Future plc (FNWA.F) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to Future's investor webinar powered by our very own future B2B team. So not only do you get insight into the group's new products through this webinar, you get a live demo of some of what B2B does. I'm Kevin Li Yeng, CEO of Future. And whilst I've been at Future for over 20 years, I've only been CEO for the last 6 months, and I'm delighted to be here today joined by my talented colleagues to give you more insight into, one, how we are driving the business forward, creating our own momentum and not only having the right to play, but also the right to win; and two, most importantly, why we are excited about our future. No one knows what the media landscape will look like in 5 or 10 years' time. But what we know is that brands trust and establishing a connection through building communities are getting increasingly important. And you will see that the new products that we will showcase today leverage these trends. We are delivering on today, whilst building for tomorrow. For those who are unfamiliar with future, here is a brief overview. We are a global specialist media group reaching diversified and intent-led audience of over 475 million. We operate circa 200 brands with a portfolio led by super brands with some featuring on the right-hand side of this slide, in diversified verticals from technology and gaming down to news and wealth stopping by style and luxury. And our brands are platform agnostic, meaning that our global high-intent audience finds our content through our websites, e-mails videos, social platforms, magazines, live events and webinars. We have market-leading positions in many verticals, and we are proud of that. And we expertly monetize our audience through advertising, e-commerce affiliate and e-commerce services with GoCompare and magazines. I will be joined today by some talented colleagues who will lift the hood on a selection of initiatives currently underway. I will let them introduce themselves, but I'm delighted to have Rob Hillary and Dave joining me today. And of course, we have Sharjeel, our CFO. But before I hand it over to them, it is important to understand our strategy and how it fits into the media landscape, which is changing faster than ever because this will set the context and rationale for our strategic initiatives. What we will cover today is, one, we understand the changes in the landscape within which we operate; two, we are proactively creating our own opportunities to thrive. Three, as always, we're leveraging our track record by being agile and focusing on execution. Our strategy is simple, meaning it is understood by the whole organization, fostering alignment, and it is timeless, driving continuous focus on execution. Starting with objectives. First, it is about audience. They are at the center of our purpose. It is about having diverse, growing valuable audiences with high intent. It is about being where our audiences are. It is about being platform agnostic. Second, it is about monetizing these audiences more effectively by diversifying our sources of revenue adding to our portfolio of products and upgrading our revenue profile through an enhanced customer proposition. And third, portfolio. This is about having the right set of assets to fuel the first 2 pillars by selling and/or closing assets when they don't grow or contribute to cash or when they are worth more to someone else than the value we can create or buying businesses that would diversify our audience reach and engagement or add monetization routes through new products. At the very heart of our business model, we feature our enablers. We first ise the power of our global brands and produce excellent content for our audiences. We have the firm and anchored belief that our editorial excellence and our content are core differentiators to our customers, and that is our moat. Our audience, including search and AI engine loves our content. We then use our scalable and high-performing tech platform alongside our rich first-party data to maintain enhance and add new products to drive incremental revenue. And all of this is powered by our DNA, the future DNA of growth mindset, innovation and agility and rigorous execution. We believe it is vital to have the belief that you can grow and drive this belief by bringing innovative processes and products to lean into areas of growth. But to be successful, agility and rigor are essential you need to be ruthlessly pragmatic about it. After this brief reminder, I would like to spend a little time on how the world of search is changing, a clear link to our first strategic pillar, audience. It is essential to understand the landscape in which we operate. The way people search for content is changing, and we're embracing this. SEO was the landscape. Now it's part of the landscape. Consumer behavior is slowly shifting away from traditional SEO to sponsored links on search engines to short summaries to AI-powered search engines and to prioritizing social first. Importantly, some of these changes are not new and have been happening for years. This is translating into an abundance of touch points, and it's very difficult to decipher what is right for the consumer. The speed of change is faster than ever and can be confusing. There is a lack of trust around content as well, making brands more important than ever. What this means for us is that we are focused on: one, optimizing today's business by doing the business as usual, faster, leaner, and that we can continue to deliver world-class traditional search engine optimization, but at lower effort. Two, we are embracing the changes to create new revenue streams as the team will evidence in just a moment. Just like 15 to 20 years ago, we introduced websites to complement our magazines. We will do it again by pivoting from SEO to AI and social, and this is already happening. But not everything is changing. On to audience. Audience needs are immutable. There will always be a need for content and advice that can be trusted, powered by humans. Our audiences are looking for communities and to engage with our content and brands. Now this is timeless. What is important is to provide this trusted content to audiences wherever they might be. We believe that not only do we have the right to play, but more importantly, we have a right to win in this landscape. And this is why we have expert content delivered through powerful global brands with strong heritage and all of this is enabled by efficient scalable tech and valuable first-party data. Additional reason to believe is that we have a successful track record of creating our own moments when the landscape is changing. And you might have noticed that these key success factors match perfectly with our enablers mentioned on our strategy slide. It is all about building direct audience engagement and being platform agnostic. So what does it all mean? The change in the landscape is a strong guide for our strategic initiative, embracing areas of growth and opportunities. And the reason why we can do this with pace and agility is because our tech stack and our powerful brands. Today, the team will showcase our first 3 new initiatives. We are developing a compelling new source of direct audience to our brands. Hillary will showcase Collab and its synergistic model where we offer world-class tech stack and brands for content creators in exchange of revenue and audience. Second, we decipher the e-commerce customer journey, making it easier for audiences. Rob will take us through signal. We are scaling our communities through engagement tools when Dave will demonstrate Futures+, our membership proposition. Now this is the start. We have other initiatives. As you will see, we are building the business of tomorrow with pace and agility. So why are we doing what we're doing? It's simple and something you might have heard if you have been following us for a while, the platform effect. The platform effect is about value creation, where 1 plus 1 equals 3 or 4. The platform effect is all about driving audiences and using our tech stack to monetize it effectively through new products, creating scale and operating leverage. The platform is about doing more with less, iterating at pace, being first to market and milking this advantage and driving a strong culture with agility. The platform effect exists and has been existing for years. But what we are doing today is adding to it, making the wheel spin faster. This is at the heart of the business model and key to delivering on today whilst building for tomorrow. I hope this introduction has provided you with useful context. And now I will hand over to Hillary. Hillary.

Thanks, Kev. Hi, everyone. I'm Hillary Kerr, the Co-founder of WhoWhatWear and the SVP of Women's luxury homes, Music, Photography and Design. I am quite excited to speak about one of our new initiatives, Collab. Collab is about creating a synergistic ecosystem with content creators, giving them access to our brands and our amazing tech for monetization in an exchange of content, audience and revenue. So I can hear you thinking, why Collab? What is the problem that we're solving for our audiences, our business and for creators? Well, first and foremost, people trust people. The media landscape is changing and our audiences continue to shift their attention to creators. The global creator economy is huge, estimated to be worth approximately $250 billion, yes, with a B, dollars today, predicting it could be nearly double that by 2027. We are moving to capture that value instead of competing with it. That said, while everyone with an iPhone and a dream, thinks they can be the next Mr. Beast or Alex Earl, the reality is much more complex. Like any talent-based entertainment industry, be that football or Hollywood, only a fraction of creators actually make it to the top. In today's landscape, standing out and having impact is tough. The market is crowded and competitive and making money as a creator is fragmented and complex. So what are we doing? Well, we all have something that creators want. We have trusted brands with reach that are valued by creators as a tool to raise their profile, credibility and reach. We also have a strong tech stack with diverse monetization routes, and we have an existing influencer network powering branded content businesses. We also have amazing editorial talent who knows how to spot talent themselves. That's literally their jobs. They know exactly how to curate and how to bring the world's most interesting and impactful creators into the future verse, if you will. Our plan is to help our audiences engage more deeply in their passions by featuring selected creators on our brands, including our websites, social media, newsletters and podcasts. We'll combine the power of our brands with audience appetite for authentic human creator voices, maximize our combined scale and reach. And finally, we'll support these creators through access to the power of our platform. Through collab, we will provide creators with the tools to publish multimedia content through our CMS, supported by our full monetization capabilities on a rev share basis. Our ad stack our e-commerce engine and our digital subscription capabilities. This delivers against a number of outcomes, trusted, vetted creators will allow us to reach new audiences and new demographics without Google. We'll deepen engagement, growing the breadth and depth of our content and doing it this way through a rev share allows us to make content scalable in a cost-effective way. We also have an always-on pipeline of content, newness and talent that allows our brands to test learn and evolve more effectively and efficiently than ever. So I can hear you wonder how are we going to do this? Well, our Collab program is already live in beta across a number of verticals, and I'd love to show you what it looks like for our audience. First up, on Marie Claire, we are using fashion influencers to expand the depth of our fashion, personal style and shopping content. While on WhoWhatWear, we are exploring new areas, including menswear, parenting, travel, culture and more. On Homes & Gardens and Ideal Home, we're going to provide even more thoughtful shopping and inspiration for our audience by featuring designs from a wide range of vetted interior designers. On Kiplinger, we are featuring qualified financial advisers to help support our audience, while on PC Gamer and GamesRadar, we are drawing directly from the community to cover more of the vast array, very vast of gaming options out there. What's next? From here, we'll build on success and scale through making existing platform capabilities available to these vetted influencers. So what's in it for us? Hopefully, you can start to see how connecting our brands with brilliant content creators delivers on our KPIs. We'll be able to access new audiences and new demographics by working with up-and-coming creators independently of Google. We'll be able to cover more than we ever could as we see in how we've already grown Marie Claire's fashion coverage and broadened our coverage of games beyond the obvious AAA titles. We'll also make content scalable delivering this through rev share means this can be infinitely scalable at our 100% variable cost. And with that, thank you. I will now turn it over to Rob to talk you through signal.

Thanks, Hilary. Hi, everyone. I'm Rob George, SVP of Product and e-commerce. I joined Future almost 3 years ago. And before that, I spent more than 15 years in and around the retail sector, so I'm excited to be talking about my home turf online shopping. Quite simply, online shopping is broken for consumers and it's only getting worse. Almost 80% of consumers find online shopping overwhelming, and that's not a surprise. You're bombarded by excessive choice, endless sponsored links, fake reviews and AI hallucinations. And with Google sending less high-intent search traffic to publishers, we're taking a clear position will help consumers find the signal through the noise of online shopping. So that's why we're developing our new e-commerce platform called Signal. Signal builds on the success of Hawk, our current e-com tech where Hawk already tracks and surfaces over 0.5 billion products from thousands of retailers to help customers buy with confidence. And in doing so, we generate more than $1 billion of revenue for retail each year. With signal, we're enhancing our existing platform to become the destination for high-trust shopping. We'll surface the advice of trusted experts create the best products for customers and do it in a way that makes shopping fun and games. Of course, we'll also create value for the business. We already do a great job of monetizing the 60 million monthly e-com page views that we get and signal will help us monetize more of our audience. More of our 300 million monthly sessions, more of our 13 million e-mail addresses and more of our 2 billion monthly social impressions. On top of this, we'll build loyalty, a more frequent, more valuable direct audience that helps build our first-party data asset. But I want to try and tell you what Signal is, let's take a look for ourselves. This is our first MVP of a curated collection launched earlier this month on WhoWhatWear. It's live now will be up to 15 by the end of this week across our brands and another 50 are in development to follow in the next month. It's early days, but we're already seeing a 9% higher mobile click-through rate than the previous version. Collections combine trust, curation and shopability. They are always built by humans, leveraging their expertise, personality and hands-on experience with the products, so you can trust them. We then surface this as a heavily curated recommendation, cutting through the noise and reducing overwhelm with an expert edit of what to buy. We'll then build on our existing Hawk capability to match the customer with the retailer. And as I mentioned before, you can see here how we're already seamlessly finding our audiences where they are in this example, integrating signal into a social story on Instagram. Next, I wanted to show you the platform effects that Kev mentioned earlier in action. We're building Signal as a platform capability but we'll also tailor it to our brands and their specific audiences. You can see here along with the synergies that we're building across the initiatives we're talking today. This is a soon-to-be live example of how we're making our Collab creator connect content in the Homes vertical shoppable with Signal. This provides us with another way of co-monetizing creator content on whatever channel that content lives. Also, if you look closely at the demo, you can start to see some of the sticky features that are central to Signal for logged-in users, being able to like products and build wish lists, encourages repeat visits, repeat engagements and social sharing. Finally, it wouldn't be e-com if I didn't talk about Black Friday and our tech vertical. This is our core deals hub on Tom's Guide from last Black Friday. It's a really strong page for us commercially, but we think we can do more to help shoppers. So here's how signal collections will evolve over the next couple of months. We'll do what we always do, curate and showcase the best deals out there that will help consumers find what they really want. We'll help them browse the best offers in a more visual way, help them sort and filter by their specific need and we'll build trust by highlighting our editorial expertise and why we think these deals are the best to buy. Again, we'll surface this wherever our audiences engage with the content. With this, we'll help consumers find the signal through the noise at the most overwhelming time of year for shoppers. So this is just the start. Hopefully, you see the vision because before you know it, signal will be creating bespoke holiday gift guides, helping me build a gaming PC with my son and filling my golf bag with the clubs that will make me a less terrible golfer, then as we add more rich, engaging shopping features, wish lists, price alerts, exclusive rewards will have a truly exciting expert-backed shopping ecosystem. So in summary, Signal is going to attract more users, making shoppers out of our entire audience wherever they consume content, engage them, driving frequency of visit and depth of engagement and finally create value by capturing and growing intent building customer loyalty and our first-party data asset. Now on to our last product for today and one I think could be even more exciting than Signal, if that's possible. I'd like to hand you over to Dave to talk through Future.

Thanks, Rob. Hello, everyone. I'm Dave, and I'm the MD of our Knowledge and Sports Group, an exec sponsor of our free membership proposition internally known as Future+, which is what I'm going to talk through now. The problem we're trying to solve is that our audiences want relevance, trust, personalization and value from the media they engage with at a time when AI is making the creation of high-volume, low-effort content easier than ever. In a world of AI-generated answers and Google Zero we need to develop direct relationships with known users to build a community that drives direct frequent and valuable engagement with our brands. So what we do? We're creating a free membership proposition for our audience where personalized experiences, exclusivity and engaging features, build habit and generate a powerful value of exchange that benefits all. As with the other initiatives you've seen today, this isn't from a standing start. We already have millions of members, people signed up through e-mail lists, forums, commenting and paid subscriptions. We have the core capability ready to assemble into a coherent membership proposition. So kiosk, which powers account and red wall functionality, Quizly, our engagement platform, which is already rolled out across key brands, commenting and forums, and rewards capability syndicated from the MyVoucherCodes business across our proprietary Eagle platform. Our membership strategy is to assemble these engagement tools into coherent user-facing propositions at a brand level that support the individual positioning of these brands. We believe this can be game changing for our business because we'll reach more users growing our direct known audience by using our membership offerings as a social referral hook. We'll drive frequency with engaging features, data-driven personalization and activation of our permissioned known audience, and we'll grow the value of this audience, leveraging the power of our first-party data and using it to build recurring revenues across our subscriptions business. So let's bring that membership vision to life. As I mentioned, we believe membership will be truly transformational when we assemble our engagement tools, rewards and content offerings into coherent customer-facing membership propositions. This is leading consumer advice brand, Tom's Guide, where membership will be a buying advice and shopping-focused execution, combining exclusive member rewards, member competitions for money can't buy experiences, like an exclusive face-to-face with the Editor and Chief of the Consumer Electronics Show, for instance, and shopping features, such as price alerts and wish lists, really bringing to life the benefits signal can bring to the membership proposition. In this video, you can see the rewards proposition coming to life. Starting with our e-commerce-enabled content and building on capabilities that started with my voucher codes. We can offer exclusive rewards like a GBP 10 Amazon voucher, for instance, that can only be redeemed by members. Once a user signs up via our kiosk platform, we can use Signal to show our audience a range of rewards. And then our members can spend those vouchers on products we recommend through collections all within the customer account area, closing the loop on our ecosystem. The second execution is community and gamification focused perfect for a sports brand like 442. We already have high levels of engagement from football quizzes and building on that, we're adding poles, puzzles, exclusive content and tailored product offerings such as the score predictor and fun salary calculator to build out the membership proposition. These tools deliver the initial engagement, and we will then further gamify membership through the introduction of badges and leaderboards. 442 and many of our brands at future also have physical magazines and paid digital versions and one of the core tenets of our membership program is that this will provide a valuable CRM funnel to acquire subscribers to these paid products. We aim to launch these 2 membership propositions alongside another one on our leading science new site live science by the Midland next month and have enough data from these live experiments to refine and scale by the end of the quarter. While at core elements of these membership propositions is engagement platform Quizly, which was acquired in May. Since then, we've integrated Quizly across our platforms and applied it to 42 of our biggest brands. We've created almost 700 quizzes, games, puzzles and polls since going live in July, generating almost 400,000 plays. Average session duration is more than double the non-Quizly session and page reviews per session are 50% higher. On top of this, we're generating revenue from including Quizzle in our offer for branded content campaigns, delivering valuable customer data and insight for our clients. The capability that Quizly is already unlocking for us is really driving that value exchange between publisher and user. Wealth calculators we've recently deployed on finance brand Kiplinger, speak to that point. These are engaging and useful tools for our users, but deliver highly valuable income data for advertisers. There's much more to come here, and we've been able to do that at pace by protecting Quizly start-up agility and rapidly integrating the tech into our platforms. So Quizly, in and of itself is being delivered at speed but its real value comes when you start to see it as part of the wider membership proposition. So what's in it for us? The membership project is a big one for future as it overlaps with many areas of the business and has the potential to really supercharge what we do. It will help us build deeper and more mutually beneficial relationships with our audiences, providing a hook to drive social referrals and encouraging more repeat visits and engaged sessions and ultimately, building a valuable direct audience channel. Membership will also power our CRM capabilities at scale using our known user base as the top of a valuable customer acquisition funnel to deliver more recurring revenues and will exponentially grow the power of our first-party data asset supporting our commercial business and enabling greater personalization for users. Thank you. I'll now hand back to Kev to sum up.

Thank you, Hillary, Rob and Dave. This is exciting. I hope that you share the same sentiment for those of you watching. In my earlier slides, I presented the platform effect and how we are aiming for more users, more often, more engaged, more valuable and more efficient. And the team has presented how each initiative does that. But the beauty of it all is that they don't work in silos. They create a synergistic ecosystem where each product fuels the others. Collab attracts new audiences to which we can serve signal and Future+. Signal users can also be served Futures Plus and read Collab content. And of course, Future members can use signal to decipher, e-com and enjoy Collab content. Each initiative complements each other, adding scale, data, revenue and operating leverage, creating the platform effect. Today, we only presented 3 new products. Our road map currently has 13. You can see the first 13 initiatives to drive performance against the key outcomes of more users, more often, who are more engaged and more valuable whilst we also ensure we are more efficient. These initiatives are on top of managing the core business, building for tomorrow, and I say first 13 with deliberately. These are the actions we are making right now. Some of them won't be as effective as we'd like. Others will outperform, We'll stop the ones that don't work and embed those that do into BAU, replacing them with the next initiatives to move the dial on the outcomes. This is the pace and agility we need in the rapidly changing landscape. In order to maximize our success, we are laser-focused on rigorous execution and governance. Each initiative is led consistently with one executive sponsor responsible for its success and a regular cadence of meetings to track progress and pivot as needed. This consistency matters because it drives scalability and our platform effect. And I want you to take away 2 things from today. First, we have the right to win because we have scale with our circa 200 brands reaching 475 monthly average users, including 2 billion monthly social impressions. We have the financial strength through our combination of strong balance sheet and our efficient asset-light model. And we have a brilliant tech stack, and the expertise and the track record to deliver new products. And second, the momentum we are creating through these initiatives is not only complementary, they fuel our platform effect, driving scale and operating leverage and most importantly, revenue growth, and this is Thomas. And now we will open the floor to Q&A. [Operator Instructions] You can type your questions in the box on the right-hand side. Thank you.

Good afternoon. I'm Marion Le Bot III of IR at Future, and I will be facilitating the Q&A this afternoon. So I think our first question is for Sharjeel. And the impact of these initiatives on growth and whether that's already underpinned in the guidance.

Thank you, Marion. Hopefully, everyone can hear me. So in terms of finances, how do I see it? Well, these first 13 initiatives will drive our sustainable organic revenue growth in line with market expectations for FY '26 and beyond. And if one of these 13 -- and remember, there's more to come as well drive upside or are better than we thought. It will drive upside to those market expectations. So we hope all of them are successful. But as Kevin said, some of them will work. Some of them won't, some of them will work very well. And if they do work well, then it will drive that organic growth. And remember the platform effect that the team talked about, that's also a key part. But also think about the market we're trying to address and why the team has spoken about the initiatives. The landscape is changing. Kevin spoke about that. But what's also clear is that there's really good growth in our addressable markets as well. And it is on us to use these great assets that we have and the initiatives that the team have spoken about today to dive into these close adjacencies. So hopefully, that gives you a bit of color. And then on the cost side, how does it play out on the cost side? Well, on the margins, these will remain circa around 28%. We will use efficiencies from AI optimization. You will have seen that in one of the charts that Kev had and the operating model work to offset any inflation and any other costs. Kevin and I have spoken about doing more with less, and we will continue to manage and allocate our BAU resources to drive the best returns. So hopefully, that gives you color on revenue and how I see it and also on margins, which we think will stay stable, and we will drive efficiencies. The last point on CapEx. Look, we're an asset-light business model, and this feature will continue, and that was highlighted on the slide as well. That said, CapEx might edge up slightly as we build these products, but it won't compromise what we are, which is a capital-light group. And remember, we're building on the tech stack we already have. A lot of the infrastructure that Dave Hillary, Rob spoke about, build on tech we already have. So we will stay CapEx light. I hope that gives you enough color.

Thank you, Sharjeel. And the next one is for Hillary on Cab and around how it feels like a lot of players are interested in this space, and you're not going into competition with something like influential from Publicis? And how can you compete with their scale and data resources and how our pitch is different to their content creators.

Thank you so much for that question. So I think the most important thing to think about is what the audience actually wants. And in most cases, that's curation. There are so many content creators out there that it can be really overwhelming for the audience to understand which ones they should be following, which ones are the best, which ones actually are worth their time, and that's where we step in. I think it's also important to note that this is a long-term partnership model. not a volume-based content pipeline. And we are giving the collaborators also really robust editorial support and brand integration we are investing in their growth and the goals that they have for their own personal brands, not just buying their content. And at the end of the day, I truly believe that this level of curation is what our audience is looking for. Plus we've also already seen from some of the early talent that we have onboarded, they are so proud to be a part of these legacy brands. in this media landscape, the creators themselves need that legacy stamp of approval as a point of differentiation, and that's also something that we can give them. I hope that helps.

Thank you so much, Hillary. And the next one is for Rob on Signal. Can you see the question here? Signal, I can see that curated collections of products could be useful, but how will consumers find these at scale? What do you have to invest in marketing for consumers to find this offer?

Nick, thank you for the question. I'm glad you think they could be useful. We think so too. And that's what we're seeing so far. There's nothing new in terms of how we market these collections in terms of how we get audiences to these collections that we're not already doing at scale today, right? We're a content marketing organization. It's our bread and butter. It's what we live and breathe, and you can see it across all of our sites today. The important thing is having the recommendation of what the customer should do to best meet their mission and then we'll market it in the ways that we already do. We'll push it through our organic social channels. We'll push it to our e-mail subscribers. We'll write articles supporting that collection that people can find on Google Discover, on Google Search. So there's lots of things that will come without a cost, without a marketing expense to do that. At the same time, and again, we already do it in the e-commerce space. If we can see a financial return from doing things like paid search, we'll do things like paid search, but we always run by the numbers in terms of how we approach this. So yes, there we go. Hopefully, that answers the question.

Thanks, Rob. And you can say on because the next one is also for you in terms of Future+. Is there a cost to you to provide the rewards and benefit?

Yes, of course. Thank you. Yes, so I'm talking about this rather than Dave, because the rewards capability lives within my e-com function. It lives on my voucher codes today. So if you want to see it live in an action, you can go to my voucher codes. And whenever there's an offer that says something like buy the thing and get a GBP 10 gift voucher. That's the rewards capability. But we're building it in a way that's much more flexible than that. So we'll still be able to do buy a TV, get a voucher or we'll able to do sign up for our e-mail and enter a competition to win dinner with our cycling expert, Dave Klutterbach, right? The flexibility is really, really key. And the reason I'm telling you that is that plays to the commercial question that you're asking. So many of the things that we will do and we'll be able to do are 0 cost to us, but massive value to our audience. There are things that provide exclusive once-in-a-lifetime experiences or access, money can't buy kind of things. On the flip side, look, we're highly commercial in the way that we use this rewards capability on my voucher codes. In many instances, it's entirely partner-funded, the giveaway. In other instances, it's exactly the same as my good old days in retail running a promotion. We will only do it if we are confident the uplift in conversion that you're getting offsets the cost of the reward. So look, we -- it's bread and butter to us. We're now just expanding it from my voucher code where it lives already to the wider future proposition where we think we can make it really value-adding as part of our membership proposition. So again, thank you.

Thank you, Rob. Next one is for Hillary. Should we see this as a way to leverage social to a much greater degree?

Yes, in part. The way that we are looking at collab is that all boats rise with the tide. So we are looking at -- we have our collaborators, all have their own personal followings. They have their own robust audiences. They have their own dedicated audiences that they're obviously interested in growing as are we. So I think that we have a combined social just on Instagram alone, across Marie Claire And WhoWhatWear the collaborators who we are working with have a combined reach of close to $10 million on Instagram alone. So we will benefit from them promoting their content. That hitting our platforms as well as vice versa. We have a pretty robust distribution plan in place and promotional plan using handshake tools to share that content. We also are experimenting with social shopping. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there, and it's also just very exciting all around. So hopefully, that helps explain that answer to you.

Thank you, Hillary. Next question, which is going to be split between Kevin and Sharjeel. First part, do you see any headwind or tailwinds because of AI developments and what that means in terms of the capital allocation strategy?

Thank you, Antoine, for your questions. And thank you for the question on AI. Look, we see AI in -- from 2 lens. It's an opportunity that we're leveraging an a risk that we acknowledge and we're building off that in order to future-proof that. But as we said at the half year, AI to us is 3 things, right? One, which is all about operational efficiency, finding the opportunities that it can unlock for us. From the back office through to content that will be translating content and the likes, but also to leverage AI to build new products. In the recent past, we've launched Ad Genie for B2B, Adviser, which is a content recommendation to improve page views per session called Adviser for B2C. These are just 2 examples. The second way is how we look at AI is through the lens of search, right? AI will help us push content in many ways that are much, much fine-tuned and targeted, but also allowing us through our investment in the AI audience initiative that was one of our 13 initiatives to better understand what does it take, what does it mean and how do we surface the right particular bit of information that is valuable to our consumers via the likes of AI overview or ChatGPT, for example. And TechRadar is performing extremely well at this moment in time in ChatGPT. And the third and final lens is the generative AI piece that we look at it, which is the third pillar of how we see AI within the company. And that is not only TechRadar performing well, but also leveraging our partnership with OpenAI to better mutually build an ecosystem that is rewarding for both the consumer, chatGPT and ourselves. This is hopefully answering your question.

Stuff, I'll take the capital allocation part of this. So the capital allocation remains very much the same that I took everyone through at the half year. But let me just give you a bit more color. What we're talking about today is that very first bucket that I spoke about, organic investment. That's, to me, always drives the best return on investment, capital employed, the IRR when I look at all the metrics, that's where I get my best bang for buck. And all the things we talked about today can add signal Futures are building on what we have today, investing organically through CapEx and our people and our assets. We have all of those that's going to drive the best return. The 3 we talked about, the 10 that are coming. We'll talk more about those at a future webinar. So that is exciting because, as I said in my first answer, we're tapping into areas of the digital media market that are growing faster than the core that we are in. And that what's going back to the very first question, is going to drive our organic growth in the future. And then the second bucket we've had in capital allocation is around bolt-ons, and one of them was featured today, right? Dave talked about Quizly and what we've done with that. You'll hear about renewal at a future one in terms of what we've done with that and when it comes to market, what we'll do in terms of retention on go Go.compare. So hopefully, that gives you a bit of color. After that, I've talked about strategic M&A being blanked out at the moment. The Board always looks at dividends. And we'll continue to look at the dividend. And if we've got any money left and it's excess cash, we will return it to shareholders like we have been doing. So hopefully, that ties the capital allocation policy into what you saw today.

Thank you, both. Back to Rob. How will you compete with Timi and Sean?

Great stuff. Yes, look, I'm fascinated with how the retail sector is evolving at the moment. I don't have any desire to be a better retailer than a retailer, and I don't think I have to be. I've been there, and I think it's more fun here. We don't have to manage stock levels and sell-through. I don't have to manage gross margin mix, supplier funding, all of the things that as a buyer would take me away from doing the right thing for the customer. On top of that, my profitability isn't going to be shredded by e-commerce logistics or even worse returns. So we've got a lot of advantages. That means we can do what we're here to do, which is focus on the customer, focus on giving them trusted expert advice focus on curating and giving them the best ideas of what they should be buying and focus on making an experience that's fun and engaging. So I think we've got lots of differences between us and retailers. We partner with a lot of retailers. And obviously, we look to learn from the great things that other retailers are doing, like you look at TV, you'll continue, for example, some of the gamification they do is great. And you're seeing some of that in the Future+ proposition that Dave was talking about as well.

Thank you very much, Rob. And next question is for Kevin. How does the GoCompare platform fit into the new strategy?

Thank you, Stuart, for the question. Great question. One of the initial 13 initiatives is all about membership in Go.Compare. And that's been driven by the acquisition of renewal, which we spoke about at the half year. And -- but also leveraging GoCo as a platform in order to actually enable membership, and this is just the start, where we'll cover more at the full year in December.

Thank you very much, Kevin. And next one, you can stay on because the next one is for you as well. And that's from Nick on when we talk to investors about SEU and AI search world, they often worry that there is no way for sites to win traffic because so many questions are answered by the LLMs before you link to any other content. So what can you do to improve your traffic in this changing search environment?

That must be, Nick. Thank you, Nick, for the question. And great question. Look, what we are focusing on is leveraging that strong foundation of future, right? And also we have brands. Brands are everything in this day and age, especially when you think about the ChatGPT, right? You're constructing answers and there will be citation, but the citation, first of all, if you look at it, it's all about mentioning of the brands. Now to us, it's also about -- and to answer to your question, it's also about understanding how consumers out there are utilizing ChatGPT and the likes. What is it that they need? What are the -- is it that they're looking for? What is it that they need in order to do their day-to-day sort of live. And as I mentioned, we have that in -- that strategic initiative, which is the AI audience, which is exactly focusing on understanding that ecosystem, understanding how do we connect via this new touch point, right, effectively, efficiently, rapidly but also with a good ROI. So this is in continuum. We're making good progress on this, and we shall be reporting on it more soon.

We've got a nice follow-up on this topic. So Kev, you can stay on. To Nick's question, how do you see click-through rates when your sites are cited in AI reviews?

Thank you, Alastair. In terms of the performance of AI overview, right, I think that our own sort of like data analytics reveals in terms of the prevalence of AI overview against our own search term to be sort of like low 30% and also depending on which brand, which vertical, the time of day and the duration, right, there will be sort of like movements and fluidity in the click-through rates. Overall, it's fair to say that we are experiencing like a degradation in click-through rates. But again, it puts and present trough in other parts, it's actually working okay. And in other parts, it's working well, meaning people will click and come to us to complete that experience on our sites. So it's puts and takes depending on many variables. But it's also worth mentioning that we are -- our audience mix is highly diversified in a similar way how future as a group is highly diversified and that is our strength.

Thanks, Kevin. A popular topic is the TechRadar. ChatGPT success based on the working agents with OpenAI. And that's one for you, Kevin, again.

Thank you, Jonathan, for the question. The answer is TechRadar really knows how to connect. TechRadar knows what the consumer wants and needs. And so therefore, we are writing what ultimately connects. And of course, as I've said, the generative engine the AI overviews, the -- dare I say it, the legacy SEO Google Search, they love our content too. So therefore, as long as we are cited, right, that's good for us, both from a branding perspective and also from an audience traffic referral point of view. So yes, I hope that helps.

Thank you, Kevin. Changing gears slightly back to Hillary on the rise of video-led. So people moving more from video as opposed to written content.

Yes. I think about shopping all the time as a matter of fact. And I think one of the things that we do so well is that we meet the audience where the audience is. So if they are on site, we give them a great shopping experience there. If they're following us on social depending on the platform, we are giving them great shopping content there. So to me, it's really about taking the best market, the best buying guides the best content and then creating original content for a wide variety of platforms based off of that. I don't see text-based content and text-based storytelling and text-based shopping, and that will always be important. That's sort of the anchor for everything else. But then from there, you across different platforms to make sure that we are capturing the audience where they are and meet their intent where they are. So we're already doing this, and this is part of our robust 360 content distribution plan. So -- and I often test all of this on myself. So thank you for that question.

Thank you so much, Hillary. That was our last question because we're about time. So thank you all for tuning in. The event will be available on replay as well. Thank you for joining us this afternoon, and I'll just give the last words to Kevin.

I'm hoping that you found this session valuable that you have gained a better understanding of our strategy, and all the actions underway to deliver flawlessly on it. I hope you will come away from this session as excited as we are about our future. Thank you for listening, and we look forward to our full year results on the 4th of December.