Future plc (FUTR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

March 19, 2021

London Stock Exchange GB Communication Services Media special 37 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Operator

operator
#1

Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's webinar titled Consumer Privacy and the Changing Media Landscape. We're just going to give everyone a couple more minutes to join, and we'll get started shortly. Thanks for joining us.

Zillah Byng-Thorne

executive
#2

Thank you for joining us today for our webinar on consumer privacy and the impact of the digital media landscape. We believe Future is uniquely positioned to benefit from the ongoing changes as we leverage our tech, data and market-leading endemic brands. However, rather than me tell you about it, today, we've assembled for you a team of experts across Future to share their perspectives. Each of the team will do their own bios when they speak, so I will leave it with them to introduce themselves to you. You may be wondering why we wanted to run this webinar today. Over the last few months, there has been a material increase in media coverage around all things privacy. And increasingly, we've been asked by a number of shareholders what does it all mean and, more importantly, what does it mean for Future. With this in mind, we thought it would be helpful to share our knowledge and expertise in this area. Nick is going to talk to you about the media tech landscape and the fact that the only constant is change, while Tania will bring to life for you the Future perspective and why we believe the risk is definitely on the upside, while Zack will talk more about the impact on publishers and why Future is well positioned. Finally, Kevin will pick up on why our proprietary tech stack is a source of advantage. What you'll hear today from the team is that media is a constantly changing industry, and we at Future have created our business to evolve and adapt to that change. The privacy changes that we are fully supportive of are just one of many changes in the last few years in the ad tech landscape. Future's proprietary ad tech, global large endemic audiences, market-leading brands, enriched data within our Aperture platform mean we are well positioned to benefit from these changes and see the risk firmly on the upside. However, enough from me, let me hand you over to Nick, who will give you much more insight than I can ever give you.

Nick Flood

executive
#3

Hi. I'm Nick Flood. I'm the Global Commercial Operations Director here at Future with responsibility for the ad technology stack and the operations teams that support it. I wanted to touch on some of the key definitions that we use within this presentation. The first is Google's Privacy Sandbox. The Privacy Sandbox is a collection of new proposals that offer more privacy-compliant marketing solutions to clients. The second is FLoC. This stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts. There's a new cohort-driven approach that allows marketers to reach consumers in a privacy-compliant manner. The advertising ecosystem constantly changes. Looking back over the last 5 years, there have been numerous changes to the Future's digital business and there still is. Looking in particular over the last few years, we've seen significant changes to privacy legislation, setting the general trend for ad technology companies to adhere to. Let's talk about ITP in particular, Intelligent Tracking Protection, which was introduced by Apple's block third-party cookies across its Safari browser. It was first introduced in 2017, so we've already been living with this for a number of years, and it's already baked into our numbers. Apple has slowly been increasing the time frame for this blocking. And in March last year, Apple fully blocked third-party cookies. Looking forward, it's clear that consumer privacy will play a major part in all areas of the advertising ecosystem, and Future are highly supportive of that fact. As you can see from some of the very recent examples of big industry change, almost all are based around looking after the user's privacy whilst trying to provide and deliver a more healthy and sustainable ads ecosystem. Apple, Google, LiveRamp, The Trade Desk for their unified ID solution and other IT vendors are all innovating in their platforms to provide a more privacy-compliant solution to market. I wanted to give a graphical representation of the way Future's ad technology stack connects with multiple distributed demand sources. Our proprietary ad technology solution called HYBRID controls these integrations and demand sources. Kevin, our CTO, will talk about the technical details of this later on in the presentation. This is really key for future as we are relying on a single source of demand, but connected in a distributed fashion to those premium sources we choose to integrate with. We have direct integrations with a number of agencies and trading groups, direct relationships with clients, but also connected to a large number of distributed SSP partners that bring unique demand into the platform, which in turn increases yield. We've included a more detailed version of this diagram in the pack distributed. Google have regularly provided industry updates as to where they've got to with their replacement of third-party cookies as announced at the start of 2020. Two weeks ago, they announced an update as to where they've got to with The Privacy Sandbox and their plans for the future. I thought it's really important to provide some clear clarifications around this announcement. Firstly, user targeting is not going away. It's just being replaced with a more privacy-compliant solution, and Future are fully supportive of that. Secondly, Google have already come out and stated that the new solution they plan to bring in, which is The Privacy Sandbox and FLoC, is 95% plus as good as the current solution, which is third-party cookies. Thirdly, Future supports a more privacy-compliant ad ecosystem as it will favor premium publishers that gain consent and attract users. Fourthly, we do and will continue to work with a large number of ID vendors so we can trade with buyers however they wish to transact with us in an elastic way on any platform. And lastly, companies such as Future with scaled high-value intent-based audiences will do best out these changes. Zack, our U.K. CRO, will go into more detail around this later on in the presentation and our first-party offerings. I'm now going to hand over to Tania to talk about some of the financials.

Tania Bruning

executive
#4

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Tania Bruning, the FD of Commercial Revenue, and I'd like to begin by taking you through Future's advertising product mix. Starting with our highest-yielding products. Direct deals are campaigns sold directly by the Future sales teams to agencies and clients. The impressions, and by that, I mean the volume of inventory to be taken, these are guaranteed. And eCPMs, in other words, the yield at which we sell 1,000 of those impressions, are between $12 to $13. Private marketplace deals, or PMPs, are also sold directly to agencies and clients, but with the efficiency of being traded programmatically. The impressions are not guaranteed and yields are set between $6 to $7. Online creative solutions, or OCS, are our integrated content solutions, again sold directly to agencies and clients and include content and digital advertising. The revenues are guaranteed, and campaigns can sell from $2,000 up to $1 million. Next, our partnerships. We continue to only work with premium partners who we directly integrate into our ad stack, including the likes of Taboola, our content recommendation partner and video partners, eCPMs are typically between $2 to $3. And finally, open auction, our lowest-yielding advertising channel at around $1 to $2. This activity takes place at the bottom of the ad waterfall where inventory is auctioned in real-time from a number of demand sources. This is where we expect to see changes with Google altering the targeting mechanism for users from third-party cookies that allow one-to-one marketing to a new cohort approach targeting groups of users with common interests. I'd also like to add that Future's achieving year-on-year yield growth across all the revenue categories I've just mentioned. I'd like to show you how these digital advertising revenue streams contribute to our total online platform revenue. And for context, online platform revenue represents circa 20% of Future group revenues, including GoCo. As you can see in the left pie chart, direct deals make up the majority of our on platform revenues at circa 40%, with open auction contributing circa 33%, online CS 13% and the remaining 14% splits equally between PMPs and partnerships. If we focus on open auction, where we expect to see change, it is worth noting that circa 70% of our inventory is traded through the Google Ad Exchange in Google's ecosystem, where, as Nick has previously mentioned, Google will be implementing a cohort approach to user targeting, an approach which Google has said is 95% as good as third-party cookies. The remaining 30% of our open auction demand comes from other suppliers, supply side platforms that will be impacted by Google's privacy changes and are expected to now work within the confines of The Privacy Sandbox. The open auction revenue earned to date from these suppliers is not material to the group. On balance, we estimate that the bear case of the impact of exposure due to targeting changes applied to Google and other SSP providers is less than 1% of Future group revenues, while, as Zack will explain, we see significant risk on the upside for the business. And now I'd like to hand you over to Zack Sullivan, our U.K. Chief Revenue Officer, who will talk about the opportunities we see for market share and yield expansion.

Zack Sullivan

executive
#5

Hello. I'm Zack Sullivan. I'm the U.K. CRO here at Future. I want to talk to you now about how Future is positioned with the changing data landscape and how we see this as more of an opportunity than a threat. My key point this morning is that advertisers will still need to reach their target audiences. On the right, I've added an example of the digital ads that we're talking about. In this case, you can see that Estee Lauder are targeting those that are interested in skin care products. There are multiple ways that this could reach that target audience. And Future has always offered a variety of ways of reaching these different users. These techniques are going to become more important going forward. The Future data offering has increased over recent years, consolidating our position as audience experts. Publishers have adapted to third-party constraints of Safari and Firefox already, and this has taken place over the last couple of years. Future's user data will become more valuable, make publishers key partners for advertisers and intermediate traders are likely to be removed from the supply chain. And ad tech companies throughout the ad ecosystem will be challenged, and publishers are likely to reduce the number that they work with. How is Future well positioned to take advantage of the changing ad environment? Well, we've already got existing first-party data, which is available to us due to what we call the Aperture platform, a diagram of which is on the left-hand side of this slide. This has been well received by advertisers. And in February of this year, we signed up 36 new partners to use our first-party data, rather than third-party data for campaign targeting. Future has already adapted to privacy-centric environment by complying with the GDPR and CCPA regulation recently. We're already integrated with the Google ad stack, and this means that we can make the Google cohort targeting available once they have released this to advertisers, with no additional work here at Future. Google's reporting that this is 95% as effective as previous third-party-based targeting solutions were. But we're also integrating other ID vendors to ensure that we can facilitate the technical requirements of all our media buyers. And we continue to develop the Aperture platform, ensuring it is able to utilize the greatest amount of user data in a privacy-centric way. These elements offer great value-additive services to our advertisers on top of the strong fundamental offering that we have. And as a remainder about these fundamentals, we have great users, enormous scale, reaching 1 in 3 online users in the U.K. and U.S. In our lead verticals, market penetration is even higher and ensures that we cover very large percentages of any addressable market for potential advertisers. This is in thanks to our search ownership strategy and our audience development capabilities. The usage of safe is a value. Thanks to the content that we produce and the functionality on site, we can demonstrate that our users have high intent and a deep connection with their passions. This is not true for all publishers. Many of them will struggle to identify the interests and passions of their audiences. We continue to offer a range of tools that allow advertisers to reach their target audiences. One of these is the Aperture platform. But thanks to our proprietary technology and ad stack, there are many others. We have the ability to capture first-party data and value. Our ad stack means we can capture more information that are relevant to ad campaigns and make this available to advertisers. Much of this is thanks to our proprietary systems, such as our data management platform, SmartBrief email, Hawk, HYBRID, Falcon. And now we are looking forward to ways to incorporating GoCo and Mozo data to that system. So how does this impact our waterfall? Our direct deals, including display and credit solutions are enhanced by the development of the Aperture platform and the scarcity of first-party data encourages advertisers to work with us through this channel. We continue to offer PMPs, or private marketplace deals. This is enhanced by Aperture data and utilizing whatever alternative solution, presumably FLoC that Google makes available to other advertisers. This channel also allows advertisers to continue benefiting from automation delivered through programmatic advertising. Whilst being able to utilize our first-party data, we see this as a particular area of growth as it enables advertisers to reach our world garden of audiences. Because of the enrichment of data, we're able to charge higher yields. Or because of the scarcity of first-party data, we can command higher prices. We expect that this will increase the revenue mix at the top of the waterfall and may well increase overall revenues. We will continue to have ad networks such as SSPs integrated to drive demand. Solutions such as Google's SSP will utilize FLoC, while other SSPS such as PubMatic for GroupM's SSP of choice, we'll be able to utilize cohort targeting along with other ID vendor solutions. We believe firmly that more advertisers will work with us higher up in our stack. As we show in this diagram, those tend to be a higher-yielding, higher-priced campaigns. So our belief is that any loss at the bottom of the stack will be offset by increased ad spend at the top of the stack at higher yield. So how have we been getting on with this? So we've already taken out our key clients. We've had 36 new partners sign up to use Aperture for data targeting already. All of our global sales teams have been trained on the usage of first-party data as well as on greater solution campaigns, and we continue to see more uptake in this element of our revenue mix. We've already increased first-party direct yield with our result. We have a road map to integrate other ID solutions, ensuring we are able to integrate with as many partners as possible and offer alternatives for third-party cookies. So while Future is well prepared, there will inevitably be some winners and losers. We believe that users are going to be winners as they move into a privacy-centric environment. This is something we strongly support here at Future. We think Google is addressing many of its regulatory challenges. And critically, it's important in its existing revenue monetization model, which we benefit from. Large publishers such as Future will have valuable audiences and data at scale they will be able to make available to advertisers. Whilst this will become scarce, it will make them more important to advertisers and likely and improve our ability to charge increased yields. Ad agencies will manage the complexity that this creates, and it will likely stop some of the in-housing of advertising activity by large advertisers. Ad agencies will be able to manage the complexity within the market. Digital consultancies, such as MightyHive will be able to work with publishers and ad agencies to navigate the complexity and create new frameworks of working together. And headline writers. This is ultimately a complex topic, and there are certain unknowns at the moment. There's a lot of chat in the trade press, and this will continue to drive traffic in the weeks and months ahead. In terms of losers, we think those that produce commoditized content such as the news publications will struggle as they're unable to identify what their users' real interest and passions are. Smaller publishers equally will struggle as advertisers consolidate on their strategic partners like Future. The ad tech sector in general is in for a tough time. ID vendors are being limited by Google changes, and they struggle to offer volume in comparison to those that large publishers can. Non-Google DSPs and SSPs will likewise struggle from the lack of an ID. Only those that have unique demand such as programmatic working with GroupM, will be able to really create any value. Audience, aggregators and ad networks will struggle to target campaigns across publisher networks, and it's likely that marketers will continue to work with a smaller number of large publishers directly. And any ad tech operating as an intermediatory is likely to be challenged as publishers look to reduce the number that they work with. Hopefully, this has given you an overview of how Future stands to benefit from these changes. I'm now going to hand Kevin over to talk through how Future has made this happen.

Li Ying Kevin

executive
#6

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Kevin Li Ying. I'm the CTO for the group, and I'm delighted to be here today talking to you all. Hopefully, over the next 5 minutes, you will get a good understanding of our preparedness, innovative thinking against an exciting track record of delivery to face the reality of the ever-changing advertising landscape that we are facing today. But first, our proprietary tech stack, which continues to be our foundation, a flexible and scalable enabler that gives us control on executing and delivering against our organic and acquisition strategy. Made up of Vanilla, which is our content creation and distribution platform, down to our monetization services like e-mail tech, SmartBrief, e-com tech, Hawk and ad tech HYBRID. Focusing on HYBRID, it is platform-agnostic, and its ease of integration means that we have now deployed it on 52 brands today, delivering display, video and Google AMP advertising demand. Equipped with both client and service-side open auction capability, it is fully secured and compliant, GDPR, CCPA and TCF2 compliant. We are proud of its diverse tech and commercial ops capabilities from malware detection, bot detection, down to a high degree of configurability with clear ROI. At the core, it is flexible by design and allows us to face the ever-changing digital advertising market. And looking forward, Hybrid continues to allow us to stay close to the evolution of the ad market. February 2021, Future is one of the select few to be part of the Google Alpha program testing Google's PPID initiative. Adaptable, HYBRID allows us to rapidly engage, iterate and test new third-party universal ID solutions as they come to life and trade. For example, we are testing ID5, PIH, LiveRamp and ZeoTap. And concurrently, we are optimizing our ad tech proposition to deliver an optimum user experience globally and to deliver new ad formats to clients. And of course, we continue to invest in our level of preparedness to respond not only to changes to our supply-side partners but also for the arrival of Google Privacy Sandbox. Complementing our ad tech proposition is our continued investment in data engineering. Over the past 5 years, Future has benefited from our automated content categorization technology, which exploits semantic analysis to interpret and tag content in a consistent way, giving us Future the ability to build and monetize our audience through first-party audience segmentation, develop a foundation for contextual advertising targeting capability and diversify how content is packaged and discovered online. Today, ever more so, it is critical that our data engineering strategy can augment our tech stack capability. Through unifying our first-party data, implementing Future's own proprietary future ID and developing a road map leading to a customer data platform. Because we believe that contextual targeting, retargeting, alongside profile creation made up of qualitative data signals and made accessible and portable means that we are building new capabilities to quickly broaden new, deepen existing and monetize all those audience segments. In turn, understanding our audience more through qualitative and rich insights leads to an increase in yield from executing direct deals and programmatic guaranteed. And with that in mind, the market pressure and no dilution in bid density could increase CPM in our third-party. So why our proprietary tech stack, which gives us the edge, control, flexibility and ability to pivot? Because HYBRID is fully featured with all advertising demands from first-party direct to programmatic guaranteed, open auction, Google AMP ecosystem and beyond Google. It has a wide demand on the urban auction market that will keep generating revenue with whichever demand partners survive post the cookie world. It allows us to be early adopters that will be testing Google's new cookie-less ad technologies and third-party universal ID solution. Our tech stack already has a strong foundation to augment our audience segmentation capabilities. And with Aperture, it can do so even further. Thank you.

Zack Sullivan

executive
#7

Thank you, Kevin. We hope this has helped to answer some questions on how Future is well positioned within the complex system and the changes within third-party data. To summarize the key points from today, the media landscape is constantly changing, and Future has a strong track record of adapting in recent years and thriving within these changes. Future is supportive of the moves to protect consumer privacy, and we believe that we have a key role to play within this as a premium publisher. In terms of impact, there's no material downside to our revenues as a result of the changes to third-party cookies. And we believe that there is an upside case to be made as our first-party data becomes more scarce and less available, and we can drive yield and win and increase market share. And Future is well positioned because we have proprietary technology that allows us to gather this first-party data. We have audiences with intent at reach, reaching 1 in 3 in the U.K. and the U.S. And Aperture audience data platform continues to collect more data and make it available to our advertising partners. And then I'm going to hand back to Zillah to take us through some Q&A from anything we've covered today.

Zillah Byng-Thorne

executive
#8

Thank you, Zack, and the rest of the team. [Operator Instructions]

Zillah Byng-Thorne

executive
#9

So a question here, which is asking about have we seen any of the data behind Google's 95% claim around FLoCs? Or are we just assuming that they're right? I don't know, Zack, if you want to pick up that point or...

Nick Flood

executive
#10

I'll take that one, Zillah. So we've not seen the research, and Google are yet to publish it, but we're really confident and the number stacks up, says 95% plus. So it's really important that Google deliver conversions on the dollar to also add value to that, we're working with a number of ID vendors that I mentioned in the presentation. So the question also includes are we working with The Trade Desk? Yes, we are. For our programmatic relationship and also working with a number of other ID vendors as well. It's really important, I think, as the ad ecosystem continues to change that we are adaptable, but also we allow buyers to trade with us and transact in whatever fashion they want because some buyers just don't want to use Google ecosystem. But obviously, the majority do.

Zillah Byng-Thorne

executive
#11

Thank you for that, Nick. So the next question I've got then is around -- a little bit about Aperture. Just asking a little bit more clarity about how long we've been working with the Aperture data? And is it a long-term build? So have we been building it in the past 5 years in order to understand the historic data set? So we should admit that we've only just put the name to it because we've been building the data platform for a long time, but the Aperture name itself was only born recently. But I'll maybe pass over to Jason who runs, among many other things, the data team at Future. Maybe Jason, you could just build a little bit of color on that.

Jason MacLellan

executive
#12

Yes. So yes, so exactly, as you say, with the kind of technique that we've been using to semantically tag and categorize our content and build up our first-party data has been around for 5 years. So yes, we have that data, and we continue to evolve that capability to improve the quality of our data and then also the targeting that we use on the top of that.

Zillah Byng-Thorne

executive
#13

Brilliant. Thanks for that, Jason. I've got another question here. [Operator Instructions] Question here is around how valuable is the GoCo data in this context? I'm very pleased, Alex, for that question. Very valuable. And it was certainly one of the reasons why we wanted to do that acquisition was we got a really highly qualified additional data set, and we see that as one of the key areas where we can add further value into the Aperture platform. But it's also worth pointing out that the acquisition of SmartBrief just over -- just under 2 years ago, has also got a hugely valuable data set. So our strategy, as Jason mentioned, over the last 5 years, he's been gradually building not only our own first-party data and our legacy brands, but doing acquisitions, which enrich the data set that we have across the organization. I've got a couple more questions. Let me just read through these. Rachel, do you want to pick up the question? There's a question here around advertising yields and just the trends more recently. And which I think reflects the significant activity we've been doing to change the mix. But can you see the question...

Rachel Addison

executive
#14

Yes, I can. Yes, of course. So yes, first of all, to point out, as I think those of you on the call will know that over the last financial year, we've seen consistent revenue growth in our digital advertising revenues and that momentum -- and around 16%, I might add, and that momentum has continued into this financial year. We're seeing the growth come from audience growth, obviously, but also yield growth. And most importantly, within that, is a move in terms of higher proportion of revenue sold in our direct revenue segments, which are the higher-yielding segments that Tania outlined earlier.

Zillah Byng-Thorne

executive
#15

Great. Thanks for that, Rachel. So we've got a question here about asking us is there likely to be a shift requiring your audience to register on given sites to be able to harvest first-party? It's a really great question because I think it's one of the areas of confusion, but I'm going to hand that over to either Zack or Nick to pick up.

Zack Sullivan

executive
#16

I'm happy to take that one. So no in the first instance. There may be certain sites and some contexts where it's very right to collect the -- that catalog within today, but we have lots of different data flags and [ their single ] system building on proprietary tech that we can build it to collect the data that's most useful for us in our advertising solutions. And so we know in that way we continue to be [ operating and collect lots and lots of ] information. We try to make sure that [indiscernible] for the actionable and usable term. I think a lot people in the market, I think, are collecting an e-mail address [indiscernible] is the answer. We don't agree with that at all. We think capturing points of action, interest, intent is important, not just having some sort of an e-mail, you need to be able to attribute it to something of value for the advertising company.

Zillah Byng-Thorne

executive
#17

Thanks, Zack. And I'm conscious of running over a little bit. I'm going to -- I've got a couple more questions. If it's okay with everyone else, we're probably going to go for a couple of more minutes and then draw things to a close. So if you have got a question, please do read it now. I've got a question here about what proportion of your revenue derives from Apple traffic and how much did it change after the restrictions came in? And I think it's a really good question. And one of the reasons we actually mentioned it in the presentation was the fact that the Apple changes have been in play for over 12 months in terms of blocking third-party cookies. And yet you'll have seen that our digital advertising growth accelerated in the second half of last year rather than decelerated. And as Rachel said, we're seeing continued ongoing movement in the yield that we would expect to see as we will move further up the stack and looking for areas to get better first-party data. So at the very bottom of the stack, we did see some depreciation there, which is what we expect, but what we've seen is a shift change, which is why we believe we have the built case in our business. I've got another question here. Have you lost any advertisers to third-party data? Nick or Zack, do you want to -- do you want to pick that up?

Nick Flood

executive
#18

Yes, sure. Zillah, thank you. And a really good question. So we believe as third-party data outside of world gardens like Future starts to come in. There will be a shift of advertising spend. To those environments like Future's properties where you'll be able to overlay additional targeting capabilities, such as all our rich contextual data, behavioral data and logged in data, as Zack mentioned earlier on. So we think over time, there will be a shift, and we're already starting to have those conversations with advertisers and agencies. What's uncertainty about where they can advertise to users in really strong endemic audiences.

Zillah Byng-Thorne

executive
#19

Brilliant. Thanks, Nick, for that. I've got a question here about will we change effect the sales price for smaller publishers if they're a net loser. I wouldn't want to comment, but probably, possibly. We will wait to see what happens there. I've got another question here, which is asking about what we've seen on yields year-over-year for the first 2 calendar months of the year. And Rachel said I'm not allowed to answer that one. However, I think Tania did say, we're seeing the continued momentum that we saw in last year, and we're certainly pleased with the performance across the business. I've got a question here on price comparisons. You've historically spent a lot of money on paid search and getting up to the top of the natural search listings. With advertising, with the skills developed, Future be able to reduce the spend? Yes, we absolutely believe that to be the case. And we think, hopefully, part of today's presentation demonstrates that we've been thinking for a long time about how we continue to build the ad stack. And by the same point, we see that's where some of the opportunities are bringing that long-term thinking and the tech -- proprietary tech that we have to GoCo is where we see opportunities. I've got -- I think one final question I'm going to take, which I'll pass over to either to Zack or Nick, which is will the new ecosystem potential allow Future to do more deals with advertisers directly, circumventing ad agencies?

Zack Sullivan

executive
#20

Yes, I'm happy to take that one. Yes is the short answer. We have already some partners coming to us directly, asking about our capabilities, looking to work with direct referenced in the slides. We'd have more vendors start working with us. And we're working with very large companies that are actually international FMCG groups. They want to make sure that they are continuing a seamless transition to their ability to buy. So they're coming and working with us and integration now and they can see we'll be managing them for months now. So we've got good pathways out that we can access it. I think the agencies will continue to have a big part, and there's certainly a lot of complexity to be managed if you're buying large scale and a very diverse product set. The agencies add value there and we've been working with them, too, to make sure that we're continuing it. There are intermediaries in the ad ecosystem that will be taken out. And we are rationalizing those -- we work with -- as the agencies. So it's nice that you got a much cleaner connection with publisher, agency and brand. And we'll continue into the rest of this year.

Zillah Byng-Thorne

executive
#21

Great. Thanks, Zack. So as I said, I apologize for running over. There was lots of good questions. I don't think I got to them all. So I apologize for that. There was one final question there at the end, which is a nice way for me to answer as also my closing remarks. Someone asking about where do we see the balance of growth between organic and acquisition? . And I think I hope what we've demonstrated today is that Future's business is all about growing its existing business. We use acquisitions to accelerate that strategy as opposed to look to do acquisitions to build our business. We're very much about leaning into the audiences community we have, doing what we think is best for them, which means we are the preferred partner for our advertisers. And it means we are genuinely premium, with genuinely endemic and market-leading audiences. And where acquisitions allow us to accelerate that or to strengthen that position, we're absolutely going to do that, but it is because it makes the business overall better rather than just because there's an acquisition there to be done. Thank you so much. I really do hope it's been helpful. I know this is a very difficult topic. I constantly find myself thinking what does FLoC stand for again, what's PPID? If you would like to have a conversation with anyone of the team, I know they'd be happy to have a one-to-one with you, even if it just help you understand the ecosystem better yourself. And if you get any subsequent questions, please do follow up with Marion, Rachel or myself directly. Thank you very much.

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