Programmatic advertising on course to reap rewards for engage:BDR

Engage:BDR (ASX: EN1) has published its most recent performance figures indicating continued growth within the programmatic advertising sector.

The ad company said it had “continued to scale” going into August 2019 with revenue growing at a rate of 15% compared to July. On a year-on-year basis, its August revenues of $1,663,175 exceeded last year’s performance by 50%.

Furthermore, its performance in the second half of the current financial year exceeded the previous year by 39% with engage:BDR’s management now expecting September to “continue along the same trajectory”.

In addition to today’s figures, engage:BDR published its half-year report earlier this week, which is subject to review by auditors. Its consolidated net profit after tax (NPAT) for the first half of this year underwent a “significant improvement”, climbing from a loss of $4.2 million to a loss of $886,315.

“The company is on its way to profitability, revenue growth and balance sheet strength in the near term,” the company said.

Other notable milestones for the ad company was the fact that one of its most significant units – AdCel – has now achieved profitability with NPAT totalling $120,000.

In addition, current liabilities and current assets improved by $9.8 million, payables were reduced by $5.3 million and current assets increased by $4.5 million.

Engage:BDR acquired AdCel in July 2018, citing strong synergies with the company’s products and mobile performance strategies. Under the integration, AdCel deployed a new lightweight software development kit (SDK) which provides an additional way to connect with publishers.

The AdCel acquisition came during a period of heightened integration activity for engage:BDR with the company announcing a flurry of integrations into its proprietary programmatic ad platform.

Latent technical issues

On a slightly sour note, the company revealed that within the first two days of August 2019 it was forced to suspend its largest single publishing relationship – a contract that was contributing around $10,500-15,000 per day in revenue, due to the “ad quality scanning issues” that had previously affected its commercial performance.

Eight campaigns supplied by engage:BDR’s advertisers were “flagged as being miscategorised” over a three-month period, which could potentially cause issues for publishers and their internal sales teams.

In consideration of these technical issues, the ad company chose not to include revenue numbers from this relationship for the month of August with the contract “still paused”.

Given the commercial value of the relationship, engage:BDR’s engineering team and external scanning partners are reportedly “working around the clock” to find solutions to resolve the challenges.

As and when this technical issue is resolved, engage:BDR said it expects to immediately generate between $300,000 and $500,000 in additional monthly revenue.