Ebiquity plc (EBQ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the presentation of the half year results to the 30th of June from Ebiquity. I think you probably all know me, I'm Nick Waters, the Chief Executive. I'm joined today by Brian Porritt, who's our Interim Head of Finance. Brian is actually not with me in the room. He's dialing in remotely because he's suffering from a cold, but he is indeed here. He will take you through the finance slides. But I'll start with the first summary slide. It's been a disappointing first half of the year, and we missed our stride. There's no getting away from that fact. Some of that has been down to external market factors and some of it has been of our own making, in truth. The outcome of that is revenue is down GBP 2.7 million, which has flowed largely through to the bottom line as we have a largely fixed cost base. So that's impacted the bottom line and compressed margins as well. However, there has been a lot of new business activity really from Q2 onwards around the world, delivering a lot of success. That with a very full new business pipeline, is giving us a strong second half to the year and good momentum into 2025. Despite the uphill revenue battle, we have remained diligent on executing against our transformation strategy. We've made good progress rolling out the GMP365 data management platform, on which we will be serving 3 of our core services. We've continued to improve our sales and marketing capability. And the major effort, major focus of management time over the last 12 months really, certainly through the first half of this year has been a significant change to our operating model really to work around and maximizing the benefits of the technology-enabled and organizational structure. And we think now, we're very well placed to create scalable growth to take advantage of the global market. And I'll obviously come back and talk to you in more detail about that shortly after Brian has taken us through the financial slides. Brian?

Yes. Thanks, Nick. So the financial overview here, these are the same headline indicators that you will have seen on the RNS. And just to pull out 2 or 3 things on this slide. The revenue, as you can see there, GBP 37.9 million for the half, is a 7% decline on the same period a year ago, and it's a GBP 2.8 million absolute shortfall, as you can see there. And if you look down a couple of lines, you can see that, that really all drops to profit, the adjusted OP shortfall being GBP 3.6 million. And so the additional GBP 0.8 million of operating expense increase is largely staff costs. And I think where that differs from previous expectations is that during the first half year, we were not able to take out staff costs through the tech-enabled product migration that's proving slower than originally planned, and we talked about that in the RNS. And so what you had in H1 were actually just some inflationary pay rises and a very modest increase in headcount, leading to, therefore, that GBP 3.6 million shortfall on adjusted operating profit. And that's really the operational gearing that we talk about through the RNS. So obviously, it hits us hard when the numbers are down in H1, but we get a much stronger conversion when the numbers lift in H2. And then just dropping down to the bottom of that slide, the highlighted items, you'll see that they are lower in H1 '24 than they were in H1 of last year. And that really reflects a couple of credits that have come through in this period. So we've written down partially the deferred consideration that we're accruing for the MMi acquisition. That will eventually be payable in July of next year. But it's linked to performance of the North American business. And as that has been down in this period, we've -- or down versus budget, I should say, in this period, we have reduced the amount that we're accruing for that. So that comes out of the highlighted items. And then there's a small write-back on dilapidation costs as well. So I think what's important, though, is I think we can expect the highlighted items to run lower in the future. We've put transformation costs through here in '23 and now in the first half of '24. And in the second half of '24, there'll be some severance costs, but then we should start to see that running down as a trend. If I go to the next slide, here, we're looking at the revenue by segment. And in the RNS, there's some explanation as to why most of the comparatives by region at the moment are difficult because we've changed the basis of recognizing revenue in each region. And we've changed the allocation of costs a couple of times, actually. So it's really very difficult to normalize 2023 on to the same basis that we're now reporting '24. So what we've done here is taken the 1 metric that is comparable, and that's what we call external revenue. So that means, in this case, that the U.K. and Ireland have either invoiced or accrued GBP 14.9 million. And the '23 numbers here are on a comparable basis. So this is the 1 metric that currently gives us a good comparison for the changes year-on-year. We'll have the same issue at year-end because the '23 comparatives will still be problematic. But as we go into next year, we'll be on a like-for-like basis again. However, you can take this as effectively like-for-like. So what you can see there is the U.K. and Continental Europe were both down year-on-year. And in both cases, a big piece of that was that there were unusually high levels of agency selection business in the first half of 2023. And we didn't expect that to repeat. And that has happened, and that's driven these shortfalls year-over-year in both of those regions. North America, which obviously we were expecting to grow very quickly because we're still somewhat underpenetrated in that market, has actually been flat in that period. And there were some very successful wins and some expansions as it says in the bullet below, but there were also some losses and delays by certain clients. So that netted out as flat. And Asia Pacific had a good H1 in Contract Compliance, but the Australian business has underperformed in that period. So you only see a 2% growth there. But all of those regions are now on very different trajectories in H2, as we'll talk about in a while. If we go to the next slide, this is obviously the financial overview here of the balance sheet. And really, the main thing here is that we -- as you can see there, we have that deferred consideration accrual for MMi, which is payable in July. And the net debt at the half year -- sorry, was GBP 15.3 million that you see at the bottom there. That was obviously an increase over the GBP 12 million at year-end or GBP 11.9 million. And that's normal seasonality, it would normally increase. It was GBP 15 million at June 2023 as well. But I suppose where this differs from expectations is that we were expecting a stronger first half. We were expecting the net debt to trend down, and we're now seeing it at the same level it was a year ago. We still have plenty of headroom on all covenants and on liquidity. And we break out there in the bullet point, the loan and the cash and so on. But we will expect this to come down as we go into 2025. We obviously collect the stronger seasonal revenues in Q4 and Q1. And so that -- the leverage will improve. I mean, it's -- currently at the half year, our leverage is at about 1.6. And I think it will be down to about 1.2 by year-end and then lower again in Q1. So that's where we are on the net debt. And then we just look at the cash flow on the next slide. And one thing that jumps out here is that highlighted items number in June 2023. And that was a deferred consideration payment at that time in respect of Digital Decisions. It was about GBP 6.5 million. And obviously, there's nothing equivalent to that in the current year, but that creates a reasonably big swing there. And everything else really is covered in the bullet points over on the left-hand side. And then finally, the net debt summary, as I've already mentioned, we have 3 operative covenants, as we show you there. The one, in many ways, that is the most sensitive is the adjusted leverage, which needs to be below 2.5. And as I've said, we're currently at about 1.6 and trending down. So I think -- we think those are all with very adequate headroom. And in terms of liquidity, the same. The -- we've had some one-off cash outflows in the first half year, which is why the net debt is at about GBP 15 million. Those included legal and professional fees to do with an aborted transaction. We had some dilapidation costs as we downsize the London office. There were some costs associated with a change in payroll provider. And we have the cash costs of the highlighted items, which were contract staff working on the transformation project. In H2, by contrast, the only kind of non-trading cash outflows will be some severance payments, about GBP 700,000 or so of those. But the one-off cash outflows of H1 will not repeat. And then from that point on, after we've dealt with those severance costs, the -- and those have already gone through in July and August. The rest is all about trading. And as we collect the better seasonal receivables from the September, October, November period as those come through as cash in Q4 and Q1, we will see this improve. Nick, over to you.

Thank you very much, Brian. Yes. Thank you. I'll spend a little bit of time now talking about the positives that we're seeing in the business right now and into the future. And just to set a little bit of context, you might remember that in Q4 of last year, we suffered a few significant clients, large clients cutting some budgets. But we still entered to Q1 with a degree of optimism. There was a satisfactory pipeline of new business opportunities. But unfortunately, we didn't convert some of them. I think it is fair to say we could have been guilty of a little bit of complacency. We had a very, very strong new business run in 2023, particularly in North America. And it might be that we were, perhaps, as I said, a little bit complacent and not specially tuned into what the clients wanted and perhaps somewhat overconfident in selling the premium nature of our services. As a consequence of that, not only did we not convert some opportunities, but we lost a couple of important pieces of business where we're incumbent. However, that really focused on lines on a more aggressive outbound prospect to new business drive in the second quarter. And of course, continuing strategy of developing higher-value strategic relationships with major clients through cross-sell and upsell. So this table shows some highlights, some of the major highlights of the activity from really the second quarter onwards, and there's just a few that I want to pick out here. If we look at the top line and new logos, I think there's some significant progress in actually winning business new to Ebiquity. But not only that, if we look at Airbnb, UBS and INEOS, those 3 brands in particular are new to our sector. So we were able to win out competition and persuade them to come to us as they try the services offered by us and our competitors. For the first time, Haleon, I also want to call out, it's a good story. We were incumbent on GSK for a number of years. And then when they spun off their Consumer Products division and called it Haleon that went to a competitor of ours. So that was deeply irritating. But 2 years later, we've managed to bring them back into the organization with our superior service offering. As you know, our ambition is to scale in the United States and become more relevant to large American corporate brands that we have made progress there despite missing a couple of opportunities at the start of the year. I'm also particularly pleased if we look over to the right-hand side of the slide, that top right box converting some major Asian brands into our company for the first time. You might recall that's been a priority of mine really to penetrate the Asian domestic advertisers. So that's positive. As you can see in the middle line, we've made, I think, very good progress cross-selling more of our services to existing major clients. And in the bottom line, similarly expanding our geographic reach with major clients. And here, I just want to call out a couple. The first 1 really to call out is Disney. So that has been a relationship in Europe for some years, but we've never serviced them in the home domestic U.S. market. So first, I note we've been able to extend that relationship into the United States, beating our competitors that it helped that business for quite some time, very encouraged by that demonstrating the competitiveness of our American business with a massive local or domestic client. The other area I want to call out is under Europe, when both BMW and Beiersdorf are turning into very large customers of ours now as we've delivered good products and service for them over a number of years. And all 4 of those brands, BMW, K&K, Henkel and Beiersdorf come out in the German business. And you might recall from previous presentations, we have struggled a little bit in Germany. So I'm very encouraged that we're able to meet their needs and grow our business with some very major German corporations. Now, that new business activities stop there. There's an enormous amount of positive activity going on as we execute our growth strategy. Currently as we sit here right now, maybe 11 live multinational RFPs that we are responding to, of which only 3 are incumbencies. So there's a lot of new business conversion opportunity there and not too much to defend. We also expect a further 3 RFPs to land imminently. And these kind of across a really wide range of sectors. I won't call them out now, but you can see them there in the sub-bullet point. And we speak to our regional management team every week and on last week's call with Leela, who some of you will have met, our Managing Director of Asia. And she's been in post for 10 years now. And she reported unprecedented levels of activity in the market, and that's a direct quote from her. So the Asian business is stimulating a huge amount of demand. I also just want to touch on the Middle East. This is not an area we have really generating business from before. But we took a strategic decision at the back end of last year to invest a little bit, and it is really only a little bit of results in trying to generate business out of the Middle East. And I'm very encouraged with the progress that's been made. We had won our first client out of Abu Dhabi. We do have some other smaller clients around the Middle East, but I won't reference now, but we have 5 global RFPs coming from around the region to Dubai, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. So I'm very, very optimistic and encouraged about our new source of business coming from that region. We have, of course, continued to sell our Digital Media Solutions, and we continue to make good progress of that. We've onboarded 20 more clients during the first half of this year, and we'll end the year with over 100 clients buying from that portfolio of solutions. We're seeing extremely strong demand for our marketing effectiveness services. And the team there actually struggling to cope with demand. I think that's going to be the problem in the back end of this year is can we actually meet demand. And I suspect some of that will move over into the first quarter of '25. You've also had been talking before about some of the innovation we're bringing to market. I'm really, really happy with what we're seeing from our new streaming TV product. We've previously called it advanced television you might be used to be called it an advanced television. We've relabeled it a streaming TV because that seems to resonate more in the United States, where we're focusing our efforts, although we are now testing it in the U.K. But I'm very encouraged by this because the results from the first wave of clients that have been buying our services demonstrate a huge value creation opportunity or waste elimination opportunity. There's a lot of money flowing into that channel, and we're finding that our hypothesis that a lot of that money will be spent is actually being borne out, and we've now got $0.5 billion worth of media investment data to start really building some knowledge about market launch there. We've also developed a new product for the retail media sector, that is in live phase with our first clients. And really looking forward to seeing the debrief or the output from those first clients to see if we can find a similar value proposition there that we have with the streaming TV product. We've reorganized our sales and marketing division. I think we're a much better placed now to generate new business from outbound efforts. We have taken the opportunity still to invest a little bit. It is only a little bit in R&D product development and some software engineering for AI. So there's a lot of positive activity giving us forward momentum. This is giving a very encouraging outlook for the second half of the year. We have secured 88% of the full year expected outturns. So we have a very high degree of confidence in being able to achieve that number. Revenue will grow in the mid-single digits year-on-year, half 2 versus half 2. And because of the operational leverage, the adjusted operating profit will reach double digit growth versus the second half of '23. As Brian already mentioned, cash flow is improving in Q4 over to seasonal receivables. And he also said there's no material nontrading cash outflows. So a much more positive picture for H2 and as we move into 2025. I now want to touch on the efforts to make us a more efficient and scalable business. You have seen these 4 points of the strategy, 4 elements of the strategy before I've touched a little bit on geography and product and the cross-selling and upselling to clients over the last couple of slides. I'll now spend a little bit of time talking about our efforts to improve operational efficiencies. This has really been where the weight of management time and focus has been, perhaps more than we originally envisioned, but it's something that I felt absolutely necessary to do to make us not just a more efficient business, but a more scalable business. Central to that is our mission to become a tech-enabled business. And by that, I'm enrolling out the GMP365 data management platform on which to deliver 3 of our core services, but also not taking our eye off the ball, continuing to build clients by selling Digital Media Solutions delivered on the media data bought. This is designed to increase scalability and efficiency of our business, but also to improve product to client. So our major multinational clients have been demanding global consistency. And of course, if we are able to deliver our services on a globally rolled out data management platform, that will deliver that consistency. But it also provides the clients with speed of insights instead of our people spending a lot of time wrangling large data sets by spreadsheets, once the data is on the platform, all the calculations are done at the press of the button, getting the client output much, much quicker. That means they get always on visibility and also forward planning visibility, which I think creates a more valuable product to them. So global consistency, speed to insight, which is a competitive advantage. Our competitors don't have that ability and a more valuable product. Now in addition to rolling out the technology platform, we have undertaken a very major change to our operating model really to able us to capture the benefits of the technology. That has involved moving delivery teams out of national marketplaces into globally mutualized teams located in lower cost territories that we'll be building a team in Madrid. That's not new, we've been doing that for some time. We had a nascent team in Guatemala that is now building out the service the U.S. time zone. And we have a team in Sofia, Bulgaria and some people in India and Indonesia, and they're operating, although they're globally distributed, they're operating as one team. And that enables our in-market teams to focus on developing client relationships and farming those and hunting for new business. So the new operating model looks like this and works like this. We essentially -- if we set aside firm decisions for the time being because that's not been impacted by this new changes to the operating model. We've essentially transformed the organization from a federation of relatively small national businesses handcrafting customized solutions on an end-to-end basis for clients, doing everything differently and customizing every solution. So we now really lifted and shifted the vast majority of the organization so it's organized like this. We have 4 teams facing clients and 3 in geographies in the Americas, Europe, including the U.K. and Asia Pacific and a team managing global clients that are not headquartered in 1 of those jurisdictions where the headquartered might be, but we might be managing the relationship, for example, from here in London. So those teams are now briefed and set up just to manage those clients, as I said, develop the relationships and of course, to go out and win new business. We think it's geographically important there. Despite that, we're operating in a remote and increasingly remote business world, there's no getting away from the benefits of face-to-face client contact. Now those teams are supported by, as I say, globally distributed a mutualized tech-enabled delivery team, and that delivery team is responsible for accessing the data, sourcing the data that the in-market teams need to provide their services. Cleansing it, organizing it and making sure it is in a position situation from which our in-market teams control the insights based on their deep market expertise and knowledge. The global organization is now supported by a global solutions team. So moving away from handcrafted customized local solutions to globally distributable solutions that can be delivered at scale, and they work hand in glove with the production team's responsibilities is to make sure these solutions can be delivered efficiently through appropriate software. And of course, that production team is where we're applying the machine learning skills and developing artificial intelligence skills to both enhance the speed of delivery and also to elevate new solutions for our clients. So that's been an absolutely massive lift and shift that has taken really a lot of time and effort from approximately some of last year through the summer of this year. And I think it would be fair to say a bit of a drain on management time is left to our managers, less focused on external work, and I think could have contributed to a little bit of loss of momentum on the top line. But we're making very good progress, I would say, rolling out the data management platform. The 3 services that we intend to deliver on the platform of ValueTrack, agency selection and benchmarking. So ValueTrack is part of our media performance products. At the half year mark, we were servicing 50 clients on the GMP platform across an aggregate of 473 national implementations, i.e., 50 clients each in a number of markets, coming 473 national implementations, which is up considerably year-on-year. And we've identified a reduction in delivery balance. So that's the hours in terms of accessing, sourcing, cleaning the data of up to 44% instead of doing it by spreadsheets on a market by market basis. So that gives us a good indication of a scalable potential there. Similarly with agency selection, we've managed 35 processes, agency selection management processes up to the half year mark, covering again, 130, what you could compliant country assignments. Again, up versus the number delivered in 2023, but they are smaller in scope. And I think that comes back to the point Brian made about reduced media management activity in the first half of this year. That's consistent with the market, our external data sources, published data sources from a company called Convergence indicate there's been about 30%, 33% less business pitched by advertisers for media agencies to pitch for. It's also true to say we -- our market share is down a little bit on prior year on that. So our market share down a bit on reduced volumes. But we continue to make progress on that. So as we sit here now, we've managed 45 processes, agency selection process on the platform. And actually, I should have said we're over 60 ValueTrack clients now and over 660 national implementation. So I think good progress for those 2. But there has been less progress transitioning the benchmarking product. We have 10 clients onboarded now covering 25 markets. This has largely been due to -- as we've got into the details and the weeds of it, there is more local market nuance required on the platform than it currently provides for. So some modifications are required. They've been briefed in and word of reassurance. These are not significant modifications. And the first releases are coming out now actually for the United States. So we think that will really make it easier to transition plants onto the platform for benchmarking, but it does mean we're going slower there and the plan has been to roll that out across '24 and '25. That now has to extend through to '26. And it's the dual running, really, of new systems, legacy systems or processes that has made it hard to realize the efficiency gains that we plan. So as and when we dial down the legacy processes, that's when we'll be able to materialize the headcount efficiencies. So rolling out a platform and a fundamental change to the operating model has required really also changes the workflow processes to deliver our full services consistently in all markets. That's all the changing of job descriptions, responsibilities, reporting lines and a large proportion of the workforce, about 60%. We've also had to put in the plumbing to make this work. And we've rolled out this software tools, our project management tool, and we've realigned the responsibilities of a number of people within the organization to become operation directors to make this run smoothly, get this running on rails. And we've rebalanced some of the resources in our in-market teams to add more hunter profile-type people, and we'll support that with increased sales incentive models. So I just want to summarize now. If I seem slightly strange sitting here saying this on the back of a weaker half 1, the business is actually now better set up for success than it's ever been. We have an upgraded product and service set combined with new innovation to make us relevant for today and tomorrow's market. We have superior technology, which not only creates a significant competitive advantage for us versus our competitors, but also supports that upgrade in that improvement in our product and service set. We have a new operating model for scalability. We're moving, as I said, from handcrafting and customizing solutions around the world into a model that I believe is industrially scalable. We are moving to a much more sales oriented skill set and mindset, supported by new sales incentives, which will come into effect in 2025. We have a unique competitive advantage through the scale of our data lakes. There's nobody else, no other independent organization in the market that has such a broad and deep empirical view of the global media markets, where global reach to the annual organization in our space has people on the ground in markets that represent more than 80% of global advertising expense. So if you are a multinational advertisers that requires deep market knowledge in all the major markets around the world, we are the place to come. And we also have a fabulous client that they recognize that. So we have an incredible set of competitive advantages. This is a huge global market, which has excess demand. And I really believe that we are now -- we've been through the turbulence that all this change has created. That has delivered a little bit of loss of momentum on the top line. But all that turbulence is substantially behind us now, and I think we're well poised and well set to capitalize on the market opportunities. So thank you for listening. With that, obviously, myself and Brian will obviously take any questions. I'll just stop sharing this so you can see us more.

Start presenting, there we go. Fiona, you have your hand up?

I do. Would you like all 3 at 1 go or do you want 1 at a time?

I think best time is one at a time because I remember in the past conversations, Fiona, you fire them and I'll obviously have to ask you...

All right. Okay. Well, the first 1 is you said there were 11 live RFPs. Do you want to give us some more color about what people are looking for and the scale of those projects in market?

Yes. The majority of these, I would say, are to understand their media price and quality position in markets around the world. So that falls within our media performance service line. It's about benchmarking their position versus competitors or versus the market around the world. However, there is some media management projects, i.e., planned companies that want to put their business up to pitch, asking agencies to tender for it and they want someone hopefully us to help them navigate that process. And there are a couple of opportunities within that 11 that are multiple service lines. So Media Management, Media Performance, Market Effectiveness and Contract Compliance. There's a couple -- there's 1 that has 3 service lines and 1 that is 4 service lines. So it's quite a breadth of requirement there.

Second question is that you -- in Marketing Effectiveness, you were talking about very strong demand levels. Is there a danger there of getting the business and then disappointing the clients in terms of delivery?

Yes, that's something we are mindful of. Now we obviously don't want to do that. So we aim to manage capacity. Clearly, we've got to get that balance right between wanting to capture as much revenue as possible this year, but as you say, not disappoint clients. So I think with some of those opportunities, we're in discussion to say, well, we'll probably have to start the project perhaps in December and maybe 1 or 2 even in January. But I don't think we've actually had that conversation, but we're in those kind of discussions, negotiations now. The good news is those kind of projects aren't hugely time sensitive. Clearly, once clients decided they won't do one, they'd like to get on with it, but it's not a big disaster to start a month or 2 late.

Okay. And the third was in terms of pricing. What's the market position? And is there an increasing expectation of more advantageous pricing to the client if there's an increasing degree of automation on your end?

So very good question, Fiona. I think there's 2 parts to that answer. The first part is we did see some pricing action from competitors in the first quarter of the year. And I mentioned we're perhaps a little bit complacent and we went in with our premium services. We have a lot of professional pride that our services are better than our competitors. But I think perhaps we slightly misjudged, perhaps didn't listen quite carefully enough to what a couple of those clients were wanting and did lose out to proposals that came in less than our price. So we're in a position of recalibrating, making sure we don't discount, but perhaps recalibrate the services we offer and don't go into such a full fat premium offering. Now the second answer to that question is about the technology and whether clients will want us to pass some of the cost savings. At the moment, we're not seeing that. The truth is, clients have not expressed a great deal of interest in how the product is delivered. They're much more interested in the output and the benefits it brings like speed to insights and always on visibility and forward planning capability. And we also do have a well tried and tested approach to clients as we sold the -- originally sold the digital media solutions on the media data book, we said, listen, we've got technology costs. We've got some technology costs. And in the case of GMP365, we have some subscription fees. So at the moment, we've not encountered that kind of pressure. Roddy, your hand is up?

Thanks for the presentation. I also have 3 questions, which I can do 1 at time, if that's best. Just wondering, firstly, I feel like you maybe talked a little less during this presentation about the complete suite of KPIs that you've previously cited. So I think there are 6. Do think you can maybe give us a little bit more granularity on how you see the business performing against those KPIs during the second half and heading into next year, please?

Yes, very good. We did write a paragraph on that in the RNS. And historically, what we do, we talk about at the half year mark, and then we produce actual hard numbers at the end of the year. The reason we do that is because 1 or 2 of these big guys can fluctuate a little bit. It's not necessarily clear, a clear picture at the half year, March, we say. But if we take the first one, which is a number of clients buying 2 or more service lines. You can see from that new business line I put out there, I think we're continuing to have good success with that. We delivered over 100 -- over 100 clients by 2 or more service lines at the end of the last year. I think what we are seeing is that taper a bit. I think it will be there or thereabouts again at the end of this year. What we need to do is get better at selling more service to the major national advertisers rather than the multinationals. I think we've done a good job on that. So that's one. The number of clients buying from the Digital Media Solutions, which are essentially, we kind of reshape that into an all-in digital governance product. We've onboarded 20 more clients in the first half of this year. And I think we'll end the year with over 100 buying from that service. The next metrics around the amount of data, well, volume of media transaction and impression data. So on media data board, we now have over USD 20 billion worth of transaction data. And for the half year mark, it was, I think, 3.7 trillion impressions. So again, very, very good progress. We've also taken the opportunity to ingest a huge amount of data even before we onboard clients onto the platform, GMP365 platform, we take data produced from the legacy delivery services and we've ingested that sort of massive data pools now in GMP. We've got over $50 billion on the platform. So that combined is $70-plus billion worth of data on the platform. So I think we're making new progress against all of those operational KPIs.

Okay. That's great. The second question was just around -- I mean, it's great to hear the level of activity that you've been seeing through half 2. Just wondering to what extent do you feel that, that is where does the balance sit between perhaps the market and clients coming back a little bit in certain areas? And how much of it is just -- or not just, but is the benefit of some of the changes you've made internally and perhaps management being less distracted?

Yes. I think that's a very fair question, Roddy. I think -- there is, I think, some degree of the market coming back. The first half of the year, the Media Management segment was quiet around the globe. And I think that is coming back and that is creating some of the, if you like, the excess demand in the second half of the year. I do think a lot of it is us really having an unpleasant experience in Q1, I'm really saying, okay, we've got to -- we haven't converted those opportunities. We really need to get out there and stimulate more demand, and I think that's been a big impact. And I also think, it's encouraging, as I mentioned there's excess demand in this market. It's been encouraging when new to segment, if you like, new to sector clients have come and chosen to join us. So I think there's strong evidence that our product and service set is of a high quality, is demanded by the market, is superior. So I think it's a combination of factors. And 1 other factor I should say that I missed to say that, some of these big clients that have cut budgets towards the end of last year, I think of the 3 we referenced, 1 in France, 1 in Hamburg and 1 in Italy. The French one has not come back. The German one has stabilized. The Italian one has come back in full. So we have done a reasonably good job of going out in bringing growth back from customers that have declined. And I think Haleon is another good example of that.

Great. And just finally, a quick question on the transformation program, which you mentioned has now sort of slipped back a bit. So that will extend into 2026. Can you give a sense for how much will be left to do in 2026? I mean is that a sort of just finishing off things? Or will there still be a fairly extensive amount of work to complete during that period, please?

So I think when it comes to the first -- look, there's a number of building blocks to it. The first is getting the technology platform rollout. That is done. The second is getting clients onto it and wanting to buy our services delivered that way, which whilst they're not particularly interested in the delivery, we have this delivered and they're very interested in the output. And so they've been used to getting a certain kind of output. As I said, handcrafted custom -- mass customization, therefore, no scalability for us. And to achieve scalability, we want consistency and standardization of output. So we're in the process of persuading them that, that's what they want. And that's 1 of the reasons actually why we've not yet been able to take out headcount because whilst we've got business onto the platform, we're still in the process of weaning them off this customized output. So instead of creating 55 PowerPoint slides to particular specifications, we have automatically generated report cards, if you like, the system producers at the press of the button, which in our professional opinion, is the output they need, and we have the expertise on top and tell them what it all means. But people are creatures, how to going to get them off that? So that's a big plan, big project for '25, something working on now as we go into '25, right? We've got the clients on. How we get them onto the more consistent harmonized output, if you like. So I think we're in a good place with that. We've made really, really -- it's a lot of heavy lifting. It's -- I think I could be accused possibly of underestimating how difficult that would be, but we've done that now in terms of the 60% of the workforce, fundamental reorganization of their jobs, responsibilities, et cetera, et cetera. And work flow processes. So that is done and all the turbulence that, that creates as you change people's jobs, that is substantially behind us. I say substantially because I think there's always a little bit of a tail end of turbulence that we just need to be cognizant of. So that is all in place. The piece that is proving harder to crack is that benchmarking product. Again, come back to the point that we want to deliver really consistent and standardized products and services to ensure we have a scalable proposition. So every market in our organization is coming from a position whereas again, they've had their own methodology that handcrafted their own results. We're now saying, no, we're going to standardize that. What we have learned is that whilst multinational clients might be complete cut or what the platform delivers at the moment, national clients are used to a greater degree of granularity benchmarking. Now our intention would be to go in and say to them, you work in all that, you don't need all that, you now need this. Actually a little bit naive. We now have to provide aggressive degree of granularity that the platform has provided in the past. So we've been working our way through that, working with our market teams what exactly is needed. And then, of course, the question is, what do you really need that? Or is it just a nice to have? So you go through that, you distill the list of what you really do need brief that in for software development, and then that comes out and then we start onboarding the clients. So we're at that phase now. Market priority #1 was the United States. And first releases of the platform modifications are live will be out before the end of the month. So we've now got to take that to market and get the clients on. And we'll do this largely just through software engineers with bandwidth reasons on a country-by-country basis. So through '25, that's a critical year, but we're realistic. I always said it would take 2 years to transition benchmark in all that. My plan had been '24 and '25. We have not made enough progress in '25. So these are going to be in '25 and '26'. By then, I would think -- yes, 80-plus percent will be on the platform. Johnathan, your hand is up? I think you're still on mute, Johnathan.

Can you hear me now?

Yes.

Okay. Sorry about that. Yes. So I think most of the topics has already been gone into quite a bit. So I really got 1 question left now, and it's really just about the U.S. market. Obviously, we've seen some fluctuations in revenues there, but I really want to get a sense of the strength of the momentum there in terms of the marketing and what you're seeing on RFPs at the moment. Or is there any particular differences in the way the sales and marketing works over there?

That's a good question. Is there a difference in the way the sales and marketing works. I think -- interestingly, I think the U.S. market in our industry, the media industry, not unique to our niche, but agency clients as well, is much more relationship-based than in other parts of the world. I think relationships are built over a long period of time, and it does take a little bit more apps to crack into them than other parts of the world. So I think there is perhaps a longer sales cycle in converting brand new clients. But once you got them on board, I think they are -- need to demonstrate good service and good value. I think the ability to cross-sell is not unduly difficult.

Right. And just on the momentum there at the moment, can you just give us a sense of that?

Yes. I mean we had a very strong '23 there. If you remember, we did 33% organic growth in United States last year. And I think this is where -- I used the word complacent. I think perhaps we were a little bit complacent in the United States. I think we felt it was all plain sailing. And we got a little bit of a nasty shot where we perhaps misjudged a couple of things in Q1, and that slowed down momentum. We are very active in pitching new business right now. We've got a number of pretty large proposals out there but, of course, still need to be secured and negotiated. But I think we've got back in our stride there now is how I would say. We've also got a couple of existing very large clients where we're in discussion with extending the scope. So I think we're getting back in our stride there. Thank you. Are there any more questions? I'm going to look around my screen. I don't see any more hands up. Okay. Oh, Andy, we haven't heard from you. And then you want to ask?

I mean, yes, everything has been covered really. I think we see -- does outlook looks good now. I think you've done a good job at sort of just steadying the ship now going to H2. So pleased to see that. And yes, we see how things look at annual results.

Yes. As I said, it does seem a bit strange sitting here on the back of just launching H1 results, but feeling very confident or optimistic, not just confident in H2. We will exit H2 with a really strong run rate, I'm very confident about 2025. And I really do think the business is better set up than it's ever been. This possibly take us a little bit longer, a little bit more arm wrestling and wrangling to get us into this position. But if you look at what we've been trying to do with a product that's in a really good place, geography, yes, a little bit of loss of momentum in North America, that's definitely coming back. Clients, fantastic. Client roster, really, really good job cross-selling, upselling, extending geographically. And the hard part has been operating efficiency. I think probably we'll know it can be quite challenging, growing our technology. That is largely done. And we've combined that, maybe we were slightly ambitious. But I think it had to be done. We combine that with a complete change in the operating model. If we hadn't done that, I don't think we've been in a position to capture the benefits of the technology. So again, that is all done. And I have clearly hoped to keep revenue going -- top line growing in the first half of this year while we did all that. And as I said, there's big external market factors that have hindered us there, but some of our own making as well. But I think we're all through that. And I think the business is actually really well set up now to achieve, greatly to achieve that scalable growth. Historically, when we've won business and adding revenue, we had to add headcount. Now we didn't have a scalability. Now we have that scalability. So I think it's an exciting time.

Yes. No, I agree with you. Investment case is firmly there, valuation looking very attractive now. Obviously, you're following a pretty unfortunate fall in the share price, which looks overdone. I think probably investors are just a little bit nervous on the debt piece, but I think when they see good H2, that will sort of go away and people will start trading more and more valuation again.

Yes, yes. Okay. Well, thanks for that. And then clearly, I'm happy to talk to any or all of you further as you want. I'm sure Brian is as well, but for now would say thank you for listening and goodbye.