What's up everybody? Welcome back to the Ronnie V Show. I'm here with a super special guest today. I have David Steinberg on with us. He is the CEO of Zeta Global. David, how are you doing?
I'm great, Ronnie. Thanks so much for having me today.
I appreciate it, David. I hear you're traveling.
Yes, I'm in Europe this week for work.
Oh, that's awesome. Well, I hope you get to, you know, experience Europe a little bit and don't just only work, but that's super awesome. Go ahead, I was gonna say...
Last night we did a once-in-a-lifetime thing. We were offered and we were given a private tour of the Vatican, and we were able to be in the Sistine Chapel just us by ourselves. It was late in the evening, we'd already finished work, and it was right before a later dinner, but it was a very spiritual and, you know, once-in-a-lifetime event. So for the week I'm here, that's sort of the one thing I got to do. But I guess if you're gonna get to do one thing, you should make it, you know, pretty cool.
That is, I am very jealous. That is amazing.
That's a wow. That's crazy. But to get into some of the questions, since we do have a limited amount of time, as you're a very busy person, and Zeta Global is doing big, big things as we all see, and me and my counterparts continue to talk about in the retail community, and just another very big thank you for coming on here. And I think it's so important to stay in touch with the retail community, especially in 2025 going into 2026. It's such a key moment in investing history where the average Joe investor really is, you know, more linked with the companies than ever before, right? We've seen Palantir CEO Alex Karp get interviewed and Robinhood CEO, and we've just seen this really bridge between retail and, you know, these very large companies. It used to be that retail was sort of, you know, very secondary, it wasn't as well researched. But, you know, between you and a number of the others, the research coming out of you guys in many cases I think is as good if not better than many of the institutions that are doing research. And, you know, as you look at organizations like Palantir and like Tesla and like Robinhood, they've really embraced it, and I'm trying to embrace it as well.
Yeah, it's funny that you say that too because, you know, it's all about having the degree and having the job title, where most of us do have degrees. You know, like I have a bachelor's degree and I've been studying for my master's in finance. So it's not that I don't have the background, it's just I don't really want the analyst job. I like what I do and I like being linked with the retail community. And yeah, I fully agree retail has been, honestly, early to a lot of great companies when they're smaller, Palantirs, Robinhoods, so on and so forth. But to get into a little bit about this interview and you, I kind of wanted to know, you know, what was the beginning mindset for Zeta and how it got started.
So when we founded Zeta 17 years ago now, the original founding premise was how do we put everything a marketer needs into one place, one user interface, and one reporting infrastructure that allows a marketer to do everything that they need. It's obviously pivoted, evolved, pivoted, evolved, pivoted, evolved to what it is today, but that still is our founding vision and our North Star. You know, it's created a lot of complications for us, I think, or confusion as a public company because we compete with so many different point solutions, right? But the founding vision was putting everything into one UI and one reporting interface.
That's awesome, yeah. I mean, and as we go forward, it's only getting bigger and bigger. I know for like my realm in the smaller markets, right, of social media and everything, and I know that's not really your guys' focus, right? It's the larger markets for sure. I've had people ask me recently on the Spaces, and they were like, you know, do you think they would eventually branch into the smaller markets? And I was like, I could see it, but I think at this time, I think what you guys are doing with the larger markets, there's so much more opportunity there, and to definitely stay focused.
It's not easy to directly translate from working with very large enterprises to small to mid-size businesses, which by the way is not to say that we don't think that's a very interesting category that we might look at down the road. But when you think about the vast majority of marketing dollars are spent today by very large enterprises, as you know, at the end of last quarter we had 572 global scaled clients, and most of them are in the Fortune 2000. We have, I think, 44% of the Fortune 100 currently use our platform, but we have a long way to go in that large enterprise space before I think we would consider moving into small to mid-size business.
Yeah, and that kind of rolls right into my next question. What do you see the opportunity long term for Zeta to be in the total addressable market?
Yeah, I mean, let me start by saying we're trying to build the next Salesforce or the next Adobe. We're not trying to build the next sort of boutique marketing platform. You know, I can tell you that the total global addressable TAM for marketing is a trillion dollars, but I think it's easier to boil it down to the fact that this year our 572 global enterprise clients will spend $100 billion on marketing alone, and at the middle of our range we'll have about 125 basis points, 1.25% of wallet share. Our goal long term is how do we get to 5% of wallet share or 10% of wallet share, and, you know, as we continue to expand and grow, and as you know, the business grew 28% ex-political and MMA last quarter, and we're continuing to grow at a pretty rapid pace. You know, about half of our growth has come from existing customers and half of our growth has come from new customers on an annual basis. I think that that will continue.
And, you know, as we move into what we call One Zeta, which is multiple use cases. So we have three use cases: customer acquisition, customer retention, customer monetization. And then we have a bunch of channels, you know, everything from email to messaging to social media, mobile display. Connected TV is one of our fastest growing businesses. Over the three somewhat years we've been public, we've grown the business at around a 30% compounded growth rate. I would tell you the vast majority of that has been taking our existing clients and new clients from an average of using one channel to an average of using about three channels. As we looked inside the numbers, Ronnie, it was super interesting to see that customers who used two use cases, meaning they used us for customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer monetization, so the vast majority of our customers start on one use case and most of our customers are still one use case. So they might use us for customer acquisition, they might use us for customer retention. Sometimes monetization goes hand in hand with retention, but it can also be separate. As we looked at it, clients who had multiple use cases spent between 300 and 350% more on our platform than clients who had one use case, and they had by far our highest NPS score, meaning they really loved us. So we've started this entire strategy around how do we get more of our clients to go from one use case to multiple use cases, and we've named that One Zeta. So I think that's how we get from, you know, 1.25% of wallet share to 5 or 10% of wallet share in the years to come.
Yeah, that's like the One Zeta, I really love the name too. Like you guys didn't overcomplicate it or like try to go out of left field or something like that, right? And, you know, try to keep it real.
You know, it's funny, we call, I make this joke, you know, we call our platform the Zeta Marketing Platform because obviously we don't have really advanced naming capabilities, but it works, yeah.
That's awesome, yeah. And then obviously bridging that all together with the One Zeta product, with Athena, talk to me a little bit about that.
Well, Athena is the future of Zeta in every way. And if you think about it, Athena today is a conversational super AI agent that allows enterprises to seamlessly integrate with our platform. I would really urge your listeners or viewers to see the demo of it, which we did at Zeta Live. It's live at our Zeta website, zetaglobal.com, and it is unbelievable because not only is it fully conversational, but Athena controls the user interface in real time as it's communicating with you. So you can ask Athena, 'What are my most underserved audiences that I can contact and create customers at the best pricing?' 'How do I lower my churn rate by 25% for my customers?' and so on and so forth. And it's really amazing. We've got it in beta right now, and we expect to have it fully production ready and in the hands of clients by the end of the first quarter of 2026.
