Time to Take a Ride with Uber? - InvestingChannel

Time to Take a Ride with Uber?

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Top Software Application Stock Searches This Month

0 1 2
Rank Name Searches
“#1” Shopify “111,254”
“#2” Exela Technologies “87,286”
“#3” Uber “68,298”
“#4” Salesforce “50,502”
“#5” Ideanomics “46,138”

Everything Old Is New Again

The other day, we had DISH Network (DISH)’s Sling TV on in The Juice’s LA office. 

While watching Married at First Sight stop judging! we were miffed at the constant commercial interruptions. It’d been so long since we’d seen a commercial while streaming other than the ones you skip past on YouTube. 

It felt like the bygone days of cable television… but worse. 

Often, there was no clear break between the show’s content and the ads. Too abrupt of a (non)transition. The ads were repetitive. Same ones every break. And often repeats of the same ad during the same break

Most troubling? There was no personalization. Other than election ads, the stuff DISH showed us via Sling wasn’t relevant. 

You mean to tell us DISH can’t collect some basic demographic data to target viewers better? 

This is what we’re paying $50 a month for? Commercial-littered streaming that reminds us of the cord we cut, but worse? 

It comes as no surprise that:

  • DISH lost 55,000 Sling TV subscribers in Q2. 
  • Overall, DISH shed 719,000 pay-TV subs (Sling and satellite combined) in the first half of 2022.
  • Sling is down to a paltry 2.2 million subs and DISH satellite 7.8 million as of the end of June. 

We wouldn’t touch DISH stock with your 10-foot pole. 

The company reports Q3 earnings Thursday. If anything noteworthy happens, we’ll write home and to you about it. 

Now, an update on a company about to roll out what we think will be excellent, even useful, advertising with a stock we’d fight you over.

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Time to Take a Ride with Uber?

Key Takeaways:

  • Uber’s push into targeted advertising gives us confidence. 
  • While traditional taxis have been showing ads to riders forever, this is different. 
  • Within a few years, Uber could be the Amazon of its space, making the stock a strong long-term speculative buy. 

 

A couple weeks ago, The Juice asked, Can Canada Get Uber High?

On the heels of Uber’s move to sell weed in Toronto, we said:

Uber needs to capture the rider’s imagination and effectively occupy their idle time in the backseat. Every one of us is glued to our phone screen when sitting in an Uber. 

We’d never ghost you, especially on the day after Halloween, so here’s the latest. 

Uber reported Q3 earnings this morning:

  • It had a bigger loss than analysts expected. 
  • It beat analyst expectations on revenue. 
  • EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) also beat expectations. Uber guided higher on this metric for Q4. 

This was good. But good, bad, or in between, it’s just one earnings report. 

For Uber, that’s a blip on the long-term radar screen. If the Q3 report wasn’t good, we’d still be long-term bullish. 

Because…

By “capture the rider’s imagination,” we meant via advertising partnerships with big brands that leverage Uber’s user data to deliver targeted deals and branded content. 

Coincidentally, minutes after we published our idea, Uber sent out this press release: “Uber Launches Dedicated Advertising Division to Serve the World’s Biggest Brands.”

This move screams Amazon.com (AMZN)

Take your bread and butter (books for Amazon and rides for Uber) and logically extend your tentacles into other aspects of your captured and maybe even loyal customer’s life. 

So it’s no coincidence the person Uber picked to head its new ad division comes from all together now, with harmony Amazon. Here’s what Uber said:

Journey Ads are the latest initiative from a dedicated team formed at Uber this year under advertising veteran Dr. Mark Grether, previously with Amazon Advertising […] Leveraging Uber’s first-party data and insights across its mobility and delivery businesses presents the world’s biggest companies with compelling new surfaces and closed-loop attribution to reach Uber’s audience of 122 million monthly active users.

Journey ads. We love that. 

Broadly speaking, this is nothing new. Traditional taxis have been showing ads in the backseat for years. But there’s a huge difference here: the first-party data and insights

When you’re Ubering (like Google, Uber has become a noun and verb, another great sign), Uber can put relevant ads in front of you because, unlike DISH and taxis, Uber knows so much about you from demographics, trips, Uber Eats orders, and other data you constantly feed its servers. 

According to Uber, it’s already working:

Journey Ads place relevant brand content and offers in front of purchase-minded audiences as they transact throughout their journey – while waiting for their driver and during their trip. Over 40 marquee brands have already partnered with Uber to run Journey Ads including NBCUniversal, Heineken, and United Artists Releasing. With one-hundred percent share of voice during the entire trip, early results show that consumers were exposed to the ad content for approximately two minutes, resulting in two to six times the brand-performance lift compared to other benchmarks.

 

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The Bottom Line: Uber reminds us of Amazon back in the day. Soaring revenue (boosted by the post-pandemic return to normal life) alongside significant losses. 

For years, AMZN bears chided the company and stayed away from the stock on these irrational fears. They used traditional metrics to judge a company unlike anything we’d seen before. 

This stubborn approach didn’t work out well, especially if these people shorted AMZN along the way. Though we bet they didn’t have the balls to bet against Bezos. 

amazon

Source: Google Finance

Amazon aside, The Juice loves that Uber is (a) diversifying its revenue stream even more and (b) optimally using its treasure trove of rider data. 

At just under $27 a share, Uber trades 45% lower than its 52-week high. 

It’s the perfect stock to buy a little bit of here and there and add more aggressively on dips. 

Because there will be dips, particularly when the company’s detractors freak out over spending and lack of profits. Just like the people who never got Amazon did.

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