals that you have data on and over 500,000,000 So maybe give us a sense of how unique that data is, how proprietary it is, where you’re getting that from Sure.

And then how it feeds.

Nizh Gore, Chief Data Officer, Zeta Global: So it looks and feels a lot like what you’d find with a walled garden, like a Facebook or an Amazon or a Google. We own at scale networks that provide tools to publishers. So we own one network called Disqus, and I’m just going to give you two sources of the data, but we have more than two. Disqus is basically allowing commenting on long tail publishers. So whenever you go to the Internet, at the bottom of web page or a shopping page, you see an upvote, downvote, leave a comment.

It drives engagement and monetization for those publishers. So there are millions of publishers that use that type of capability. On the other side, we own a company called LiveIntent. LiveIntent is the largest email exchange for publishers, and I use publishers broadly. Think about the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Groupon, Sam’s Club, and so they power email ad units within publisher emails like the ones you receive from these brands.

And those are sources where we’re able to collect signal, we’re able to collect identity through our relationship with the publishers, and they contribute to the two forty million in the graph. And that two forty million, again, it’s about represents about 90 to 95% of The US adult population. It can fluctuate a little bit month over month, but we’re at scale and at maturity in The US and on top of those individuals, we would layer in signals. What does someone want to do next? What are they reading about?

What are they shopping for? All of those become features of an individual profile, and then that’s used to create optimized campaigns. And those campaigns are generally generated by a combination of our platform and AI coming together. And maybe just to clarify one point, you’re not selling the data, are you? How do you monetize your So the and this is a kind of a loaded question, and I had mentioned this to Chris.

So the rules around what constitutes a data sale are changing. It’s state by state now. You know, if you are enriching the customer’s understanding of their customer that’s being used for marketing, that could still constitute a data sale, like in California as an example. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just the definition of selling data is changing over time.

Our general and most widespread model is to enrich a customer’s understanding of their data and allow them to achieve better outcomes through our marketing platform. Right? They have to use our channels to actually achieve those outcomes. That is the way we operate. We also allow customers to tap into our data asset to find new customers, just like you would find an audience in Facebook as an example, Zeta manages our own audiences that are very, very high value, that give different intents and interests that you can can use to find your next best customers.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: So maybe if I paraphrase, for someone for a customer to actually engage someone in Zeta’s through Zeta’s data asset, they would have to do it essentially through your platform?

Nizh Gore, Chief Data Officer, Zeta Global: That’s correct.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: Okay.

Nizh Gore, Chief Data Officer, Zeta Global: They use us for marketing, and they use our platform to reach those end consumers.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: Got it. Okay, perfect. Maybe switching gears a little bit. One of the, I think, big successes you’ve had over the last, I’ll say, year and a half now has been working with the agencies. Historically, you’ve gone direct to enterprise.

We started working with the agencies. They’ve loved Zeta, they’ve kind of distributed it to their brands that they’re working with. How important is this channel? How much of a, I’ll say, differentiator has it been to your or help has it been to your growth rate? And maybe just talk about the different dynamics between enterprise versus agencies.

Chris Greiner, CFO, Zeta Global: It’s evolved. And it’s evolved from, like, starting with our philosophy several years ago. We you probably would have pinned us down, we would have kind of squinted and said probably more of a competitor than a partner. It’s certainly evolved now to be full partnership. It’s taken a multi pronged growth approach now.

We started first working with the largest global agencies and we refer to them in our earnings calls as the holdcos. And these holdcos deploy billions and billions of dollars in media. They work with hundreds of brands each within their umbrella. It is a one to many, very exciting go to market strategy for us. It starts with solving their toughest problems, which oftentimes can be marketing inside the walled gardens, But then it leads to over time doing more and more inside Zeta’s platform.

It’s gone from, call it, mid single digit percentage of our revenue to knocking on the door of 20%. It’s been one of our fastest growing segments of customers. We now work with all five of the largest working on the next and it’s now split into a dedicated sales team focused on those customers and that is a lot of harvesting and partnership work that’s still a long way, way in front of us. By way of example, we work with, call it, 100 plus brands at all five of these, know, adding up to all five of these agencies, meanwhile there’s thousands that we should be working with. So it’s pretty early in its growth story.

We also started to do more and more with independent agencies. These independent agencies could be regional based. They could be very vertical specialized. They could be maybe more multicultural or creative only. It could be a whole host of things.

There’s hundreds of these independents. The biggest difference there is that they work with Zeta and engage with Zeta a lot more like a direct enterprise relationship does. So they’re taking on multiyear contracts with Zeta. They are creating minimum usage contracts that have to be fulfilled using our direct channels. Doesn’t mean we can’t do social, but they’re starting with using Zeta’s platform.

They’re white labeling it, so they’re going to market with a whole new set of capabilities from data enrichment to prospecting to business intelligence and they’re branding it as their platform. They’re winning new business incrementally because of it. We started with two at the end of twenty twenty four. We’re now approaching six of these independents. Again, there’s hundreds of them.

But it’s a really new exciting growth area and there’s a dedicated sales team to it as well. So it’s a big part of our growth play. It’s almost a hunting license for Zeta if we do great work to keep asking for more. There’s different ways we can scale within these agencies. We can kind of operate within, many of them have sub agencies, several sub agencies underneath an umbrella of a HoldCo, and we’ll work within each one.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: Okay.

Chris Greiner, CFO, Zeta Global: There are other models where they centralize digital buying, and we can be part of what’s in what powers that intelligence of where media is best deployed across many brands. That’s a great model for us to scale even faster, but there’s different ways in which we can grow within those accounts. But it all starts with the outcomes that we’re helping them generate helping them be more efficient, generate higher margins working with Zeta.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: Yeah. So it’s a win win because they’re winning more business by using Zeta, and obviously you win

Chris Greiner, CFO, Zeta Global: because At a better margin as well.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: At a better margin. And what were they doing before, before Zeta?

Nizh Gore, Chief Data Officer, Zeta Global: So collection of internal tooling, external tooling, and then a collection of different solutions to deploy media. You know, we’re consolidating all that into one place for them. It really gives them the ability to compete on tech, compete on data, compete on intelligence, and I think the next vector is really being able to compete in generative AI because we invest so much of our effort now and R and D effort on pushing generative AI forward. These agencies want to take advantage of all of those kinds of updates as Okay.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: And where are the so you mentioned, Chris, that the agencies will start off maybe with one use case and then they’ll expand over time or one channel and they’ll expand over time. Where are you in kind of getting broad based adoption with some of, I’ll say, your more tenured agency customers and their brands?

Chris Greiner, CFO, Zeta Global: And I’ll expand even beyond agencies. But our average customer is now approaching three channels per. And that up to this point in our growth journey, the primary vector of us getting bigger and growing ARPU has been channel expansion. And our fastest growing cohort were those scaled customers with three or more channels. So continues to work well.

That was an evolution of our sales model we made three years ago where no matter whether you were selling retainer, grow, require use case, you could sell all channels on the truck if you will. The biggest leap forward, what we announced recently is OneZeta, is this multiple use case expansion. So if I add an extra channel and that extra channel I add to a customer equates to a dollar, there’s three to five to seven times more leverage by adding a use case. We, you know, it’s our one Zeta initiative. Of our five forty eight scaled customers, which is still wild even to us as we think about it, less than 15% of those five forty eight scaled customers use more than one use case.

Meanwhile, all of our use cases are 100 plus million in scale, growing double digits. Structurally within these enterprises, they have separate infrastructures and technologies and people that manage existing customers and separate technologies and infrastructure and people that manage the acquisition of new. So there is a bit of an organizational hurdle to work through, but more and more CMOs are looking to bring those teams together for obvious reasons. Just doesn’t pay to market to you as if you’re a new Amex customer when you’re already one. That’s wasted media.

So it’s a massive opportunity for us. It’s why we created this One Zeta. We’re not letting our teams kind of run across the whole portfolio to sell it. We started with around 10 targeted customers in ’24, had really good success there. We’ve got a couple dozen this year, and that lens will get wider and wider over time.

But it doesn’t just have to be with an enterprise or within an agency where we have that strategy. It’s very much even more appropriate when our direct relations, we can sell that multi use case strategy.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: And so less than 15% of customers have more than one use case today. And the expansion when they do add another one is multiples? Multiples. Okay. And do you, like when you’re going to market, do you prioritize between acquire, retain, grow one over the other?

Or do you think there’s one use case that you can that can be the big next seller

Chris Greiner, CFO, Zeta Global: for you? I think what’s really interesting about our go to market model is, a, we are not beholden to an RFP cycle. Yeah. And if you think about where we started, a brand’s technology stack is they spend a vast amount of money on data sets, third party data sets that they can then use to benefit what they know inside their their four walls. They spend software to orchestrate all that, the marketing clouds, and they spend a vast amount on acquisition.

Zeta can enter through any one of those doors. Our preferred way of entering is starting with data. We call it data in, media out. Most of the time these are $50,000 pilots to $150,000 proof of concepts that reliably get bigger over time. We have a slide, it’s in our earnings supplemental, I think it’s like slide nine as of the last quarter, but what it shows you is the cohorting of our customers.

If the vast majority of our deals start in this 50 to 150 ks level within the first twelve months based upon last year, the average spend within the first twelve months of those customers is 900 ks and that’s up from 600 ks in 2023. It gets bigger and bigger in that one to three year cohort to where that three plus year cohort is over 2,500,000.0 per. So there’s very significant scaling in our experience past a million is where we start to get that hyper scale. But it’s a very predictable, reliable growth. But it all, and again, ties back to the ROI that we’re generating.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: Yeah. Maybe one just if we zoom out. We’ve talked about a few of the growth drivers, but I would love you to kind of just maybe unpack some of the other ones that you’re also kind of pushing, because when I look at your growth rate, you’ve been growing mid to high 20s organic growth ex political for the last two years. Even this year, you’re forecasting, I think, 23%. So you have agencies, we talked about OneZeta.

What else are you pushing that’s driving this level of growth? Because we don’t really see this that much in software.

Nizh Gore, Chief Data Officer, Zeta Global: Yeah, so we’ve made considerable investments in generative AI for the last several years. And I think the, you know, our version of generative AI is not to version our software or sell it as an upsell. We think that generative AI allows marketers to have easier, faster, better solutions, and that drives consumption. So if you can make it easier for them to deploy a campaign, see the result, and then redeploy, you’re going to actually drive more consumption to the platform, especially if it’s performing well. So our growth can come from two places, the subscription side, the consumption side.

On the consumption side, we’re seeing big upticks in that respect. And I think this is still TBD as to how generative AI will shape out from a pricing model long term, but in the early innings, the easier, faster, better model is working to drive consumption.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: And where does AgenTic fit into that? Because you’ve talked about AgenTic before as well. Is that

Nizh Gore, Chief Data Officer, Zeta Global: part of Yeah, AgenTic is part of this. So we think of AgenTic in three worlds. There’s productivity, there’s personalization and impressions. So productivity is can you just get a marketer to be able to do more with the same resources? Personalization is can you actually deliver against a one to one experience at scale?

And if you’ve seen Zuckerberg’s recent comments, that’s what he’s talking about. And then Prescience is, can you basically allow a marketer to become a data analyst on the side and make it easy for them? So these are the three vectors that we’ve been pushing forward for about a year and a half now, and a lot of the tools are in production and being used tremendously by our clients today. Yeah.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: And maybe it’s a little bit too early to concretely answer this, but I’m curious how Zeta’s agents will interact with other agents from other Do you orchestrate that? Is that integrated today? How does

Nizh Gore, Chief Data Officer, Zeta Global: it So, yeah. So there’s two protocols today. One’s called MCP, it stands for Model Context Protocol. Another one’s called A to A, agent to agent protocol. And so these will become the interfaces through which our agents will collaborate with external systems, external databases, other eugenic frameworks, and we’re doing a lot of testing in this already.

It’s still early though because the guardrails around these systems aren’t fully equipped yet. Okay.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: Maybe switching gears a little bit. Chris, I want to come to you because I think the kind of selling environment, the uncertainty out in market is on top of mind for everybody. I’m curious as CFO, you think about forecasting and giving an outlook in this environment when there is uncertainty? And what are you seeing from your customers in terms of behavior change, if anything, recently?

Chris Greiner, CFO, Zeta Global: We haven’t seen anything different. In fact, the when we ended the fourth quarter of twenty twenty four, ’7 out of our top 10 verticals, we serve 15, but the seven, you know, the tenor, call it 90% plus, grew over 20%. That was the same seven in the first quarter that grew over 20%. Now we wanted to approach guidance and how we communicated with shareholders in very thoughtful way. First, when we raised our second quarter guidance on the top and on the bottom line, we wanted it to be clear that that was a reflection of our expectation that the momentum we had in the first quarter would continue to be in place in the second.

And I talked about how the month of April was every bit as strong, if not stronger than the month of March. It continues to be our view of the world. The second half, we did not have a data driven marker to take down the second half. But we felt like for the first time, the psyche marker of the investor was more important to take what we beat by in the first and just lower the second half as an extra layer buffer period, full stop. And if you know our company, you know that we typically like to give ourselves two to five points of growth buffer in any given quarter and this is the extra layering on of that two to five points of growth buffer.

So the verticals that we see as our fastest growing, if you extend out to the rest of the year, we’ve given ourselves room to where those four verticals have the ability to grow half as fast and we still get to what our guidance was. And not to say that that can’t happen, but that’s a lot of dominoes and totally different industries falling simultaneously to have to be the case.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: So you’ve kind of proactively left some of this cushion even though there’s it’s maybe out of an abundance of caution as opposed to something

Chris Greiner, CFO, Zeta Global: Totally out of an abundance of caution, zero data driven markers as to why we could have done that.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: Okay. And maybe just like as you’re thinking about the model and how you run the business, what is like the trade off that you can make between growth and how you invest for growth versus margin expansion? Because we’re I think as we look at the guidance, there’s both that are happening, but what are the levers

Chris Greiner, CFO, Zeta Global: In fact, over the last five years, we’re in rare air in that there have only been a total of eight companies from 2021 to what’s expected of them in 2025 to grow every single year over ’twenty and expand free cash flow margins every year, every year. So you don’t have to sacrifice one for the other. Think it is actually a misnomer amongst the investing community that you have to. I did a podcast yesterday talking to some extent about this and that’s because our philosophy of investing as a company is every dollar we have to deploy should go towards creating the best product in the market and creating sellers that can go sell it. We don’t invest in the middle.

In fact, we invest to get leaner in the middle. So we’ve been able to drive more engineers, more data scientists, more sellers, more account reps while reducing the middle of our organization. And I think we can continue to do that, but it doesn’t put us in a situation where we have to make that trade off. I think frankly, if we could hire more engineers faster, we would. If we could hire more sellers, we would.

But throwing bodies at growth is just a bad investment. We make the funnel pretty small for hiring and sales. We have over indexed on hiring the most experienced sellers, which means we pay them more. But the benefit of that is they know how to ramp themselves faster and their time to their first deal is multiples quicker than what a newer experience, you know, inexperienced sales rep would be. We hire with an expertise.

It could be an agency expertise, a marketing and software expertise or an industry vertical expertise. So these different lenses and gates that you have to get through makes that funnel a little bit smaller. But we’re still in a net add position of quota carriers. We think we need to add 10% to 15% more quota carriers a year to hit our goals. That’s about half as much as we’ve had to add in the last four years.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: And you have, you know, as you’re looking at some of the other growth initiatives, whether it’s AI or whether it’s OneZeta, are those specialist sellers? Are they part of your core go to market organization? How does how does that picture kind of

Chris Greiner, CFO, Zeta Global: Our OneZeta team is led by Ed C. Ed C is our Chief Growth Officer. We hired Ed in January. Ed was the lead partner for McKinsey’s marketing practice, so he has got an incredible book of business that he can go, you know, immediately call upon. His team is small, they’re more like fighter pilots.

If we are going to a, you know, one of the largest airlines, one of the largest banks, one of the largest healthcare companies, we will take our best seller in one of our three verticals, acquire, grow, or I should say use cases, acquire, grow, retain. They will lead the deal. But all sellers are incentivized to make this multi use case sale happen. So we haven’t, we’re not necessarily adding a big layer on top. It’s just more of the coordination point.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: Okay. Maybe I’m trying to bridge this with the conversation we had earlier just about the agency growth that you’re seeing. Is there a balance that you have to kind of manage between how much you’re focusing on direct? Because agency channel has increased to 20%, as you mentioned, relatively quick Can you do both effectively?

Chris Greiner, CFO, Zeta Global: We I’m not saying this to be flippant. We don’t run the company like an investor might view the KPIs. We lead our sales process with what is the most, what is the toughest problem our customer needs solving. In the agency space, that is social, it starts with. But then where can we drive the best ROI?

And that is from using Zeta’s direct channels to market, full stop. It’s that combination. What I think is oftentimes misunderstood is that growth with the agencies, which has been our fastest growing new customer set, totally new set of customers that we are selling to today than we weren’t three years ago, Their toughest problem is social. Social grew the fastest out of the gate. They’re now making that nice migration.

But even though those margins on selling social are called in the mid thirties versus our when we sell direct in the mid seventies, it’s accretive to adjusted EBITDA. So you’ve had this mix shift from a new set of buyers starting with a lower margin product, but outside of a sales commission, we’re not innovating inside the walled garden. There’s very little G and A attached to it. It’s a very high adjusted EBITDA. So as this mix shift has happened, yes, there’s been some contraction in gross margin, but expanded we’ve been expanding adjusted EBITDA margins faster and free cash flow margins even faster than that.

So I appreciate very much the focus of an investor on this, But if you zoom out, you’re solving your customers toughest problem, you’re becoming stickier in the organization because of that, and there’s a pathway that leads to ROI on a higher margin product over time.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: Yeah. Because essentially you’re getting distribution from the agencies, which is one of the benefits of going through that channel. Okay. Perfect. Well, we are out of time.

So we’ll leave it there. Appreciate the time, Nizh, Chris.

Chris Greiner, CFO, Zeta Global: Thank

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: you. Thanks as always.

Chris Greiner, CFO, Zeta Global: Thank you, Arjun.

Arjun Bhatia, Research Analyst, William Blair: And for everybody in the audience, we do have a breakout in ten minutes upstairs in Jenny A, if you’d like to ask any questions. Thanks.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.