Ebiquity plc (EBQ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to you all this morning to today's Capital Markets Event and held here in our lovely London home. So as well as welcoming you this morning and soon handing over to Nick and the rest of the Ebiquity leadership team. I just wanted to take this moment to thank our outgoing CFO, Alan Newman. Where is Alan? Alan was obviously being uncharacteristically shy. But I know he's extremely well known around the CCN, across the investor community and held in hugely high regard. And from my perspective, I was absolutely delighted to be able to entice Alan out of premature retirement a few years ago into the role that you played at Ebiquity. And I think you've performed a really, really strong role and your input has been much noticed by everybody, I'm sure, across the room. So another quick round of applause for Alan. And then equally, I'd just like to extend a particular welcome to our incoming CFO in bright green today. Julia Hubbard. So Julia has got big shoes to fill, but I have no doubt whatsoever that you will step up to the challenge. And I know that she very much looks forward to continuing the work that Alan has set off and getting to know a lot of you across the investor community in the coming months. So on that note, enjoy the next hour, 1.5 hour or so, and I'll hand you now over to our Chief Executive, Nick Waters.

Thank you, Rob. Good morning, and welcome, and thank you very much for joining us for the Ebiquity Capital Markets Day. My name is Nick Waters. I'm the Chief Executive of Ebiquity. And our story that we'll talk through today is one of growth, innovation opportunity and margin potential. Now we have about 90 minutes scheduled today. If you feel you would like to ask a question for a point of clarification, but please do. Otherwise, hold questions until we end or else we might run the risk of disappearing down rabbit holes interrupting the flow. I'm going to be joined speaking today by Julia, who's just been introduced our new CFO, Ruben, who joined us 3 years ago the acquisition of Digital Decisions, which has now just completed its earnouts, and Ruben is the Chief Product Officer. He will demonstrate the Media Data Vault where we manage large, large amounts of our digital data. Paul and Leela will talk you through our opportunity and plans to accelerate growth in North America and Asia Pacific, respectively. Mark, our Chief Client Officer, will aim to illuminate what our value proposition is through talking through a case study. And Susanne, our Chief Delivery Officer, joined us last year through the MediaPath acquisition will demonstrate the GMP365 platform, which is the data management platform from which we are transitioning the management of our services, and then I will summarize at the end. I'll start with a little bit of context. We operate in a very, very large global media market, estimated about $900 billion and forecast to be $1 trillion by 2025. But our focus really is on the world's top 100 advertisers. They're our primary target customer, and they spend about $100 billion annually on advertising. But you could argue that they don't spend it as well as they could. There's huge amounts of waste and inefficiency in the global market. You'll remember the old adage often attributed to [ The Lord liveth hymn ] that's 50% of my advertising budget is wasted. I just don't know which 50%. We think it's probably not quite as high as that, but we do see perhaps 20% of all advertising budget is wasted. And that's where we come in. And our purpose is quite simple. Our purpose is to help advertisers improve the returns from their media investments and therefore, increase business performance, we see that $20 billion wasted as considerable shareholder value destruction or value creation opportunity. Why is there so much inefficiency and wastage in the market, but it's primarily to do with the vast complexity that has grown over the last 20 to 30 years in the advertising industry. Looking around the room today, some of you are of a similar generation to me, not all of you, some of you a bit younger, some of you are similar generation to me. And if you share the same sophisticated cultural taste you'll remember sitting down on a Monday, Wednesday evening at 8:00 p.m. to watch Coronation Street. When I started buying media, I could buy a 30-second spot in the center break of Coronation Street and reach over 1/3 of the U.K. adult population. We can't get anywhere near that anymore, and you'll think to your own media consumption habits that you probably watch a lot of subscription-funded media opportunities and you're moving away from linear broadcast opportunities. But at the same time, I'm sure you all feel bombarded by ads. Just one slide to highlight the complexity of the market. This is the LUMAscape, and LUMA tracks all the intermediaries that operate between an advertiser spending its budget and that budget reaching a publisher to deliver a consumer. All these intermediaries are seeking ways to take revenue, take revenue out of the ecosystem. And effectively, advertisers have lost the ability to control where their investments go. And that is a spectacular challenge for them. So in a market where billions of dollars are wasted through the lack of governance and transparency and controls, advertisers need independent advice. And that's what we do. We don't take revenue from any part of the supply chain, except for the brand owner. So they can trust our independent advice has no vested interest anywhere else. In addition to being vast and complex, the advertising market is hugely dynamic as well. You think about a lot of the things in the news at the moment, the implosion of Twitter, the booming of TikTok, Amazon building a massive advertising business, Netflix and Disney+, creating advertising models, ITV launching ITVX. It never stops, never stands still, it's highly dynamic and where there is constant change, there is the constant opportunity to create more value. So what exactly do we do? Well, we're a data management company. We're not an agency business. We don't plan and buy media. We don't create ads. We're in data management company providing intelligence for the media buying and marketing industry. We provide our services through 4 service lines, media management, media performance, marketing effectiveness and contract compliance. Through those services, we analyze very, very large amounts of media buying data. That helps us identify this waste and efficiency. We create market authoritative benchmarks because of the amount of data that we obtain and observe and analyze. So we help our advertisers, our clients understand where they sit in the market against benchmarks on any range of metrics that you can think of as being potentially relevant to their businesses. We help those advertisers select their agency partners, hold their agency partners to account, and we apply advanced analytics to those investments to create more value for the advertiser. We have a very significant competitive advantage. Think of our primary target customer, the World's top 100 advertisers. Well, we are able to service them in about 110 countries globally now. We don't have boots on the ground there, but we have data from 110 countries, which we can analyze. So if you're one of the world's largest advertisers, think of the Unilevers of this world who advertise everywhere where we can help them wherever they might advertise. We are a world authority. We would describe ourselves as the world authority simply through the amount of scale we have and the data we have. We analyze around about $100 billion of media buying data and contract value annually, including approximately $7 billion worth of digital, $1.5 trillion digital impressions. As a consequence, 75 of the world's top -- was actually 76 of the world's top 100 advertisers actually partner with us. We're also, again, we feel, leading the way when it comes to innovation. We have recently launched a productized service offering that helps advertisers measure their CO2 emissions, which we think should have appeal given the scrutiny all corporate or under to map their part to net zero. You'll be familiar with the issue of disinformation, the harmful disinformation and we're helping advertisers stop inadvertently funding bad actors in the market place. We talk briefly about ITVX, while the whole area of connected TV is massive, it's exploding in the United States, as is retail media, and I'm sure you will be familiar with influencers. So there's a world of opportunity to innovate new products. So how are we trying to capture that opportunity? We have 4 focus areas: clients, product, operating efficiency and what I call a geographic rebalancing. When it comes to clients, the opportunity is to maximize the commercial relationship with this incredible client roster. So how do we do that? We do that through developing or seeking to develop higher-value strategic relationships with bigger decision makers in the client organization and thereby sell more services to them in more territories. We've spent the last 2.5 years, focused very strongly on developing and bringing to market a suite of productized digital solutions, which Ruben will talk to you more about shortly. That's been going extremely well for us and now accounts for our GBP 6.6 million of revenue, strong year-on-year growth and a higher margin for us. It's gaining good traction with clients. You can see these are the operating metrics that we publish, good traction with clients. It's proving sticky, and it's building a really strong moat for us. With that amount of data in our Data Vault is increasingly difficult for a competitor to come and say they can do what we do. We are the market authority. Now just one point to note on these numbers. Ruben will put up some numbers that are different from these. And that is because these are the operating metrics we've published since we launched our suite of digital media solutions. We have subsequently ingested a huge amount of historical Ebiquity data to fill out those data vaults even more. So Ruben will share you some numbers that aren't the same as this. If we are analyzing huge data sets, we need strong technology to be able to manage it and do the calculations and actually take human intervention out of this system. So we have put a lot of focus and energy in the last, let's say, 2.5 years on our data management platforms. One came with us through the Digital Decisions acquisition, and then last year and another one came with us -- to us through the MediaPath acquisition. So Ruben will demonstrate how we manage the digital data. And Susanne will demonstrate how we are managing should we say, the historical Ebiquity data. We're supplementing technology with increased use of lower-cost centers, so we had a -- originally had a team in Madrid. We've extended that team to Guatemala to better service the U.S. time zone. MediaPath had a center of gravity, should we say Sofia, Bulgaria, we have people now in India and Indonesia. So increasingly supplementing technology with people operating in lower-cost regions. And the fourth element of the strategy, the geographic rebalancing, I just want to show you the opportunity on this chart. If you look at the United States figure, 39% of all global advertising spend is in the United States, spent in the United States. Ebiquity now following the acquisition of MMi last year, we generated 18% of our global revenue from the United States. So there's a significant market penetration opportunity there. And if you look to the East, Asia Pacific is now 34% of all global ad spend, and we generate 12% of our revenue from there. So we over-index significantly in the more mature lower growth markets of the U.K. and Western Europe, and we see great growth opportunity in the West and in the East. So I'm going to leave you there for a moment. I'll pass to Julia, who will present just a couple of slides on our financial model.

Thank you, Nick. If I can just take you through -- there we go. I'll take you through the financial model. We manage the business across geographic lines. So that gives us local expertise in local markets, and that's driven growth across all regions and service lines. In addition to that, we manage our global clients essentially rather than at a local level. And this has helped us to drive out increased average revenue per client and enhanced profitability. Our model is recurring revenue. So that's developed from the client service that we provide to clients, excellent client service, together with really solid information and useful information for those clients. So that's really helped us drive growth across all of our operating regions. We've driven -- in 2022, we drove a revenue growth of 20%, 10% of that was organic and 10% through acquisitions. You can see from the table that are -- we have a track record of delivering acquisitions. So we integrate those, which generates cost savings and our strategy is to provide scale in geographic areas. So for example, in North America, we acquired MMi, which provide at scale there. Digital capability -- so Nick has already mentioned our acquisition of Digital Decisions that provided digital product at enhanced margin and technology, so GMP365 came through our acquisition of MediaPath, and we will talk about that later. So margin enhancement. In 2022, our margin increased 5 percentage points to 12%, and we've got further opportunity for margin growth in the medium term. We focus on quality revenue rather than any revenue, and obviously, that drives profitability. We've improved our digital revenue mix, so Digital Decisions, which was acquired in January 2020 added to the higher-margin digital products to our portfolio. Last week, we made the announcement that we settled the earn-out on that acquisition, and that was GBP 16.1 million, which was double the amount that we anticipated on acquisition. So that demonstrates the success of the product. And indeed, in 2022, Digital Decisions contributed GBP 6.4 million of revenue from almost a standing start from acquisition. So geographical scale, you can see from the table, we've grown North America. So we were loss-making in 2021, and we turned that into a profit in 2022. That was driven from revenue growth. So our revenue growth in that region was 138%, of which 73% was organic. So it's not only adding the acquisitions, but that's helped to drive the growth and performance within the business within that region. Leveraging global operational efficiencies. So we have a continued strategy of global resource planning. Nick has already mentioned that we have resource planning in low-cost areas. So Madrid, Guatemala, India, Indonesia and Bulgaria. Our central overheads. So we have overheads in 2022 with circa GBP 6.5 million. That's a similar level to 2021. And of that, we drove revenue growth of 20%. Similarly, production costs, which provides data, which is utilized within the product across the global organization year-on-year, slight reduction. And again, that generated revenue growth or supported revenue growth of 20% across the year. Automation, so automation of the GMP365 platforms are getting more products on that platform. We committed at the time of acquisition to annualized synergy benefits of GBP 5 million. So moving on to the balance sheet. We're well funded. We have a GBP 30 million facility in place with NatWest and Barclays jointly and that was secured in March 2022, 3-year facility through 2025 and extendable for a 2-year period. Net debt at the end of the year was GBP 9.1 million. Since the year-end, we've made the earnout settlement on Digital Decisions and the cash element of that was GBP 6.1 million, so despite that payment, we've still got significant headroom within the facility, full compliance with covenants, of course. So let me pass you over to Ruben.

Satyan, what do I do? Well, let me just start with a good overview of the slides there. Great. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Nice to see many new faces and also many familiar faces again. My name is Ruben. I'm the Group Chief Product officer. Well, I've had a bit of an introduction already. And today, I really wanted to start with a bit of a recap on my journey with Ebiquity so far, which I think speaks volumes for what we've been doing as a group and what we've achieved. As Nick said, I joined Ebiquity in January 2020 through the acquisition of my company Digital Decisions, which I founded in 2017. And -- at the time when I made the decision to sell quite early, many people in my circles said I was crazy to accept such a low upfront and I told them, well, now there's a huge opportunity here. And together with Alan, I had -- I was lucky to be able to negotiate a deal where we would both benefit from the profit upside that we would generate as a result of the integration which resulted in 27x deferred consideration versus the upfront and now we've settled that, which means I'm a significant shareholder at this point, largest individual shareholder and I'm very pleased and privileged to be able to be on that cap with many of you and continue to drive the business forward as we continue to benefit from those synergies that we have installed. I think, we are heading into a phase of heavy growth efficiency, and we are executing a transformation in the business, which is very exciting, and I am and remain very committed to working with Nick and the rest of the ELT and to build wider business to get Ebiquity where we think it should be. Just as a bit of a leader going into why we have put so much emphasis on digital products. The digital media market is fast outgrowing the linear or offline media channels. We are expecting or the market analysts are expecting the global media industry to become a $1 trillion industry by 2025. By 2027, out of the total global media spend, 74% will be digital. So it was absolutely imperative for Ebiquity to have digital credibility authority and scalable, profitable solutions to answer these fast-growing new challenges and high amounts of ways that we see in digital. So it's no surprise that digital is increasingly a priority for brands, and that's why we positioned ourselves in a way that we're able to work with them in the long term. The good thing about digital for us in terms of our ability to add value to our client relationships, is that digital is relatively incredibly complex, and there is a lot of wastage in digital advertising. We see wastage as an opportunity because as Nick already said and I'll show you in the live data in a second, there is a high amount of value opportunity that we're able to work towards driving efficiencies with our procurement, media and marketing clients and basically drive either savings, hard cash savings or reallocation of their media investments into better-performing areas to drive their business growth. We are rapidly innovating in emerging channels such as connected TV, you're probably all aware that Netflix, for example, has released their ad-supported tier for subscribers. So that's a big growing channel. The same is happening with Disney+. We have ITV also in the room now, there is connected TV alternatives that are overtaking the linear channels. The buying methodologies and infrastructure are very different and have their own unique challenges with regards to fraud, for example, or efficiency and effectiveness of the formats delivered through those channels. Also on retail media, especially in the U.S., this is an incredibly fast-growing area. Paul, in the next section will dive into that a bit more -- in a bit more detail, but what we see is large retailers such as Walmart, and now have announced last week, they have realized $3 billion of revenue on their retail media ad product at round about 80% profit margin compare that to its overall retail profit margin of sub 1%. It's a massive growth opportunity where retailers are essentially bringing audience data and purchase intent into a digital advertising product, which is rife with issues around fraud, quality and wastage. Again, a big opportunity for us to work with clients to run that efficiently and effectively. The digital solutions that we have built so far are -- I'll share a few, I think, very important characteristics. They are productized, scalable and recurring in the sense that the -- what we deliver to clients is very standardized delivered by systems mostly and can, therefore, really quickly be delivered. So every month, our skilled clients will have a fully up-to-date view of their investments in digital and the wastage or the issues in their delivery of the previous month. So it's a much more near real-time experience for our clients with us than it was previously when we did work more in a manual fashion. We have -- we continue to see strong growth from 2020 to '21, albeit from a low base, we nearly quadrupled revenue. And then last year, we had a 76% growth and what is important to mention there is that while doing so, we have managed to maintain and even increase the net margin on delivery of these productized scalable solutions and we continue to drive growth across our business. We -- I think I feel comfortable now saying that Ebiquity has really obtained a new sort of leading authority position in the market with regards to some important innovative areas. Just in December, we had a feature on the Wall Street Journal together with a partner where we released a big study on the carbon emissions in digital advertising was picked up by a load of other press as well. And out of that, we have now developed and deployed a product, again, a scalable, repetitive, profitable product that helps our clients measure and reduce their emissions in their digital advertising activity. And that is not a nice to have, I don't know how many of you are familiar with the European Commission's directive, the CSRD on standardized sustainability reporting similar to how listed firms are required to report their financials, that's now coming for carbon emissions. And the SEC in the U.S. for the first time is basically deploying a carbon copy of the ECs directive in the U.S. in 2025. So all of our brands or nearly all of our brands will be required by law to report, verified, standardize emissions figures for their activity, including their investments in media and advertising. And so that's just an example of where we currently are the only skilled player in our industry who provide a service solution to do that for brands. Data is our most valuable asset. Ebiquity is a data business, right? We -- I make sure that we get that point across in all of the products that we deliver, our moat and our strongest value is in the fact that we have very recent vast amounts of data which allow us to work with actual indicators of what quality looks like, what competitive quality looks like for our brands versus their peers in the wider industry but also it allows us to very early on identify where the big movements in media are going. Just as a sound bite, for example, we were the first ones to see the actual drop in revenues before Twitter after the takeover of Elon Musk. Now we haven't published that, but it's something that we see happen in near real time just because we are connected to the actual investment data with very rich granular metrics. What I'm showing you in the next few slides is a live interface. That is our Media Data Vault aggregate view where I just want to give you a sense of the scale of the data that we have accumulated and also the richness of that data. It provides us with a competitive moat, but also a lot of stickiness. We have more and more clients that rather than set absolute figure targets with their agencies when it comes to certain quality metrics they say, well, we want you to perform 20% better than Ebiquity's benchmarks. So it creates a lot of stickiness because our benchmarks and our data has actually worked into contracts and partnership agreements with -- by our clients. Also, I should mention that we are working on using this data to focus more on the forward-looking opportunities, using it for forecasting, machine learning and even down the line, deploying AI models. This is what we're preparing for. And the most important thing is that we have a very solid, rich proprietary data sets. And today, I'm happy to be able to share with you the scale of our current data set and the fact that we are prepared and ready to start commercializing that in other ways than we are currently doing. This is our live environment, our dashboard with IT, I managed to embed the interface in the PowerPoint, which is great. And really, I want to take you to a few of these where you can see from the Ebiquity group level, how much of a deep understanding we have of the media industry through the work that we do. Currently in here, and this includes the historical ingested Ebiquity data, as Nick mentioned, we have about $12 billion of spend in what I'm showing you now, over 2.5 trillion impressions for 237 clients in 99 markets. Whenever we do work, we are able to very easily breakdown activity and dive into performance or delivery, for example, by sector, by period or -- sorry, by markets. So if we want to go into a certain region, let's say, North America, we are able to drive insights really quickly and get a point or get intelligence that we need in order to deliver the work in a day-to-day environment, but also more and more what we do is we work with reporters and analysts to provide them with a stronger view of the media developments. Just as a bit of an indication of how granular this data is, we get data directly from platforms. And those include the names that we all know, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, but also the more fringe platforms. We have data across all of them across a whole array of clients with a very granular set of metrics, allowing us to see comparatively in the market, exactly which platforms when used for media trading drive the most efficiencies or would provide the most efficient route into buying a certain type of media, for example. We have our own proprietary taxonomy where we are able to really easily create and drill down in to sector analysis across our clients. We have a very rich selection of clients, of course, as Nick already mentioned, across a rich array of different sectors and subsectors and this is what we use to make sure that what we deliver to clients is relevant for them and compares their activity with the activity of their actual peers or competitors in that space. Now I think the most interesting overview is here, and I'll talk over it because the numbers are a little bit small. What you see here is client projects in a table with a live overview of the spend that we have analyzed through the work that we do, and then the opportunity, the value opportunity that we have identified and delivered to the client and then a percentage of the value opportunity as a part of their media spend. And you can see that across the board, structurally, in this overview, in this sample of projects, it's 21% of the spend that we analyze comes back as value opportunity. And that is a direct win. It's an ROI for brands, which they can immediately address with their agency partners or internally if they manage things in-house. And it makes our commercial model, which for these products is value based, no time and materials or no cost plus. It's a value-based flat annual recurring fee, more like a subscription which we are able to get clients to agree with because of the outsized value that we deliver. And this is how we work. This is how we talk to clients. We work with them, assess their actual investments on a structural basis and identify where there's opportunities to drive value, either by reinvesting or reallocating spend or by booking savings, especially in recessionary climate, that gives us a very strong advantage from an anticyclical point of view. This is what I wanted to show you, just so that you have an overview of what we do in digital productized services. And I'd like to hand over to Paul, our leader of the North American region to talk about that part of our business. Thank you.

Thanks, Ruben. Good morning, everyone. It's great to be here. And my focus and goal for the next few minutes is to give you a sense of how we are driving the group strategy, objectives we have, the innovation that we're bringing through to the North American market. We're focused on organic client growth, we're focused on new customer acquisition, operational efficiencies and then bringing innovation forward in terms of new products and services. We touched on it a little bit. It is a massive scale opportunity in terms of North America. Nearly 40% of the world's ad spend just comes from the U.S. alone, 2% from Canada. It is a very digitally led market. It actually accounts already for 44% of the total digital ad dollars globally. One way that I find helpful for people to contextualize the size of the opportunity is to think about those large target customers that Nick referenced earlier. In the U.S., there's over 175 companies that spend at least $100 million. We like companies and we provide great service to companies that spend a lot of money and face a lot of complexity. Thinking about and diving into that digital complexity, there is a massive amount of change that's occurring in our market. For many years, Google and now Meta have dominated market share. That presents a lot of challenges for clients in terms of the power and control that they have in terms of media pricing and media inventory and how that is traded. Certainly, they still maintain about 47% share of all digital dollars, but that share is declining as their rate of growth slows. And what's really interesting is what's happening across the market from some other relatively emerging entrants. So TikTok at 23%, 24% growth projected this year is literally exploding. There's a lot of interest in terms of that growth. There's a lot of interest in terms of potential government regulations and intervention. But at the moment, advertisers are flooding there across all different segments. B2B, obviously, consumer and younger skewed advertisers. Amazon, we talked about retail media a little bit through Ruben, but Amazon is driving really significant growth off the back of their retail media practice and offering. And then LinkedIn really high-value, really interesting ad product that is growing at a significant rate. Twitter is at the other end of the spectrum. So just tons of clients that we service and the market in general is pulling out of Twitter and just sort of standing on the sidelines to observe what is actually happening there and what sort of an environment that represents for them and their brands. And then Snap, a significant social media network will actually be dwarfed by Twitter -- dwarfed by TikTok this year. So TikTok will be 3x bigger than Snap in terms of ad dollars that they attract. Into that complexity and the complexity again through the lens of our clients, you add layers of what's happening with connected TV and retail media. So again, connected TV, if you're streaming any content on a Roku device, on a PlayStation device on a connected smart TV, you're consuming streaming and you're consuming connected TV and the ad placements in that environment are growing significantly. So this year, it will be the fastest-growing major ad channel in the U.S. market. And we'll reach about 10% of all digital dollars. Within connected TV, there's a lot of change happening. There's a concentration of dollars at the moment across Hulu, YouTube and Roku, but there's also a long tail that's emerging and Ruben touched on the fact that Netflix have just introduced an ad-supported model, which will disrupt that further. Again, what we appreciate about this is the opportunity in terms of helping clients navigate the visibility of what's happening, how their dollars are being spent, where the dollars are being spent and how effectively they're being spent. In a similar vein, retail media, which will become the fastest-growing channel over the next 3 years, is, again, incredibly significant. So Ruben touched on this a little bit, but an offering like Amazon is already 10x the size of Walmart. Walmart has seen just a ton of value and a ton of opportunity. There's other entrants, there's other major players. There's actually 40 retail networks that clients are considering and navigating in terms of, again, how to get close to consumers and leverage that retail opportunity. So retail media is simply placing ads on the retail providers' websites. What is fascinating is the race to sort of participate in this growth. And if you're a retailer, you're trying to figure out how you can get into this. We've talked about the acquisition that we closed last year. It has really accelerated our growth and development in the region. So from an integration point of view, we're functioning operating as one combined unit, we've strengthened our team, strengthened our management team, and we're working in an integrated way across major clients. We have expanded that roster of clients. We're working with major blue-chip U.S.-based brands, some international brands that we weren't working with prior to the acquisition. And then one example of GM, which was the largest respective client for each entity coming together and now we're servicing them across a complementary set of services. We overachieved our synergy goals in year 1, and we actually moved the profitability, as Julia indicated. From a growth perspective, it presents us with a brilliant opportunity in terms of organic growth of that client base but then also bring to that client base solutions that they hadn't had access to before and some of what Ruben talked about in terms of our focus on product innovation. And then there's the benefit of margin enhancement in terms of combining those 2 businesses. Across the U.S., if you measure size and importance of clients by what they spend, we work with 19 of the largest 25 in the market now through this combination. So again, when we talk about organic, opportunity and growth, we're talking about how do we bring more high-value services to that portfolio of clients and brands. And it provides a really significant platform for us to move off in terms of acquiring new customers. So to put in some context in terms of the size of the market and the scale of our business. As Nick has said, and I've sort of reinforced, largest market in the ad environment is certainly the U.S. In the U.S., the Ebiquity clients that we represent account for 10% of total ad spend. So if you like, that's a way to think about our market share. We are the largest in our sector. So there's no one that does more of what we do across more clients, but we are relatively small across the broader market. And again, that's how we think about the opportunity and the focus that we have. We -- and picking up on this area of digital value, digital waste. This is one of the most compelling conversations that we're having with the market and with clients in terms of the amount of digital wastage in the U.S., again, we see it somewhat sort of like 18% to 25%. But even if you just took sort of the lower end of that to 20% and projected that across the total market, that's about $50 billion of value opportunity back to clients. And we like to emphasize, yes, it's made up of wastage. Yes, it's made up of fraud and inefficiency, but it represents value opportunity for brands. Going forward, we, again, incredibly enthusiastic about our organic growth opportunity, but we're also interested in further acquisitions to support how we scale. So how do we do more of our core services, how do we bring more of that to that large market? We're also interested in terms of innovation. So what potential acquisitions could help accelerate our provision of new solutions. And then lastly, related to that, what acquisitions might represent really new and interesting data sets. So in closing, again, I think, aligned with the group's strategy that you've heard Nick frame and consistently some message from Ebiquity over the last couple of years. In North America, really focused on those drivers of organic client growth, new customer acquisition, the efficiencies and how we operate and drive improved margins across the business and then also bringing innovation through new solutions. So I'm going to hand over to Leela now to talk through Asia Pacific.

So hello, everybody. Nice to be here. So I'm usually based in Singapore. And I've been with Ebiquity for about 9 years, and I think I've never been -- this is the most fantastic position we are in within Ebiquity at the moment. All the years that I have been with the organization and then Nick's leadership, we've really fast tracked, what we're doing globally, but especially in Asia Pacific because we had the fortune of Nick having a lot of experience in our part of the world. And really, that's partly why the figures look the way they did, you know how Nick talked about how we are underrepresented in Asia Pacific. With Nick coming along, we've really fast tracked our movement in the region. So what I'm going to share with you is how we're really now well placed to actually leverage some of the local brands that we've got in the region and how they represent a huge opportunity globally. Paul was talking about TikTok, but Douyin, obviously, a Chinese brand. We've got high digital growth in the region as well. And China represents a massive opportunity, of course, to us. So let's just put a bit of context in place, remind us how big Asia Pacific is. So our geography that we look after in Ebiquity runs from China all the way down to New Zealand and across to India as well, so some big markets. So here we look at the population, we see that Asia represents almost 2/3 of the world's population. We know that India and China represents almost 3 billion of the population around the world. So we're sizable, the 2 biggest markets sitting in our part of the world. And they're not just big, there's not just a whole lot of people, but they're growing in their wealth as well. So we see here in 2023, the growth that's occurring in the world, half of it is coming from Asia. So all those people are getting increasing well. And because of that, we're seeing -- we've always been the second largest ad spend region in the world. But we're growing, and you can see on this side at twice to 3x the pace of the rest of the world. So advertisers, marketers are spending more money in our part of the world because they want their brands to grow and there's more wealth, more disposable income and they're capitalizing on it. And when that ad spend growth is happening, it's happening in digital. So we are not as advanced as what Ruben was talking about in some parts of the world. But in China, you can see -- so how we read this, sorry, is China represents 80%, so their digital ad spend represents 84% of their total ad spend. So that's how we read that. So we can see in Asia, there's a massive long-term opportunity because all those countries are at various stages of the digital penetration, so there's an ongoing opportunity for us to take the Ruben solutions and Susanne with GMP365 into these markets, and often, the projects that we get in Asia are multi-market projects. So that's why I'm so excited about the opportunity that exists with the 2 solutions that we've got. They're really applicable for our region, and we'll really be able to leverage it. What most CMOs that Ruben touched on are concerned about in our part of the world is as that digital spend is increasing, then they are increasingly concerned about the wastage -- inefficiency and wastage that goes with it. They're all very aware of it. They don't know how to quantify it. And we're able to do that job for them. So in Asia, when you take, this is a survey -- not a survey, analysis that we did, and it showed that 22% of the digital spend that was occurring was wasted. And if you apply that 22% spend to all the digital spend that's occurring in Asia Pacific, you get $38 billion worth of potential wastage occurring in our region. There is no CMO, CFO or CEO that doesn't want to improve on that number. So our services are highly relevant. In addition to the services that we are able to offer in terms of digital analysis and the region, the scale services. Sometimes it's helpful to go in with locally relevant services as well. And e-commerce in Southeast Asia, it's the fastest growing. So this is people buying online and placing ads online. So it's -- the fastest growth region in Southeast Asia. And you can see in terms of digital spend, it makes up a sizable portion of digital spend, so when we're able to help advertisers understand the efficiency and effectiveness of e-commerce, it's often a good way in to leverage it. So this is areas that clients want to know more about now, and we're able to help them. Similarly, in China, influencers that Nick mentioned earlier, a high interest area. We have the largest influencer pool in the market. So again, a great door opener for us, a great way to engage CMO, CFOs as well. What we're looking at here is the top 20 advertisers by market. We're looking at China, India and Indonesia. And while if we've done this analysis maybe 5, 10 years ago, you would have seen it -- would have been all white. And the blue that you're looking at are local Asian advertisers. So how the market has changed in just a few years' time. And all these local or Asian advertisers are looking to expand globally just as TikTok has done. They're all knocking on the doors, looking to expand their market, not just in Asia, not just in the Pacific, but of course, around the world. And this all represents huge potential for us in addition to our global relationships that Mark will talk about shortly. And here, the great news for Ebiquity is we're on the ground. We're on the ground in India, China and in Singapore and as agents, we like face-to-face engagement. So we've built good strong local client relationships. So we've got a great platform to leverage further and build and grow the business. China, of course, it cannot be a Asia Pacific conversation without going into China. So we must talk about China for a minute. So China just recapping on the opportunity that exists in China. Similarly to what Paul showed, we are the leading consultant in media investment analysis in China but we still only represent a relatively small part of the overall opportunity that exists in the market, which is really exciting from my point of view. And we've got great leadership in China at the moment. Over 2,000 advertisers sit in that market that we can tap into, many big brands that some of you might be familiar with now all looking for advice on how to expand overseas, leverage the growth in the market and 1.4 billion people. A complex media landscape that is very different, at the top there that is very different from what we used to here in the West and huge spending opportunities. You would know 11/11 Singles Day. That one single day, if you put Christmas, Black Friday, Thanksgiving together, all the sales that happen in that, you double it and you've got the 11/11 sales. So it's an amazing -- the dynamism and opportunity that sits in that market is incredible. So I think we're really well placed in Asia Pacific to grow, develop further and capitalize on the high-growth markets that exists that you saw that's happening there. The Asian brands where we've already got existing relationships with and that we're focusing on and developing them in Thailand next week to talk to the Thai clients, and then digital-first solutions using the tools that we've got and the services globally and supplementing it with local intelligence so that we're remaining relevant and being able to have sticky long-term relationships with clients and across China, which remains our focus. So I'll hand you -- that's Asia Pacific. I'll hand you over to Mark, I think, to talk about relationships with clients.

Thank you, Leela. Good morning, everybody. Mark Gay, Chief Client Officer. That means I really look after our best practices for all of our client engagement community, but specifically, I manage the team of people who are looking after our globally distributed clients and everything that we do with those globally distributed clients across all of our service lines, across all of our markets and geographies. So I'm just going to spend a couple of minutes, 2 slides to tell you 2 stories. The first story will be about us and how we have organized ourselves to really work with these clients. And the second will be much more interesting, I suppose, a story about clients and what it means for them working with us and the benefits they get from us. So first of all, about us, story about us is that 3, 4, 5 years ago, we were organized as a technical sales team. We have our service lines, we have brilliant people in each of those service lines who went out and represented that service line to the clients, did great work, but what we identified quite clearly was that those people were so deep in their subject matter expertise. They were going into the room, talking about what we did brilliantly in their one specific area. We're not necessarily always great at listening to what the client's overall problems and challenges were and connect them across our different service lines. So we took a group of people and said, let's focus on some high-value strategic clients and manage them in a way where we are looking across everything that we do. We are putting our top people sitting and listening to clients and building with them the solutions that will really help them. So we talked about our high-value strategic clients. We had a program started off with just simply 7 of our largest clients. Proved it, built it out to 28 clients in 2022, and we're now scaling this approach completely across everywhere we are in 2023. And already working in this way now with 60-plus clients. And the reason we do this is because what we proved in that period between 2020 and 2022, if we looked on our average revenue of our entire client base, and we look to end of the average revenue of the clients where we were working in this way. We looked at that as a percentage of their global media spend, it was twice as high, so their proportionate spend with us when we manage them in this way, high-value strategic clients was 2x the average client. And this was down to talking about everything that Ebiquity does, not just one thing in one market, but everything we do in every market. As soon as clients start buying more service lines from us, understanding the different ways we can help with them. We're getting to this exponential growth in terms of our revenue and our stickiness. We can see here that 1 service line as an index versus the all client average, it's against all clients slightly under 100. But when you come to 2 service lines, it becomes 4x that 1 service line number, 10x if they're buying 3 service lines, we get them involved in all 4 service lines, it's 14x. So by having the strategic management of the clients, moving them from being really engaged with us doing one thing in one place, to become engaged with everything we do everywhere, grows this value hugely. So let's talk about a client. Let's talk about Jaguar Land Rover. Quite interesting business over the last 5 years. Automotive has not been the easiest category to be in. We've had COVID. We've had the chip challenges. We had the -- all of the challenge of electrification for automotive. How we, as consumers, treat cars is completely different now than it was 10 years ago. The aspirations around car ownership are very different. So this is a client who's going through a challenging time over the last 5 years. Their advertising budget in that time has effectively halved. Our revenue from them has grown considerably because we help them through that change, help them understand the challenges and help them move forward. So very colorful, I know, but it's related back to one of the first charts you saw about our different service lines. By working with them in our Media Management piece, we worked with them on selecting a media agency for the future, building with that media agency commitments of how they were going to deliver the price and the quality of the media investment, looked at the digital wastage and how they're going to be reducing that and guarantees and promises were made as to how the agency was going to make that improvement and manage that through a period where everybody knew the investment was going down rather than up in the media space. But by not only helping with that selection, but then helping with the governance and the management of that agency, we've identified ways for our agency to over deliver and improve against those commitments that were made at point the pitch and continually optimize in a granular way market by market to find value improvements. Now value improvement in media can be something like achieving the same quantity of media, but at a higher quality. Think about TV placement, if you can buy a spot in the middle of a prime time show for a price that's similar to that, which we used to buy a spot during a daytime show, you're still buying the same number of spots, but there's a -- and maybe at the same price, but there's a massive value improvement, measurable value improvement by changing the quality of the airtime you're buying. I've used an old-fashioned TV example, but you can -- in the modern digital world, you can say exactly the same thing. There's quality of placement in every media channel. Helping them to optimize and improve the quality is a big value driver. And for a brand like Jaguar-Land Rover, for whom quality of placement is essential to get across their brand image, working with them on the quality of the media has been as valuable to them as working on the price of the media. We've also been using our advanced analytics capability with them, and that's probably one of the biggest areas of interest in growth with now as they're actually hopefully, their business is moving back into an upturn, maybe looking to invest more media money again. Where is the next best place to spend my next media dollar? If you're not connected or deeply invested in the supply chain, you're not interested in anything else than what will help sell the next car becomes a really interesting point piece of analysis to our advanced analytics team are doing, and that's growing out with this. And our Contract Compliance piece making sure that this agency relationship, there's all these commitments, there's these contractual terms, are they being delivered absolutely properly everywhere? And is there value to be recouped for not proper provision those times? And by managing all of this over a 5-plus-year period, we have a $300 million value recognition from this client. Now that's not actually just our numbers, it's their numbers because the way we work with them, they have to justify their investment internally not as part of their media line, but actually from their sales teams related to the same way they buy their management consultancy work because that's the area of strategic support we're providing to them, that's the level that we see from them. And that number comes from helping them reduce the cost of their media through the pitch process, helping to even reduce it further by overdelivering on those pitch commitments. That accounts for about half of that money there. There's enough -- sort of 10% of that comes through a mixture of the Contract Compliance and the marketing effectiveness work. And then the other big chunk is this improvement in the competitiveness and quality of the media that they're getting for their dollars invested. To say the dollars have been coming down, the pricing has also improved, and the quality has gone up to lead to this story that we help them through the entire piece. So I think I'll leave it there and hand it over to Susanne to talk about the GMP solution.

Great. Thank you. Hello, everyone. For us to -- so my name is Susanne Elias, I'm the Chief Delivery Officer. I've been here about a year now. I came through the -- buying the MediaPath business last April. Now to achieve the efficiencies we want to deliver to the business, we will be focusing on transforming the way we work in our daily business, daily work into the new operating model, basically. And the new operating model will be very heavily leaning on the GMP platform. Now the purpose of the GMP365 platform is for us to eliminate the people- and Excel-heavy manual work that we have and move into a technology-driven automation and globally harmonized way of working. So for all our core business, core services like media benchmarking, agency selection and value tracking will be delivered in the same way, harmonized both in the way we work and also the methodology we are using. These 3 services also constitute about 60% of our revenue, which will be driving a great margin improvement opportunity for us. Now why this is a benefit to our clients is not only the improved service of quality and the faster turnaround times, but also be able to course correct throughout the year by moving into an always-on way of working. These benefits, amongst other benefits, will also contribute to a greater reliability and trust in us as their partners, as our clients' partners, but also, it will contribute to our very strong position in the market and the ongoing success for us. Now what I want to do now is to move into demonstrating how GMP works. So I'm going to make sure -- so we do have -- I have 2 demos that I'm going to show you. One demo is to go into the live environment, where we have our pools where we will be delivering -- not delivering the benchmarking product, but where we are creating the benchmarking product across all our media. This is where all our data is now flooding in through the way we work with all our services. And I'm going to show you how quickly we can run a pool to -- that will be maintained by people for a country like Spain, as an example. So we will go into Spain. I will just create Spain Test 2022. Of course, I need to select the country here. And we will be able to do this in any country of the world where we have data collected. So we are now active in 122 countries. So as long as we are fulfilling the pool rules that we have, we will be able to deliver this kind of benchmark. We're going to run TV. Also, it's developed already to be able to cover many countries. So both where we're running cost per GRPs, or for some Latin American countries where we run it on cost per spot, or in some countries where we run by CPM, so we would be able to select what it is that we want to run here. And this is now a pool where the team working with us can go in and start maintaining the pool, and all the benchmarks for Spain would now be taken out of this specific audit. Now I'm not going to scroll down to show you the client names and their results right now. But as an example, you will be able to see -- this is live data for Spain, where you can see the split within the pool, between the different agencies, and you could also go in and look at it by sales house and look at the net-net investment we have for Spain specifically, or the number of GRPs as an example, or even moving into target audiences. This process today is very mixed between the countries that we work with, where we have more manual work where we are doing things differently. This will be a fully normalized or harmonized way of working. So any company in the world for any of our advertisers will have the same kind of analysis being able to be delivered to them. Now I'm going to move into demo environment because we're going to show you a little bit in the day-to-day work that we do. So if we choose the couch travel where we have uploaded a lot of client information -- sorry, different client information, and just moved it around so you can't really see what it is. I'm going to show you an example of how the insight team that would be doing the day-to-day work for one of our clients, as an example, running a report. So that's part of what we are delivering. Now if we go to run a report, which is, today, very manually run, and you can go to an advanced report, and we're going to create a CMD test. What we will do is to select the year we want to deliver the year for and the report for, which services we want to demo, and then all the data that we want to have included. I'm just going to include everything in this. We select the brands, and we can select the countries. I'm going to run this for Europe. And I'm going to include North America. So you could run this for all countries that you have in the system that you're working with a client on and basically you create a report. While we are now speaking, these reports are being created. This is something that would normally take several weeks to deliver because you deliver one by one. But because we go in and select all the countries at once, the work has been done upfront to make sure that the data is coming in from the media agencies to the system. We can then run the report very much quicker basically. Now when you go to the customer reports here, you will see that they are being created. So we are running these tests. And what we can then do is to go in and create a management summary based on all the reports that we just run by selecting the reports that we want to include in this management summary. Now the good thing with this is that when we work with the report today, if there's an update in a specific report, we need to go into the Excel, update that. We need to go into the PowerPoint and update that. And then next step is to go in and make sure that the management summary that we share with the client is updated. Once we go in and update something in one of these reports, the client who will be able to access the report that I have prepared here now for you, everything is updated automatically throughout every single report that we show in the client basically. So this is for the kind of report where we are doing the value tracking in a very fast and efficient way. I think we talked about this, that it's about 60% timesaving, that was the first number that we're looking at in the kind of reports that we are delivering today. 60% more time efficient. And this is for the valid tracking product. If we then look at some of the reports that we are running for the deep dive analysis, the benchmarking, I'm going to show you an example of how quickly we can run a report for the U.K., which is the country we want to run the report for. And this is the insight report, which is more the benchmarking, the deep dive product. So we choose the year we want to include and a reference here, we want to compare with, as an example, we choose both of this, and we are running the report, as you can see. And the system brings in all the information for the client and the report is done. So instead of spending time on number crunching the data, creating the PowerPoint slides, this happens within seconds in the system, and what our team will be doing instead is to go away and look at what is the information we want to share, what is the storytelling. We will do the storytelling in here to say, okay, this is something we want to highlight. We want to present this move to the clients. We want to make this a bigger presentation so we can then start to comment this. And instead of creating a PowerPoint report that we share with the client, that is that everything is now shared with our clients straight from the system basically. So all clients get their own log in and can, therefore, access the reports very, very quickly. I think that was what I was planning to show you today. All right. Thank you. Handing over to you, Nick. Thanks.

Thank you very much, Susanne, and thank you all for listening. I'll just very briefly summarize then. So we operate in a very large and increasingly complex global market, which we feel creates opportunity for us -- for us to create value for our clients. We provide the independent advice that clients can't rely on any other partner in the ecosystem to provide. Yes, there's an awful lot of players providing advice, but they all have a vested interest somewhere in the supply chain, except for us because of our independence. We have very large data sets, as I think you've probably seen, hopefully, you've seen now, and that we continue to grow those data sets. We see the opportunity to create more value from more data, from more sources. We see a very interesting opportunity, future-facing opportunity to apply machine learning for predictive capability. And of course, with the current zeitgeist around generative artificial intelligence, we're looking at that. Where we think -- and this is still very early thinking, and I'm sure everybody in this room is thinking, does AI represent a threat or an opportunity for a business. We're certainly not complacent that there's no threat to us. But what we think is there's an opportunity for us and that there is a sufficient moat around this to minimize the threat. By that, I mean, if you look at what generative AI does, it accesses vast amounts of information and data that is open source data and then produces whatever it is you want from that. So the moat for us is actually the value we bring to an organization to a client company is from the data that we've ingested within our own systems that is proprietary to all our clients and aggregate it. So the opportunity for us will be to apply artificial intelligence to generative AI to that data that exists within our moat. So that's the way we're thinking about it at the moment. We can't see a way in which an external party could provide that same value because we've got the proprietary data. So very early days, early thinking, but I'm sure it's within all your minds, as a data business, is it a threat, is it an opportunity? Of course, everybody's come out through in The Financial Times this morning, the Chief Executive of Bertelsmann saying, AI is actually a really good opportunity for publishers. And I think [ YouGov ] just said recently, yesterday or this week, don't worry about AI. It's not going to be a problem to us at all. So I'm sure every business manager is standing and saying, AI is an opportunity. But I just wanted to give you a little perspective on how we think it might be applicable to our business. But I do want to stress it's very early stage of thinking. It's not like -- it's suddenly going to create massive value for us now, but that's how we're thinking about it. We've got a spectacular roster of blue-chip clients, but we have a wonderful opportunity to increase the commercialization of those clients. We're coming from a history, if you like, where, yes, we've had this broad range of clients, but we've had limited services and products to offer them and the relationships have been largely tactical. So we're in the process of migrating those tactical relationships more of them into more strategic relationships, which are higher value. And of course, to be able to do that, you have to have more things to sell to them. And our big focus, as I said over the last 2.5 years, is to make sure we are relevant in the digital market. Global media market, 64%, 65% of it is digital. We have to have relevant products and services in the digital market. We've done that in a really good way. We've productized services that are growing strongly, proving their value, demonstrating they're sticky and recurring, and we're able to deliver at a good margin. It's a massively dynamic market, and I'm sure through Paul and Leela's sections have given you an indication of the explosive growth in 2 very significant areas, connected television, retail media. Massive area that is really under analyzed in social influencers. So we focused on new product development on connected TV and retail media and a little bit down the track on influencers. We launched or piloted a connected television service or product in the United States in the Q1 of this year. We're just starting to debrief out that. And I have to say, when we pilot a new product or service, we don't actually know what sort of value it's going to deliver. What we do know is that there's a vast amount of data for us to analyze. Most of these things are poorly governed, as I showed at the start of my presentation, and therefore, there should be a value capture opportunity for us. As we start to debrief on these pilots of connected television, we're already finding really interesting information. So we've analyzed $110 million of ad spend on connected TV so far. We have shown the clients that we've debriefed on things that they weren't aware of, some of which has really alarmed them, and some of which they go, oh, god, now, I know I need to tackle that. Simple one, I'll give you a background on, if an ad is served to a television screen in a living room, it's a pretty clean and safe environment. But if it's served to someone watching on mobile or tablet, there's huge amounts of fraud and robots and unviewable content there, millions of dollars already being wasted on that. And there was a survey, not conducted by us, last year, which showed 8% of all ads served on connected TV were served when the television was switched off, the devices are switched off. So there's huge opportunity if we can provide a valuable meaning service there. Retail Media. We haven't launched a product yet. That's our current one in the product development sets, our priority now for MPD, and we hope to bring one to market in the next few months. But just one interesting data point that reached my desk this week, working with a large American electrical retailer, they are actually looking at life through the other end of the telescope is how do they maximize their advertising opportunity. And work that we did for them showed that they have a $22 million -- I think we analyze about $80-odd million for them. They've got a $22 million value opportunity on the retail media products. So it seems like there could be a big value opportunity there. When it comes to social media, Leela referenced something in China. We've got some local market innovation. Back end of this year, we'll see if we can develop globally, a scalable product there. As we analyze more and more data, vast amounts of data, it's imperative that we have strong technology solutions to be able to do that. And I think we've demonstrated that with the media -- data vault for the Digital Media, which is well established and providing a lot of value for us. Susanne has demonstrated what the GMP365 platform can do. We are early stage in transitioning the service provision for our clients on to the platform. It's high functionality, as you can see. Ebiquity has been providing its service one way for a client. We now want to provide it another way from them. They naturally have a lot of questions. The agencies have been providing data to us in one way. We now want them to provide it to us in another way. So they have a lot of questions as well. So it is a transition journey. We've always said it's a 3-year transition journey to move our business from the service provision, if you like, from where it is now, onto the platform. It is a 3-year journey. It is hard work, but we are putting a lot of effort into it. And we've got a huge amount of confidence that it will be a big value for us. Geographically, we see big scaling opportunities in Asia and the United States. Our market penetration there is relatively low. So there's big opportunities there. So we view our story as one of a growth innovation opportunity and margin potential. So I hope that has been illuminating for you and gives you a good understanding of us as a business and where we're going. And of course, I'm very happy to answer any questions that you might have now.

Fiona?

Do I need a mic?

There is a mic, yes, because this is being recorded. So yes, it's better that you do speak into a microphone.

First, with the new productized services, when you're developing that, do you get the data that needs to be aggregated in order to function? Is that part of the existing package of data that's coming into you? Or are you now having to go around and renegotiate all that -- what you need to enhance?

It's a combination of both. We've got, as you see, bucket loads of existing data. But from new areas, we need to obtain new data. The permissions we have to get actually come from the advertisers because it's -- in this industry, there's a perennial debate of who actually owns the data. But in our view is it's the advertisers' data. And that's generally accepted. We certainly think we can get read-only seats, the advertisers read-only seats enables us to access that data.

And the other one -- I'm interested in Mark to talk about the potential for scaling up the high-value strategic clients. I just wanted to know what particular challenges were going to be in moving the numbers up from the [ 28 ] you had in [ 2022 ] just over 60?

Yes, it's a good question, and I get asked that quite regularly. And the only real challenge is the ability to find people that have the experience, the knowledge, the credibility of the gravitas because the last thing you want to do is to put someone who's undercooked on it and claim they're going to be your partner, Mr. Client, and they can't deliver it because then you lose credibility in your back at least a year or 2 years. So it's about -- and as you all know, there is a constraint on how much we can invest into people. Obviously, these people, experienced, knowledgeable people with gravitas are expensive. So we have to be moderated in how we invest into them and into the opportunity.

Roddy Davidson from Shore Capital. A couple of quick questions, please. The first one sort of relates to Paul's presentation. In terms of areas in which you might make acquisitions in the U.S. to add to your skill set, what should we be looking for there? And you talked about NPD, particularly in the context of sort of retail markets. What else should we be looking for coming down the tracks in terms of your sort of NPD pipeline, please?

Good. Well, when it comes to the United States, one of the geographic priorities, we will look at inorganic opportunities through the lenses of strategy. So huge opportunity with these vast American corporates. Is there a way -- is there an opportunity to bring a business into the organization that has really strong high-value relationships already with a big American corporate. When it comes to the digital services, we want to be productized about that. Is there an organization out there, a company out there that has smart productized digital services that we currently don't offer? And then innovation. Is there an organization out there that has innovated in a media segment or channel which we don't currently have an offering in? So that will be the opportunity. And I suppose the other one is, is there an opportunity to scale further in what we do this business? The more data you've got, the more value can add. Is there scaling opportunities there? So that was the first question. Remind me of the second question?

P Yes, the second one was around NPD royalties beyond the -- particularly beyond the retail side of things.

Yes. We don't want to, a, confuse ourselves or confuse the market, so we'll be quite moderated in NPD. Big focus at the moment is can we prove out the connected television pilot or product? Good signs, optimistic signs, actually. We've had already on the basis of a pilot, one of the clients has come back and said they really want to sign up to a load more, which is great. It's a really important focus of us on the retail media area. You see it's a $45 billion market already. I think Amazon has already generated a $34 billion advertising sales business. I think the market in the United States is $45 billion. Really important opportunity for us to capture that. We don't particularly want to get distracted from something like that. But I do want, perhaps in Q4 of this year, to start working on a potential NPD in the social influencer market. It's a little bit of a wild west that. There's a large amount of money. We started on this journey with a client demand in China. One of our large multinational clients spends GBP 40 million a year buying influencers in China. Somewhere up the tree in the global organization, someone said, well, is that right? Is it nuts? What are we getting for it? And it couldn't really be answered. So we're trying to help them answer that to the extent, as Leela said, we've now built a solution there. On the back of that, Leela's team in Singapore of innovative for a client there and got some innovation in Italy as well. So coming Q4, we'll look to see if we can create a globally scalable product solution. And then following that, we'll just look to see where the opportunity is, where the value opportunity is, what are clients struggling with. At the start of this year, I had a conversation with a global media director of one of the largest FMCG companies, and tried and tapped him, what's your problem? What are you struggling with? What are your challenges? And he said his boss, the global CMO, had put a top 10 list of priorities for his global media director to address, 3 of them were TikTok. So is there a business opportunity for us to be made by becoming deep specialists in TikTok? I don't know. We'll have a look at that. I mean this is one of the things about media, isn't it? There's just so much opportunity. How many billions gets spent on paid social? How many billions are spent on search? Now we do have offerings in those areas. There are ways in which we can scale them further. Yes, Mark?

Three questions, if I may, please. First would be with AI and so we look like with potentially the very early stages of the disruption of search. So what sort of opportunity set is that for you to advise your clients on how they navigate that would be the first question. Second question would be, what's the early feedback on the carbon emissions product? I mean how big an opportunity for -- could that be particularly in the context of some of the regulatory and reporting requirements that Ruben touched upon. And then final one is Mark showed that pretty powerful value created or value saved for Jaguar. In this case, the $300 million. Is there any way or linkage in the remuneration that Ebiquity gets that you could link in some incentive payments or targets that are measurable against that because you can directly measure that value created or value saved that the Ebiquity payments of renovation someway linked to delivering on those targets which will give you significant upside if you could be able to achieve that.

So I'm going to take that question first and work my way back. That is a subject that has been discussed and debated and considered. But we think there's a floor if we try to go down that route. And the floor is the fact that clients trust us. They have a high degree of trust in our integrity to be telling them the truth based on absolute objectivity. But when you start linking our revenue opportunity to that value we create for them directly, like a commission or a percentage of, then suddenly, you undermine that trust and integrity and independence because it becomes an opportunity for us to make the number up. Do they still trust -- that GBP 300 million, if we were going to get 10% of it or maybe we can find a way to call it GBP 500 million, we just can't be exposed to that risk because then the whole thing goes really. Carbon emissions, CO2, early-stage partnership with Scope3. Scope3 is the company that measures the carbon emissions. We don't try and measure it. We let an independent party measure it. They've -- that's what they put their intellectual capital into. What we do is we match our clients' digital media impressions to the carbon metric produced by Scope3, and we say okay, your carbon footprint on this campaign is X. And then we can help them out. What do you have to do to reduce that. We think there should be a big opportunity in that. So myself and Ruben and Mark went down to Istanbul a couple of weeks ago. It was the World Federation of Advertisers' Global Marketer Week. Sustainability was their theme for the whole agenda. So we -- unfortunately, you have to sponsor some of these things. You have to buy a bit of this and -- this, then and that. But we use that as an opportunity to launch our capability in the space. And that provides a lot of very interesting conversations because this is new -- it's a new service offering in the market. It's the first time an advertiser has been able to measure their carbon emissions. All the agencies are enthusiastic about it because they're now able to plan the media for the client based on reducing carbon emissions. So our thinking, as Ruben said, it's becoming a matter of regulatory requirement to report all aspects of our carbon emissions, both in Europe and all the way to the United States. I don't think advertisers have really thought until now that their media activity is burning fossil fuels. So it's a matter of now getting into the conversations we had down in Istanbul. There was a lot of interest, and it's really interesting. God, I didn't know we were doing that. So now we've got to turn interest into action. And I think an inhibitor that we've got our work on hard is that the people controlling the media budget, so there's media or procurement or marketing people, are different from the people with a sustainability agenda at these corporates. And we have to try and navigate the connection between the 2. So that's work that will need to be done. We are optimistic that it should have strong take-up. Your first question was about generative AI. And I think Mark, it was about how we advise our clients to apply it. Was that right?

Well, sort of specifically in this case, was the impact of generative AI and disrupting the search market potentially.

Well, that's a very good question. And I can speak with some direct experience of that. Some of you might know, my previous job was managing the Density business in Asia, Asia Pacific, not Japan, obviously, but the rest of it. I stopped -- I left that job at the end of 2018 to come home to the U.K. So in 2018, we had already developed an AI product that was able to create search advertising with better returns than human being set. We started applying it to the hotel market. We had one of the hotel chains in -- international hotel chains. They have some properties in Thailand they wanted to just experiment. So hotels say, next week, it's Mother's Sunday or whatever. We're doing this brunch or that. They've all got these weekend things. So we developed an AI solution that was able to achieve better returns than human beings writing search advertising. So I think there is a massive -- and that was 2018. I think there's a massive opportunity for AI to disrupt the search market as huge. Yes. So I'll come to you in a minute, John.

I got 3 again. One for Susanne, Paul and Ruben. Ruben, your slide had data right at the end, one of the points of our data is the foundational element of AI and machine learning. I would like you to maybe elaborate a bit on that if possible. For Susanne, the question was on GMP365. How much of this is a competitive advantage? I understand where Ebiquity is a massive efficiency internal gain. But how does it actually take you -- it doesn't actually really improve you versus your competitors and how competitive of an advantage is that? And Paul, I was a bit surprised that you already work with 19 of the top 25 U.S. advertisers, but the revenue contribution is quite miniscule in the group context. 70% comes from U.K. and the EU. So the question here is how much of it is just going to the current client base that you have and reminding them of the work that Ebiquity can already do? And if that's not happened to date, why hasn't it happened?

Thank you. That's a great question. So to elaborate on that, what we see in generative AI now, it's developing. And I think the most interesting thing that we're talking about is the large language models. So the LLMs like ChatGPT from OpenAI or Microsoft and Bard, which is part of Google, and some fringe operators. These models are being trained on largely open source media, open source information. Now there's a whole discussion going on about do they actually have the intellectual property rights to have these models trained on that data, but that's a separate conversation. What we know is that our data, which is really at scale and growing faster and faster every year, is a proprietary and secure within our control. So competitors or new operators in our space will not be able to replicate that data set to then train a model, for example, to interrogate it around what would be a strong -- what would be the most efficient campaign investment strategy for a summer promotional campaign. Like those kind of interactions with our data are going to be possible in due course. And similar to Bloomberg, who have released Bloomberg GPT, based on their terminal data, it is something that can't be replicated by these other operators. So the model that will win and the model that will be most valuable for specific use cases is the model with the most rich, recent and relevant data that is being trained on. And that's what we mean by the competitive moat that our data set, which is growing and becoming increasingly rich, will bring us not just for generative AI, but also with regards to machine learning and forecasting capabilities to predict effectiveness and efficiency in future media investments. But data is the heart of any of those initiatives and exercises.

Yes, the competitive advantage. I think it's a huge competitive advantage, not only for the reason of speed of delivery, but also based on the products we can deliver in -- to a client across multiple services. As an example, the benchmarking product today, to be able to run this in any country in the world, none of our competitors can do that. I mean this is already now growing our possibilities to deliver where we will need less and less partners. So from that perspective, we will get away and have a bigger path between us and our competitors who will not be able to deliver. Today, we are using partners in some countries, but that is something that we are really moving away from -- because we will be able to do all of this in-house basically. So from that perspective, it's a huge advantage. When it comes to agency selection, to be able to be much faster in the way we report our clients from our competitors needing 4, 5 weeks to deliver 1 report to our client, we can do it within 24 hours. This is something that -- it's not even the same product anymore. It's not comparing different Excel sheets and what is best. This is about automation and being extremely much faster than competition of it. I mean, yes, do you want to add anything to this?

No, that's it. Very good.

Yes? Thank you. Thanks.

Paul?

I think the word you used was miniscule. So I'll just take you back 3 years ago, North America represented 5% of the group's revenue. So we are more than tripled it. We're a relatively new leadership group and team. So I've been there 2 years. We've acquired a company that's really bolstered us, strengthened us. But what you've diagnosed is spot on. We work with an incredible array of leading advertisers and brands across the market that in an often quite one-dimensional or one service line orientation, very transactional. So we're asked to perform a task and provide a scope, we provide the scope, and then we might see them 12 months later. We have completely flipped that orientation to be more, as Mark sort of demonstrated, to be more strategic in the client relationships that we're building, to be more value orientated in terms of our solutions and the value they bring. And what's brilliant is the combination of the innovation of new products. So the more offerings that we have that are relevant to what clients are struggling with to navigate, the more traction we're finding in terms of that growth opportunity. And then the other aspect is off that platform to be more proactive in the market. So again, shockingly, we were quite reactive. So we would win new business because we were asked to participate in an RFP. Now we're showing up on people's doorsteps and talking to them about Ebiquity, whether it's at a conference or actually face-to-face interaction and going and visiting clients and prospects and getting that market traction and voice because we're really confident and feel really good about the proposition we have, and we just want to be able to make it available to more clients.

In terms of what can be achieved. I was actually being positive on that front. Miniscule in terms what can you do...

Yes, yes. No, no, no...

Thanks for all the clarity, all the [indiscernible]. Thank you.

Yes. Great. Thank you.

Yes. Johnathan, yes.

It's Johnathan Barrett from Panmure Gordon. I've got 3 questions left. So one for Ruben, one for Leela and one for you, if that's okay.

Sure.

So I'll kick off with Ruben. The margin in digital, can you just talk about what you think the sustainable margin is or might be for the future given that obviously, the product mix is changing and mix make you need to do more things, et cetera. Can you just perhaps give us appeal for that or appropriate yourself from that one?

Ruben, can you answer that?

Yes, sure. I think it's a very different model. It's more like a service subscription but without a complete self-serve model, which means that it's scalable in a way where our incremental costs are very minimal for when we need to add multiple markets or a wider scope to the delivery that we do. Exactly what a sustainable or achievable margin will be, I mean, we're currently floating very healthily above 50%, and we'll continue to optimize and see how we can maximize investment in innovation and new channels also using that capital that is released as a result of that to further grow that. But it's -- we continuously look at that with the group and with the CFO to see what's sustainable for the midterm and long term to operate on.

And then just for Leela, too. Just on the Indian market, I mean you made some comments there. And I think there's some of the data points I'm aware of about the level of spend in digital and media. It looks quite low in that market despite the level of retail activity on mobile and the like. Could you just contextualize that just so we understand what's happening there, please?

Sure. So it's still predominantly a traditional media market. So it's still largely TV. So in India at the moment, happily, we launched our India office at October last year, October '21. And in that short time, they're already one of the largest advertisers in the market. It's [ treadway ] launched with the PepsiCo pitch that happened. And -- but still in the market, traditional media is the dominant media. So there's a lot of interest in digital still. So it's just the way the nature of the market, they're mainly a traditional media market. It's very, very fragmented. Of course, it's a complex market. We say India, but of course, we all know that there are -- it's a dialect by state-driven market. So it's a very complex language and wise -- and so media wise, all the media is different by state. So yes, it's mainly a traditional media, TV, press and...

I'll say a couple of things there, Johnathan. One, on the broadcast front, I haven't seen data in the last sort of 12 or so months. But amongst the top 20 global advertising markets, on a purchase power parity basis, the cost of advertising on broadcast meter, India was the lowest. So it's really, really good cost efficient for advertisers. So that's why a lot of our dollars still go into there. It's a massively complicated market, the television market, as Leela said. There's great opportunity to add value through analyzing the television market. But digital is growing extremely strongly. And it will. It will. My last job in Asia Pacific, we invested heavily into digital capabilities, and we outgrow everybody else. So I think it's a really interesting dynamic market. And as you know, it's a really tough one for multinationals to operate in.

And just my last question to you, Nick. Obviously, you've made a big push to drive the reduction in usage of data and some automation -- business was changing quite a lot now. You're getting much closer to being a business intelligence company. Can we think about you growing in your margin development in the same way as we would with the business intelligence company, i.e. a nice sort of constant growth rate within a relatively narrow range and the margin just continually [ eking ] up as you get the higher incremental product from revenue growth.

That will certainly be the ambition, yes. Progression, Johnathan, I think, is our intention. Andrew?

Andrew Renton from Cenkos. The first question is around Twitter and around whether you're seeing revenues coming back now that WPP, for example, sort of took them off a blacklist. And the second question is around sort of the commercial agreements for the data that you're bringing in who has the right to share that with you as the advertisers? Is it the platform? Could those arrangements and agreements sort of change in your favor against you?

Well, let's start with Twitter. It was interesting to see Mark ready to say that. It wasn't a WPP now comfortable to advise its clients to come back on to Twitter. My own personal view, and this is probably our corporate view as well. That's a little bit early. I think, yes, they've hired Linda Yaccarino. She's an ad sales person, which is clearly a good thing because she's sensitive to the needs of advertisers, or perhaps Mr. Musk wasn't. But will he -- will he put in place what advertisers need to reassure them to come back. And that is about moderation. That's what advertisers are worried about, having their brand exposed on a badly or not at all moderated platform. So I think there is still caution. I think they will still wait and see what does Linda's presence actually do. Does Musk change his policies at all? And truthfully, that would be our advice as well. Just wait and see for the time being. Yes.

Linda impact because of gravitas in the market because of the relationships across all of those groups. And it's going to be quite quick, and it's not a surprise that GroupM have responded so quickly and to be the first. But it might be -- that impact might be confined based on the conditions Nick was addressing.

And there was another question on...

Yes, around the commercial agreement for the data that you're using.

Yes, there's 2 elements to that, which is, one is the data sets relating specifically to advertisers activity, media buying activity. There is a degree of debate in the market whose data is it. Does it belong to the advertisers, belong to the publisher or broadcast? Or does it belong to the agency? Our position is that if an advertiser is buying something, they should have the right to do whatever they want to do with that data. And that tends to be the position of advertisers as well. So that's the basis on which we operate. As I say, it's not without question on that, but I think it's a very established norm in the origins of the media audit market, that's exactly the way it is. Will it stay that way forever? Difficult to say, but I think there was a general consensus amongst the advertisers. We spend all these billions of dollars. It's our right to be able to analyze it however which way we want. So that's where we are. And there was another question.

That was it.

That was it. Okay. Good. Thanks. Yes, one at the back.

On the digital product, could you just say how many clients are actually using it? And then explain a bit about cross-sell in terms of how far you are in penetrating the clients, how quickly they take it up? And then lastly, could you give a bit of a range of sort of how much it might cost, how you price it?

Sure. The number of clients buying from our -- I say new, it's now 2.5 years old, suite of digital media solutions is one of the operating metrics that we published. At the end of 2022, we had 55 clients buying that. That's from a standing start of 1 in 2020. So we've got 55 clients buying that. A very good repeat purchase. I believe only 1 client has not repeat purchase, and that was more to do with the corporate reorganization and ability to manage budgets than anything else. So 55 clients and continuing to progress quite well. I think that curve will flatten out simply because you get your first clients onboard that they're most ready to buy and then you have to work a bit harder on converting clients, but we still see a lot of good progress there. Similarly, cross-sell is another one of the operating metrics that we published. At the end of 2022, we had 97 clients buying more than 1 service line, and that's up from -- I think it was 50 something at the end of '21 and 30-something at the end of 2020. So good progression there in terms of the cross-sell as well.

The last one is how much is it, how much is the range?

And I -- as you can imagine, I get asked that question a lot. My answer is not highly satisfactory, and that it's a little bit like how long is a piece of string? So -- and by that, I mean, a client might typically start buying the service saying, well, I'm not sure what value it's going to add so let's have a look in 1 country, and that has a price tag on it. Now that's interesting. Maybe it was value in 3 countries and then 8 and then 50. Similarly, a client might have 1 brand that wants to analyze, and that proves its value out and they go, let's analyze it across 3, 5, 10 brands. And they might have very different scale of budget. The work we have to do, the data we have to ingest for a client that's spending $10 million versus $100 million versus $150 million is a lot. So it's a value-based pricing model, and it's not directly linked to a rate card as such. So I think for a single market, single brand advertiser, I think Ruben, the ticket price is about 50,000, something like that?

For small markets. It's more [ 120 to 150 ] for large markets.

Yes. But then multi-brand, multi-market client, I think our largest is 800,000?

Over 1 million.

It's over 1 million. So huge range then from sort of 50,000 to 1 million, which is why it's sort of how long is the piece of string. Yes, Fiona?

Yes. Have you seen any changes in the competitive landscape? Are the consultants trying to move down the same lane or reacting in another way?

There is a reasonably vibrant competitive market. But what is interesting is I would say that competitors don't try and offer the same services as each other. So I would say, our most respected competitors might be PwC. They're much less about analyzing large data sets and more about providing consultancy services. Another good competitor we have is a company called MediaSense, privately owned, is taken out by private equity a couple of years ago. They have a different model in that -- they essentially don't have any geographic distribution that people all here in the U.K. So they don't have any national market expertise. So they analyze data quite a high level. They can't apply that detailed local media market knowledge that we do. And they won't try and compete against us like that. It's just when Susanne was a competitor of MediaPath. Her competitive approach was, well, I'm not going to have boots on the ground everywhere, but I'll have a really good technology platform. So competitors are approaching things from a different angle. Over in the United States, there's a big beast called MediaLink, which does all the big -- really the $1 billion agency pitches and things. But they don't want to do the data analysis that we do. So -- and then you look at our marketing effectiveness capability. That is a very competitive area. You've got big companies like Nielsen and Kantar. You've got smaller companies that compete -- I mean, and all the agencies offer that sort of service as well. So the competitive field differs. When you look at our Contract Compliance capability, there are some small independent competitors, but I think PwC, Deloitte, brands like that, EY are the bigger competitors. So it's a mixed competitive field. There's no one organization that does exactly what we do.

Has there been any shift in what they're doing in response to what you're doing?

Not to my knowledge, I've not seen anything like that. I think they'll probably take the view that they can't compete with us head-on against our areas of strength, so they have to do something different. Roddy?

I'll ask another question given that the [indiscernible] again. I'm really interested in the whole notion of, I mean, obviously, the technology is really driving your ability to analyze, manipulate data, et cetera. And this was maybe something you touched on before. To what extent does that -- do you expect that to involve you becoming more embedded in the sort of forecasting process and the planning process at client level?

Yes. And that is an ambition we have. We now have the capability to do that. And I think we've actually got very good capability to do that. So now it's a two-fold job now. One is to change a bit of market perception about it. As you know, brand perception always lags reality. So the perception of Ebiquity is very much in the analysis of what has happened. So we now have to change the perception that we can use the analysis of what have happened to inform the future. And then there's, if you like, a sales job for us to do, change perception and go out and sell it. So it is very much our ambition. I think it will take time. But I think we have the capability. Any more questions? None for you, Mark, no? Very good. Well, thank you all very much for attending, listening and for your questions. It's pretty great to meet you all and speak in front of you. I really appreciate your support. If you're hungry or thirsty, I think we have something. [ Candice ] has prepared a nice little buffet lunch and snacks and things. So feel free if you're hungry or thirsty to spend a little bit more time with us, that would be great. Thank you.