Acast AB (publ) (ACAST) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome, everyone, to Acast Capital Markets Day for 2025. My name is Lizzy Pollott, I'm Acast's Chief Communications and Brand Officer, and I'm your host for today. Over the next few hours, we'll present our updated financial targets and provide a comprehensive company update. We've prepared a detailed agenda to give you a clear picture of our strategic direction and future growth. So we'll start with our updated financial targets. Then we'll give a brief overview of Acast. We'll provide an overview of the dynamic podcast market, followed by a walk-through of our strategy. We'll showcase our innovative product offering. And finally, we'll conclude with a review of our financial metrics. And you'll be hearing from our leadership team: Ross Adams, our Chief Executive Officer; Emily Villatte, our Chief Financial Officer and Deputy CEO; Greg Glenday, our Chief Business Officer; and Matt MacDonald, our Chief Product Officer. We encourage you to submit any questions you may have via the Q&A box below as we go. Add a question and click submit throughout, and we'll address them at the end of each of the strategy, product and finance sections. Furthermore, we're so happy to have you here with us in London at our state-of-the-art Acast Studios London, our new U.K. headquarters in the heart of Old Street. But enough from me, I'm going to pass you over to our CEO, Ross Adams, who will get started with our new financial targets.

Hi, everyone. Really happy to have you with us today. My name is Ross Adams, and I'm Acast CEO, normally based out of our US HQ in New York. But today, I'm pleased to be able to come live from our Acast studios in London. This morning, we presented new financial targets. We have provided 2 targets related to 2025 and a midterm growth target extended to 2028. Our financial targets are as follows: Our financial target for the period 2025 to '28 is to deliver organic net sales CAGR of 15%. We are targeting an adjusted EBITDA margin between 3% and 5% in 2025, demonstrating our focus on continuous profitability improvement. We are committed to generating a positive cash flow from operating activities in 2025. The target affirm our dedication to delivering continued profitability improvements alongside strong revenue growth. Let's take a closer look at our business, the market we're active in and the strategy we have in place to achieve these goals. So for those of you who are newer to Acast or should you need a reminder, we are the leading independent podcast network globally. In the United States, we hold the position of second largest network in terms of audience. Acast was founded upon true innovation, creating the podcast market as we know it today, when we invented dynamic ad insertion in podcasting back in 2014, fundamentally changing how advertising is delivered within the medium. We're widely recognized as the thought leader in the podcast space. Our marketplace hosts more than 140,000 podcasts, which together generate over 1 billion listens quarterly and reached more than 100 million uniques per month. We achieved this scale through having significant global reach while also maintaining a strong local presence in 15 markets. Now let's talk a little more about how we've shaped the podcasting landscape over the last 11 years. Dynamic ad insertion was our very first innovation. And I'd argue the modern podcast market today would not exist as it does. When we started, there was a fundamental lack of data in the podcasting space. It was a mass medium, but without the insight to back it up and attract those lucrative ad dollars, we changed that. We introduced robust data measurement and standardization, providing advertisers with the transparency and accountability they needed. This legitimized the podcast advertising, leading to increased expenditure and growth in the industry. Then, more recently, we made podcasting even more accessible with the introduction of our self-serve platform for advertisers. In short, we built the access and laid the groundwork for scalability that has allowed the podcast industry to flourish. And during this time, we hit some important milestones as a company from starting in Sweden, then expanding into markets of the U.S., U.K. and Australia. We became a public company in 2021 and on our journey have made several key strategic acquisitions to bolster our strategy. Firstly, Pippa, the hosting platform for creators of all sizes, then RadioPublic, the leaders in creator tools, Podchaser, the industry's intelligence engine and most recently Wonder Media Network, which is at the forefront of branded content in the U.S. This vision innovation led us to announcing full year profitability for 2024, a real milestone for any company. Essentially, we are an interconnected ecosystem bringing together creators who produce compelling content to attract listeners using their creativity to build a loyal audience base. And this high-quality content, of course, attracts audiences who are eager to consume it. Sizable and engaged audiences are, of course, highly attractive to advertisers seeking and paying for efficient reach and engagement at scale. And we underpin this with the widest data set in podcasting through our data company, Podchaser. This allows us to drive discovery for podcasts, matchmaking between advertisers and audiences and of course, creating revenues for both creators and Acast. So Acast empowers podcast creators and advertisers with global reach, strong monetization and cutting-edge technology, all at an unmatched scale in the podcasting industry. Now, let's take a brief look at our core revenue streams. We offer brands a range of advertising options to suit different campaign goals. We have host-read sponsorships, which are in-show reads delivered natively by podcast host. Traditional audio ads using preproduced audio creative created by the brand themselves to reach listeners. For brands looking for that deeper engagement, we provide branded content and omnichannel solutions, allowing for immersive campaigns that extend across multiple platforms. The business model for our advertising revenues is a revenue share model, where we split revenues between 50% to 70% with the creators depending on the ad format. And beyond advertising, we have non-ad revenue streams, including hosting, distribution and data analytics, our SaaS revenues. There are different ways to buy advertising in podcasts, Firstly, directly through the Acast sales team. Secondly, you can access the market through our programmatic channel. And then finally and perhaps most efficiently, there's an Acast self-serve advertising platform. So just like any other digital media buy across platforms like Meta or YouTube, this is the fastest and easiest option. It's a fully automated solution and available at any budget level. I'll now proceed to examine the dynamics of the podcasting market. The podcast advertising market is experiencing significant structural growth. Globally, podcast ad spending has grown at a compound annual growth rate of around 33% since 2017, and projections indicate it will reach USD 5 billion by 2027, reflecting an 8% CAGR for the upcoming 3 years. Now, Acast hasn't just ridden that wave. We've outpaced it. Acast has significantly outperformed the overall global market growth during 2017 to 2024, achieving a sales CAGR of 56% versus the previously mentioned 33% for the market. And this has been enabled by our strong market positioning, where our strategy on supporting the open ecosystem has proved effective, which coupled with our gradual market expansion has spurred substantial revenue growth. So what are the trends that are driving this market growth? Well, firstly, podcast consumption is booming. The number of people listening to podcast continues to increase at a very stable rate. 2021 saw a bump in many regions, but today's level is even higher. In our largest markets, the U.S., u.K. and Sweden, over 40% of the adult population is now listening to podcasts on a monthly basis and this is a number that continues to grow. There is still a significant gap to radio, but podcast consumption continues to gain ground, which is providing a foundation for the overall podcasting market to grow. However, ad spend hasn't caught up with the increase in consumption. So looking at the podcast consumption share of total ad-supported media podcasts represent around 4.5%. However, when looking at the share of ad spend, it only represents about 1%. Podcast offers several advantages over other media, and there is no reason for the gap between ad spend and consumption to be bigger than in other formats. Audio has been traditionally broadcast, so one to many, and podcasting is one-to-one like traditional digital. Podcasts are sourced, not served, meaning that podcast listeners are active participants curating their own experience rather than being served content by, say, an algorithm. Podcasts often cater to niche interests allowing advertisers to precisely target specific demographics. In a much less cluttered ad environment provides a higher share of voice. So unlike other forms or some other forms of digital advertising, podcast ads also have high completion rates as listeners are less likely to skip or block them. Even though podcast ad spending has doubled since 2020, it still needs to increase 4.5x to match the share of podcast consumption, providing substantial headroom for growth. The fact that ad expenditure trail consumption is not due to podcasting not being an efficient medium for advertising. In fact, we see that companies that invest in podcast advertising see exceptional returns. In an economic study using Swedish data between 2021 and 2023, it was found that podcasting saw an average short-term return on ad spend of 4.2x compared to an average of 2.7x across all formats. So this basically means that 1 second invested in podcasting generates SEK 4.2 in direct sales. The analysis also showed that podcasting offers leading returns when you factor in the long-term impacts of -- from brand awareness and consideration in addition to direct sales impact with a long-term ROAS of 4.9x versus an average of 3.7x across all media. And this is evidence of product market fit and economic utility, which drives monetization. And as the leading independent podcast company, we see a responsibility in unlocking this market potential by closing the ad spend gap, and we will come to address how we are positioned to do that throughout the day. Now, let's look at Acast's market position. We hold a leading market share in the U.K. at 60% to 65% and in Sweden at 40% to 50%. In the U.S., while our current market share is 2% to 3%, we see vast growth potential to continue growing our reach and scale in the market. Driven by rising consumption and untapped advertising potential, the podcast market is ripe for growth. Acast at its core is uniquely positioned to deliver exceptional value to creators and advertisers alike and will be the main beneficiary from these trends. We didn't just join the podcasting revolution. We ignited it. We are podcast experts and have been shaping the commercial podcast industry, giving us unmatched expertise and data that we use to match make the right advertisers, with creators and their valuable audiences and are leaders in a very specific niche focused on podcasting in all its form. With exclusive monetization rights to over 140,000 shows, we possess a network of unmatched scale and content. This forms a 2-sided marketplace where extensive network of creators acts as a powerful magnet for advertisers. We are innovation leaders. Our relentless innovation in ad tech and content creation has redefined the podcast experience. And we are delivering leading solutions that resonate with both advertisers, creators and their audiences. We are podcast first, but not podcast only. We are able to expand beyond traditional audio podcast in creating immersive experiences to amplify brand narratives and drive deeper engagement across multiple channels. This holistic approach sets us apart from our competitive set. We're not confined by borders. We attract and help talent grow across the world and provide advertisers the opportunity to reach a global audience. Our established infrastructure and expertise further allows us to scale operations globally. We're now turning to have a closer look at the U.S. market, which represents a significant opportunity for us. Let's start with the sheer size of the U.S. podcast advertising market, forecast to reach USD 2.2 billion by 2024 according to the IAB. It's not just big, it's more than half of the entire global market. This scale alone presents a large potential for growth. Now let's examine the dynamics. As the graph illustrates, podcasting is structurally growing. The yellow line shows the U.S. podcast ad revenue growth. Note the consistent upward trend even amidst fluctuations in overall advertising expenditure, which is the blue line and GDP growth, which is the light blue line. And while we acknowledge that the podcast market is subject to cyclical swings in the broader advertising landscape, the underlying growth trajectory is undeniable, reflected by the fact it is maintained growing even in macroeconomic downturns. This presents a unique window of opportunity for us to capitalize on the sustained expansion of podcast advertising in the U.S. and reflects why our momentum in the U.S. is important. This chart demonstrates our strong performance in the U.S. The dark blue line represent Acast U.S. growth year-over-year, reflecting our outperformance compared to the overall U.S. podcast ad market growth. Over the past 5 years, we have outpaced the market with a CAGR of almost 50% versus the overall market CAGR of 25%. Importantly, we saw an acceleration of growth in 2024, where we delivered 37% growth versus the projected market growth of 12%. This reflects that our strategic initiatives targeted investments and execution are driving market share gains and is a testament to our competitive advantage and ability to capitalize on the potential the U.S. podcast advertising landscape offers. We are committed to building on this momentum. We'll continue to innovate, invest and execute to further expand our market share. The U.S. podcast advertising market is notably fragmented with no single entity holding a dominant share. And this landscape features a diverse mix of players, established legacy and satellite radio companies, podcast platforms with varying specialties and a large contingent of both broadcast to podcast and podcast native publishers. This fragmentation, while complex, presents a significant opportunity, especially advantageous is the fact that many competitors lack a singular, dedicated focus on podcasting. Allowing us to capitalize on a more specialized approach. We're able to stand out in this market, thanks to all pure-play podcast experts benefiting from our positioning as a leading friendly independent supporting an open ecosystem. We have deep podcasting expertise and offer a variety of solutions for advertisers. We leverage our podcast assets to compete strategically with the larger organizations. We have a global reach enabling advertisers to reach global audiences, while also enabling creators and publishers to monetize their content internationally. This is a big USP, especially in the U.S. market. We are leading the way in buying audiences in podcasting, which has helped us to establish a distinct position in the U.S. market. Agencies recognize us as a unique podcasting company, unlike some of our competitors, which are typically considered for a specific show in media plans. So thanks to enabling audience buying, Acast is appearing on major media plans for brands like Capital One. We're podcast first, but our holistic approach extends beyond audio. We craft immersive multichannel experiences that amplify brand narratives and drive deeper engagement, which is a key differentiator in the market. The strength of these differentiators is evidenced by our growth outpacing the U.S. market. So to summarize, we are active in a structurally growing market where podcasts are a fundamental shift in media consumption. And we're building the infrastructure for their long-term growth. We are the global leader in a niche market, riding the trend of streaming media in symbiosis with the largest tech players, where we are benefiting from open ecosystem strategy. Global podcast ad spend is expected to grow at an 8% CAGR and still has room to grow by 4x to 5x long term to match the consumption levels due to audience attention far outweighs ad spend. We're capitalizing on this massive untapped potential. Podcasting provides exceptional returns and has several characteristics that makes the medium, particularly interesting for advertisers. And we have responsibility in closing the gap between consumption and spend benefiting creators, advertisers and ultimately, Acast. Building on our history of exceeding market growth, we intend to maintain this momentum in the years to come. We have a strong positioning with leading market positions in the U.K. and Sweden and large potential to continue expanding our scale and reach in the U.S. market. Now let's delve into the specific actions we will take to leverage these trends. Before I do that, let's hear from one of our creators. [Presentation]

Always nice hearing from one of our wonderful creators. We're now moving on to the strategy section, outlining our key growth initiatives. Our actions are guided by a clearly defined purpose, which is articulated in our vision, mission and of course, our strategic framework. We envision a world where the power of podcast stories connects creators, brands and audiences in meaningful ways. We believe in the unique ability of stories to foster connection and build communities. Our mission is to be the best in the world at matchmaking human storytellers with their valuable audiences and advertisers, and we will leverage our leading position in audio podcasting, while evolving to also connect creators, audiences and advertisers across the extended channels of podcasts and aim to continue outgrowing the market. Let's start by showing how we are positioned to grow with our creators. We foster and grow relationships with podcasters of all sizes and types around the world. Our portfolio of creators ranges from the biggest personalities like Peter Crouch and Gigli Squad to established networks like Ted audio collective and news publishers such as The Economists, The Guardian and CNN. Of course, we also support niche shows of all types who bring with them, of course, they're very dedicated and loyal communities. And this diverse range of content allows us to connect advertisers with the creators and audiences that perfectly match their needs. We possess the data, tools and market intelligence to strategically prospect and identify shows with valuable audiences. By year-end 2024, our platform hosted over 140,000 shows generating more than 1 billion quarterly listens. And this represents a sevenfold increase in hosted shows over the past 4 years with an average increase of approximately 5,000 shows per quarter during 2024. Existing relationships with agents and creators, coupled with our platform's network effect helps us in attracting top-tier talent. Supported by a global team, we provide comprehensive support to our international base of creators helping them to monetize their content and providing them with the potential to grow, which attracts new creators and shows to our platforms. We've established a strong creator offering. Leveraging our advanced matchmaking and insights capabilities, we enable creators to expand their reach and crucially maximize monetization. To date, we've distributed over USD 440 million to our creators, demonstrating our proven ability to drive significant value. We benefit from our position as a friendly independent championing the open ecosystem. We allow creators to distribute their content openly across the ecosystem, reaching their audiences no matter where their audiences are as the content is available across all large listening and social platforms. We also create unique distribution deals with partners like Amazon, to open up further new revenue streams. We offer the necessary tools needed for creators to manage and publish their content, grow their shows, analyze their performance and ultimately track their revenues. Then, we have our creator network team. Our experts taking care of the most premium in-demand podcasters globally. Our 10-year track record is unique in the podcasting space. And we are a trusted partner for podcasters of all sizes, having pioneered the podcasting industry through ad technology, which has helped us in becoming the leading player in this niche. We further benefit from having a large global reach, around 20% of U.S. produced shows reach an international audience, which is -- and why is this important? This means that we are able to, of course, unlock revenue potential for creators by monetizing them globally and more efficiently than any other player. At Acast, we understand that the creators need diverse and robust ways to monetize their content and that's why we offer a broad range of monetization options, ensuring there's a fit for every podcast and every creators strategy. At the base of our pyramid, we have ads. This is a foundational element allowing creators to generate revenue through targeted advertising integrated seamlessly into their content. Moving up, we offer sponsorships. And this allows for deeper partnerships with brands, creating more integrated and impactful campaigns. Branded content enables creators to collaborate with brands on custom content, providing unique and engaging experiences for their audience. And of course, all of this is designed to enhance the listening experience. Whether it's through a seamless ad integration or compelling branded content, our aim is to ensure that creators can monetize effectively while delivering exceptional value to their audience. Our positioning comes with other positive benefits. Thanks to our international sales team and global creator network team, we can use our relationships with advertisers and data to understand demand for content in specific regions. We can monitor advertiser demand. And if we identify sufficient demand and have access to relevant content in new markets, we can monetize it through automated channels such as programmatic. If it proves successful, we then consider acquiring more content to expand that monetization. So this iterative process allows us to strategically grow our revenue in new markets and provide a potential pathway for geographical expansion with a prudent approach. This strategy has facilitated entries into markets such as Spain and the Netherlands, and is another example of how we benefit from having global operations. Before handing over to our Chief Business Officer, Greg Glenday, I wanted to introduce you to another of our creators and let you hear what he has to say about Acast. Jake Humphrey, host of the high performance podcast. [Presentation]

Thank you, Ross, and thank you, Jake. Good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here presenting to you today. I'm Greg Glenday, the Chief Business Officer at Acast. I'll be presenting our advertiser value proposition, showcasing how we drive impactful results for global brands and detailing our strategic growth plans. We work with advertisers of all sizes, including some of the most recognizable and respected brands in the world from tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Google to household names like Unilever, Airbnb and Disney, we're attracting leading companies across diverse industries. The number of brands and agencies advertising with us continues to grow at a healthy pace. In 2024, we saw a 24% increase in the number of advertisers amounting to more than 3,300 in the year. This expansion reinforces our ability to provide creators with sustainable monetization opportunities. Providing revenue opportunities for Acast while further solidifying our leadership role in bringing new brands into the podcasting space. Besides having new advertisers, we're observing a very compelling trend. Advertiser who partner with us not only return, but progressively increase their spend. In 2024, 65% of our top 500 clients were repeat customers. Notably, these returning clients increased their spending by a significant 30% year-over-year. This demonstrates confidence in our ability to deliver measurable return on ad spend. By consistently delivering these results, we're encouraging advertisers to allocate larger and larger portions of their media budgets to podcast advertising, recognizing it as a critical and effective marketing channel. Our ability to connect advertisers with engaged audiences sets us apart. We've an incredibly strong value proposition for advertisers. By the end of 2024, we reached over 100 million monthly unique listeners, basically meaning we reach 100 million unique people a month. To put that number in context, 100 million unique viewers for a single televised event would be considered a major success, generally only achieved by events like the Super Bowl or the Olympics. We deliver largely exclusive audience, providing unique value that other podcast networks struggle to match. This distinct advantage sets us apart in our broad portfolios in contrast with competitors' top-heavy creator dependent models. Advertisers also come to us due to our global presence, enabling them to tap into international audiences easily. We've pioneered audience buying at scale. This means that advertisers can come to us to Acast to both work with individual shows, but also to buy audiences. This is a very key USP for us, and I'll discuss it in more detail shortly. So advertisers today face challenges with attribution, ad fraud, they're increasingly concerned about made for advertising websites, brand safety and content moderation on platforms like TikTok and X. These concerns have recently intensified with rollbacks for content moderation policies, especially on platforms like Facebook. Podcasting offers a brand safe and high-performing alternative, delivering word-of-mouth at scale. Our effectiveness is directly tied to sales and attribution, demonstrating clear ROAS for advertisers. This is why major advertisers like BetterHelp consistently increased their spending in podcasting and with Acast directly linking the effectiveness of their campaigns with Acast to their subscription growth. We deliver exceptional results within premium environments differentiated by a sought, not served model. Listeners actively choose to consume podcasts like Jake's High Performance show, resulting in high engagement and focused attention, a valuable advantage in today's attention economy. This carries clear value for brands and advertisers. Another factor that sets us apart is that we offer a comprehensive suite of services and buying routes for advertisers, a feature that is largely unmatched in the market. FRocky Mount large omnichannel campaigns where we developed deep custom creative executions to super efficient channels like programmatic and self-serve, we offer performance marketing or direct response. These campaigns are designed to drive specific actions and deliver measurable results by focus on optimizing these campaigns for conversions and return on spend. For those brands seeking efficiency and scale, we provide programmatic solutions. This allows for automated buying and targeting, reaching audiences across a wide range of podcasts. We also offer a self-serve option, empowering advertisers to manage their own campaigns with ease and flexibility via our online marketplace, which is perfect for those who want direct control and real-time optimization. So ultimately, whether you're looking for a highly customized omnichannel strategy or a quick and efficient programmatic buy, Acast has the tools and expertise to meet any advertiser or any strategy. What's really unique to podcasting is that most of the audience's attention remains untapped due to current buying behaviors. Most podcast campaigns have traditionally been planned and bought at the show by show level and not audience first. This is a bias that exists only in podcast planning and not across other digital channels. Nearly half of U.S. podcast advertising spend lands within the top 500 shows. But these shows account for only 12% of the monthly reach meaning that advertisers are missing the opportunity to reach nearly 88% of the addressable podcast audience. While this behavior is common in the very fragmented U.S. market, we have developed a strong capability to overcome it. Solving this will benefit Acast because we're positioned perfectly for this shift as we have a long roster of shows in aggregate provide high engagement and results. We are leading the industry in developing this kind of horizontal audience buying. It will also benefit the podcast industry. As the revenue concentration expands to more shows, the industry will be a more viable marketing channel within the media mix for advertisers. Brands, as the brands embrace podcast audiences in addition to individual shows, they will have stronger results, a higher share of voice, reach wider audiences and limit audience fatigue to their message. And finally, most obviously for creators by democratizing more of the revenue across a wider group of creators, this is a positive development for shows outside of the top 500. As the bar for becoming a viable revenue-generating creator becomes lower, the quality will increase as well. This is unique to Acast. So brands and advertisers often struggle with the perceived complexity of podcast fine, leading them to focus on the top brand shows, Acast solved this. We provide access to a vast and broad portfolio of podcasts, expanding their reach far beyond limitations of traditional top-tier thinking. We do have big shows with our listenership, which we refer to internally as the head, primarily consisting of professional publishers with big independent producers. We sell these shows at a premium across all of our sales channels, and these shows often anchor our larger ticket omnichannel campaigns because their audiences engage with them across many platforms. The heart encompasses a massive segment of podcast within the significant often untapped potential in the industry. These heart shows offer high return on ad spend potential for advertisers. Think of it as the sweet spot for us. We're talking about potential revenue through programmatic ads, self-serve and a more streamlined way of securing sponsorships. This is where Acast excels, making it easier for advertisers to tap into all valuable audiences. And finally, the tail. This represents the long tail of podcast shows with fewer listens. While each individual show might have a smaller audience, collectively, they represent a significant reach and highly engaged niche community of audience. From a consumer's point of view, since podcasting is primarily a one-to-one experience, a small show is no different than a massive one. The heart and tail meet the demand of advertisers who prioritize audience targeting over show selection. And this audience buying is happening now at Velocity. We have many examples from Coca-Cola to Capital One that instead of buying individual shows, they are buying our audiences. The transactional digital advertising landscape has fundamentally shifted towards this audience buying across virtually all media. An obvious example would be connected television or CTV, where brands would traditionally play its buys on specific TV shows to reach a demographic. Now, they can also make an audience buy on a variety of platforms. So for us, putting the head, heart and tail together for a brand is where it gets really exciting. Imagine a brand like TRESemme, wanting to connect with their target demographic, females 18 to 34. Looking for that audience, they work with Acast on deep omnichannel integrations with a few large shows and then buy a long-tail audience buy that extends their reach into the market. Acast enables advertisers to efficiently access these audiences, providing a comprehensive and scalable approach to podcast advertising. Looking at the top 10 IAB advertiser categories in 2024, we saw increases in all of our top 10 advertiser categories across the board. It also shows that their spend with us is diversified across categories. This ultimately reflects that our growth is broad-based and we are not beholden to specific verticals. This is also a direct result of our monetizable listen strategy that I will discuss a little bit more in a moment. So to give you a real world example, let's listen to one of our advertisers who are seeing great results with us. [Presentation]

Well, thank you, Brittany. It's nice to hear our strategy is validated by one of the largest podcast advertising buyers in the world. Now, I'd like to outline some further strategic initiatives aimed at laying the groundwork for us to continue to outgrow the podcasting market. We will continue to expand on our leadership position, primarily through growing U.S. region scale. By continuing to build on our current momentum in the U.S., we will be boosting sales efficiency and succeeding with our upstream strategy. Getting access to taking larger shares in media plans, this will allow us to increase the sales efficiency across our organization, growing our base monetizable listens by investing in the commercially attractive content available in the market. Increasing revenues generated through automated channels such as programmatic and self-serve, which allows us to achieve scalability in our sales efforts. Our CPO, Matt MacDonald, will discuss this in more detail in the product segment to follow. So amplifying beyond audio. Our position gives us a unique advantage in capitalizing on the omnichannel opportunity and growing outside of traditional audio format. I would also like to take the opportunity to discuss what we're doing in the U.S. specifically. In 2024, we demonstrated significant growth in strategic advancement in the U.S. We've secured record-breaking bookings and captured a substantial portion or even the entirety of advertising budgets for specific podcasting campaigns, achieving robust programmatic revenue and executing larger, more impactful branded campaigns. Our content portfolio has also seen notable expansion with influential renewals like Bigley Squad and the Goodlife project, alongside exciting new signings such as Ted, Better Collective, among others. We have strengthened our team with key talent additions, enabling us to capitalize on multichannel opportunities. As discussed, we used to just focus on advertisers that had already selected podcasting and had selected the shows that they wanted to buy. For years, this was the primary revenue stream for podcast in the U.S. We've excelled at ad insertion and service, but our real breakthrough came from strategically targeting major advertisers in a high-level way. By now connecting with advertisers earlier in the planning process before media selection and way before show selection to evangelize podcasting and Acast specifically. This upstream approach allows us to influence multimillion-dollar media plans at the outset. For example, a $25 million media plan might allocate only $2 million to audio and maybe $1 million of that to podcasting, which then gets further fragmented into smaller RFPs. By engaging earlier, we aim to capture a larger share of that initial $25 million rather than competing for a much smaller piece. Through our use of research insights, PR and strategic acquisitions like Wonder Media, we proactively drive increased podcast budget allocations, which has enabled us to be at the forefront of major campaigns from the outset. Our strategic objective is to elevate Acast from a podcasting bucket to the -- within the media plan to a stand-alone item on the media plan, where significant budgets are allocated directly to us due to our bespoke value proposition. By engaging with advertisers and brands upstream, we position Acast as a critical partner in addressing their core challenges. This shift has driven significant growth in large ticket buys. Moving podcasting upstream might sound like an easy fix, but it requires incredibly hard work. And it wouldn't be possible without our positioning and the technology investments we have made. Our proactive approach of engaging directly with major media agencies and advertisers directly beyond traditional direct response has also been instrumental. This has been key in allowing us to enhance our brand recognition and markedly outgrow the U.S. market. Our next strategic focus yielded a substantial increase in both large-scale advertising expenditure and overall advertiser spend. In the U.S. market alone, we witnessed significant surge in the number of advertisers committing over $1 million annually during 2024. This demonstrates the effectiveness of this strategy I just described in attracting and retaining our high-value advertisers and that they are increasingly allocated substantial budgets to our platform. And this growth is consistent across all of our advertisers, looking at the average order value in the U.S., it has more than doubled since 2020, with the average campaign increasing significantly, thanks to our upstream strategy efforts. Our strategy focuses on connecting the dots for global advertisers. We're now coordinating comprehensive solutions. For example, Airbnb works with Acast in several global markets. We've recently begun coordinating regular business reviews with them to surface the best ideas across the world. Also, as you heard from BetterHelp, they grew their business globally by buying Acast shows. And now they buy our audiences as well as custom branded content production through our acquisition of Wonder Media Network. This approach not only attracts larger advertisers, but also positions us for scalable growth. As clients like Airbnb, L'Oreal and Coca-Cola invest in substantial campaigns, they naturally seek to expand their reach across our global network. That underscores the value of our global presence and reach. Thereby, we establish ourselves as a strategic partner for global brands seeking comprehensive, data-driven creative solutions. So growing the base of monetizable listens is a key fundamental for us. This is not just about raw listen numbers. It's about attracting the right content that delivers high-value audiences to our advertisers. Not all listens carry the same value. Factors like audience demographics, ad load tolerance and willingness to engage in omnichannel campaigns significantly impact the value of content, just to mention a few examples. Our industry expertise, established relationships and advanced technology provide us with a comprehensive understanding of creator and advertiser needs. Our dynamic ad insertion technology, global marketplace and ability to facilitate bespoke omnichannel campaigns allows us to maximize the value of listens, driving higher returns for both creators and our advertising partners. This strategic approach is a key differentiator, setting us apart from competitors who struggle to offer this level of sophisticated audience monetization. Over the past year, we've announced numerous content signings that bring great commercial value to our platform, including Ted, Case Files, Tony and Ryan, The Fellas Studios, among others. We will remain focused on attracting the right kind of content, and we'll continue to invest in strengthening the commercial value of the supply side of our marketplace channel through our creator network team. So while we are an audio-first company, we understand the power of extending podcast campaigns beyond the ears. The definition of a podcast is evolving quickly. What once was defined as a conversation or a story primarily delivered in long-form on-demand and via audio has now evolved to include video, live content, shorter-form segments that extend reach. The core components that make the medium unique remain in place, content that is sought after by the audience and delivered to them on their terms. Over the past year, we have seen an increasing demand from both advertisers and the creators to do these integrated omnichannel campaigns. Advertisers get the opportunity to increase their reach with these powerful campaigns and we extend monetization potential for our creators. That is why we offer a comprehensive 360 media extension strategy. We help create and execute campaigns across platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, allowing brands to engage with audiences in visually dynamic and interactive ways. This extends the podcast narrative and allows brands to engage with our creator's loyal audiences wherever they need them. We also offer a live events, editorials or sampling to create impactful campaigns. Having successfully addressed the complex challenges of creator monetization and audio, our established advertiser and creative relationships, coupled with our unique position as a leading independent podcast company provide us with a distinct advantage to capitalize on the omni-channel opportunity. A significant event at the start of the year was us completing the acquisition of Wonder Media Network, which will expand our audiovisual production capabilities and ability to deliver large omnichannel campaigns. Wonder Media Network is a creative audio studio based in New York, highly experienced and innovative campaign delivery and podcast production, producing highly awarded branded and original content. They have historically worked with a number of large and established brands to assist them with their audio strategies. With Wonder Media, we can now offer advertisers integrated campaigns and branded content solutions from ideation through to production and campaign delivery, allowing these brands to reach engaged audiences across audio, video, social, live events and more. Our data and capabilities, as Matt MacDonald will show you in the product section, enable precise audience connections. Wonder Media provides a comprehensive solution to how ensuring advertisers effectively reach their audiences through tailored strategies and comprehensive campaigns. The acquisition is already opening up new revenue streams for Acast and our creators, while also fostering deeper relationships with brands, enabling us to unlock bigger budgets, as you heard from Britney at BetterHealth. Omni-channel also provides an opportunity for us to get access to campaigns that otherwise would not have resulted in an audio ad buy or extending that audio ad buy to multiple channels. As we expand our offering to include social media integrations, we see large increase in budgets, reflecting the added value of reaching audiences across multiple platforms and through diverse content formats. When incorporating even more channels, it allows us to reach a much larger audience, which also justified the significantly higher budgets. This is where we see the greatest return on investment for both us and our advertising partners. When we look at omnichannel campaigns executed last year, we see that over 1/3 of total revenues from those campaigns came from channels outside audio. The business model on these deals is very similar to audio where we share the revenues generated outside audio with a split similar to the range that we take in our normal course of audio campaigns. This slide illustrates what we are doing in practice, showcasing how we can extend our reach to impact beyond traditional audio and engage especially Gen-Z audiences even more deeply for brands. There are many, many examples I could talk through, but I'll pick just a couple to highlight for you now. First, we have Self, a well-known personal care brand in the U.S. who wanted to associate themselves with helpful content and positive conversations around financial wellness. We did this by creating a branded audio podcast with some of the U.S.'s best podcasters. The conversations leveraged on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels resulted in nearly 300,000 views. Secondly, one of our largest deals in 2024 was a significant campaign with Google, who wanted to showcase the features of Gemini Live on Pixel 9. We worked with some of the biggest podcasters in the U.K. and around the world to create a campaign doing just that, captured in branded segments across both audio and video as well as YouTube prerolls with more than 22 million plays across social. The campaign performed so well that Google then chose to run assets from our campaign as social ads. These examples showcase the versatility and crafting integrated campaigns across various channels, including video, social media, events and written content. Our independent podcast centric expertise provides a unique advantage. Our established relationships with both creators and advertisers create fertile ground for omnichannel expansion. Notably, our existing creative portfolio offers significant reach beyond audio podcasting. Looking at our roster of creators. We analyzed our top 5,000 shows across 5 markets and noted that we have an additional YouTube video views monetization potential from these shows of 38% incremental on top of our Acast audio listens, of which 5% have already actively opted in for Acast monetization over the last few months. This strategic expansion beyond audio represents a significant opportunity. By capitalizing on our existing creator relationships and commercial rights, we can unlock new revenue streams and solidify our position as a leader in the evolving podcast landscape. So to summarize, we have a strong creator and advertiser value proposition. We act as a trusted independent partner within the open podcast ecosystem. We have a deep understanding of market dynamics and we have a respected influential leadership voice in the industry. Our global presence provides creators with international monetization opportunities and empowers advertisers to tap into diverse global audiences. We have strong U.S. momentum where our strategy is yielding significant results and larger tickets. We're strategically positioned to capitalize on growing omnichannel opportunity and growth. We've covered a lot of ground in this section. I hope this provided valuable insight. The most powerful stories are often told by our advertisers themselves. So let's hear from Maria at Horizon Media before we head over to the Q&A. Thank you. [Presentation]

So it's time for our Q&A with Greg and Ross, and we encourage you to submit your questions using the box below, and we'll answer as many as time allows. Okay. So first question from Pierre. How will you be able to expand revenues with declining lessons?

I'll take that one. Thanks, Pierre. We at Acast, of course, are committed to growing the fundamental of monetizable listens, but of course, in the right areas. We've got to recognize its fundamental importance to business in the long run. This entails prioritizing content with strong commercial value, investing in our creative network and making sure that we've got the capacity to attract the right high-quality shows. And as you heard from in the presentation, we've attracted shows like Ted. We've resigned great shows like Giggly Squad and signed new shows, global shows like Case Files. Kind of what iOS 17 showed us was the value of return on ad spend from a kind of podcasting spend. That was already there. But the listens actually went down during that period. Value remained constant. And we're actually able to increase the value as a result. That's why, of course, ARPL then went up. Our direct-to-consumer brands were attracted to podcasting category earlier and more and more advertisers are actually seeing the value of podcasting every day. So that, of course, if you look at some of our data, that's reflected the 24% growth we saw in the actual number of advertisers in 2024.

Great. We have a question from Dan Ral, Castillo. If you had a comparison site of your competitors, which companies would that be? And what would be their valuations?

I'll take that one as well. Dan, I guess it varies by market, right? We have a competitive landscape globally. But if you look at something like the U.S., we operate alongside established radio players, streaming services and of course, other publishers as well who are competing for those ad dollars. But some of these are actually public companies. So, examples, I would put forward here are the likes of SiriusXM, iHeartMedia, the likes of AudioBoom, I'm sure you'll be able to find their valuations. If you look at markets like Sweden, our first market, of course, where we grew from, competitors are smaller and often more content focused with limited tech investment. Our advanced technology that we've got, that's of course, the global footprint that we have provides a clear and competitive advantage. I do want to highlight, though, is that we distinguish ourselves as pure-play podcast experts with significant technological edge and unparalleled global reach, if you compare us to the likes. And this allows us to effectively service our creators and advertisers beyond their domestic markets, which fosters an open ecosystem, and that benefits all of our stakeholders. And this is a strategy that has proven successful over time.

Great. We have a question from Philip Anderson. Are you aiming to continue to staff up in the U.S.?

I can take that one. Yes, we remain committed to disciplined investing in regions that deliver strong ROI. And of course, in the U.S., we're experiencing significant momentum. So this continues to be an important area of focus for us. So we will certainly invest with discipline. But I'd also point out that it's not a whole lot more work for a salesperson to write up a $10 million insertion order as a $10,000 insertion order. So we feel really excited about the upside and the momentum we have. So yes, we will be investing in the U.S., but we'll be doing it with discipline and focused on ROI. Also, we're in the process of incorporating Wonder Media Network into this. So that's going to give us a whole new more sophisticated integrated solution. So there's a lot of work to do to attract those large advertisers. So that's where we're focused.

Great. Thanks, Greg. A question from Andreas. Do you also see the number of listens starting to grow again without hurting profitability?

I've got that one. I think what we've got to do as a business is focus on increasing, of course, our base of monetizable listens, which I know Greg has talked about throughout that last section. And we're going to do this, then we're fully committed, of course, to continuing to increase our profitability off the backside. But I definitely do feel that listens will start to grow, but we've got to make sure, of course, we are focusing on those right commercial areas. So it's kind of a balance. But I think if you just look at the track history with Ted and the Case Files and the new shows, we're attracting and resigning, we're definitely going to be growing that base in that fundamental.

Great. I have another question from Andreas. Why do you think ad investments focus so much on the top 500 without considering the reach?

Yes. It's quite simply that it was thought to be too difficult. When I talk to advertisers, they love certain shows, and these are the well-known shows at the top of the ranker and for 100 years in U.S. media, the top show in television gets the money and the top show on radio gets the money and podcasting is much more democratized. So it's just education. We have a much louder voice in the industry now. We're working with the industry org. So we're excited about how quickly that's changing. But it just evolved as, hey, it's easy to buy one show at a time, so let's do that. And now we've made it easy to buy as we said, horizontally rather than just vertically.

Great. Another question from Andreas. I understand the potential in the heart segment, but how will you make this happen? Programmatic ads in self-serve has been around before. So why will it happen now?

Sure. I can take this one, too. Similar, if you look at pattern recognition, people used to buy digital one website at a time. And then as technology comes in, you're able to target same things happening with CTV. So it would be unusual if this didn't happen in podcasting. So I think -- we look at that, and we're positioned better than anybody to take advantage of that. So, for us, I think the heart and the tail is what creates a ton of value again because broadcast is one to many, podcasting is one to one. So there is value in smaller shows if you can figure out how to make it easy.

Great. And another question from Andreas. On the U.S., would you say the ad investment shift to podcast are ahead or after countries like Sweden and the U.K.?

I think, obviously, each market has its own local nuances. U.S. is a big market, but I'd say that U.S. is slightly behind on the brand advertising section that U.K. and Sweden are ahead of. And then, you'd actually say the likes of programmatic are ahead in the likes of France and Australia. So we do see these local trends, and we have to adapt and tweak our strategy accordingly. But I wouldn't say they're necessarily ahead of the curve. They're just more mature markets for us and U.S. is maturing and very much copying the vision strategy that we have implemented so incredibly well in our core markets of Sweden and the U.K.

Great. Another question from Andreas. How come the omnichannel budgets are so much significantly larger than podcast only just to help us understand, as this looks like a significant growth opportunity if the split in the budget is unchanged.

I think if you look at what brands and the trend that's happening, alignment with influencers, marketing in general is massively increasing. And podcast creators are essentially influencers. And they are platform agnostic. They will reach and engage an audience on a multitude of platforms. It might start with podcasting and what I think omnichannel budgets do is allow us to one, reach an incredibly wide audience, but engage with them in a different manner. And actually, when you look at kind of the more upstream budgets like Greg spoke about, that allows us to capture a larger portion of that budget, not just pitch for the smaller part of the audio budget. So I think that's going to help us massively accelerate. And a lot of other competitors don't actually offer that or have the rights to offer that across different platforms.

Great. We have a question from Stephane Ward. What is your view on the outlook for ad spend volumes and value in the U.S. overall and for the podcast, while not specifically. Can you deliver growth in the U.S. if the market is weaker?

I'll go on, Greg. Yes, we've got a track record of doing this 10 years. Our ambition, of course, is to continue outgrowing the podcast market regardless of the overall advertising market performance. And if you look at podcasting in general, that is seeing structural growth. So even in macroeconomic downturns, you're still seeing growth in that market. And we're the leading position in that in multiple markets and have a sole focus on podcasting. So my view on kind of the outlook on ad spend is even if there are macroeconomic pressures, you're going to continue to see this grow.

Great. I think that's it for now for this Q&A. Thank you, everybody.

We are now going to proceed with the presentation from Matt MacDonald, Acast's Chief Product Officer, and he'll cover Acast's differentiation from a product perspective. [Presentation]

Everyone. I'm Matt MacDonald, Chief Product Officer here at Acast. I'm usually located on the East Coast of the United States, but I'm happy to be here today in Sunny London, I guess. Our commitment to innovation in the industry is not just vaporware or spin. From the beginning, we've repeatedly proven that we're not just not just ridden the podcasting wave, but that we've helped start and shape it. A little bit of history and context. As you heard from Ross, earlier in 2014 we invented and developed dynamic ad insertion, the solution to a problem that prevented podcasting from realizing the true commercial potential it was locked away within individual episodes. Now this wasn't just a small tweak. It fundamentally changed how ads were delivered in podcasts. And now today, DAI is the default industry standard. In 2017, we were the first to introduce programmatic advertising into podcasting and this brought the efficiency and scale of digital advertising to the podcast world. We also launched our self-serve platform in 2022. And it was the first time advertisers could buy ads and sponsorships on thousands of podcasts in one place in an automated way on their own. And so we've continued an unwavering dedication to pushing the boundaries of what's possible in podcasting, ultimately enabling podcasters to make more than $440 million to date. And we're not just keeping pace with the industry. We've defined it, and we remain committed to accelerating its future. Now data has been and continues to be our critical differentiator and our foundation of long-term competitive advantage. And we moved podcasting from a simplistic approach to delivery and distribution with unreliable data and brought it forward to the future to become a true digital medium that drives results. And so, for over a decade, we've been aggregating and refining unique first-party podcast data. This historical depth of data, combined with our acquisition of Podchaser in 2022, has significantly expanded our capabilities. Through acquiring Podchaser, we gained access to the podcasting industries' intelligence engine, adding a dataset encompassing over 5.6 million podcasts and 26 million data points. While others collect surface-level scrapable data, our advantage lies in the combination of breadth and depth with verified known data. It is the combination of both breadth and depth of the data that is our differentiator and Collections+ is one of those examples. This unique combination allows us to move beyond raw data and generate actionable intelligence. It gives us a deep understanding of what buyers are interested in, what audiences, they are interested in gaining access to and the creators who can provide that audience. Now, as I mentioned, we consolidate data from Acast and Podchaser. But also podcast listening platforms and combine them into a centralized platform. Here, we apply AI and machine learning to transform raw data into actionable insights. And this process enables capabilities like precise audience targeting, predictive demographic analysis and optimized campaign performance, enhancing our marketplace's effectiveness. This sophisticated data aggregation and analysis framework represents a competitive advantage, and ultimately, this enables us to offer creators the best monetization opportunities and maximizing ROAS for advertisers. Now related to audience data. We go beyond basic demographics and podcasting table stakes like user IP, user agent and geolocation data and create new first-party data sets through listener surveys which power predictive parental status, income and political SKU among others, providing even more granular understanding. And on the creator side, we collect and make available not only detailed information about the show and the details about episodes, but also increasingly more data points about the creator themselves. Do they wear glasses? Are they in a relationship? And so on to be able to better understand which brands will work best for them. And with the addition of Dynamic Creator managed profiles, we now have creators opting in and providing even more details about their audiences found on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, which support our omnichannel efforts. And so on the advertiser side, we provide critical data points like ad by size, repeat, spend, sponsor history, delivered impressions and campaign performance. Now crucially, our marketplace captures unique behavioral data, including past sponsor activity, creative ad effectiveness, creative response times and their commercial preferences. And this data increased and refined over 10 years is difficult to replicate and provides a competitive edge in our matchmaking process. Now having all of this data is one thing, but we leverage and use data to provide powerful applied intelligence across our marketplace, particularly in audience targeting. We have built the industry's smartest targeting and matchmaking capabilities, ensuring that the advertiser's message reaches the right audience in the right context every time. And so this includes things like enabling advertisers to use their first-party data for retargeting and look-a-like audiences, employing episodic conversational targeting for precise AI-powered episode level targeting, as well as providing comprehensive listener demographic targeting through third-party data and audience -- Acast audience segments and by utilizing Collections+, powered by Podchaser data and AI for sophisticated content categorization and enhanced targeting verticals. And with these insights, advertisers benefit from reaching target audiences at scale discovering new advertising opportunities and maximizing campaign effectiveness. When while creators experience improved monetization, for example, Collections+ enabled an additional 24% of Acast podcast creators to monetize their content in its first year. The successful commercialization of Collections+ as an ad tech offering contributed a 1 percentage point positive impact to our 2024 gross margin, demonstrating that Collections+ creates tangible benefits for our creators, advertisers as well as Acast. Now scaling up our marketplace has meant we've needed to focus on efficient ways to attract both creator supply and advertiser demand. And we've done so in an increasingly automated ways, smoothing and automating the on-boarding process for creators. We focused on bringing more advertising demand into the marketplace. And as Greg and Ross mentioned, not only has the average ticket size increased, but also the total number of advertisers as well, seeing a 24% increase from '23 to '24 and of course, the key way in which we attract both creators and advertisers is by deeply understanding their needs and solving for friction points that they encounter to streamline processes and increase our sales efficiency. So in our conversations with creators and advertisers, we hear about their many needs and problems. But what we hear over and over again from creators is help me grow my audience and help me make more money. And from advertisers, it's help me reach a valuable audience. So, of course, there are many more needs than just those where our capabilities help both creators and advertisers. Like in the preproduction distribution to reach desired audiences, monetization, insights, targeting, activation measurement and more. Now where we see the greatest need, where it's the most friction and the most opportunity and what we, as Acast are best positioned to solve for are in the areas of optimized brand to creator to audience matchmaking recommendations and our streamlined collaboration and transaction workflows. These advancements enable us to achieve greater scalability, leading to increased revenue generation while creating improved value for both advertisers and creators throughout the omnichannel space. It's our data-driven matchmaking capabilities that empower advertisers during the discovery and planning phases, ensuring that they will reach their desired audience. And it's through these capabilities that we enable audience buying at scale. Okay. So let's drill into one of these core needs, matchmaking and look at it in more detail. Our advanced advertiser and audience matchmaking is a very clear example of how we extract maximum value from our data. By using our applied intelligence, we are able to identify shows and creators that reach highly specific demographics, supercharging our internal sales team's capabilities and maximizing results for our advertisers. And so to do this, we've developed proprietary technology to analyze our extensive creator and audience data and podcast sales knowledge, enabling us to curate highly tailored show recommendations that precisely match complex advertiser briefs. This applied intelligence is integrated into our workflows, which empowers brands and advertisers to effectively -- efficiently identify and connect with the most effective podcasting and potentially unexpected audiences. It's kind of like audience alpha for advertisers. The product development has been driven by internal seller demand, initially empowering our Acast sales staff to enhance customer value. Okay. I want to get into some examples of how this works in practice. We now provide these highly tailored campaign recommendations for best fit shows and audiences by understanding the natural language way in which buyers ask for them, like find me podcast heard by people of this age and gender and in this location and that also happened to be about fly fishing. It'd probably also be great if the creator also wore glasses and had a dog. Another example, help me find audiences that index highly with sports enthusiasts even if that show is topically about finance or -- and what's interesting is that we are able to leverage our data to find audiences beyond the first level screening, a clear advantage in connecting advertisers to the most valuable audiences. Another important way that we are scaling our marketplace is in further developing our transactional workflow collaboration capabilities, which enables a real-time collaboration on an advertising brief and the ad creative deliverable between multiple creators and advertisers at the same time. And what we've seen is that it speeds up the behind-the-scenes workflow related to getting an ad or sponsorship into a podcast episode like brand vetting, creative statements and deliverable tracking. And this has significantly reduced the back-and-forth communication typically associated with sponsorship campaigns by a 50% improvement in communication efficiency. Additionally, the efficiency of this workflow is evidenced by the fact that 68% of all of our sponsorship campaigns in February of 2025 utilized this solution, enabling us to effectively and efficiently manage a high volume of sponsorship campaigns. Now I want to be clear that the collaboration capabilities are useful beyond audio podcasting, which means that we can leverage this workflow solution to solve sponsorship friction in other channels as well. Everything that I've just covered is about taking a lot of the manual work that has been done on research and discovery and setting up and delivering the campaigns and to automate that process. Another important focus to achieve scalability is through channeling a greater share of revenues through our automated channels, both programmatic and self-serve. Our self-serve and programmatic offerings are pivotal for scaling operations and driving revenue growth. These automated solutions facilitate the efficient transaction of higher advertising volumes. Buyer adoption of these channels is accelerating. In December of 2024, programmatic channels accounted for 36% of total campaign delivery, while our self-serve channel contributed an additional 9%, representing a combined 45% of total campaigns facilitated through automated channels. Now these automated channels are fundamental for scalability. It not only streamlines operations and reduces manual involvement, but it also unlocks significant growth potential by enabling us to handle a larger volume of advertising transactions. Acast didn't just adopt programmatic podcast advertising. We were first in connecting the programmatic pipes in podcasting. Today, what sets our programmatic offering apart from our competitors are our ability to gain access to show level visibility, multiple SSP approach to servicing campaigns, first-party audience matching, brand safety integrations, in-house creative team to develop bespoke and breakthrough creative. And there's a lot of coordination work to be able to support all of the major DSPs and buying platforms. It's similar to my point on the data. There's no single connection that carries significant value on its own, but rather in the aggregated connections make up our programmatic pipes. So in short, our pioneering role and comprehensive programmatic offering puts us in the forefront of podcast advertising, providing clients with targeting, safety and creative support for maximizing campaign impact. Programmatic advertising will continue to grow in our industry, which will allow us to improve sales scalability. Our self-serve platform has been designed to facilitate, efficient and effective advertising for advertisers, agencies and podcasters themselves seeking to engage valuable audiences in real time in a complete self-serve setup. The interface depicted on the right demonstrates the platform's intuitive campaign planning capabilities, allowing users to define campaign parameters and launch campaigns in just minutes. Some of the key features and the use cases include access to the podcast inventory with key demographic and contextual data points, use of the audience builder to find the most relevant podcast, breakdowns of delivery and conversion metrics in real time and full reporting with valuable insights that can be used to create new efficient campaigns. Acast self-serve redefines podcast advertising by providing a powerful platform that grants advertisers and agencies direct access to our large and valuable inventory. This platform is important as it democratizes access to podcast advertising, enabling advertisers of all sizes to leverage the power of audio in a streamlined manner. Okay. To summarize, we have shaped the podcast market through our technological leadership. We have a decade of investment in capturing and analyzing marketplace level insights and has yielded an unparalleled understanding of the landscape. And this expertise, combined with our proprietary data aggregation and analysis capabilities enables us to deliver superior targeting and optimize campaign performance. This strategic focus on data-driven intelligence ensures our long-term success and solidifies our position as a premier podcast advertising company. The growing adoption of our automated solutions has led to higher transaction volumes in automated channels, which supports our scalability. Okay. With that, it's now time for some Q&A. But before we head that way, let's hear from another one of our creators. [Presentation]

Thank you. So we are now opening up for Q&A with Matt and Ross. So first question is from Pierre. Why can't you just slow down R&D efforts and focus on maintaining and optimizing the marketplace?

I'll grab this one. I mean, the simple answer is I think we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We continue to focus on creator and advertiser problems. And I think we've definitely proven that we can effectively manage our costs while continuing to innovate and scale. And I think something like introducing Collections+ over this past couple of years is a good example of that.

Okay. Great. Thank you. A question from Philip. Why do you need a product team of 100 employees when there are competitors with just a tiny share of that?

I'll grab this one again. I think one of the key things is like we are helping creators and advertisers across many multiple markets. And as Ross said earlier, we're doing that for 140,000 shows. So that's identifying the ways in which we have to handle local currencies, local privacy policies for targeting advertising as well as the localization and internationalization, that's a fun one to say, across all of the different markets that we have. So I think a lot of our growth and our effort has been put toward building things ourselves when we have needed to and for renting the things that we need to when appropriate. And yes, I mean, it's a big operation with 140,000 shows across the world.

Okay. Great. Another question from Philip. Will you increase R&D investments and why?

Okay. I can take this one. I think -- if you look at what we've done previously, so we've nearly doubled our revenue base with a product team of the same size as of 3 years ago. And having invested in audio technology, we're now able to focus on more efficient optimization, making sure we provide the solutions needed to improve sales efficiency. We heard a lot, obviously, about our self-serve platform and what we're doing there and targeting. At the same time, we got remain committed to delivering a leading value proposition for our creators and for advertisers, which means empowering their growth across podcast channels beyond audio. That's definitely a trend that we're seeing. And while product development likely will see incremental increases, we anticipate no material shifts in investment levels.

Okay. Great. A new question from Pierre. How much does Programmatic and Self-serve represent in terms of revenue?

I can take this one again. I think if you look at Self-serve and you look at the actual number of campaigns, that constitutes 9% of our total overall campaigns. While if you look at Programmatic in terms of number of campaigns, that accounts for 36%. And it's important to note that these deals are characterized by smaller average ticket sizes compared to, of course, our large direct sales. That's what Greg talked about from the SEK 10,000 to SEK 10 million, resulting, of course, proportional lower revenue contribution. On the Programmatic side, revenues represent whilst it's 36% in number of campaigns, it's 14% in overall sales. Self-service on the kind of lower single digits. So it's not yet material. But these automated channels, of course, facilitate really efficient management of high-volume campaigns, and that enables us to reach a broader audience without a corresponding increase in operational costs and spreading kind of that revenue out throughout our entire creator base. For us, it's about focusing on supporting buyers to further increase their investment through these automated channels, both these automated channels, and it will improve our sales efficiency, of course, overall by doing so.

Great. We have a question from Andreas. What impact would you assume further increased automated sales channels may have on your gross margin? And how far ahead of competition would you argue you are from a technology perspective?

I think it obviously depends on the last part of the question by what market you're talking about. But if we look at the Programmatic ad side, it's a 50-50 split in terms of revenue standpoint. So stand-alone, it's got a positive impact. But it's also about selling those ads more efficiently as well, which Programmatic helps buy. I think the broad offering helps us support the global operations. And I think if you look at our competitive set, we are purely focused on podcasting as a medium. Not many competitors of ours are purely focused. If they are, they're purely focused on just the sales side. For us, it's the collection of everything we do, the ad technology, the unique targeting, the broad reach we have, the focus on -- we got 15 markets. Every creator's audience reaches an international audience in some respect, small percentages or large percentages. Being efficient at monetizing that will inherently mean that you are the first go-to for a creator. So it's really important we stay ahead of the competition. And I'd say we are very ahead of our competitive set in pretty much all of our markets.

Okay. Great. Another from Andreas. How far have you come in the automation of your sales channels? And how far can you get?

I can grab that one. I mean I think we've made enormous strides in being able to automate the existing workflows that are related to podcasting from our traditional work over the past 10 years. And I think one of the core focuses for us and where there's both opportunity and where we've made significant inroads is around that host read sponsorship side of things. As Greg mentioned earlier, there's a desire to oftentimes concentrate the buy for podcasting into a smaller number of the higher listened to shows. And through the technology that we're building, these workflow and recommendation engine capabilities, it's really affording us the ability to kind of take what was a much more bespoke manual process and really scale that. And I think -- so as we're kind of doing that from the podcasting traditional audio side, we're starting to then learn what's happening within the omnichannel environments related to video so we can kind of piggyback off of the same playbook that we've had at Acast of like kind of learning from the manual sellers and the direct sales work that's out there to kind of understand the most automated solutions to bring to that space.

Okay. Great. And a question from Stephane. Slide 66 with the logo buttons with YouTube, Spotify, Audible, et cetera, what does this mean that you can run a campaign on pods on these platforms? And just to note, this is related to the Self-serve slide.

You can ahead?

Yes.

Yes, go ahead.

I think if you look at obviously, like you talked about the logos on those slides, of course, we can run campaigns across all platforms that distribute obviously, the RSS and audio platform that includes the likes of Spotify, Apple, et cetera, 250-plus platforms. When it looks at the wider omnichannel opportunity with the likes of YouTube and other brands, this is the beauty in what we do, matchmaking brands with a creator's audience regardless of where they're consuming that content. They could be consuming video content. Look at the examples that Greg showed earlier on from Google and what they were trying to achieve. That went across TikTok, that went across YouTube, that went across all Instagram, all different platforms. So yes, we can run campaigns on podcasts, video podcasts and beyond across all of those platforms and any new platform that happens to create.

Great. Thank you. I think that's all for now. We are now going to head over to our CFO, Emily Villatte, for our financial section. Please do continue to submit questions using the chat and we will make sure to include them in our final Q&A session that will be held after Emily's presentation.

Hi, everyone. I'm Emily Villatte, CFO at Acast since 2019. I will take you through our financial performance, look at underlying metrics and KPIs and discuss how these position us to make continued financial progress. Looking back at our history, it is clear that we are a true growth company, having more than tripled our sales over the past 4 years and reached close to SEK 2 billion in revenues in 2024. Over the past 2 years, we've also markedly improved our profitability to reach full year profitability in 2024, and we're now moving forward as a profitable growth company. Now let's work through how our revenues are built up. And the foundation of our ad-based revenue is our inventory, which is the product of the lists we generate and the number of ad breaks available in each show. This represents the total available capacity we have for ad placements. And our success in selling our inventory is reflected in the sell-through rate. The product of the sell-through rate and the inventory provides the number of delivered impressions or delivered ads. Ads, of course, are price and CPM or cost per mille, which is the price for 1,000 impressions usually expressed in U.S. dollars. And this buildup results in our ad sales, which represents over 90% of total revenues. In addition, of course, we generate revenues through non-ad-related services, including SaaS and hosting. Now we look at how these metrics have developed over the past years, and I'll share some deeper data and nuggets from our markets. I'll start with our listens, noting that our listens volume has significantly increased since 2020. Yes, our reported listens declined by 13% in 2024 due to a technical effect from Apple's rollout of iOS 17, which, by the way, affected the entire industry. Excluding this effect, our growth -- our underlying growth was plus 4% in listens. The reported number of listens is what is generated from Acast hosted shows and does not capture the previously mentioned additional inventory potential that we possess in other channels. As highlighted in the strategy section, we are focused on growing our listens in audio and beyond. Now the Acast show on average features 6.8 ad slots per episode. That's a number for '24. And that figure has steadily increased over the past 5 years. But we will not compromise the ad environment or listener experience during this time. In fact, even if Acast sold all of the available slots, we would still have an ad load that is lower than TV, radio or most digital channels. '24, we empowered creators by enabling a second mid-roll placement. As you can see here on the right, you can see how this has played out in some of our markets. In general, we note that our more established markets have a higher ad load, whereas we tend to have lower ad load in less established markets. Sweden, for example, has the highest ad load across all of our markets. And notably, the U.S. ad load is not at the top. So there is definite potential to grow there. On a market level, there will always be differences depending on the market's culture, maturity and, of course, ad tolerance. Overall, the podcast medium's less saturated advertising landscape allows us to sustainably increase ad load over time, which will help us to expand our inventory and sales potential. Our total inventory has doubled over the past 5 years, thanks to a combination of higher base of listens and as you saw previously, higher ad load. In 2024, ad load compensated for the decline, keeping inventory near 2023 levels. And we are in a good position to keep growing our inventory, both through listens and through ad load. A significant driver of our revenue growth is our improved sales of the available inventory that we already have, evidenced through the substantial increase in our sell-through rate. And in 2024, we achieved a 41% sell-through rate, up from the 27% the year before, driven by growing advertising demand and enhanced sales efficiency. SGR levels vary, as you can see on the right, with our top 3 markets exceeding the group average. And the current sell-through rates reflect an upside potential, both with our leading markets and our smaller markets as they scale. And we project that we can comfortably achieve a group level sell-through rate above 60% over time, giving us an additional lever for ad sales growth here. Moving on to pricing represented by CPMs. These averaged $13 in 2024, slightly lower than in previous years, as you can see. CPMs are, of course, influenced by external factors, including general advertising demand and economic conditions. But there is also an impact flowing from our product mix and how much clever targeting ad tech that applies to the campaigns that are sold. And as you can see on the right, average CPMs vary greatly by market. In the U.K., for example, we have creators who deliver very strong sponsorship opportunities and a very sophisticated advertiser base using ad tech, leading to higher CPMs. And by focusing on these internal levers, ad tech, targeting, et cetera, we aim to maximize revenue and enhance the value for our advertisers. Now the combination of listens, ad loads, sell-through rate and CPMs result in our average revenue per listen or ARPL, which has consistently trended upwards and is a key indicator of how effective we are at monetization of each listen. We've seen steady ARPL increases at the group level every year, and we saw a significant increase in 2024, as you can see here, driven by our improved sell-through rates. On the right side, you'll see that ARPL increases over the last 5 years vary by market with our top 3 markets significantly outperforming the group average, led by the U.K. Importantly, ARPL growth has been broad-based with all active markets achieving record high ARPL in 2024 compared to previous years, but there's still opportunity to grow. Now this overview captures the positive development of these metrics over the past 5 years, culminating in a substantially larger revenue base. As you can see, we have multiple growth levers, listens, ad slots, sell-through rate and to some extent, pricing. And holistically, they carry the potential to continue to increase ARPL over time. Now we believe that we have the ability to double our average revenue per listen over time as these levers progress along a natural trajectory. Per updated financial targets, we aim to deliver organic net sales CAGR of 15% between 2025 and through to 2028. Here, we're looking at our market performance in our 3 largest markets and then the remaining markets as collective. U.K., of course, is our largest market and has come far in growing the monetization per listen and has found new ways to expand on their portfolio, including capitalizing on the omnichannel opportunity. 2024, as you can see, was a soft year for the U.K. with an impact from the overall ad market. And this affected the growth coming in at 2% in the U.K. The U.S., however, saw a very strong growth in 2024 at 37%, thanks to an increase in ad load and its ability to sell bigger tickets. And our investments in the region are clearly paying off. Sweden did have a dip in 2023, but rebounded really strongly in 2024, delivering some 28% year-on-year growth, which I think is an impressive number in the local media market environment. Looking at the remaining markets covering all other regions we're active in, these have grown at a rapid pace over the past 5 years at a CAGR of 68%. And these remaining markets currently exhibit lower sell-through rates compared to more established markets, offering substantial opportunities to grow. Now let's have a look at our 2024 profitability using 2 key perspectives. On the left-hand side, we see the traditional group P&L part. Out of 100% of revenues in 2024, you will recognize our 39% gross margin, after which 38% in OpEx, excluding depreciation and amortization was deducted, leading to a 1% EBITDA margin. After 4% in D&A, the EBIT margin was a negative 3%. Alternatively, we look at the geographical segment profitability by analyzing segment contribution profit, showing profitability after gross profit and local market costs before then allocating global costs to arrive at the same EBIT level. And this approach shows that working down from the same gross margin of 39%, our local market costs were 22% of sales, resulting in an aggregated 17% contribution margin. Our global costs, including global sales, product development and admin functions amounted to 20% of sales, leading us to the same negative 3% EBIT margin. Now looking ahead, the potential for improved profitability comes from both growing local market profits while scaling against our global cost to an even greater degree. The gross margin component here is an important -- is a very important starting point, of course. And in 2024, the gross margin improved year-on-year due to, firstly, our product mix, where we increased sales of high take rate ads over sponsorships and also ad tech advancements where positive impact from internal ad tech such as Collections+ had a circa 1 percentage point impact on the gross margin versus 2023. Now I anticipate further margin benefits from yield optimization in ad tech, but we also acknowledge that market competitiveness, particularly in the U.S. could counterbalance long-term gross margin performance as the U.S. becomes a larger share of our sales. Our aggregated contribution profit has improved significantly over the past year, which you can see here, driven by revenue growth and broad-based operating leverage across segments. And on a group level, the contribution margin amounted to 17% in 2024. Here, we're looking at our contribution profit per market and its development over a time period of 5 years. And we're plotting this against the market share in each market. In markets where we have been active for longer and today hold a leading position, U.K. and Sweden, for example, we achieved contribution margins of 24% and 32%, respectively. And all other markets are also on a strong path upwards, including the U.S. despite holding a smaller market share. I think it's really encouraging to see our ability to achieve higher profitability through scale as well as the material progress made by markets currently holding a smaller market share. So everyone has been stepping up. Now our focus extends beyond local efficiency. We also work to scale against global costs. And over the past 5 years, global cost share of sales has decreased significantly from 34% to 20% in 2024. And these costs, which are necessary for global operations, including product and tech, global sales and marketing and admin have scaled effectively. And further scaling against these costs will help us to drive additional profitability improvements in the future. Our depreciation and amortization has stayed stable in relation to net sales at around 4% over the past 5 years. And the majority of our D&A is related to our depreciation of capitalized development expenses, as you heard Matt speak about, followed by our IFRS 16 treatment of leases. Now I do not expect any material changes to our D&A will be trending in relation to net sales near to midterm. Our EBIT and EBITDA profitability metrics have improved significantly as well over the last few years. And the profitability gains are attributable, of course, to our growth, the improved gross margin and the leverage we have achieved through scaling costs against a higher revenue base. Our EBITDA margin reached 1% in '24, and we delivered on our profitability target. But EBITDA is not just a clear view of our core operational profitability. It's also a good proxy for our operating cash flows, which I will show very soon. Importantly, we are committed to further improving our margins while simultaneously investing strategically in growth initiatives. And here, we are targeting an adjusted EBITDA margin of 3% to 5% in the full year of 2025. Historically, our net financial items have shown swings between the years, largely due to unrealized FX gains and losses as illustrated in this graph. And as our FX exposure is mainly related to noncash items such as goodwill, we maintain a policy of not hedging FX at the group level. Excluding these temporary FX impacts, our current financial income is primarily driven by interest earned on our substantial cash reserves as we currently hold 0 debt. The shift to a positive net profit in 2024 flowed from our improved financial performance, of course, as well as support from positive FX impact and the recognition of deferred tax assets linked to prior loss carryforwards. I will also note here that we're still holding around SEK 200 million in unrecognized tax assets off balance sheet, effectively minimizing our near to midterm anticipated tax payments. And let's acknowledge as we look at cash flows that there is not much difference between EBIT and our operating cash flows. We've had large positive adjustments from noncash items in net financials, including the previously mentioned FX impact. And we've also had some noncash items in OpEx related, for example, to our share-based long-term incentive programs. Operating cash flows have trended ahead of EBIT over the past 4 years and amounted to plus SEK 34 million in 2024. And our efforts to accelerate payment collection, as you can see here, have yielded a strong working capital position reflected in a 2% net working capital to sales ratio in 2024. And whilst we foresee no major changes in working capital dynamics, I do recognize the importance of proactively maintaining a capital buffer to support operational needs as the working capital position fluctuates. And for 2025, we're committed to delivering positive cash flows from operating activities, thanks to an improved profitability. Our tangible investment needs are very limited, and our CapEx mainly stems from our capitalization of product development expenses, and these amounted to about 3% of sales in 2024. Going forward, I do not foresee any material changes to our CapEx related to sales and believe it will remain at around 3% of sales in the near term. Now adding all of this together when it comes to cash flows and also incorporating the cash flow effects from acquisitions and our financing activities consisting of lease payments, we have delivered a strong cash flow improvement over the past 3 years, mainly stemming from our profitability and working capital improvements. So as at year-end 2024, the company's strong balance sheet exhibited a cash balance of SEK 714 million, complemented by significant current assets and goodwill. Now a minor portion of the cash position was, of course, earmarked for our acquisition of Wonder Media Network, which we closed at the beginning of the year. We do not have any debt. We have a clean balance sheet and are financially stable. So how are we deploying capital to drive sustained growth? Well, as the previous speakers have highlighted, we are strategically reinvesting in our core strengths. This includes expanding our marketplace reach, targeting high-return regional investments like in the U.S., improving our leading tech platform. These investments are crucial for our organic growth trajectory. And simultaneously, we're able to maintain a strong cash reserve. And this provides us with strategic optionality for potential accretive M&A opportunities should they arise. Such acquisitions would be targeted to strengthen our market position, improving our positioning with creators and advertisers and expand our market share. Now looking back, we have made several acquisitions that have strengthened our core business in the past and shown that we can integrate new ventures to continue to innovate in our niche. We are in the position to do so whilst maintaining a robust balance sheet as a cornerstone for financial stability, which we're, of course, committed to. Now before wrapping up, I'd like to recap the financial targets we set back in 2022. Firstly, we set a target to achieve an average organic net sales growth rate of 40% to 45% between 2020 and 2025. And we have, in fact, achieved an average of 40% between 2020 and 2024, which is within the range. Secondly, we set out to deliver gross margin between 35% and 38%. And in 2024, our gross margin amounted to 39%. Finally, our target was to reach positive EBITDA in 2024, which we did. Now today, you heard Ross announce both near-term and midterm financial targets. And to recap these, our midterm target is to grow organic net sales at a CAGR of 15% between 2025 and 2028. And we aim to achieve an adjusted EBITDA margin of between 3% and 5% in 2025, and we target to deliver positive operating cash flows as well in 2025. And the targets are, of course, underpinned by our commitment to continued profitable growth. We are approaching Q&A, stay with us. I'll just wrap up the finance block, and then we'll head into Q&A. So we do have a proven growth track record and achieved a growth rate improvement in 2024 despite our largest market being affected by soft advertising market, showing positive effects from our diversified revenue base. Moving forward, we have multiple levers for sustained growth and prospects to double ARPL over the long term. Driven by broad-based operational enhancements across our global footprint, we have successfully transitioned to a profitable growth company, and we are confident in our ability to further enhance profitability by scaling our cost base against a larger revenue base. We're committed to reinvestment in our core strengths and our robust balance sheet provides both financial stability and strategic optionality for accretive M&A, enabling us to capitalize on opportunities that strengthen our market leadership. So that concludes the financial overview. I believe we'll now hear a final podcaster testimonial before moving to the Q&A. [Presentation]

So we are now heading over to our final Q&A session. I'd like to remind you to submit questions using the text box below. So first question from Ramil. Why do you not say anything about margins beyond 2025? Presumably, you have internal targets. Could you tell us qualitatively what the ambitions for the future are?

Of course. Let's look at this and add some color to it, Ramil. I appreciate the question. So of course, what underpins all of our financial target is our commitment to profitable growth. And as our revenue base expands, we anticipate an increase in our profitability margins. And we are committed to growing revenues faster than costs. That includes 2025, that includes 2026, 2027 and so forth. Now the exact pace of that growth and the dynamics between years might vary. That might vary based on the growth pace that we achieve in a year or the ROI on strategic initiatives. But make no mistake, I think it's a great question, Ramil. All of our targets are underpinned by our commitment to continued profitable growth.

Great. Another one from Ramil. Given the contribution margins we see on some of your markets, where will investments happen moving forward as we will not see the full scale benefits if you continue to grow? Is it contribution margins will decline in existing strongholds or you will increase overhead to sales or you'll be more forceful outside Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S.

Now let me be clear here. Contribution margins holistically should go up. So the markets have not reached their end destination when it comes to achieving their full potential when it comes to contribution margin. So that journey remains ongoing. But in addition, we should also see even greater operating leverage stemming from scaling global costs against a larger revenue base. So we're committed both to scaling our markets, continuing on that journey, improving contribution margins, but delivering even larger operating leverage from our global cost base.

Great. Another question from Ramil. How will you grow at almost double the rate of the market?

Thank you, Ramil. Well, we've continuously demonstrated our ability to outperform the market growth over time. We know we've got the right model in place for the U.S. We've been expanding our inventory of monetizable listens, as you heard from the content we've attracted. And we're confident, of course, that we're going to continue to outpace market growth as history has shown in the last 10 years. Today, we have discussed, of course, several strategic initiatives. And those are aimed obviously continuing to build our leading position in podcasting. And those include the likes, of course, boosting our sales efficiency. That is really key to optimizing the sales process, leveraging technology, like Matt talked to you through, improving the sales strategy to improve our efficiency overall. And that obviously self-serve helps that. And of course, then closing larger deals as well. We've got to grow our base of monetizable listens. And by expanding that audience reach and increasing listener engagement, we, of course, are creating more revenue opportunities for our creators. And then thirdly, I think amplifying beyond audio. I think we talked about omnichannel. Our offering is expanding beyond traditional audio podcasts. This includes, obviously, video and other formats as well as we've shown in some of the case studies and examples. This helps us, like I mentioned, attract larger budgets, a wider range of advertisers, and it helps us capture a larger share of the overall podcasting advertising market. I don't know if that covers that question.

Great. Another question from Ramil. How should we think about FCF?

Free cash flows. Long cash flow questions. I will take that one. So I did discuss the dynamics a little bit in my section when it comes to cash flow. So there are -- that should give some idea. But I'm sort of sensing the question in relation to the target around operating cash flows. Now one thing that I'm keeping in mind here when it comes to both my operating cash flow targets and when I think about free cash flows is that the payment patterns of advertisers in markets that are a little bit uncertain, and that's the type of market we're in today, these payment patterns can be a little bit volatile, and that can impact our working capital. Having said that, I definitely think there could be a path to positive free cash flows in 2025 on top of the positive operating cash flows that we've guided to. And again, I want to highlight that we are firmly committed to growing revenues at a higher pace than costs over the coming years. And what does that mean? It means higher profits, higher profit margins, positive and improved operating cash flows and therefore, also improved and growing free cash flows.

Great. A question from Derek Laliberte. Why no growth target for 2025? And why no longer-term margin target?

Thank you, Derek. I'll take that one. I think in the current sort of backdrop of the market context that we have right now, it requires some reflection, and we did not feel it was right to provide further detail than what we have given today. But let's see if we can add some color on near-term growth. There's definitely also here a path for us to deliver growth at a faster pace than the 15% CAGR that we have guided to. And if we share a little bit of nuance of what we've seen so far in the year is that when it comes to campaigns delivered this year, we've not seen an impact on growth from the current uncertainties in the market. But we're, of course, keeping a very close eye on this into Q3 and then Q4 to see how this pans out. Of course, Q4 is our biggest quarter, and it's just too early to call how that will pan out. And when it comes to longer-term profitability target, which you asked about as well, Derek, the podcasting market is still evolving. We've seen lots of examples of that and podcast testimonials as well, highlighting the evolving nature of the podcasting market. So we felt it was too early to call the long-term profitability. But I guess what we will say is that as this market matures, we should be in a good position to deliver strong and relevant margins compared to peers, given the strong market position and developing market positions that we have and the investment that we made into scalability and our ad tech platform.

Great. Another question from Derek. Are you directly impacted by the U.S. tariffs?

Very good question, Derek. We are not directly impacted by the current tariffs that have been announced. But indirectly, of course, there could be an impact on general sentiment and the advertising market in which we operate, of course. What we're benefiting from here is good spread across our geographies, we have North American operations, European operations and Asia Pac operations. So that gives us a good geographical spread. And as you saw in Greg's section, we have exposure to a wide variety of sectors, and we're not dependent on one sector in particular to continue to make progress. So that's a good backdrop for us in an overall uncertain market.

Great. A question from Pierre Hansen. Given that you have reached positive results and CF, it would be interesting to hear how you see capital allocation and especially dividends or buybacks?

Very relevant question. Thank you, Pierre. So right now, we are allocating capital, as you saw at the end of my section to fuel our organic growth, but we also have optionality for strategic growth such as M&A. So we're keeping that as an optionality while still being very committed to having a strong balance sheet, financial stability and so forth. When it comes to dividends, I'm sure that's something that will be discussed or surfaced for discussion in the future. I don't think this is a near-term item for us.

Okay. And a question from Derek. How has the podcast ad market behaved in 2025 so far?

Well, what can I say there? I guess we've stepped into 2025 with definitely better consumer sentiment compared to the position we were in back in 2023 and actually back in 2024. So this has set us up actually for a good start. What we can say to date this year is that we've not seen a negative impact on growth on campaigns delivered to date. Of course, we're going to be monitoring the developments closely. That's kind of all I can give really on that question.

Great. A question from CG. You share the income 50-50 with your creators, but you also guarantee the income for some shows. So how big a part of that is -- sorry, a big part of the total is that?

Thank you, CG. Good to hear from you. I'll note also that the split depends -- varies depends on the types of ad formats. But you're right on ads, we split 50-50. And when it comes to minimum guarantees, these guarantees that you referenced, I would not foresee any material changes to MG exposure as it relates to our overall sales.

Okay. Another question. What are minimum guarantee contracts currently in the industry versus during the pandemic?

I can give that one up. You can add if you would like to. I remember when I started at Acast back in 2019 in Stockholm, that was quite a competitive time in the local market in Sweden. I think then, Ross, we saw quite a competitive market in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021 when it comes to MGs. But since then, there's been quite a lot of shifts. Some competitors have stepped away from this practice. Some have reviewed how they see minimum guarantees. But I think they will be -- they will continue to be a feature in the industry, and we're well placed to navigate that.

Great. A question from David. Is Spotify currently taking a share of the revenue Acast generates through its channels on the platform? Or have there been any discussions around that?

No. Same as Apple, same as all of our different platforms we distribute to, they do not take a share of any of the revenues from us on that. They get to service their customers, obviously, the content we distribute to them, but we have the full monetization and distribution rights and that comes to us, and we share that with our creators only.

And a question from Stephane. Is the negative iOS effect over now in all material respects?

Yes. IOS started to affect the reported listens in the second half of 2023, Stephane. And then there was a gradual rollout. So we saw that shift with a larger impact in 2024. And these effects should disappear in the first half of 2025, which will be an absolute delight.

And another question from Ramil. Can you please talk about the reasons for ARPL in the U.K. being that much higher than elsewhere?

Yes, I can touch on that question. I think if you look at the U.K. as a whole, U.K. is one of our most mature markets alongside the likes of Sweden. And it has incredibly advanced buying behaviors. So we have taught the market for the last 11 years how to buy podcasting and podcasting audience. We have over 50% of the podcast market. So we have a great audience reach there. We also have evolved the likes of our self-serve platform, which makes obviously us a lot more efficient and that obviously drives our ARPL. But of course, omnichannel is a really key factor here. And the fact we're starting to attract a lot of creators like The Fellas Studio that have a scaled reach across multiple platforms beyond just audio podcasting, that allows us, like Greg talked about, a pitch for the bigger, larger budgets before they get distributed just to audio, so we can pitch for the larger social budgets. And that allows us to drive campaign order size up and therefore, increase ARPL.

Great. A question from Peter. Does Acast need acquisitions to strengthen its position and ability to deliver integrated omnichannel campaigns?

Peter, good to hear from you. Good question. The wonderful position that we're in is that we are looking at M&A from a great vantage point and a great position. We could do M&A, but there's no specific technology, no specific capability that we would have to buy. There are options to build or partner. So we're looking at M&A, having a strong balance sheet, having that optionality, but it's not something that we would have to do to capitalize fully on the omnichannel opportunity. But there could also be very valuable opportunities that could accelerate our path to get to the full potential of the omnichannel opportunity.

Great. Another question from Peter. It's quite a long one. The priorities you have set, are they supposed to drive sales or margins? Trying to understand your financial targets, they indicate that higher sales give higher EBITDA margin only from sales, not positive sales mix. Are you able to discuss the profitability level Acast can reach in end of growth phase 2028?

You're right, Peter, to point out that we haven't guided to a long-term profit margin. The podcasting market is still evolving. We've seen great and advances in the U.S. and in other markets, but we felt that it is too early to call the long-term profitability goal. But of course, we will get back to that. So we're focusing on our strategic investment. We have a strong market position and our focus on innovation and our tech-related investments position us really well to not only continue to make margin progress, but also to deliver a good future steady-state margin. But it's too early to call the exact levels at this point.

Great. Final question from Peter. You're stating continued strong balance sheet, but is it needed to maintain the current war chest?

The war chest that we have, you're absolutely right. It is a war chest, and it does give us optionality for strategic M&A if that were to arise. But no doubt, this will be a continued discussion with and we welcome input from our shareholders, of course.

Another question from CG. With now a positive cash flow and big cash position, the question is buy back shares, but your listing doesn't allow that. So when will we have dividends?

I mean we have previously stated CG that we are in the process of evaluating a stock market uplisting, and we'll give back to you and all of our shareholders on that later in the year. Having said that, this is a decision with a broader base of stakeholders. And per our current dividend policy, we are not paying dividends at this stage of our growth journey.

Another question from Stephane. Is the gross margin target range of 35% to 38% maintained? Or shall we expect plus 39% GMs going forward? It looks like a 40% gross margin should allow for long-term mature profitability of at least 15% on the EBITDA level. Can you -- sorry, can you please give some comments on this suggestion?

I'll park the long-term margin for the time being. I think we've reflected on that a couple of times. So when it comes to gross margin, you're right, we didn't have a specific gross margin target. There are lots of different dynamics that drive our gross margin. The product mix, for example, if we sell more ads, Programmatic preproduced ads, that drives the gross margin up. If we sell more sponsorship, those come at a lower gross margin at around 30%. The U.S. market, we've seen significant growth in the U.S. market, and it is a little bit more competitive. And that is why we have spoken about sort of the potential for gross margin uplift stemming from product mix, ad tech, the likes of selling Collections+, which we've done to great success, but then a potential to counterbalance that with our growth in the U.S. And I must say I'm sort of agnostic as to those 2 routes. If we have -- continue to have fantastic and strong growth in the U.S., I would be absolutely delighted. The other element here is that sponsorship, for example, comes with higher CPMs. So at a gross profit level, selling ads or selling sponsorships at a gross profit level can come in at the nominal same level. So I think we have a great journey for growth and profitability, and we're a little bit agnostic around the exact level of the gross margin.

Great. Another from Andreas at Carnegie. How come CPMs did not grow in 2024? The quality of the listens should have increased after iOS 17 given counted as active downloads. So one could imagine the value per listen should increase. Is it purely related to regional mix with U.S. growing the fastest?

You're definitely on to the right point there, Andreas. We had strong growth in the U.S. where CPMs are typically a little bit lower, and we had strong growth within the ads segment. But you're also right that the iOS 17 impact adds value to advertisers. So over time, that should be reflected in CPMs. But in the last year, there were pressures on the general economic and consumer sentiment. We had high inflation, high interest rates. So it was not a time for a quick shift in CPMs upwards. So that was definitely part of the backdrop and the reason for the CPMs going down, but mainly related to growth in the U.S. and growth of us selling ads.

Thank you. Another M&A question. What kind of M&A needs would you say you have? And what is lacking in the portfolio?

I can answer that question. If you look at our acquisition strategy, it's about generating shareholder value by, of course, reinforcing our core business model and accelerating the growth trajectory. We focus on acquisitions that help enhance the core competencies. So expanding our market footprint or providing access to technologies and capabilities that we're lacking. It's reasonable, of course, to assume that our acquisition focus is likely to be, I guess, concentrated towards our largest and most strategically important markets. As you know, and I spoke about in my section, we acquired businesses with varying profiles previously from the likes of Pippa to RadioPublic, Podchaser and Wonder Media. And all of them have been used strategically to strengthen our core business in enhancing our value proposition to our customer set, which, of course, is our creators and our advertisers.

Great. I think that was the final question. So thank you very much. Thank you for all of your questions. And now it's back to you, Ross, for your final remarks.

Great. Thank you. Acast is at the forefront of the podcasting revolution. Acast is the top independent global podcast platform, connecting creators, audiences and advertisers through Podchaser data for discovery and revenue growth. And our competitive advantages include pioneering dynamic ad insertion and Programmatic advertising, unique data for unrivaled matchmaking, unmatched at scale and partnerships with thousands of advertisers, a global reach and leadership in omnichannel campaigns. And these factors enable us to outpace the structurally growing podcast market, which is driven by increased podcast consumption and predominantly ad spend catching up with that consumption. We have a proven track record of growth and cemented our transition into a profitable growth company in 2024. And we aim to maintain high double-digit growth with improved profitability in the coming years while continuing to lead the podcasting revolution. Our team has shown that we can scale globally, innovate in a niche and successfully integrate new ventures. As part of our journey, we are currently in the process of moving to a main market listing, which will strengthen our credibility and open for a broader investor base, and we'll provide a further update on this matter in due course. It's been a pleasure sharing our vision and strategies with you all today. We hope you've gained a deeper understanding of Acast and the exciting opportunities that we are pursuing. Make sure you follow us for updates at investors.acast.com and acast.com/blog. Our next upcoming events will be the Q1 report on May 6, and our Annual General Meeting is held on May 20. If you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to send them to [email protected], and we'll get back to you. Thank you for your participation.