TechTarget Aktie

All right. Thank you very much. We're here today with Informa TechTarget's CEO, Gary Nugent. Gary, thanks for being with us. We'll do a little bit of a Q&A for the next 30 minutes. Gary, why don't we start with an overview of Informa TechTarget for those not familiar with the company and with a bit background on the nature of the business and also how it came together with the merger of Informa Tech and the TechTarget business and how it has transformed the business for what it is today.

Yes. Well , first of all, thank you. Pleasure to be here. Well, let's start. First of all, I would describe the business is really sitting at the intersection of 2 quite exciting and large and dynamic markets, which the first being the B2B technology industry and the second being the B2B marketing world. And our business kind of sits really right at the intersection of those 2 markets. I would think about the first -- it's really a 2-sided business model.

The first side is that we inform and we educate the buy side of the industry. In other words, we are really informing the buying journey of decision-makers and influencers whose role it is to invest in information technology and communication technology to improve their businesses or governments.

And then the second side of the business is as we serve the sell side of the industry. And really, our proposition there is growth, right? We help the sell side of the industry meet the buyers and position themselves as the best choice for those buyers.

So that's really the kind of high-level gist of the business. If I talk a little bit about some of the fundamentals and really, the business is underpinned by 2 proprietary data assets.

The first is what we would call the market data, the proprietary market data, which is 25-plus years of insight into the B2B technology industry market and its size, its shape, it's growth rates, it's trends, et cetera.

And then the second data asset is our permissioned audience data, which really talks about actually how does the market think and feel and act today and the here and now. So there's those 2 data assets and those 2 data assets really underpin all of the products and services that we offer to the marketplace and in particular, offer to the sell side of the industry.

If I then just talk a little bit about the kind of the combination between Informa Tech and TechTarget, really, that was a story of breadth and scale. The market that we are in is actually a large market. I estimate it to be about a $20 billion market addressable across all the products and services that we offer.

And I suspect we are -- through the combination, we are the largest player in that market, but actually we're the largest player with only 2.5% market share. It is an incredibly fragmented landscape of competitors or players in the marketplace, but a large and dynamic market.

And really, the combination was about establishing some breadth and scale because most of the companies that are out there are relatively small. They have a finite supply capability for the industry. And therefore, the market has to invariably deal with many, if not multiple partners at any given point in time.

And of course, that's a bind for most of my customers. They would much rather do business with a fewer number of more strategic larger partners. And really, the combination was about creating a player of that ilk.

And perhaps coming out of that merger, you talked in the past about 2025 being a year of combination and integration and 2026 being about growth and growth acceleration. What operating and sales changes have you made to the business that gives you confidence that you're now on the right track when it comes to growth acceleration?

Most of the usual things you would expect when two 2 large companies come together, large players come together, we did, first and foremost, a kind of harmonization of the go-to-market, so the sales and marketing efforts of the company.

And in particular, a strategic shift as well, not just effectively the kind of rationalization and harmonization of all of that, but actually a shift in emphasis and a shift in the focus to focus those go-to-market efforts on the larger players in the industry that we serve. So that was really number one. And then the other things which are obvious, of course, are the consolidation of brands and products and services within the portfolio.

Invariably, when you bring two companies together, there is overlap, there is duplication in the portfolio of products and services. We went through a fairly structured and diligent process of deciding what was the strategic portfolio moving forward and then recasting that portfolio in the marketplace and the brands associated with that.

Those are probably the 2 kind of key component parts. Beyond then there's a lot of processes and systems work that you need to do, really designed to make sure that again, you're consolidating, you're rationalizing, you're harmonizing the products and systems that either, a, are making you easier to do business with in the marketplace; or b, you're making it easier for the colleagues within the business to do their job.

And those are the kind of two key things.

Gary, in the last part, you touched upon the concentration and the focus of your go-to-market efforts. How does it compare with how your customers' profiles kind of scale across your curve, right? I mean there is clearly a lot of -- I mean, you serve the pretty much top 200 tech vendors and tech players with -- globally.

How do you think about your go-to-market for that part of the market, which is a very significant portion of your TAM? And at the same time, capturing kind of the mid-market and at the same time, the more kind of high growth and kind of, I would say, start-up end of the market, which is obviously very vibrant and expected to continue to grow, particularly with AI being an enabler of company creation and things like that.

So top end of the TAM, big players, a lot of the part of the curve in the middle and then a pretty vibrant kind of start-up. So how do you think about your go-to-market?

I mean a few things. I mean I said earlier on that I think we estimate it to be about a $20 billion addressable market. Within the top 200 companies that we do business with, they probably represent about half of that market. They represent about $10 billion of that $20 billion.

That's why it's really important to be a strategic partner and a player to those companies. They are invariably also large-scale companies, $1 billion -- multibillion-dollar revenues. They're all trying to grow their business by 8% to 10% year-on-year.

Actually, many of them are successfully growing their business by 8% to 10% year-on-year at the moment. And that's a scale go-to-market problem. I mean you can't solve that with low numbers. And what that means is they've got scale problems and they have demand for our products and services, which is very consistent.

Week in, month in, quarter in, year in, year out, very high predictable consistent demand for what we do. That's why we placed some -- a focus and an emphasis there. And we have -- we've done so, we've invested there. But to put that into perspective, that's 200 of the customers. We have over 7,000 customers as a business.

But that's the remaining -- that remaining long list of customers are relatively small players. They are either start-ups, they are scale up. Some of them are established players in the kind of hundreds TechTarget, Inc. of millions. But the reality is that the demand for our services tends to be a little bit less consistent.

They usually have to digest and then generate the ROI and move on, et cetera. So really, you need a very different go-to-market model for that space actually.

And so we've kind of -- we've kind of bifurcated the go-to-market model to deal with those 2 slightly different dynamics. The last thing I would say, which is more of a kind of how does this compare to maybe how the world looked 5 years ago or 4, 5 years ago.

The very, very, very vibrant start-up scale-up world doesn't really exist in the same way it used to. When the cost of capital was almost nothing, there was a very kind of -- there was a lot of money down in that space as companies were being funded and they were looking to try and establish themselves and grow.

Obviously, I think it's a much more discerning world than it was now internally because the cost of capital is much higher. And so what you tend to find down there is that it's a slightly more stable market than it used to be, but it's not a bigger market as it used to be.

Gary, picking up on another theme you touched upon when you talked about the path over the last few years and how Informa TechTarget got formed and your focus on integration. You've now moved into reporting on 2 segments, B2D and I&A. Can you give us some color about the 2 segments, how they're performing and how investors should think about also the profiles of each of the 2 when it comes to growth and profitability and long-term growth rates for each?

Yes, certainly. I mean, obviously, I think it's a good thing because it gives the market a little bit more transparency and a bit more granularity into the business. The way I would think -- I mean, the way I certainly think about it is Intelligence & Advisory are the services that we provide to the customers quite early on in their thinking. they're much more strategic in their nature.

Usually, we're helping our customers work through their market strategy. So we're helping them try to identify what are the most attractive markets. We're helping them figure out what their product strategy should be and whether or not they have strong product market fit for the markets that they want to go after. And then we're helping them work on their go-to-market strategy.

And it's about 1/3 of the business. And we reported in the first quarter that, that business was a mid-single-digit decline, low to mid-single-digit decline, largely due to the advisory part of that business, which is more of a kind of consulting project nature of the business.

2/3 of that business is a subscription business. It's the subscription to that proprietary market data that I spoke about earlier on that customers use in their corporate development and their corporate strategy and their product business units and their product management to make those strategic decisions that we talked about earlier on. It's definitely a slightly more mature market.

It's a maturer market where the players that we compete against are maturer competitors. And the long-term growth prospects for that market are probably kind of GDP plus 1 or 2 percentage points, I would say, in the long run.

The B2D side of the business then is really on the subject of execution. So I've sort of worked with you. We've made our strategic decisions about attractive markets around product strategy, road map and fit around the go-to-market strategy. It's now about executing that in the marketplace. It's about raising awareness for your brand.

It's about establishing thought leadership for your business. It's about ensuring that you're going to be considered, it's about making sure that you have the appropriate messaging and content for the marketplace. And then it's about putting that in front of qualified decision-makers and influencers for what it is you have to sell.

So it's really all about growing revenue. That's the market that's much more fragmented. That's an area that we would normally expect to see mid- to high single-digit growth rates in the marketplace. I think it has been a little bit subdued that market over the past couple of years as what you see from the technology, the B2B technology industry is they're trying to funnel as much cash and capital as they can into AI R&D.

But generally speaking, that's a good long-term indicator for the health of our business because every single one of those R&D dollars at some point will turn into a product or a service. And that product or service will have to get launched. And then after being launched in the marketplace, they will need to make sales and we'll need to get an ROI on that R&D spend.

So I certainly look at the pent-up R&D spend that exists within the B2B technology marketplace as being a really strong indicator of the health of the business moving forward. So hopefully, that gives you...

And perhaps a follow-up on like you commented on the growth profile of each, very clearly articulated like where you play and where the opportunities are. How about the margin profile of each of the 2?

Interest, the margin profile is relatively similar. There's not a lot to choose between them. Certainly, I mean, both sides of the house have parts of the portfolio that are very highly geared in terms of the incremental revenue very quickly to the bottom line.

And then they have bits of the portfolio where we do project work for customers, and it's mainly in the advisory side of the house and the content side of the house where they are. So actually, if you look at the margin profile between the I&E and the B2D segments, it's actually on a blended basis, it's pretty similar.

Got it. And perhaps before we talk about AI in terms of how you have and you plan to use it, implement it product-wise inside the organization, why don't we start with the foundational layer that you also touched upon in one of your answers before, which is the proprietary data assets.

Can you elaborate a little bit more like how do you protect it, how proprietary they are? Can they be accessible from a public scraping standpoint? That's really the key debate as to can a large language model or an AI play access to the data and replicate it somehow?

Well, I mean let me talk about, first and foremost, how we actually garner those 2 assets. So we have over 700 market experts within the business, analysts, researchers, editors, journalists. Most of those individuals have 5, 10, 15, 20 years of experience in the marketplace and relationships in the marketplace.

And as I say, there's really 2 data assets. The first data asset is the market data, and that comes from our deep relationships with all of the B2B technology companies around the world and spending time with their leadership and spending time with their product business units and product management teams and building up that profile of the industry. And that's the first data asset.

The second data asset is the audience, our membership asset. And that's really the editorial journalism. We operate over 200 technology-centric B2B media properties, and we observe the behavior of our audiences of our members in terms of what content they consume and when they consume that content and what's the nature of the content they're consuming, et cetera, et cetera. That builds a picture of the buy side of the industry.

So we have a very strong lens on the sell side of the industry and a very strong lens on the buy side of the industry between those 2 data assets. In terms of how do we protect those data assets, I suppose my flippant answer is we don't make conflicts for [ MDLs, ] right? It's [indiscernible] small tool. We don't license our data to other people to create products and services off of the back of that.

It is our data. We protect it, and we build it into our products and services that we offer to our customers, but we don't license it elsewhere.

There's a good segue to geo and the other AI-enabled tools that you have launched. How do you guys think about AI in terms of revenue driver revenue growth accelerator, retention enhancement? And if you can expand a little bit on your product strategy to capitalize on the AI opportunity and give us some examples of things that you have launched and...

Certainly, I am firmly of the opinion that the phenomenon that is AI or the technology that is AI is a net positive for my business and generally for businesses of ELK. I look at it across sort of 4 different dimensions. I mean the first thing, of course, is that our job as a company is to connect the buyers and sellers of technology and AI is a technology. So we're actively participating in the market that is the buy side of the industry is trying to educate itself on what is AI and how can I apply it usefully to my business.

And the sell side of the industry is desperately trying to convince everybody that it's got really high-quality AI technology that can grow your business and improve your costs. We actively participate in that market every day. I track what I would call 55 genuine AI players. And what I mean by genuine AI players are not companies who are taking AI and embedding it in existing products.

I'm talking about companies who are genuinely bringing new AI products to market, products that didn't exist before rather than enhancing or improving existing propositions. And we track our penetration rate and growth rate in that marketplace, and it's a great market for us. That's number one.

Number two is the obvious one, which is the -- how does it make us more through the adoption within our business and embracing it in our business, how does it make us more efficient and more productive. The sweet spot of most of the AI use cases are the heart of what we do for a business, right? We collect data, we aggregate data, we analyze that data. We produce insights from that data.

We create content. We display that content in front of highly qualified decision-makers and influencers. And AI, all the use cases of AI are right in that sweet spot. So in terms of our ability to leverage AI to improve the quality of what we do, in terms of our ability to leverage AI to reduce the costs associated with what we do to a very strong opportunity for us there.

The third thing then is that how do you -- how do we leverage AI to actually improve our products and services, the actual products that our customers buy. Most of that is about how do we actually -- certainly most of that thus far has been about how do we either, a, put AI conversational interfaces in front of our data.

So we put an AI conversational interface in front of our audience experience to let our audiences more easily discover the content to synthesize the content to basically inform their decision-making, their buying journey. We similarly put AI conversational interfaces in front of our audience data and our intent data from our audience data, which enables them to much more readily extract value from the data that we're offering them.

Now it sort of does 2 things in my opinion. The first thing it does is it just makes it generally easier for customers to extract value from the data that we're providing them, but it actually also increases the addressable market for it. If you work on the principle that if you make it easier for people to be able to interrogate and analyze data and content, then more people can interrogate and analyze data and content.

You don't have to be an expert, right? And it's that basic phenomenon that AI conversational interfaces are actually making our products and services much more accessible and addressable in the marketplace. So those -- that's effectively what the product road map is doing there, plus the basic principle of integration, right?

So AI is an actual fabulous tool to better enable integration into the landscapes of our customers. So it makes it much easier for me to get my value into my customer systems and for the customer then to be able to kind of extract value from within their systems. So those are the key things there.

The area that, of course, I think most people talk about is that how is it affecting the buying journey? How is the kind of notion of AI and answer engines and LLMs impacting our buying journey as we move from largely what was a search economy to an answer economy.

And certainly, our experience of that over the last 12 to 18 months, it's certainly having a significant impact on the buying journey. It is changing the buying journey, but not to the detriment of our business model because effectively, what we are seeing is that as a trusted provider of original authoritative information about the industry and what's going on, that all really the AI is doing is it's sort of filtering out the nonqualified buyers from the not very serious researchers, and I'm not having to then filter out, right?

So I just have to filter out all of those non particularly serious decision-makers and influencers and to the point where that's really being done for me. And so I'm just getting a much more highly qualified set of traffic to the business which were then converting into membership at much higher rates and converting into active members at much higher rates.

So I think the notion that somehow it fundamentally changes or its businesses of our nature, I think, is all wrong. And I have that conversation with investors all the time. I mean the reality is that -- I mean, everybody in this audience could quite easily have plugged into an answer engine a question along the lines of I've got $3 billion to invest, and I'm this type of investor, could you please just give me a list of companies to invest in?

And it would have given me a list of companies to invest in. But you wouldn't have deployed capital against that. You would have then taken that information at the early stages of your journey and you would have then done your deeper research. And it's no different from my customers. My customers are not making sort of capital investment decisions. They're making technology procurement decisions. And those technology procurement decisions are in the tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions.

And they have big -- they have large ROIs associated with them. So they use it as part of their early stage research, but it's not where the journey stops and actually -- it actually feeds me with the fuel value.

That's a very important point about AI, how it enables the business in 3 different ways and layers, as you said, Gary, and you anticipated my next question was going to be how are you coping with the change in the search and buyer behavior journey.

So perhaps another element of discussions that is prevalent now is how AI and the derivatives of it are changing the revenue model of some of the data and software and related businesses with the concept that seat-based subscription revenue models that were considered ones that kind of go-to or the standards for "the SaaS business" model are now I think of the past and particularly subject to disruption.

You have a lot of experience in a model that is, I would call it, hybrid that has a consumption layer that has kind of like a fit for purpose when it comes to where the product and the user and how that fits to the pricing model and the revenue model.

So you have an advantage that you've developed over 15 years plus in the organization on how to really kind of go and fit the pricing model to the user experience and the product.

Can you elaborate on how do you see that as an advantage for your organization? And how do you see that in the AI world where consumption models is more and more something that is perceived to be prevalent going forward?

Yes. It's a really interesting question. And there's a bit of this is maybe specific to Informa Tech Target, but I think there's a generic kind of trend in all of this as well. I mean the first thing is we were never a seat-based model for monetization. Actually, the company has always largely been a consumption-based model for monetization. So we're not sort of exposed to the phenomenon of your revenues are directly proportional to seats.

And if the number of people in the company are going down, your revenues are going down and going up. That was never really part of the model. That's your commercial packaging. I think that's slightly separate from just the notion that the SaaS business model was also just about platforms.

Everybody was building a platform. And you consumed the value through the platform and the value is usually some form of data at the end of the day, data in its many shapes and forms.

Actually, what the market began to realize was it had this platform proliferation problem. I've got way too many platforms now in my business. And these platforms don't talk to one another, and it's making the workflows very complicated.

And so it started to kind of reject the notion of I need another platform, right? It started to really get into the world of, no, no, no, I need you to integrate into my platform. I'm going to make a strategic decision about what my platform is and then you will have to integrate into it. I'm not buying your platform.

That's a very different phenomenon. It's much more kind of the phenomenon of how do customers want to consume, not how do they want to pay, right? And so that's where the kind of the heart of like being very good at integration. The ability to take your asset, our data assets and seamlessly integrate them into the customers' environment is an important part of how you compete and win rather than distributing your value through the platform that you create a platform that you create.

So I think they are -- those 2 phenomenas are linked, but they're not the same thing. And it's important to kind of keep them distinct in your mind. And we are -- I mean, I think in terms of how you monetize over time, I think it will be interesting to see how do customers want to pay for value over time.

I do think you are right that increasingly, as your ability to offer and govern consumption-based models, the marketplace will want to have a more consumption-based view of consuming the value. And you need to be neutral to rate. I mean, anybody who's been in an industry -- I've been in the telecommunications industry for many, many years, telecommunications industry was a consumption-based business model.

There are many kind of principles of consumption-based business models that you have to wrap your arms around, right? How do you rate and how do you price, right? And these are the things that I think we're all going to -- all data companies are going to wrestle with in the way that all telecoms companies have to wrestle with as they move from your fixed fee every month to your -- how much do you consume? How many minutes do you consume and how many seconds do you consume?

Thanks, Gary. That's very interesting. And you have an edge as you described and said, like it's an organizational motion that is not necessarily a flip of a switch when it comes to like changing pricing and usage and revenue models.

Perhaps looking forward and taking a little bit of a kind of bigger picture approach when it comes to strategic priorities for this year and especially for the next kind of few years and call it, 3, 5 years type of outlook? And how do you think about those vis-a-vis your capital allocation policy and kind of strategy?

It's a phenomenal free cash flow business. It's always been -- you've been profitable for a long time. How do you think about capital allocation organically and inorganically vis-a-vis your strategic priorities?

Well, I mean, my #1 strategic priority is to grow the business. As you said earlier on, it's a tremendous business in terms of the drop-through to the EBITDA and in cash flow when the business grows. And that's in part because there's so much of the cost base of the business is largely fixed. So the incremental revenue dollars drop very quickly to the bottom line. So #1 strategic priority is to grow the top line of the business. And as I said earlier on, although we're, I think, one of the largest players, if not the largest, we still only have 2.5% market share. So there's certainly lots of room to go out and to compete and win.

And as I mentioned earlier on as well, the strategic focus is on the largest customers in the industry that we serve because they are the ones where I believe that the breadth and scale of the company gives me real competitive advantage, and they are the deepest pockets. I mean I can't remember the name.

There was an old American bank robber, that when he was interviewed by the press on the steps of the court, they said, why do you rob banks? And his answer was, well, because that's where the money is, right? So that's -- and our go-to-market model is sort of centered around that principle.

So that's my strategic priorities. We've got a little bit of tidying up to do in terms of the combination. There's still a little bit of work to do, but we've really done most of the heavy lifting on that part, but that's largely it. And then it will be about thinking about the different -- what are the 5 growth levers that we have at our disposal.

So at the moment, we've got -- I think of the business growth levers as 5. The first one is taking market share in what we call the enterprise IT technology market. And that's really what we're largely kind of working aggressively on at the moment or assertively on at the moment.

Then there is expanding the business further into what we call vertical technology markets. There are companies out there that produce technology, information and communication technology that is very specific for particular industry verticals. So fintech for the banking industry, for example, treasury systems and all these sorts of things, or health care systems for the health care industry or telecommunication systems for the telecommunications industry.

We think that we have a real competitive advantage in those vertical technology markets, and so we see that as the next lever of growth. Then there's just international expansion. 60% of our addressable market is the North American marketplace, but by definition, that means that 40% is elsewhere.

And in particular, I think the real international market expansion opportunity is actually about how do you -- how do we help international technology companies be successful in the North American market and the Western European market. And so that's the kind of the third lever.

Fourth lever is a little bit about some of the new product innovation that we have coming down the line. We've got -- I think we've done a fabulous job in terms of creating coherence in the product road maps of the combined company. And we've got a really exciting product road map over the -- that I look forward to. And then the last thing would be inorganic activity, our ability to -- for want of a better expression, roll up this highly fragmented market that we're in.

I actually don't see us doing much of that until '27 and a bit, to be honest. You said somebody asked me kind of what's the capital strategy? Well, the capital strategy is grow the business, build the cash on the balance sheet and give ourselves some options. And then what we will do is we'll think about how we apply those options when we get there, I suppose.

And it will be the usual things. It to what extent do we want to give that money back to shareholders as opposed to what extent do we want to invest that money for further growth that's going to drop and improve the profitability and the cash flow. And whether that's organic investment from our own R&D and our own product road map or whether that is organically -- inorganically acquiring.

I think if we were going to acquire audiences is always an important thing. Reach into the marketplace is an important asset to look for in the market. You'll clearly be wanting to look for things which are going to enhance your product development capability and the skills in AI and in data and in software development in and around that space.

And then I think the last thing you also look for is customers. And we did a very small tuck-in at the beginning of this year. It was fundamentally a game of customers that we wanted deeper relationships with and an audience that would have taken me 2 or 3 years to develop and would have probably cost me 2x or 3x what I paid for the company.

Very clear and very well articulated, Gary. Any questions from the audience before we wrap up? Gary, it has been tremendously helpful. Thank you for your clarity and articulation and good luck for the future, very exciting path that you've laid out for the business.

Thank you, G. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to your team and to the invite event. Thank you.

Awesome. Thanks, Gary.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Informa TechTarget First Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the conference call over to Charles Rennick, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. The speakers joining us here today are Gary Nugent, our Chief Executive Officer; and Dan Noreck, our Chief Financial Officer. Before turning the call over to Gary, we would like to remind you that in advance of this call, we posted a press release to the Investor Relations section of our website and furnished it on an 8-K. You can also find these materials on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. A replay of today's conference call will be made available on the Investor Relations section of our website. Following opening remarks from Gary and Dan, they will be available to answer questions.

Any statements made today by Informa TechTarget that are not historical, including during the Q&A, may be considered forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties, are based on assumptions and are not guarantees of our future performance. Actual results may differ materially from our forecast and from these forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including those discussed in the Risk Factors section of our most recent periodic report filed on Form 10-Q and the forward-looking statement disclaimer in our earnings release filed earlier today. These statements speak only as of the date of this call, and Informa TechTarget undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events that may arise after this conference call, except as required by law.

Finally, we may also refer to certain financial measures not prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of certain of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures to the extent available without unreasonable efforts accompanies our press release. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Gary.

Thank you, Charlie, and good afternoon, everyone. As always, we appreciate you taking the time to join us today. I am pleased to share our Q1 2026 results, which demonstrate continuing progress with our strategy and our commitment to delivering top and bottom line growth on an ongoing sustainable basis.

In Q1 2026, we delivered revenues of $106 million, representing a 2% increase year-over-year, whilst achieving an adjusted EBITDA of $7.4 million, an increase of 27% year-on-year. These results reflect the durability of our business model, a model that is built upon our proprietary first-party market data and our permission membership data. They are also the reflections of the early returns of our combination program completed in 2025.

From today, we also report the results of our 2 operating segments, Intelligence and Advisory; and Brand to Demand, offering deeper insight into the makeup of the business and the key drivers of growth. I see durability as Q1's results, and I suspect the remainder of this year are set against the backdrop of ongoing geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty in addition to the broader digital transformation that is accelerating across B2B markets as AI changes, how buyers are informing their buying journey and how sellers are reaching out and trying to stand out to prospects and customers.

I spent much of Q1 and April on the road, meeting with clients and colleagues. It's always my favorite thing to do. In the main, our clients who are B2B technology vendors are in good health. However, they continue to prioritize capital to R&D investment as they seek to stay current with the AI arms race. This is subduing investment elsewhere for now, specifically in go-to-market. However, as a future indicator of demand for our business, it is incredibly positive. And ultimately, they will need to seek a return on those R&D investments. Our story of the indispensable partner with the breadth and scale to enable our clients and address their ambitious growth objectives resonates loudly. And it's clear that we are only just scratching the surface in terms of how and where we can help them accelerate their growth and in doing so, drive our own growth. The trends we are observing and the needs and wants of our clients directly correlate to our strategic focus.

First, -- our clients are themselves experiencing the impact of the shift from a search engine economy to an answer engine economy. And as such, their ability to raise awareness and generate demand by and of themselves is becoming more difficult. And with that reality, they are increasingly recognizing the value of working with a partner that itself has direct reach and relationships and influence with the prospects and customers.

Second, there is a growing realization that better marketing outcomes are achieved when the marketing effort is aligned and integrated across the life cycle, from strategy through to execution and that the breadth and scale of Informa TechTarget makes us one of the few companies that can deliver value across that life cycle.

This is encapsulated in our unified demand playbook that we launched at the beginning of Q1 and which has been very well received in the marketplace. And finally, we're seeing clients prioritize working with partners that can integrate seamlessly with their sales and their Martech landscape and then join the dots in terms of attribution to demonstrate measurable performance and return on investment from their marketing investments. Again, that is something that we can provide and are getting increasingly good at, further differentiating us from others.

In numbers, revenues from our strategic focus on our largest customers, who are the largest players in the industry we serve were up double digit as a result of this focus and the investments in product, sales, delivery and customer success in Q1. Staci Gullotta, our new CMO, has gotten her feet well and truly under the table, launching a bold and ambitious marketing strategy designed to raise awareness and generate demand in the broader $20 billion addressable market. As a part of this, we recently leveraged the Forrester B2B Summit in Phoenix to showcase how we are leveraging the breadth and scale of Informa TechTarget to partner with our clients and transform their go-to-market and deliver tangible results.

One example of this was the work that we've been doing with Tanium. Tanium are a cybersecurity company that helps enterprises manage and protect mission-critical networks. Tanium partnered with Informa TechTarget to move beyond a fragmented siloed marketing approach towards a fully integrated always-on, go-to-market model, choosing us not just as a vendor but as a strategic partner for our unmatched audience access, high-quality intent data and ability to influence buying groups before their sales teams are engaged.

By activating our platform across portal, BrightTalk, content syndication and targeted editorial environments, they were able to precisely identify and engage in market accounts at scale. The results were substantial, over 5,000 leads delivered, equating to $1.2 billion of influence pipeline, an ROI of over 2,800 times. And importantly, this has translated directly into real revenue growth. As a result, they signed a new 2-year deal immediately following the program, representing over a 50% increase in their annual investment.

On the subject of our membership and our audience members, as buyers increasingly rely on AI-powered research and zero-click search behaviors, we fundamentally adapted our operational approach to meet them where they are. Our content creation and distribution strategies now prioritize AI discoverability while maintaining the editorial excellence and thought leadership that our audiences have come to expect. With a focus on quality over quantity and engagement over acquisition, this dual-focus continued to deliver for us in Q1 with our permission membership continuing to grow in low single digits and our active membership in priority personas, such as Chief Information Officers and Chief Information Security Officers, up high single digits in the quarter. This all being despite ongoing disruption to traffic.

In addition, we added four leading U.K. media-based brands to our portfolio through the period. Accountancy Age, the CFO, Bob Guide and the Global Treasurer. This expands our first-party permission members in the financial services and Fintech space and is in line with our strategy to grow by extending our vertical audiences into new geographical markets, and we're already seeing strong engagement from these new community members. And in recognition of the power and the value of our authoritative, trusted and original content in the age of AI, our editorial teams recently won 3 coveted awards at the B2B Industries Oscars, the Neal Awards. And we've also been shortlisted for 15 awards at the forthcoming ASB Nationals.

On the product front, our investment in the product pipeline continues to bear fruit. By popular demand, we launched the new BrightTalk nurture demand product with 12 customers piloting this new offering in Q2. We also announced to the market the commercial partnership and technical integration of our NetLine demand product with the Demandbase ABM platform.

In direct response to the shift from a search-based to an answer-based economy, we have leveraged all of our experience as a digital publisher to launch our AI LLM content audit and consulting services designed to help clients understand how discoverable and citable their content is and to work with them and how to improve upon it. And only last week, we launched the Omdia AI Search Assistant, a further example of how we are leveraging AI technology to improve our products to improve upon how our customers discover and consume our original authoritative content and extract maximum value from their subscriptions. The Omdia AI Search Assistant enables our clients to submit natural language queries to the Omdia Knowledge Center and receive answers that are in an intelligent composite of all Omdia's data and analysis. They can also return those answers in over 70 languages, increasing the global applicability of our product. This launch builds upon what were already very encouraging KPIs in the Omdia business, with users, user engagement and the Net Promoter Score all up double digits in the first quarter.

And as we move through to the second and the third quarters, you will see more examples of how we are applying AI technology, specifically conversational interfaces to our data and content that will improve discoverability, ease consumption and unlock value for our clients and our members. And in June, our AI search for our audience members will undergo a significant upgrade based upon the lessons learned from the pilot of the past 6 months, further improving the audience experience. We're also leveraging automation and AI technology and tools extensively across the business to improve upon our productivity and quality in marketing, and sales, and research, and editorial, and operations, and our experience is that this is a game of continuous improvement, and we're already banking clear benefits.

By way of example, in Q1, our time to first lead for our core demand products decreased by 38% year-on-year, accelerating time to value for our customers and accelerating time to revenue for ourselves. I think Q1 demonstrates delivery to our plan financially, strategically and operationally, growing our revenues and adjusted EBITDA, simplifying and focusing the business, embracing and capitalizing upon the opportunities that AI presents.

Our priorities for 2026 are clear: deliver value to our customers and growth for our shareholders. This will give us the momentum and put us in a strong position to continue to invest in innovation and build upon our core strength of trusted expertise, proprietary market and permissioned audience data and a unified portfolio of products with the breadth and scale to deliver for customers across their life cycle. We are wholly committed to this plan and to growing revenues and adjusted EBITDA in 2026. I look forward to updating you on our continued progress in the quarters ahead. And now I'll turn the call over to Dan to discuss our financial results and guidance in a little more detail, and then we'll be happy to take your questions.

Thanks, Gary, and good afternoon, everyone. In the first quarter of 2026, we delivered revenue of $106 million, representing approximately 2% year-over-year growth compared with the first quarter of 2025. While market demand remains subdued and the environment cautious, our results reflect solid execution and early benefits from our sharpened operating focus following the combination and organizational realignment. As Gary mentioned earlier, we are now reporting our results through two operating segments.

In brand and demand or the B2D segment, which represented around 70% of total revenues and is where we generate revenues by providing clients with services that help them raise brand awareness, engage with buyers and target more qualified potential customers, we saw good revenue growth of around 5% year-over-year with particular strength in our unified demand offering.

In Intelligence and Advisory or the I&A segment, which represented around 30% of total revenues and is where we generate revenues primarily through subscription services to our intelligence products, including first-party data and specialist analyst research content as well as advisory services that provide clients with strategic support and bespoke solutions, our revenues were around 4% lower year-over-year, primarily reflecting a decrease in our go-to-market strategic consulting.

Both segments improved profitability in terms of segment operating income, which we define as being revenue less allocated direct and indirect costs, but prior to unallocated costs such as central functions, facility and related overhead expenses. Operating margin also improved for both segments. Encouragingly, we delivered company adjusted gross -- adjusted EBITDA growth of 27% year-over-year to $7.4 million with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 6.9% compared with 5.6% in the prior year. This improvement reflects continuing cost discipline, the streamlining of operations and the initial realization of integration efficiencies following last year's combination plan even as we continue to invest selectively in growth, product innovation and go-to-market capabilities.

On a GAAP basis, our net loss narrowed to $70.8 million. This included a $45 million of technical non-cash impairment of goodwill as well as ongoing acquisition and integration costs and other non-cash charges. Turning to the balance sheet and liquidity. We are in a strong financial position. We ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $47 million and had almost $130 million undrawn on our $250 million revolving credit facility, giving us liquidity of approximately $178 million. Our net debt at the end of March of around $72 million represented around 0.8 adjusted EBITDA for the prior 12 months, similar to the leverage level at the end of 2025 and the end of 2024. Our free cash flow in the quarter reflected the seasonal dynamics of the business as well as the phasing of integration and restructuring activities from 2025. On an adjusted basis, we delivered meaningful cash flow, demonstrating the attractive underlying cash generation characteristics of our business model.

Turning to guidance. We are reiterating our commitment to deliver growth in 2026. To this end, we are maintaining our full year 2026 adjusted EBITDA guidance of $95 million to $100 million. We are pleased with the progress we've made simplifying the business, improving operational efficiencies and positioning the company for growth. While the macro environment remains uncertain, we continue to see opportunities to expand customer engagement, increase wallet share and improve margins as the year progresses.

In summary, Q1 represented a solid start to 2026 with revenue growth, adjusted EBITDA improvement and continued progress integrating the business and sharpening our operating focus. We believe we are well positioned to execute through the remainder of the year and deliver on our financial objectives. As a reminder, our financial model is built to scale efficiently. As we return to growth, every additional dollar of revenue delivers substantial incremental margin, giving us the ability to grow profitability and free cash flows significantly over time. And with that, we're now happy to answer your questions. Operator, will you please open up the line for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions]

Your first question is from Bruce Goldfarb from Lake Street Capital.

It's Bruce. Congratulations on the solid quarter. So the first is, are any inflationary pressures in the business that would put your $95 million to $100 million EBITDA guide at risk?

Bruce, thanks for the question. This is Dan. I don't think we're seeing anything out of the ordinary from inflation that would put that at risk right now. We're still very confident, which is why we reiterated the $95 million to $100 million adjusted EBITDA target.

Great. And then how are growing AI search volumes impacting your membership sign-ups and paid subscriptions?

So I'll take that one, Bruce. Nice to talk to you. Well, I mean, we've talked about this on occasion actually in the past. We've certainly seen the shift in traffic and the mix of traffic that we receive as a business as search has become disrupted and Answer engines are becoming more prominent. We continue to see that Answer engine traffic converts at a much higher rate to membership than search traffic used to.

But interesting enough, we're also seeing search traffic conversion rates improve as well. I think that's largely as a result is that what we're now getting from search is still more qualified. Effectually, what you're beginning to see is that the effect of an Answer engine environment is that it qualifies out people who are not really serious researchers and serious buyers. So actually, the reality is that whilst traffic might be disrupted and down, because conversion rates are up, we're still seeing solid membership and therefore, our membership is modestly growing. And in particular, the membership and the activity of members who are the key personas is growing quite nicely.

My next one, how are churn rates trending in the small to medium enterprise market segment?

Bruce, this is Dan again. So from a churn perspective, obviously we don't show those metrics. But what I would say is that the churn is still higher, clearly because our portfolio accounts have grown. So we are seeing a bit more churn at the lower end of the range. But what I would say to that is we're starting to see a stabilization of that. And so it gives us confidence as we look out for the rest of the year as it relates to those particular client segments.

Great. And my last question, how is business trending internationally in EMEA and APAC?

I'll take a look at that. I spent a couple of weeks. I was on the road for some time. I was actually in APAC traveling through Singapore and then through Shenzhen and Beijing in China before finishing off in Seoul in Korea. I would say that actually, the environment was encouragingly optimistic and building. I mean the vast majority of our business in that part of the world is the intelligence and the advisory business.

But there's certainly a huge amount of demand from APAC companies to grow their business internationally and to expand into markets such as the United States and Europe, and that's a great opportunity for us. And similarly, there's still an appetite from big American brands to build their business, particularly in markets like Japan and Korea. So generally speaking, I was actually really encouraged by the demand there. And I would say that the business has been trending inline with the rest of the business actually in the first quarter, no sort of material difference in pattern.

The one obvious exception to that is the Middle East and Africa region as a result of the ongoing situation in Iran. That there, we've definitely seen customers begin to slow down their investments and slow down their decisions.

Your next question is from Jason Kreyer from Craig-Hallum.

This is Thomas on for Jason. I know you touched on it a little bit, but could you give a little more commentary on the environment you're seeing for software sales, particularly like a Priority Engine that has more of a recurring nature to it? Do you feel like tech companies are still sort of hesitant to lock-in longer-term deals?

I actually -- I'm going to pick up on that subject more broadly. I would certainly say that we've definitely seen the multiyear environment is not as strong as it was 2 years or so ago. That's definitely true. We're seeing customers, and we've said for some time that customers are shortening their contractual commitments really through 2025 and I don't think that's really -- it's not picked up in 2026.

It's interesting in what is potentially an inflationary environment because usually, there's a bit of tension in the marketplace between customers wanting to lock in pricing for multiple years vis-a-vis making those long-term commitments. So it will be interesting to see how that plays out. I think generally, in terms of commitments to software in general across the marketplace, I haven't really seen a lot of change in the customer's appetite. But one of the things that we have spoken about is the need for us to actually integrate our data directly into our customer's platforms. especially in the intent space as customer's Martech stacks and sales tech stacks have become more mature and more settled, it's absolutely imperative that you are able to integrate and play nicely with their environment.

So we -- you heard us talk about this a lot when we're talking about the investment in the Intent product is that actually a lot of our investments are now on the subject of integration and -- integration, not just with APIs, but also increasingly with MCPs in the AI world. And that's really where I think the game is being played now and the game will be played in the future in 2027.

Great. That's helpful. And then maybe just one follow-up. With the moves you made to position NetLine in a more down market, does that carry any incremental churn or volatility? Or do you still have pretty good visibility into NetLine production?

NetLine continues to perform incredibly well for us. It's a very exciting story within the company, and it's going from strength to strength. As we said, we have done a very thorough analysis -- forensic analysis to see whether it was cannibalizing any of the business elsewhere. And actually, that's not the case. These are different customers. They are different personas within our existing customers. They are different budget pools.

It forms part of the unified demand portfolio and in actual fact, the unified demand story that we're now telling where we have, I think, the broadest portfolio of demand products to meet any demand problem a customer might have is playing really nicely for us.

[Operator Instructions]

There are no further questions at this time. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference has now ended. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.

Good afternoon. Thank you for attending today's Informa TechTarget Fourth Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call and Webcast. My name is Tamia, and I will be your moderator for today's call. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to pass the conference over to your host, Charles Rennick, General Counsel. You may proceed.

Thank you, Tamia, and good afternoon, everyone. The speakers joining us here today are Gary Nugent, our Chief Executive Officer; and Dan Noreck, our Chief Financial Officer. Before turning the call over to Gary, we would like to remind you that in advance of this call, we posted a press release to the Investor Relations section of our website and furnished on an 8-K.

You can also find these materials on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. A replay of today's conference call will be made available on the Investor Relations section of our website. Following opening remarks from Gary and Dan, we'll be available to answer questions. Any statements made today by Informa TechTarget that are not historical, including during the Q&A may be considered forward-looking statements.

These forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties, are based on assumptions and are not guarantees of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from our forecast and from these forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including those discussed in the Risk Factors section of our most recent periodic report filed on Form 10-K and the forward-looking statement disclaimer in our earnings release filed earlier today.

These statements speak only as of the date of this call, and Informa TechTarget undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events that may arise after this conference call, except as required by law. Finally, we may also refer to certain financial measures not prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of certain of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures to the extent available without unreasonable efforts accompanies our press release. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Gary.

Another step forward in our journey to establish Informa TechTarget as the indispensable partner to the B2B technology industry. During 2020, we laid the groundwork to return the business to top line revenue growth in 2016 and accelerate that growth in the years ahead. Today's agenda is slightly different from previous calls. I will begin with an overview of our strategic progress and some market positioning. And following that, our Chief Financial Officer, Dan Noreck, will provide an overview of our financial performance. And then afterwards, we'll open the floor to your questions. Let me start by highlighting the significant strides we've made in combining and transforming our business to become a market leader and what is a large and dynamic addressable market, a $20 billion addressable market.

And while we currently only -- therefore, we currently only hold a 2.5% market share and the opportunities for expansion and growth remains substantial. In 2025, we achieved full year revenue of $486.8 million on a combined company basis, in line with our guidance of being broadly flat year-over-year. Importantly, we delivered a strong 10% growth in adjusted EBITDA to $87.3 million, exceeding our guidance of $85 million.

And I think this demonstrates our ability to drive meaningful margin expansion through strategic focus and operational excellence. Our combination plan has been the key driver of this progress as we seek to leverage the breadth and the scale that the combination affords us. We made significant progress in consolidating into rating automating and leveraging AI technology to improve our processes and systems that underpin the business, making ourselves easier to do business with and easier to work for. improving quality and productivity. On our products, unifying our intelligence and advisory operations under the Omdia brand, we have created a comprehensive market intelligence platform.

Bringing together the expertise of Canalys, Wads and ESG under the Omdia banner, simplifies our market positioning, while it enhances the cross-selling opportunities. And I think the Omdia's award in November as the analyst form of the Year by the Institute of influencers and Analyst Relations, the IIAR, is true recognition of the strength of this approach.

We also streamlined and integrated our portfolio of branded demand products, launching the Informa TechTarget portal in September. The ITT platform was the first offering to leverage our combined audience data set, providing our clients with expanded reach and enhanced intent signals over a 40% increase year-on-year.

It also offered seamless integration with industry-leading marketing automation client relationship and sales enablement platforms and a unified customer experience. And additionally, we repositioned NetLine to address the cost-conscious demand generation market. and this move, in particular, delivered exceptional results in terms of revenue and bookings growth while expanding our addressable market coverage. The product road map for 2026 is compelling as we leverage AI technology to enhance existing and launch new capabilities, and I'll talk a little bit more about this slightly later on.

On the subject of our go-to-market strategy, we focused on the largest customers in the most dynamic highest growth markets. And thus, we've increased our investment in coverage, establishing dedicated sales and service teams to deepen our relationships and strengthen our position in the most influential technology companies in the industry. And this approach resulted in revenues growing double digit year-on-year from this cohort.

On audience and audience membership, A key differentiation of our company is the role that we play in informing, educating and shaping the buy side and the buying journey. Our expert original trusted editorial content remains a vital investment. And I'm proud to share that and again to the Omdia award I've just mentioned, we received 48 prestigious award the strength and the quality of our journalism in 2025. And despite the changing patterns in search traffic due to AI answer engines, we leveraged the breadth of our network and reoriented our editorial and our audience membership development focus. Today, less than 45% of our traffic is sourced from search. And crucially, in 2025, our audience membership grew and our members became more active on our network.

We learned that the progress that our progress in search domain authority is a transferable asset and scale in this new AI answer engine world. And notably, our citations from AI answer engines increased in volume over 235% year-on-year. And as we've discussed before, we see that the conversion rate to permissioned audience members are 2 to 3x that of traditional search. On the subject of AI, as I've said before, we firmly believe that generative and agentic AI will be a huge positive for our business. and we've made significant progress in adopting and embedding AI across 4 strategic areas of the business.

The first one we call conversational AI interfaces, making our proprietary market data and our permissioned audience data more easily accessible and actionable by our clients. In the first half of this year, we will launch the AI researcher system, a multilingual conversational AI interface that will unlock a wealth value from the wealth of our proprietary intelligence in our market data. And starting in Q3 of 2026, we will debut a suite of AI-powered go-to-market intelligence solutions. This suite introduces advanced AI skills, sort of the equivalent of apps that allow marketers to generate actionable insights by synthesizing Informa TechTarget permissioned audience data and coupling that with their own internal and external web assets.

The key capabilities will be AI-driven problem identification by analyzing the specific content being consumed across our network, our AI will identify the actual business problems that buyers are researching, allowing go-to-market teams to move beyond broad targeting and engaging -- and engage prospects with differentiated managing tailored to be immediate and specific needs and AI-driven content insights performance-based recommendations that will pinpoint which content topics and brand investments are successfully addressing buyer pain points, ensuring the strongest ROI on their marketing spend.

And whether utilizing our prebuilt AI scales or deploying their own, our customers were fueled by our AI-powered go-to-market intelligence, making Informa TechTarget an indispensable fixture of the modern martech stack.

The second area that we're focusing on is personalized audience experiences, bringing the wealth of expert original and trusted content from across our network to our audiences rather than us taking them to the content. Creating penalized content experiences based upon a deep understanding of their company, their role, their business problem and where they are in their buying journey.

The third area, enhancing the efficacy of our go-to-market programs, both for ourselves and our clients as we improve the precision of our targeting and content and campaign effectiveness. And then finally, the fourth area is automating our operations, enabling our experts to deliver deeper insights more efficiently and enabling our operations and customer success teams to deliver our products and services to our customers with increased quality and effectiveness.

Talking with our customers, particularly with our larger customers. a key takeaway is an increasing desire on their part for integrated solutions rather than point products. And our customers are looking for partners who can provide scaled solutions to their scale problems, precisely what the new Informa TechTarget was built to deliver. And taking just one prime example in 2025, a key customer of ours lamented that they had to engage with over 30 supplier companies over ilk in order to service their scale needs. Following a strategic review and a decision to focus on fewer larger relationships, they have consolidated those relationships down, and I'm delighted to say that we were a natural partner to partner with. Further, those same technology companies are keenly aware that they must deliver a clear ROI from the substantial investment that they have made in AI.

And that we are very well positioned to be an essential partner and providing a range of products and services to help them achieve that. Our ambition is to become the indispensable partner to the B2B technology industry. informing, educating shaping, connecting buyers to sellers. In 2026, our objective is to return the business to top line revenue growth for the full year. with an adjusted EBITDA expanding to $95 million to $100 million.

Our strategy is to continue to build our house on the land that we own, by which I mean producing original trusted authoritative content that informed education shapes the industry through our expert analysts and editorial capabilities and in doing so, nurturing that proprietary market and our permissioned audience membership data asset. We're going to continue to leverage the breadth and scale of the product portfolio and deliver unified and integrated customer experience. We're going to continue to focus on to market efforts on the largest customers and the hottest market with our scale to install scale problems.

And we're going to continue to make ourselves easier to do business with and easier to work for, adopting AI across all disciplines to improve quality, enhance productivity and in particular, to amplify the expertise of the 1,900 colleagues apply their trade Informa TechTarget. And on that point, I'm incredibly proud of the progress that we have made and I want to express my gratitude to our dedicated colleagues and their teams for their hard work and commitment. It is their efforts that have positioned us to seize the opportunity that lies ahead. Thank you for your time. I look forward to updating you on continued progress in the quarters ahead. And now I'm going to turn the call over to Dan to talk a little bit more about our financial results in detail, and then we'll be happy to take your questions.

Thanks, Gary, and good afternoon, everyone. I am pleased to be able to report on 2025 results that I think delivered in line with or ahead of our guidance and market expectations and which demonstrated both our operational discipline and strategic execution capabilities.

We delivered full year revenue of $486.8 million, which, as Gary mentioned earlier, was right in line with our guidance of being broadly flat compared to the $490.4 million we achieved in 2024 on a combined company basis. While revenues remained stable, our focus on operational excellence and strategic reorganization with accelerated delivery of cost synergies drove strong margin expansion. Our adjusted EBITDA reached $87.3 million, comfortably exceeding our guidance of $85 million, representing a healthy 10% increase from 2024's $78.8 million on a combined company basis. This translated to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 17.9% in 2025, a meaningful improvement of 180 basis points from the prior year.

Our fourth quarter performance was particularly strong with revenues of $140.7 million, representing a solid 3% year-over-year increase on a combined company basis. Q4 adjusted EBITDA of $41.6 million represented a 56% year-over-year increase with our adjusted EBITDA margin expanding to around 30% compared to approximately 20% in the corresponding quarter of the prior year on a combined company basis.

Our Q4 performance reflected some seasonal upswing in the business, but also benefited from our strategic initiatives that are gaining traction, which allowed us to accelerate the realization of some cost savings along with some favorable phasing impact. Our quarterly progression throughout 2025 tells a story of building momentum. Following the seasonally slower first quarter, each of the remaining quarters of the year showed positive sequential revenue progression, a trend we expect to continue in 2026. From a year-over-year perspective, revenue performance consistently improved from a minus 6% in Q1, narrowing to a minus 2% in Q2, getting back to growth in Q3 at plus 1% and plus 3% in Q4 over the comparative combined company measure. Our balance sheet also reflects a strong financial foundation that supports our strategic initiatives while maintaining the flexibility to capitalize on growth opportunities that may arise.

At the end of 2025, we had cash and cash equivalents on the balance sheet of around $41 million and had utilized around $107 million of our $250 million unsecured 5-year revolving credit facility, resulting in a net debt of approximately $66 million, not vastly different to the approximately $62 million at the end of 2024 despite significant cash expenditures in the year on acquisition, integration and restructuring costs. Our free cash flow reflects the impact of our integration and restructuring investments in 2025.

On an adjusted basis, we delivered meaningful cash flow, demonstrating the strong underlying cash generation characteristics of our business model. Net debt at year-end relative to adjusted EBITDA for the year was just 0.8x and slightly lower than at the end of 2024, illustrating the strong cash-generating characteristics of our business. Now quickly turning to our guidance for 2026. Following the substantial progress made with our combination program in 2025, the priority for 2026 is to build on the foundations laid and to return to growth in 2026. Our assumption is that the market environment will remain similar to that in 2025.

Nevertheless, we expect to grow our revenues in 2026. That, coupled with our continued cost discipline, annualization of synergies and operational leverage, we expect our adjusted EBITDA to grow further to a range of $95 million to $100 million, marking a further meaningful improvement in our adjusted EBITDA margin. Q1 2026 will reflect this trend. This guidance reflects our confidence in the progress we've made through our strategic initiatives and the strong foundation we've established for sustainable growth.

In conclusion, our financial model is built to scale efficiently. Every additional dollar of revenue delivers substantial incremental margin, highlighting the strength of our unit economics. This structure enables us to grow profitability and free cash flow over time. And with that, we're now happy to answer your questions. Operator, will you please open up the line for Q&A?

[Operator Instructions]

The first question comes from Eric Martinuzzi with Lake Street.

I wanted to, first of all, congratulate you on the fourth quarter results and overachieving versus the adjusted EBITDA for the year. but I was particularly impressed with the go-to-market strategy results. Your comment in the press release talks about an approximate 10% growth in revenue from your largest customers. Was that a full year basis? Or is that a Q4 metric, Gary?

Eric, good to hear from you. That's a full year basis. and on a combined company basis.

Okay. And then there was a time when the different tiers of customers, if I go back to like the end of 2024, you talked about the 7,500 customers that the combined entity had and that there were 70 customers that were over $1 million a year in billing. Is that the tier of customers that we're talking about here? Or are you stratifying the customer base differently?

No, we are stratifying the customer base differently. It's not the same. We have a bit -- I mean, if you recall, I've actually go back to we have identified about $10 billion of our $20 billion addressable market sits with about 150 to 200 clients in the marketplace. We then further prioritized that down to a cohort of 30 portfolio customers and then a further 120 or so customers that are what we would call majors. And the number that I'm quoting for you is for that cohort of 30.

Okay. And then is there -- you've got so many different products that you're offering customers now. What was resonating with that largest cohort? What -- first of all, did they contract in their use of any other products? And then what was it that they expanded their use of?

Well, you appreciate it's a bit of a mix picture when you go down to the kind of individual customer level. I would say if there was a trend there, we saw really strong demand for demand. So there'll be strong demand for our demand products, and that was encouraging to see, in particular, as we consolidated and rationalized the demand portfolio and did a better job of the market positioning of that.

And then second, there we see content content was generally a strong theme last year as customers were looking to really establish a distinctive voice in the marketplace to stand out from the noise and to leverage the expertise we have our analyst expertise and our editorial expertise to really give them a bit of brand association.

All right. And then given the total revenue on the pro forma combined basis actually declined 1%. Obviously, the smaller customers contracted to sort of offset the success that you had with the higher tier, as you put it, the 30 portfolio customers. Was there any themes to recognize across the smaller customer base, either smaller enterprise or SMB teams.

I suppose the theme I would talk to is much more about international markets for us. I think what we saw, in particular, was in the Asia Pacific region and the triangle between sort of Singapore and China and add a fourth point of square if I add Tokyo to that. That was definitely a market that we -- that was challenged last year.

I think, in particular, some of the macroeconomic situation with Asian technology companies looking to export their businesses internationally. And that was probably the area where I would see the trend really was. I think then we just also saw in that sort of small to medium end of the IT marketplace that, that was a market where I don't think that was odd, but there was customer churn in that market in the small to medium end.

Got it. All right. And then, Dan, as we're doing our modeling here for 2026, obviously, the top line, you didn't want to put too fine a point on it, but -- is that looking at the growth that you had in the back half of 2025 on the pro forma combined, you were up 1% in Q3. You were up 3% in Q4. Is it a prudent starting point to kind of take the blend there and say, "Hey, if we are going to grow, let's put it in maybe start with 3% and just use that as a baseline? Or is that to aggressive.

No, Eric, I think that the way you're laying it out makes sense. I think you could go maybe a little higher than that 2%. But I think the way you're thinking about modeling makes sense to me.

Okay. And then last question is around the source of the incremental adjusted EBITDA. Obviously, revenue is not going to be -- revenue we're planning on it to be a little bit higher in 2026, but let's just for discussion, say, we're talking about a flat revenue in 2016 versus 2025. In 2025, that adjusted EBITDA number was around what was $87.3 million, and yet you're guiding to kind of a midpoint of 97.5%. So just to keep it simple, call it, $10 million of incremental adjusted EBITDA. What is it that's getting you there? Is this primarily going to be driven by further synergies on the bringing of the 2 entities together? Or what's driving that?

Yes. Eric, so if you think about where the synergies sort of landed in 2025, they were really back half loaded. So you're really going to start to see the impact of that throughout the full year as opposed to just being combined or contained to the second half of the year.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] There are no more questions remaining at this time. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.

Good afternoon. Thank you for attending today's Informa TechTarget Third Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. My name is Tamia, and I will be your moderator for today's call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to pass the conference over to your host, Charlie Rennick, General Counsel. You may proceed.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. The speakers joining us here today are Gary Nugent, our CEO; and Dan Noreck, our CFO. Before turning the call over to Gary, we would like to remind everyone on the call of our earnings release process. As previously announced, in order to provide you with an update on our business in advance of the call, we posted a press release to the Investor Relations section of our website and furnished it on an 8-K. You can also find these materials at the SEC free of charge at the SEC's website, www.sec.gov. A corresponding webcast as well as a replay of this conference call will be made available on the Investor Relations section of our website. Following Gary's remarks, the management team will be available to answer questions.

Any statements made today by Informa TechTarget that are not factual, including during the Q&A, may be considered forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties, are based on assumptions and are not guarantees of our future performance. Actual results may differ materially from our forecast and from these forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including those discussed in the Risk Factors section of our SEC filings. These statements speak only as of the date of this call, and Informa TechTarget undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events that may arise after the conference call, except as required by law.

Finally, we may also refer to certain financial measures not prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of certain of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measure to the extent available without unreasonable effort accompanies our press release.

And with that, I'll turn the call over to Gary.

Thank you, Charlie, and thank you all for joining our call today. As always, we greatly appreciate you investing the time. And I'm pleased to report that Q3 of 2025 demonstrated the momentum that we had anticipated following our Q2 results and that we made good progress in unlocking the benefits of the scale and breadth and diversity of our combined business.

We have said many times that we view 2025 as a foundation year for our combined company as Informa TechTarget, executing upon our plan to align and integrate at pace and seize the benefits that the combination affords us and I am convinced will be a key point of differentiation in the market as we move forward. Our early strategic initiatives are gaining traction and beginning to bear fruit, and we're seeing improving performance from our business.

The B2B technology market is a dynamic one with artificial intelligence and cybersecurity and generally, digital transformation key drivers. And really a $5 trillion end market today, our own Omdia analysts forecast this end market to double by 2034. And really, our ability to inform, educate and shape the market and connect technology vendors with engaged purchase-ready IT decision-makers has never been more valuable.

Our clients are in the main performing well. However, they are currently engaged in a strategic AI investment cycle with the majority of resources being redirected towards R&D in this arena. And while this may be temporarily impacting go-to-market and marketing budgets, these investments will ultimately need to demonstrate an ROI, which will drive increased demand for our products and services in the midterm.

Regardless, it is a large addressable market out there. We size it at around $20 billion for our business, of which we have only penetrated 2.5% market share. Thus, there is plenty of runway for growth to leverage the breadth and scale of our client proposition to compete and win, increase our share of wallet with our customers and take market share.

Our strategic focus remains on 4 key areas. The first is a revamped go-to-market strategy, focusing our resources and efforts on the largest clients and the hottest market, largely artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and the channel market. Second is our product innovation. We are aligning and integrating the portfolio of products and services, leveraging the breadth and scale to offer and deliver solutions that align to the needs of our clients across their product life cycle and by extension, positioning ourselves as a strategic partner and improving our average order value. The third point is improving our operational efficiency and effectiveness, unlocking the cost savings and the synergies that the combination affords us. And then fourth is a focus towards diversifying our audience development and engagement strategies, including establishing our discoverability through AI answer engines and LLM.

In terms of our financial performance, from a revenue and an adjusted EBITDA perspective, we are delivering in line with what we had previously indicated. And today, we are reaffirming our full year 2025 guidance. We continue to expect broadly flat revenues on a combined company basis compared to the prior year and an increase in adjusted EBITDA from last year to over $85 million this year.

What is particularly encouraging is the sequential momentum that we've built throughout the year, moving from a negative 5.8% in year-on-year growth in Q1 to negative 1.6% in Q2 and now achieving positive year-on-year growth in Q3. Q4 is seasonally our strongest quarter of the year, and this trajectory demonstrates the underlying strength of our combined platform and the effectiveness of our strategic initiatives.

Third quarter revenues were $122 million as compared to the prior year of $121 million on a combined company basis, a growth of around 1% year-on-year. However, it also represents sequential growth of 2% on Q2, which was versus a modest seasonal sequential decline last year. So revenue momentum is building. And I think in particular, there's a bit of catch-up here as we work through the aligning and integrating and combination in the first 2 quarters of the year.

The business generally exhibits attractive profit drop-through on revenue expansion, which, together with the cost savings that we were delivering, resulted in our adjusted EBITDA growth in Q3 being ahead of our revenue growth, both on a year-on-year basis and on a sequential basis, delivering healthy margin expansion. And in Q3, the adjusted EBITDA grew by 9% year-on-year. The company posted a net loss of $77 million, largely as a result of an $80 million noncash impairment given the reduction in our market capitalization during the quarter.

Our Q3 win wall, as we would describe it, which is a device we use internally to keep track of and celebrate our successes, is covered in interesting anecdotes and posters. We have consolidated our intelligence and advisory brands under the unified Omdia banner, bringing together the expertise of Canalys, Wards and ESG into a single powerful market intelligence platform. And this consolidation is already showing results in terms of client clarity and cross-selling opportunities.

We launched in September the Informa TechTarget portal, which is the first product leveraging our combined audience data set. We're now able to provide our clients with a unified access to intelligence, intent and demand via an improved common interface. It represents a significant increase in the intent data signals, over 40% increase and greater audience reach, and improved performance and ROI reporting, and the ability to seamlessly integrate with the majority, if not, all of our customers' preferred marketing and sales platforms.

And on that note, we were delighted to receive in October, the Demandbase Technology Partner of the Year Award. Our editorial teams have won 47 awards for their original, authoritative and impartial B2B journalism year-to-date. This is such an asset in a world where trust and trusted sources of information command a premium. And in addition, the editorial team have recently launched a new publication or Channel Dive, targeting the North American technology channel partners. We collaborate with major tech companies on marketing, sales and distribution.

It's an important point to note that in this industry, over 70% of all value goes to the market via the channel. And therefore, this is a critical market for us to compete and win in. Our all-star editorial team for this combines talents from TechTarget, Channel Futures, Light Reading and CIO Dive.

Our go-to-market focus on the largest players and the hottest markets is beginning to bear fruit, with bookings up year-on-year, longer-term contracts and increased average deal sizes, as we present more comprehensive integrated solutions to our clients. And we continue to successfully reposition NetLine to target the volume end of the demand market, which is delivering significant growth in revenues and bookings year-on-year. But most pleasing of all, I'm proud of the way our team has embraced the combined company culture that we are building, and we're seeing excellent collaboration efforts across the business.

We continue to view AI as a significant opportunity for our business as a technology market to serve in its own right, as a tool to improve productivity and quality, and as a catalyst for enhancing existing and inspiring new products and services. And the focus of our efforts today lies in 4 key areas: to provide conversational AI interfaces into our proprietary market and our permissioned audience data enhancing the efficacy and the speed of building and executing on their go-to-market programs for our clients.

The second area is on providing conversational AI interfaces into audience experience across the network, enhancing our audience's ability to discover and engage with the original authoritative and unbiased information that better informs and shapes their buying journey.

And then finally, really, it's about enhancing the productivity of our market experts as they create original data and insights that inform and educate and shape the market, and the productivity of our marketing and sales teams as they seek to scale our presence in what is that $20 billion addressable market. And whilst AI is evolving the way audiences discover and consume information, Informa TechTarget is well positioned for this shift given our wealth of market expertise, our trusted original content and the diversity of audience development techniques that we have.

We are being proactive and agile in adjusting to the fundamental change in how technology buyers discover and consume information. With the rise of answer engines and AI-driven search, there's an accompanying skepticism towards generic content. According to our own search, over 4 out of 5 technology buyers do not fully trust AI today. And our focus is on high-value expert-driven editorial content and specialized audience communities is proving prescient as audiences seek to verify with trusted sources.

And to that, we're seeing a 2 to 3x higher membership conversion rate from answer engines and LLM citations compared to traditional organic search. We believe this is validating our strategy of prioritizing quality and expertise and our diversified capabilities in attracting membership, such as growth in direct traffic and newsletter engagement, which has meant that our active audience membership grew modestly over the period.

Looking forward, we will remain focused on capitalizing on the breadth and scale the combination affords us to become an indispensable partner to the technology industry, informing, educating and shaping the market, connecting buyers with sellers, accelerating their growth via an expert-led data-driven and AI-enabled B2B marketing leader. We aim to further build our momentum in Q4 and into 2026 as we leverage the benefits of combination, and we believe that we are well positioned to capitalize on the opportunities ahead and deliver consistent profitable growth and increased value for our stakeholders.

And I want to thank our entire team for their dedication and continued execution of our strategy. I have spent the largely -- the large part of the last 8 weeks or so with our customers in Massachusetts, in California, in New York, in Washington, both D.C. and state, in Texas, in France, in the U.K., in Dubai, in Tel Aviv. And without exception, our customers have gone out of their way to highlight the quality of our people and the relationships that they have built, and their expertise and commitment are the foundation of our success.

And with that, we're now happy to answer your questions, and I'll ask the operator to open up the line for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] the first question comes from Joshua Reilly with Needham.

All right. Great. Maybe just starting off on one of the last topics you were just talking about there and the whole concept of driving traffic via search engine optimization related to the AI LLMs. What are you seeing? And what have you done? Maybe you can just expand on this a bit more, as a company as you obviously have to pivot from traditional SEO to the answer engine optimization concept. And how are you progressing in that? How much more work do you have to do? And what are you seeing in terms of the readership trends as customers or end users ultimately find more answers via the answer engine optimization versus traditional web search?

Yes, Josh, I love to always hear your voice, and thank you for the question. Well, I think the first thing I would say about that is that, as a combined company, our strategy and tactics for attracting audiences and converting them to members are quite diverse. They're very diverse. Less than 50% of the kind of top of the funnel comes from search engines within the business. So we have an array of tactics that we use to drive audiences. And like I mentioned in my note, we've actually seen -- although there is a dynamic in the marketplace at the moment, we're actually seeing our active membership increase modestly through the period, which obviously gives us -- which is very comforting.

I think in terms of -- we're also seeing that the traffic from the answer engine is growing. And I think we had over 77,000 citations through the period that we talked about. But interestingly enough, it's not just that we're seeing increased traffic coming from these sources, the conversion rate of that traffic to members -- and remember, it is the member that is the valuable asset for our business. It's not the traffic.

The conversion to members is 2 to 3x what it was from what it is from search. So what we're really seeing is we're just seeing a slightly more qualified audience member coming to us. And so what we really also think we're seeing is that the AI answer engines are filtering out some of the traffic that actually was not buyers that would have been valued to our membership. Does that make sense, Josh?

That's super helpful and interesting. All right. So moving on, maybe we could dive in on the quarterly progression of revenue that we've seen this year so far. So we know Q1 was depressed due to the integration process. Would you say that Q2 revenues and now Q3 are back to a normalized run rate for the combined business? Or were they also depressed somewhat? And the reason I'm -- the angle I'm trying to get at here is if we look at the sequential implied increase from Q3 to Q4 for total revenue, I believe it's roughly a 15% sequential increase. And if I remember correctly, in the old days, the normal TechTarget business would have about a 10% sequential increase from Q3 to Q4. So maybe you could just kind of help us understand what's gone on with the revenue trends here year-to-date.

I think we're -- as I said, I would use the kind of word progressive momentum in there, first and foremost. I think we are -- I mean, you asked if it's the run rate. I mean, I would say that we are aiming to improve that constantly over time. But the other thing you need to remember, of course, is that within the combined company in Q4, there is revenue from our Canalys business, the Canalys Forums, which is a series of events that run in the fourth quarter in October and in December. So that is also -- that's effectively explaining the delta between your traditional 10% and the 15% that you're seeing.

Got it. So you recognize the full amount of that revenue maybe for a year of subscription in Q4. Is that kind of the right way to think about it? Or is there onetime -- is that event-based revenue?

It's event-based revenue that is onetime and recognizes when the event floors.

Got you. Understood. Last question for me is, obviously, we're talking about AI as an opportunity for your business. Maybe you can speak to what specifically from a product perspective that you're doing that could drive some tangible revenue over the next couple of years and really help us understand better what are you doing to productize ultimately the AI opportunity for the new TechTarget?

Yes, I touched upon this in my opening comments. And I described it as conversational interfaces into our market data and our proprietary audience data -- sorry, our permissioned audience data. And if you think about this, it's really a way we're offering our customers the opportunity to interrogate our data in a way that's a natural language way. And what that does is it makes it more actionable. It makes it more accessible, especially when you're then transitioning from the marketing persona to the sales persona. So what you will see increasingly from us, and we actually have demonstrations of this, is how you can actually, through a natural language interface, through a conversational AI interface, interrogate, for example, our intent data.

And in interrogating that intent data, it then gives you a greater sense of the context behind why that particular company or that particular prospect is somebody you should be focusing your attention on and actioning. And that, we see, as being a major way to make the ability to extract value from our data and lower the barriers to the ability to extract value from the data.

Next question comes from Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

This is [ Cal ] on for Jason tonight. So maybe you kind of touched on the call a little bit about seeing some longer and some larger deals. But just curious broadly how you'd characterize the backlog and the pipeline and how that kind of plays into your confidence for some accelerating growth trends here in Q4.

Well, I mean, certainly, I mean, on both, given that we've reaffirmed the guidance for the year, both the pipeline and the backlog supports that outlook for the year. And generally speaking, we feel confident that we will roll into 2026 with a healthier backlog given the profile of bookings and revenue through the fourth quarter. I would say both of those are true.

Great. And then just as a follow-up, can you just kind of provide an update on some of the unified go-to-market strategy you've had and the success that you're seeing tapping into more spend with your existing large customer base?

Yes, of course. I mean this is effectively us organizing ourselves around the largest customers in the industry. I think I've mentioned in the past that about -- depending upon how you look at it, between 150 and 200 end customers represent about half of the addressable market in the marketplace.

Now we're not focusing on all 150 to 200 at present. We've taken a cross-section of that to prove out this concept. And we've built effectively intact teams across the organization, so not just sales, not just SDR, not just customer success but all of the capabilities within the business to service customers in an intact team basis to wrap our arms around these customers and ensure the quality of offer and service to them.

And we're -- but it also means that what we're seeing is our ability to then land within those customers and expand our presence within them. I talked earlier on about these -- the strong relationships that we have and the strong sponsorship that we have. And so the key thing that we're looking at constantly is are we penetrating new product business units. Are we penetrating new field marketing and sales units? Are we penetrating different dimensions like industry vertical marketing or channel marketing or pocket strategy where there are new budget pools for us to address? And that's really kind of measure of our progress, is where we are expanding our presence inside these larger accounts. So obviously, it's nice to grow an existing relationship, but actually, what we want to do is expand those relationships within these very large customers.

The next question comes from Bruce Goldfarb with Lake Street Capital Markets.

Congratulations on the results. Just a couple of questions from me. Are you seeing any changes in sales cycle duration or deal size within Priority Engine or your subscription offerings as we move into year-end budgets?

Thanks, Bruce. It's good to hear your voice. I would say no, nothing material changing either in terms of the cycle time on deals or on the average values at that sort of transactional level. No, no material change.

And then can you comment on the pipeline for potential tuck-in acquisitions? Are there adjacencies either in data or workflow tools that could accelerate growth in '26?

At this stage, we are very focused on aligning and integrating the existing assets within the business and bringing that to bear in the marketplace. That's really our focus, is to ensure that we do that well, we do it quickly, we do it well and that we build a platform for the future. I think it won't be until we roll into the second half of next year that we'll get serious consideration to that.

There are no more questions waiting at this time. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.

Hello, everyone, and a warm welcome to the Informa TechTarget Second Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call and Webcast. My name is Emily, and I'll be coordinating your call today. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the call over to our host, Charles Rennick, to begin. Please go ahead, Charles.

Thank you, Emily, and good morning, everyone. The speakers joining us here today are Gary Nugent, our Chief Executive Officer; and Dan Noreck, our Chief Financial Officer.

Before turning the call over to Gary, we would like to remind everyone on the call of our earnings release process. As previously announced, in order to provide you with an update on our business in advance of the call, we have posted a press release to the Investor Relations section of our website and furnished it on an 8-K. You can also find these materials with the SEC free of charge at the SEC's website, www.sec.gov.

A corresponding webcast as well as a replay of this conference call will be made available on the Investor Relations section of our website. Following Gary's remarks, the management team will be available to answer questions.

Any statements made today by Informa TechTarget that are not factual, including during the Q&A, may be considered forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties, are based on assumptions and are not guarantees of our future performance. Actual results may differ materially from our forecast and from these forward-looking statements.

Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including those discussed in the Risk Factors section of our most recent periodic reports filed with the SEC. These statements speak only as of the date of this call, and Informa TechTarget undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events that may arise after this conference call, except as required by law.

Finally, we may also refer to certain financial measures not prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of certain of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measure, to the extent available without unreasonable efforts, accompanies our press release.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Gary.

Thank you, Charlie, and welcome all. Thank you for joining our call today. As always, we appreciate you investing the time. We have, of course, already spoken to you in part about our Q2 results. However, we will take the time today to reiterate what has already been said and to complete the Q2 picture.

I would like to remind all that through our communications, we use the term combined company to refer to the amalgamation of the results in 2024 as if the company was one, allowing us to give a slightly more meaningful year-on-year comparisons. And so I will use this term through this morning's discussion.

Really the key messages this morning are really as follows: first of all, our Q2 10-Q was filed this morning. We are delighted to be filing ahead of schedule and confident in our ability to continue to do so going forward. We would maybe describe it as normal service has been resumed.

The second message really is one of momentum and momentum is building as we progress and unlock the benefits of combination in what is our foundation year and as we seek to unlock the breadth, the scale and the diversity of our new company. We are reaffirming our guidance for the full year, broadly flat revenues with improving adjusted EBITDA margins of $85 million plus.

And then really we ask you to -- we're looking forward to and we ask to look out for some product innovation that we'll be announcing in the fall with the launch of what we will be calling the Informa TechTarget Portal. And last but not least, we are firmly of the opinion that AI is an opportunity for our business and that we are well positioned to embrace and take advantage of an AI-enabled world.

If I turn to the Q2 results. Revenues were posted at $120 million as compared to a prior year of $122 million on a combined company basis. That represents a decline of 1.6% year-on-year. However, it also represents sequential growth of just over 15.5% on Q1. And for those of you who have been tracking the company will see that, that's about 5 percentage points ahead of prior year on a combined company basis. So momentum's building.

The company posted a net loss of $399 million, largely as a result of a $382 million noncash impairment, and posted adjusted EBITDA of $17 million versus $19 million prior year on a combined company basis. From a balance sheet and liquidity perspective, at the close of Q2, we had a strong balance sheet, $62 million in cash and cash equivalent. We have utilized just about $120 million of the $250 million revolving credit facility that we have. And net debt at the end of the period was negative $58 million, pretty much in line with prior year.

If I talk a little bit about some of the highlights from Q2, and first of all, if I talk about a market highlight. As we've mentioned before, as part of our market strategy, we are focusing on and investing in our relationships with the largest customers and the largest players in the market that we serve. And we believe that about the top 200 customers in the industry represent about 50% of the addressable market. So that's about $10 billion of the $20 billion addressable market that we have.

And these are the customers who have broad scale requirements and, therefore, these are the customers where we believe that the breadth and the scale and the diversity of the combined Informa TechTarget play the loudest. And therefore, we have been investing in and focusing more of our resources, our marketing resources, our sales resources our customer success and, indeed, even our product management to better serve and address the needs of these customers. And through that, we have seen encouraging growth year-on-year through the first half and look forward to that continuing in the second half.

From a product perspective, we've mentioned before that in our Intelligence & Advisory portfolio, we have moved quickly in the combination to undertake brand consolidation and product portfolio consolidation. At the brand level, consolidating the brands of Wards, Canalys, ESG and Omdia under the banner of Omdia as our go-forward brand, this allows us to maximize the return on our brand investment dollars behind that one brand. It also eliminates an overlap within the product portfolio and enables our expert analysts and researchers to therefore spend more time with clients. We're delighted with the progress that we've made there.

And then the second product highlight I would mention, of course, is the repositioning of the NetLine product to address the volume cost-conscious end of the demand market, really tapping into a new source of adjacent revenues for the company. And here, again, we've seen meaningful growth year-on-year in this regard and we're very encouraged by the results.

The final highlight that I wanted to mention with regards to Q2 was really with respect to our editorial activity and their audience development and, in particular, in recognition of the expertise that resides within our company, within the research community, the analyst community, the editorial community, the journalist community who are committed to unbiased, authoritative and trusted content. We're delighted to advise that we have won 45 prestigious online B2B editorial awards in the first half of this year alone as a demonstration of our commitment to quality. And I'm going to talk a little bit about that more as we go through the call this morning and why that's so important.

If I look forward to the second half and beyond, we continue to progress at pace with our combination and our foundation year as we bring together the brands, the products and the talents in the organization as we look to eliminate the overlap and the duplication and unlock the promise of bringing these two companies together. And as such, we announced in July the next step of our combination plan, the reorganization plan, streamlining certain areas of the business, streamlining markets, streamlining products, streamlining brands and functions whilst we reinvest in other areas, the areas that we believe to have high growth potential and improve upon the product and service delivery, enhance our go-to-market capabilities.

And this program is expected to lead to a net reduction of approximately 10% of the company's global colleague base. And therefore, we will be meaningfully ahead of the original year 1 cost savings and synergies that were the original part of the combination thesis. And we believe that we are well on track to deliver the promised synergies of $45 million by year 3 in the original combination thesis.

I also said earlier on that I wanted you to look forward to some significant progress that we've made with our product road map, which we will announce in the fall. And for those of you listening in European, that's the autumn. We are looking really to -- as part of our product road map and our product strategy, we've got three core priorities.

The first priority is to bring all of our products and services together into a single unified experience and interface for our customers. The second priority is to enhance on our ability for our customers to demonstrate the performance and the ROI of their investments with us through our analytics capabilities. And the third priority is integrating our products and data with the platforms of choice of our customers.

And we're delighted that with the launch of the Informa TechTarget Portal in September, we will have made some significant progress against all three of those priorities. And in particular, in the integration of our products and data with the platforms of choice of our customers, we'll be announcing three new integrations with key platforms, which will bring the total of integrations to 13 in total, which we believe covers all of the major ecosystem platforms that our customers like to do business with. And I'll happily talk a little bit more about that in Q&A.

The final point I wanted to make really was about AI, and we are firmly of the opinion that AI is an opportunity for our business and that we are well positioned to embrace and take advantage of an AI-enabled world. We've mentioned before that AI in and of itself is a market that we participate in. I mean, our business at its heart is about informing, educating buyers of technology and helping the vendors of technology reach and position their products and services in front of those buyers.

And AI as a market is no different from any other market, no different from cybersecurity or cloud or enterprise computing. And indeed, as a market, it is estimated by our own Omdia analysts to be north of $250 billion as an end market by 2028. And we see that as an opportunity in and of itself, and we're actively participating in that as we speak.

Second, though, we've also mentioned that within our business, we see many ways for AI to improve the efficiency and the quality in our operations and the differentiation in our products and improve audience member experience. The primary AI use cases today lend themselves incredibly well to the heart of our business, which is largely in and around content curation and creation and data manipulation and analysis. And we will be leveraging that heavily within our business.

And then finally, with respect to how we sustain and grow our permission-ed audience, which is a core asset of the business, really, the breadth and the scale and the diversity of our portfolio of B2B digital properties that inform and educate and shape the industry is unrivaled. And the strategy and tactics that we use to attract, to engage and to retain audience members are manifold.

Search is a part of that armory, but search represents less than half of our audience development strategy. And we have many other strategies within that armory, branded destinations, a very extensive outbound newsletter strategy, our publisher partnerships, our customer partnerships and, of course, the vital event audience asset that we have access to through Informa's IIRIS and the relationship with Informa.

And there is no doubt that search is being disrupted with the advent of AI and LLMs, but there is also increasingly confidence that domain authority will remain an asset as search will continue to be a relevant way of finding audiences. But also we are seeing that domain authority is influencing AI engine optimization, and we're seeing our AI engine referrals growing rapidly. And encouragingly, we're seeing the conversion rate to members to being higher than traditionally from search. And so all of that is reasons to feel that we are able to embrace and adapt to the changes in our marketplace.

Our business model is not built upon anonymous traffic. But known and engaged members and decision makers and influencers of vital technology investments are always going to be looking for unbiased, authoritative trusted content, which is why I wanted to highlight those 45 prestigious online editorial awards in the first half alone. And in an AI world, the old computer science adage of garbage in, garbage out still holds. And our ambition is to be the indispensable partner to the technology industry, connecting buyers to sellers and accelerating their growth.

And at the heart of that strategy is our goal and our commitment to the quality of the information, the insight and the actionable data that we produce as a company, effectively being the quality in and the quality out in this world.

Finally, to close the call and we'll move to Q&A, we are reaffirming our guidance for 2025. We see the sequential momentum that we've seen in Q2 over Q1 continuing into Q3 and then into Q4. I would highlight that, that sequential improvement from Q3 over Q2 is also not a normal pattern. The normal pattern you would have seen in the business in prior years was that Q3 is slightly lower than Q2. We do not believe that will be -- we are not believing that to be the case this year. We're not forecasting that this year. And we are, therefore, reaffirming our guidance for the full year of broadly flat revenues and improving adjusted EBITDA margins of $85 million and plus.

And as I mentioned, really, the core messages to close then. Momentum is building as we progress and unlock the benefits of combination, the breadth scale and the diversity of our new company. We're delighted, as I say again, and delighted for Dan and the team to be filing ahead of schedule and confident in our ability to continue to do so going forward. Look out for the product innovation in the fall. And as I say, we are firmly of the opinion that AI is an opportunity and that we are positioned to embrace and take advantage of an AI-enabled world.

And with that, I will pause and I will open up to questions and answers.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from Joshua Reilly with Needham.

Maybe just starting off in terms of brand consolidation. Can you just discuss the trends you're seeing in Intelligence & Advisory as a large public competitor? Just put up guidance below expectations. I'm curious what you're seeing there in terms of turning customer retention for Omdia.

Josh, yes, thanks for the question. Generally speaking, I would say the kind of momentum and the trend continues. We're seeing our Intelligence & Advisory business perform to our expectations. We're seeing, I think, strong and continuing -- I mean, it's always a business that's had strong customer renewal rate both at a volume and a value level, and we're seeing that continue. There's really no change to that pattern.

I think it's certainly fair to say that new business is probably where the market is the most competitive and challenging. I think that has always been true of this market as well because the Intelligence & Advisory proposition is one which is relatively sticky with customers because you really get deep into their workflows and into their strategic planning cycles. So I mean, I would say our outlook for the year is as expected, no change.

Got it. That's helpful. And then as we think about the implied second half guidance, how much of the sequential improvement in revenue in Q3 is from any type of market recovery that you're assuming relative to the operational improvements that you've already highlighted on the call here?

Well, we're not making assumptions around market recovery in any way, shape or form in our guidance. Really, this is based upon the bookings momentum that we have, the revenue pacing momentum that we have. I think as I mentioned earlier before, one of the things that we moved really quickly to do is to get our management information systems combined, such that we had a kind of transparent and real-time view of bookings from customers and revenue from customers. And so we see that on a daily basis. So it really is all about those KPIs, not any assumptions around market recovery.

Excellent. And then last question for me is, can you just review what did you do exactly to the product for NetLine to drive growth in the lower end, more class conscious end of the market?

Yes, certainly, Josh. I mean, actually the product itself, really, there wasn't a lot of change to the product itself, but there was a lot of change to the go-to-market strategy for the product. And we have built a dedicated go-to-market capability for the product and then positioned it in that sort of volume and cost conscious end of the demand market. And it is, therefore, really is about the emphasis of the go-to-market behind the product and the positioning of the product. The actual product itself, the engineering of the product itself hasn't materially changed.

Our next question comes from Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum.

Just wondering, as you look at the guide and the implied return to growth in the back half of the year, can you give any either qualitative or quantitative commentary on bookings or on the pipeline that give you confidence in that return to growth?

I mean the best I would say is that our bookings momentum and our revenue pacing all support the guidance that we've given you and the confidence and its support of it. As you know, we are a business that are sort of really -- we've mentioned this in the past, actually, Jason, if think about the revenues in key categories, we have what we would describe as the subscription revenues. And the subscription revenues are rated over a year, and therefore -- and we have a high degree of visibility of those revenues because of that.

The second sort of category of revenues are kind of consulting and our advisory revenues. These are project-related revenues where we recognize revenue on a level of effort basis against the backlog of projects that we've kind of booked and on the books. And then the third category of revenues are the kind of more transactional revenues, where we usually get about 90 days visibility through the pipeline in the business, through the sales forces' pipeline. And so when you take the mix of that, we have a relatively good picture of the business.

Appreciate that commentary. Just going back to the AI topic. As you look across your business today, what segments or what products are seeing near-term fundamental benefits from the AI category?

I think probably you'll see this showing up first is really in audience experience and how we actually -- how audiences discover and then consume content as they go through their buying journey. So if you think about our audiences, they are decision makers and influencers of material technology decisions. They require to be well informed and well educated prior to making those decisions. Indeed, we usually spend about 80% of the buying journey researching before they actually dialogue with potential vendor, shortlisted vendors.

And really through AI, we have the ability to change the dynamic of the audience experience. So if you think about the audience experience today, we have over 220 B2B digital properties that inform, educate and shape the market on a daily basis. But the reality is that when you land -- when you discover one of those properties and you land on that property, no matter how you get there, you might get there through a search, you may get there through a direct link, you might get there through a brand that you recognize, largely you're consuming the content on that property. You may then be -- I mean, we obviously encourage our audience members to move around to the network to learn more, to become more immersed in the subject. But actually, that is something which is not -- is easier said than done if the truth be told.

If you think about the use of AI and in particular LLMs, what that really allows us to do is to take all of the content across that estate of 220 sites and put it into a large language model and then allow our audiences to consume content by asking questions and receiving answers from our proprietary LLM, which we built within the organization. And indeed, we're in the process of consolidating all of the content from all 220 estates and, indeed, we will also add our research content to that as well. So you're fundamentally changing the audiences' experience in terms of how they discover and then how they consume and how they become educated in a topic. And I think that's certainly kind of probably, first and foremost, where we will see the influence.

I also mentioned that a lot of what we do in our products is really data manipulation and analysis. So the whole notion of how do you derive intent signals from audience data and their consumption patterns is something that we'll be enhancing both in terms of quality and fidelity through the use of AI models as we move forward in time. So hopefully, those are just two examples of where we can see leveraging AI: first and foremost, from an audience experience perspective; and second of all, from a client value proposition perspective.

That's really helpful, Gary. Just one more for me. So as we get into the second half of the year, we're forecasting an uptick in profitability and cash flow. Just wondering what your balance sheet priorities are across like deleveraging, buybacks, M&A. Any key objectives from you?

Dan, do you want to...

Sure. I mean, as we think about the second half of the year, it's really going to be about identifying opportunities for the business with a focus on delevering and then also just building up cash.

Our next question comes from Eric Martinuzzi with Lake Street.

I saw you called out the Canalys business as part of the uptick in the back half. I'm not familiar with that. Are we talking about on the order of $1 million or $2 million or $3 million to $5 million? What does that conference business kind of kick in when it does show up in Q4?

Eric, yes, good question. So there is a series at the tail end of the year of what's called the Canalys Forums. The Canalys Forums are a prestigious news of conferences. There's one in Europe, one in Asia and one in North America, in the United States. It's really the kind of gathering of the decision makers and the influencers within the channel community of the technology sector. It's really where the distribution titans like TD SYNNEX and Arrow and where the giant resellers like SHI and Computacenter and others come together with the vendors to meet and discuss business.

That all happens in really October, November. The quantum of it is -- I will never be able to give you a quantum. It's between $5 million and $10 million. I'm not going to kind of put too round a number on that, but it's in that range. And as I say, it tends to be -- it's what kind of give the Q4 revenues a bit of that slight skew.

Okay. That's helpful. As far as macro demand, it looks like the brand and intent business, you characterized it as the most volatile. Are you seeing that across your markets? Or is there a difference between, say, North America and rest of the world?

No, I don't think there's any kind of material geographical differences there. I think the pattern is relatively consistent across Europe and APAC. I would say -- I think I've mentioned it, certainly within the business, kind of APAC revenues and the APAC bookings are where -- one of the areas where we've been seeing decline year-on-year. I mentioned earlier on that we've got growth year-on-year in some of our strategic bets. But by implication, other areas must be declining. And I think we found the APAC market challenging this year, but it's not localized to the proposition of brand and intent. I think that's more of a market than a product factor or issue.

Okay. Fair. And then lastly, you had talked about wanting to be the -- work with your customers' platforms of choice. I'm familiar with marketing automation platforms that would be users of Informa TechTarget data, things -- HubSpot, for instance. Can you give me other examples of platforms that you're talking about integrating with?

Yes. I mean, typically, the industry sort of calls them CRMs, MAPs, SEPs, SEPs being sales enablement platforms. So you've mentioned, the CRMs of this world are Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, et cetera. The marketing automation platforms are the Eloquas and the HubSpots and the Marketos of this world. The sales enablement platforms are things like 6sense and Demandbase and others. Does that help?

Yes. So your sense is you're pretty well there and you'll have it by the end of the year as far as being able to plug in with all of these?

I think certainly by -- at the time of the fall launch, where we're adding three new integrations to the portfolio, I think I said that would be 13 in total. I think that gives us really good coverage of all the major platforms that our customers choose and therefore is good. I mean, obviously, it's a dynamic world. I mean I sort of remember sales enablement platforms didn't exist 5, 6, 7 years ago. The world were CRMs and MAPs at the time, or customer relationship management and marketing automation platforms.

So we're keeping an eye out on that. There are also a couple of what we would call lead management consolidators or lead management consolidation platforms, so the converters of this world and integrate. And they are also -- they're on our list. And so we -- this is really, I think, a clear commitment from the company to integrating into the ecosystems that our customers build and being easy to do business with and facilitates and being seamless to do business with.

Got it. Well, congrats on getting back on a normal reporting cadence.

Thank you, Eric.

Thank you. Those are all the questions we have for today, and so this concludes our call. Thank you all for your participation, and you may now disconnect your lines.

Good afternoon. Thank you for attending today's Informa TechTarget Reports First Quarter 2025 Conference Call and Webcast. My name is Victoria, and I'll be your moderator today. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to pass the conference over to Charles Rennick, General Counsel. Thank you. You may proceed, Charles.

Thank you, Victoria, and good afternoon, everyone. The speakers joining us here today are Gary Nugent, our Chief Executive Officer; and Dan Noreck, our Chief Financial Officer.

Before turning the call over to Gary, we would like to remind everyone on the call of our earnings release process. As previously announced, in order to provide you with an update on our business in advance of the call, we posted a press release to the Investor Relations section of our website and furnished it on an 8-K. You can also find these materials with the SEC free of charge at the SEC's website, www.sec.gov. A corresponding webcast as well as a replay of this conference call will be made available on the Investor Relations section of our website. Following Gary's remarks, the management team will be available to answer questions.

Any statements made today by Informa TechTarget that are not actual, including during the Q&A, may be considered forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties, are based on assumptions and are not guarantees of our future performance. Actual results may differ materially from our forecast and from these forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including those discussed in the Risk Factors section of our most recent periodic report filed on Form 10-K. These statements speak only as of the date of this call, and Informa TechTarget undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events that may arise after this conference call, except as required by law.

Finally, we may also refer to certain financial measures not prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of certain of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measures to the extent available without unreasonable efforts accompanies our press release.

And with that, I'll turn the call over to Gary.

Thank you very much, Charles. And of course, welcome, and thank you all for joining the call today. As always, investing the time is very much appreciated. If I may, a few words of context or introduction, first and foremost, to be clear, what we're going to talk about today are preliminary Q1 2025 results. They are subject to final review by our independent registered accountants. The matter that's outstanding is the conclusion on impairment and the consequent income tax expenses associated. And therefore, what you will have seen in our release is effectively a range, a high and a low as it's described, both on the subject of the impairment and the income tax expenses.

It is our aim to file the [ Q1 Q ] shortly after the July 4 already. And from there, we expect that our Q2 will be filed on or before the 14th of August, which will put us back on schedule. And in that Q2, as you'll have seen in the release in those Q2 filing, we do anticipate recording a further noncash goodwill impairment, which reflects the current depressed market capitalization.

If I can then just talk about the headlines of those preliminary results, I would -- I mean, first of all, the first headline really is that the Q1 revenues were in line with our expectations in our previous guidance and on a combined company basis, revenues declined by 6% year-on-year. And as we've highlighted, we see improving momentum as we go through the second quarter to the end of the first half, and we're expecting a mid-single-digit decline at the half year. In those Q1 results, we posted an adjusted EBITDA of $3 million.

The second highlight is that we were reaffirming our full year guidance. And our full year guidance being that revenues will be broadly flat on a year-on-year basis on a combined company basis and that we will post improving adjusted EBITDA of $85 million plus.

The third highlight I would describe as really a bit of an update on the combination program and the fact that we are combining our pace as we seek to lay the foundations for growth as we move forward in time for the future years. In particular, that those initial foundations focused on establishing leadership and reporting lines across the organization to ensure that we give colleagues clarity early on and establishing our new operating model as a business. And then from there, the next phase was really about us looking at the product strategy and the product road map and the product portfolio, and then simplifying our go-to-market structure and ensuring that we had clear market priorities and clear product priorities as we move forward.

On that go-to-market structure and those priorities, we talk about our focus on our key client accounts and the investments that we've made to ensure that those customers are effectively addressed and giving us the opportunity to uncover, identify and address and then deliver against new business opportunities, new growth opportunities within those customers and improve the client experience. We also similarly talked about our market focus and a priority for us in addressing the cybersecurity sector.

And then the last thing I would say about in terms of the headlines of the release is really about our ongoing confidence in the long term. We still believe that this is an incredibly attractive end market, the intersection of the technology sector and B2B marketing is a large $20 billion addressable market with many dynamics that we believe are favorable to our company, and in our ability to compete and win in that market through the breadth and the scale and the diversity that the combination affords us as we bring the companies together. And that has been no more so. I think that confidence has only been reinforced in the recent customer conversations that we've been having.

In particular, over the last couple of weeks, we had the opportunity to host a number of our most valuable customers at Cannes and Nice. And similarly, we also hosted our ROI Summit with over 130 customers in London. And in all of those conversations, I was continued to be encouraged that what we are proposing is really leaning into the needs and the wants of our largest customers. We talked therefore about where we see the growth coming from, where we see that long-term growth coming from, first and foremost, in increasing our penetration of the enterprise IT market. And then beyond that, we talked about the lever that is international expansion and the fact that 40% of our addressable market sits outside of the United States.

We talked about the industry vertical technology market, which is actually demonstrating robust health at the moment. These are technology markets that are specific to given industry verticals, whether that be automotive industry or the telecommunications industry or the financial services industry, et cetera.

And then we talked about our ability to create new products and bring those to market. And then finally, the fifth growth lever, which is as cash builds and our strength builds our ability to deploy capital to grow inorganically.

We also talked about in the release AI as an opportunity. We believe that the phenomenon that is artificial intelligence is a huge opportunity for our business. And first and foremost, it is a market. Our own Omdia analysts predict that the market for artificial intelligent products, services, tools, systems, however you would describe it, will be about a $190 billion market in and of itself by the end of 2028.

And of course, as a business, it's our role to inform, to educate the buy side of the industry as they seek to make buying decisions, procurement decisions. And of course, it's our role to then connect the sales to the industry to those buyers. And that is the heart of our business, and therefore, having a new robust technology market is a fabulous opportunity for us.

We also see a huge opportunity in terms of the nature of our business and what we do and the use cases that exist for AI, both generative and agentic and other forms of it, lend themselves to our ability to improve our effectiveness and increase our efficiency and to be able to then turn that into competitive advantage in the marketplace. And we are working diligently to do that. And we also believe that we can see ways in which actually through the application of AI to our existing products and to new products that we have in our road map that we can make those products more competitive, more functional, more feature-rich and more competitive.

The last thing we talk about in the release is really -- it's something which is, I think, is discussed regularly with our customers and with investors, and actually within the company as a whole is the way in which AI is changing how the world discovers and consumes information with a shift from the kind of traditional search to AI-enabled platforms. And we are strengthening our capabilities in artificial intelligence engine optimization. And actually, we're learning that much of the skills and the knowledge and the experience we have in search engine optimization are highly applicable there.

We will, of course, continue to invest in those search engine optimization skills because we believe that they are still very relevant moving forward. But also a key point that we wanted to make clear is that we also continue to invest in the many other audience development and engagement strategies that we have at our disposal as a business. And for example, the Industry Dive outbound newsletter model, the BrightTalk and NetLine partnership models that exist. And of course, the access to the rich first-party data from Informa PLC and the events businesses which we believe underlines the strength and diversity and our approach to building and nurturing audiences and then creating that permission first-party data, which underpins all of our products and services.

I think I'll pause there and see if there are any questions or comments.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Joshua Reilly with Needham & Company.

Maybe just starting off here, what gives you confidence in the guidance being unchanged from the prior call that you can improve revenue sequentially in the second half of the year to hit the full year implied revenue guidance of roughly unchanged revenue? And how much of an improvement in the overall market demand has to occur to hit these numbers versus any operational factors that we should be aware of?

Thank you, Josh. Thank you for your question. Good to hear your voice. Well, certainly, I would say that first and foremost, we're -- within our assumptions and our guidance, we're not expecting any material change to the market outlook. That is not included. Most of what gives us the confidence is the operational improvements that we are making and obviously, the conversations that we're having with our customers in terms of their demands and their intentions. As we highlighted, I think, in the release and subsequent -- in earlier conversations, we acted fast and we've been executing the combination at pace. And we recognized that, that -- there was some disruption, particularly in December and January and maybe early February, and that contributed to the initial -- to the start of the year.

But then we've just seen that as we embedded in that, first and foremost, that go-to-market strategy and in particular, the focus that exists in the -- those larger customers within our portfolio, the shift in resources that we've placed to make sure that we can anticipate their needs, we can intercept and identify opportunities and pull them down and then to deliver the client experience. And what that's delivering for the business is giving us confidence and that's one of the market factors.

The other -- one of the product factors that we mentioned in the previous call is that we talked about the fact that we have been repositioning the NetLine product to address the more cost-conscious volume end of the demand market, and we're seeing really encouraging results from that as well. And then just generally, as the organization beds down and we get into our stride, we're seeing revenue pacing in bookings and the profile of demand from our customers picking up.

Got it. That's helpful. And then as you look at the Informa Tech assets, maybe you just hit on NetLine here for a second, but maybe dive into that a bit more. What, if any, changes are you making to either the go-to-market product or business structures that we should be aware of now that you kind of have the combined company operating as one?

Well, I think if we talk a little bit about on the product, let me talk about on the product front. I mentioned earlier on that we have been moving at pace in terms of the product strategy, the product road map and part of that effort was the rationalization of the portfolio of products and services. That, we started early with our intelligence and advisory products and services. And you will recall that as part of that effort, we have been consolidating what was the Canalys, Wards and ESG products and services underneath the Omdia brand and the effort within the Omdia portfolio. And we're largely -- we largely completed that exercise, which creates a much tighter portfolio of products and services for the marketplace, one I think has much greater product market fit, easier to market, easier to sell, easier for our customers to buy. And that's certainly an effort that is largely complete.

On the brand and content and intent and demand space, we have a similar exercise, which is underway. It's not quite as progressed, but it has good -- it's well underway, and it's got good momentum, and you see similar -- you'll see similar there.

And then as I mentioned on the market side of the equation, as to me -- if I may finish on the product side, there's one other point. Of course, the other thing that we've been looking to do is how do you -- how do we readily cross-sell all of these capabilities to address the needs of our customers across their product life cycle. So whilst each and every one of these individual portfolios of products need to stand up on their own 2 feet, the real power comes from our ability to address our customer needs at scale across their life cycle. And therefore, the next effort really is about how do we then sell them together? How do we position them together? How do we sell them together? And importantly, how do we then deliver them together in an experience that is seamless to the customer? And so that's the last thing I would say maybe about products and services.

And then on the market front, I think I've already mentioned that really, we've said many times that about half of the addressable market, half of the $20 billion addressable market, really fits within the top 200 customers within the marketplace, clients within the marketplace. And therefore, the emphasis that we are placing on serving them, both in terms of our resources deployed, but also in terms of the road map of our products and services and their needs and requirements is a key part of the strategy.

Got it. That's very helpful. And maybe just one last question for me. You highlighted cybersecurity as a key market for you guys that you're doubling down on. What does that mean exactly? And how do you actually increase your market share in that end market?

Yes, absolutely. I mean, obviously, I mean, the cybersecurity market, in other words, the array of new and innovative large and small cybersecurity vendors is an excellent market opportunity for us. At the enterprise level, at the government level, on the buy side, we see no shortage of demand or interest in cybersecurity products and services. I think it's top of mind of almost every Board, it's top of mind of almost every government, how do we secure our data? How do we secure our people? How do we secure -- and so we see that as a very exciting market. And we also believe that the assets that we have at our disposal, both in terms of the audiences that we command and the brands that we own including the partnership and the relationships that we have with Informa gives us a unique position to compete and win in that marketplace. And so it really is about assembling those assets in a way that we can go the cybersecurity vendor community and help them accelerate growth in a very exciting market.

Our next question comes from the line of Eric Martinuzzi with Lake Street.

Curious to know if you've seen a response from your shift in focus in the go-to-market strategy towards the large customer accounts. In other words, since the start of the year, since you've been focusing in a more concentrated manner on large customer accounts, has there been an incremental lift in the pipeline from those accounts?

Eric, thank you. I think -- I mean, the short answer to that question is, yes, I'm very encouraged with the response we've had to that, both in terms of results year-to-date, but more importantly, as we look forward, we see within -- I've talked about addressing the needs of our customers across their product life cycle and across their organization. And actually, within these large accounts, there are many profit pools and budget for us to address with the products and services that we have as a company.

Most of these companies, the beginning of their product life cycle is within their product business unit and product management and product marketing and the way in which they are looking for us to help them shape their -- inform and shape their product strategies, their product road maps, their market strategies, et cetera, et cetera, there are budgets associated with that activity. We then invariably get to the stage where they're looking to release product, either it's a new products or it's a significant enhancement to an existing product. We're then looking to raise awareness for their brand, establish thought leadership in the marketplace. That's usually brand management, it's product management, and there are different budgets associated with that.

You then have the notion of that they need to fill their pipelines with demand for their sales team to deliver a return on that investment and whether that be the direct sales force or their channel sales force or their vertical industry sales force, and they all have separate budgets for us to address with our products and services. And so what you can really see is that we have needs across this product life cycle. There are different budgets across that for the life cycle. And through our increased engagement with our customers, we're getting higher visibility of that. We're able to anticipate and intercept that, and we're seeing some really interesting wins year-to-date, but also some very interesting opportunities in our pipeline.

Okay. And in your press release and in your prepared remarks, you talked about artificial intelligence engine optimization versus search engine optimization. TechTarget has always had a terrific footprint relationship with the Google.com search results. How are you -- the household names in generative AI, the ChatGPTs and the Perplexitys, the Geminis, how are you getting the AI engine optimization to work to TechTarget's favor with those players?

Well, I mean, the first thing is that, I mean, the rules of the game are being written as we speak. In fact, I think -- in fact, you may even argue that the rules of that game are being written and changing as we speak. So that's the first thing. So we are keenly testing and learning within -- in that space. The second thing I would say about that is obviously that there are multiple rules of the game if you like because there is no one major force in that regard. There are many players, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, et cetera. You mentioned a number of those names earliers. So we're playing -- we're learning how to play all of those games.

One of the things that we are beginning to at least feel is that actually our search engine authority actually has a bearing on that -- on the rules of that game and we're keenly looking -- we're keenly watching that. And as I say, really, it's just about having -- I think it's the same curiosity and the same innovation that took us through that leading position in search engine optimization will serve as well as the new rules of the game form, and we have to play. And you can see that -- I think you can see that already in the way in which our content is regularly cited in the top answers in many of the engines.

And maybe the last point I would say about that is we are still fundamentally believe in the value of original, unbiased authoritative content. I'm an old computer scientist by education. And one of the first rules in computer science you are taught is the rule of garbage in, garbage out. And artificial intelligence and large language models are no different to that. We adhere to that rule. And therefore, we believe that the rule that we will play in ensuring that there is quality in and therefore, quality out will be an important factor as we move forward.

My final question has to do with the financial kind of high-level color that you've given. If I take the, let's call it, $85 million on the adjusted EBITDA and roughly $490 million of revenue, that speaks to about a 17% adjusted EBITDA margin for the year. Certainly, Q1, I would expect that's going to be the trough here with the 3% adjusted EBITDA margin. But how should we think about the adjusted EBITDA margin progression through the remaining 3 quarters of the year? Because on average, we've got to come up with about 21% for those 3 quarters to achieve the full year outlook.

Eric, this is Dan. So from a modeling perspective, Eric, I think if you look and think about the seasonality of sort of the business is on a combined basis, Q1 is definitely going to be the lowest quarter and then you're going to get sequential growth throughout the remaining period, which is going to allow you to get that sort of outsized trajectory to get those adjusted EBITDA targets that we're closing here in the live.

Our next question comes from the line of Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum.

Gary, wondering if you can provide any green shoots just in regard to the early stages of the combination, like any product categories or any business segments that you're seeing improved demand or higher interest from customers in those products or cross-sell opportunities.

Jason, yes, I mean, look, I think on an individual product level, the first thing I would talk about, of course, is the example of the repositioning of NetLine to the cost-conscious volume end of the market, which is really a market that we didn't particularly play in or focus on. And as I see, that repositioning and the early adoption by customer -- the early acceptance and adoption by customers has proven very encouraging. So we're encouraged by that. That's sort of a slightly individual product level.

I think maybe more collectively what we've really seen is -- and this was reinforced with the conversations that took place at Cannes with our customers, this was reinforced by the conversations that took place with our customers at the ROI Summit in London was really this notion of what we would call branded demand or what was being discussed as branded demand. And as much as that our customers are beginning to realize that they cannot continue to execute their brand activities in isolation of their demand activities. And in particular, their demand activities are poorer for the fact that they are not aligned and integrated to the brand activities. And so that has lent nicely into the fact that as a company, we have the breadth and scale to actually address the brand strategy and the brand requirements of our customers and the intent and the demand capabilities of our customers and put those things together.

And indeed, just earlier on this week, I would say today, but it wasn't, it was earlier on this week, we had another really interesting win where we were seeing a combined offer of brand capabilities and intent and demand capabilities to serve our customers' requirements. And I think we're increasingly seeing our customers understand the power of that and lean into that.

Okay. Appreciate that. I wanted to maybe hop on or piggyback off the last question. I mean you gave some good indications of the revenue trends through the first 5 months of the year. Curious if you can give any color on how profitability is tracking through the first 5 months.

Yes. So Jason, we haven't given any specific guidance, but if you think about how the business has sort of trended historically, with revenue growth comes high incremental margins, I think we would see that sequentially from Q1 to Q2, and through the first 5 months.

Okay. One last one for me, just on AI. Curious how the AI opportunity manifests today and then how that changes over the course of the next year.

Gosh, forecasting the next year with AI is an interesting thing. Certainly, I mean, how it manifests itself today is first and foremost as a market in and of its self and addressing it as a market. I mean it's now becoming a really live market. I've been watching the AI market for 4, 5 years now. And certainly, I would have said that up until now, there was a lot of heat and light in it, but not a lot of enterprises or governments deploying serious capital on the subject. And I think that's beginning to change in time, and therefore, that is an opportunity for us here and now.

And then I think, as I said, the second thing I mentioned was the whole notion of efficiency. How do we deploy AI within our editorial capability? How do we deploy AI within our research and analytics capability? How do we deploy AI in our content creation and our data analytics? How do we deploy AI in go-to-market motions? And -- but actually, I mean, there are many use cases across the business. I was experimenting and deploying AI in the business. There are many cases actually within the business where that is now in production and having an operational impact in the business.

And as I said earlier on, I would say that most of the early AI generative and agentic AI use cases lend themselves incredibly well to the nature of our business in terms of what we do and how we do it.

That will conclude today's call. Thank you for your participation, and enjoy the rest of your day.

Thank you, Victoria. Thank you all.