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More Q4 Earnings
Warner Bros. Discovery (👎): Q4 revenue was down 7% to $10.28B, missing estimates. Linear TV advertising fell 14%, but WBD became the first Hollywood conglomerate to have a profitable streaming unit, with Max delivering $103M in 2023 profits.Streaming subscribers reached 97.7M. Shares fell 10%.
PubMatic (👍): Q4 revenue was up 14% to $84.6M, beating estimates, driven by a growing customer base and supply-path optimization. Full-year 2023 revenue was up 4% to $267M. The supply-side platform says Q4 revenue growth accelerated, and it has authorized a $100M stock repurchase. Shares soared more than 25%.
Innovid (👍): Q4 revenue was 15% to $38.6M, beating estimates, driven by CTV and measurement growth. The CTV ad serving and measurement platform halved its Q4 net loss to $1.7M. Full-year revenue was up 10% to $140M. Shares spiked about 10%.
IAS (🤷): Q4 revenue was up 14% to $134.3M, beating estimates, driven by social media/short-form video revenue growth (37%), measurement (18%), and optimization (16%). Full-year revenue was up 16% to $474.4M. Net income dipped slightly in Q4 and 2023. Shares fell in after-hours trading as much as 18%.
WPP (🤷): Q4 organic revenue was only up 0.3%, driven by losses of some creative accounts and weak client spending. Full-year 2023 organic growth was up 0.9%; operating profit was $2.22B. The agency holding company predicts zero to 1% 2024 growth. That's below the other major holding companies like Dentsu (1%), IPG (1%-2%), Omnicom (3.5%-5%), and Publicis (4%-5%).
Stagwell (👎): Q4 revenue was down 7.5% to $655M, missing estimates. Full-year revenue was down 6% to $2.53B. The challenger agency holding company expects 2024 organic growth of 5%-7%. Shares fell more than 25%.
Vizio (👍): Q4 net revenue was down 6% to $502.6M. Platform+ net revenue, which includes viewing-data analytics and advertising, was up 28% to $174.2M; Q4 ad revenue was up 36%. Shares, already up 6% after the Walmart deal, inched higher.
Opinion: We still have another week of Q4 earnings to get through, but so far, we've seen mixed results. The good news is, most digital ad companies are still growing, and profitability has largely increased, especially for those that focused on cost-cutting last year. There are signs that revenue growth accelerated in Q4, but many companies have issued more conservative guidance for 2024 than what Wall Street wants, underscoring the ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty.
We have seen big walled garden winners such as Meta and Amazon, which have their revenue flywheels humming. In the independent ad tech category, The Trade Desk continues to post robust numbers, while others like AppLovin and Criteo reap the benefits of their various pivots. Of course, it’s unclear how cookie deprecation will affect all of this, and the market doesn’t seem to know what to make of that either.
The agency holding companies fared much worse in 2023 after some decent years during the pandemic, although Publicis and Omnicom appear to be breaking away from the pack in terms of their 2024 growth forecasts; we'll be interested to see how close they get.
The bottom line: Q4 earnings are telling us little about the trajectory of the industry in 2024. The arrow isn't quite pointing up or down as of now...
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