LBG Media plc (LBG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to LBG Media's 2024 full year set of results. Just to be clear, that's our new year-end to September 2024. For those of you that haven't met me, I'm Solly, CEO and Founder of LBG Media. And today, I'm joined by Dave. So Dave is going to be stepping in today for Richard, who's taking some time off for personal reasons. Dave is our Chairman. And in terms of being in a fortunate position, Dave's background is Deputy CEO of GBG, prior to that CFO and CFO of many other positions before that. So Dave is going to be talking you through our financials today. So I'm going to kick off with some key highlights, then handing over to Dave to take you through the financials. And then I'm going to talk you through our progress across our line of sight to GBP 200 million and then hand over to yourselves for Q&A. So in true LBG Media fashion, we're going to kick off with a video to give you a bit of a flavor on what we've been up to. [Presentation]

Thank you. So just to kick things off with some highlights, overall, the business is in a strong position. Our pro forma revenue is up to GBP 86.2 million, which is up 22% year-on-year to our new year-end September 2024. We've made a number of strategic investments, which I'm going to talk through how they're paying off today, in particular, the U.S. and our audience growth, notable things to call out. We've made strong momentum towards our line of sight of GBP 200 million, and we can see that momentum continuing to move forward. And also, I'm pleased to say that we're 6% ahead of our market consensus. So just delving a bit deeper across the 3 growth lenses that we look across the business. I'm going to talk through Direct, which is the work that we do with brands directly. So clients want to access our young, Millennial and Gen Z audience base that we built, and we work with them to help them drive more customers, either engaged customers that they've already got or new customers through our scaled audience base. Indirect is us working with platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, et cetera, where our content lives on there. We monetize that through their sales team and sharing that. We also have our websites where our content lives on, and we have programmatic advertisement across that. So that's our Indirect. And then the U.S. speaks for itself. It's our U.S. division and business within that. So from a Direct perspective, our Direct business is performing very well, and we continue to build market leadership position across young adults. And through the bigger and deeper relationships that we've been building, we saw that business grow by 39% year-on-year. From an Indirect perspective, our audience is up 19%. We've now crossed the 0.5 billion mark, so it's up to 503 million. And we've also got a significant portion of that in the U.S., which is a huge opportunity for us as the largest advertisement market in the world. One thing to call out is the commercial change across Facebook. In Q3, we saw a weaker performance. We've been working with Facebook continually around that commercial change. And I'm pleased to say towards the back end, through the work that we've done and the improvements that we've made, we exited the year in December up 20% month-on-month versus last December. So our December was up 20%. We've also made good progress within our Indirect revenues across our diversification drive. We're seeing our Web business up 77% year-on-year. So that's our websites where our content lives and people come to visit. We saw a very strong performance, 77% increase. Another thing to call out in terms of diversification. When we listed the business, Facebook was around 23% of our overall revenue. Since we've scaled the business -- sorry, 37% of our overall revenue. And since we've scaled the business, that's reduced down to around 23%, and we've got a much more healthy balance across our overall business in terms of revenues and also geographic. From a U.S. perspective, last year, we acquired Betches, market leaders across Millennial and Gen Z women out in the States. We've got a fantastic business product across podcasts, social, websites. And we integrated the 2 businesses together and have made real progress in growth across our audiences and also some joint wins, which I'm going to talk you through on the next slide. It's going to do that thing now. It's going to come forward 4 times, isn't it? Just whilst that's having a moment, I'll talk you through without -- so from a client perspective, we continue to focus on bigger and deeper relationships. And the big focus for us is capitalizing on our market leadership position across Millennial and Gen Z young adults. We work with some of the largest blue-chip advertisers. And just to name a few, some of the clients that we worked with last year were the likes of Lloyds, Vodafone, Visa, Sky, and many, many more. And just going into the increased scope element of working with those clients, which has been a big driver of that 39% increase year-on-year, to name a few, I'd like to talk you through Tesco's and also Uber. So a big focus for them was about weaving into culture where young adults are. And a statistic I've seen recently is that over 30% of time from Millennial and Gen Z audiences is spent on social media when they're on their mobile phones. So we wanted to take them where those audiences are and weave them into culture. And we did this by integrating Uber Eats into one of our famous formats, Snack Wars, during the Euros where we carried out a special edition of that. We had the likes of Thierry Henry, Kate Abdo and many other big football names who featured in those episodes, and Uber Eats were the sponsors of it. It actually gained more viewership than the final itself, which was a very big success for Uber and quite cost effective in comparison to sponsoring the final. In terms of the other one around Tesco, their big thing was around Christmas. They wanted to weave into culture in a natural manner. So what we did is one of the bits of work that we did for them is we got Santa to go into Tesco to get his Meal Deal. And of course, the man has got to eat. So where else is better to get that? And that generated millions of views, was all over social. In terms of the U.S., we're looking to replicate the success that we've seen here in the U.K., and we've done that by bringing the businesses together. Betches has already had a lot of success across blue-chip advertisers. We've started to build an organic business over in the States that has started to pick up some steam. Last year, we brought the 2 together. And we've had some really strong wins across notable clients such as L'Oréal, Netflix, Peacock and many others. So we can see a real opportunity to grow and build. And again, there's a lot of scope to build out in what is the largest advertisement market in the world. So purpose-driven work sits at the heart of what we do within the business. We do a lot of work around mental health, protecting women and girls, giving a voice to underrepresented communities and the environment. Our most recent work, which you might have seen on the video, was around encouraging young voters to turn up to the election and place a vote. And we saw millions of people that weren't considering voting, voting during those elections. And we even saw our campaign, You're On Mute, appear at Glastonbury. That's all from me for now. I'll hand it over to Dave, and I will come back and talk you through our line of sight and the progress that we're seeing across there.

Thank you, Solly, and good morning, everyone. As you're now aware, I've now stepped in for Richard Jarvis on a temporary basis and with the help and support of the fantastic internal team here at LBG. I'm joined by Chris Dodd over there, our Commercial Finance Director, who used to be with LBG -- well, has been, not used to, has been with LBG for over 10 years. And by the way, he used to have hair as well. But LBG is a great growth and business value opportunity, but I guess I'm bound to say that. And it's a pleasure to get more involved and under the lead a bit more. I'm looking forward to taking you through our strong financial performance last year. On each slide, we've presented 2 comparative periods. We've presented the statutory figures, which give us the -- which, given our change in year-end, represent 9-months and a 12-month period comparison. On the left-hand side, we've got the pro forma 12 months. And these are the pertinent numbers really that I'll take you through. So as Solly said, revenue grew 22% on the 12-month pro forma basis to GBP 86.2 million. The 22% demonstrates the sustained growth in both our reputation and business with blue-chip brands. LBG continuing to capitalize on an increasing dominance of the digital advertising medium and the growing purchasing power of the global young adult audience. On an organic basis, the growth in the 12-month pro forma was 6%. This number excludes the impact of Betches and Australia and New Zealand. This was lower than we wanted. The change to September year-end brought in a high comparison against calendar Q4 2022, where Facebook introduced short-form video, which gave us about an extra GBP 2 million back in 2022. Now if you take this off the 2022 figures, that's about 2% to our organic growth. Another key point which Solly talked about is in July to October, Social revenues were lower than last year due to Facebook's changes in commercial model. The short-term reduction in revenue reduced our organic growth by about 6% or GBP 4 million. These commercial model changes were talked about in the previous 2 presentations, trading updates. At the time, the quantum was unknown. But with the change of commercial model, the business quickly adapted and saw a return to normal levels in November '24 and then it exited December '24 with a very good level of growth that Solly talked about. That provides us obviously very good momentum as we move into our current financial year or new calendar year. The growth in Web and Direct has given greater diversification. And as Solly said, the revenue with Facebook is now at 23% versus 37% at the time of IPO. And this was one of the initial risks at IPO, and that's significantly reduced now because of this diversification. With strong performance and revenue momentum across the business, we continue to make meaningful progress towards the line of sight to GBP 200 million. Moving back to the diversity of revenue streams again and enhances our business resilience and demonstrates our stability and multiple levers for growth, which you can see the split of the revenue on the bottom part of the screen there. We've been more reliant on the Direct side and also very good growth on Web. So moving on to looking at the Direct revenue. Direct revenue now represents 51% of the total and grew strongly, up 39% to GBP 43.9 million. The performance is driven by strong client retention and acquisition. The deepening of relationships with existing partners is evidenced in our KPIs with a 74% repeat rate revenue. The 29% brief conversion that normally ranges from high 20s to low 30s highlights our expanding client roster and broad cross-sector appeal. We're doing more and more with bigger brands being increasingly important to corporate marketing strategies. And as Solly touched about, Google is a perfect example of this where we worked across multiple high-profile brands of their own, Pixel, Android, Gemini and Google Pay. Betches' revenue profile is weighted significantly towards Direct. And already, we're seeing positive results in the U.S. with more high-profile partnerships such as L'Oréal, Netflix, and a very strong pipeline moving into calendar '25. Indirect revenue grew by 6% to GBP 40.7 million. As a reminder, Indirect revenue is split between Social platforms and income from Web advertising, which is our owned and operated websites. The growth in this period was driven by our strategic investment in Web, which has triggered a rise in sessions and yields; the latter, the yields, rising by 67%. Web now accounts for 45% of the Indirect revenue with a growth of 27% in the pro forma period. Just to add a little additional commentary about the lower Social revenues and Facebook commercial model change. In Q3 2024, we also maintained our position of one of Facebook's largest publishers, having 7 pages in the top 50 globally according to Taboola. Turning on to the next slide and costs. Costs in the 12-month period ending September totaled GBP 61.8 million, which represented a 24% increase on a pro forma basis. GBP 3.4 million of this are investments that were designed and are designed to continue to scale the business. We are and will continue to well gatepost these against near-term performance. So we're not suddenly going to make big investments in the hope we're gate-posting as the business moves through quarter-by-quarter, month-by-month. Payroll remains the largest of these costs followed by content production and overheads. Looking at adjusted EBITDA. We achieved GBP 24.5 million worth of adjusted EBITDA, a 16% increase. The increase was driven by a number of factors, including the strong revenue performance over the period and the growth of Direct and Web, returning Australia and New Zealand to profitability following the successful changes to the operating model, and our growing U.S. footprint with contribution from LBG and Betches joint wins. The 16% growth was obviously impacted by the investments of GBP 3.4 million and also the strong comparative period with Facebook and the commercial model change. But as you can see, we've maintained a healthy margin of 28%. Now onto our cash position. We're a highly cash-generative business, and we have a robust cash position at the end of December with GBP 30.5 million in the bank. And it was up significantly from the previous year. The other key point to highlight here is 105% cash conversion. And that was down to very good performance within the teams. Chris personally collected the GBP 4 million of that cash-in, in April '24; also helped us a little bit by moving our year-end from December through to September because some of the larger clients, as you will all know, tend to hold on to their cash at their own year-ends. So that shift also helped us a little bit. And the first Betches earnout was paid last year, which is $4 million or GBP 3.1 million. We're not just going to sit on that cash as you would expect. So we're looking for further organic opportunities and some interesting M&A opportunities for the deployment of this capital with the obvious reason to deliver sustainable value for our stakeholders. Now we should talk about our change of year-end. So you all know our year-end changed from 31st of December to the end of September. We made this decision to better guide our business planning and investment pacing as well as to improve visibility over the market dynamics and enable greater transparency on performance for external stakeholders. While the first half, the new first half, now includes the seasonally largest Q4 period, it will also include the traditionally smallest Q1, calendar Q1. So it's not all everything front-end loaded. There's a balance of those 2 in the weighting of first to second half in our new financial year. As such, there still will be a seasonality impact, but this will be less pronounced than a calendar year-end. We've provided a lot of additional disclosures in the annual report. And also in the appendix to the documents you've got, there's a half-by-half split there going back to the 3 years, which, as you know, we'll always be very transparent. And any additional help that you need in that, then just please let us know. Finally, I'd like to look at the KPIs, key performance indicators, in more detail. As we outlined at the half year in September, these KPIs reflect now the business is run on a quarterly basis, summarized to help external stakeholders to better understand our strategic decisions and investments. Firstly, in terms of Direct, brief conversion remained at 29%. It's a reflection of the strong relationship we have with our existing clients and new opportunities. Underscoring this rate of conversion is our repeat revenue, which was 74%, which means 74% of clients who did business with us this year also did business with us last year or the year before. We've also changed the third KPI from up-and-coming quarter prebook to the number of clients over $1 million. We decided to make this change having listened to some investors and analysts as we did not feel that the prebook was an appropriate metric to use as it only provided an insight to a point in time and could be misaggregated externally to give inaccurate figures. In the absence of the prebook number, as we outlined in our RNS this morning, we started the new financial year strongly with Q1 achieving, which is the October to December, a double-digit growth compared to last period. We feel the new KPI of over 100 -- over $1 million, not $100 million, that's a few years' time, $1 million in revenue better reflects how we view the growth trajectory of the business over time. In the U.K. Direct, as of 30th of September, we had 8 clients over $1 million. I would also just like to speak to the diversity of that group of clients, which is 28% of our revenue is with clients over $1 million, 31% of the revenue is between $0.5 million and $1 million, and 41% of the revenue are those below $0.5 million. So there's a real diversity of clients. And as Solly talked to, we want to move people up that spectrum as we become more important to them and they feature more of our campaigns. This provides the group, as I said, a fairly even balance where we're not overly reliant on any particular client. And it's also great evidence of building deep relationships with blue-chip clients for their own corporate marketing strategies. This is a number that we believe will steadily increase over time. And also when I come to the U.S., we've started with one, and you'll see that supersede the U.K. over time. I won't say how quickly. But turning to Indirect. It's on the same slide, sorry, just in the middle there. Our global audience has grown to 503 million, up from 452 million in the same period last year. On Web, the daily sessions have grown from 4.9 million to 5 million, while the session yield increased by 67%, benefiting from a high focus on quality, Web platform enhancements as well as strong demand for our content inventory and obviously reach with young adult audiences. Our investments in Web have obviously directly led to this contribution and improved the diversification of the Indirect revenues, as I touched on earlier. Turning finally to the U.S. In line with the positive trends seen in our U.K. Direct division, we've changed the KPI from up-and-coming prebook to clients over $1 million. And on here, there's one at the moment. As we say, over the next few half years, that will steadily increase. And that's despite having Betches onboard for just a little over a year. We've also -- sorry, just getting my train of thought. So we've also seen the U.S. audience increase to 143 million, and the KPIs moving forward are obviously moving into a very positive success. We look forward to sharing those metrics with you on an ongoing basis. And with that, I'd like to thank you all. It was great to be back here in an analyst briefing in a -- for a long while, actually. It's been a long, long time since I've come back. So I'll hand you back to Solly to talk about some of the strategic direction of the business. Thank you, Solly.

Thanks, Dave. Yes, Dave did resist the ask from me to get involved with the uniform and his hair coming off, but he politely turned it down. Thank you, Dave. I don't think you would have realized that it's been a long time, and appreciate the step-in and all the support. So just to kick off my side of things, LBG Media is in a fantastic position when it comes to the market. We're in a market that, as of last year, grew to around $1 trillion, up 7% year-on-year, and we're operating in the fastest-growing parts of that. So digital, 5 years ago, was around 50% of the market. Fast forward to now, it's over 70% and accelerating in the key markets that we're operating in. In addition to that, we continue to invest in our Gen Z audience base, which on a monthly basis is up at around 70 million each month, consuming our content across the different platforms and our owned and operated websites. And the Gen Z audience is set to be the wealthiest demographic by 2030. So we're well positioned to continue to grow into that as they grow in wealth. So to finish that slide off, I just want to finish it with, we're in the center of a big market and also operating within the fastest-growing segments of that. When it comes to why are we well positioned to win over time, we have developed a formula that is unique, and it continues to grow and future-proof our business model. We built an audience at scale with over 0.5 billion people, and we generate tens of billions of views every single year. So we've built the scale. The other aspect of our business is the brands that we've developed. We have big celebrity names coming to us to access our reach and our brand relevance to help them, which has the knock-on effect for us. So we built brands that if you ask people on the street, if you've heard of LADbible or in the U.S., Betches, you often get that smile to the face. So we've built that IP and that unique aspect to our brands that people recognize and love. The other aspect of what we do is the content creation and how we go about doing that. We've built proprietary tools, which are unique to us that enable us understand how to engage audiences better. And over time, the more data that feeds that, the better we get at creating that content and, as we've demonstrated over time, generating the tens of billions of views, engagement and growth in audience. All of that is what advertisers want to tap into. They want to access the reach, the brand recognition, the tools and the understanding that we have to help them with their customers. And what we do with that is we invest that back into the model and into the flywheel, and that enables us to develop our tools further, invest in how we use elements of AI, technology and other means, develop our brands and invest into future audiences that ultimately feeds that flywheel even more. So when it comes to progression along our GBP 200 million line of sight, last year, we made a significant step forward in that. From a Direct perspective, we will continue to focus on bigger and deeper relationships. We've built a market-leading position when it comes to brands wanting to tap into that audience, and we've built a range of capabilities and tools to help with that. Whether it's LADnation, our panel, production, social expertise or some of the things that I mentioned before, that puts us in a unique position to continue to build and grow within that. Last year, we generated a customer that hit 3 million. We want to do more of those and also build more strategic relationships in the 5 million-plus mark. From an Indirect perspective, we want to continue to grow and scale that 500 million audience base, build it in terms of size, but also engagement. We can see that across growing our social audience, growing our websites and also looking at how we can develop across areas such as connected TV and as entertainment starts to build out, looking at areas such as wearables and other ways in which we can innovate over time. The final piece for us is the U.S., the largest advertisement market in the world. We've made a good start with our acquisition of Betches just over a year ago now, brought the 2 businesses together. We can see a huge amount of opportunity in a market that's 8x the size as us here in the U.K. We're going to continue to focus on bigger and deeper relationships, focus on building out our capabilities and build into that opportunity. All of this is underpinned by the opportunity for us to go after other businesses to bring into the fold and build on the M&A activity that we have done previously. We've got an active M&A pipeline. We're very picky. We've obviously had a lot of success with UNILAD back in 2018, Betches as of last year. So we're very selective with that, but we have an active M&A pipeline and cash to use as and when we find the right opportunities there. So just to finish things off, we've got good momentum across the 3 growth lenses across our business: Direct, Indirect and the U.S. We've become an integral part of blue-chip brands' ability to connect with young adults and that part of our business up 39% year-on-year. We've seen some very good wins across the U.S. element to our business, a good start with the businesses coming together and blue-chip relationships starting to form in a bigger and better way, and we see a huge opportunity in the largest advertisement market in the world. We've had a good start to the year with double-digit growth, and we expect our revenue for the full year 2025 to be up 10%. We have confidence in our momentum and line of sight of GBP 200 million. So that's all from me. So I'll hand over to yourselves for Q&A.

It's Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt. I've got 3, please. So the first one is, you've done GBP 3.4 million of investment last year. There's going to be more investments into the business this year. Can you talk us through those and what things you're focusing on? The second question is there were some impacts in the commercial changes at Facebook for calendar Q3 last year. Since then, it's normalized. But on the horizon and as we look over the next 12 months, are you -- are there any more changes that we should be expecting? Or is this it now and things will calm down? And then the final one is just on, there's been a lot of noise with TikTok over the last week, went dark, obviously, and then it's back again, and it feels like things are progressing okay. But can you talk about your thoughts there? And is it an opportunity, is it a threat as we go into 2025?

Yes, brilliant. So I'll kick off with the investments and no doubt, Dave may want to add on to that as well. He's been very close to the detail on the numbers. So we obviously have a number of different growth lenses which we look at the business. So the U.S. being a real opportunity. So we'll be investing in building out our capabilities. Here in the U.K., we have the likes of LADnation, which is our panel, research and insight teams that can help measure the effectiveness of the work that we do with clients, production capabilities, social expertise and a number of different strings to our bow, which we offer clients. We can see a real opportunity to further develop that offering out in the States. So that's going to be one of the areas which we can see room to grow. The other is Gen Z. We see that as a real opportunity moving forward and want to lean into that. So on platforms where you have younger audiences or areas where those Gen Z audiences are engaging, we will continue to invest in that and future-proof the business. Our own IP, so Snack Wars, which Uber Eats sponsored, 7-figure sponsorship of that, again, we'll look to develop more unique IP that sets us apart from others in market. And then, of course, you've got the likes of our Web business, which we've seen strong growth last year through the technology changes that we've made and really utilizing those technology changes to drive that. So those are some of the areas which we'll look to invest in.

Can I just add? Just looking at from the financial lens on that, that will show itself in reuse of operational leverage into next year. In addition to that, we think we're going to spend an extra 1% of revenue to bring the margins from 28% to 27% to allow us that capability of putting investment into growing out in the U.S. more, which is obvious from what we've talked about, as well as some of the capabilities that Solly has talked about. Just as an aside on that, the business is extremely careful on, we call it internally, gate-posting when an investment is made. So it will make an investment, see how it goes, add some more, see how it goes. So you won't see a big GBP 0.5 million, GBP 700,000 thrown into something. It will be gate-posted as we move through. And then moving into the year beyond that, we think we -- the lowest part on our operating margins will be about 26%. And then as U.S. starts coming through in more detail, that 26% will start moving up, and then we'll just continue to reinvest operational leverage for the long term. Sorry, it's a long answer. Your bit?

And as Dave said, those 2 things come hand-in-hand in terms of the controls around that. It's very important to us and our culture. On the Facebook changes, so Facebook were very transparent with us. So we were working with them from the beginning of the year. The big thing for them was short-form content is becoming a bigger factor of engagement within the platform. And one of the major drivers for them on the change was to find a better model to monetize that because, of course, on 3-minute content, you can have more advertisement or it can stand out a little bit more. But on shorter-form content of 15 seconds, people aren't as willing to watch for a 30-second advert before 15 seconds of content. So that dynamic was a big shift for them and something that they wanted to find a new model. So we worked very closely with them on that. In terms of the changes, obviously, over the past 13 years, we've seen lots. We've been fortunate to see and move over all of those. It was good to see the recovery at the back end of the year. But in terms of diversification of the business, we will continue to do that. And of course, if there are any new updates, we will be transparent, as we were around the commercial changes with Facebook. From a TikTok perspective, I think we have a diverse audience base. So that 500 million is very well balanced across Meta products, Instagram and Facebook, Google products, YouTube, Google SEO, and also our owned and operated websites as well. So we, of course, paid very close attention to the changes that were happening. And we're thinking that maybe that would see an uptick in Meta products, in particular, or YouTube Shorts. And I mean it was very short-lived. So we will see what happens over the next 90 days. We see that as a very small potential impact for us on the business, and we can easily adapt and change based on the way the business is set up.

It's Fiona Orford-Williams from Edison. My 3. First of all, are there any downsides from being more exposed to the very largest clients? I mean we all know that they're very keen on their own margins. So what are the implications for you there? Second question is about Web yields. I mean you've pushed them ahead very substantially this year. Is there potential for further growth there? And just break that down a little bit. And the third one, pipeline. I mean you said it was very strong in Betches. Can you just give us a broader feel for pipeline across the group and what conversion is doing at the moment?

Sure. So on the largest clients and the approach around bigger and deeper, I think Dave touched on the diversification that we have across the different client types. We'll continue to service the smaller bits of business as well as the medium size as growing the larger to make sure that we don't have any concentration across clients. For us, we offer something that's very unique. We are market leaders in what we do. We are very selective in terms of how we really open up the full weight of the business when it comes to capabilities. And in terms of size and scale, 500 million, the billions of views that we generate, the technology tools and also brands that we've built, we are in a unique position. So for us, it's, of course, about understanding client problems and applying that to it. But I think for us, we're in a great place to build more as well as going deeper within the clients that we have. Anything you'd add to that?

No. I just think that the flow of the business is, as you saw the 3 categories there, it's winning some smaller ones or a single campaign with a bigger one. And naturally, the business tries to grow that, just gets more embedded. So it's just -- it's not something that it's just in the DNA of the business. That's what it does. So it's just natural to the business to do that.

On the Web yields, we made a number of changes with that. So one of the things that we did is implement an AI technology that's helped us optimize the way in which advertisers access the audience. So we saw a really positive uptick from that. We've made technology improvements with our websites to make them faster, more discoverable for advertisers. And we focused on quality rather than quantity in terms of sessions and audience. So those changes that we've made have seen a big uptick, would not expect as aggressive increases moving forward. However, we do see it as a real opportunity to continue to grow in that area. And then do you want to take...

I'll just add to that. There's a few organizations that have big revenue numbers attached to their own websites. So maybe not in yields, but in terms of additional revenue over the medium, long term, there's no limit on that. Yes.

Yes. In terms of pipeline, do you want to...

Yes. So the -- I'm not certain really what to add to the question. The -- speak to U.S. first. The reason I said it's a very strong pipeline is that both of the sales teams, both being LADbible and Betches, were joined together second half of calendar year. They have been joint pitching to brands. So by the fact it's been a joint pitch, that's added -- Betches were super strong anyway. UNILAD was super strong in the U.S. That combined, being gender 50-50, just gives a very exciting pitch for the brands. Read that over into the U.K. and the similar thing is happening. We don't just pitch LADbible in the U.K. We pitch the joint capability as well. So again, that's just attracting interest from bigger brands.

It's Alastair Reid at Investec. Three for me as well. How do you think about or sort of go about sizing the connected TV opportunity, sort of firstly? And then secondly, on Direct, could you just, even if sort of roughly, how much of that now in terms of revenue is in the U.S.? And what's the total number of clients in the U.S. for that business? And then lastly, it slightly sort of touches on a previous question. Can you just perhaps update us on your thinking in terms of, as parts of your audience age, how you pivot your content creation or your brands to ensure you're attracting new entrants into that sort of 18 to 34 demographic?

So just starting with the connected TV opportunity, we see this as beyond the GBP 200 million line of sight, how can we continue to move towards that global entertainment powerhouse status. So by 2030, I believe the connected TV portion of the pie is expected to be over 10% of the overall ad market. So it's been growing steadily over the years. We're already on YouTube, which in terms of a supplier to the big screen and audiences watching the big screen is a big access point. So we're upping the amount of content that we're creating within that space with the likes of Snack Wars, Minutes With and some of the other formats that we're creating. So we see that as the natural access point. In the future, we'd like to look at FAST channels, which is, again, on the big screen and how we could integrate into that ecosystem more with the IP that we create. We create a huge amount of IP in-house, and we've got a lot of content that we already sat on. We'd like to see that as an opportunity to utilize that and grow and build our brands in time across that market. So very early doors and an area that we're starting to explore in the future.

I'll cover the second one. I was just trying to find the accurate numbers rather than just from memory on that. So in terms of the quantity of clients first, there's actually more in the U.S. of smaller, about 90% of the clients in the U.S. are sub GBP 0.5 million. In terms of the U.K., then it's more evenly geared in terms of that. And in terms of the revenue side, it's GBP 25 million U.K. and Ireland, GBP 8 million in the U.S. So the advantage, coming back to the previous question that's gone there, is we've got a lot of clients that previously with Betches were inbound. Now we've got an outbound sales team. So those under GBP 0.5 million will start building over time as well as new inbound and outbound sales calls.

And then in terms of -- I mean just to add to that as well, you look at the market opportunity, even if you take a 5x on the U.K. business, you're looking at GBP 150 million business out there versus, say, where it is now. So a real opportunity to grow, and that market is growing quickly as we know. And we know that with our market proposition as market leaders across Millennial and Gen Z women and the LADbible Group proposition, we're in a strong place to take market share from others. When it comes to audience and investment into the future, I mentioned about Gen Z, that's something that's been on the forefront of our minds for a while. We've always been early adopters and have innovated quickly with anything that comes new. We've got big audiences, over 70 million across that Gen Z cohort. The way in which we've approached that is finding the best people who understand that audience better than anyone else; so people that have built audiences themselves, bringing them into the business, ensuring that the technology and tools that we have are very carefully looking at who's engaging with content, what kind of content they over-index with and mission control our in-house tool which we've created enables us to do that. And then in terms of other areas of investment for us on that, it's something that we'll continue to do across the different platforms. I think that's it in terms of those questions.

It's Johnathan Barrett from Panmure. Just 2 questions, just to be different. Carefully, really, I'm disguising 6 questions, but there's only 2 officially. The first one is just around revenues. Obviously, you've given us guidance of 10% for the year. I wonder if you could just talk about the split between Indirect and Direct and perhaps with the geographical flavor sort of laid into that, just give us a bit of shape. And then just as part of that answer as well, you've obviously started pretty well in Q1. I mean you've said strong. I would have thought strong for you guys is north of 15%. So is 10% very demanding this year? Or are there a few bumps in the comps that we should sort of think about just to get some context? And then just second question is around working capital. Obviously, receivable number -- receivable days number has come down to, I think, about 110 now. Some of that structural benefit you allude to has happened with the year-end change. You had about GBP 10 million of overdues at the end of last year. I'm guessing you've collected most of that now. And I'm just wondering where that 110 can get to as well going forward. Is 60 a sort of reasonable target for the end of next year? Or structurally, does your business end up at a different number to that? Just trying to get a feel for what the reference point is.

I'll take it and you add in. So the guidance on 10%, as we'll find it in the next financial year, things will move at different rates of growth. So let's say we win a big account in the U.S., that will accelerate things. Let's say we bring another account in the client in the U.K., that will accelerate things. So really, we're not giving guidance on that. All I can say is if you just take the past half and half, then over time, the Direct is likely to increase. By what percentage is really difficult to say because we obviously want to win as many million-dollar-plus accounts or grow to that. But that rate of pace, we're not experienced yet in the U.S. We just know the opportunity is there, and we're winning and we're growing, yes. So I wouldn't want to -- and is 10% low, it should be 15%? Well, we hope so. But are Facebook going to do another model change next year to bring that down a little bit? We hope not. Both of those in line, then that could happen. But we want to give a conservative guidance that we're confident of beating. Double-digit, 10%, we think is pretty good against the market dynamics. So we're not doing it that cautiously just to -- so we could always beat the promise. Working capital, I think the change of year-end to September will help, as we said, because it's not our clients' year-ends. We made really big strides in the 9 months in the new accounting period to September. I think with our methodology, I can't see any significant improvements in that because what we concentrate on is getting the order in and then delivering the order rather than on concentration on the post-results type of work where we can get the cash in sooner. So I wouldn't bake in anything other than that. I think the guidance would be an 85% EBITDA to cash conversion because we had the benefit of Chris doing his cash collection in April last year. I think ongoing guidance will be north of 85%.

You don't want him knocking at your door.

I'm guessing that GBP 4 million is the bit that was really sticking out in the end of the year...

Yes, it was. Yes, yes. And that was -- on your overdues, it's like GBP 40,000 or GBP 50,000 now. It's not much at all. Yes, so it's really small. Yes, yes. I alluded to it, just saying, some of the very big customers that we invoice hold on to their cash at the year-end, and it takes a while to get that until somebody comes and knocks on the door just to say, about time we had the cash, please.

It's Peter McNally from Stifel. Just a clarification, really. You mentioned Facebook was a bit of a hiccup during the year, but you worked with them, and December was up 20%. Monthlies are obviously tricky. Would you say that that's a good run rate going forward? Are you actually in a better position with them now?

So I was looking for you. Where were you? So the question was around Facebook and expectations moving forward. So in their own words, last year was a year of transition and change and their words were, this year should be more settled. So from that perspective, I'd take that as the monetization changes that they've made to short form have settled in. Of course, if we get anything other than that, we would share it. And if we expected it coming down the line, it was good to see the performance at the end of the year, the back end up 20% year-on-year on the final month. So we saw the decrease and then coming out of it, we've seen an improvement. So we'll continue to work hard at continuing that.

But you think that year-end is sort of indicative of where you might be going forward with them?

I guess we've built into our models enough headroom across the Indirect business as a whole, whether it's Web or studios, to offset any potential issues coming down the road. But it's hard to say exactly where it will land. Again, Facebook from an audience perspective is, from what we can see, is doing very well. They've made some significant changes to their platform. We remain an important part of their ecosystem. I think Dave mentioned in terms of our position as the most engaged publishers on the platform. So we remain positive about Facebook as an opportunity, but also looking at how we can grow and build the Web business, how we can grow and build other facets of that Indirect business as well within that.

Just one thing on relative size of Facebook. We said that Facebook is in the low 20% now compared to previous years. So if that growth, which is what a single month, the biggest month of the year does continue, that will have a lesser impact on the overall revenue.

Sorry, just a third question. Just going back to Facebook, that 20% growth, December on December, I presume that's a revenue number this year.

Yes.

Could you just give us a flavor on the volume and yield mix there, just so we can understand that a bit more?

I don't particularly want to get into monthly volumes and yields on it. So...

Well, just the trend for the overall shape of it, is it because you've got much more volume and it's lower price? Or is it pretty even versus where you were at because yield was the issue, right?

We got the...

The shape has changed...

Do you want to answer it?

Yes. Yes, Dave, sorry. I've got a voice, by the way. Yes, the -- so yes, the shape has changed. So the volumes have gone up, but the yields have come down slightly. So overall, as Solly said, the coming out of the year, we were 20% up. But yes, over the last 6 months, we've had to get used to the change in shape of those KPIs, but things seem to have settled down from here.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you all for attending and look forward to speaking to you soon.