Zeta Global (ZETA) J.P. Morgan 54th Annual Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference summary

Strategic vision and platform evolution

• Aims to become the operating system for enterprise marketing, leveraging AI-driven business intelligence and data integration across channels.

• Athena, a conversational AI agent, enables clients to achieve marketing outcomes through voice commands and real-time analytics, driving significant workflow adoption.

• Partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google expand capabilities, including serving ads within the OpenAI ecosystem.

• Focus on ingesting and matching large-scale first-party data, with over 555 million global opted-in individuals, creating a strong data moat.

• Plans to expand beyond marketing into broader business intelligence products, with future monetization strategies for AI offerings.

Financial performance and growth drivers

• Achieved over 30% organic top-line growth and over 50% organic EBITDA growth for four consecutive years.

• Q1 saw 50% top-line growth, 42% EBITDA growth, and 42% free cash flow growth, with 21% ARPU growth and 120% net retention rate last year.

• Growth driven by both new and existing customers, with 19% increase in Super-Scaled customer count and 21% ARPU growth.

• Customers using multiple use cases and channels spend significantly more, with those using more than one use case now approaching 25% of the portfolio.

• Consistent beat-and-raise performance, with 19 consecutive quarters of exceeding guidance and raising outlook.

Product innovation and operational efficiency

• Athena drove a 700% increase in agentic workflows and is credited with major client wins, including replacing legacy vendors.

• Internal automation platform SPADE generates 75% of new code automatically, accelerating product development and controlling costs.

• Headcount growth kept at 10% while maintaining 30%+ organic growth, with expectations to slow further as automation increases.

• Monetization of AI currently through increased utilization fees, with future plans for analytics and business intelligence product extensions.

• Direct revenue (70-75% of total) has higher margins, while agency and social channels are growing and expected to migrate to higher-margin direct channels.