Ebiquity plc (EBQ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Well, good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining this morning's Ebiquity Capital Markets Day presentation. I'm Rob Woodward. I'm the Chair of the Board of Ebiquity. I'm absolutely delighted to introduce Nick Waters, the Chief Executive of the company. Nick has been running the company now for 4 months. And today, you'll hear his views about the operational refinements that he's been making across the business, his future plans for future operational changes. We'll hear about Ebiquity's products and services and future developments. We'll touch on the market and the market opportunity and also the competitive landscape. And you'll hear how Nick and the team are setting out a plan for growth for the company. Most importantly, though, as opposed to just hearing from Nick, you're going to hear from key members of Nick's executive team. And hopefully, you will be -- you will see the strength in-depth that we have across the Ebiquity leadership team. As I think all investors are aware, there is no quick fix for the company, but we're going to set out a logical and convincing path for future growth. I should say before we start the session is being recorded and will be made available on our investor website. All the materials have just been posted onto our website. [Operator Instructions] So without further ado, let me introduce the company's Chief Executive, Nick Waters.

Thank you very much, Rob, and thank you all for dialing in. We have about 90 minutes of presentational content, and then we'll hand the floor over for any questions you may have. Firstly, I just want to introduce the team. Speakers today, your speakers today will be Ruben Schreurs, recently appointed Group Chief Product Officer; Federica Bowman, fairly recently appointed to lead the FirmDecisions business; Laetitia Zinetti, she's the Managing Director of our Continental Europe business; Leela, who runs our Asia Pacific business, recently promoted into that role; Mike Campbell, who heads our Effectiveness capability globally; and Jim Mason, who runs our clients in North America. And this is the agenda we'll address today. I'll spend perhaps 15 minutes talking about the market context in which we operate in, and then Ruben will take us through the digital product strategy and how we plan to take advantage of changes in that market context. Laetitia will talk through what we call the media life cycle management, which gives an overview of how we form our services and how we integrate them to provide end-to-end solutions to clients. We currently see something of a crisis in effectiveness in advertising. So Mike will talk to us about that. We see that as a major point of competitive differentiation and an area that will drive. Then, Federica will talk to us about contract compliance. We are the market leader in this space. And although we've been going at this for about 20 years as a company, we still see it as a relatively untapped opportunity with room for huge growth potential. It will turn west to look at the U.S. market opportunity. That's the world's largest advertising market, home to over 160 of the world's top advertisers. So we see as a relatively underdeveloped business there, significant growth opportunity. And then looking east, to Asia Pacific, the market that holds 2/3 of the world's population, huge focus for brand owners to grow and drive their business there, and we'll hear from Leela as to how we plan to take that opportunity. And then, I'll make some summary comments. So first of all, I'd just like to introduce myself briefly, and each of the speakers will do this. Until taking this role in July, my entire career of being spent on the agency side. I spent 18 years, the first 18 years of my career with WPP before moving to Aegis, which, as you know, became Dentsu Aegis. And during that time, I've managed global client assignments, and I've run agencies across Asia Pacific, across Europe, Middle East, Africa and then agency group portfolio across the region. So I have a deep understanding of media agencies, a deep understanding of global media markets and brand owners, and I hope to bring that knowledge and experience to bear for the growth of Ebiquity. Just a quick reminder of our business as we currently stand, we are very well geographically distributed. We are, by far, the most geographically distributed business that operates in our niche. We are present in markets which represent around about 80% of the world's advertising spend. So we are uniquely positioned to service not just brand owners in the key markets around the world, but to service multinational brand marketing companies. A very, very quick overview as to where we generate our revenue. You can see the pie chart on the left. About half of our business comes from the U.K. and Ireland. And if we add Continental Europe in there, 3/4 of the business comes from mature western markets. We have, as you can see, a big opportunity to grow our business in both the U.S. and Asia Pacific if we can tap sufficient demand from those markets. And then looking to the right, our revenue by service sector, we are essentially primarily a media performance and management company. And if we add contract compliance to that, almost 80% of our business comes from, what we would say, core media management services. Analytics and tech are important parts of our business, which have grown recently, and we will continue to support them. But I actually view all the services that we provide as operating within the wider media ecosystem. And that's how we will define ourselves as a company as a media specialist, deep market media specialists able to offer services and solutions across every aspects that a client company may have when it comes to managing their media investments. As Rob noted, I joined the group in July. And this is just a summary slide of some of the changes we've made since I arrived. On the bottom left corner, there's a box that says clients, product and organizational structure. These are the 3 primary focus areas. And we will put much more strategic focus on to developing valuable client relationships and increasing those values. We will put considerable focus on refreshing our product and service set and bringing new products to market. We'll take an approach to increase operational efficiency by reorganizing the business. So the management structure that is being put in place now is we have a refreshed executive leadership team with clear responsibilities and accountabilities. We are creating a product and innovation board and Ruben's appointment to Chief Product Officer is the first step in that. And that will have the remit to develop deploy, specify, commercialize our product and service offering and to innovate in the market as the market changes so rapidly. We're creating a client and revenue board to put proper focus and strategic focus around developing a core group of major multinational client companies, and they will be managed by a global client solutions center. The pieces for that are all in place. We just need to make some organizational changes to bring that to effect. We've made 4 internal promotions already. I referenced Federica, a promotion, an internal promotion to lead the FirmDecisions business. That's our Contract Compliance. Likewise, Leela Nair is a promotion, an internal promotion to lead the Asia Pacific business and also Ruben, an internal promotion to the product officer role. We've also made [ not only these 4 a part of the panelists, ] an appointment as a Group Operations Director to ensure we can bring more efficiencies to our business. There are 2 new hires to the group. One has already been made. We announced last week the appointment of New Business and Marketing Director to really put our arms around a go-to-market function and to develop a cohesive and coherent new business and marketing strategy. There's one further role that we haven't yet started the process on, but I will be recruiting or appointing from within a Chief Client Officer. Now to talk about the market context, we see the whole industry at significant crossroads. And our point of view on this is that the media world has taken a turn down the wrong path. Consumer dynamics and corporate pressures to address those changing consumer dynamics are changing the market significantly and forever. Brand marketing companies are investing in data-driven, measurable channels, at the expense of mainstream advertising. That is no longer the default, and it's no surprise to you. All the commentary and narrative in the industry is around data and technology and personalized messaging, addressable marketing at scale. But what we are seeing is short-termism to achieve fast results. The promise of digital is that it's identify -- easy to identify the effects and the impacts of advertising. But what we are seeing is that there is considerable defective measurement in the digital marketplace and considerable wastage. In fact, we would go so far as to say there are tens of billions of dollars wasted in that. If you think about Facebook, people swipe through Facebook ads, YouTube ads are skippable. There is a tendency, I would say, a practice in the industry not to use long-term historic brand devices that we're familiar with from television advertising that is not translating through to the digital medium. And as what we can see is through significant wastage and our lack of focus on brand building, we're seeing results diminish. And advertisers are not getting impartial advice from many media agencies. TV has become unfashionable and unpopular, and yet all the metrics we see is that it is still the most effective medium for moving brand metrics and business, but agencies are not providing that advice. And as a consequence, we're seeing something of a crisis in marketing, where marketing directors are increasingly struggling to prove the effectiveness of their work and the return on the many, many millions of dollars they're investing on behalf of their company. So marketing is severely challenged. And this slide shows the reality behind that. So for quite a number of years now, almost 10 years, we've seen a steady decline in the effectiveness of marketing spend. This chart shows the key business effect tied to marketing spend is declining and declining, as more and more money goes into digital channels that are unaccountable and where money is wasted. Through this -- turning to the mix, this issue of agency trust, and agencies, you could argue, I think, have taken their eye off the ball of, building solutions, creating solutions that are unambiguously in the brand owner's interest. The work they do is no longer having such an effect for brand owners, and there is significant mistrust in the marketplace. That is leading to a rapid shift in marketing delivery structures if client companies don't trust their agencies and if the work the agencies are doing for them is less and less effective. Brand owners are seeking different ways to organize themselves and to find partners that can actually change this dynamic and improve their marketing outcomes. That's creating a very active market. This is specifically looking at the volume of media investments that are put up for tender by brand marketing companies every year. As you can see, it ranges between $20-plus billion to $30 billion a year is put up for tender, much of which 2 -- at least 2/3 of which changes hands as client companies seek better solutions, better partners, new positions in the market. This year is an anomalous year, and that, of course, will be the case for many sectors because of the impact of COVID, but there has been less business put out to tender in the first half of the year, about $10.5 billion was reviewed. There's about another $9.5 billion reviewed in the second half of this year, but that is relatively light by recent historical terms. And we see pent-up demand from this. We think '21 will be a very, very active year. A lot of contracts are on a 3-year renewal basis. So businesses that was contracted in 2017/'18, quite a lot of that, I think, will be renewed or reviewed rather in '21. So what players are there in the market to help brand marketing companies navigate this complexity, try and improve return on investment, try and minimize or eliminate wastage. This is how we segment the market between national and global players, on the x-axis and specialist media consultants through the marketing consultants and general auditors on the y-axis. The size of the bubble is an approximate view of comparative revenues. These companies, most of these companies are privately held. So revenues aren't published, but we can make assessments based on returns at companies house and employees headcount. So we occupy space as being a significant player that are deep market media specialists on a global scale. The size of the bubble obviously doesn't apply to the general auditors. But in truth, they are not approaching our sector strategically. And that doesn't surprise me. These advanced businesses and our sector is a relatively narrow niche. So I didn't believe our sector is of significant strategic importance to them, and we've seen Accenture exit the market. And if we look to the left-hand side, MediaLink is a very scaled player, but that's operating almost exclusively in the United States. So we are not unique, not a significant competitive differentiation by our scale, our global distribution and our deep market specialization. And this is the range of services we offer and an assessment of our competitors against each of those offerings. So whilst Media Pitch Management, Digital Consulting and AdTech Consulting are all fairly evenly offered by our competitors, we do have a greater breadth of service and leadership in some of these verticals, namely contract compliance, in particular, the whole area around media pool benchmarking has a very high barrier to entry. We don't see other players entering that market, and that gives us an advantageous position when it comes to media savings tracking. On the right-hand side of this graph is the analytics or the effectiveness capability, which we are the only player to offer, and we have significant capability and scale there, and that is a really important unique differentiator for us if we look at the declining effectiveness of advertising, media investment and the declining return on investment. This is an area that we will aim to capitalize on more fully. Why is that breadth of service important? Because it gives us multiple entry points to a client. We have strength across the breadth, which gives us the opportunity to provide a service offering to our clients depending on what their particular needs might be at any given time. That then gives us the opportunity to deploy a land-and-expand strategy where we add markets geographically or we cross-sell services, and we provide an integrated service offering with end-to-end solutions rather than specific point solutions. And this chart here is simply a depiction of a typical revenue development with the client company. It goes down at year 3, simply because the services we offer are not demanded every year by client companies. They might hold a pitch once every 3 years. They might have a major analytics review once every 3 to 5 years. So the breadth of service offering is important to maintain and develop strategic client relationships. But if we think about ourselves as an independent neutral third-party adviser, offering objective advice to brand marketing companies, as they navigate this increasingly complex market in which they have diminishing effectiveness, what is the biggest issue? The single biggest issue of our time when it comes to media investment and marketing brands is massive problems in the digital supply chain, very well documented in the area of programmatic. If that's the biggest issue, then that is our biggest opportunity to address. But what sort of size is that opportunity? This is looking at specifically the investments in digital media ad spend which are reaching around about the $400 billion this year according to eMarketer. That's now close to 54% of global ad spend. And whilst the growth trajectory is declining in percentage terms, that is because it is of an increasingly large base. So the digital market, despite all its inefficiencies, despite all the billions of dollars wasted and increasing difficulty and seeing a return on investment, the digital marketplace is still the growth driver of the media industry. So if we look at trying to size the market opportunity for us, if we can provide products and solutions that help clients improve effectiveness or eliminate wastage in this market, the total digital ad market is over $400 billion by 2021. We have to be cognizant that a very significant amount of that is long-tail advertisers that previously had a barrier to entry from advertising because broadcast was out of their financial reach. But with the likes of Google and Facebook, vast, long-tail, small-to medium- sized enterprises and our advertising through digital channels. We can set that long tail aside. Our primary target market is the world's top 100 advertisers, of which we currently service 70. So we have good penetration of that primary target market of the world's top 100 advertisers. And that group, that universe invests around about USD 50 billion a year in digital media. Now the new products and service that we've already brought to market this year are identifying between 15% and 30% waste in client and digital spend. And if we extrapolate that across the full universe of that top 100 advertisers, that's in the range of $7.5 billion to $15 billion of so-called investment, which is not having an impact or is wasted. So if we only take 0.5% of that $50 billion investment, and if you think of it in terms of the commissions or the taxes in the tech stack, 0.5% is a small figure compared to the 5% and 10% that some of the tech stack operators or even 15% challenge. So if we just aim for 0.5% of that $50 billion spend by the top 100 advertisers, that creates a market opportunity for us to go after a USD 250 million. So at this point, I'm going to hand over to Ruben, who will talk to us about how we're going to aim to take this market in terms of our digital product strategy.

Thank you very much, Nick, and good day, everyone. Thank you very much for joining today's Capital Markets events. My name is Ruben Schreurs, as Nick said, and I have yesterday been made Group Chief Product Officer of Ebiquity. And it's been a very interesting journey so far. So I'll just give you a bit of the background as to what got me here and why I'm so heavily involved and committed to the Ebiquity group. I started in digital advertising over 10 years ago, have since worked on both the agency advertiser and publisher site, always in digital media, specifically in programmatic and biddable media formats. And then in 2017, I launched and self-funded Digital Decisions as a specifically digital answer to clients' needs to optimize and to track across the globe their digital media investments as an independent party. So Ebiquity was a huge example and inspiration for me and for us when we founded the business. Why I mentioned that I self-funded it and the fact that we were profitable from the start is that we worked in a very similar way to how we're operating now at a group level. Meaning we had consulting services as a core business when we started to generate capital and generate strategic relationships with clients, which we could then convert into the more strategic and scalable service sets that we have been developing over the last 3.5 years, which I'll come back to later on. Earlier this year, Digital Decisions was acquired by Ebiquity, which was incredibly amazing, and this year has been great. I'll give you an update on performance as well. And this has culminated in an appointment of myself into the CPO role, working with the new executive leadership team to bring the new products focusing on the digital economy and the digital market to the global group. The -- following on next slide regarding the advertising market development and digital dominance within that, I wanted to highlight the fact that it's a completely different market. It's not just bigger now than offline media channels, but there's also some very intrinsic key differences that we need to take into account when we talk about product strategy and service strategy for Ebiquity. First and foremost, the digital market is dominated globally by a large -- or a hugely consolidated number of players. As you can see in this overview, the biggest players are Google, Facebook, Alibaba and Amazon. And beyond that, there is a much higher level of global consistency in practice, infrastructure and buying methodology when it comes to digital media versus off-line media, like TV and print and out-of-home. What this means is that when we compare the digital market to the saturated and commoditized off-line markets, there is a critical set of difference that we need to address in order to bring the appropriate services as an independent expert to the market to help our clients eliminate the issues that are prevalent in digital media. So first of all, if we look at the saturated commoditized market of off-line media, it's highly esthetic. It's already very transparent, the practices and how things are traded and what the actual output is. There is a steady growth decline, as we all know. And therefore, the focus for advertisers is primarily on output price, who -- if talking about agencies, who can deliver to me, the best rate for the commodity I already know and what value it will bring me. So the focus of the services we bring to market there and where we are dominant and market-leading, is mainly about guarantees, commitments and output price. Compared to the digital market, which is much more dynamic, still very opaque. So practices are not well known for buyers, both on the brand side and in some cases, the agency side. We see a very high growth, and there is, therefore, a much higher focus on value. There's a high variance in what you can buy for the same money. So the actual focus on how to invest the money, where to invest it, what metrics and KPIs to assess and how to do that is the highest priority for brands, where the primary things we focus on or brands are focused on are quality of the digital media, governance to ensure proper, high-quality and brand-safe delivery of their investment -- their media investment. Advertisers within digital media waste, as Nick already addressed, a very significant part of their budget in digital media structurally. This study by Alex Partners and The Drum amongst a sample of FMCG brands, large global FMCG brands has shown that actually the waste can reach up to 60% of the total investment, which is a completely different world than the waste that we see and identify in off-line media. Major contributors to the waste are transparency issues, ad fraud issues and brand-safety issues, which leads to a very low percentage of the invested budgets actually converging into effective working media for brands. Now this is very much what we founded Digital Decisions for to address that issues structurally back in 2017. And when we started talking to Ebiquity last year, we together reached the conclusion that actually, there would be a potentially hugely synergetic and profitable structure if we would merge the businesses, if we would take the technology infrastructure that we had built over the past 3.5 years and the capability to deliver and deploy it on the incredible client base using the credibility of Ebiquity and merging the 2 organizations and capability to deliver. And this year has been great, which actually has far exceeded my expectations. When the pandemic hit, I was quite worried about the impact that would have on the business. However, this year, we've reached 26.2% average month-to-month revenue growth. We've onboarded 11 new clients and are currently onboarding many others as we speak. We're now active in 80-plus markets, all managed from a central hub in the Netherlands, where we are headquartered. And we have over $4 billion ad spend in scope across the clients that we service. Now this has been a great year as a proof-of-concept for the validity of the business model that we have created and the fact that this can create a very interesting new market or an on top of incremental market for the Ebiquity group. So the way that we look at this is that we are creating and launching a bifurcated commercial strategy, where we have our core business, including the media management and the off-line media services we have in the market, where we are the dominant player in which Laetitia will address later on as well as to what kind of services we bring to the market in that life cycle. On top of that, we have a new strategy opportunity where we have a new market to create and tap into as we have actually already been doing over the year. It's a high-growth market where we are a first-mover. And the barrier of entry for other firms to follow is very expensive, as we have a massive head start on the rest of the market. Also, the services we bring are much less people-based or people heavy. It's about technology as scalability. So it's highly profitable compared to other consultancy or FTE-based services. And also, as we've seen this year, the nature of these services, because they are so value-based, and we are accountable for the actual waste we eliminate, the nature of the service is highly anti-cyclical, making it particularly interesting for this and most likely next year when brands have to reduce their budgets, but want to do so in an effective way. Now the core business is the critical part of this equation, in my opinion, because it provides us with financial continuity, an amazing network of existing top-tier brands, as Nick already mentioned, and also an amazing network of media experts and geographic footprint. And we are very strategically embedded with clients. We have the relationship. We have the trust. So we are able to bring to market the new products much more effectively than when we would start from scratch. So that part of the M&A strategy has definitely worked out in our favor. The great thing is that the new market is not just something we create and operate in isolation, but there are major synergies between the core business that exists and the new strategy we are deploying as we speak. The new strategy brings automation, data management capabilities and delivery upgrade to the core business, leading to increased profit margins at a higher competitive edge and a more comprehensive life cycle suite of services. Our core business, conversely, as I already mentioned, brings a very strong client base, credibility and a global network to us, which helps us with the new strategy as a group to kick start growth, to shorten the sales cycles and to really identify and strategically pursue the existing demand in the market. We changed our ambition or way of thinking about products and services for this new strategy from McKinsey to McDonald's as we have dubbed it, where McKinsey is largely people-heavy, project-based driven on seniority, as limited profit cap and limited automation opportunities due to the strategic in-depth nature of the services, we are going to bring to market more globally consistent products, focusing on high efficiency making sure that the product and service experience is consistent across the globe and that we have robust quality standards. And similar to McDonald's, we will thrive on scale of the existing core business. The key assets underlying the McKinsey business is knowledge. In the case of McDonald's, some people don't know that, but it's actually real estate that drives their financial wealth. In our case, it will be media data as we are deploying a radical data management strategy, which will underlie the new services we bring to market. The key priorities for us or the keywords we think of when we build or design and build and deploy the new strategy is data, efficiency, recurring nature of services, so not one-off project based engagements with clients; profitability and stickiness, meaning that there is value for clients to continue working with us as time moves on. A major part of what we have been creating over the past 3.5 or nearly 4 years now and are now integrating within the Ebiquity group is the media data vote structure. Basically, what this means, and this is unique in market, is that we will be gathering structurally data mostly directly from source on all digital media channels into central environments for our clients across their different agencies and allow -- this allows us to much more rapidly deploy products into the market to access and bring to market research and insights and to create more robust, relevant benchmarks for the digital market. This is not just a concept. We are live with the alpha version of the integrated Media Data Vault. We have deployed the tracking in August and already over EUR 200 million in ad spend and nearly 60 billion impressions are actively being tracked and monitored by us and the recommendations around how to eliminate waste and increase the value are actively being brought to market at a consistent rate of between 15% to 30% of total spend being identified as waste and therefore, opportunities to increase the effectiveness of the advertising. We are bringing to market a digital media suite of new services, specifically designed or altered for the digital market, taking into account the intrinsic differences between digital and the more commoditized off-line media channels. I won't go through this in depth, but the collateral can be found on the website, if you want to have a more close look. But effectively, we have 4 key pillars of service that we bring to market, ranging from monthly sourcing to governance monitoring to commitments and productivity of spend tracking and to the digital media review, under which we are deploying specific forensic add-on products, which we can deploy at a large scale at high profitability into the market, addressing client needs as they vary from market-to-market or client vertical to client vertical. Not all of this is completely newly designed. Much of what we have done has been around redeploying and reusing assets that already exist within the Ebiquity Group business, which has been very exciting, and we have really identified the assets we have and make sure that we are focusing on the new strategy with a bootstrap mentality, using what we have with low CapEx requirements, using our existing capital and assets to bring this to market, and we are ready to do so at scale in 2021. The way of delivery also, as a final point here I want to address, has changed radically. We are right now at scale, deploying into the market with our clients a different way of bringing insights and recommendations to them, where rather than having static twice a-year or once-a-year PowerPoint presentations, on top of that, they have realtime access to a highly forward-looking environment in which all data is updated consistently across all of the markets in scope. And clients are on top of, together with us, their spend on a much more timely and short guidance than currently. And this has been received really well by the market already. Next to this, we are releasing the Media Leadership Index, which is a group product where we bring together all of our practices and expertise and provide annual insights to our clients across their global markets around where they are versus the market in terms of maturity or leadership in different matters relating to digital transformation, performance tracking, effectiveness, compliance and media management and so on. This is again what we are releasing in 2021 and are now setting up a beta environment for the first selected group of clients to go live on. The metrics and KPIs on top of the financial metrics, obviously, that we will be monitoring to measure success is the spend monitored in the Media Data Vault environment, the value we actively create for clients. We do that at a highly forensic level. The clients that we have successfully on-boarded on the new suite of services, the inefficiencies we managed to identify at large and the new clients won as a result of the new digital services, so where the digital suite had a primary role. So the opportunity right now, and I should say that, as I mentioned at the start, I am very positive about the future, the near future of Ebiquity. I think we have an amazing opportunity in terms of the assets that are in place to basically deploy this new strategy from. I recently acquired shares myself as well, really to be part of this journey all the way. And I think the key points here is that we are on the verge of creating a new market with the opportunity to lead from day 1. Our network is ready, and we believe client demand is high. Ebiquity is the market leader, and the time to capitalize is now, and we set cores based on proven business success in the last 9 to 10 months. And lastly, our scale and existing data will give us a massive competitive advantage in terms of competitors that will likely try to follow us into this market. And now I would like to hand over to Laetitia to give you a better insight into what that core business part means and what the media life cycle is [Audio Gap] actually what that means for our clients. Thank you very much.

Good morning to all. So I'm going to be talking about the media life cycle management. And just a bit of information about me. So I'm Laetitia Zinetti. I'm the Managing Director of Continental Europe. I've been with Ebiquity for 10 years, and I'm currently based in Paris. I started my career on the brand owner side first as communications managers at Qantas Airways. Then I moved to the auto industry with Nissan Europe, where I was Head of Media for 17 markets across the region. I joined Ebiquity in 2010 to launch Ebiquity office in France. Then after 4 years, I moved to Ebiquity head office in London to develop our global offering in media consultancy services. I've been acting as Managing Principal, Media Management practice since 2014 and was appointed last year Ebiquity Continental Europe MD. So I'm going to be talking about media life cycle management and to start with a bit of context. As Ruben has shown the digital ecosystem is complex, it has been forcing advertisers to review their internal organizations and the way they work with partners, while also reviewing that technology is right to meet future business objective. With this complexity, advertisers have a great opportunity to drive greater effectiveness and efficiency. And at the same time, the digital market continues to grow. Advertisers are looking for transparency with their relationship. If we now focus a bit more about how COVID-19 has affected media and how it has accelerated these trends. First of all, media consumption changing and the consumption habits changing as well. The volume of subscription-based services has increased. For example, we saw Netflix is growing to 60 million users. More consumers are engaging in noncommercial space online. The lockdowns have forced company to quickly digitize with the increase of e-commerce and find solutions to accommodate the market shift, with this consumer purchasing online more and more often. With this requirement of digital specialist skills are heavily increasing. There is a small pool of talent. So it is becoming challenging to find the right skill sets and talent. Brand owners are, therefore, to adjust their way of working and implement agile process, internally, but also the way they work with their agency partners. So this is how Ebiquity services cover the full spectrum. We believe we provide a unique offering in the market, as our products cover all challenges within the media and marketing spectrum. No other consultancy can offer the depth of expertise and suite of products we have. We want to move away from point solutions as Ruben demonstrated. Our combined strengths allow us to provide integrated and tailor-made solutions to our clients, ensuring that the clients are delivering against their objectives such as transparency, efficiency, effectiveness, organization's design and technology. This is an example and a success story that we would like to replicate. Our Vodafone client partner has grown the relationship, as you can see in this graph, from helping them initially in 2014 on an agency selections process and moved to a more integrated and integrated relationship. We have received some feedback from Sara Martins de Oliveira, which was the former Head of Brand and Media at Vodafone. And she said that Ebiquity are collaborative, extremely knowledgeable, trustworthy and above all completely in tune to our culture and ways of working. The breadth of our service cover all clients' needs, and we want to replicate this example with other clients. In terms of leadership capabilities, we are leaders in this space. Media is our passion, our talent excel across all our areas of our business. We are ranked #1 across media performance measurement with about 60% market share. We are #1 in agency selections with more than 100 assignments per year, so in Contract Compliance, where we have about 70% market share. Our analytics teams have been recognized for their work and are award-winning with DLG, for example. And finally, our newly formed tech team, already one of the most respected partners for tech solutions. So as a summary, in these slides, you can see that the combination of Ebiquity assets make it unique to tackle all brand owners challenges. The combination of experts, portfolio mix, geographic footprint, but also to advertisers, we are developing fit-for-purpose solutions. So I will now hand to Mike, who will be presenting in more depth, the analytics practice, which is one of our key points of differentiation. Thank you.

Thanks very much, Laetitia. I hope every one can hear me. I lead the analytics practice. I have done for about the last 5 years. The -- I'm also trying to lead that. That seems to have done it. In terms of my background, very briefly, I have worked for about 30 years now, actually, from which 20 years within the Data Analytics business. And about 10 years, actually in the media agency environment, running the Ninah Consultancy within the Publicis Group. I think so as introduction, Nick said earlier that the average ROI is declining as a result of media. The one thing and certainly the experience of working within the Publicis Group and it is no different to any other agencies that there is a remarkable lack of science that goes into media planning. The other thing you got to bear in mind is that when you talk about the return on investment, the ROI, it is very much governed by the margin that agencies make on different media channels. So their ROI will be maximized by selling the highest margin media channels, whereas actually the client's ROI, of course, will be dictated by the media channels that actually have the greatest impact. And there is certainly a significant data balance or sort of balance there. The fact is that the majority of media plans are still generated that are audience led, trying to focus in on smaller and smaller segments. As soon as you do that and get to niche augments, the media agencies can charge a lot more for those audiences. But obviously, it comes at a significant price premium to the advertiser. So if the plans are actually effectiveness-led, you could then say, "well, is that price premium being offset by the lift in sales that it generates." And very often, that isn't the case. And certainly, that movement towards digital media, a number of those digital channels, again, as Nick alluded to, people don't look at them. They skip through them, they swipe across them in the case of Facebook and an interesting stat for you. It's only about 1 in every 200 Facebook ads are actually viewed all the way through to the end. They charge on the impression that they serve, but only 1 in 200, they're actually seen all the way through to the end and with the headphones on. So again, the sales lift that, that will induce is obviously going to be tempered because of that effect. The key thing, I think, for us to help clients with is to ensure that they are measuring, that they're planning their media. It's one thing sort of benchmarking within our sort of media and benchmarking prices, et cetera. But you've got to be buying the right media that actually works for the business. And again, if we put that together, so we're doing with some of the leading clients, there's Vodafone example before that Laetitia showed, then that's where you make the big gains for clients and the stickiness of those clients. The other thing when you are putting media plans together, and again, this is something that Nick alluded to in the introduction that there's a number of lenses that you need to apply. One is thinking about the long-term/short-term goals. Now again, if you think in sort of classical marketing terms, you talk about the awareness funnel, you need to make your prospective customers aware of your brand and to try and do that generally at scale if that's the business that you're in. If you are a chocolate, biscuit, or a cereal or whatever it is, you need lots of people to have that sort of mental awareness of your brand in the first place. And then ultimately, you'll get down through that funnel to try and convert those customers that are aware of your brand. But increasingly, in particular, on digital media, the targeting is such that you're focusing on the conversion. But again, if you haven't got as many customers actually being aware of your brand effectively in the hopper in the first place, obviously, there is a limit to the impact of that when you're just focusing on conversion when people are actually not aware of your brand or been refreshed about your brand in the first place. So it's important to have that in balance, have sort of brand assets at scale, high reach, together with the conversion as well. And a lot of the industry rhetoric and a lot of the conferences that I and my colleagues speak at, is to try and get that in balance than actually sort of proving the case that once it is in balance, then it has a major positive impact for the brands that we support and obviously, putting the measurement framework to get that in balance. One of the key cornerstones in the industry in terms of media measurement in terms of its impact and the ROI that it generates is econometrics. So most people know it in the media. Industry is marketing mix modeling. So that's the MMM in the title. And again, typically, what we would find is that when we're applying marketing mix modeling, the kind of ROI improvement on these big media budgets really is significant and tends to improve through time. So getting over 20% is a realistic expectation that we would generate, actually had a case there of the likes of Vodafone, that is certainly the case. Again, it was mentioned by Laetitia that we've won some awards that we are proud of. If you're not aware of the IPA, these are the sort of media effectiveness awards, the most famous in the world. They've been set up for the last 30 years. We've won gold, actually, it's every 2 years. We won 2 golds now for Direct Line Group, also for Lidl. And again, a lot of this is sort of focusing on getting the channel mix right, the deployment right, but also the content, the creative rights. In the case of Direct Line Group, it was looking at a more long-term brand view and the sort of gains to the fixer that was the focus of the most recent campaigns. The other thing, because that long-term brand view of advertising that needs to be the focus, we actually won the Channon prize, actually Channon, not Cannon or something for the Best New Learning in terms of the techniques to actually measure that. And again, this Effies and sort of other awards. That face at the bottom, if you're not aware, this is a guy called Mark Ritson, who's a Professor of Marketing. He's actually a brit. He writes the marketing week. He is probably the biggest drawer in our industry and conferences. And he is absolutely latched on to some of the works that we do in conferences and some of the papers that we have submitted. And actually, that link certainly works well for us when we're selling our work. I mentioned that this -- so lurge towards digital media and that the rate of acceleration towards digital media doesn't always make sense for our clients. So very often, when we're consulting with them and actually measuring the impact, we say well, actually, we need to sort of get that back in balance, and I think this slide here, which is a slide of our benchmarks in terms of ROI benchmarks from our data bank of results from marketing mix models or econometrics. So just to explain this, I'll just take the auto one. If we're looking at the ROI, the return on investment of the most efficient channel, which we're finding to be TV, then you can see the relative efficiency of other channels and just to point to digital display, which for those that are not directly in the media industry, so it's fairly annoying little ads that you can very often not shut down. The efficiency of digital display ordinarily is about 1/5 of that of auto. And certainly, one of the auto clients that I worked with, they were spending about 40% of their budgets on this before they measured it and realized it wasn't being efficient. So once we've established the efficiency of the different media channels, it's not quite as simple as just saying, well, okay, TV is more efficient, in that case that we looked at. It's not always the case, of course, but if channel A is more efficient, put more into channel A and away from channel B or channel C. The reality is we're measuring the response curve because the more you spend on media, you don't get a linear response in terms of the payback because you tend to run out of people that you're sending that message to. That's the reach of the media, and you're hitting them more and more time. So you get in to a point of diminishing returns in its effect because of that. So when you've measured the efficiency of the media and you understand the saturation profiles, it enables you to do an optimization. So very simplistically, if you've got 3 media channels, if you take money here, we've got investments along the bottom. We've got sales and profit return on the vertical axis. If you take money out of channel C that is oversaturated, put it into channel A, then there is a big uptick in the sales impact from the media plan. Then if you start to look at channel A and get the deployment, the seasonal, the weight, all of those correct, again, the ROI will improve even further. So at the heart of it is what we're doing in terms of the channel mix. And we have developed a suite of tools that do this very powerfully. We also look at all the halo impacts if they advertise one product, the impact on other products in the range. And you can start to look at if you've got a media budget of GBP 50 million, what's the most optimal way of spending it? Or if you are, let's say, an auto manufacturer and you want to sell an incremental 10,000 cars, what budget do you need? How do you deploy it, et cetera? And we've got these live in many of our clients, Vodafone was mentioned, and I'll go on. So Volkswagen, they certainly have these tools. And really, just to tell the story of Volkswagen to finish off. It's an account that we pitch for one, I believe there's about 10 competitive agencies initially in that pitch. What we initially did as a proof-of-concept is to work just for the Volkswagen brand itself. So not Škoda, SEAT and Audi, but initially just Volkswagen initially in 3 countries, that's the U.K., Germany and France. What we've been able to do through that is to measure and then now implement and improve the value of the program. So we've got an ROI improvement at the point where we've got all results and implemented them in market, and that figure is going up to currently 18%. And it's an interesting element to this. When you go into -- when we went into 2020, there is the Global controller, actually, Group Controllers, Dr. Dahlheim, of Volkswagen made the point that actually 2020 and then obviously the tightness and the inability to sell cars and the financial pressure bring certain things into focus. And he pointed to the modeling that Volkswagen were doing with Ebiquity, and so that's actually a practice that is working that should be done everywhere. So we are now setting up and starting the modeling exercises for the top 5 European countries for the other parts of the passenger car range as well. Okay. With that, the implication is that there are significant changes that will be needed for client media plans. And obviously, we need to wrap the appropriate contracts around those. I'll hand over to Federica, who's our CEO of FirmDecisions. Thank you.

Hi. My name is Federica Bowman, and I am the CEO of our Contract Compliance arm within Ebiquity branded FirmDecisions. I started in advertising in media back in 2,000 with a focus on digital, spending the first 10 years working, both agency and vendor side within the supply chain. In 2010, I joined Ebiquity and, over the last 10 years, always with a focus on digital, have worked in a variety of markets internationally, North America as well as London, being made then, most recently, the CEO of FirmDecisions in August of this year. So what is contract compliance? Well, very simply, it's the auditing of agencies that advertisers use in the marketing space worldwide to make sure that those service providers, being media, creative or production agencies, for example, adhere to the terms of the contract between the advertiser and the agency and a transparency in the management of client investments. We work on average with around 85 brands per year. Many of our clients work with us on a cyclical basis, either auditing every 1, 2 or 3 years. And we're considered really valuable to our clients. Many of them have been with us for over 10 years. And the reason for that is that we deliver significant value over and above financial returns. So primarily, advertisers will want to work with us because they think that they will get monies back. But actually, our audits create a significant amount of value over and above that. We prevent issues from reoccurring. We create increased protection for advertisers by helping to identify risk areas in their contracts. And we identify better agency working processes to ultimately improve the advertiser-agency working relationship. Our clients are global. We're really proud of the list that we have. They include brands such as Unilever, L'Oreal, General Motors, Google, HSBC, Mondelez, just to name a few. On average, we complete around 333 audits per year. The World Federation of Advertisers, which is the global advertiser body, ran an independent media advisor survey a while back and claimed that we are the largest contract compliance consultancy in the world. We're definitely market leaders in Europe and certainly across parts of Asia in particular. We delivered over 7,000 audits since our inception back in 1999, so we're a very established practice within our space. And really, all of that experience is key for our clients because knowledge of agency finances and the way in which they operate is key. We have over 700 years' worth of combined experience within our business alone of the marketing industry. Since our launch 20 years ago, we've audited in over 75 markets around the world, from underdeveloped ad markets such as Myanmar, for example, to fully developed ad markets like North America. We've got a team of over 50 staff that service any market where our clients have a presence. We're specialists, particularly in contract compliance for the marketing sector, and are made up almost entirely of ex agency finance staff. So as we like to say, we know where the bodies are buried. In 2016, we were heavily involved in a seminal report issued by the Association of National Advertisers in the U.S., which is the industry body for advertisers in North America. And it highlighted significant risks to trading transparency by media agencies, and you may have heard Laetitia talk a little bit about transparency being one of the key pillars of what we do. And fundamentally, for FirmDecisions, our business revolves around helping advertisers get transparency with their agency partners. That really led to a shift in client engagement for us to focus on media agencies. And as a result, over the last 4 years, almost 90% of our projects have been the auditing of media agencies versus any other type of agency. And in fact, in '19 -- in 2019, we audited $79 billion worth of client spend. Typically, our projects cover 2 years' worth of advertiser spend. So annual client spend is around the $40 billion mark. So that -- when you put it in context, that $40 billion is around 0.2% of the potential market that's out there, which is estimated to be around $1.7 trillion. So that gives us really plenty of room for growth. And the question really is how do we grow in a scalable way. We'll be broadening our audit services. As I mentioned, we currently skew heavily towards media auditing. However, our heritage is in creative and production audits. Our experience spans across a far broader set of agency types from print, point-of-sale marketing, influencer agencies, e-commerce and many more. So next year, the focus on growth will be for nonmedia audits, cross-selling to existing clients in order to be able to build stronger relationships with them. Laetitia talked about that kind of cross-selling opportunity in order to build those relationships and something that we fully intend to pursue. An example of that opportunity might actually be Nike, who alone uses over 25 different agencies just covering media, digital and creative. We currently only audit their media agency in that space. And so there is a lot of room for growth even at an individual advertiser level. We intend working more innovatively with other parts of the Ebiquity business. We already have working streams in place to collectively build services that give us a point of difference in market, particularly in the digital and programmatic space, which is a huge growth area for us. Where there are -- all of these areas are clearly places where clients need our help. We're already in the process also of becoming more efficient, finding ways to reduce laborious work to provide time for more strategic analysis and insights that find -- that clients find valuable. And movement into automation of our services this quarter will help us to streamline what we do for our clients, to make ourselves more efficient, to speed up our project delivery times but also increase our operating margins while enabling us to stay competitively priced in market. We'll also be increasing our marketing and sales efforts in specific markets next year. In particular, the focus will be on North America, India, China and the MENA region, where we already have a small but established presence in each of those territories. There's a massive growth opportunity. These 4 markets have significant growth potential for contract compliance as our market share is not as developed as it is in, for example, Europe and the U.K. The U.S., India and China are 3 of the fastest-growing ad spend markets in the world. And although a smaller overall market, the MENA region presents a significant opportunity for us as it's a highly fragmented market, and so many advertisers have to engage with multiple agencies in order to deliver their services. And we still currently only account for about 15% of market share in that market. So these 4 pillars will form the basis of our 2021 strategy. I talked a little bit about the U.S. opportunity for contract compliance. This is a market where we work very closely with the media team in America, providing leads for new business and responding to combined service requests. So I'll now hand over to Jim, who will take you through the broader business strategy for the North American market.

Thanks, Federica. Hi. My name is Jim Mason, and I lead Client Services for Ebiquity in the U.S. My background is in Strategy Consulting, where I worked for a number of years before shifting to the digital side and the agencies, working in digital marketing and digital transformation, most recently leading business consulting for Publicis Sapient in EMEA before shifting to Ebiquity in the U.S. I want to talk to you for a few minutes about the U.S. market. As you know, the U.S. is the largest media market in the world by far. It's the size of the next 5 markets combined, actually. Yet as you saw with Nick's slide earlier in the presentation, we under index in the U.S. Consequently, it's an important market for Ebiquity moving forward. The dynamics in the U.S. are actually fascinating because historically, it has not behaved like the European markets. Whereas Europe has a rich history in media auditing, the U.S. does not. Our rates of media auditing are much lower. Historically, advertisers have just not felt the need to audit here. Why? It's a great question. There are probably a number of different reasons for that, but I believe an important one is trust. On the right, you'll see the U.S. has had a higher level of institutional trust than other European countries. In the chart, I picked Germany to represent Europe, but you could pick really most nay Northern European country, and the number would have been about the same. And let me give you an example. Federica just mentioned a 2016 ANA landmark report. It was -- this report blew the lid off of shady media practices in the U.S. It shocked the U.S. marketplace. People had no idea. They had so much trust in their agency. But in Europe, well, they were surprised as well, but it wasn't about the content of the report. The Europeans were skeptical enough about the agencies. There was nothing really in the report that was new. They were just surprised that the U.S. advertisers didn't know this was going on already. Even this last week, I was talking with a financial services company that has never performed a media audit before. And they remained reticent because they trust their agency, and they're concerned that this may do something to damage that relationship, which really actually isn't the case. We found, in many ways, it's actually strengthened the relationship. And though that opinion is uncommon, it's becoming less common with every passing year. As you see with the chart on the right, institutional trust actually is declining every year in the U.S. steadily. And we see that, that actually is a trend for greater benchmarking in audit services for us. But it's more than just that level of trust that's a key dynamic in the U.S. There are 2 factors I want to talk about that increase the need for independent advisory services in the U.S. First is the complexity inherent in the shift to digital. There's been a theme throughout all of the conversation thus far. Ruben talked about it in depth. And you've heard about the information asymmetry where agencies and technology companies have all of the information and all of the power. The top 100 brands used to have significantly more power, but this has shifted to the technology platforms and the agency holding companies. The brands now are looking for an advocate in their corner to provide advisory services and to help them make sense of what is now an increasingly complex environment. Correspondingly, it has also become more challenging for a brand to determine how well its agency is performing in this digital space. The standards are changing. There are so many different factors that are affecting performance. The brands need assistance from someone to understand what does good look like. The second major factor driving an increased need for independent advisory services is the increased use of performance incentives and agency compensation. As you see from the chart on the right, most of the largest advertisers include incentive compensation in their agency contracts, and we are seeing advertisers of all sizes now following that lead and really pushing that percentage higher and higher with each successive year. This change is significant for Ebiquity since brands need an independent third-party to measure that agency performance against their saving commitments. Industry reviews have, therefore, become a buying trigger for our services in the U.S. As the overall market demand for independent audit and advisory services increases, the client conversations have changed. The nature of the ask goes well beyond traditional television benchmarking. But to be clear, there's still very much a need for that work, and we're still getting many, many requests for that. The conversations now extend more deeply into digital governance strategy and operations and other consultancy services. You've heard about the digital governance and the source data monitoring tools earlier in the presentation. But brands are asking for operational reviews. They realize, in the digital space, they need more than just an audit. They need somebody who really understands the intricacies of digital media to review their agency performance. A great example is paid search. Brands spend millions with Google so you'll visit their website. But the setup configuration, maintenance of paid search is pretty surprisingly complex. Agencies must manage thousands of keywords, countless ad copies and numerous configuration settings. With the pressure on agencies to reduce fees, they often don't spend the time needed to review everything in detail, and that's where we come in. Our teams look through the details of the search setup and operations. We access the client account and perform an in-depth diagnostic and a forensic review of 100 dimensions to confirm that best practices are followed. And this is an environment where little details matter. For example, not long ago, we found a client wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars because a single flag, one check box, was not set to restrict the geographic range of their search. And I can assure you there are many more of these kinds of parameters under their end of the hood to look for and investigate. Consequently, our clients love this service. They like how actionable it is. They like how specific it is. They like that it results in significant and measurable savings. And as you can imagine, we're having good luck selling that kind of service. The largest takeaway from these 2 slides, specifically the context, is the U.S. market is growing. More brands are interested in our services, and that's going to drive an increase in our client account. And they're looking for a larger set of services, meaning our average revenue per client should increase. We're excited about the momentum we're building in the U.S. Despite the challenging year, we've been hold our performance essentially constant. And we've had great success replacing Accenture with clients this year as they've exited the business. You can see we've gained multiple top 5 retailers in the U.S. We have -- we've gotten new household names in financial services, electronics, alcoholic beverages, and that's just the beginning there. We've had several other notable wins where we've added new clients, and I'd like to point out the multiyear renewals. Our clients, and these are massive clients, top 10 market caps, Silicon Valley players, major automotive, major travel advertisers, have really responded to what our media teams have been delivering and have signed up for multi-year engagements with us, which we're excited about. And we feel that there's significant momentum in the U.S. market with these wins, gaining Accenture clients as we move into 2021. One of the reasons I think that the momentum will continue is related actually to the uptick in agency reviews. Nick talked about this early on in the presentation, and this chart shows the U.S. agency selection activity over the past few years. And there are 2 things, really, I want to highlight. The first is the peak in 2018. That's really when we saw the highest agency selection activity over the entire period. Most media contracts, they'll have a 3-year contract period, which means all of that peak will really be up for renewal or review in 2021. The second point is that this year, given everything going on, we've experienced about a 40% decrease in agency selection activity in the U.S. That isn't going away. It's just deferred for 12 months. So we think for both of those reasons, that's going to lead to significant gains and selection activity in the U.S. next year. What does that mean? One, there's going to be demand for Ebiquity agency selection services; and two, as brands are going to be looking to establish a media audit and governance program as they begin their relationship with their new agency. As I mentioned earlier, many brands did not have an established audit relationship, and we hope to fill that gap. We've discussed the growth of the U.S. market, our momentum in the U.S. Let's talk now about how we're going to capitalize on the opportunity and further build on our momentum. The first growth lever, as you'll see on the left, is to capitalize our existing client base. We have an amazing client roster. And with a number of marquee brands, we have a sizable opportunity to grow revenue with these clients. Our challenge now is to really grow the relationship with these clients, expand into some of the additional services that you heard Mike talk about or Laetitia talk about or Ruben talk about, the full breadth of our portfolio that we can bring to serve these clients and their needs. This year, we restructured our client services approach, and we've brought in more client partners to really emphasize our relationship and our level of service for these clients. The second growth lever is to proactively outreach to capture new clients. There are a number of brands that need media audit and advisory services, and we want them to look first to Ebiquity. For example, there are several sizable Accenture clients that have not selected a new media auditor. We've had a lot of success picking up those clients earlier in the year, and we hope to continue that into 2021 to essentially run the table and pick up the remaining clients on the board. We discussed an uptick in agency reviews. For interviews that we are not running, we're going to aggressively target those brands and let them know about our compelling services offered. Fed mentioned the FirmDecisions exit. That's really a no-brainer for brands to conduct before they end their agency relationship. Our third lever, and I should note this is a list of priority, is to opportunistically grow our base of mid-sized advertisers. Ultimately, these are the reasons that I'm optimistic about our momentum in the U.S. market. The market itself is growing, and we're well positioned to continue to capture share and exceed the overall market growth rates. With that, I'd like to shift geographically from the U.S. to Asia Pacific.

So a very good morning to you all. I am from Siemi, Singapore. As you can see, I'm actually operating out of our office. So we are actually working to fairly normalized conditions in Southeast Asia or across Asia, which means that for 2021, we are expecting a strong rebound and looking forward to great growth overall. As you know, Asia is a big opportunity, and we are market leaders in the region with very little competition. So we're expecting big growth for ourselves across the region. Okay. Just a little snapshot about myself. I've been in the industry working across Asia Pacific for a long time, too many years to mention, almost 30 years. And in 2014, I had the privilege of opening up the Southeast Asia office. I think this is the first time Ebiquity actually opened an office in Singapore, and that's been just great. We've run it to a market leadership position. So we dominate the market right across the region. And then more recently, obviously, I'm looking -- working across Asia Pacific. So it's been an exciting time for us here at Ebiquity. Just to give you -- I was trying to size the market for Asia Pacific for you. This is looking at the size of the population. As Nick mentioned earlier on, Asia represents close to 2/3 of the population in the world, just around 60%. And if you look on the left, you'll see -- ranked by population size, you'll see the markets in light blue, actually, Asia markets. So 5 out of the 10 most populated countries in the world are actually in Asia. And where there's a large population and potential spending power, it's of interest to advertisers, obviously. So it's not just that there's a lot of people here with the potential to spend. There's also large economies here as well. And if we look on the left here, we can see that ranked by GDP, annual GDP, we are able to see the size of the market. And we can see here that we've got, in Asia, 3 of 5 largest markets are actually here, so here in Asia. So we're big as well. And if we look on the right, we can actually see the growth rate. So what we see is the bars. The bars are the Asian markets, and then you see a line, a line is the European growth rate. And we can see that the Asian markets are growing somewhere 3 to 5x of what the GDP growth rates is in Europe. So again, any marketers like -- what Nick was saying in the beginning, any marketers that are looking for growth for their brands and for their companies may come to Asia as one of their ports, of course. So big growth is well expected in our region. And so the size of market, combined with the fact that we've got good growth in our region, means that in terms of advertising spend, we represent the second-largest advertising spend in the world, which might surprise you because some of you are based over there might think that, in fact, that might have been Europe, but in fact, it's Asia Pacific. So where there is a high ad spend, we know that there is a need for our services. Advertisers want greater accountability for spend. And as Mike was saying earlier, too, they want to know that they gain the ROI for their spend. They want to know that the spend is being effective and where it's being effective. So that -- we work very closely with Mike and the team to actually how advertisers get a sense of whether their ad spend is working for them or not and where it's working for them. The other area that Laetitia mentioned was the pricing of advertising. So as you know, Asia Pacific is a very diverse region. Advertisers want to understand where they should be investing their money. So many advertisers are in charge of the whole region overall. And they want to know should they be spending their money in Malaysia versus Indonesia, which is a massive growth market, of course, in our region. And so they want to know are they paying the right price for that media. And obviously, our media performance audit service is able to answer that question, which is incredibly valuable to advertisers. We're now looking at that ad spend that we saw earlier by medium. So the light blue, if you focus your attention on the light blue area over here, that is the digital ad spend. That might be surprising to some people. When you think -- some people might think Asia Pacific is not very digitally advanced or certainly any part of Asia. But in fact, digital represents more than half of the ad spend in our region. So -- which is why, again, working with Ruben that we saw earlier talking about the digital capabilities in our region is absolutely vital. I mean Ruben mentioned getting the data from source. And anyone that's worked in this part of the world will know how manual things could be and how valuable being able to automate that part of the process is to advertisers. So really, that capability in this part of the world will be invaluable. Most advertisers aren't even sure what the percentage of ad spend is across Google, Facebook, Alibaba, as Ruben was mentioning earlier. So they're not even able to get the basic metrics. So this is going to be hugely valuable for our clients. And as Mike said, a big area that we get asked a lot about is how much might ad spend be on TV versus digital. What is more effective? How can I get greater effectiveness? So this media mix is extremely really sitting in our core skill set and an area that we're really able to provide a lot of value to advertisers and marketers. This might be interesting to you. This is the top advertisers list in Indonesia, and then on the right is for Vietnam. I'm not sure if you've seen something similar like this before. But so the top -- Unilever is the largest advertiser in the market, and then Tempo Scan down the bottom is the 20th largest advertiser in the market. And what we see here in blue are the local advertisers, so these are Indonesian advertisers. And a few years back, if I called you off a similar ranking, you would have seen mostly multinational advertisers featured on this list. So it's -- it shows the changing times that we're living in. But these local advertisers are super interesting. They are -- not only are they massive domestically and want to know whether they've gained the right price for their media spend, they're looking to -- for greater understanding of the effectiveness of that spend. But they're also looking to expand internationally. So you may be, of course, very aware of brands such as Huawei, Samsung, all big, large Asian brands that have very much become part of our global landscape. But some of these brands are actually coming to you soon. They start with Asia. They've expanded out of the domestic markets into Asia, and they want global best practice and advice. They want to operate not on a domestic best-practice scale but on a global best-practice scale. And so a company like ourselves is able to provide that advice to ensure successful expansion. You saw this chart earlier, which is the competitive landscape that Nick shared with you. And now we're looking at the landscape for Asia. As we can see, we got lot of white space. We dominate this region. And the great thing from a revenue standpoint is the downside risk is limited. Here, what we're looking at is -- I suppose one of the things that many international advertisers have is a natural concern around the transparency level in business practices, especially in Asia. So this was a survey conducted by the World Federation of Advertisers, and it was on the global buying practices, so advertising media buying practices. And what we see is a whole host of different areas that they surveyed. And on the left is the west, and what we see here is mainly green. Green means high level of transparency experience. And then we look on the right, and we see Asia, and we see more reds there. And as Fed was talking earlier on the contract compliance, that they are very much leaders and specialists in that area. I mean that's a great thing about Ebiquity is we've got some people with amazing specialty skills, and that's why I would say it's a highlight of my career working in this organization. So Fed is -- Fed's team is very much active in Asia because, of course, where there's a high level of opacity or lack of transparency, there's a need for independent assessment. There is a need for contract compliance. And there's a need for independent advice from Ebiquity in order to generate that. This is particularly important for multinational clients operating in Asia. And then in terms of e-commerce, so just to clarify, when we say e-commerce sales, we're talking about sales that are going through the Amazons of your -- of the world in the west and very much in the east, the Alibabas and some that you may not have heard of like Lazada and Shopee that very much dominate our landscape over here. So these are looking at e-commerce sales. And you can see that over 60% of the e-commerce sales is actually happening in Asia Pacific. And Laetitia mentioned earlier that this is something we are particularly focusing on CS majorly growth opportunity for the next year. So where there are sales, advertising moves. And where advertising moves, obviously, Ebiquity can help. So we have obviously benchmarks. We have expertise and capabilities that we are able to offer marketers in the space and really provide valuable advices. Obviously, during -- with the COVID situation being on as it is at the moment, we very much don't see any reduction in the e-commerce in the upcoming years. So really exciting times for us in Asia Pacific. I hope that gives you a sense of the growth that -- and the focus areas for us for next year. And I'll hand over to Nick, who will talk about the path of growth for Ebiquity on a global scale.

Thanks, Leela. And I understand Laetitia and myself may have both suffered from the same technical glitch. So I hope you can see me this time, and I'm not just a disembodied voice. I'll just very quickly summarize. And I think an important point to note is that this really is the start of the journey. We're setting course with a refreshed management team and a revised strategy. So this is the start of the journey. It will take a little bit of time to come to fruition. But to summarize, to leave you with a few takeaway points. We see the media market in real turmoil with literally billions of dollars wasted, and we see an opportunity to create a new digital product strategy designed to eliminate that wastage. We'll put our business together in such a way that we offer integrated, end-to-end solutions for clients and develop major client relationships in a strategic fashion. In addition to the billions of dollars being wasted or partly because of the billions of dollars being wasted, we see a crisis in effectiveness. And hopefully, you've seen that our capabilities there can lead to very considerable value creation on the behalf of brand owners. Contract compliance is a segment that we're well established in and is growing in understanding, I would say, amongst the client community and growing importance. And as Federica outlined, we really and are only in the foothills of the total market opportunity. Geographically, we've outlined where we see potential for considerable growth in both U.S. and Asia Pacific. And we've pulled together a very strong management team, some of whom you've seen today, that we feel have the real capabilities to execute against this strategy. We will be launching some new KPIs to help chart our growth. We'll look at our strategic development of client revenue and revenue per client. We do not yet currently have a client satisfaction survey or Net Promoter Score. We'll put one in place. We haven't spoken in any depth about productivity and efficiency in this particular presentation, but that is a focus -- an internal focus of our efforts going forward, and we'll be measuring that. You've seen that a lot of the strategy is focused on developing our digital capabilities. So we'll be measuring that critically because the whole organization, the whole ability to deliver is underpinned by people. We will be putting in place an employee engagement metric. We are still in the process of capturing the baseline data for some of these, but we will be presenting the KPIs with our full year announcements next year. So with that, we'll take some Q&A. I'll ask the team to show themselves, to put themselves back on screen now, so that we can aim the questions at any member of the team. There are some that have already come in. I'll answer those first or take those first.

There's a question regarding the Vodafone example and if we could share how the annual contract value has changed over that period. Many of you know Alan Newman. He's on screen now. He has fed the information to me. And that contract value increased by 60% up to 2019, and we are now seeing some small growth even in 2020, so positive growth there. I'm going to pass this next question to you from Jonathan. Could you tell us the financial implications of the strategy? How should we think about organic growth by product or region? What are the cost implications for product and sales investment? And Alan, would you mind taking that?

There's several questions. Thank you, Nick, and thank you, everybody, for the presentation, which I hope you all agree, given us a really good overview of the different aspects of our strategy of our business. I think taking the first point, I mean, in general terms, we're still developing specific plans for next year and our sort of 3-year view with improving numbers. But I think there's a couple of things that come through clearly from what has been said today. One is that we're looking to focus particularly growth out of exploiting our capabilities and supporting our clients in digital media. So we'd expect to see further strong growth in the areas around digital decisions and the development of the product set that Ruben laid out. I think one of his charts already showed that we're looking for like higher growth rates from that area and similarly in some of the other specific areas such as Federica, or Fed, outlined around contract compliance and effectiveness. So we're still looking to see growth coming from the broadening of our service into our clients. I'm not going to give you specific growth rates today. That will wait, I think, for the next round of communication when we do our results. In terms of the geographies, there's a short long-term differential here. We've benefited quite strongly in the Accenture wins that we already have actually in Continental Europe, and quite a lot of the revenue from those will flow through in Continental Europe. But in the medium term, as already described in the 2 last presentations from Jim and Leela, we do see America and Asia Pacific as being -- having the higher growth rates over the next 2 or 3 years as we explore those markets. Cost-wise, I think what we're trying to do here is make sure that we can exploit our capabilities and some said redirect resources into those areas where there is higher growth opportunity. At the same time, we're looking, as Nick alluded to, to make efficiency gains, and that's partly by being more effective and automating some of the process for delivering existing sort of, you might call, a core businesses, as well as referred to by Ruben, but also again, exploiting some of the areas where we don't need to have -- there's many people doing things in order to deliver data to our clients. So the idea here is not to -- it's a door that's within the envelope of our current cost base, not to significantly increase the cost base in growing the revenue, not to grow disproportionately anyway because we're very conscious that one of our other objectives is to improve, over the medium term, our margins from where they were back in -- certainly where they have been this year but where they were in last year in 2019. So I hope that gives you an overview. I'm sorry, I can't -- it's difficult to be more specific with particular numbers at this stage.