Q4 2024 CEO Letter
Reklaim Q4 2024 CEO Letter: Privacy, Profitability, and the AI-Driven Ad Market
Chapter 4, 2024
Neil Sweeney, CEO, Reklaim Ltd.
“I know that I know nothing.” - Socrates
Since Reklaim’s inception in 2019, I’ve viewed each quarter as a chapter in a longer narrative — a story set against the backdrop of a transforming data economy moving increasingly toward consumer inclusion. When we launched Reklaim, we did so with the belief that privacy, transparency, and consumer control would eventually upend the way data is transacted. This belief has proven correct in the advertising and media business five years later. You would be hard-pressed to find anything impacting this industry more than privacy. Google’s removal of the cookie. The ownership battle of TikTok. The debate around genetic data from a bankrupt 23&Me, to privacy violations for data brokers and publicly traded companies. These are all rooted in privacy. Privacy is not going backward; it's accelerating.
Chapter 4 of 2024 does more than close the fiscal year — it marks a shift in the ecosystem. Industry-wide, we are seeing regulatory acceleration, the rise of AI-driven automation, and consolidation among indistinguishable legacy players. These are not independent trends. They are interconnected, and the companies best positioned for the future are those with privacy-first systems, AI at their core and inherently differentiated.
As always, my goal with these letters is to provide insight, not only into Reklaim’s performance and positioning but also the broader macro signals that will impact the companies in and around this space. This is a running commentary on where I believe the market is going and how we intend to lead within it. I would encourage you to read previous ‘chapters’ (Q3, Q2) to see how these themes have unfolded over each quarter. Like any good book, each chapter brings something new, with just enough suspense around the corner to make you ask: What’s next?
Each of you has a variety of options related to your investments. I appreciate your continued support and participation in Reklaim. Enjoy Chapter 4.
N
Reklaim 2024
"No great thing is created suddenly." - Epictetus
In 2024, Reklaim delivered record revenue for the sixth straight year, growing topline by 26% over 2023. We also posted our second consecutive year of profitability, with EBITDA of $831,250. Q4 was our strongest quarter ever, with revenue up 25% over Q4 2023 and gross margins expanding by 5 points to 82%. That margin expansion was driven by our growing ‘deal’ revenue — a vertically integrated media buy that combines Reklaim data with publisher inventory. This vertical alone was up 435% over last year’s Q4.
In 2025, we expect more of the same: profitable growth.
Reklaim isn’t built on M&A roll-ups, promotional IR, or vanity metrics. We focus on fundamentals and growth, funded by cash flow. That’s how we stay in control of our own destiny. In this market, I believe boring — and predictable — is a good thing.
Q4 Ad Market Trends and 2025 Advertising Forecast
“The only thing that is constant is change.” - Heraclitus
In Q4, the advertising market continued expanding, driven by traditional Holiday spending and the one-time injection of US election dollars. To properly understand the market and how the companies within it are performing, it would be wise to look at any earnings in this industry minus election spending. The election was a non-event for Reklaim and drove no material revenue, so our numbers accurately represent Reklaim’s proper position in the market.
In 2024, Publicis, the largest advertising agency in the world, posted growth of 6.3%, with the other holding companies - Omnicom (+5.2%) and IPG (+0.2%), who recently agreed to merge, slightly lower, and WPP declining by 2%. Overall, the advertising market surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in 2024, growing 9.4% from the previous year.
That was then; this is now. The one benefit of writing a Q4 letter in Q2 is that we have better visibility on how 2025 is shaping up and what we can expect for the remainder of the year.
Magna, the intelligence unit of IPG Mediabrands, revised its 2025 U.S. ad spend forecast downward from 4.9% to 4.3% year-over-year. This downgrade, while modest, is meaningful. It reflects a structural unease among brand marketers grappling with a rapidly shifting regulatory landscape and market uncertainty.
This is further corroborated by Reklaim’s proprietary quarterly survey of more than 125 front-line media sellers across Demand Side Platforms (DSPs), ad networks, and data platforms, published this week.
59% reported a decline in advertiser budgets (+5 pts vs. Q3)
5% observed an increase (–5 pts vs. Q3)
36% saw no change (flat vs. Q3)
It’s best to think of this quarterly survey as the ‘VIX’ of the advertising industry — a temperature check from those on the front lines, selling day in and day out. While not deterministic, it’s a solid proxy for where the market is headed, according to the people doing the work. I trust these road warriors more than the analysts watching from the sidelines.
While Reklaim isn’t immune to macro fluctuations, our exposure is limited due to our relative market share. We’re a growth company — expanding share, not defending it. I’ve always preferred to play offence, not defence. The best tonic for broader macro pressure is more sales from new clients. Our go-to-market strategy remains focused on account penetration and category expansion. Combined with increased staffing in 2024, this positions us to maintain our growth rate into 2025.
We offer a privacy-first, differentiated data product that’s quickly shifting from “nice to have” to “must-have” for brands. Privacy — and everything that comes with it — is a tailwind for Reklaim.
U.S. Privacy Regulation Update and Its Impact on Reklaim
“If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it.” - Marcus Aurelius
Privacy is no longer a backdrop. It’s the main storyline.
In Q4, the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) initiated seven enforcement actions against unregistered data brokers. These actions included civil penalties exceeding $50,000 and a clear public message: even the sale of so-called public record data is not exempt if used to generate inferences.
California’s proposed Delete Act is even more consequential. It would fine data brokers $200 per consumer per day for failing to honour deletion and opt-out requests. For context, more than 3,000 data brokers operate in California alone. As I’ve written previously, these firms, despite powering billions in data revenue, are heading to zero, with their budgets inevitably redirected to compliant alternatives.
California is not acting in isolation. States like Texas, Virginia, and others are becoming increasingly aggressive in targeting data brokers and opaque practices.
Other Q4 regulatory momentum includes:
Maryland’s Data Broker Tax and the passage of MODPA, arguably the most stringent privacy legislation in the U.S., which explicitly bans the sale of “sensitive data.”
Delete Act-style legislation is gaining traction in Vermont, Illinois, and Nebraska. It requires that profiles be removed from targeting databases upon consumer request.
Public scrutiny of data asset bankruptcies, such as 23andMe’s potential sale of user DNA data, has reignited debates around data ownership, ethics, and consumer rights.
These aren’t isolated events. They signal a more profound realignment in how data is governed, and more importantly, how regulators and consumers now define ownership.
It’s essential to understand how this inflection point directly impacts Reklaim and why it serves as a catalyst for our future.
The best way to visualize the shift is to examine the traditional data value chain and see what has broken.
In short, demand remains intact, but the delivery mechanism has collapsed.
For two decades, brands accessed data through a sprawling, largely unregulated marketplace. Without consent or consumer visibility, brokers were free to collect, repackage, and sell user data, ranging from ethnicity to purchase intent. Platforms like Oracle or Transunion offered a “grab and go” model where marketers could search, apply, and target with no audit trail, notification, and certainly no compensation to the consumer.
If you were an alcohol brand trying to reach Hispanic audiences on Meta or The Trade Desk, you could log in, search “Hispanic,” and apply a data segment to your media plan — no questions asked. The consumer was a silent, free input, unknowingly powering a trillion-dollar industry.
That world no longer exists.
Today’s data infrastructure is fracturing, and three forces are driving it:
The reclassification of demographic and behavioural data as Sensitive Personal Information (SPI) under laws like CPRA and Washington’s My Health My Data Act means that once-ubiquitous attributes—race, gender, income, location—now require explicit consent to be used.
Civil rights legislation like the Fair Lending Act prohibits discriminatory targeting of financial products. To avoid compliance risk, platforms like Meta have removed categories such as ethnicity and household income altogether, creating a vacuum for any financial brand that relied on that data.
The rise of consent-based frameworks. Data is now largely unusable in compliant environments without a precise mechanism for opt-in and opt-out. Due to the aggregation-first nature of most brokers—what I’ve coined as headless data companies—the challenge is structural.
A headless data company has no consumer interface, no identity verification, no ability to capture consent, and no ability to honour deletion or opt-out requests. This represents 99.99% of the data companies operating in today's trillion-dollar data market. These firms were built for scale, not compliance. Now, their lack of consumer connection makes compliance nearly impossible.
We began highlighting this shift in earlier letters, notably Oracle, the largest of these platforms, which announced its exit from the third-party data business, citing growing privacy pressure and mounting legal exposure, including a class action related to unlawful data collection. If Oracle, with a $500B market cap, can’t make it work, there is no situation where I can see the 3,000 data brokers and hundreds of other platforms making it work. Oracle’s retreat was the first major sign that the old model was no longer sustainable. More exits are on the way.
The result? The old infrastructure for scalable targeting has crumbled. Demand still exists, but supply is now fragmenting behind regulation, consent, and consumer control.
This is where Reklaim fits in.
Each time a data category is reclassified or restricted, the supply chain breaks. Brands and platforms are forced to find a compliant partner, which is Reklaim’s advantage.
Because our data comes directly from the user, we manage the full life cycle of consent, both the opt-in and opt-out, while providing brands with the targeting fidelity they still need to execute their campaigns.
Reklaim supports all state-level privacy regulations across the U.S. Our infrastructure was built for this moment, designed from the ground up to be interoperable with the modern ad ecosystem. Reklaim data can be deployed across every major social platform to close compliance-driven targeting gaps. We also support integrations with more than two dozen demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms (SSPs), and data management platforms (DMPs), ensuring that compliant, consented data can flow wherever media is bought or sold.
In a world where the delivery mechanism has collapsed, Reklaim has increasingly become the replacement.
Agentic AI: From Workflow to Workforce Replacement
“Man conquers the world by conquering himself.” - Zeno
Artificial intelligence, specifically Agentic AI, redefines what constitutes “work” in media. Unlike traditional AI, which reacts to prompts, Agentic AI acts independently — analyzing problems, devising strategies, and executing tasks with minimal human input.
It autonomously transforms data into action. For advertising, the implications are massive: Most agency functions—media planning, segmentation, optimization—are logic-based, and that logic is now programmable.
This is what makes the proposed IPG–Omnicom merger so baffling. Framed as a strategic scale play, it’s clearly a defensive consolidation of legacy infrastructure. The crown jewel? Axiom, a headless data platform that is functionally identical to what Oracle just walked away from. A $31 billion price tag for more of the same, and I believe more liability. Puzzling. In an AI-first world, merging two slow-moving giants doesn’t create leverage — it compounds inertia.
The advertising industry is about to undergo its most significant transformation—not because of market decline but because of an explosion in efficiency. Those who treat AI as a bolt-on will fall behind, while those who build with it at the core will accelerate.
Reklaim is building for the latter. Our roadmap assumes less manual work, not just for efficiency but to match the velocity of the market we’re entering.
Closing Thoughts
Reklaim exits 2024 with record financial performance, operational discipline, and clear strategic momentum. However, metrics aside, the world we envisioned five years ago is a reality.
We know you have many choices regarding investing in stocks, and we appreciate your support of Reklaim.
See you in Chapter 1, 2025.
Neil Sweeney
CEO, Reklaim Ltd.
Publicly traded on the TSX.V under the symbol MYID and on the OTC as MYIDF
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