Verve Group SE (VRV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

A warm welcome to Verve Group's Capital Fourth Market Day in Stockholm. My name is Jenny Rosberg from ROPA, and I support Verve Group here on the ground in Stockholm, and I will facilitate, moderate today's session. A warm welcome to all of you online and a warm welcome. Great seeing everybody here in the room as well. And yes, today, we really will have the opportunity to catch up and speak to the management team and also the experts we have with us. So I'm going to actually walk you through the agenda of today and what we have in front of us. And I know that all of you are super eager to dive into the financials, as Verve just released the Q2 report. So that is, of course, early on to the agenda. And the same with the recent acquisition of Jun Group, which is also really exciting. Okay. So let's see what we have here. Yes, I thought so, the disclaimer is always coming up first. So please read it through and pay attention. So not for distribution, coming into next slide, going back, one, like that. So -- the team I want -- yeah, here we go. So with us today, we have all managers from Verve Group joining. So we will have Remco and Paul. Up on the stage, we have Sameer, we have Alex, we have Mishel, new to the team, CEO of Jun Group; and Prasanna, Carl, and also Esther. And Alex is also new so I will ask them to do a proper presentation of themselves when they come up on stage. Looking into the agenda, we have three sections. And in the first one, we will have the financial and commercial update from Paul and Remco and also the Jun presentation from Mishel. And after each section, we will have a Q&A. So here in the room, you will ask questions. And if you are online, please send in your question and I will read them out loudly and also your name who is asking the question. In Part two, we will have the experts coming up on scene. And It's Peter from former CEO client relationship and Media, Dentsu. And we will also have Rowena from, sitting over here, IAB, this organization and setting the technology standards speaking about privacy and targeting and we will also have a team from Google Cloud coming in, and I will present them later on in the program. Third part will be all about Verve group and making media better. And we will have all the managers on stage and diving into both the supply side with Sameer, the demand side, coming up also with Alex and then, of course, the CTO with all the interesting stuff going on around AI and Carl from Verve Nordics. And also, of course, we're going to close up with the closing remarks from Remco. And the intention or aim for today is, of course, to give you a commercial and financial update, and also to bring the experts to you. So you also get the intelligence and insight into what's going on in the industry in the market, both when it comes to the commercial part as well as the technology part as lots of things are moving around. And most important, of course, meet and greet with management and take the pulse on them. So I think with that, I would like to hand over to Remco. Welcome.

Thank you, Jenny. Yes. Welcome to everybody also in the name of the team. Happy to see everybody, and we know there's many more people online. And so that's a big welcome also to everybody there. Just a year ago, quite a lot has happened in this year. We already published our Q2 numbers so you have seen those this morning, we published also our full Q2 report. Yes, it's going pretty well, actually. And we would like to take you today through first of all, Q2 and then also dive much deeper into the different parts of the company. One small thing. You will find this on your table, that's a glossary and we know, and that was a remarked last year and also, Peter, when he joined the Board was like, wow, it's amazing what you're all using as abbreviations. We're trying to be complete. If you find one missing, please tell us, and there will be a lottery with a few bottles of wine for the missing ones. So yes, there's a sheet. We try to explain what we do. We try to explain it also when we do our presentation. But yes, ask. I would like to start commercial update. Yes, as mentioned, we had a really good Q2, 26% organic growth, 30% adjusted EBITDA and 30% growth -- sorry and 30% adjusted EBITDA margin. We brought our leverage down. I think that was one of the criticisms we got also from investors. And if you look at how much interest you pay also, that's one thing that we are working on with high speed to really get it down which, with a good EBITDA, of course, and a good cash position is working very well. So we're now on a 2.8x leverage ratio. The company is growing, 33% customer growth we have. And Paul is going into many more details later where we grow? How we grow? And then you will see in the later presentations, the backgrounds of that, why we grow? I think that's most important And also, of course, important 9% adjusted net result margin. So it shows we continued our strong growth in Q2, with 16% in Q4 last year, 21% first quarter, 26% second quarter and there's a lot of growth drivers that we will go through for the next quarters. We outperformed the market, and we were in the top tier with our peers where we really see a quite big difference between companies doing very well and companies not doing so well, which has to do with innovation and, yes, working with the market. Our mission, we're going to hear that a lot of times today, make media better. What happened in Q2? The first one I would like to mention is our rebranding. We have the AGM where the shareholders agreed to change the name. And the name now is Verve, formerly Verve Group SE. It's one company, one brand, and that's one thing we wanted to make clear. The company has been built by several M&A cases or M&A acquisitions and we believe in integrating, we believe in acting as one company because it just makes us much more efficient, much more clear and, yes, drives our market position better. Second point, strong customer growth, very important. We're still small and adding customers is super important. The other thing is scaling existing customers. If you have a customer, it's nice, but customers are connected to us. We take a cut of the media on most of the cases. So we need to scale them. They need to be happy with our products. And that brings me to the next point, which is really the 1 where we are outstanding in the market, which is privacy, targeting in environments where there's no identifier or where there's, let's say, no reliable identifier. Contextual targeting with ATOM, we have Moments.AI. We have different ways of targeting there. We'll go through that in the presentation further. Then the other thing, the more supply we have, so the more publishers connected, the more data we have and the better our platform is, the more of the ad requests that we're getting from the publishers will be monetized. So it's all really working more supply, more data and better AI. Prasanna will later really say a lot about the platform and give you a bit of understanding what we're doing there. So it's not only about adding customers, it's really also doing more with what we have. Then strengthening the demand side. That's -- yes, we have a new joiner, Alex. I'm not sure where he's sitting. He will also give a presentation. Alex comes from GroupM. And we said, okay, we had an -- when we started less than 10% demand side, 90% supply side. So we're really strong from the supply which is a very good position because that's where the data are, that's where the consumers are. But you also want to talk to the ones that have the budget, the advertisers, the agencies. That's what we're ramping up now. The acquisition of Jun Group is also a good step on that. Mishel is also sitting here and will also present and Alex, yes, knows the world of agencies, advertisers. So he's joining. He's also going to present. And then improving our capital structure. Paul's going to say a few more words about that. Leverage, I mentioned already before. So that's going in the right direction, but it's also important, of course, communication with the capital market, which we're doing here today, also very important. A bit of history. Growth path, I mean this company has gone through 2.5 phases, I would say. The one was gaming, we started as a gaming company. We saw, I think, in an early stage that showing organic growth with gaming is super difficult. That's what we see in the overall market now, gaming companies really suffering. Gaming M&A is nice, but the roll-up story is not enough for being a public company. And we started at a roll-up story. We built a nice gaming base, but organic growth is difficult with it. So we decided to solve the second largest problem of a game company or maybe even the largest, advertising. User acquisition and making money with ads. We were not happy with the advertising companies at that time because they are either point solutions already doing one channel or doing one solution or they are taking too much margin, some of the walled gardens, for example, you don't know where they spend the marketing money. And that's the reason that we didn't draft about what's the ideal advertising company. It's vertical, it's for sure digital then it's vertical, DSP, SSP, supply-side platform, demand-side platform, it should be on the list, by the way. And it's multichannel because you want to reach people during a day. And in the morning, you use your mobile phone, later, you listen to a digital radio station, you see it a digital out-of-home screen, you use a smart TV. So we want to reach people on different channels and then identifies the discipline privacy is becoming more important. So you also want to make sure that you can target people everywhere and that you have 100% addressability. So not only target people where you have the cookie. That's what we were building. That's why we renamed to Media and Games Invest because we didn't dare to immediately make the switch, which we did now. So we're now really an advertising company, a media company, a digital media company. And yes, showing good growth. As everybody knows, end of '22, beginning '23 were a bit difficult, with the Ukraine, the interest rates increases, growth was a bit more difficult at that time. We grew our customer base very well. We kept our revenue in the first three quarters of '23 stable. But we have since then really shown extremely good growth coming to the growth drivers a bit later. A bit about the team. The Board is not all here, but also we have a strong board, we have a very good board. We have two new joiners in the board. First one is Greg Coleman. He's U.S.-based, he's a professor at New York University and the Stern's Department of that. He was formerly President of Criteo. He worked also as a President of BuzzFeed, so he knows the market extremely well from a publisher site, from an ad tech side, I would say. So super happy to have him join. And Peter Huijboom, who we will see later on stage and we will get a bigger introduction, but as mentioned already before, background on Dentsu. Knows the advertiser side very well. And so we have not only in the C team, Alex, but also in the Board now, Peter, who we know this part of the market very well. Then the C team, the team that's managing the company, Jens, now doing that with me for 12 years, COO. Paul, 6.5 years, 7 years almost, CFO; then Sameer, also more than 4 years, 5 years now on board, 5 years, I think; and Alex, new joiner; and myself, yes, I started with buying a distressed games company and pretty proud about where we are now and a strong advertising company. Employees over 300 in the U.S., over 400 in Europe, over 50 in Asia or, let's say, rest of the world, a few also in LatAm. 87 -- sorry, 78% -- difficult to read numbers. 78% of the revenue is coming from the U.S. And that's maybe good to quickly zoom in there a bit. U.S. is the biggest advertising market. We will see some numbers later. But U.S. is also the most competitive advertising market. There's a lot of competition there on digital advertising. And our philosophy is, if you can really be successful in the U.S., you can also be successful in the rest of the world. And we have the big advantage that we are also European based that we also understand GDPR, that we understand that different countries have different languages and these things, what a lot of Americans don't understand. So apart from driving the U.S., we're also now more and more driving the rest of the world. With spare hats, we don't do every country at the same time. We also need to focus our growth. But it's important. So U.S. strongest, but also a lot of potential in the other markets. A bit about our business model. Yes, I know a lot of people here, most people following us for longer. Those that don't and maybe as a reminder for the others, what we do is basically super simple. You have a mobile phone or you have a laptop or whatever. You open a page and on the page, there is an ad. At the moment that you open the page this ad, which is technically connected to our platform is, let's say, presenting a signal or that's the ad spot is sending a signal to us. we enrich the signal as much as possible with data. So what page is it? If you have a cookie or identifies what kind of person is behind it. That's going to the demand side, to the advertiser. The more data we have, the better an advertiser can estimate if that's the target group, the company would like to target. So the higher the bidding is, the more information, the better information we give. The highest bid wins, we render the ad. Can be a video, can be a banner, it can be everything. And then that ad is displayed at the ad spot that you see. That all has to happen within 100 milliseconds because if it's slower, you will not see an ad, and then nobody is really happy because that means money is lost. So within 100 milliseconds, we have to do that. That also means that this is not a human interaction that this is full automated AI data. More data, better AI means better targeting, means making better decisions for the advertiser, means more money for the publisher. So that's what we do. As said, it's not so difficult, but still a lot of work. Then that's also a bit the guideline for today. we have, let's say, three main areas that we're looking at. The one is enabling better outcome for advertisers and publishers. As I mentioned before, an advertiser wants best targeting for a good, let's say, fee. And then publisher wants a good CPMs and fill rates, so as much money as possible for its inventory. Then with responsible advertising solutions coming to that in a minute in emerging channels. Going through those three. I mean here, I took away of it already, efficient user acquisition for advertisers, best monetization at scale. What's happening? So on the demand side, the advertiser side, it's about using the data, giving them the possibility to target certain segments, male 30 to 40 years old driving a luxury car, whatever, different segments and global supply because more and more companies are working globally, and they also want to target outside of the U.S. or outside of Europe. Then on the Supply side, global demand. [indiscernible] publisher, more and more publishers are also acting global, a lot of games companies, but also news companies, they translate. I mean, AI translates everything. So also there, it is about, let's say, getting more global demand that they don't have -- I don't know if views in India that are not monetized. Then it's about fill rates and CPMs, which I just mentioned and also about making life as easy as possible for them, which means good SDKs. SDK, software development kit, also on the list, which is that what we integrate into an app, but if the SDK has technical problems, the app crashes. You lose people on your app, you don't want that. So that's very important. And in the middle, supply path optimization, it's cutting the middleman. We lately saw an ad again which have passed 16 technical platforms between the advertiser and the publisher everybody taking a cut 20% or more. So that's not efficient advertising. SPO, supply path optimization is as much direct supply for the advertiser as possible. So no people in between. Targeting, I mentioned that before; and scaleable, Q4 is the strongest quarter that we have. So quarters are building up. There is seasonality in this market. Q1 is the weakest, and then the quarters get stronger each quarter. And in Q4, you don't want to have your systems pause or to have technical issues. So scalability in the platform is super important. Response advertising solutions, yes, who are we having on the demand side? That's advertisers. First of all, here's some of the logos. You will see many more. We work for large companies and a lot of small companies, a lot of Scandinavian companies also. Then agencies and here are the top 5 agencies in the world. They have roughly 70% of the global advertising budgets that go through their books. So those are super important, but there's also tons of small advertising companies that we work with. And then the DSPs, the demand side platforms, a lot of agencies, but also advertisers directly booked on demand side platforms. The Trade Desk is probably the well most known of that. So we have over 80 of those connected to also be able to buy on our supply. Yes. A few things here. Getting the right solution for the right audience. So it's about responsible advertising, which means it's privacy conform, we look at carbon things, we look at brand safe. You don't want to have your ad in an, I don't know, an unsuitable kind of environment page. So those things are very important. I'll also cover that later in the presentation. Then focus on emerging channels. We have a whole presentation on that by, Carl, later. But first of all, I think it's smart as a company to focus there where the growth is. It's easier to grow where growth is than to have a market that is declining. And secondly, it's also nicer or easier to take a market position there because market positions are not yet taken. Growth markets are easier. We focus on mobile. That's our strongest one. It's over 80% of our revenues. CTV, our second largest for us market over 10% of the revenues both grow with over 10% per year. That makes already also a challenge for us, of course, to grow faster. And then a bit, let's say, channels coming up now, digital out-of-home. You see a lot of more traditional screens, but it's getting all digital, easy to steer, you can also do targeted advertising. You know who's come -- passing by, time of day, you can show different ad. That was not possible then people had to stick the [ big blackouts ] there. And then also upcoming Retail Media. Yes, Amazon is the big example, making more money from advertising than from selling goods but you also see a Walmart that's heavily invested and each retailer that's not making money from the data and the customers they have is kind of missing something. So retail media is coming up very strongly. And also audio podcast, totally undermonetized. A lot of people are spending a lot of time with podcast and audio advertising they are still super weak. I'm sorry, that was the vector. Then, yes, we have achieved a lot. And just a few examples here, leading in terms of reach and quality of supply, some Pixelate, some other Johnsmedia that's showing that also getting to that later, a dominant presence in different channels. We are strong, especially in the U.S. and a high industry recognition for really being a yes, power player, and a strong player, but also especially for our privacy solutions and then showing really good KPIs. And here some again, 20% organic growth, I mentioned already before, a revenue CAGR of 30%, 45% over the last years and earnings per share went up also nicely. We're mostly focusing on the company, but of course, it's also good to see that the earnings per share are going up. What's driving the growth? And that's basically my last slide before I hand over to Paul. A bit of summary. First of all, the market, we have growth markets where we are which have a lot of potential, which are a lot larger than we are. So there's ample growth opportunity here. Then it's about adding customers, it's about scaling the customers that we have. It's about new products and contextual asset gives us a really strong position in the market. It opens a lot of doors also for new customers. But the technology also enables us much better addressability. So we can address a lot more people if an advertiser -- oh sorry -- if a publisher for example, has 100 ad views, but only for 40 of those or 50 of those, there is a cookie, then the rest is blind. The blind ad spots are sold cheaper. So the CPMs, the cost per mill are lower. But if you can target in the blind spot basically, with contextual targeting, you just make a lot more money with a lower CPM, a lower cost of media. So those things are super important, and it's about a publisher wants to sell all its ad impressions and not only the ones that have a cookie or have an opt-in. And platform synergies. The bigger we get, the more efficient we get. The verticalization is a strong target for us. We would like to have a 50-50 between demand and supply because that makes it just more efficient. We cut all the middleman, that makes it more efficient. We do multichannel that makes targeting for an advertiser much easier and also for a publisher that has multichannels. So the whole platform thought is super important. And that also makes it easy. We work with Google, we have a cloud platform from Google, which is helping us a lot also on getting a lower cost structure, but also on the AI side, improving that. So all those investments, the bigger you are, the more efficient they are, and that's very important for us to go in there. Then I would like to hand over to Paul. Thank you very much, and hope you have a good day.

So welcome, everyone, and I'm delighted today to present the second quarter financial highlights. But what we will do today is especially also making a deep dive into what is really driving our organic growth behind the financial numbers and even more important, what is the outlook of the business, what is the margin expansion which we expect for the coming years and why this company is gearing towards very strong growth in the future. So starting here right away with the second quarter financial highlights, which we released this morning and also two weeks ago, already the first financial update. And we are very proud to present 26% organic growth in the second quarter, 27% total growth, taking FX into account as well. So we printed EUR 97 million revenues in this quarter compared to EUR 76 million in the previous year and we increased the EBITDA to EUR 29 million compared to EUR 21 million in the previous year, which means a 37% EBITDA growth. And what we see here 37% EBITDA growth versus 26% organic growth. So we have a very strong operating leverage given that we initiated a cost-saving program last year. So very good cost savings in regards to personnel expenses, but also OpEx. And that enables us now to grow the profits much faster than the revenues. And that is also relating into very strong cash flows. So the operating cash flow came in at EUR 31 million, while the CapEx, which was also reduced over the last years sitting now at EUR 9 million of the investment cash flow, which in the end then relates to a very strong free cash flow generation. Then looking a bit into the past. So we have consistently over the last years, growing the revenues as well as the EBITDA even in a year, '22 and '23 where we protected our bottom line, where growth was not as strong. And why was growth not as strong? We see here on the right side, the 38% organic growth in 2021. And as Remco mentioned already, with the Ukraine war starting, the inflation rates were going up, interest rates were going up. So corporates needed to protect the bottom line, so they were cutting the marketing budgets. That led already to a reduction in organic growth in 2022 to 18%. While then we saw the bottom, this 5% organic growth in 2023. During these times, we always kept our customers on board. So the retention rates across the customers were always between 95% to 98%, but on average, they will decrease their budgets. What we saw then in Q4 '23 is a very nice recovery of the advertising market, following then also increasing budgets from the corporates. Plus in addition, I think that's what we will see today, a lot of company-specific growth drivers like a lot of new customer onboardings but also a lot of new products which we launched, which already show very good results. That leads already to a very nice acceleration of the organic growth now in Q1 and Q2, so 21% organic growth in Q1, 26% in Q2. And I'm very delighted today to already give some visibility that July, August, we also see a further acceleration of organic growth so this company is growing much, much faster, and that's also one of the reasons why we recently increased our guidance. Then some main KPIs, which we report for quite some time already now so that people can really follow what is behind the financial numbers. One very important KPI is in the end, the volumes, the ad impressions, which we deliver which in the end is always the ads, which we show to the end consumer. And with each ad, we have a billable event. So we're making revenues. And we see here that the ad impressions were growing with 24% in the second quarter to 224 billion ads shown to the end consumer. And we also see here with an organic growth of 26% and 24% volume growth that the prices per ad on average started to increase again in 2022, 2023, the so-called CPM surprise per ad were going down given that there was less demand for advertising. And now we see basically with the recovery of the advertising cycle that this starts to improve again. And on top, we also have new ad formats, which are also driving higher CPMs which in the end means more revenues with less transactions and more margins and more profitability in the long run. What we also see in the expansion rate, so that's basically the customer growth from the existing customers that in 2023, on average, the customers were decreasing the advertising budgets. They were slowly improving until end of 2023. But we see now in Q1 and Q2 that we really generate additional organic growth also with the existing customers again. So we had 110% in Q1, 109% in Q2, and we expect that to also develop at least at these levels is further improving as we're also growing the share of wallet with the existing customers through new ad formats and new verticals where we're going into. On top of already the 9% to 10% organic growth from existing customers. Each quarter, we're adding a lot of new demand and supply partners, which means we drive a lot of additional revenues, not just in the current quarter, especially also in the years to come because it usually takes three to six months to really scale up the customers so they become large customers. And here, we see that the team really did a great job. So 33% growth of the large software clients in the second quarter year-over-year. And also very important is the retention rate. So it's not just we're onboarding a lot of new customers and we're scaling the existing customers. We're also keeping the customers on board. And further improvement to 98% now, it really proves that the products which you offer on the demand side, but also on the supply side, really driving a lot of monetization, efficient user acquisition and in the end, a very high quality, which the team delivers here to the customer. Making a deep dive now that we got a lot of questions over the last years, which verticals are growing? Where we are in? And here, we do the split now on the demand as well as on the supply side. And I think it really gives a lot of insights, which verticals we're growing the most. And maybe as the first note, yes, we started as a 100% gaming company. And in the beginning in 2019, where we really started to invest more into ad tech basically on the left as well as on the right side, it was more or less 100% gaming demand as well as gaming supply and we have really diversified the company over the last years, onboarding a lot of new verticals like retail, food, but also digital and social brands like LinkedIn. And that's what we see on the left side on the demand side. So from a revenue split in the first half year in '24, 49% were coming from the retail and food sector, 28% were coming from the digital and social brand sector like LinkedIn, but also Facebook and others, 12% from gaming, that means that we have further diversified compared to the 15% in the previous year. And in the end, this also shows where we onboard a lot of new customers over the last year. So we're further diversifying the company, also a bit away from gaming while gaming will still be part of our DNA, and it's still also a very important part of the advertising industry as there's a lot of new games, mobile apps constantly launched and a lot of screen time also on the mobile sector, which Peter will also show us later that this is one of the most important sectors to be in. On the supply side, we also see that we diversified away from gaming, 41% in H1 '23, 34% of the ads, which we place now in content is now in gaming content, but also the entertainment sector, and that's also online radio stations, but also Paramount, for example, all the streaming content which people also now consume through the mobile. Here, we see a lot of additional ads which we place on that content, but also news, for example, Overall, I think it really shows that we have diversified the company in various sectors and that we have really grown across the industry and taking a lot of market share. Then looking a bit more into the regions. Remco mentioned already. The U.S. is the largest advertising market in the world. And we've taken a lot of market share here. So last year, we had 64% of the revenues in the second quarter coming from North America. This is 78% of the group revenues now. And we see that, especially in the U.S., we saw a very strong growth, so 41% which in the end is more than EUR 20 million additional revenues, which we just in this one quarter generated in North America. And within the United States and that's especially here in that region, we also see a very nice additional revenue from the full screen and video ads. Also, Carl will explain a little bit more the development from the banner to the full screen ads and how these new ad formats drive a lot of additional growth and what this market needs in the end. But we see here this is completely new revenues. We did EUR 6 million revenues already in the second quarter '24 versus EUR 1 million in the previous year. And this growth in the end can also develop into the second half year and in the years to come as it is still a quite young ad format where there's much more scale and demand coming from the advertisers for now. In addition also, and I think that's important to mention, Jun Group is specialized in selling these full screen ads. So they have a lot of direct demand from the advertisers. And as we have already supply at scale, there's a lot of revenue and cost and margin synergies which we can also generate in the years to come. And Mishel, the CEO of Jun Group will also tell us a little bit later how this will work together and what's full screen ads are being about. Then looking into the verticals, the emerging channels where we are in. So 85% of our revenues is coming from the mobile sector. So the company is mobile first. That's where we started also across the ad tech part. We then also added CTV, one of the second most growing markets the advertising industry, which makes today already 11% of the group revenues. Then desktop, not a big focus, but still as an omnichannel platform, good to offer it to the advertisers as a full stop shop and a one-stop shop. And in the end, [ 1% is ] out-of-home, that's something where we also plan to further grow and on top and there, we don't do much revenues yet. It's also, for example, the audio, the podcast world, where we see a lot of growth potential, which would also be one of the additional markets, which is still early for us, but where we expect to also further grow in the coming years. On the right side, and I think that's really good to see is that especially on Apple iOS where the identifiers also being out of the market already for quite some years now. We see a very strong growth, especially also compared to the previous year, where 23% of the group revenues were coming from the iOS Apple devices. It's now increased to 31%, and that is driven basically on our privacy first targeting solutions. The scan optimization, which was basically introduced last year by the Verve DSP shows extremely good results for the advertisers is reducing a lot of cost per install. I think Prasanna will also explain a little bit later how this works. And here we see a lot of additional demand, but also ATOM, for example, which is a product which we released already in 2021 and which we plan to further scale now over the coming years significantly. So there was a new version early this year. And also there, we see already the first very good results. And in essence, in the end, that's one of the main drivers here is in the end, the privacy-first targeting solutions on Apple. Then what does this all relates to? It relates to organic growth. And that means taking market share. The company's market on average and Peter will tell us much more about how the market grows and which verticals are there. But on average, it's growing at 9%. That's the expectation for 2024. We are growing almost 26% in the second quarter, 21% in the first quarter acceleration in Q3. So we see that in the end, we take a lot of market share. On average, the ad tech peers and the open Internet growing at 7%. So also here, we take a lot of additional market share. And why is market share so important? In the end, it means becoming more relevant for publishers and advertisers, getting even more budgets from them, onboarding much more new customers because in the end, they want to work with the large companies, the companies which have a lot of data. And that means in the end, it also enables us to even grow faster in the future, and therefore, it's a very good and strong base that we currently take a lot of market share and really scale the company. Then talking a little bit about Jun, and we will talk more about Jun today also in Part one. But we started basically on the supply side, to helping the publishers, the games companies to monetize their gaming content. That is also the reason why in the second quarter, before the Jun acquisition, we had 86% of the revenues coming from the supply side, just 14% from the demand side. The demand side was already growing at 68% organically in the second quarter. But obviously, to come to a 50-50 split, which is in a perfect world taking fully out the middleman, increasing margins, the ideal world, that would have taken quite a long time, and therefore, we are very happy that we could do the acquisition of Jun Group so that on a pro forma basis already, we're doing now 30% revenues on the demand side, 70% on the supply side. And there's significant revenue opportunities by combining both. We expect EUR 30 million to EUR 40 million in the next 2, 3, 4 years. And where is this revenue opportunity coming from? It's in the end from connecting direct demand and supply, driving more volumes up on both sides. It's also the international expansion of Jun Group, 98% of the revenues is in the United States. We already have a lot of offices -- sales offices here in Europe, but also in LatAm as well as in Asia. So there's a very strong revenue drivers also from the international expansion. Then one example, Mishel will tell much more about the synergies which we can realize here together. But also Connected TV, for example, which we sell on average at a 10% margin. If we sell that directly to the advertiser, we can really double down on this and in the end also getting even more budgets. And with the direct supply, which we have, which was missing on the Jun side, we have a lot of synergies which we can realize together. What does this all relates to, not just more market share, it also relates in the end to cash flows. And here, we see that on a last 12 months basis, we now did EUR 97 million in operating cash flow. While we did the last year, EUR 69 million so that's just 6 months, and the increase is 100% organic. While also the free cash flow after interest increased from EUR 23 million already to EUR 47 million. It's not taking Jun into account yet. So there will be much, much stronger growth also in the second half here from organic but also in addition to Jun. But we also see that the interest rates or the interest expenses have been rather on the high side was EUR 41 million, relatively stable now, not further increasing. But also here, we expect once the existing debt is refinanced that we can basically reduce that cost EUR 10 million to EUR 15 million. We already did large -- a smaller bond issue where we brought down the credit margin by roughly 2.5% and we think that's just the beginning as the company with the ongoing growth, which we have will become a much, much stronger company. And we are already, as of today, with the reduced leverage. So overall funding costs should go down, and that will drive much more free cash flow also in the years to come. On the right side, the CapEx development, so we didn't do as much M&A or more or less no M&A in the last two years, actually, that reduced also the acquisition CapEx, but we also were doing quite some cost savings. We were cutting down platforms, integrating. And that is the reason why the maintenance CapEx is also relatively low with EUR 8 million. And then we're adding some expansion CapEx on top new ad formats, new emerging channels, these kind of things to really drive more organic growth also in the years to come. And overall, we now have a total CapEx of EUR 39 million, which is in comparison to our operating cash flow of EUR 97 million on an LTM basis. From our perspective, the perfect balance because we generate a good free cash flow, and at the same point in time, we also really invest into future organic growth of the company. What does it mean if you generate a good free cash flow? Obviously, it means also a very good deleveraging capacity. And here, we see that we ended up in 2023 at 3.1x net leverage. We were already in the high times at 3.6x during 2022, and then we basically said, okay, no M&A and we completely focused on organic growth and really bring leverage down. We are happy that we already report now 2.8x net leverage as of June 2024, while by end of the year on a pro forma basis by taking also the Jun EBITDA for the last 12 months into account, we expect to be already at 2.4x and then without giving a forecast here, but these are consensus numbers with EUR 61 million expectation from the analyst for the free cash flow generation next year and then also paying down some debt items. We expect already to be below 2x net leverage by end of the year which is also then in line with our long-term financial targets, which we just basically also a further decrease in terms of leverage of 1.5x to 2.5x, and we are extremely confident that we will deliver this outcome. Then coming more to the outlook, so what the future will bring. And here, we are very delighted that we could increase the guidance again on the back of a very strong organic growth in the first half year, but also with visibility into July, August. So that has nothing to do with the Jun Group acquisition, that was basically the first guidance update and we expect now EUR 400 million to EUR 420 million in revenues, EUR 125 million to EUR 135 million EBITDA and if you would take Jun into account for the full year, we would be at around EUR 450 million and EUR 151 million EBITDA already on a pro forma basis, which is a significant increase in size and profitability compared to the EUR 322 million revenues and EUR 95 million EBITDA, which we have generated in the financial year 2023. In line with the guidance update, we also now increased our midterm financial targets. Given that we connect in more direct demand to this direct supply. So there's a margin expansion. We take out the middleman, more margin stays in-house. On top of all this strong customer growth, existing and new customers, we are also very confident that we can grow with the 25% to 30% revenue CAGR, with an EBITDA margin of 30% to 35% with an EBIT margin of 20% to 25%. And we also committed to further bring down the leverage to 1.5x to 2.5x and we expect already to be at this level by end of this year, but we also expect a further good reduction during the next year. And then in line with what I just highlighted already that I'm delighted to already give some visibility that we see a further acceleration of the organic growth. We can also already basically here confirm that for the third quarter, we are already within these targets and that we also see a further margin expansion on the profitability side and that also the leverage basically is in good development. And here, in the end, summarizing what we have seen, Remco already basically was guiding us through the four growth drivers, which are really driving the business. So we have a very strong underlying market growth, which obviously also helps our existing customers to grow, which is our base. Then we have the customer expansion, which we saw a lot of new customers onboarded, 33% more large software clients but also existing customers scaling up. Then we have the new products, ATOM as well as, for example, also the full screen ads where we will learn more today also in the other sessions. And then on top, obviously, the platform synergies, connecting direct demand for supply, but also on the OpEx side, with the new Google cloud contract, which we have, which is saving a lot of money also on the bottom line. So bringing all this together, we enable a lot of very profitable organic growth for the future. That's Then the last section. I think the time is almost up already, and then we open up for questions. What does it mean for Verve? In the end, what we are today? So we are able to grow at very high rates due to our very strong leading market position, which we have now, especially on mobile, but also CTV and also in other emerging channels. And we also have a very strong ad technology, which drives that growth and the customer demand. Today, and that's what we saw earlier. We are a much more stronger diversified company across a lot of verticals, not just in gaming. We improved our credit metrics and also reduced our net leverage now. We improved the quality of earnings, which also enables much more free cash flow generation going forward and more deleveraging capacity. We will deliver together with Mishel also a very successful integration of the Jun Group and will take further market share by combining demand and supply. And in a nutshell, what does it mean? We will generate a material shareholder value over the years to come. And we, as a management team, been extremely committed to deliver on all these targets and things and further growing the company as we have done over the last years. So with this, I would like to open up for questions.

Thank you, Paul and thank you, Remco. So please, come on up Remco. And Paul you stay up, right? Okay, So we can now start with the audience here around us, and we start over here. And please introduce yourself and ask your question.

It's Fiona Orford-Williams from Edison Group. First of all, you're obviously gaining a lot of market share. That makes you a lot more visible to your competitors. Does it make you more of a target for them to try and encroach on the gains that you've made? That's my first -- do you want to do them one by one or would you like...

One by one.

Let's do them one by one. I think that's easier. Yes, the good thing about getting -- becoming more visible is that, of course, we're getting much more approached. And it's competitors, but there's also a lot of, let's say, cooperation in this market. So the more we get on their screen, the more business we will get, and that's basically also driving further growth. So it's -- and that's also maybe to emphasize the one brand Verve, also helps there because in some of the charts, we will still -- he was smart or there was PubNative, there were all kind of -- we're in a lot of charts, but with different brands. And now people really start to realize what we are building here. And yes, that helps.

My second question was about CPMs. I mean, you're -- we've both got improving CPMs in the market. And through -- and you've got more improvement through your own mix as well. Do you want to just dig down a little bit deeper into which is the primary driver and how you see those developing in the second half?

It's your turn.

So the majority of the driver is company specific. We don't see on average a recovery of the CPMs yet, but especially in new ad formats like the full screen ads deliver better CPMs, which means, in the end, we need to do less volumes for a higher amount of revenue, which then also means more margins and especially also the full screen and video ads, we see a very strong growth. So we expect on average to further improve that also in the years to come. We also expect from the market that, on average, the CPM should further improve because there's more demand, especially in the U.S. from the big corporates in terms of advertising spend, which means if demand goes up and the supply stays relatively the same and the enterprises should go up. So that's our expectation. So this company specific currently, but we also expect the market to recover in the periods to come.

Maybe one extra sentence on that. We are very good in targeting in segments without consent or traffic without consent and that by definition has a lower CPM. So we also -- the more success we have in non-consent traffic that has a damping effect on our CPMs because they're just lower in that segment. Still it's a big part of our success. So we will always have a bit of that effect, which is a mix effect.

And my third one, if I'm allowed. Just on the shape of the second half, you said -- just for clarification, you said acceleration of growth in July and August? Do you mean acceleration over Q2?

So when we saw the 21% in Q1. The 26% in Q2 is basically another with the same calculation principle like-for-like to the previous year.

And then Q4, obviously, you'll then start to get tougher comps because that's when we had the balance last year?

That's true. That's also baked into the guidance update already, as you can see, otherwise, the guidance would be even higher. On the other hand, there are so many new customers which we onboard, also very large companies. So there is much more growth also. And yes, we are, as usual, also being prudent on the guidance. But here, I think given the very strong organic growth file of the company, that's much more meaningful double-digit organic growth also for the full Q4 and the years to come.

Yes. And also here one addition, political is the one that's super difficult to judge seeing how much money is collected by the candidates now and what ammunition is coming there, not only from the top candidates but also locally. There's a lot of money coming into the market. We're super careful in our forecast with that, but that could also drive a lot of additional extra growth in the Q4 -- end of Q3 actually already and beginning Q4. But that's something that's difficult to judge. So we'll take it when it comes, but we're not forecasting too much there.

But we don't see it that's maybe also important. We don't see it yet. So the numbers which you saw in Q4 in Q2, the 26% organic growth is basically without any political spend, which means in the end, there's no onetime effect or something similar in here.

Okay good. And I actually take a question from online, and then we take like every second from. So we have one here from -- it's from [indiscernible]. Hi, Remco and Paul, great numbers -- and I think it's a tag along question to the previous question. Can you give us your view on the consolidation going on in the ad tech market? Are you open for a merger or being acquired? Maybe Remco?

First of all, if we would, let's say, we are not allowed to tell those things. I mean that's, I think, important. Now market is consolidating, market needs to consolidate. That's what we -- when we were a games company, which we saw and as I mentioned before, there are so many point solutions, so many subscale companies in this market. Now we can say that. We are big, bigger. No, but there isn't -- how to say, consolidation is ongoing. A lot of smaller companies are disappearing. We see a lot of companies not growing as fast as the market, that means that they cannot invest in innovation. If they don't invest in innovation, they really will get in trouble. We've seen some larger, yes, also acquisition steps. Sarto was acquired by Equativ. There's a few more things we just saw now. Outbrain acquiring [indiscernible] very good. So there is a consolidation going on in the market. It needs to happen. There's too many parties. I mean an advertiser doesn't want to work with 20 parties and publisher also wants to have, let's say, the parties that have the good contact with the advertisers. So yes. And -- we think our best way of getting there now is organic growth also to make that very clear. Organic growth is so strong at the moment. And M&A, if you do it is also disturbing, and not saying now that Mishel is disturbing us, because we like them as a member of the Verve. But an acquisition like Jun, which really fits extremely well in, but we would like to digest that. Our best period has been the last quarters where we didn't do M&A. We were really able to concentrate on our products, on really growing all those things. M&A is disturbing. So that should be exception, if at all, we are an organic growth company now.

Okay. So check from the audience, then. Yes, we have one over here.

Vincent from Pareto Securities Analysts. A follow-up on this if I start with that one. During the beginning of the year, you mentioned the special events and sports events. I just wondered how those type of events have come into effect and affected CPM so far during the year?

Yes, we always -- because we're global, we always have different effects. Let's say, we had Olympics. We had the football. As we are mostly U.S. traffic, football didn't have such a big effect, Olympics a little bit, not really a lot. I mean we had cricket championship in India, which then suddenly you see a spike in India. I think we are now so spread that those things are, let's say -- it's giving small peaks, but it's not the -- bigger peak still are a Prime Day from Amazon, for example, those kind of days because around that, there's a lot of advertising. So sports events are not the big ones are driving. But to your basic question with CPMs, each extra demand is driving CPM. I mean if there is Q4, the CPMs are always higher, because there's just, yes, much more demand in their supply, so we see also during those peaks that these things are happening and especially if it's a special event, then the suppliers not all supply suitable, so they get in special pockets of the supply, you get also increasing CPMs.

Maybe to be concrete on the question as well. So we didn't see any big fluctuations in the CPMs during the sport events. And as Remco also said, we are mainly gearing towards the U.S. So the impact on our platform is relatively low from these events.

All right. And another one on the U.S. group revenue share increasing from 23% to 31%. I know you mentioned some of the drivers behind that increase in revenue share from the whole group. But if you could just dig a little deeper to the actual improvements that we've seen and elaborate on that.

So as mentioned, and Prasanna will also present one of the solutions with data set, our DSP has basically released last year. So there was a lot of new privacy manifest things, updates also by Apple, where we develop a lot of AI technology around -- to really drive much better results for the advertisers. One of the results, for example, was the 25% lower cost per install for UA campaigns of certain advertisers. So we saw a very strong expansion of these marketing budgets from the customers, which basically try to these things. In addition, we also saw a lot of new customers basically onboarding because -- and asking us also for in the end, the iOS vertical, given that we have a lot of other privacy-first targeting solutions like ATOM, even the product has just rolled out at a much larger scale now. So the revenue impact is not as large yet, but we already saw a lot of customer intakes due to this. And that also had a very positive impact already on the iOS vertical, but we would expect that to grow further in the periods to come.

Okay. And my last one on the topic of Google. And that they have decided to not phase out or them retracted from the previous initiative of phasing out the third-party cookies from browsers, and now they have provided users or will provide users with options to how they want to be tracked on the web. It would, of course, it'd be interesting to hear your overall take on this, especially since it's been a whole topic of discussion of overall marketing space, but also during previous presentations and con calls, and what the potential impact could be on advertising on Android and Google's privacy sandbox, overall?

Overall, we love privacy. I mean, privacy is good for the consumer, but it also disrupts this market. So let's identifiers, all those kind of things. We have really prepared for that. We have the products for that and we gain market share with that. When Google announced private sandbox, which is quite a while ago, they first announced it actually for Android, and later for -- how to say for it for their browser. There was a shock effect in the market. Or let's say, there was an uncertainty in the market. This is coming. People were waking up. A lot of agencies were waking up. But Apple did it, a lot of -- let's say, when they got their scan implemented, a lot of people went from the Apple Island to the Google Island, and just started spending there, because they still had identifiers. But then Google announced, they were also going to deprecate it got a kind of wake-up effect to agencies and brands. And when then they made a clear end of last year that they were really going to take a series with privacy sandbox, the shock effect was even bigger and people started to look around. Then they delayed it. They said already, okay, we need to delay. There was a lot of crisis also from the sector because the proposal that we made was basically an forcing everybody to go into their ad server, which would have been a global dominance on that almost, that's something that nobody in the market wanted. So that was where also a lot of regulators, but also companies in the market were protesting. And now we're drawing it. The effect -- psychological effect is there. And what they now say, we give the consumer the choice that's basically also what Apple said, when they were starting this. So we expect the, let's say, cookies to further disappear into the market. There will be less concern from users to use data from them. And therefore, the journey with more contextual will continue. Maybe a bit less drastical than the end of last year, we expected but the movement is there. The trend is there. And we have some numbers later in the presentations. And there, you see that over 50% of the traffic already is without consent at the moment. And so it's really spreading and it's helping us as a company. I hope that answers your question.

And we have one final question over here.

Sven Sauer with Kepler. I had two questions, if I may. First one, you said just before acquiring Jun Group that you weren't particularly looking at acquisitions. What's your -- going forward, are you not involved at all in M&A at this point? Or how should we think about that?

As mentioned before, organic growth is our driver. So we don't want M&A to disturb our organic growth. On the other hand, we are in a consolidating market. So we have a half an eye open, I would say, if things come by, but it's not -- we rather say no to M&A because I said before, it's disturbing too much. So basically, no M&A now.

So they have to come to you?

They have to come to us. They have to...

And just a second question. You have been very diligent in bringing down your CapEx. Where do you think CapEx to sales should be in, maybe this year or next year?

So the current rates which we see is EUR 31 million expansion CapEx and around EUR 8 million to EUR 10 million maintenance CapEx. We think that's a very healthy ratio. So we have a lot of discussions on the management team, how much should we invest into the new ad formats into the emerging channels and to new targeting solutions. And was also the experience from the last years where we see, if we put enough capital in various pockets that some of them will definitely take off, which we see now as well. We think that's a very healthy ratio to keep. We don't need to increase these budget significantly. While we also did not would like to cut them to just optimize the free cash flow generation. And I think in the end, the next big driver is really bring down the interest cost.

No, that's maybe to add one thing there. We are adding a lot on the sales side to salespeople, those you don't capitalize. So that's really where you see growth, which goes directly against the EBITDA. And that's, of course, we cannot hire 400 salespeople at once because then our investors wouldn't like it very much. And also, it's hard to manage that. But we are ramping up on the sales side more sellers, because that's also driving. And as we showed before, U.S. is very strong, but also there's a lot of potential, but also outside the U.S.

Just to add on this, in the end, the Jun acquisition obviously bring us a lot of great sellers in, sellers which have been there for 5 to 15 years already with Jun Group. They have all the contacts. And if we would have built that up in-house, we would have most likely hired a lot of people, which maybe downturn out to be successful in reading a lot of additional budgets in. So with the Jun acquisition, we already have now a very strong base also on the sales side. We maybe add a few people here and there also on publisher sales to onboard even more publishers as well. But in the end, I think we also with the Jun acquisition, we have a very good set now also on the demand side to really drive further growth in the years to come.

Okay. Thank you, Paul and Remco. And I know we have more questions in the room. And I would also like to say to you online. Thanks a lot for all the questions, and I will do my very best to see if I can really include them in during today. So that's my promise. Okay. So I think we keep on going. And we will get you back on stage for a couple of more questions. Okay. Wrong direction, right direction. So we welcome Mishel, CEO Jun Group on stage. Welcome.

Thank you. Great to be here.

Yes. Great to see you. So I'm thinking maybe you should share a little bit about your journey with Jun Group. Let's just set the scene.

Of course. So I've been with Jun Group for 10 years now. So I guess time does fly when you're having fun. When I joined Jun Group, the company obviously was much smaller back then. And my main goal initially was to add structure to the way we were building products and going to the market with those products, as I joined as the Head of Product. And then as the company grew and evolved, I moved from Head of Product to COO to CEO.

That's a good starting point.

All right. Awesome. So great to hear in my first Verve Capital Markets Day, first of many. I'm going to talk a lot about some of the topics that Paul and Remco started covering in terms of synergies and growth opportunities. But before I get to that, I wanted to give a quick overview of Jun Group and spend a few minutes talking about how we use technology to enable our performance for our clients, the different lines of businesses that we have, and how we serve those lines of businesses and then share a few examples of case studies and how we actually perform for those clients. Jun Group is laser focused on brands and media companies. We are always focused on helping those brands and media companies achieve their goals. We have a lot of experience working with those brands, and I'll get to a few examples in a minute. Here on this slide, I wanted to share just a few stats about the company's performance and the general health. And all of that is accomplished by having the right team in place, obviously, it all starts from there. And then having the right alignment from a technology perspective in terms of our ability to fulfill the goals and KPIs that our clients have. So let's get into the specifics. As was mentioned earlier already, we are super focused on the demand side. We have a strong positioning on the demand side. Most of our business is U.S.-focused, but we do have some international clients as well. When we think about who we work with, we work with brands, either directly or via media agencies and the big five holding companies were mentioned earlier, we work with those. We work with smaller agencies, depending on who the client is using. And then on the other side, we also work with media companies. Now some of you might think, wait, media companies are publishers now. Like how are they related to the demand side? Actually, for us, media companies are demand clients. So even though in the examples you see here those media companies serve ads on their properties and on their websites. When they work with us, they work with us to amplify their content and to reach their target audiences and we see them as demand side partners and clients. So here are a few examples of our clients. I mentioned earlier that we work with the brands and agencies. On the left side, you see a few examples of those brands and media agencies that we work, again, either directly or indirectly with them. And then on the right-hand side, you see examples of a few of the media companies that we work with. There are some big names there that have worked with us for many years. They represent a wide range of types of clients, some of our clients are focused on reaching broad audiences. So when you think about consumer packaged goods companies, CPG companies, et cetera, they are normally looking to reach a broad audience. And then on the other side, you have companies or advertisers that are interested in reaching niche audiences, and our platform was built to serve both types of clients. All right. So let's talk about the different sides of our technology, starting from the SDK. So Remco mentioned SDK earlier. SDK stands for a Software Development Kit. Think about it as a piece of software that you integrate into your app, and that allows you to monetize the audiences that you have in Europe. It all starts from there. And the importance of that SDK for us is the ability to reach the consumer directly. We don't want to have 16 hops as Remco mentioned earlier, before we reach to the target consumer. And having an SDK gives us that direct access to the consumer that is super critical when it comes to controlling for performance, in terms of targeting, in terms of our ability to execute full screen and beautiful attention grabbing ads and also in terms of our ability to maintain a high margin. Then we have schema. I'll talk in a minute more about Schema and Vera, but think about Schema and Vera as our tools or engines that allow us to laser-focus on the right audiences that are advertisers that we work with want to target. And then Vera comes to serve as the optimization engine, again, enabling all that performance that we guarantee and promise to our clients. So in this example that you see here, which reflects what is Schema, we always start from this capability that the SDK gives us to ask users questions. So because we are integrated into those apps directly and we have a direct access to the consumer, we can ask users very simple questions directly, and they can choose whether to answer or not. It's all consent-based. We are not operating in an environment where we have to tie it to mobile additives. So we are not really dependent on the mobile [indiscernible]. We're definitely not dependent on cookies. So respecting users' privacy and making sure that we operate in an environment that does that is super important. So going back to the question we asked this [indiscernible] year about whether they're in the market for buying a new car, the recent response that we get from the user, we can do multiple things. The first one, which is kind of obvious when you think about it, we can serve the right ad to the user based on the response that they give us. So if the users here in this example says, yes, I'm in the market to buy a car. We will serve them in this example, a Honda ad and make sure that Honda is reaching those consumers that are interested in buying a car right now. The other thing that we do that is interesting, which gives us the opportunity to scale things up is, we take that data and we added to other information we have about that consumer, and we built what's referred to in the industry as look-a-like models. So basically identifying users that have similar characteristics, similar attributes that we have in our system that are likely to say yes to this question, and then serving them that Honda ad based on that information. If the user says no, or if we -- if our system decides that this user is not likely interested in buying a new car, then we will start on a different ad and that ad could be contextually targeted or could be targeted based on other information and other data points that we have about that user. In the industry, this is referred to as zero-party data. And the reason why it's referred to a zero-party data is because the user is volunteering that information. And they don't have to give that information, but they give that information voluntarily, and we use that to target them with better suited ads. Now let's talk about Vera. Vera is our optimization engine. It's AI-based. We started using AI in 2019. Many years before it became a household name and a buzz word that everyone is using. Everyone is doing AI these days, right? So for us, AI has been part of the story for many years now. The way we do -- we use AI involves our ability to use the data that we have to optimize the performance of the campaigns that we're running for our clients, in a way that is aligned with their goals and the performance objectives that they have. So that can involve using data that we collect directly, SDK polling, other information that our SDK gives us directly, et cetera, and can also include information that we get from third parties. You wanted to make sure that if a certain brand or a customer that you work with is interested in a brand lift or in sales lift, you have the right integrations in place to measure that you're actually accomplishing the goals and objectives that, that brand has. So we have a suite of integrations that gives us that access that allows us to optimize for the goals that those brands and media companies have. And then we always -- that engine will always look for ways to further optimize not only the performance but also the margin to make sure that we operate in a high-margin capacity. Now let's talk more about the lines of business. So you heard me mention brands and media companies. Let's take a look and focus more about what that actually means. So starting from brands. We just spoke about the importance of targeting and how targeting the right consumer for advertiser is super important. Once you target the right consumer, you have to make sure that you grab their attention. We are all being exposed to ads on a daily basis from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep. It's super important to grab the user's attention. Once we targeted them to ensure that the message the advertiser was interested in sending is actually being delivered. Then you have to measure and you have to make sure that you perform. So it's a combination of targeting, grabbing their attention and then measuring the success and optimizing based on the results that you see. We've included a few examples here of full screen ads. You heard Remco and Paul talk about the importance of full screen experiences. Obviously, when it comes to attention grabbing, we have to make sure that we have the right creatives in place. So we have an in-house team that would work on ensuring that the creatives are actually accomplishing the goals of the advertisers that we work with. We can also use creatives that advertisers give us. So it really depends on the goals and what the clients have. Starting from here, we have a couple of examples, including full-screen video and full screen display. It could be a rich media unit as well. We don't have any limitations when it comes to the actual execution of how the ads operate, and our team will adjust the creative to the goal of the advertiser. Next, you heard Remco talk about Retail Media. We have some sound in background, the full-screen video [indiscernible]. And the important thing to note about this execution of the ad is what happens after the ad plays. So in this example, the user has the ability to shop for the product that they just got an ad for, directly without leaving the app. So our system will ensure that the product that we are promoting is actually available in stock, around the area where the user is watching the ad from to ensure that we're driving the user to a product page, of a product that is actually available in stock and allowing them to make the purchase immediately. That's a growing segment for us. It's part of a broader retail media and commerce media story that is growing and evolving. Then audio. Audio is another emerging channel. To give you some context. Obviously, audio has evolved a lot over the years from the days of analog radio, to digital radio, to podcast. One of the challenges that advertisers have, advertisers that want to run audio ads is where to run them. At the end of the day, there is a limit to how much you can do on Spotify and on Pandora. And if you want to reach broader audiences at different places, you have to diversify the type of inventory and supply you work with in order to reach those target audiences. And we believe that InApp is one of those tools that would be super powerful for advertisers to reach their target audiences. So in this example here, there is an audio ad that is playing in the background in addition to some visual element, where the user can again go, and make a purchase. In this example, a target of the product that is being promoted directly again without leaving the app, which is super powerful. Again, when it comes to running those types of executions, we want to -- not only make sure that we grab the attention, but that we also perform and drive those add to cart executions and sales. When clients work with us, even though our in-app is our bread and butter, we also want to make sure that we build the right packages for them. And those packages may involve cross-device web in addition to in-app advertising, definitely involve connected TV. That's an emerging channel that many advertisers are super focused on these days and then digital out of home. So when we work with those clients, we offer a broad tool set that they can work with in order to reach their audiences. I've included an example here of a client that you just saw an ad for, Racket. Racket has been working with us across multiple products and business lines. What you see in this example is the great performance that we're able to deliver, because at the end of the day, if we don't perform, those customers will not continue working with us. It's really important for us to make sure that we have the right relationships in place, but also super important to have the right performance. So in this example, you see above benchmark performance when it comes to return on ad spend, add to cart trends, et cetera. Then we have media companies. So as I mentioned earlier, media companies work with us in order to amplify their content. We help them reach their target audiences such scale. The important thing to note about this product is that it's all self-service. So our clients, media companies can go sign up and run campaigns within minutes of signing up. If they want to change the content that they're driving. People to consumers, users, they're able to do that very easily. The system allows them to set their bids. It allows them to set the target audiences, geo, time of day, et cetera, gives them a lot of flexibility and this platform has been a game changer for us in terms of our ability to run those campaigns efficiently. In this slide, there is an example of one of those media companies that works with us, ShareCare. We were able to help them drive 130 million page views of targeted audiences that were the target audience for them and their advertisers via platform last year. An extension of that is broadcast. By raise of hands, who is listening to podcast here? Almost everyone. Podcast has been a growing channel across the industry. One of the challenges that podcast creators have is the ability to get their new content discovered. If you are a new podcast creator or even if you are an existing one and you want to reach new audiences or scale up the listenership of your podcast is kind of challenging. There is a limit to where you can advertise your podcast. That's where Jun Group comes to help. So in the [indiscernible] platform that I just showed you, which allows those media companies to sign up and create campaigns, they now are able to do similar campaigns set up for the podcast. So they can go in with their podcast, identify which target audiences they want to reach. And they'll be able to go live and scale the listenership of their podcast fairly quickly. The important thing to note there is, we want to make sure that users subscribe to those podcasts or reaching the right consumer and that will be of high value for those podcasters is important, and we help those advertisers reach that target audience, and this is going to be a part of our growth story going forward. So just to recap what we discussed. We are highly differentiated because we understand brands. We understand media companies, and we know how to perform for them. In the in-app space, we're uniquely positioned to offer that. All of that performance is enabled by our SDK, by our targeting, by our creatives and by our performance engine. And when clients work with us, they work with us because they trust us and because we offer white live service, so they know that they can allow us to perform for them because we have those strong relationships. When it comes to becoming part of Verve, there are many opportunities for us to work on synergies that we started working on and also growth opportunities. The first one I'll mention is Connected TV, which Paul already mentioned. When we sell Connected TV right now, we sell it by accessing or before the acquisition of Verve, we would sell it by accessing supply indirectly via third-party platforms. There are two issues with that. The first one is when you don't have that direct access to the consumer I spoke about, then you're not running it in a very efficient way in terms of targeting the right audiences. The second thing I want to highlight is, your margin is kind of limited. If we want to make our typical margin, we would never be able to do that when we don't have that direct access to the consumer and to the inventory. Here comes Verve. Verve has a lot of supply of Connected TV, direct supply, and that's going to be a game changer for us in terms of our ability to scale up Connected TV for our clients. Then we have marketplace demand. Verve currently has a lot of demand available to run via their SDKs. We're now going to add the Jun Group SDK, Hypermex to the mix. And to run -- to funnel that demand via that SDK. And then we're going to do the opposite, where there are times where we are not able to fulfill our campaigns just using our inventory, and we will do that via various existing inventory via its SDKs and that's going to help our growth story there. The third thing I'll mention is brand app installs. When advertisers work with us right now, in most cases, if they come to us and say, "We also want to run an app-install campaigns." So let's say, you work with McDonald's. They want you to run a brand awareness campaign for them and also run an app-install campaign. Typically, before the Verve acquisition, we would say no to the app installed part because that was not a strong suit. And we didn't feel comfortable saying yes to those opportunities. Now we can say yes to those opportunities because of adverse DSP, that's going to be another big growth opportunity for us. Then as I mentioned in the beginning of the presentation, Jun Group traditionally was focused on the U.S. market. There is a huge international expansion story as part of the combination into Verve. Verve has a lot of supply internationally that we're going to tap into. And then lastly, I want to mention formalizing a unified sales strategy with the rest of the Verve teams, both in the U.S. and internationally to have a single demand story that we go to the market with. This has some great potential in terms of revenue and also EBITDA synergies that you can see here. Then on the cost side, we are evaluating multiple flows of synergies. The first one is transitioning to the Verve DSP and to use that instead of third-party platforms. There are some opportunities around cost savings when it comes to OpEx and cost of sales around cloud services. And then doing the full mapping of third-party vendors to make sure that we are spending our money from a cost perspective wisely across the team. And this is the last slide, I promise. We are also looking into supply mapping to make sure that the SDKs are integrated in the right apps across the board, and that we are optimizing our opportunities there in terms of access to supply. Working with media companies, not only as demand side partners, but looking for opportunities for them to run as supply partners as well. And again, international expansion. I am super excited about the integration into Verve. We have a lot of potential, a lot of great synergies that we already started working on, and the growth here is going to be substantial. And we are fully committed to the goal of making media better. Thank you.

Thank you, Mishel. So let's check with the audience, have questions for Mishel. We have one coming up here. Anyone else in the room? Okay. So please go ahead. We will have time for...

[indiscernible] A lot of what you were talking about with the way that the brands and the agencies work, I would traditionally have thought would have been process that involved driven by the agencies. Who is -- how does that tripartite relationship work? Who's in the driving seat?

So it depends on the brand. So most brands when they buy media, they'll do it with an agency. So in most cases, we would work on the brand side with the agencies. It is important for us to have to maintain a relationship with brand as well when it's possible from -- and the reason for that is twofold. The first is, obviously, having that connection, agencies can change, so you want to make sure that you have that direct connection to the brand. The other aspect is, in many cases, the agency would be responsible for pitching our products to the brand. So again, having that direct relationship and having the ability to have the conversation with the brand is super important. On the media company side, we were directly -- it's 100% direct to the media company.

My second question is on the zero-party data. When somebody who's just in their app gets one of those things served. Do they really understand who they're giving that information to?

Yes. So every form where we present the information has what we refer to as the DAA icon, where they can click on it, they'll learn about how the information is used. And again, if they don't want to, they can exit or they can just select prefer not to answer. So they have full control over that experience.

Right. My third question was about, you selling into Verve. Had you been looking for a partner, somebody to take you further? And if -- and so how did that -- how did it all come out? What were the criteria you were looking for?

Yes, of course. For context, we were previously owned by a company called Advantage Solutions. At some point, Advantage Solutions decided to focus on core retail and not on the media part. So we were not a good part of that story for them. And we were looking for a partner that would accelerate our growth. We were already planning to do some of the growth opportunities that I mentioned around international expansion, et cetera. But doing that with Verve is going to be at just a different pace.

Okay. And one final question over here.

[ Eldon ] here from Nordea Markets. So a short question. The data management platform that you have from Verve with ATOM and Moments.AI and such, is the technology that you have, what's it called Vera or Schema, like similar to ATOM or Moments.AI? Will it be like integrated or kept beside each other? Like how will that work going forward?

Yes. The way we approach it is similar in concept, different in execution. Our goal is to protect the privacy and make sure that we operate and target users in a privacy compliant way. The way we do it with Schema talks about using zero-party data, having the -- given the user control over the information that they provide us. Verve with ATOM and some of the other products is ensuring that they target the right audiences in a privacy compliance way, just using different executions.

I think also important to add to that. There's different ways of addressing it. Zero-party was one possibility, Moments.AI, different ways of using, let's say, contextual segments. But behind it, the philosophy of our company has always been trying to get everything in one stack, because that's really the most efficient, but without losing the traction that you have in the market. And that makes it sometimes a bit slower to do integrations. Prasanna will talk a little bit about it. We still have, let's say, legacy platforms that we acquired that we are putting together, which we're making better components out. But in the end, we want to keep the service to the customer. We want to further improve the service to the customer. But in the meanwhile, also make sure that we get the efficiency on the inside. And that's what's -- yes, I mean, acquisition is just concluded basically, let's say. So we're working on those things at the moment.

We have time for one short or ...

But really short.

Really short. So how many users actually answer your Q&A there if you're applying for? If you want to buy a car or not? Like is it like 50% or 10% of users?

So it really depends on the question. It's varies by question and also varies by who are we trying to reach. So there -- we have this process where we look at the statistical significance of the answers that we're getting in order to build a look-alike model. So there are cases where we'll say, we only need 10,000 users to respond to this question, and in the cases where we will ask 30,000 users to ask that question. So it's part of that campaign setup process, and that would determine how many users we actually need to ask.

Okay. Thank you, and thank you, We will get going. Thank you, and welcome to Verve Group. So next coming up was the time for question, and we've done that, right? So we are moving into the second part of the Capital Market Day. And this is the expert session. So a warm Welcome to Peter.

Thank you, Jenny.

Yes. You are on the expert panel today, but also new Board member. So you have a long CV. So maybe you could share the audience of your background before you get going.

I'll keep it short. I'll explain about two gems I met in my career. I started as an entrepreneur, 20 years, built a research and data company around Europe. Sold that to Aegis. Some of you may know Aegis PLC that was later acquired. Aegis PLC had two arms, Research and Media. I started to lead the research business that became a business of 6,000 people in 62 markets that was sold to Ipsos, a company that you may also know. Once that was done, I stayed with Aegis, and I went into the media business. And for the last 10 years, I had the opportunity to build the global client organization for the international business, and also to lead the media business, which was roughly half of the business of [indiscernible]. So that's the background. With that, I'll explain my task today, which is about giving you a more high-level overview of the advertising industry. Focusing a bit on digital and also talking about some trends. And some of the questions we've heard will also be answered perhaps a little bit deeper in what I go through. We now go forward. So the big picture to put things in perspective. Global ad spend is more than $1 trillion, which to give you a reference, is the same as roughly the same as the government budget of a big country like Italy, the ninth economy in the world. What people do not always realize and it was referenced here, is that almost half of that spend happens in the U.S. Of course, in the Americas. Of course, the U.S. is the key market. And as you also see, the other regions definitely contribute. APAC is important with markets like China and Japan leading. And we see that the third region is EMEA. So EMEA, most countries, but EMEA least spent, which is really an interesting idea. In EMEA, there are countries like Germany and Italy, for instance, who are currently lagging in digital spend, which is something that I'll come back to, because you see in blue here, the digital portion of the spend, and you see that also EMEA there is lagging behind. Digital spend has been or is projected to triple up to 2028. So Remco explained about the decision that was made around 2018. You see that, that was the moment indeed that digital started to fly, because the proportion of digital of total ad spend started to increase. It has projection is then tripling to 2028. A turning point is in 2023. Currently, we are seeing 71% of total ad spend being digital. In 2023, the growth started to flip. So until 2023, we call that the area of transformation, there was always double-digit growth. There were even years that it was above 20%. This has now turned. We're now into single-digit growth. For digital as a proportion of the total ad spend, which is logical because it's becoming a very high proportion. So it's aligning more with the total growth of ad spend. Interestingly, there are significant differences when we look at markets and significant differences when we look at the growth opportunities of markets. What we have plotted here is, here you have on the vertical axis the projected spend in 2028 of countries. On the horizontal axis, you see the 5-year CAGR running up to 2028. And immediately, you can see that there are two clusters that will be contributing to the continued growth of the volume of digital. First of all, that is the cluster where we see the U.S. and China, two big markets who are already having a high proportion of digital spend. And we will continue with mature growth, continue to add to that incremental volume. But then there's another interesting cluster, which is really growth markets, and those are markets like India and Indonesia, where we see penetrations of digital of total ad spends, well below 50%, and we expect these markets to catch up really quickly. That is because of expansion of infrastructure, hardware, et cetera. Just realizing that a market like India is expected to be the third largest economy by 2031 or '32, there is tremendous growth coming up in some of these markets and very important for players like Verve to make sure that we capture that growth. Over 80% of ad impressions are now served programmatically, and we see the same as what we saw with digital as a proportion of ad spend. By the way, I'm zooming in the area. The white bar now is digital, and the blue bar now is programmatic. You see that the same happens. There's also a flip. So the high growth of programmatic within digital is also going a little bit slower, but it is continuing, of course. Within this area, there are a couple of areas referenced already today, and you will even hear more that are growing faster than the rest of digital. Connected TV, retail media, but also digital out-of-home. So also there, we need to make sure that we capture that growth and we are present. And when we think about that growth of retail media and Connected TV, that is very much linked to the changes that are happening in terms of addressability in the market. We are in the digital era. At the same time, this is the mobile era. And this is an important chart, especially for Verve, because Verve is very strong in mobile. That mobile growth will continue over time, because of increased penetration still in some markets with a lot of people, because of increased use cases and applications and also because of other growth opportunities in the area. For Verve, this provides huge opportunities given the coverage and given the capabilities they have in the area. As I'm sure you're well aware, there are these digital giants who have been driving a lot of the growth of digital, which we have just seen. And that is simply because they have built these walled gardens and these world gardens made it fairly easy for advertisers and agencies to target specific audiences. That is the reason why they have been capturing so much of that growth. We expect that to change. And it is mainly because for years now, we see a significant change in how people spend their time on the Internet. You see that on the top bar. You see that around 10 years ago, more than 60% was spending time as a proportion of time in the walled gardens, and that has now flipped. So it's now more than 60% in the open Internet. And interestingly, that builds on a question that was asked previously, we do see that spend has not followed that change in consumer behavior. And that is something we expect to change as well, because with the extended privacy regulations and also with what is happening in the market, just reference with some of the parties with cookies, we do expect that there will be further changes and opportunities that companies like Verve have, we were just talking about moments AI, ATOM, but also about Schema and Verve, these are opportunities that we should be able to capture. Underneath that digital growth that I've taken you through, there is a lot of complexity. There's also a lot of duplication and there's also a lot of fragmentation. Some of you may remember this slide on the left, I've taken it from our previous presentation. But since that slide was shown, complexity has further increased and so have fragmentation and duplication. At the same time, we see crowding out effects. So the other chart shows you the ad spend per capita in the U.S., which is now really getting close to $1,250, which is immense. And with so many impressions thrown at consumers, it is inevitable that there is impact on quality, there is impact on effectiveness, et cetera. So we need to make sure that we manage that and that we find solutions. So with how the industry has grown and evolved, it is inevitable that some fundamental changes take place, and there is a need for simplification, consolidation and integration. And this is precisely what we see happening at the moment. So we do see that holding companies at the moment are bringing in expertise in the area of ad tech, that is talent but also capabilities, acquisitions. There are some good examples there. At the same time, we see ad tech companies integrating upstreams and getting closer to the demand side. We've heard a lot about what Verve is doing in this area. And they're investing in talent, they're investing in capabilities to get more directly to the advertiser and to the agencies. And then advertisers. We do see a lot of examples at the moment, and I've been very close, of course, with the agency background to that movement. We see a lot of movements of them disintermediating players in the industry and going direct. They are going direct to ad tech partners, but also with the in-housing, they're bringing in a lot of expertise, and I'll come back to that point. Luma Partners, I think that most of you know it, they are an investment bank that is really focusing on this industry and they provide a lot of reports and perspectives. They use the label Peter Pan industry for the ad tech industry. Just to express that they feel it really needs to mature. So the consolidation that was discussed earlier will happen in this industry, there will be fewer players, higher volume. And ultimately, also most probably better quality, and let me not forget better experience for the consumer. Because we talk about the industry, but ultimately, we are most successful when the consumer is happy about what is being served. So consolidation is a fact. M&A has already picked up. What you see here, the two numbers is year-on-year, 73% for the second quarter and quarter-on-quarter 27%. And if we dive a little bit deeper, you see here, transaction. This is from the Luma report. So you see that activity is picking up in the first half of '24. And have pointed a number of bigger acquisitions for the first half. And you see some of those trends coming back. You see Walmart, which is really bringing in media expertise and publishing expertise directly into their business with the acquisition of VIZIO and then, of course, a very good example discussed just now, the acquisition of Jun Group, which makes that Verve has more capability and more power in media and also on the demand side. There is one thing, and it wasn't really discussed yet, and it's very close to my heart, which all these players have in common, and that is the fight for talent. There is a lot of dynamic happening on the talent market in this industry, and that is because of the arrows we saw previously, all of that movement, that is also about movement of people. A recent Deloitte study, it was published a couple of months ago, found that if CMOs were given an additional 10% budget, they would spend it in that area, bringing in terms of digital, programmatic data, et cetera, especially advertisers realize that the access to first-party data is really critical for them, of course, for some industry verticals that is more logical than for others. Think about CPG, really difficult. So they need to start partnering and bringing in expertise in a different way. And this is all largely due to the complex ecosystem, the string and data protection things we see and also the need for a different approach to targeting that is also very much felt on the advertiser side. When discussing the role and dynamics in the industry and the importance of digital and the complexity of the ecosystem, we need to realize that it's actually a very simple industry. It is about advertisers who want to build their brands and who want to attract and retain valuable customers. Having led the Dentsu Global Client organization for 10 years, I've seen many changes, and I want to highlight three of them. So first of all, it is how clients organize themselves. So we've always seen centralized clients. We have central budgets, we have central strategies and who also work with agencies in a very structured way with almost one pipe and the local subsidiaries have to follow. Microsoft, how they spend their advertising money is a good example. Then we have advertisers who are really decentral. And when you [ service ] these advertisers, you may need to have a totally different infrastructure. They're also internally organized very differently. So when you come into the digital [ ASN ], you want to capture the digital opportunities, it's a very different level of orchestration. And then there's the hybrid, in between. What we see clearly is that decentral is going down and central is increasing, which has huge implications for media agencies when you think about how they organize themselves and how they make sure they have the right talent in place because what we do see is that advertisers are also bringing in a lot of talent because they do not want to be influenced by only the media agency. They want to make sure that they are in control of their own destiny. And especially in the area of first-party data, this is critically important. And that in-housing, some people feel that, that has stopped and it has passed. No, it's still happening. It's happening in a different way. It's happening very much on a project way, and we see that a lot media agencies are succumbing people within their client organizations to make sure that they can help to drive that journey for them and with them. So in the past 4 years, apart from in-housing, I've seen a lot of change in how advertisers and also agencies organize themselves in terms of digital hubs. So in order to capture the buying power and to make sure that also the efficiencies are realized, a lot of activity is brought together in certain areas, and you see some typical areas here. China, for instance, [not ] because it's a very separate ecosystem. And you can -- you will see more of this in the future. For a company like Verve, it's critically important to know how these things are being organized and to make sure that we are part of the teams that are being built because I see a lot of opportunity for direct connection to advertisers in the future. There are two other developments I would like to go through that is the attention economy. So attention becoming more of an important currency in the media industry and is so often discussed the application of the cookie. With the ad pressure per capita increasing, we do see that there is saturation. And we do see that historic measures like reach and also viewability are less effective to describe the performance. So we need to make sure that when we plan for media, so media planners, they now take attention much more central as a variable, and they start to play with ad formats with the mix, et cetera, to make sure that they optimize for attention. And you just saw a very good example from Jun Group with the full-screen advertising that is happening. Another thing and a consequence of driving more ads with attention, better attention into the market is that there is less waste in the digital system. And this is really important because carbon footprint for the industry is a topic, and it is an increasing topic. And we do see that the advertisers, and that is really under pressure of their stakeholders, are passing on a lot of pressure in that area on their partners. So on media companies, but also ad tech companies will be feeling that pressure and -- because we are in one industry, we have a responsibility there, and we will need to make sure that we provide an answer as an industry to make sure that we also prevent further regulation to happen that will force that we make some choices. Then for years now, identifiers, cookies have been disappearing, and we have just discussed the path that Google is following. It is a fact that it become -- will become increasingly difficult to address directly on the Internet use and all of these capabilities. So we were talking about Google. There are some numbers here. It was promised by Remco that we'll show the numbers. So the share of Chrome is 63%. At the moment, addressability via [ Chrome ] is 37%, which on itself is not high already. But when it is projected, and that's based on an eMarketer study, it's projected that, that will go down to 11% once consumers start to opt in. So yes, this will have impact. And yes, this will provide opportunities when you have the products that we were discussing and the connections and the partnerships in the market. So wrapping up before closing, yes, there is a case for change, for sure. There will be more consolidation, integration and simplification. And influencers like, for instance, carbon and attention will definitely be having impact on the industry. Privacy regulation has made and will make further that we need to target differently with again -- which again is an opportunity. And then digital will continue to be the fastest-growing segment, but there are segments within digital that we need to make sure we capture, retail, CTV, et cetera. And then the application of artificial intelligence. Yes, it has an impact on the industry. It's a positive impact on the industry. You see a number of areas here where we see the influence. And it will drive more efficiency and effectiveness in advertising, and we need to make sure that we drive that. Verve as a business was very early in this. At the moment, it was not even called artificial intelligence, we used different names. But also, this player will need to continue to reinvent itself and to make sure that we stay on top of the market. In summary, if there are some key messages that I would like to through, it's a very exciting industry, it's highly dynamic, it's a lot of fun, and there's never a dull moment. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Peter, and we do have time for a couple of questions. So let's see. Do we have anything here from the room? Yes, coming up here.

You may have your own mic?

Yes. Here you go.

It's Fiona Orford- Williams from Edison. Just really a general one, is scale the only factor for survivability for the players in the market?

Sorry?

Is scale the only factor of survivability for all those players in the Lumascape?

I don't think so. I think there is a lot of opportunity in making sure that there are partnerships in the market. So like Remco already alluded to, there are a lot of -- there is a lot of collaboration, and we see increasingly also partnerships becoming more formalized. So also the digital giant have joint operation plans with advertisers, agencies, et cetera. So I think collaboration in the industry is really important. And from collaboration, you sometimes see further movements like acquisition. And I think underlying in the industry, a lot of that is happening, but it only makes sense if there's volume. With so many fragmented players as we see in the industry, it doesn't make sense because it is -- there's a lot of investment in putting it together.

Okay. More questions from the room? No more questions to Peter, so -- over here. Yes. Otherwise, I put someone in here. Yes, we have.

[indiscernible] here from [ Nordea again ]. If you have time, could you go back maybe to the slide with the Google cookie depreciation -- deprecation?

Yes, this one.

Could you just further explain -- so at the bottom there, open web addressability, 37% as it is today, and it will go to 11%. And it doesn't really matter, you say. Could you just say that again why it doesn't matter?

Now what I want to say with it, it doesn't matter, there is a lot of discussion about this happening. At the moment, it is 37%. It's going back to 11%. So with 37%, we already have an issue. So the addressability will go down. But also now, we need to have solutions already for the addressability for 63% that is not addressable. So when we have these solutions, it doesn't matter that it becomes 89%. Where it does matter is when we go back to that other slide where I was showing the difference here in what is happening to this spend pattern -- where is it? No, it's down. Or is it -- now come on. So we do see that spend is not following. So the moment that, that non-addressable part becomes bigger, and we already know that people are spending more time on the open Internet, it is logical that the money will be following the moment that we have these solutions in place. That's life.

Okay. Thank you, Peter, and welcome.

Thank you.

So -- and with that, I think it's pretty much 12:00. So lunch is coming up, and we're going to have a short lunch break for 30 minutes and start again at 12:30, with the Google Cloud team coming up first. So enjoy lunch. [Break]

Welcome back after lunch. So we will get going with our Verve Group's Capital Markets Day. I would just like to add before we get going that we have lots of questions coming in from you online, and they will be taken care of. So we will add one, again, the point at the very bottom of the agenda. So after the closing remarks today, we will have a PS also on the agenda, where we cover the questions that we don't managed to cover on the agenda. So I just wanted to share that with all of you who are joining us online. And we are in the second part of the program of today. So it's all about the experts and what's going on in the industry. So next coming up is the team from Google, and we will start with Jonathan from Google Cloud. A warm welcome. Here you go.

Thank you. Thank you. So your favorite topic after long lunch, right, going deep on programmatic algorithms for bidding, 1.5-hour technical deep dive, my favorite topic. You just had lunch, you could just fall back and sleep. I'm just kidding. Jonathan, I'm a customer engineer at Google -- Google Cloud, spent 7 years almost in Google. Started in DoubleClick back in 2017. And prior to that, worked with large media agencies across the Nordics, WPP, predominantly on programmatic advertising. So this is indeed my favorite topic to discuss ad tech and how AI and ad tech fits together. So what I'll do is that I'll spend 20 minutes now just covering some basics on AI. I know this is probably the [ 55th ] AI day or day you are attending a seminar and someone is speaking about AI all day long. So I won't be spending too much time on that, but I want us to be on the same page on what do Google think about AI right now and where do we stand. Then I'm going to spend a bit more time on the implications that we see for advertisers predominantly and how that impacts businesses in the advertising business like ourselves and like yourselves. And then finally, we'll touch upon the -- how we are providing a platform that is very suitable for ad tech because it combines two quite hard things, managing data and managing AI. And lastly, I'll invite my colleague, [ Yam ] on stage, and he'll add some colors to the partnership between Google and Verve, and we'll be here for some questions. Sounds good? No one said no. So AI, let's just look a few years back, like 20, 30, 40 years back. Computers were all about deterministic programming, right? That meant that for everything you wanted a computer to do, you needed to write a line of code. You want a computer to recognize cats, you write a line of code describing an attribute of that cat. And that has been the programming regime for all computers up until around 2012-ish when neural networks and machine learning started to rise. So instead of deterministically putting in all the attributes of the cat, we could show the computer 100 pictures of a cat and 100 pictures of something that looked like a cat but wasn't the same, like a blueberry muffin or a Chihuahua. And then the computer will figure out which attributes to look at in the image, in the pixels in the image, right? Machine learning. And that has been available for a decade and probably holds a lot more value than it has gotten to at this point. And then all of a sudden, we got in these large language models and everyone talks about AI because the key difference is that, in the cat example, the large language models are pretrained on enormous amounts of data. So you don't need to do that specialized training anymore, right, because building and training AI and ML algorithms are hard and expensive. But with the new range of machine learning or AI, we did large language models, we made it accessible on a whole different level. Because there's three things that are unique about those models. And this is not going to be a generative AI seminar, but I want us to agree on these three things. So first, in these large models, they have what we call emergent capabilities. That means that they're suitable for things they are not specifically trained on. They're able to do things that were not a specific part of the training data. And then the way you interact with those models is human language. So the way you program these models and make them work for your business is Swedish, German, English, whatever language you have. And if you combine that with AI's capabilities of understanding patents in large data set, you get a pretty unique and flexible technology. And you're adding one thing to the AI toolbox. We're not replacing the AI toolbox. We're adding a capability with generative AI, being able to create new content. And that also means that any business, whether you're an analyst or a developer or whatnot, you could have an accelerator not a replacement, an accelerator, and it's a good one. And that also accelerates the other thing we can do with AI but they aren't really new, right? So understanding and classification problems and prediction problems we've been doing that for 10 years or more, some companies have done that for 10 years or more. Google has been deploying that at scale for over a decade. So back in 2016, we declared that we're an AI-first company, right? The reason why you're not getting spam e-mails in Gmail compared to a lot of other e-mail services is because we're doing classification of all emails with AI and ML for billions of users. Every time you do a Google search, we're using AI/ML to understand the sentiment and what the intention is behind that search. And that applies to over 10 services at Google that has more than 1 billion users. We have 5 services on more than 2 billion users. And all those AI initiatives, whether that's auto complete in Gmail or whether that is predicting your travel times in Google Maps, it's driven by 2 main forces. One of them is Google Research. Google Research or Google DeepMind, which is named right now consists of more than 3,000 dedicated AI researchers. The T in chat GPT stands for Transformers. That's the technology every large language model is built upon. That was invented by Google Research back in 2016. AlphaFold, which is a massive large language model not used for chat bots, but used to unfold proteins was invented by Google DeepMind. So we have a rich history of research and we're doing -- contributing to a few advancements in that area. But that's only one part of the equation. The other part of the equation is compute power. So some of you have invested in NVIDIA, right? And you're smiling quite bright now. Because there is an enormous need for committing power across AI/ML workloads. And at the moment, we're at a point where if you add more power, you get better models. So it's a matter of having not only GPUs or TPUs as we're building at Google, but also having the other infrastructure around those chips available. You need network to range across not 1 GPU, but hundreds or thousands, of course. You need physical things like data centers that have high enough voltage in the racks to deploy more GPUs and TPUs into the racks. Back in 2016, we set out to build TPUs. TPUs, tensor processing units are dedicated chips to do AI/ML workloads. And the reason we did that was that back at that point, you could start talking in your query at google.com, right? Some of you try that. You could talk in your query instead of writing it. And if all Google users were to do that 3 times a day at that point, our data centers would burn up, right? We simply haven't had the compute power to do the inference of those models. And if we were to scale that the way Google scales, we need to be able to not buy more third-party GPUs or chips. We need to find a more energy-efficient and cost-efficient way of serving AI to our users. So that's the reason why we invested in infrastructure. I've been doing that for 10 years. And see some of the other hyperscales are doing that right now. And then thirdly is about how do we take that to the market? How do we make that AI powerful infrastructure and the technology advancements in research in a responsible way, making it possible for companies like Verve and others to decide how their data is treated, where the compute is happening and to what extent the models they're building are transparent and fair. So I'll jump from that overall where Google are and AI and directly into my favorite topic in a minute on what the implication for advertisers. The implication or the result of all these investments Google have been doing over the years is that we are, by far, the leader in forces evaluation on AI models and AI infrastructure. I mean it's basically enough -- it is not enough place on the right-hand side on the strategy. But let's talk about what that mean for Verve and other advertising companies. So talking about advertising, we need to start like the market would start, right? So what's the problem with the customers or how do we reach customers? So customer journeys have been complex for decades. They're even more complex. Because we have more digital touch points, and it's not only about the volume, it's also about the variety of those touch points. So each day, we have a few billion searches on google.com. 15% of those every day are such queries we haven't seen before, never seen them before. So it's not really about making rule-based decision engines and rule-based actions to reach customers where you want them. There simply is too many different alternatives. And then at the same time, customers are demanding more relevant advertising. So 87% of the customers that we have -- so I'm referring to research we're doing on behalf of Google Ads here as well. They want offers that are relevant, they are personalized to what they're browsing and what they're doing. And at the same time, they demand for privacy, right? They want to know what data is used to deliver that personalized experience. How was that consent given? Who's governing that data? Who could access that? Where can I reserve from sharing those data? And it's somewhat of a paradox that I think the entire ad tech market is in, right, is that on one hand, you are supposed to use more data than ever. And on the other hand, it's getting harder and harder to get hold of data to make the experience relevant. The key element there is to be transparent about how data is being used. And then let's look at how the advertising business really works. So this is an example from Google Ads, but it's basically the same across all advertising technology. Each and every time there is ad or whether that's a video or Google ad and banner on the web page, there is an auction going on, right? You all know this. You know that within a few milliseconds, advertisers are vouching which price to pay for that exact impression. And by that, you also know that the winning strategy is to know how much I'm willing to pay. So what's the value for my company to show that ad to that human being at that particular point. The technical problem is that you don't know that at that point. Because you're advertising for future behavior. You're advertising for someone to do an action in a day or an hour or perhaps even a year from now. So to solve that problem, we've typically been building proxies, right? We've been knowing that all our customers, they're female, they're ranging from 18 to 25 and they're most oftenly in the Stockholm Central area. So we just advertise there and then we know there's a higher likelihood for us to reach them. Because we know that that's a proxy, that's a leader. If we're running a hotel, you could say, I want people into my web page, and then hopefully, they will do a reservation and hopefully, they will spend a lot of money in the restaurant when they're arriving at the hotel. The winning strategy for all advertisers is to inject that reward data, the actual value of the what they're selling at the end back into the algorithms. That means if you're a hotel, you're able to tell your advertising platforms afterwards, that these customers were more valuable than these customers. Shifting from buying on proxy dynamics into fully automated AI-driven thing, where you basically ask the ad platforms for more sales to more profitable customers. So that's the problem to solve, right? Connecting those customer journeys, connecting all those millions of touch points of data into a reinforcement learning algorithm, so to say, where you could, for each and every advertiser tune the model based on their data and their consumer behavior. That's what we're doing with Google Ads and that's what Verve is doing with the ads platform as well. So that is the core problem to solve. Understanding first-party data for advertisers, making it possible for advertisers to leverage their data and then applying AI to that in a cost-efficient manner. The other thing, and I would say that's an opportunity that arised 1.5 years ago with generative AI is how do those advertisers and their parties using our platforms and technology. I'll show you a few examples from Google Ads. So for instance, the actual ad creation process, where we have a decades talked about personalized advertising, I want the ad to be uniquely tailored for you at the moment, you see it. But that has a backside. And even though I couldn't know that's you and I should give you that message, I also need someone to produce that asset. That exciting ad that gets your attention. So now you could essentially create one campaign and then with a few prompts, you could make that into hundreds of versions that are more relevant for different users. You could actually do it at scale. You could use the same technology to create your visuals. Take one photo of your product and place it in hundreds of environments. And you can control your food campaign. So what you previously -- and this might be a torture, but what you previously paid your media agency billions to organize and buy media across, you could do with some simple prompting. I want to buy more customers in Germany, that's profitable. Thank you. Enter. And you could do all that today. So this is just adding yet another interface for advertisers to do that. All right. I'm going faster, I only got 20 minutes, right? So that was some of the implications and opportunities that we're seeing. Lastly, so the third chapter of this speed talk is around how our AI platform is enabling companies like Verve and others to actually do that core job, delivering AI/ML applications. So hopefully, you heard that we're quite confident that we have a platform that is very competitive and very unique in terms of AI/ML. Let's dive into what it really mean to build an AI/ML-driven application, right? It's 3 quite distinct disciplines you would need to tackle. You would need to tackle data engineering. And keep in mind that advertising is a rather interesting technical problem, right? Because each and every interaction in the advertising value chain is a transaction. Someone end of day will pay for that transaction. So you need accountability, transparency, what we call acid-proof transactions, meaning you can't risk that something is missing from the bill or that you have double counting for one ad impression. At the same time, you need speed. Because no one is waiting for advertising, right? So we're impatient, we're exceptionally impatient when it comes to advertising. So solving that has been some of the toughest technical challenges for Google over the years. That's the reason why we have very unique databases that are globally distributed. That's perhaps the reason why our data platform is so different than many others. It's because we've built everything you can buy in Google Cloud, bottom-up, purpose-built to solve Google's needs at scale. And then you need to deploy your data scientists and your engineers into building those AI models, building them, training them, validating them, evaluating them and lastly implemented into your platform. For most companies, there's a lot of challenges here. One is just getting enough people in the blue box. The other one is to make all those 3 disciplines collaborate. Because they work with different technologies. A lot of the people in the blue box said, they're pretty much a rock star. Like, this is my rider. This is the technology I work with. This is the framework I'm building with. So you want to enable a lot of different frameworks adapt for talent. At the same time, you need to make it collaborable across those. And that is what we have been solving for ourselves and making available with Google Cloud, a unified platform from data to application. It's one of the platforms where you have all the data elements in the same interface as all the AI/ML components. And it's a combination of what we call manage services, which means you don't need to care about service. You don't need to care about anything other than running your application and training jobs and open frameworks based on open source. Because our customers want flexibility, right? Like Verve, perhaps you want GPUs for something or TPUs for other things. But more importantly, building things with open source frameworks also makes it portable, right? It makes you very attractive and able for competition because you could -- I would argue Google Cloud is potentially not the easiest cloud to move into, but it's the easiest cloud to leave. Because we're so committed to open source, which gives you good cards if your company that have modernized your software to be transferable across clouds. And our AI platform has proven financial impact by far in the market the platform that enables the collaboration between the 3 disciplines, better than any other platform. You spend less time juggling around between data teams and ML teams getting access to the data. You spend less time on evaluating those models, and that also means faster time to market. And I guess with that, if you remember nothing else, this is the 4 key things we wanted to bring in these 20 minutes that the AI revolution we're in with generative AI means more than just chat bots, right? It has the ability to accelerate everything, also the core job of developing ML applications. It's harder to do advertising for advertisers. And the key to success is transparent and open first-party data and AI. We believe there's a lot of opportunity in the -- making the entire value chain more effective using AI, not only the actual placement of the ad. And then lastly, we offer Verve and other companies a purpose-built platform for ad tech. There is no other player out there that have invested the same amount in data and AI at scale. So with that, let me introduce you to Guillaume that will add a few colors to the partnership between Verve and Google.

Thanks a lot, Jonathan. My name is Guillaume. I'm basing in Stockholm. I'm a Technical Director for Google Cloud Nordics. Been at Google for 10 years, and it's my pleasure to describe the strategic partnership that we have between Google Cloud and Verve. So the journey started in 2020. We first started with hosting a game in Google Cloud Platform in H2 2020. And then in 2021, Google Cloud Platform, the GCP became the central data hub for Verve. And then pretty shortly after that, Verve got access to PM, PM stands for product management. So product management and engineering. These are the people that are developing new solutions and new products to give feedback on the road map. So already there, we started to connect very closely between our engineering and Verve. And then we have another abbreviation there in EBC, which is an exec briefing. So we had a product deep dive in New York between some of the leaders and experts of Verve and Google Cloud. And then we got some feedback from Verve on our products, which allowed us to innovate. So that's also part of the strategic partnership is that we're taking feedback from Verve and we're integrating that in our product and first giving access to Verve and then exposing that to the rest of the market. And then we like to help our customer to cut some costs. As you can see here that in 2022, 2023, we did some joint FinOps or cost optimizations of both compute and Big Query. Big Query's our cloud native data warehouse that we're using as well internally within Google. And then in 2023, we did a partnership refocus and the development of a strategic collaboration. And the result of that is that in December '23, we agreed on a 4-year contract for a deeper strategic partnership. So that's a little bit of the story and since the signing of this strategic partnership, we've intensified the collaboration. So there is now a lot more funding so that partners can help Verve implementing and getting value out of the platform. There is also funding for professional services. We have our own, let's say, consultants. So they're now able to work with Verve on getting the best value again. And then deeper access to product management and engineering, access to alphas and betas, commercial funding for proof of concept and then getting access to best-in-class AI technology and infrastructure, as Jonathan described. And so there are 4 different work streams in this strategic partnership. So the first one is about assessing the different parts of the group and basically conducting a migration assessment to understand what would be the benefit and the cost of migrating some of the existing environments into a cloud platform. So that's migration and unification and then we're doing another work stream on data architecture, where we're doing a deep dive session to design a unifying data architecture zooming on CDP, customers data platforms, and evaluate how we can enrich them with generative AI. Then work stream 3, we're doing an AI road map and privacy Sandbox collaboration. And then we're also in work stream for evaluating how we can integrate the Verve stack at tech stack in our stack as well. So overall, yes, super proud of the strategic partnership. It's one of the biggest we have in Europe and really looking forward to what's coming in 2024 -- the rest of 2024 and 2025. And that's it for the overview of the strategic partnership. Now we're available for any questions that you may have.

Thank you, Guillaume, and thank you, Jonathan. So maybe both of you around the table. So let's see questions from the audience? Yes. Okay. Here we go. Thank you. Raise your hand if you have more questions, so I can see before hand where you are.

Yes. It's Fiona Orford-Williams from Edison. I mean it's obvious from our perspective, how this partnership advantages Verve. Can you tell us a bit more about how it looks -- what they bring to your party, first of all?

So if I can help a little bit. I think -- some customers, because of how good they are what they do, they tend to push us in our limits. So even though we're a big Google, in some cases, a company might say, well, we need a bit lower latency. We need a bit more faster inference for AI or lower -- better iOPs for database, whatever it could be. So it could be performance, it could be new features that are really important for Verve. And so we realized that, okay, Verve might be at the forefront. And so we might want to implement that feature and then maybe the rest of the market at some point will get access to it. But Verve is getting the first access to that, they get maybe advantage of 6 to 1 year before anybody else with a few other maybe select customers. So that's what happens with Verve and has up and I've been myself involved in other strategic partnerships where -- in some cases, we start working together, and it looks like what they're asking us to do is impossible, and that's what triggers us is when customers come to us and say, "We want to do this, and we feel like, okay, we need to 10x our capability." So that's what excites us.

And you said this was one of the biggest partnerships you had in Europe. That obviously means that you have other partnerships in other parts of the world as well as other partnerships in Europe. Is what you develop within this partnership exclusive? Or does it -- can it be applied across your suite?

I'm [indiscernible], I'm the account manager for the Verve Group. So it depends actually what we actually evolve during this partnership. As Guillaume also just said, the early access programs there, of course, the product is being developed, and it's improved. And then after some time, it's generally available to the whole market. So that's how we approach these things. And of course, there are also some custom preparations that we do for the customer, and these are exclusively done for the customer.

I do actually have one more. We've heard a lot from around the industry about the whole saga of the deprecation of cookies. But we haven't heard what it looks like from your perspective. So please, can we.

Well, I think ideally, I would love to give you the answer of when it's actually going away. The real answer is that I don't know. So obviously, we're here to represent Google Cloud, which is one of many heads across half of it. One thing that I do know is that from the day the discussion started and the Privacy Sandbox was launched, the ambition has been two folded, right? One is providing transparency and choice for users according to both the expectations from users and legislation across the world? And then secondly, try to find open-sourced alternatives through a third-party cookie that can be used by others than just Google for Google's sake. So that's the ambition of the Privacy Sandbox. And then more comments on how that is doing and when and why cloud will or Chrome will eventually deprecate a cookie, then I can't really comment on that here. That will be someone else.

Okay. Thank you. And thanks a lot, Jonathan and Guillaume. So give them a big hand. And we're going to continue on, yes. Thank you. Great to have you here. So we are moving on in the expert -- yes, here we go. Expert part of the program, and I'm welcoming Rowena up on the stage from IAB Labs -- Tech Labs, correct, New York. So that was a long flight over here with you.

Thank you so much for the introduction. And maybe to start off, I can just tell you a little bit about IAB Tech Lab for anyone who is not familiar with the IAB Tech Lab. We're a nonprofit organization focused on developing technical standards to support the digital media ecosystem and the growth of the digital media ecosystem. And I lead specifically our privacy pillar. So all of our technical standards related to privacy is what I lead at the IAB Tech Lab. And thank you to the Verve team for inviting me today to talk to you guys about privacy and targeting. So what I will do today is provide insights on the current state, starting with consumer sentiment towards privacy and digital advertising. Then we'll take a look at what the regulatory landscape looks like. We'll also talk a little bit about privacy-driven platform changes. We've heard a lot about that already today. And so you'll hear a little bit more. And then the role of technical standards and how they can help the industry navigate all of these various changes. And then last, the opportunities as well. Consumers are increasingly aware of and better understand personal data and its use in digital advertising. And this is sort of what a recent consumer privacy report that the IAB released earlier this year seems to indicate. I'm not going to go through the results of the entire survey, but just highlighting some key points from the survey that are relevant to the conversation today. Consumers are mostly aware of what personal data means on the Internet. 3 and 4 of them understand that personal data includes identifiers like their name, address and email. But they also understand that it can include their website or app usage history, interest and shopping behavior. And what's interesting about this is that as you can see, in almost else's, it is actually the older generation that has more awareness of what constitutes personal data on the web compared to the younger generation. So they understand what constitutes personal data on the web, but they also understand the benefits of sharing personal data. Roughly 2 out of 3 consumers will share personal data regarding their preferences, interest and habits so that they can receive more personalized content and services and get better deals. I think that's a pretty obvious one, write personalized content. The more interesting thing here is that they're also willing to share that personal data to see more relevant ads. But they're not willing to share their data with just anybody. So reputation, transparency and trustworthiness are key factors and considerations when consumers are deciding whether or not they want to share their data. 74% of the respondents agreed that if they were assured that their personal data is protected and secure, they'd be more likely to share and so this kind of falls into 2 buckets: reputation and trustworthiness and transparency and choice. So under reputation and trustworthiness, do they know the brand? What is the reputation of the brand? How they engaged with the brand in the past? And under transparency and choice, they want to understand, as we heard from others earlier today, what the website or app with whom they are sharing their data with is actually doing with the data, what sort of data are they collecting and they want control over their data as well. And this is where it looks like websites and apps are perhaps not doing the best job today, right? Consumers want more transparency from website and app owners. Half of them think that today, website and apps actually do not give enough information regarding how their data is used and protected. But what they're concerned about when it comes to sharing their data with websites and apps is really related to criminal activity rather than advertising. So criminal activity, fraud, set, personal safety, that is of concern to them, and their information used for ad targeting is little to no concern. And interestingly, while it's clear that they want more transparency, more controls over their data and there are laws that exist that gives them those rates. Many of them are actually unaware that these laws exist. So only 1 in 4 consumers are aware that data privacy -- are aware of the data privacy laws in the U.S. and Europe. But that's not stopping regulators from being really active. And so we'll take a look at what the regulatory landscape looks like. Data privacy regulations are not new. But 2 that I'm highlighting here the GDPR and the CCPA, I would consider a turning point because these 2 regulations really begin to scrutinize use of consumer personal information in the age of the Internet and have had a substantial impact on the digital advertising ecosystem. So the GDPR, that really set a global standard for data privacy, they give consumers the right to access, delete out of their information. And in the context of digital advertising, in most cases, you need to establish legal basis of consent for use of the consumer's personal information. In the U.S., California was the first to enact a data privacy regulation. Similar to the GDPR, you have similar rights. So the right to access, delete, modify any personal information. The few difference here is that in California, it's an opt-out rather than a consent for use of personal information. And now California was the first, but in the U.S., what we're seeing is more than half of the states in the U.S. actually have a data privacy regulation on the books. And unfortunately for the U.S., it does not look like there is federal regulation coming anytime soon. And obviously, noncompliance means fines. Since then, this has really exploded, and this is what the global landscape looks like today. 160 countries and jurisdictions now have comprehensive data privacy laws. That's 82% of the global population that lives in a jurisdiction with privacy regulations. And this is what global organizations have to deal with today. They're all a little bit nuanced. And it's not just comprehensive data privacy laws that digital media ecosystem have to concern themselves with. Two examples of this is in the Europe, Digital Services Act, what this aims to do is to regulate online platforms and digital services within the EU. There are articles that are specific and impact the digital advertising industry. There are requirements for clear ad disclosures, user opt-out options for personalized ads and content moderation to manage harmful content and disinformation. And then in the U.S., we have Washington State's My Health, My Data Act, which is a regulation that's actually focused on health data privacy for Washington State residents. But again, there are impacts of digital advertising because what constitutes health data according to this regulation is actually quite broader than one would think. And so therefore, the digital media ecosystem needs to be aware of this as well. Concerns around AI and automated decision-making. Regulators are becoming active around this as well as consumers and businesses continue to adopt AI and automated decision-making. Regulators are focusing on it as well. We have the EU AI Act, which passed and then currently in California, the CPPA is in the middle of draft rule making for automated decision-making technologies. What I will say is that regulators at this time are not focused on digital advertising uses of AI and automated decision-making, but I'll say that they're not focused on it yet, right? They're really focused currently on developers and distributors of large language models. But it is something that the industry needs to stay on top of and continue to monitor. Because automated decision-making is actually very widely used in digital advertising for use cases like audience creation, campaign optimization and other purposes. So all of this makes it really difficult for businesses to comply with all these regulations, especially when we take a look at a couple of different things. So first is regulatory focus on data minimization. That is just a little counterintuitive to how digital advertising has worked to this point. Typically what happens is everybody collects a whole bunch of data, they remonstrate to figure out what pieces are important to them, whereas the regulators are basically focused on having everybody limit the amount of data that's being collected and limit the purpose and use of that data. There's also a really high bar for data to be considered anonymous or de-identified. Regulators have made it really clear that hashing is not enough. And so this is another factor that makes it really difficult. And then when we take a look at different channels and compliance with data privacy regulation across different channels, that can also present some unique challenges. And in particular, CTV is a good example because when you think about showing and giving consumers transparency and choice, when you think about a TV and a remote, a consumer is using a remote, like how are you actually effectuating consumer choice. Oftentimes when you're talking about CTV, it's also not one-to-one. There may be multiple people in the room, so who is actually providing the consent and making the choice. So there's a lot of complexities when you start taking a look at different channels. And it's not just the regulators, right? Identifiers are experiencing more constraints from large platforms, so large platforms have also been really active and consumer privacy. This is clearly not a comprehensive timeline, just some highlights on some key initiatives from Apple that has impacted the availability of different identifiers. And in 2017, they launched Intelligent Tracking Prevention, ITP, which limited the lifetime of the cookies to just 24 hours. That was sort of like just a starting point of the impact to availability of identifiers for the ecosystem. In 2018, that's when they launched Scan though at that time, it was not widely adopted at all. Fast forward a few years to 2021 and then really active here, this is when we start seeing ATT, Private Relay, Hotmail e-mail, private click measurement, all of these launches again further reducing the signals that can be used for identifiers. And in 2024, they're evolving a lot of these prior initiatives. And now we have app, ad attribution kit, web ad attribution kit and Private Browser 2.0. On the Google side, we've talked about this quite a bit already today, but the current team announced the deprecation of the third-party cookie back in 2020. Then in 2021, public privacy sandbox trials launched. In 2023, they announced that similar changes were coming to the Google Android Advertising ID. And 2024 going into 2025 was supposed to be right the death of the cookie. Cookies were supposed to go away, but just a few months ago, they announced that they're no longer deprecating the third-party cookie and instead are going to elevate user choice. It's actually not really clear as to -- at this time as to what elevating user choice is today. So there's still some questions around that. But I think many are thinking that potentially what we're going to see is something similar to an akin to ATT from iOS. And so navigating all of this, this is where industry frameworks and technical standards help the industry. The IAB Tech Lab -- just a little bit more about the IAB Tech Lab. The mission is to develop global open interoperable technology standards supporting the growth of a secure and private ad-supported digital economy. We are a global organization. We have more than 1,000 companies throughout the world. Participating in more than 23 working groups with more than 3,000 individuals who actually participate in those working groups. Our Board is also global and our membership is representative of the entire digital media ecosystem. So we have members who are publishers, advertisers, ad tech, everyone in the digital supply chain. And here are just a handful of the technical standards that we develop and steward. So OpenRTB, which you can think of as sort of like the pipes for programmatic advertising. VAST, which is video ad serving template for video ads. The TCF, those are just a few of our technical standards. And our technical standards are adopted by the industry based on their merit. So whether you're a member or nonmember, we don't force anyone to adopt our technical standards. They adopt it because they solve a problem for the industry. We think about our technical standards from 5 pillars. So we have supply chain foundations, addressability and pets, privacy, measurement and advanced TV. Prior conversation today was really relevant. Our privacy pillars and our addressability and privacy enhancing technologies pillars. So I mentioned technical standards to help the industry navigate privacy regulation, all the changes that the platforms are making. So you think about this holistically in sort of 2 different buckets. The first are technical standards that healthy industry comply with regulations. So some of the standards that we have for that are the transparency and consent framework or the TCF, which helps the industry comply with GDPR. We have the global privacy platform. which is similar to the TCF, but for global data privacy regulations. We have the DSA transparency, extension in OpenRTB, accountability platform, data deletion request framework to help the industry manage consumers right to delete. So those are just a few to help with regulatory compliance. And then on the other side for addressability and privacy-enhancing technologies, we have technical standards for helping the industry rethink addressability as a whole while prioritizing privacy. So data clean room guidance, differential privacy guide and IT Solutions guide, that is really more of education for the industry and making sure that everyone is speaking the same language and they understand what all of these different things are. And we also provide frameworks for the industry, for example, to evaluate different ID solutions out there. Then open private joint and activation and publisher advertising -- publisher advertiser identity reconciliation. This is why we love acronyms here because these are all mouthfuls, and seller defined audiences are technical specifications. The first is for interoperability of data clean room as well as seller defined audience is a specification to do cohort-based targeting. Ensuring consumer privacy is more than just a requirement . It is a baseline regulations required at this point, but it can also be a strategic advantage for organizations that do it right and get ahead of it. And so what can they do to get ahead of that? First is adopting a privacy by design approach and keeping fair information practice principles or FIPPs in mind. So really, thinking about products and services that are being developed with privacy at the forefront and not as an afterthought. Keeping fair information practice principles in mind allows organizations to be a little bit ahead of the curve because many of the data privacy regulations are actually rooted in these principles. So if you consider these upfront, you're already, I would say, a little bit ahead of the curve when it comes to privacy regulation. Third-party sites will still likely become more limited. And so businesses that diversify their approach are going to be better positioned for success. And part of that is investing in and learning more about privacy-enhancing technologies. And the last thing that I will leave you all with is that getting privacy right resonates with consumers, and this is important for consumer-facing businesses, but it's also important for non-consumer-facing businesses. It's important for the ones who have direct relationships with consumers for obvious reasons, right? Those are their customers or potential customers. But for nonconsumer-facing businesses, the reality is, is that where the trends are going to be or that your partners who do have direct relationships with consumers are going to demand that you also treat the consumer data and have a privacy-first approach moving forward.

Thank you. Okay. So let's check here in the room. Have questions for Rowena? Internal one, okay. Anyone from -- here you go, you go first.

Rowena, one question. This is related to the -- look, generative AI, Google just announced and every big competition is actually preparing for these things. How much influence does IAB Tech Lab or IAB has with the governance and the regulatory acts like, I've seen Tony sitting in Congress in Washington, D.C., but what sort of influence this IAB Tech Lab or the organization can actually help with different regulatory acts?

Yes. So the IAB Tech Lab, which perhaps it's helpful for me to say that the IAB Tech Lab is actually completely separate from the IAB. We actually spun out of the IAB, it's our 10-year birthday this year, as a matter of fact. But at this point, we're a totally separate organization. The IAB Tech Lab really focuses on developing technical standards. And so we don't, I would say, necessarily influence regulators, though we often have conversations with them to educate them on how digital advertising works and how technology more broadly works, especially all the new technology like data clean rooms. So we often get invited by regulators and do have conversations with regulators in that context. The IAB on the other hand, they do, I would say, I guess the word is lobby and have those types of conversations with regulators.

Okay. Next question coming up.

Yes, it's Fiona Orford-Williams from Edison. Again on the position of the regulators. Is your general impression that the regulators have got the level about right at the moment. And the supplementary to that is do you feel that their ambitions extend further in what they would like to see in terms of privacy?

Have they got it right and do they have ambitions to go further? I think what we're seeing is an indication that, yes, like they are potentially going to go further and further regulate. And in terms of whether or not they got it right, it's a little bit of a loaded question. I think that they had the best of intentions and further communication and education with how the ecosystem actually works is going to be helpful. I mean, it's starting to feel like they're more open to the conversation and understanding the complexities of digital advertising. But I do think that what we have today, perhaps like some of that complexity was not considered.

Okay. Thank you. So let's see if we have more questions. I'm going to check what's online here and see who we have. We have one coming in online for you. So I'm going to read it. It's from Karim. And what do you expect of further push on TCF from European consumer data regulators. Thanks for the presentation. It's from Karim, CEO cabler.

Yes. So the state of the TCF today is -- there was this question of is the TCF appropriately helping the industry comply with GDPR. And in particular, there is this question, is the TC string, which is the representation of the consumers' choices could that potentially also be considered personal data? Those questions were referred to the European Court of Justice and they've provided their opinion on the TC string itself that it may be considered personal data. And so in terms of the evolution of the TCF at this point, what we've done is we sort of taken that into account so that we can establish the legal basis of legitimate interest for anyone who's actually reading the TC string. So I would say that TCF is in a pretty good place. But a key thing to note is that there's still -- it is still an ongoing process. Those questions were just referred to the European Court of Justice, but ultimately, that's going back to the Belgian DTA. And so we'll learn more, there's more to come.

More to come. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So then maybe I have a final question. Because I know you had a sneak peek of the presentation before, and you were kind of super excited about Adam and [indiscernible]. So anything you want to add up here?

So one of our pillars, addressability and privacy-enhancing technologies, really, that's about encouraging the industry to again, just think about addressability from a different perspective and not necessarily dependent on identifiers. And one of the reasons why Adam was so interesting to me when I saw a preview of the presentation is that it makes use of something called on-device learning. And that is one of the things that we're trying to educate. One of the privacy-enhancing technologies that we're trying to educate like the broader industry on. So that's what was really like interesting to see that folks are really implementing them in the real world out in the wild.

Okay. Big thank you. And after lunch, coffee is coming up, and it's going to be 10 minutes coffee break. So be back at 20 minutes to 2:00. Because we're going to start sharp as always. And that's when we will dive into the Verve Group and the management team and really get the speed presentations from all the managers. So see you in 10.

Welcome back, and we are moving into the third part of the program now. And just before we get started, I just want to, again, inform you that we will do like a PS session after the closing remarks, where we will cover the questions coming in online that we -- that I don't manage to cover here on stage. Just so you know it will be after the closing remarks. Okay. So we're going to kick off this refi into Verve Group and making media better with Sameer. So warm welcome, Sameer.

Thank you very much. Excellent. I'll try to put some energy back in the room while our enzymes are helping to digest the salmon or the second we had actually. Okay. Super excited to be back at CMD. Just to share some of the investments, the initiatives that we've put in the last 12 months. And as we all know that we recently rebranded our [ seltzer's ] Verve. And Verve means vigor, Verve means high spirits, not the spirit that we're going to have in the evening. And Verve means a lot of enthusiasm. We all Vervians are proud, and we are super enthusiastic as we are one of the fastest-growing global SSPs, which is a supply-side platform. And the next few minutes, I'm going to talk about what is it being like a publisher. The pains the publisher has to go through, how do they survive? So try to make it more informative session for us. Okay. So what do we do for better outcomes for the publishers? We'll talk about what a publisher wants. What is Verve's position in -- on the supply side of things, what is Verve's solutions for the supply side of things. And in the end, we'll talk about some of the investments of the road maps for the supply side that we're actually putting as a group. Supply sales -- and we use the terminology supply, demand impressions. What is supply. Supply is an ad request opportunity, which is actually coming in from a publisher, if I have a Pandora app or if I have a digital out-of-home as an application or a CTV application. So supply sales make me feel special, treat me differently. And we believe that the demand is going to flow or basically, it's going to follow the supply. And if we handle the supply in a different way, and this is what we do when we claim within the group that let's make media better. This is a glimpse of some of the premium global publisher direct publisher partnership that we have. And it's extremely hard. We cannot fit in 20,000-plus logos into one slide. But just to give a sense of the reach, the relationship, the trust that we've actually built over the last few years. This is just a quick glimpse of it. And it's very important to know as we grow, we genuinely process close to 700 million to 800 billion ad requests per day. Okay. Prasanna is going to cover a lot more on the technical aspects of what sort of optimizations we actually put in the system. But that's a big number. And we serve roughly 4 billion to 5 billion impressions per day across the platform, which is actually growing phenomenally for us every day, every week as we speak because of the newer initiatives. Before we get into what publisher wants, I want to share some of the common biggest challenges that publishers actually face, which we've heard a lot, but just again a quick glimpse of what a few of them of those are, privacy related, quality related and market related. From the privacy part of it, there is an immense pressure on every publisher about the privacy policies, which are actually ever changing, coming again and again in the system. We've talked enough about the cookie impact. But basically, it was really scary and very dark and moments for the publishers and for the entire ecosystem that what's going to happen there. Consent collection, what sort of IDs we can collect with permission, what can we use for better targeting, et cetera? And just imagine for a minute, how do we still -- how does the publisher still makes revenue when there are very few IDs or there are no ideas, actually. This is where we step in. We -- companies like us actually step in to come out with solutions. Quality, it's an extremely important thing. What sort of quality adds are we serving. Is it too much annoying the customers? Because if the ads are not relevant, if the ad quality is bad, trust me, the users are not going to go back to their applications and which is a loss to the publisher. So we need to make sure, again, the publishers are getting this service, and they can still retain their position. And the last one, which I want to cover here is the market-related stuff. Look, wall gardens we all know are big. They are gigantic. They have -- doing their own optimizations actually. That generally means that there is a lesser publisher, a genuine publisher traffic, which is actually available to the open markets and the exchanges, actually, for -- they get less revenue shares and they basically are kind of like covered within the wall gardens. A lot of pressure of cost around the personnel cost, the traffic, et cetera. And we have to make sure that how companies like us can help ensure the traffic is actually and the market fair share is still available for the genuine publishers, which are coming out of the market. Let's see what a publisher wants. Some of the attributes are covered here. The first and the foremost thing here is trust. Publishers absolutely need a very strong relationship and the trust for the SSPs or the platforms that they actually work with. Revenue generation, good fill rate, higher CPMs leads to bigger revenue checks to the publishers. Quality ads, I've just covered. We have to make sure absolutely that the quality of ads, the brand reputation of the platform, no slippage of unwanted ads, et cetera, is actually getting out of the systems because there are IAB guidelines and the publisher actually dictates or tells us what sort of ads you should put, what sort of ads they do want to see. So we have a lot of companies, a lot of platforms, SSPs actually get into trouble if they end up in serving an ad which is not wanted or recommended by the publishers. Curation capabilities. As the world is getting sophisticated towards open exchange programmatic capabilities, publishers have a genuine ask of companies like us and SSPs to actually curate and help represent their supply into packages, which can be bought programmatically. We are PMPs, which are private marketplaces and also programmatic guaranteed. You may hear this PMP and PG a lot, actually. So this is a means of actually packaging your supply for the kind of targeting or what sort of advertisers are actually looking for. And it is a table stake for any SSP to actually offer it. But trust me, not having it is actually not good. So curation capability is extremely important. And the next topic is payment, absolutely. Every publisher needs money on time and on a regular basis. Tools and technologies is, again, look, there are options out there, but the publishers will always choose some trusted platforms to work with, and the sort of tools in the technology that we offer is -- it should always be lightweight, it should always be easy for rollout, it should always be nimble for them to actually integrate. So these are some of the attributes, and I'll share a few more. I think every publisher has the right to know more about the users. And as they scale and they grow with these platforms, they need to know -- and not every company actually does a good job in going back and telling them the trends of the users, the audience and the classification and the content consumption patterns. So knowing more about the users, we take it very seriously. That's where a lot of products like ATOM will be covered in the next sections actually, our intent is to tell more about their users back to the publishers. Customer acquisition. Publishers spend hundreds of millions of dollars for actually acquiring more customers. And as global reach through these publishers that are actually just spanning across from an app versus out-of-home or CTV, so they expect quality customer acquisition capabilities from companies like us. Cost benefits, efficiency into the system and cheaper cloud costs, infra costs, et cetera, tools is also a big help to the publishers, that brings in cost benefits to them. Transparency is so important because we've talked about SPO patch. We've talked about when a dollar starts flowing into the system from an advertiser, eventually what goes to the publisher. So transparency is also a very important aspect, which platforms like us actually are improving and making sure that the publishers have a good view into the system. Supply path optimization has been covered in the past from a few speakers here. Now this is again an extremely important aspect here. What is happening when there is so many middlemen and basically the SPO impact on the delays when the ad would come back to them and SPO impact of IAB guidelines have been defined like ads or [ TXT ], which Rowena actually covered. So SPO and is again a very important part for the publishers to know. Sustainability is also becoming an extreme important topic these days of the carbon emissions, et cetera. Look, publishers feel it. Publishers know that they want to be responsible, but they can only be responsible by working with responsible platforms and companies like us, who also actually are providing means to be solving these problems together in the industry. What is Verve's position on the supply side? We'll take a deep dive into this. I think we are, again, we all Vervians are actually proud of saying that we are beyond just another SSP out there in the market. There are a few options that the customers have, but they've got to have a reason actually to stick and work with us. And our results have been showing some consistent means of actually measuring that there is -- they are still working with us. We focused on the emerging channels. We've heard a lot about emerging channels today and probably in the next few sessions also. Why is it so important? What basically helps us to stand out in the competition, ever growing competition, especially in North America, 78% of our revenue is actually out there. Mobile app has been our core strength from get-go. CTV, OTT is one of the fastest-growing channels, which we are actually a part of. Targeting capabilities, which are very strongly driven by AI and data propositions. And of course, the whole ecosystem, partners like Google are actually offering more technology that we utilize. But this is an extremely important area for us to look into. Global scalable platform here. I think scale matters and it helps us. 700 billion to 800 billion ad requests being processed in a day and hundreds of millions of outbound ad requests, which is going out to the DSP. The ecosystem, again, has to help each other. There are limitations in what number of ad requests we can set outbound to the DSPs from our exchange. And these are sophisticated algorithms, which are AI ML driven, which are running within the systems the optimization of it. So more scale that is coming in is genuinely helping us to make our platforms to be a better decision maker. And this is -- these are decisions made in milliseconds, actually. When in 100 million seconds you have to deliver an ad. Unique formats and experiences is again, puts us in a very different position. And we are always innovating that what best can we actually get from the self-generated demand, which is coming out of our own DSPs, which we own a few. And also now, especially with Jun Group edition, which brings in a lot of brand and agency direct demand that's going to help us bring more value to the publishers. I'll share -- I'll quickly share a few key USPs here. As we talked about, in-app has been a strength. SDK, we are one of the leading SDK distributor with a footprint that is going out there in the market right now, which is -- we are launching SDKs on a very regular basis across the world, which is helping partners across all verticals like gaming, entertainment news. We cannot be specialists that we say artists only works in one vertical or actually our SDK, the beauty of it is it can help any kind of publisher, and we have a very healthy mix of that. We are proud to say that we have connected over 20,000 apps today. This is one of the aggressive tasks for the group to actually continue to actually spend more and more SDK distributions. Verve has a leading CTV position in footprint in North America. We are, again, one proud company to be having more than 60% reach -- household reach, which is a decent number when it comes and stands in front of our customers and competition. We are proud and we are very well positioned to be actually directly connected with a lot of premium publishers. And it matters, as I talk more about the SPO path and SPO chain and what it means actually, directly connecting to the publishers, as Mishel also covered, always puts us in a fabulous position of like in the SPO chain, minimum hops at one hop or direct top actually. So I share with you, we work with a company which is called Jones Media. And I think this has been shared. This is all public information. Jones Media is one premium marketing organization in North America, who works with pretty much all the big SSPs they work with, a lot of DSPs, they work with advertisers and agencies. And Jones published that Verve is actually in the in the chart. We are actually way up high in the chain where we are connected directly with the publishers. So this is an extremely important recognition for us, and we continue to make sure that this is actually taking us in the right direction. We talk about a few more key USPs, contextual targeting as we are -- our early focus has been -- has genuinely help us to solve -- it's in our DNA to solve for the complexities and the solutions where the IDs were actually not going to exist, right? So we have to make sure that the products that investments which we are actually doing, and we -- puts us into a leading position into the contextual solutions in the industry. Owned and operated is an extremely important aspect of it. Look, we have owned and operated games, which gives us unique position in terms of certain formats that we can try out. We basically are in a position to try and we not tried actually put our SDKs, not in a sense of as a test bed, but it does give us an environment where confidence level goes up. We are in a position to take a lot of first-party data that helps improve our overall targeting capabilities within the system. We own a game, which has more than 1 billion download, so -- which is having -- giving us a real perspective of what a publisher generally needs. So that helps. And I've already talked about trust. We have been consecutively ranked as the leader in the seller trust index for mobile and in-app and CTV mobile. And these recognitions absolutely help us for successful long-lasting business relationships. Okay. So a leading and growing emerging channel supply position. We've talked a lot about our focus on emerging channels. I want to quickly share here around the channels in the countries on how we are positioned today. We are leading in mobile. We are extremely strong in CTV. We are upcoming on the digital out-of-home aspects of things. We are early in retail audio or mobile ads, and this is generally -- a lot of investment in the platform actually is being done. And we have a low focus today on PC and web. On the countries or the geos location side of things, we are leading in North America, 78% now. We are strong in Scandinavia and Brazil, upcoming our Netherlands and U.K. We are early in India and APAC. And Peter mentioned about India and the opportunity in Indonesia has so we are early, but we have solid plans on how we actually start capturing those markets. And today, for called out reasons, we don't have any focus within Mainland China or Russia. We know the reasons. But for the growth plans, we want to be stronger and stronger in the areas which we are already good at. Critical mass accumulation genuinely helps. We want to solve for the weaker positions that we have, weaker channels or weaker regions. So we are putting in a lot of resources to make sure and product investments to make sure that the growth plans are actually aligned, which takes our emerging channel supply position in a fabulous position across the globe. That was fast. All right. Let's quickly talk about the solutions for the supply side. We bring in an optimal demand for the publishers. We want to make sure that every ad impression opportunity, which is getting out of a system, is sold in the most efficient way. And trust me, it takes lot when we use the word efficient. Because when you get 800 billion auctionings happening on a day, you have to make decisions, which are fast enough and smart enough. We bring premium brands for global reach. We are able to bring in a lot of performance buyers at a global level. We bring demand for supply with and without IDs. We have demand for all formats. We bring in demand for via open auction, waterfall setups. We talked about bringing in demand through curated marketplaces, which is PMPs, programmatic guarantees, et cetera. And we bring demand from our own DSPs, our own brands and AD plus global DSPs, which are actually helping us filling this. And what is the end result of all of this? This optimal demand, we want to have a happy customer, a happy publisher and the revenue and the growth charts for the publishers should actually be aligned to make sure that they always select us and choose us over others to work with. All right. Our solutions for the supply side -- apologies for going back and forward, actually, generating more value per ad impression, okay? So making the publishers' inventory more valuable is the key secret is our key USP where the competition may be or may not be good at. And how does it happen because scale matters. We have reached for more than 2 billion devices. Recently, some algorithms have been deployed, [ for some ] might cover it. Enrichment of signals through all of these data assets through our SDK connections, et cetera, which is coming. And we enrich those signals and we send it downstream to the DSPs are auctioning on our open exchange actually. Addressability is in our DNA. As I mentioned, it's extremely important that solutions and products like ATOM, ID and ID-less graphs that we are actually working on, et cetera, it has to solve for these addressability challenges. Best-in-class demand shipping, supply shipping mechanisms, which is, again, very AI, ML driven to make sure that our systems are actually very efficient and they're able to scale. And this all is automated by the way. We don't have people -- more traffic is coming in, let me put more rack space servers actually et cetera. So -- and then what is extremely important, which is covered by Jonathan also where Google is a big leader is, help get the right ads to be placed on the right users at the right location, okay? It seems super easy, but trust me, it's super hard actually. But we -- this is how we actually make the publisher inventory more valuable to our buyers, to the advertisers, which are connected to us on our system. There's a lot more happening behind it. We can compress this information on a few slides for you. But some of the other important areas of optimization and focus is easy and low touch integration means with our publishers in our industry peer sets. We are the only company in the world today who has an open source SDK, and it means a lot. We have not marketed it well, but we will make sure that this message goes out very hard because this brings trust. Publishers, they work with us because they see, they can just get into the source code and see, are we doing goofy things. We are not. Open source is a big belief for us. And because of our multichannel focus, the reach extension is also a very important aspect. And I'll give a very quick example here. When we deal with the advertisers, the advertisers actually again rely on our capabilities. Advertisers have budgets. The budgets can go out in banner ad or a video ad or a native ad. Reach extension genuinely helps us to actually help to serve and fulfill their KPIs and needs. PMP capabilities, we've talked about a bit, but again, we are investing a lot into making sure that the PMP solutions are actually are at the state of the art from us. Preferred publisher partnerships. Look, again, we -- there is again a reason for publishers or partners to choose a platform for us. We want to be more accretive for the publishers. We have -- we want to be engaged with some special programs, wherein the publishers are actually convinced that they just don't get a white glove service or a check from us, but there are many more reliable opportunities that the publisher community can actually work with us. I'm out of time, I'll try to quick. I would love to share with you Verve's road map for the supply side, and I'll try to compress this under 2 categories. One is product development and innovation, which will be covered by Prasanna to some extent is. Mobile, we will continue to invest a lot more into full-screen video, rewarded video solutions. Jun Group brings an amazing opportunity us together to actually make sure that this experiences gets to the next level out in the industry. CTV, we will invest into CTV to make sure that the needs of the CTV publisher base, which is growing fast, it's no longer a green field. The creative experiences and the richness is actually is also taken on a serious note, and it's a part of our road map. We've talked about digital out-of-home in audio, and we now are in a position, Jun Group already has solutions. Prasanna's team is already building more and more into the technology and platform. Data will always be an integral part as we grow. More and more data elements are coming into the system to improve our solutions for the ID and the ID less world. ATOM today is for iOS. ATOM 3.0, our teams are actually working on an MVP solution for Android. We are putting our thoughts and processes for how we can have an equaling solution for CTV, et cetera. And platform in general has to be -- as you grow so large, the platform has to make sure that tools, the enrichment, the capabilities, the small nuances of it actually are in a very simplified way actually offer to our customers. Last slide that I'll take is improve our publisher relationships and continue to grow the revenues. We will be investing a lot into sales and internationalization. There are some new [ geos ], there are some new channels where we have to actually invest a lot. Q1, Q2 results, a lot of attribution goes towards farming because our account managers have done a phenomenal job in working very well with both the supply and the demand side of things. So we will continue to invest more and more into it. We will absolutely invest into PMT and [ feasibilities ]. I talked about ATOM as a first solution for privacy, which will be the flagship product. And the last one is publisher relationships. It's not just whining, dining with them. It's not just getting a check to them. That takes a lot more in terms of trust and basically our positioning and for them to choosing us to work with. So we will continue to improve -- invest more into the publisher relationship that we have. And yes, look, again, everything that we are doing together is to making sure that we can get the best of the demand towards the best of supply relationship, and we want to make media. Thank you so much. I'll pass it to Alex.

Thank you, Sameer. So I think we actually move on, right, I mean, next presentation. And the next coming up is Alex. Where do we have you? Over here. Welcome.

Yes. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Alex Stil. I'm very new at the company. So let me introduce myself a little bit. I'm 7 weeks in. I'm not counting, but someone just told me. I have an agency background. I used to start my own company and media agency a very long time ago, which I sold to WPP, and from there on, I had a career within WPP and GroupM. So very much coming from an agency. And for me, stepping into the world of Verve has been also a great experience and a learning experience for which I also have to thank Sameer, who gave me some lessons on abbreviations, and maybe he did the same for you today. I don't know. So I'm going to talk a little bit more around the demand side and how we're going to build the demand side and how we're going to scale the demand side for Verve. First of all, I want to start with what we have. And I think Sameer already explained a lot around the things we do and the capabilities we have, the supply we have, the skill we have. And also with Jun Group joining with Mishel, who's sort of actually starting at the same time now with me. We have a great starting point. We have great scale. We have great opportunities. We're big in the U.S. where we're scaling in other markets. So there's a great starting point to start to build relationships with agencies and brands. But building agencies our relationship is a different thing just technologies talking to each other. So one of the challenges we'll be looking at in the coming years is how do you build those relationships? How do we make it simple for agencies and brands to explain what we have without using too many complex words, but actually delivering what is really needed? Delivering results for an advertiser who has a budget and wants to spend it in a way that it delivered the results. First of all, it starts with how do we actually get a seat at the table. There's many companies. You've seen many logos today. And how do we make sure that we actually have the right to speak. And it sounds maybe a little bit strange. But coming from an agency, I can tell you, there's short of staff, short on time and everyone is in a hurry. So how do we make sure we can actually get the attention? And what is going to be our story to explain next to, we're great. We have great supply. Well, there's 3 components that are really important, where I feel that combining that into products and solutions will give us a great story, but also really delivering results for our clients. Sameer already spoke about premium supply, and premium supply is really talking about the quality we have, the direct connections we have. So being very close to the -- and have access to the consumer through our own SDK, but also how we grow in CTV. I have a son who is 18 years old. He doesn't work -- watch linear TV. He only actually watched well, not even Netflix. I think it's now Disney with Star Wars. But anyway, he looks TV in a different way. And we see that, that different groups are starting to have different behaviors. They're moving to different channels and different consumptions. So us being there where the consumer is moving is critical. Us being there to make sure that they can reach -- the advertiser can reach the right consumer, and we can help them with that is critical. The second is around data, and I'll talk a little bit more about that. And Prasanna, I don't know where you sit. But he will do a lot more in detail around some of the things we have like ATOM as well. We talked about Jun Group. They did a great presentation, Zero-party data. To be honest, when I joined, I never heard of the word Zero-party data, and I've been 25 years in the industry. But it's quite interesting to know that maybe we'll get also a fourth party or fifth party data, I don't know. But 0 starts like perfect data because it's the consumer who's giving consent and sharing information with us willingly that actually enables us to give them the better experience. And I think that's the core of what we want to do as an organization, making sure that we give great experiences towards those advertisers to deliver the results. And lastly is then around solutions. And you'll hear about, I don't know how many times you heard today about ATOM and Moments and others, but it is around packaging into solutions, making it simple for an advertiser or an agency to really understand this is what it is and this is what you get. We have to reduce some of the complexity in the industry, but we'll have to make it easy with systems and help with people. If you can't convince them, confuse them, they always say, so here's a lot of logos. But on a serious note, these are already all clients that are working with us. These clients are already spending and buying our supply. So we have a great starting point. All of these clients already see results with us. My job, our team's job is going to be to explain what else is possible. What can we do more for you? And how can we help you more to deliver better results for you or as an agency for your clients? And that's going to be the challenge for the coming period where, together with my team, we're going to work on. You heard a lot around objectives today as well. And I think it's really important to realize that when you saw all those logos, they don't have the same objectives. Certain brands, I worked for a long time, for instance, for Unilever, there was a lot of things around brand awareness. And the way we measure it is around brand lift. Brand awareness is also being there where the audience is. Again, we can help them by reaching those audiences in those newer channels. Someone once told me, mobile is the most important because it's close to their heart. I have it in my pocket, but still it's close to everyone. But being there that has an impact is important. And I think that's what we can do with the supply we currently have. Also, you heard more about, Mishel spoke about it, you'll hear more around Carl as well around the formats we have, interactive full-size formats. Have any impact, creating engagement has an impact on the consumer and helps him to actually move into purchasing a product. I can go down the whole list. But basically, for every objective, it fits with some of the solutions we have with the data we can provide, with the supply we have and reaching the audience we need to reach and actually convert them into an action. But it's seriously not one size fit all. Different agencies have different needs. Peter spoke something close to your heart today was around talent. And I think talent in our industry is a big thing. But also at the agency side, it's a challenge, not just a big thing because everyone needs to have the right people. But also a lot of the agencies have short on staff as well, and they need help. So in some of the cases, we don't just provide here supply or here's a product. We actually do a full white glove service where we do end-to-end, help them to plan, buy, execute and deliver. This is critical for some of the agencies we work with, and this is where we really make a difference. It's still a people business on the demand side. These things also work. We use a lot of technology. We do it very efficient, but there's also still, can you help me? The second is around providing deals. Sameer again, did a lot of talking around PMPs. So I want to go too deep and I'll show you a little bit. I think it was REMKO yesterday, he set the best explanation for everyone around PMP, so I'll give you the credit, REMKO. It's an ETF for media. It's basically packaging. You see now you know what it is. I can see someone recognizing it. But it's packaging, the best we have bundling it, combining the supply, combining the data and basically making it easy to buy these bundles and make it relevant for those advertisers. And last is providing the technology. Some of our clients say, listen, we do have the people. We do have the knowledge, but we want to have the best-in-class technology. And also that we have, and that's what we're currently further developing. I'll show you a little bit later. Again, for each of those clients, we have to think around what is the best solution, not just from a product perspective, but also how do we serve these clients. What is their need or basically said, how do we solve their problems? I think the one thing you've heard the most today is around, let's make media better. But the core 3 things that we're really focusing on is, again, outcomes. And me coming from an agency, I think it's hopefully the most important word. Outcomes is not just around performance, what we call in a market like a lower funnel, like a test drive or someone buying something. Outcomes can also be on a higher level. So brand preference, brand interest, engagement. Those are also outcomes. So dependent on the need of the client and where they are, we have different focus on different KPIs. But what we really want to do is making sure that for each of those clients, we have a solution and we can deliver those outcomes. And we want to do that again in a responsible way in the right channels. The disadvantage of presenting in the late afternoon or afternoon is that a lot of other presenters already been before me. And I think Mishel from Jun Group already presented certain things that I will repeat because Jun Group is part of the foundation we're going to build our whole demand business on as well. He spoke about the audiences and the things -- how do we reach those audiences. These are sort of the 6 points you see here that are basically critical to get to the right solutions for clients. So one is around -- in the world that is changing, the deprecation of the cookie, privacy, all of those things, how do we still pinpoint audiences? How do we know that we can still reach those people that we need to reach? And we have multiple solutions for that. The second is, do you have the supply? Do you have the data that we can actually reach it? So it's not just about knowing those audiences, but can you deliver that for us? The third thing, and most people from a tech perspective, talk less about it, is actually the creative. And you've seen already some great examples, but creative is really important to drive results. Probably 50% or more is actually triggered by the creative. If the creative is good, you'll do something with it. I wanted to use a word that I won't use, but I'm Dutch, so I'm [indiscernible] to have bad language. If the creative is not so good, you will ignore it. And let's be fair. We're also ignoring a lot of ads. So making sure that you have the right trigger, understanding who your audience is, adapting the ad to that knowledge to be able to have the right trigger is critical. And that's also why we're looking to make sure that we can help our clients with that as well. Number 4 is around measurement and targeting. We have a lot of data, and we can do a lot of things with it, but it's also important that we can measure in the right way. And in this industry, a few companies accept that. It's not very much appreciated if we measure our own homework. So we'll talk a little bit more on how we do that and what do we measure? Number 5 is having the right technology. And number 6 is around knowing what's going on in a certain segment. So let me go a little bit through a couple of the examples. Some slides you've seen before. This one comes from Mishel. In the media industry, there's a saying that if you want to get the message across, you need a frequency of 3. So maybe we'll see one later again, but then you really know these slides. But on a serious note, this is a very important part that we're going to scale. This is the ability to ask consumers questions, know more about consumers and actually optimize against it. So with [indiscernible], which is currently mainly used in the U.S., we're going to look on how to expand that in the coming months into other markets. The other one is Moments.AI. And I think you heard a lot already around contextual. We also have developed our contextual solution. Verve started really early with it. And I think one of the unique things or the most important things and also was a learning for me, was around that, actually every day, I think, what is it, 73% of the URLs are new on the web. So there's a lot of new content every day, and we need the right technology to learn from that from a contextual and map bit and bundle it in segments to offer it to our clients. So it's a nice combination, by the way, with 15% of the searches are new. So what you actually now know is that the searches are new, the content is new. So that it's actually always very real-time relevant information that we need to focus on. I think ATOM wins the price for today when we talk about it. Prasanna there, you're sitting by the way. Now I see you. We'll talk in more detail about it. The one thing I want to say about ATOM coming from an agency side is, one of the things we're really looking for as an agency as a client is, of course, to worry around the deprecation of the cookie, the disappearance of the ID. How do we still get to know how do we reach those people? The focus towards privacy solutions, the focus towards building cohorts that are very close to what we used to call the audiences we're targeting at is critical. Being able to talk about those groups and those cohorts that are relevant, being able to still deliver on that, even for those groups that don't have IDs, is of much value. Because, again, the price -- the CPM of some of them are lower, but the quality can be exactly the same with these cohorts. PMPs, there, they are again. The coming months, we'll release our curated deal marketplace, and you're going to see that on our website. And also we're going to release a tool that helps us and also our clients as a self-serve to create these deals. Maybe just to give you a bit of a picture of what -- where we talk about those, let's call it, media ETFs for today, just for the fun of it, what kind of deals are we talking about? These can be event related, so a package for Valentine's Day. But these can also be performance-related, knowing that these positions have a viewability of 80% or knowing that it has a certain completion rate. It can also be for -- well, Black Friday, as an example, but it can also be packages around certain formats. We just want these formats with these kind of targeting. So it's packaging relevant content, relevant supply, relevant data for specific verticals for specific clients. Making it prepackaged, easy, but also making it custom, so we can still adapt based on what client needs. There we go. Other thing that I already spoke about is the creative. You'll see a lot of examples today around creative, but I do want to emphasize the importance of that and also that we have the capability with Jun Group, but also in Europe and some other places where we help our clients with these creatives. I saw the Google presentation. I think it's great what you already can do with GenAI. But some of these creatives, you can still not do with generative AI. There's still a lot of manual work there to be done, because there's creativity needed and there's interaction needed. And a lot of our experience is in that, knowing what works, knowing how a consumer will interact, how they will behave and how we trigger that. So knowing more about creative, but also measuring and learning around the creative and how they interact is key. And again, I'm not going to make all the examples and explain what is what, but I think in your life, you've seen all these kinds of formats already. But this is not just for mobile. This is also, for instance, digital out-of-home. And I'd like to give you just a few examples to give you a flavor of how out-of-home now has evolved into the next thing where we can be very relevant. We can be very relevant from a location perspective, but also with all those other different data sources. So if I know time of day, I can be different in my messaging. If I know the location, I can very much customize the ads towards that location. If I know the weather, I can adjust it that I sell barbecues only above 24 degrees or whatever we do. So basically, the static experience of out-of-home has now evolved into a very, I would say, rich experience and much more relevant, where we can use different data sources that we also use for those other channels to really be more precise and relevant for the audiences we're reaching. On your left side, you also see that we created a planning tool, which is part of our DSP, where you can help our clients to really pinpoint and select in different ways around really making sure that you reach the right audiences at exactly the right locations with exactly the right positions. Sometimes we also do custom work, and I thought it was nice to see also something like more specific. So Netflix came to us and asked us, "We like to do digital out-of-home, but we really need to like adapt almost daily around what's the best series. We want to have different titles. We want to be really custom. Could you connect it to our database and could we have the control instead of you?" So we basically build from our DSP to them -- into all the digital out-of-home opportunities, an interface that enables them to select the title, to select the image, to select the background and even select like if they want to change certain locations. So they have a full control of actually optimizing some of those creatives. Certain creatives, I understand, they're also not allowed to use because of rights. So for them, it's really important to have the right control around that. I'm watching the time. I see you watching me. Measurement, I already mentioned measurement. And again, I don't want to do all these logo parades, but it's important to know that measurement is not something we do ourselves. Measurement is also what we do together with partners. So measuring if there's a brand lift, measuring if there's footfall traffic into a store. So we have different partners that enable us to measure the things for a client the way they want it, but also that data and that information can be used to optimize and target. Number 5 is the technology. I already spoke about it. We invested a lot in our DSP. From a contextual perspective, making sure it's privacy first, focusing on these emerging channels and also giving our clients the ability to actually develop their own algorithms and their own learnings in this system to optimize their own bidding strategies. And then last, because this is all great. We have now products, we have creative, we have supply, we have data. But it was really important when we talk to an advertiser or to any client or any agency is understanding the verticals. So the coming year, we'll invest more in vertical knowledge. You've already seen some examples from Mishel around retail. So how do we make sure in the coming year we'll be the best at retail and not just the best around our products, but also sharing the knowledge around retail and speaking the language of retail, because each vertical has different language, different needs, different KPIs. So for us, we're really going to organize ourselves also towards these verticals. So bringing that all together, 6 points, 7 weeks in and a lot to do, but quite excited to do so. We're going to invest in people in the market. We need to build teams. We're going to invest in products. As you've seen, there's a lot, but how do we package it. Growing in markets where we don't have that many people like the U.K., you've seen in the presentation from Peter and also from others that the U.K. is a very important market also because the agencies. As you start to look at where are the hubs of agencies where they have central is, London very critical location. So that's from a market perspective. Investing in clients, making sure we build those relationships, investing in our current clients because we have already a lot extending that, but also looking at new clients. Growing again in those channels. You've seen Sameer saying we're very great and big in supply, in mobile, in in-app and CTV, but also as these channels grow, we will grow. As we get more supply, the more things we can do. And last is around verticals. As I said, we're going to focus on verticals. We're going to select a couple of them as a starting point. You've seen where we already begin like retail, entertainment, but more will come in the coming year as well. And the timeline says, no, stop. That's good. I finished. Thank you very much.

Alex, stay on stage because we actually have -- yes, please. And I would actually like to ask Sameer to join up on stage. So I'm thinking we can take a short Q&A session here in between. When we have the top line guys on stage, right? Yes. So let's open up for questions, demand side, supply side. [indiscernible] come on.

I would be disappointed if you don't have any questions now. The pressure is on now.

The thing that I've been thinking about while you've been talking is in terms of the PMPs. They're obviously developing very fast. There must come a point where the PMP is the standard way forward in a way, especially with the possibilities of AI. So if that happens, and that's the way of doing it. Surely, the ability to price at a premium will erode?

Wow, that's, first of all, a good question. And it's not me being American saying that, but it's a seriously good question. I think, first of all, I think in the coming years, there will be PMPs still open as well. Because, again, for different objectives, so if you have, for instance, performance client or performance agency, they want to have a lot of flexibility and actually, some of that flexibility is less with PMPs. So dependent on objectives, you'll see that different ways of buying are actually being used. So I think that's one side of the equation. What the impact will be on pricing as PMPs grow? I find it really hard to say. It's again supply and demand. I think with PMPs, if we package things well and it delivers the result, you basically pay for quality, right? Because you pay for some of the work that's actually being done for you. You don't need to find things. We already created it. We curated it. And we're actually even optimizing it. PMP is not a static thing, like here you go. It actually takes work on both sides. So it's -- you basically create a package. But doing that, it's still work on our side and their side. So I don't think that directly the price will go down if there'll be very -- but it's more around how is it valued? And how do we make sure there's enough value in the future.

Absolutely agree with you. And PMP is actually now a table stake, I'll be honest. All the platforms they do offer. But I absolutely agree with Alex is the differentiation will be basically, what are your targeting capabilities. If it's a choice of a measurement partner the advertiser has -- are we already integrated with them or not actually. What sort of other audience or [indiscernible] layers you can actually get in.

Thank you. And we're moving over here with the microphone.

[indiscernible] with Kepler Cheuvreux. It would be interesting to hear a little bit on the positioning and how you should think about the agencies? Are they -- I mean, you're encroaching on their territory? Or are they actually going to be there? How do you see that someone who has worked there for a while?

Well, well, I don't think we -- as I said, I come from an agency. And I think there's a normal -- well, I'd say with a relationship with the agency the advertiser and let's call it supply or the supply side. It's more around, how do we work together and how do we create efficiency. So I think when you look at -- and Sameer talked about it around supply path optimization as an example, they want to work with partners who actually create efficient access to supply. They don't want many stops. They want to work with those kind of partners. In that way, I think we're in a very good place, and that's also why I think there's a great opportunity. The other part is, as I said, there's actually a different kind of relationship where we also have the knowledge and the resources to a certain extent that sometimes doesn't always sit in an agency. And I'm, again, not saying agencies because I've been there for a long time, don't always have the knowledge, but different agencies have different skills and actually working together is a positive thing where we can do some of the work or we can provide information and insights they don't have. So I think it's a balanced ecosystem that will evolve over time and who does what. But in the end, we need to make sure that we make their life easier, we make them look good and we basically make sure we deliver results, right? Those are very simple things, but that's actually in the end, what it's all about, making sure we can deliver results, and then we don't compete because they, again, look most of time from a broader perspective and also, yes, they have a different role in the ecosystem.

I'll just add one very interesting thought to that. Look, agencies, over the years, have actually reduced the number of SSPs that they work with. And there is a legitimate reason behind it, actually. And as we are building more products and solutions to solve for the future. They always are looking for which new companies are solving for the future, et cetera. Scale matters, because they will not select a partner just to switch to a different partner where they will fail. So they absolutely need scale. And we are a very large open exchange marketplace business as some of the logos that actually Alex shared. So we are in a very good position because they are already spending hundreds of millions of dollars of the advertisers that they are representing through open exchange. So we have all valid reasons to go engage with them for doing a large-scale global other relationships to the product offerings.

Okay. Back to Fiona.

You've talked about building teams. And you've also talked about talent shortages in the industry. So how do you resolve that dichotomy?

Good question again. I can do the disclaimer a few weeks in and here we go. But on looking further. I think there's a couple of things why Verve as a company is attractive. I think talent is interested to learn and learn new things. I think the company -- we are. There's a lot of opportunity to learn and grow. And I think that's really important. I think the second thing, and I've done already a couple of interviews is, I think even the younger generation, it also around -- they're still interested in the, say, in advertising, but they would want to do it in the right way because certain things are also annoying. I think how we position ourselves and how we're not trying to really do it good and make Internet better. It's fun to be part of. Third, for me, what I do use in some of those conversations for a global company and for a lot of people, that's also very interesting, right? You can learn from different parts of the world. So it's not just a local thing. You learn why you work with colleagues in different markets, different things, and we have the scale that you can learn. So I think the direction of the company, the scale of the company and the new things of the company is what makes it very attractive.

And people follow the leaders.

They all follow Sameer.

Everyone wants to be on the best team.

Look, we'll be very honest and we'll be very grounded from that perspective. We have people from Google working with us. We have people coming in from the best and the best possible companies. And there is alleged reason like -- they see that we are doing something good too.

Thank you. So let's see. No more questions, right? Then, I think it's perfect timing to [indiscernible], thank you. Yes. We can. Okay. CTO time. Prasanna. Welcome up and take your time.

Thank you. Finally, you get to see some younger people on stage today, towards the end. Super stoked to be here. This is my second Capital Market Day. I joined just before -- in August of last year, so it has been 12, 14 exciting months for me. I'm super glad to have this opportunity to present the technology vision to this audience. Over the next 20 minutes or so, I think we will talk about 3 key problems. We'll talk about how we keep advertising relevant and safe at the same time through the solution suite that we're exposing. We spoke about all the risks of advertising. We spoke about some of the changing challenges and constraints. How do you still keep advertising relevant? And how do you still keep it safe. We'll talk about how Verve has been thinking about solving some of these problems. Part two, how do we lean into AI into solving and delivering differentiated outcomes for some of our customers? We'll spend some time talking about that. And finally, tech is a very high scale game. How do we kind of solve this business and solve it sustainably, responsibly and with a high degree of efficiency. We'll spend some time and wrap up with that. Now we've seen enough of this since morning, but take a step back. Digital advertising in general started with a singular promise, and that promise was essentially, "Hey, we will allow advertising to be highly personalized and advertising to be highly measurable." Now compare that with -- in all the solutions that existed before digital advertising; print media, broadcast media, none of those could ever promise any kind of outcomes like that. And yet, as we see that single promise that digital advertising started with has become increasingly difficult to hold up and scale to. Now many of you have probably had this experience. You go to Amazon and browse a few products. And then you go anywhere else on the Internet, you start seeing ads of that same product just following you and being flashed everywhere else. That's not magic, that's cookies, right? And the reason that has even been possible historically is because SSPs and DSPs have worked and indexed information against a common cookie ID, and they follow you. As a user, they are able to track your entire journey irrespective of where you are, which website you are, which app you are. And that's allowed them historically to very precisely deliver targeted advertising to users. Now what's happening recently with a lot of the regulatory changes, with a lot of the platform changes, that is just not possible. And it has obviously shaken the foundations of digital advertising. What you see essentially here is how the landscape has been shifting. On the left, 8 years back, 10 years back, pretty much every user who access the Internet was digitally identifiable, either through device identifiers or through cookies or through first-party identifiers. And as we go from left to right, as we start getting into 2025, that coverage has massively reduced, right? We spoke about Apple. We know Google is taking a slightly different approach here. But as you go from left to right, the addressability of the overall digital population has massively reduced. And that's created a new problem that a lot of companies need to solve for, and that is really the problem of ID-less addressability. Has anybody mentioned about ATOM before me today? Okay. So we've been working hard. And very honestly, we've been working hard about solving some of these challenges, predicting and preparing for some of these eventualities and more importantly, asking ourselves that question, how do we stay true to that digital promise that digital advertising started with. And a lot of that culminated in the launch of ATOM 3.0 in the earlier part of this year. We'll finally talk about what ATOM does. ATOM is an on-device software that is distributed into our core advertising SDK. ATOM has access to hundreds of absolutely privacy-safe signals. We talk about PII and we talk about sensitive data. ATOM doesn't deal with any of that. ATOM uses commodity signals that are accessible pretty much on every smartphone that you're probably using it, accesses the gyroscope, the compass, the accelerometer, the battery levels and none of these will ever be able to identify the user precisely. And that is the promise of ATOM to kind of keep targeting completely anonymized, but keep marketing completely relevant. Now what do we do with all that information. We take all that information on our SDK, on the handset, on the phone. And then we have complex on-device deep learning models that process all of that information, the point-in-time status as well as the historic status of those information. And eventually, what comes out of the device is what do you see on the right, which is cohorts. ATOM as of today supports 150-plus cohorts and what leaves the device and what eventually becomes available to advertisers and DSPs who are target users is what do you see on the right side there. So essentially, how do we take significant amount of privacy safe data, process all of that completely locally on the device through edge intelligence, through on-device AI and how do we make behavioral aspects or contextual aspects about the user available to advertisers to continue their buying behaviors? Now over the last year or so, we have spent a lot of time taking item from being a platform into actually being a solution for different customer segments. We started with building and specializing ATOM for the brand customers. So this is a good example of top-funnel, mid-funnel brand, an outdoor brand, trying to get users who can potentially visit their pages and potentially drive some conversions. And here is a good realistic example of the kind of signals ATOM is able to collect and process on your iPhones, because ATOM is largely IOS only today. And the kind of cohorts that buyers can eventually target. And none of this depends on device IDs, none of this depends on cookies and none of this depends on e-mails or any of that. Exact same platform, powering a very different customer segment and that is a segment of performance buyers. The performance buyers are significantly more demanding because they are willing to pay only if there are precise conversions much down the funnel that they're willing to -- that they spent on. So this is, again, the same platform. It's really exactly the same platform that is powering all the different segments, but it's a potentially different set of signals or different set of cohorts that eventually help this advertiser drive transactions on his food delivery app. And while we were envisioning all of this for advertisers some time in the earlier part of this year, [indiscernible] started also asking us a question on what can ATOM potentially do for publishers. And if you take a step back, publishers really care about 3 things, right? Publishers care about, how do I acquire more users. Everybody wants more scale, more users always drives more money eventually. Publishers care about how to keep those users on their app much longer? How do you maximize session times? How do you maximize engagement? And then once you're able to maximize engagement, how do you eventually convert that into revenue per user or real dollars? And historically, the focus on ATOM in the last year has been on Phase 3, which is how do we drive higher CPMs on anonymized users. But as we start getting into the second half of this year and next year, we'll also be looking very seriously at solving problems one and two from a publishing perspective. Now rounding up with this ATOM 3, which launched during MAU in the earlier part of this year. It was a watershed release for many of us in the company because it really graduated the product from being a beta software to potentially what we now call as being generally available. That means all the previous barriers that existed to adoption of ATOM have now completely been removed. And what that essentially means is every SDK customer who uses the Verve marketplace for monetization will have ATOM also prebaked into their app and prebaked into their users. And as we get into the later part of this year, one of the interesting projects that we have been trying to bring to life is ATOM for Android. Now we know that Google has postponed their decision around cookies and ad out identifiers, and we'll actually use that to our advantage. Because this actually puts us in a very interesting situation where for probably the first and last time, we should be able to compare how ATOM does in a world with identifiers and see whether ATOM is able to deliver to the promise that we have been talking about. So this is a great opportunity. And this is not going to last too long. But for the 6, 9 months that this window exists, we would love to compare and see how ATOM's predictions fall in line with standard traditional ID-based audiences. And then as we get into next year, we are also starting to evaluate and think about how we bring some of this magic onto other platforms. Now Verve is inherently an omnichannel marketplace. IOS has been number one, because of what Apple did with ATT. But then going beyond iOS, going into Android and then going into other channels, a lot of that is super interesting for us, and it's in pretty early stages of investigation right now. Having said all this, we spoke about if ATT is a good data point. We know that 75% to 80% of the users typically opt out of the ability to do one-to-one tracking, but there still are the 20%, 25% of the users who will continue to consent, continue to provide their entity. And we haven't forgotten about solving for that subset of the population either. Now digital identity inherently is a complex piece, right? So even though it's only 20%, 25% of the users who are potentially opting in, the way users provide information on digital landscapes, it could be a telephone number, it could be an e-mail address, it could be platform created device identifiers, a lot of companies rely on IP address. And what you essentially see here is a single physical person is now being mapped into multiple digital identities, right? And this creates a new fragmentation problem that we need to be solving for. The Verve identity graph, we launched this product earlier this year, exactly solves for that fragmentation problem and what the Verve identity graph essentially does is, it allows advertisers and all of our customers to navigate that complex maze of identity. And what we essentially do is both through internal data assets that we have through our supply and demand side businesses as well as working with some of the external vendors like Experian, LiveRamp and [indiscernible], we have a clustering solution that allows us to cluster all the digital identities for a single user. So you might have only the e-mail, you might have only the IP address, you might have only the device identifiers. How do we kind of ensure that, that single person and his different avatars online are all brought together and made available to the buyers. So the identity graph has been one of the very significant milestones and launches that we have had in the earlier part of the year. Now this is probably my favorite slide because so far, we have spoken about the identity graph, you have spoken about ATOM and this is really how all those solutions come together. I mean the beauty of this is that we, as a company, as a marketplace, we want to take complexity away from advertisers. We want to ask advertisers to continue speaking the exact same language, which is, hey, you continue to think of the kind of users you want, the kind of personas you're going after. And our machinery will actually do the heavy lifting of solving that same problem across the world of identities and across the world of [ idealize ]. So this is really those 2 products coming together into a single multidimensional graph that is now completely machine learning powered and allows us to deliver on the outcomes that advertisers have always seeked. We'll move next to what is obviously one of the hottest topics -- hottest topics in town and how we lean on AI into delivering on some of these outcomes. Now let's be honest, I think -- AI, it's a time the ecosystem is going through a time where you cannot not be talking about AI, right? And the reality is that the reality we feel is that a lot of companies are playing to the gallery. A lot of companies are talking about common solutions being AI-powered, but the fundamental question that we asked ourselves and the question that we've been asking ourselves over the last few quarters and years is how do we kind of stop leveraging AI at a tactical level? And how do we solve for using AI to transform the company, right? And how do we use AI within every layer of the organization to fundamentally and in a long-term manner, transform how we operate as a business. And we narrowed down on a multidimensional framework -- framework like this. It always starts with people, right? I mean as hard as there are technology challenges, technology challenges are still solved by great people. So a big part of what we have invested in the last 12, 15 months is just hiring the right experts across the globe, bringing subject matter experts, bring people who understand the complexities of machine learning, bringing people who understand the complexities of advertising and then throwing some of these problems -- throwing some of these problems to them. From people you move on to solving the other 2 pillars, the pillars of data and technology. Now Verve as a company has been created through a lot of fundamental acquisitions that have happened over the last 4, 5 years. So how do we bring all of that data together at a platform level. We don't want to keep data in silos, and we want to ensure that there are AI algorithms are learning across the user irrespective of which business of Verve that user has seen on is activated on? And how do you bring that data lake together to power all of our AI algorithms? Technology, a big part of our decision to sign a Google contract was how do we actually use the power of Google AI the voice from Google earlier spoke about how Google has been leading the thought leadership on this and how do we use all of this in general to make experimentation and faster for our data science team. That's been a big part of our mind share as well. And finally, process, I mean, we don't talk about it, and it's important that AI is a first-class citizen in your road map planning process. So a big part of what we've also tried to do is we have hired AI Savvy product managers who think about not just using AI for the sake of AI but think about real customer problems that can be solved in a very differentiated manner through AI. So -- and how do we bring that discipline into our road map -- road map planning process. That's been a big part of how we have looked at this journey as well. That was step 1. Step 1 was really how do we internalize AI and step 2 is within this domain that we operate in, what does it mean to be state-of-the-art? Now go back again to the promise of digital advertising, digital advertising promise that you could deliver advertising ads that are highly personalized and highly relevant and how do we now deliver that exact same promise through the power of deep learning and the power of machine learning. So solving for user, the definition of a user has changed. Previously, it was an ID that you could identify and now it could be an ATOM cohort, it could be somebody in the Identity Graph. The definition has changed, but the problem hasn't fundamentally changed. So how do we use some of these to our advantage? And how do we actually solve for hard problems at the user level? How do we do this in a real-time manner? I mean, user feedback comes in at high scale and user feedback comes in very fast, right? And you need to be able to adapt to some of these signals to correct some of the errors that your models might be having. So along with solving the problems at a user level, solving it near real time, minimizing the data delays is a significant part of the investment that we make. And finally, Google spoke about this in their presentation as well. How do you go away from traditional regression classification kind of models into more deep learning-based architectures, and we are working with Google very closely on evaluating the fitment of some of these deep learning neural network models for the use cases that we have. Now Verve has a unique position. We operate across the full length of the supply chain, and that really means that we have multiple places in the whole chain that we need to solve and think of AI as a solution for. We spoke about everything that's happening on your phone, the Edge, which is what we call Edge Intelligence, everything that ATOM does on the phone is bucketed under Edge Intelligence, but we also have a supply side platform and hence, you need to solve for ensuring that you're representing publishers optimally, you are able to figure out the right price of every user and every publisher that you're working with, which is where our floor pricing models come into play, but then we also have a DSP, right? And so it becomes important for us to meet and cater to the advertisers' requirements and advertisers want the highest bang for their buck. They care about unit economics. So how do you actually deliver on some of those bidding requirements at scale. So AI for us is across the board. It's not one problem that we use AI for. We sit across the whole supply chain. And for us, AI is a fundamental building block of each of the components and businesses that we run. Now we'll zoom into one particularly successful example where this entire blueprint, this entire thinking we feel has worked very well. We spoke about Apple launching ATT and taking away the support for device identifiers. Now one of the very interesting problems we had within our Verve DSP, which is a contextual demand side platform was, what is the alternate to IDFA going away, right? So the data science team within the Verve DSP spent a lot of time modeling -- modeling some of the features, modeling some of the data. And what you see on the right there is really their representation of an alternate set of signals that they believe can contextually deliver almost on par with the previous world of identifiers. Now with that foundational work having been done, the team then went on to design what they call as the Explore exploit agent. And this is really probably solving the needle in a haystack problem because advertisers are here coming to the Verve DSP saying "Hey, I have a $1 million budget, and I'm willing to pay $5 for everybody who orders food once. Now how do you figure out who's willing to order food and how do you minimize the wastage in that effort, and that is where the Explore Exploit agent, the Explore agent is responsible for narrowing down within a universe, the pockets of inventory that it finds promising, and the Exploit takes over what the Explore finds, it discards what is not useful, and it doubles down on what -- where it can get highest return of investments. The results have been very interesting. Scan in general, when Apple launched Scan, I think there's a lot of pushback from the industry because Scan, in general, generally gave a perception that advertisers don't now have enough visibility and control over some of these conversions that they care about. But to a large extent, we were able to provide better visibility on our contextual DSP for advertisers in spite of using the underlying limitations of Apples -- Apples Scan engine. Every advertiser cares about lower CPIs. And a big part of what we were able to deliver was consistently better unit economics when identifiers went away. Now ad tech is a big -- it's a high-volume game. We have always spoken about hundreds of billions of auctions that we progress on a daily basis. In Q4 of last year, we signed an interesting expanded collaboration with Google. Now Google is, and Google was a huge partner for us, and we work with them in multiple capacities. So beyond bringing significant economies of scale to our particular business and to the order of saving about 20 million over the next 4 years. A big part of why we feel this partnership is useful because it opens a lot of doors that potentially were not accessible before, right? And a few of them, how do we again use the best-in-class capabilities of Gemini and Vertex that the Google session covered? How do we actually potentially co-build for some of the problems that we are dealing with in advertising? And how do we own the IP associated with that that co-build, working with probably some of the best engineers in the world at Google. And finally, Google is undoubtedly also the biggest advertising company on the earth. So how do we also partner on that front? How do we work deeper into the Google advertising ecosystem with Google DSP, DV360, with Google open bidding on the supply side? And how do we use some of that to our advantage. Now the technology vision. In general, I think one of the challenges that I have felt as a technologist is, what is the right balance between building solutions at a platform level? Which means you're trying to generalize and solve for certain common denominator problems versus when is it worth specializing? Because generalization in general means that you're solving for common problems and specialization means you're having separate teams solve for very customer specific problems. And Verve being a multiproduct, multi-market, multi-channel kind of company, we have -- we have to figure out the right balance between generalization and platformization. But the team, I think, in general, has done a stellar job. I think a lot of the legacy stacks that we had -- have been sunset over the last 12 months. And one of the biggest and most ambitious projects that we are probably undertaking starting now and on to the next 12 months is how do we -- how do we power our 2 biggest marketplaces, the performance marketplace and the brand marketplace through a unified core. And that unified core essentially starts to look something like this. We won't go too deep into this. It's really a single unified SDK that has ATOM as we spoke about. That same SDK solving for different customer segments. It has performance optimized experiences, branded experiences. We have an exchange. The exchange is again, there's a common run time within the exchange, where it also has very specific workflows to the different channels that different emerging channels that we operate in in-app, CTV web, audio, digital out-of-home. And then, of course, AI and data are horizontals, right? I think there's going to be AI across the board, and there's going to be data that we leverage across the board and all of this runs in a unified manner on the Google Cloud infrastructure. Finally, to wrap up, I think it's been a very interesting and exciting 12 months for us. And I feel the teams have kind of generally gone all in trying to deliver on this new mission that we have finalized as a company. But more importantly, I feel we're just getting started. So I think to that extent, a big part of what the teams want to be doing and the teams are looking forward to is doubling down on the investment that we have done over the last 12 months? And how do we use all of this to create a completely unmatched Competitive Edge. Thank you.

Prasanna, stay. I think we keep you on stage for Q&A. So checking in with the audience questions. On technology, Fiona, Rasmus, Nordea, Yes. Here we go.

Okay. So [ Adrian Almond ] here from [ Nordea ]. Just if I get it right, like the data that you use for ATOM doesn't require cookies, and et cetera. But could there possibly be any regulatory change to perhaps not allow you to see the swiping speed? Or was it the percentage of battery left. Could Apple just remove that as well or...

No. I mean you're right. I mean we are playing by the rules of the game that we know today. But the rules of the game, as we know, continue to change, continue to evolve. The good part about -- the part that we feel proud about in ATOM is, ATOM is not dependent on, let's say, a signal that if taken away, will completely bring down the product. There are a lot of companies whose day-to-day business depends, for example, on IP addresses. And IP addresses are probably one of the highest risk signals that Chrome or an Apple will pull out at any point of time, and then those companies come completely crashing to the ground. ATOM is not based on a single signal of -- ATOM collects hundreds of signals. ATOM has hundreds of customized models into [ predicting this quads. ] So yes, as the rules of the game change, we will continue to evolve and adapt to that. But the fact that we don't have a single binding dependency significantly reduces the risk of ATOM.

Right, right. And also, it seems like ATOM and Moments.AI, et cetera, seem to be the main driver for the customer intake, maybe this quarter?

Yes.

And maybe -- like will this lead to all of your competitors developing similar products? Do you think a few competitors will have the products that take over? Like will every competitor have its own ATOMS, et cetera? Or how will it look do you think?

Look, building ATOM is hard, right? And I think on this stage a few years back, ATOM, as a product was announced, I'm sure many of you who have attended previous CMDs have also heard about ATOM. But figuring out product market fit for something that's not been done before is inherently a complex problem, right? And we believe that we have 3 years of learnings into figuring out what are the things that you can do, what are the things that turn out to be complete dead ends and what do you need to be investing on? I mean take price Sandbox as an example. For a company as big and as massive as Google, they've taken 4 years and they still realize that the product is not ready to be rolled out. So it's a huge barrier to entry. And I think we have 3 years of learnings to our advantage. So that's what we'll continue to rely on.

Is it possible to get any number on like the CapEx you've spent on ATOMS.

Yes. I think we're still right now in the process of mostly using ATOM for some of our internal DSP campaign. So given that we own both the supply and demand side of the marketplaces, right now, ATOM is a free product available to all advertisers on our DSP, right? And a big part of as ATOM scales up with iOS 18, a big part of that is also going to be around figuring out the commercials and figuring out how we make those signals available to the third-party programmatic ecosystem. But a lot of what we saw, including in the context of the Scan optimizations, a lot of that is based on the internal signals that ATOM is making available to DSP.

Okay. More questions? Fiona, welcome.

There are an awful lot of things that you're working on. How are you prioritizing your internal development schedule? And what are the roadblocks that are stopping you pursuing more of the things at the same time?

We're working very hard. No, I mean, look, I think it's important as much to figure out what is not worth pursuing, right? I think a big part of what we have tried to rationalize at least in the 12 months that I've been in this company is pick your bets, double down on those bets. And that often involves making some very hard decisions about 10 things that maybe customers are screaming for, but you just don't have bandwidth to invest on. So ATOM is one of those top 5 things that we decided to double down on, but saying yes to ATOM also meant saying no to 5 other things. But that is having that brutal prioritization philosophy and knowing when it's okay to say no, allows you to do the yeses significantly better.

Okay. So no more questions. I think that's it.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot. Welcoming Carl, Verve Group Nordics.

Thank you very much. So welcome to the last session of today before Remco will wrap up this year's CMD. Listening to Sameer to Alex and to Prasanna. We have gone through how Verve enables better outcomes for publishers, advertisers and consumers in a responsible way. This presentation will deep dive into where we do that and more specifically, in which advertising channels. So you have heard the words emerging channels many times during the day. And to follow up on this, I'll guide you through 3 things. First of all, why we focus on emerging channels? How do emerging channels evolve? And what is driving their growth? And lastly, our position in these emerging channels. Let's start off with the why and also with some additional repetition being one of the last speakers of today. But we have explained this before. So looking at the world of consumers and advertising, you will most likely be exposed to an ad, wherever your eyes and ears are. So whether if it's you are searching for something, you're reading the news, playing games on your mobile phone, taking a walk in the city, listening to a podcast or watching a favorite show. You will see ads. So wherever there are people, there are advertising channels. And given the amount of advertising opportunities, the market is complex and hard to navigate. And the programmatic ecosystem helps out a lot with the complexity, the efficiency and the targeting by automating the transaction process of digital channels. And within these digital channels, Verve has found a sweet spot position at a few hyper-focused channels that we consider emerging from the standpoint of consumer behavior, industry adoption and potential. These are, again, mobile, CTV, digital out-of-home, digital audio and commerce media advertising. The emerging channels are, of course, part of the digital and the programmatic ecosystem. But to illustrate through this very simplified illustration, they are still in an early phase of their channel life cycle, in contrast to media channels such as traditional linear TV, broadcasting radio or print newspapers, which is all advertising channels on a decline. This as well as with some legacy older programmatic channels such as web, desktop display, which has matured a lot for the last couple of years. And being in that early channel life cycle and looking at the growth, emerging channels are strong drivers ahead. So if we compare the growth of in-app and mobile and CTV growth with the total ad spend growth, both mobile and CTV is expected to grow at a much faster pace for the next coming 5 years, 2024 included. Then how do emerging channels evolve and what are the main drivers behind their growth? So we look at it with a 3-step process coming from, one, consumers and publishers. Two, the ad tech industry. And three, advertiser adoption. So the very first step is coming through publisher innovation. And with that, the possibility of change in consumer behavior, Imagine the first time you used Facebook at that point without ads by the way. The first time you played Candy Crush in a mobile phone or the first time you started to stream music or podcast on your way to work. There was no way back from that. So when a consumer behavior change in media consumption is a fact, the second step happens, which is when the ad tech industry picks up the consumer trend, innovates and starts to enable advertising and media opportunities to brands and agencies. And over time and through adoption, this leads us to the final step, which is when the industry has standardized the channel infrastructure and when the whole industry allows advertisers to fully follow the consumer trend, reach and engage with their target audience, leading to good outcomes in a privacy-friendly way and, therefore, accelerate ad spend growth through that channel. Circling back to the first step and some consumer behavior change. Here's some examples. So what we look at are 4 different trends. The move from traditional towards digital, the ad spend shift from traditional TV to Connected TV, the user trend moving away from desktops towards mobile and CTV. And lastly, the consumption time from walled gardens towards the open Internet. So first, you'll see the average time spent per day with digital versus traditional medias in the U.S. between the time of 2021 to 2025. And the digital medias contain all different sort of devices that you can imagine, which is connected to the Internet. So let's say your mobile phone. While the traditional media is based on non-Internet connected media such as traditional linear TV, broadcast radio or print media. And it's very interesting. So only for the past 4, 5 years, which is a very short period of time, the gap in hours spent between traditional and digital medias has almost doubled. Next chart shows a bit more specific data, and it's the ad spend shift from traditional TV towards connected TV also from 2021 and with a prediction up until 2027. It already shows that CTV ad spend is growing and on the cost of traditional TV, which is on a decline, but given the fast change in the consumer behavior, combined with that linear TV is still quite dominant in ad spend, the opportunity coming years is huge. Then we have the time shift from desktops towards mobile and CTV where we also see very steady signs of a consumer behavior change, decreasing their time spent on desktops and increasing their time spent with mobile and connected TVs. Lastly, rolling back the years far way back to 2014 and to Peter's slides earlier today, there is also a trend where user consumption time is moving away from the walled gardens and towards the open Internet, which can be partly explained by the fact that there is a vast amount of publisher innovation in emerging channels and therefore, also in the open Internet. And again, this is just a few examples, and there are many, many more, of course. But let's move on into how the ad-tech industry picks this up. So here's a visual example over how the ad tech industry picks up a consumer trend and make it better over time. And time is a very important x-factor here since, innovation, adoption and development doesn't happen overnight. So to the left, you will see one of the very first steps of the industry actually enabling a new advertising opportunity with a simple ad slot in the bottom of an app. Improvements and innovation then led to the bit more sophisticated native ad in the middle. And in the end, as of today, through further innovation, the establishment of industry standards, general improvements, you'll see the adoption of the media in the current stage of an interactive full-screen ad enabling better outcomes, higher attention for advertisers and publishers. Of course, it's not only the creatives, which is improved and enable better outcomes. Behind that very same creative, there are improvements in targeting insights, reporting, technology, artificial intelligence, data privacy and much, much more, where the full engine behind delivering one single ad to one single consumer is just getting better and better. For the last step, advertisers must follow the user trend. And I have already pointed out that the time spent with the channels of the open Internet has been steadily increasing for the past 9, 10 years. But this is not yet fully reflected in the programmatic investments, and that's another opportunity. So even though the consumer spends roughly 1/3 of their time in walled gardens, the walled gardens still stands for the majority of the programmatic and the advertising investments. And this is, of course, an opportunity where we believe that the consumer behavior change with a slight delay and the development and innovations around the industry will change that distribution of investments. It's very hard to predict when it's going to happen, but to make it happen, you need ad tech companies to innovate, raising the bar, continuously develop and be the frontrunners setting new industry standards. And Verve is one of those companies. The team has illustrated and showed you plenty of times during the day how we are embracing the growth in emerging channels, introducing new innovations and enabling new solutions, such as ATOM, Moments and [ Schema, ] the latest addition here to actually make media better while outperforming the market. So how do we position in these channels? As you have heard during the day, in the channel of mobile, we are already one of the leading companies in the ad tech industry, offering AI-powered privacy first solutions using data in a brand-safe environment without using IDFA or GAID. Working with top publishers and over 20,000 directly integrated mobile apps, we are offering responsible advertising solutions to the top brands and agencies globally with the latest creative solutions available. Our product and position in the connected TV landscape is also strong. Here, we are top 5 ad-exchanges in the world with an overall reach of over 300 million unique CTV devices, delivering over 20 billion daily auctions and an extensive network with over 4,500 apps and publishers within our marketplace, reaching 60% of the U.S. households. And in that very same marketplace, we deliver direct access to premium CTV inventory, offering bespoke audience, O&O data and inventory packages with advanced targeting both via ID-based and ID less solutions. And overall, CTV is a -- it's very interesting from so many perspectives. It's not only about the growth here. So it's especially about the advantages it actually has over traditional linear TV combined with that consumer behavior change that you see, where advertisers now can get precision targeting, real-time analytics, reduce cost and advertising waste, gaining flexibility throughout the programmatic infrastructure. In the same time, as they can leverage cross-platform reach to other devices to elevate their multichannel strategy. We are upcoming in digital out-of-home. Here, advertisers, as, Alex, was into earlier before as well, they can leverage our solutions to deliver dynamic content and smart targeting capabilities on highly visible areas in a sustainable way, both in global and local markets. And the digital out-of-home market is growing and have an expected CAGR for the next coming 5 years at around 9%. And just as with CTV, digital out-of-home is very interesting going from and being used as a one to many media only to joining that programmatic infrastructure and allowing advertisers to become hyperlocal, hyper-relevant, accessible and scalable while adding data points such as weather targeting, real-time traffic data or footfall data in stores. Lastly, in digital audio and commerce media, we're still in very early stages, exploring the opportunities and the potentials of the channels. So digital audio and its evolution from traditional radio still has some limitations of how and when you can acquire ads, consume the content. And we believe that we can further develop the potential of the channel through in-app. The audio market is also growing, driven by digital audio and the consumption time is growing even faster. So with the addition of Jun Group to Verve, we have a first footprint in the media. Commerce Media and its subcategory of retail media is also super exciting, where we have made some early investments and already worked with some of the world's largest retailers, creating click-to-cart ads, shoppable ads and so on based on their actual documentary to help them advertise specific products with relevance. And with retailers essentially becoming ad networks and publishers as well, we believe that we have a role to play through our technologies. Commerce Media and Retail Media is growing fast with a 21% growth prediction in 2024. And you can see companies such as Fedora, [ Viber ICA ] here in Sweden, Stadium, Hype and many more and Walmart, which is a client of ours, tapping into this advertising opportunity, and it's all born from a consumer behavior change. Finally, all the emerging channels play a massive role in the consumers' daily life. From the moment when you wake up in the morning and you open up your daily weather app, until you watch your favorite show in the evening, you will see ads. These ad slots make content in the open Internet available, and it helps advertisers to engage with their target audience with increased efficiency and precision. Summarized, Verve enable better outcomes for advertisers, for publishers and for consumers with responsible advertising solutions, and we do this in the emerging channels of mobile, CTV, digital audio and commerce media. We adopt to the consumer behavior change. We are enabling new advertising opportunity, and we continue to invest and innovate to fuel further growth and development while helping advertisers and publishers navigating the programmatic landscape, reaching the eyes and ears of their clients. Thank you.

Thank you, Carl. So stay with me. Gonna ask for questions. So take the opportunity. So what do you say, Fiona, Rasmas, Nordea, come on. Last call, final call for questions.

I'm just wondering why you think the market has been so reluctant to move away from the walled gardens. Is it just because that's an easy manner of conducting their business. What's the reluctance? What's stopping them?

I think that's -- you partly answered that question. And I still think that there is a lot more fragmentation outside of the walled gardens or it has been at least and is becoming better and better and better. Of course, some of the new emerging channels is also still under development. So CTV has been there for a while, of course, but it's still also continuously developing. The move from subscription only on demand TVs, moving more and more into hybrid. And the more the industry adopting, the easier it will be to navigate for advertisers. And I think that will be one of the keys for advertisers to move away from the walled gardens.

So let's double check. Nothing online for you. Okay thank you Carl.

Thank you very much.

And that takes us to the closing remarks. So I'm going to welcome Remco back on stage.

Thank you. Yes. Thank you all for being with us for such a long time. And we know it's really -- it's a long day. It's a lot of sessions, and I always myself have issues with sitting so long and listening to people. But I hope that we were able to really have a good day for you. It's always difficult in days like this to find a good balance between a deep dive, which is meant and not creating confusion. And we fully understand that there's different levels of knowledge in the room here with regards to advertising adtech. And we have tried to find a good balance, not get too technical, on the other hand, we need to show some technology. We need to show some innovation that you really get a taste of what's going on here. I think Prasanna did a very good presentation, but also realize you have -- he has almost 200 people in his team. So there's a lot of power behind that, a lot of good people that we recently hired. So there's a lot of, yes, I say drive under this company, and I would like to take you through some of the slides. So. Yes, plan for today was to take you through what has happened, what we have achieved in the last year. And it's always good to look back. Then we had experts showing you a bit what's happening in the market, what are threats, but also opportunities. We rather see them as opportunities. But of course, each opportunity has also a threat. But opportunities change market conditions and for a fast-growing company, it's much nicer to really use those opportunities to grow. And then we had presentations of the team going into depth about our 4 pillars here -- or sorry, not 4 our 3 main attention areas. So better outcomes for publishers and advertisers. We went through the publishing side, Sameer, who went through the advertiser side done by Alex, responsible advertising solutions. It was covered by already Mishel earlier, but also by Prasanna in his presentation, and I think the others also covered quite a bit of that and then going into emerging channels. With this, I think the company has really with its rebranding found a very clear positioning. Our mission is, let's make media better. We think that the market is far from perfect. I mean we had a discussion just before about the walled gardens getting a very big part of the cake, which doesn't make sense because it's not brand safe. It's not in relation to the views that are there, but they have a lot of power. I mean, they have -- they're big. I talked to one of the top guys of a big media agency. And he told me, if I have to talk to people like you, I have to talk to several. But if I go to Google, I can just allocate 50% of our budget. So there's a lot of size things also in this market. And the question came also before from the audience was about, yes, how can small companies survive here. You need to team up. You need to team up with partners like Google like they're doing. You need to really make sure that you are becoming one of the big ones. But I think -- I hope at least that we were making -- we're able to really make clear that our new brand, really being an advertising company with a very clear positioning here is making a lot of sense and giving us a lot of potential to grow. Yes. This slide, I mean, I'm really repeating some slides. I'm sorry for that. But I think it's also good to remind. We are a fast-growing company. I think that's what we showed in the beginning already. But we're also a very innovative company. I think that's what I hope that we also were able to show today. And innovation drives also future growth. And coming to our 4 pillars of growth. This slide was there also, and I won't go through all the details again. But I think it's really good to have growing markets. As said, there's already a 10% underlying growth in what we do. And on top of that, we do customer acquisition. I think we have a lot of good products, but we have to bring it much more to the customers. We can further execute on getting more supply, getting closer to supply. But especially on the demand side, we still have a lot of work to do to really make sure that we sell the things that we have. New products, just mentioned, innovation, really having cool suite of products that we can work with and then the platform synergies, a lot of them were mentioned before already, vertical multichannel, but I think one that became also clear during today is talent. And that was a few times the topic, how do you get talent? First of all, I hope that we are able to show you that we have a lot of talent in this company that we're also able to attract people like an Alex or Peter or Prasanna, the other side, they're already longer. They were far early convinced. But we are able to really attract a lot of good people. And I hope that we will continue with that. I expect that we will continue with that and also be able to grow because in the end, it's also the people behind it that drive execution, they drive the ideas and that really grow this company. So yes, with this formula, strong growing market, customer expansion, new products and platform synergies this company will grow a lot further. And I would like to quote Prasanna with what he said before, it's just the beginning. That's a little bit how I feel also. We decided 5 years ago to pivot to advertising. It's kind of, yes, makes me proud also. We're one of the larger companies, advertising companies in the world already now, still small compared to Google and some others, but with a lot of growth potential. And we need to make that clear to investors also. So that's the reason for today also to take you along. It's much more difficult to explain an advertising company than it is to explain a real estate company or something like that. But -- and that's a bit of one of our challenges. But yes, we love to do that. We love to talk about it. And also happy to do one-to-ones and to explain further. And yes, it's a great company. We're happy to be based in Stockholm in Sweden, and we would like to take the growth further from here. Bit of numbers. I showed these already before. So we expect to do over EUR 400 million revenues this year with over EUR 125 million EBITDA, normalized or pro forma basis with taking Jun into account and I think we were also able to convince that Jun is really a very good addition to the company. But Mishel also very happy to have him and also the team of Jun. We're already at the EUR 447 million plus EUR 150 million EBITDA. And we want to grow further. Strong growth, revenue growth, EBITDA margin, EBIT margin and bring down the net leverage, I think that's the aim for the coming quarters and years ahead, brings me to thinking, first of all, all the speakers. I'm not going to do it all individually. Then the people in the background, the crew here, of course, but especially also Soren and his team for doing all the work in the background, the graphics team of Jun, so that's also may be good to see how corporation works. So there was a lot of work done and I have the feeling that our Capital Markets Days are getting better. This is our third one that we do now in Sweden. But we would like, of course, to get feedback also. That's super important to get that. And yes, then this biggest thank is to you, to our investors, to our analysts, all other partners, you drive us, you help us, you support us, and you trust us, and we are going to further build on the company. One brand, one team, one mission, that's make media better. Thank you very much.

One round of questions and then everybody can have drinks.

Should we have some more Q&A now? Or should we take the online questions, Soren?

I would say because that came in, there were quite a few online questions, which you would like to take first.

Let's do it like this. We take questions from the room to start with and then we wrap up, and then we can take the online, and you can choose to actually, if you want to go to other things. So let's start with the questions in the room. Yes.

Paul, do you want to join on the stage here because there's certainly going to be some finance questions.

Yes.

Maybe it's good that also Alex, Sameer, Prasanna.

Bring the management team up. Presenters join on stage.

Who am I forgetting?

Love it.

No, that's also good to show it. This is not a one-man show. This is not a 5-man show, but this is really a big company now with over 700 people and a lot of talent and a lot of very enthusiastic people. And yes, let's answer questions. Now nobody dares anymore with so many people here.

All right Vincent Edholm from Pareto Securities. I'm just wondering about the long-term potential in terms of further tech integrations, especially with the recent addition of Jun, but also in terms of other assets that you have acquired during the years. What's sort of the long-term outlook and your ambitions in terms of the tech integration? Do you feel like it would make sense to move sort of towards one product or at least a one-brand offering or do you feel like the value exchange in general is greater when the different assets are stand-alone?

Thanks for the question. I don't see what you're setting by the way. There, okay. Sorry, that's something hiding. Part of it, I think we answered already. It's one brand. It's one company and one team, one mission. It's Verve brand. But we have also learned to take a bit of an organic approach on integrations because if you immediately -- if Mishel and the team are coming to the company and we say, "Hey, tomorrow, you all call Verve, you lose a lot of identity, you run a lot of risk." And the same with technology platforms, we can do crush integrations, but then for sure, we know that we are not innovating anymore for the customer. We have to do also to build new features. We have to work with the customer. So you cannot do everything at once. And what Prasanna was referring to before, we have now 2 big stacks -- performance stack and a brand stack, and they need to come one integrated stack in the end. That's a big project that takes a year or more. And so integrating, it always sounds easy, but it's also what we have said always this company already in the gaming side time we believe in integration and being one company. It's just buying companies and managing a portfolio that works if you buy three, but not if you buy several ones like we did and we are much stronger as one single company.

Fast growth can expose structural weaknesses. Where are the challenges that you see? And where do you need to invest to make sure that those weaknesses don't become more apparent?

Yes. The growth perspective that we have is huge. I mean we talk about the markets with $1 trillion of size, and we have a lot of growth potential. And indeed, your question is right on, spot on. You can also grow too fast and not be in control anymore. And if we look at all the opportunities that we have, if we would try to go for all of them, at the same time, it wouldn't work. We cannot start 20 countries at the same time. We cannot hire 200 extra sellers. We cannot, et cetera, et cetera. So it's all about dosing the speed. It's all about also how they levering up on the quality of the management. And that means that some managers that are with us are really going up and growing with the company. Sometimes we hire people from external. We try to find a good mix there. But it's, in the end, all about people, managing teams, very important company culture. We try to be really welcoming for new companies that we acquire or new people that we hire. It's one company. We have -- you see it here, different cultures, different nationalities, but it's all -- what's all driving us is really to be successful to use the opportunity of the market and to make media better, as we say in the thing here. And I think that's super important. I'm always saying no politicians, no people that are aggressive in the company because they kill company cultures, but company culture is a very important point. But of course, yes, controls, internal control systems, we have done a lot. Paul is more specialist in that than I am. But no, but those things are also super important. We changed accountant. We did a lot of -- so there's a lot of stuff if you grow that comes with it. And we also know that some investors wanted us to, let's say, get -- already do reporting, for example, like a larger company like 4 years, 5 years ago. we were not able to do that. We had to staff up, which we have done largely now. So there is, let's say, a lot of -- we are growing, we're growing fast. We're growing in a very controlled way, I think, but we still try to grow as fast as we can. But you need to sometimes take a bit of a breath. And we did it also. Let's say, we did a lot of M&A, but we had to stop it because you can otherwise indeed get out of control.

Okay. So let's check. Was that the final from the room. I think so. Right. Yes. Then we're going to continue. You stay where you are. We're going to continue with the questions then.

I'm just realizing we're all on the stage here and I'm answering this shouldn't be the case. That's...

Okay. So I'm taking them in chronological order and let's see how we put them. So it's Sven Sauer from Kepler. He says thanks for the presentation. Is the only viable goal here for Verve and similar companies to build on AI-driven monolithic platform, serving buyers and sellers through the same platform. That's maybe from. Yes -- monolithic -- AI-driven monolithic...

Let me read it out. Is the only viable goal here for Verve and similar companies to build an AI-driven monolithic platforms, serving buyers and sellers through the same platform? Yes. Look, I mean what is the alternate, right? I think, look, I think we -- in general, we have believed and we have leveraged AI at different levels within the organization. But again, being a multiproduct company generally gives us a very different advantage, right? The fact that you see things starting from the users who are using the phone to advertisers who are eventually paying the bills and everything between that gives you order of magnitude advantage that I don't think many companies can claim to have. And then when you're solving problems at the scale of whatever 500 billion, 600 billion, 700 billion a day, you don't have options except to automate and accept to ensure that your machines are making the best decisions for your customers.

Okay. Thank you. Next question coming up from [ Percy ]. Why are you so strong in North America and why not so much in the rest of the world? So is it for Remco? Is it for Alex, Sameer, yes come on?

Sameer? A lot of Americans here.

This question can be answered in various ways. I think Peter showed us in his slides that the -- it's a $1 trillion advertising economy and out of that 50% plus to 60% odd revenue spent in $1,250 per capita. That's a big number. The consumption patterns and the way the targeting of the sophistication actually happens, a lot of innovation is not just only concentrated only out of North America, but that's where the tech industry and a lot of innovation in VCs actually were really looking into that part. But trends are changing now -- it's that -- Jun addition actually takes us to 80%, 78%, but we are absolutely investing into resources, local sales for emerging channels into other markets also. So I'm sure that the targets for the management for next year will be that we show some sort of shifts in trends, but they will be slow. North America still will be like an experimentation or a strong market consumption region.

I would like to add 1 point here. And it's really -- I mean, we see all the markets, and we see that U.S. companies are just faster in adopting new things. So the change even though Europe is much faster on GDPR and all those kind of things, companies, especially larger companies, larger advertisers just take longer here. And it's in the U.S., people take quicker decisions, they go with bigger budgets and that's, I think, the main reason that we have such a good growth opportunity there. We are innovative. They like innovation, and they like to test it. And if it works, they keep it. If it doesn't work, they don't keep it. But you see now customer retention that we're doing pretty well on that.

It's interesting. And it's also interestingly U.S. is really the most competitive market when it comes adtech. Okay. Next one coming on for Peter. So it's from [ Karim ] and how -- the question is -- how will the business model of the media agency change given the increase in, in-house marketing capabilities.

Good question. What we see in media agencies is that not only the talent base, as I referred to, needs to adjust, but also the connection into the clients. So what we see with getting closer to data, getting closer to technology, also the clients are doing that with the in-housing, I explained, they also get access to other budgets. So in the last few years, I've been talking to more CTOs and more CIOs in international advertising companies than I have to CMOs in the end. That's also because the longevity of these individuals is much longer. CMOs change within 18 to 20 months. So you can -- when you go into a long journey in terms of data and transformation, it's better to talk to CIOs and CTOs. So I think over time, that whole model will change and also the base for these agencies will change.

Can I add one thing?

Yes.

Some background there as well. I think if you look at the history of media agencies, it started with skill and skill was power and skill was buying power. So it was really around skill and buying power and thereby the whole story came. I think even now look at media agencies, it's still about skill as well for those clients, but it's skilled towards knowledge and skilled towards data and skilled towards insights. And those data points and those insights still convert into best price and all of that. But there's a big change within the agencies around where they invest, what knowledge they have, their data experience and those kind of things. So from skill -- from buying into skill and knowledge, I would say, is a big change for the agencies.

Interesting. Sounds great. And Paul, you're going to get a short one. Quick question from [ Christopher ]. So just a quick question. I'm reading it loud to Paul. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the revenue per platform device graph for Q2 '24 suggests that revenue from CTV was flat year-on-year.

So that's in the end...

What is the reason for this given the general growth that the CTV market shows. And then we have some numbers here also that. Yes, over to you.

So there were basically some shifts within the group from various platforms. So we integrated also the liquid platform into the smarter platform, et cetera. And we were also cutting some old tails, which were not profitable. And that's the main reason basically why the CTV segment as such were flat year-over-year, where we currently now see also there 20%, 30% organic growth. So that's the main reason while when we look at the previous year to this year in the first half year was mainly flat.

Maybe I can also comment something to that. What we see, CTV is growing fast. And you see that a lot of parties are really taking market share with low margin. Some part of our business was also low margin. That's something that we don't like. We don't want to be dumb pipes. We want to add data. We want to add value, and we want to make more money on that. So that was one of the reasons that we did some shifts there. So the quality of the revenue is better even though, let's say, you don't see it immediately in the gross numbers.

Okay. Great. And next question, I'm not sure if this is something you disclosed with the acquisition of Jun. But it's about June. It's coming from Conrad. How diverse is the Jun customer base? What is the revenue share of top 3 customers? What is the reaction towards becoming part of Verve. So maybe Mishel?

We are pretty diversified in terms of our customer base. We do have verticals that we specialize in. So we spoke about retail as one of them. That's our biggest and also growing for obvious reasons. Those advertisers understand how to use advertising to perform, and that has been one of the growth drivers for that segment.

Maybe just to add, we also have on the website basically on the investor presentation about the Jun acquisition as a complete split out of the largest customers and the customer diversification. And the largest customer has 9% of the revenues, but he's also with the company for more than 5 years. So there's a lot of stickiness around the revenues. And as Mishel just pointed out, they are well diversified.

Great. And yes, next one, I think, is for you, Remco. It's from I'm not sure I get this pronunciation, but [indiscernible] and the question is as follows. What gives you confidence in high organic growth for the coming years? Is it partly market share gains, partly CPM rebound or is there anything other specific.

There's market and there is a company, I think we should split those two. Market is growing. CPMs will also go further up again. So those things are a good baseline. But on top of it, and that's what we have been trying to give here over several hours, this company really has a lot of great assets. This company has a lot of growth potential and from product, from getting more customers, from scaling the customers and from using the synergies of the platform I think I'm not going to repeat all of that. But I hope that we were able to convince you all that there is a lot of growth potential.

Growth, Growth I heard it lot. Okay. Next question coming from [ David Matson ], and this one, let's see its financial question. Could you please elaborate a little regarding why the EBITDA margin is increasing. Did CapEx regarding ATOM make it lower in Q1 for example? Is it your part? Yes.

I can start and then also Prasanna if something to add. So in the end, what we did last year is a cost-saving program of EUR 10 million, and that brought down the personnel expenses quite significantly year-over-year. In addition, then also with the first moves now towards cloud and some other efficiencies, which we also gained across the OpEx with the cost-saving program last year. We now see that we basically have a reduced fixed cost base where the revenue started to scale up significantly organically and that in the end leads to a very strong operating leverage, and that's the reason why the profit is growing much, much faster the revenues. Q1, we had some starting costs basically for ATOM. So that was the reason that the EBITDA was not growing as fast as the revenues. But we, in the end, really seeing now since Q2 that the operating leverage is in place, and we also expect that to further basically come out in the second half year, so that there is another margin expansion in the second half expected.

Okay. Good. Okay. Next one is for you as well, Paul. So it's from [ Christophe Hoffman ] and the question is as follows. You stated that Verve could reduce interest cost by EUR 10 million to EUR 15 million. Are you assuming a refinancing of both bonds? And does this number already include possible interest rate reductions?

So that basically is a rough estimate based on the current market trends in regards to the 3-month driver as we have the bond floating, plus in addition, also taking into account the first signs of decrease in credit margins, given the much, much stronger balance sheet and free cash flow generation, which we have now. The latest bond we already raised or rolled over at a 2.5% lower interest rate or credit margin. And we expect that is just the beginning, given that the growth profile remains very strong. The second half year then also the Jun acquisition will show a much, much higher profitability. And once all these things come in together and there's much more visibility in the next year, we would expect that in the end, the financing costs to come further down. And in addition there's a lot of banks also here today and also a lot of bondholders following us constantly, and we currently also have a lot of inbound. So basically have all the options available. And then obviously, at the right point in time, we will look at it and then take the best decision, but EUR 10 million to EUR 15 million is from our perspective, very likely.

Okay. Great. And then we continue, the next one is about digital out-of-home. So the question comes from Jörg Frey and he writes. You mentioned digital out-of-home for the first time as potential for growth. Can you comment on the margin and the growth potential in the business? Will this be comparable to CTV? Who's taking that one?

Should I?

Remco? Yes.

Yes, I think we mentioned digital out-of-home already in earlier presentations, but more as a part of a small slice of our business. But as I said before, you cannot do everything at the same time, but we have now really decided to take digital out-of-home, audio and retail media all 3 segments, which are fast-growth segments as absolutely active segments. Very nice that with Jun, we already have quite a bit of action and how to say it in the podcast sphere, especially. So that's helping on the audio side. We also had a lot of inbounds from publishers that wanted to work with us with audio things. So that's helpful. and digital out-of-home. Yes, we did some creatives for Netflix, as you saw before. So also there were some movements, and we've now said, okay, let's really double down on the segment and go for it.

Yes. Okay. We have 2 similar questions. It's about U.S. listing in the future. Maybe that's for you to comment on as well, Remco?

Yes. I've learned one thing as a public company not to comment on these kind of questions. We are super happy being little...

Right answer.

No, we are super happy to be relocated to Sweden, to Stockholm. Stockholm is our main capital market. We also -- we have a secondary listing or let's say, our second listing is in Germany, where we have also a lot of good shareholders, lot of fans. And we're happy as a European company. Even though we have now the majority -- for the majority of our revenues in the U.S., but I think that also motivates us to also grow faster in Europe and to try to speed it up here as well a bit.

Good. So one final question then from online audience. So -- and this one is for you Remco as well. So you can take a chance to wrap it up after this one because then we will be done. So it's coming from Christophe. And in the updated guidance, what factors are you taking into consideration? How does Verve the current macro environment? What risk factors do you see? Do you still view the guidance as cautious as you stated in conjunction with the first guidance for 2024? Over to you.

Okay. Yes, I can now give the short form or the long form, I think because everybody here very long already, and there was a lot of already said. Market perspective is pretty positive. You never know if something big explodes. So that's -- you cannot take that into account in things like this. But especially U.S. is positive. Europe is a little bit less from a sentiment but also getting better. People post their marketing budgets in 2023, they found out after several quarters that first of all, the economy was not as bad as they thought. But secondly, if you pause your marketing budget, you start losing market share. And so they had to ramp up the market -- their marketing budgets again, that's what we have been seeing coming. CPMs are not as high or not there yet where they were before. But also some segments will be missing. I mean, the super high cheaply financed -- financial capital and private equity with the rollout everywhere and all the kind of stuff. There were huge budgets that were basically driven by free money. Those we will probably not see coming back hyper-casual games, for example, as a segment. But still, there's enough solid advertising spend. So base market is good. Our segments are better because there's a lot of relocation of budget in there. So yes -- and in the end, even when the market was not so good, we were able to grow our customer base. We were growing against the market. So in the end, it's about company performance, and that's what we hopefully were able to convince you about today.

And I think that's -- that's it for today, right?

Yes. I would like to thank everybody for being here so long for joining us. And yes, very important. We need to educate the market. It sounds very stupid. But as a gaming company, it's easy to explain the real state also, but advertising needs to be explained. So we need to convince investors in Europe that this is a great sector to invest in and it's easy in the U.S., there's many more adtech companies listed. But we see as one of our main handicaps here actually really that we need to show advertisers how cool the segment is and what the company can do. Thank you all.

Thank you.