Hi Russ, Yeah had a good chat with Mat last week. He was very...

Hi Russ,

Yeah had a good chat with Mat last week. He was very generous with his time. Ill try and get a bit more of a summary up of the conversation in the next couple of days. I wasnt able to type fast enough to get everything down accurately/in enough detail hence why I will need to revisit and expand my notes. From memory however the salient points that I took down were: as per recent comms from the company there is no lack of demand for their services and traffic guard seems to be very popular with clients however what has been a surprise is how well it is working and how much fraud was actually occurring with TMPs registered supply side partners prior to traffic guard. Additionally traffic guard has an element of machine learning which has meant that its detection has been getting better over time. I believe this has played into the revenue decline as time went on with more and more fraudulent actors identified and Tech Mpire choosing not to work with them anymore.

The other aspect of the revenue decline is the competition in the supply side of the market for quality supply channels. As they have stated this is something that they are looking to fix imminently by engaging new supply side partners. Part of this was employing more supply side engagement staff within TMP. We didn’t cover exactly why it has taken so long to identify/act on but aspects of the reasoning were evident in other responses (eg. They needed more staff, getting in contact and negotiating with quality suppliers, finalising deals with advertisers etc.). Mat did confirm however that going forward that this is basically their top priority (the other being the commercialisation of traffic guard).

Mat spoke a bit about placing of ads and the supply side advertising space which was good for understanding the way that the market worked for someone who didn’t know the inner workings (like me). He likened it to the real estate market and from discussion it was clear that right now it’s a sellers market and competition was pretty high for quality space. He said that getting the suppliers that we want to work with was about striking the right deal of not only price but guaranties of supply of quality adverts for a given time (ie something with a good conversion rate such that the ad placement actually results in action and payment). This was why their focus on tier one clients was important.

He was able to confirm that we are still in the trail with the tier one video streaming company and we should hear back in a few weeks.

(As per the recent letter) He confirmed that the performance marketing division was still profitable even on these smaller revenue figures and that all the burn was coming from the technology division (traffic guard). He said that if we could develop that into SAAS and generate revenue we would be back to profit almost immediately. Also he was really confident and excited on the SAAS application of traffic guard and how this could quickly become much bigger than the PM part of the business.

Ill need to follow up on my notes and ensure that I have got clarity in my own head on a couple of things but certainly feeling a bit better after speaking with him.