YouGov plc (YOU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you all for coming. It's a great turnout. It's great to see. So what we'll be hoping you take away from this is why our platform will win over the competition and what a platform even is and what platform means to us, where YouGov sits in the market research landscape, how we will continue our growth trajectory and how we will measure success going forward. And I'd like to start by stating our claim as the pioneer of online research. I think it can be fairly said that we are the ones that made online research something real, accurate, impressive. Before us, it was seen as quick and dirty. People used it as a as a cheap way of doing things. And when we came along, we said, no, with the right modeling in the right way, building proper panels that you can build up data around, we can actually get accuracy, and we can get depth of data. And that was not in the discussion at that point at all. It was just a quick way of getting some initial views. So we created accurate and reliable data, where previously, it was a lightweight snapshot. And polling in general was inaccurate. It wasn't just online polling, I mean that wasn't even attempting to be accurate. I mean there was no predictive power in those polls before us. But even general, traditional polling was having a bad time. They've got a few elections wrong. And people were questioning whether the methodology is still worked. And we came along and our first 3 polls quickly established a 1% or less than 1% level of error, which, of course, is extremely close. And as tight as -- I mean polls tend to have 2% or 3% margins [indiscernible]. We got it down to 1%. And while it hasn't always been 1%, it actually has maintained a very low level of error throughout the last 20-odd years. Tracking studies back then were big heavy clunky things that happened monthly at this. We would have annual -- their annual study. They might have a quarterly one. If they really had the big box, they might do a quarterly -- a monthly study, but that was about it. What we now have is huge multidimensional data sets updated daily. It isn't even a matter of, oh, it's a monthly or it's a weekly. It's actually one big data set that is updated every single day, weekends included automatically. Before us, polls were disconnected snapshots. We created with huge panels rich connected data. Audience profiling in those days had tens or perhaps a few hundred at most profiling points, because it was also expensive. And we, of course, with our ability to hold on to panel over a period of time and therefore, develop through lots of surveys, more and more profiling points with YouGov profiles, you have -- well, you actually have thousands, tens of thousands of variables in there, most of them from a single source. That is to say it's overlapping. We don't have tens of thousands of points of information for every panelist, but we have at least 1,000 for most of them, and they overlap in a way that we can create proper connected data. Research studies were slow. They took a long time to turn around, sometimes months and even polling for newspapers was incredibly slow. So the -- when we first started working with telegraph, they breathed the big sigh of relief because they used to have to get their questions in on Monday to have something for Saturday or Sunday. And that was the speed of turnaround in those days, and that was in the year 2000. It seems incredible to think that was the case. Of course, now it's overnight typically for our media clients, but it can be even ours. And I say -- and in fact, data collection is continuous. And finally, analysis was done in clunky old ways using SPSS and Excel, which didn't obviously do much data crunching. You can't do much in those and we now have our own proprietary system called Crunch, which is cloud-based, super fast, easy, but actually PhD levels of our level analysis done through drag and drop. And it is the best platform for data of its kind in our space. It's not -- what is it called? Plateau? Not plateau. Tableau? It's not Tableau for giant data set. It's not data visualization, which must come, but it is the best way of analyzing the sort of medium-large data sets that we have. There is nothing that does that as well. So this is a really big change and a lot of technical innovations in there, but the one innovation that is absolutely critical to everything that we do, and that was not done before and is still not done by anybody else as far as I know, certainly not at scale, is actually to engage your panel and to treat them well. Now this is extraordinary if you think about it, because everything that market research does, everything that polling does is based on human beings being willing to talk to you and tell you about often very private things, often very boring things. Some of these surveys take 15 minutes, 30 minutes and some of our [ viables ] have surveyed booklets that take 2 hours to fill in. Now that is a really big ask of somebody. And if you pay them 50p or 1 pound or even a fiver for the 1-hour thing, it's not really a great return. So how do we expect people to give you quality data in those circumstances? How do we expect them to stay with you for years, which is when the data becomes really valuable? Our most valuable data comes from people that we have known the longest, because we have the most information about them and we have most things to compare it with. Why would you do that if you're a normal person, unless you were treated reasonably well? I say reasonably well because I don't claim and some of you may be on our panels. I don't claim it's a beautiful experience. It's definitely better than it was. As an aside, our trust pilot scores went up from about 3.5 a little while ago to 4.6, I think it is now. So 4.5 will very shortly be 4.6, because it is improving all the time, and it has some historical numbers in it. And if you read them, you see -- to get a 4.5 score, done a few great mathematician to work out that the majority of people are answering those, and it's thousands of ratings? Thousands of ratings in there. The majority of them are giving us 5 out of 5. That's pretty good. I'm saying to you that, that is what enables us to do our work. That only if you do this, can you be fit for the requirements of clients in the future. Because only if you do this, you get rich data, recent data, data that you can use for AI. I'm talking about that in a second, but you can't have skinny, unreliable, old data for AI and hope to make something good out of that. AI doesn't transform junk into something good. So it is absolutely critical that we treat people, not as commodities, which is what the industry does. It treats people as commodities. It gives them boring surveys, badly written and expect that data to be good, as I say. And the other day, somebody was saying there's a new innovation in panel companies. They're no longer going to not pay you for the screening service, because what happens if you join a lot of the panel companies is you do one survey, short say 3 or 4 questions. And it says, sorry, you don't suit this survey, you're not the right person. And then you do another one and you don't get paid for that, and you do another one, you don't get paid for that. And sometimes you don't get paid at all after 5 or 6 of these. And so on says, actually, this company is going to start doing paying for all of us. Well, we've been doing that since the year 2000. We've been paying people for every single thing that they do for us. In this sense, there's no screening out. You always get a survey, you always get paid. It's fundamental. But imagine what happens if you join a panel and you go to survey after survey and you get kicked out. What your first thing you're going to do is you're going to lie. You're going to actually say -- you'll quickly work out what you're meant to say to get in the survey. And so that's how fraud starts. And we're almost encouraging forward by making the experience so bad. If it was a good experience and you were paid properly for it, then it might be a different story. And you'll hear a little bit about what we're doing about that in that area later. So panel as a commodity is a disaster, and that's what almost everybody else is doing, I would almost say everybody else. For us, we are a public-facing brand. No other panel has an actual public-facing brand, a brand that means something. It has a social mission. YouGov has explained itself in its title. And that is something meaningful to people, and that is why they join a panel and stay in a panel. And that is why we are still the industry-leading pioneer. And we [indiscernible] back when was the May elections at 2016? '17. In 2017, we used MRP for the first time. We were a pioneer of MRP, because we actually were involved with the people who invented it. We tested it with them. We actually gave some money towards it. And so we were the first with that, and we did -- that's a machine learning algorithm, essentially same old as AI. And with that, we had the most accurate poll that anyone had ever seen. And actually, it was an astonishing one, if you remember, everybody thought [indiscernible] was going to win by a landslide. We said she would lose seats. Everybody ridiculed us. And when it -- on the night when it happened, constituency after constituency was correct. We didn't just say overall what would happen. We were correct on nearly every constituency and it was the most incredible performance, and that was using a form of AI of machine learning. That is what you need. You need recent accurate data combined with things like census data in order to do -- to be successful in AI. So the source data that is required for AI -- for the next phase of AI has to be good data. It has to be recent. It has to be connected. It has to be rich. And that is -- those are the characteristics of ours; a genuinely connected continuously updated multilevel profile and tracking, combining behavioral and survey data. That is what you need to input into AI. You can't put a crappy poll into a machine and ChatGPT turns it into something interesting. It won't happen. That is why we believe that we will continue to innovate and continue to lead the industry even with these -- well, not even, especially with these new tools that are so appropriate to our data. Now why do we think that we can be -- that we're in the best position to deliver to clients? Well, the industry problem, and this is a controversial thing to say, but our industry is dysfunctional, and it's dysfunctional because it's fragmented. Nobody has panels in every country. It's a big ask. So it's -- I don't blame anybody. We don't have it. But it means that you always have to cobble together for a global study, other people's data, often 3 or 4 people, suppliers for a single country where it's a difficult thing to do. That is going to be poor data. Even when we do it, it's going to be not great data, because we're relying on data that we're buying in. And nobody can offer even in their strong panels, they can't offer the richness of properly representative panels at scale. Everybody -- most people can do one representative survey, one representative sample. But if you actually want to do a large study and have the right number of different levels of education, of income of minorities and so forth and even just young people who are very hard to reach, it's difficult to do that at scale. If you have a customer like a luxury brand company, it's very hard to reach the early adopters of expensive things. So there are lots and lots of niche cases that nearly all companies want. Even companies that have a large profile will have little niche areas that they want research in and what -- the whole industry struggles to achieve that. It's very hard to do. And yes, so those are the -- what's lacking in it. And the tools there for also aren't connected, they also don't work across all those countries. So it is a fragmented industry, and we believe that the only way to solve that is to have highly engaged panels in every major company that I say, with global reach and that only genuinely connected data can be operationalized properly. And our solution, therefore, is to further improve and deepen the panelist experience. And you will see the next stage of that when you see our demos in a moment, where we think we take very seriously the panelist experience and to globalize further with panel. We've made a lot of advances in that, but we have further to go. And then we can do more interesting things like connecting survey data with behavioral data and so forth. So that is what we're trying to achieve. And of course, our architecture for that, some of you have seen this before, is this thing which we call a platform. And let's just think for a moment what a platform is. A platform isn't just having a website with a few products on it, because everybody now says I've got a platform. If you look at our rivals' websites, every one of them says platform in it. What does the platform really mean? It means you're bringing together -- you're using technology to bring together different groups, in our case, the public with clients, it could be car drivers with passengers and so on in a technological way, in a connected way and creating value to both sides. Now that is what we do when we have panelists that are assured of their privacy that have a good experience that find what they do interesting and supply data to people that need to talk to them and then improve services and products back into society. We think it's a virtuous circle, and that is what makes us a proper platform company. The essence of it, as I've said twice, I want to say 2 or 3 more times today is a panel that is large, has scale, is representative, has connected data because it's with you for a long time, that is the basis of everything. On top of that, we've built the Cube, which is the biggest data set of its client that's ever existed. I mean it has -- well, certainly billions, probably more data in it [indiscernible] its trillions or whatever. It is trillions of data pieces in there, all structured. All of this has a code book of all the variables you could want and it's done over time. It's updated every day. And of course, it has a lot of different people in it that makes it cubic. And that lends itself to analysis. It lends itself to machine learning algorithms and all of that stuff, because it's organized. And on top of that, it's Crunch, which I've talked about which is a highly sophisticated data analysis tool. And those 3 things together is an engine on which you can build an entire universe of offers, [ satire ] or it goes through all the workflows that marketing people have. And it's -- all of it is connected, and all of it is recent and all of it is -- goes towards accuracy. The bar across the side is the interfaces and tech systems that enable this and that allow people to reach that, including the dashboards that let you do self-service. So those 4 boxes, Crunch, Cube -- Panel, Cube, Crunch and the interfaces, that is a platform. And that is the basis on which we're doing all of our work going forward, and it's efficient and it's highly -- creates very valuable data in a very effective way. The [indiscernible] is Senex. That means our centers of excellence. They are outsourced service centers, and they are a good way of giving high-quality service to people and extending the availability over time, so that we won't be long before we'll be at 24/7. We're not at 24/7 at the moment, and they are equipped to give templated solutions. That is to say to do the things that marketers do all the time, they can help you use the platform to be in a very efficient way to help you do the self-service and to have a simple level of service. And then if you are a major customer with lots of different needs, want to be on the forefront of experimentation, want someone to work with you and help you develop your ideas and your designs and so forth, then you're going to go to our expert research teams. And of course, it's a much more account managed service. So that together creates the architecture of our platform. It allows constant data to be produced. You can use it at every level, or you can use it at different types of service, and it is at the forefront of all the developments such as AI. And just -- because I've forgotten to mention it before, when I'm talking about AI, we haven't got a section discussing AI, and you probably want to talk about it in the Q&A, but I should have said that we have at least 3 different uses of AI at the moment. One is obviously to develop the analytics side of it. Another is for interactive surveys. The next stage of collecting data will be to use Chat to have surveys that respond to what you say. It's a much more efficient -- we've been testing this. It's a much more efficient way of collecting data and more fun. And thirdly, somebody remind me. The operational efficiencies. So Senex will become -- more and more processes will be helped by that. All right. Why is it a platform again? Just to sum it up, not from that sort of -- more sort of the blocks of it, but to look at it, as you will see in the demos as 3 different pieces. The public, we have a very strong, as I say, consumer-facing brand that provides lots of data for the public. And we now have essentially an encyclopedia of opinion that we are building, and you will see what that looks like. And in fact, it's live, so you can go and play around with it yourself. That public data, which most people experience as polls in newspapers is one of the reasons or probably the main reason why our panelists like interacting with us. Sometimes they say, when they actually say in feedback and when we just talk about the experience and say, well, it doesn't pay a lot, but I feel as if I'm doing something worthwhile. And so the sense that there's a public data site, which is growing and growing, it becomes a Wikipedia. As I say, you'll see that in a moment, that is a critical part of our tripartite if you like, platform. A part that brings -- that site makes people into members, it encourages people to become members. And of course, members are the ones that see something valuable happening out of their surveys -- of their survey work. And they also get rewards, they get financial rewards. But they also get -- with safe now, where they can download their data sets and get value for those, they can actually get control of their own data that other platforms have on them. And in a transparent way, they know exactly how it's being used, and so they get some control back over their own data. And then there are the clients, of course, who pay for it all and get the benefits. And those benefits even go back to the public because, of course, you get improved services and products and so forth. So that is our virtuous circle, which is 3 parts of the platform. And at that point, you, of course, want to see the platform, and I now invite up Charlie to -- Charlie Brady to show us through. Please come up, Charlie. That's the first part of the platform. I'm going to replace this and hope not to...

Hi. Good afternoon. I'm Charlie Brady. I'm the Product Director for the public portal. I started at YouGov in January. So this is about [indiscernible]. But it's been a really exciting few months to be working at YouGov. I'm sure it's exciting all the time. But I've had a really good time. And one of the things that I'm going to show you today is the new public portal homepage that we've been working on. But before I do, I just thought I would recap some of Stephan's point about what the public portal is and why we have it. So the public portal is actually an umbrella term for 13 different sites across 10 different jurisdictions. And they're the way in which we make our encyclopedia of public opinion freely available. And the reason we do this is twofold. As Stephan mentioned, YouGov has a social mission to make people's voices heard. And we know from members that this is really valuable to them. They want to be part of the debate. They want to feel they're into that conversation. That's really, really important to us. But there is a commercial benefit as well to the public platform, and that is that it creates an environment whereby we attract members, and we attract clients. And it's quite a straightforward process in a way. We have high-quality data. We have a really good reputation for accuracy, for thoroughness, those kind of things. And you got it frequently cited in newspapers on the radio in Parliament. I have a quite a good time coming through [ hindsight ] to see where we got mentioned. And that means people that people have heard of us and they trust us. So when they're thinking about -- during a panel, when they're thinking about buying product, we're a name in their mind and they come to us. The other thing is that often, they may change. We may have members who also are our clients and that kind of thing. So what I thought I would do is I would give you a quick demo of the public portal. I'm going to show you the U.K. and the U.S. consumer sites. Those are the ones that went live last week with the relaunch, but they're also the ones with the most traffic. So we're going to have a look through them. There will be time for questions after all the demos. And then after we've had a look, I'm going to tell you about some of our plans for what's next. So this is the U.K. site. You can see it up there. And what I want to draw your attention to, first, is the search bar. So I don't know if any of you are familiar with the site as it looked before. But we've made search much more prominent. And there are 2 reasons for that. One, we want people to be able to find stuff. It's really useful if you know how to search. But more importantly, it says a lot about who we are. I mean it actually says a lot about who we are, public opinion about anything and everything. But more importantly, searching for opinion data is who we are. You can find anything. And we want that to be up there, loud and proud. The other thing we've introduced, and I'm going to start typing, and I'm hoping you'll be able to see this clearly is auto suggest. So you can see here, I've added in most popular; most popular actors, most popular airlines. If I change, we have most popular brands. We have most popular business figures. I don't think anybody is particularly interested in most popular [ cap ] reads. We have a lot of things going on there. It works with names as well. If I type in Forest, if you're interested, you can find out what the U.K. thinks about his competence, his decisiveness, his strengths. And it also works for our product. So one of the things I'm going to do as we work through the demo is I'm going to point out opportunities at which people who visited this site have the opportunity to move forward into a different relationship with us, relationship as a member or as a client. So here, we're showcasing some of our products. And if that's what you're looking for, we're going to get you there really fast. Again, 2 reasons, navigational, obviously, but also another opportunity to showcase the breadth and depth of the content we offer. If I switch to the U.S. site, you'll see it now looks the same. They did look different before, and I will come on to explain why we've made them look similar. But you can see the layout is the same, search bar. What I'm going to talk about now is the purple and green pills that you see under the search bar. These are a curated search. So these are fast ways into key areas of content. At the moment, this is done manually as I look at what's going on in the news, what hot topics are, what we know people are searching for, and I curate these. The purples go to product and the green ones go -- sorry, the purple ones go to content and the green ones go to product. Again, another opportunity to move users of this site into a commercial relationship with us. And -- but we hope over time, these will become responsive. So responsive to what we know people are searching for, responsive to what's going on, but also responsive to what you're looking for, so it will begin to learn. Let me show you this. So Idris Elba, from a YouGov point of view is an entity, he's a thing. A thing is something we have data about. It could be a person, it could be a brand, it could be a group, it could be an issue, but it's something we have opinion data about. And our rate identities have a page, they have a hub, and this is where all of the content we have about Idris leads to. So if you're interested in Idris, this is where you're going to go. And you can see here, we know how famous he is in America, we know how popular he is. And if I expand that data, you can see that we have an additional level of granularity there. So we can see his fame and popularity by age and also by gender. And surprising to me, he's actually slightly more popular and famous with men than with women. So there we go. It's really good to have snapshots of Idris's fame and popularity or anything, but more importantly, is seeing that over time. So if I scroll down here, you'll see the same and popularity tracker. We track this over time. So we can see trending data. And we can see, for example, that Idris is holding pretty steady, but we saw an increase around about Q1 2022. And when Charlie gets to his demo -- and there are 2 Charlies, and I'm sorry about that. When Charlie gets his demo, he'll explain a little more about that. The other thing that's really important about data is that you have it in context. So it's great to know that 58% of America liked Idris, but what does that mean? And that's where we go to rankings. So if I move over to the right here, you'll see 2 lists; contemporary actors and all-time actors. And if I open the contemporary actors, this is a ranking. So this is the most popular contemporary actors as of Q1 2023. Morgan Freeman's there at the top, 97% of people have heard of him, 83% of people like him. Idris was 143. So I don't think Mr. Freeman needs to worry just yet. But the good news for Idris is he's on the way up. If I have over Denzel, you see poor Denzel is on the way down at the moment. So I'm just going to go back to Idris's page and show you some more things. So I'd like to put your attention to the blue bar, the chat bar. This also went live last week, and this is a really important innovation for us. So the assumption is, I'm here because I like Idris. I want to know more about Idris Elba or, I don't know, Band-Aid or whatever. And I have consumed that content, and I have enjoyed reading that content. But the next step is to start creating that content to take that first step to being a member. And this is our most recent innovation in creating that. So if I just open this box here, you'll see share your opinion about Idris Elba. And up on the right, loading up will be a series of questions. Now I'm not going to spend much more time on this because actually Sarah is going to demo what happens next when we get to her, because there's a beautiful handoff with the member platform. But the point is that this is an opportunity to get millions of users of this site into active and engaged participation and content creation. So I'm going to go back now to the homepage. And one of the other things I'd like to show you is the browsing. So we've done quite a lot of user research. And what we heard was that users would really like a way of understanding the different types of content we have available and also of honing in on subjects that were particularly of interest to them. And again, because we're all about participation, we want to do that too. This is our feature tab. We have a little bit of everything on there. We have, for example, a tracker. I'm just going to open that. So you get a chance to see what a tracker is. So every week, we ask 1,000 Americans how they're feeling. We have a similar poll running in the U.K. And you can see there that we have different things we can pull in and out; stressed, board, loan meat, so on and so forth. And again, you can dive into that by age education and gender. So we have trackers, and we put those front and center. We have articles, these are beneath here. And we also have rankings. You see on the right-hand side there, there is a brand ranking. And the other thing we want to do, as I mentioned, is drill into the subject specific. So if I click on to entertainment, you will see here that all those cards have refreshed, and we're now looking at cards related to entertainment. So social media influence, paid film consumption and wrap and hip-hop music artists, all over there. You can see right on the far hand side there, we've got Snoop Dog in at #1. Ice Cube at #2, and then LL Cool J. One of the things that I wanted to show you, and I didn't show you before, so if you forgive me for going back into Idris. I understand now I'm sounding like I've got an obsession with Idris Elba, is I wanted to show you an example of an article, because these are a really lovely way of engaging with people. So about 2 weeks ago, we did a poll, who would you like to be the next Bond? And Idris came up top. We -- he always does. Henry Cavill came in second, and then it went through the list. People are allowed to make their own suggestions. And again, it's a really nice way of engaging with people. People come here because they've seen it in Twitter, and it's been quoted the news, and they want to find out more. And if you're interested, people's most favorite bond is Sean Connery. I don't know how people feel about that. I do think George Lazenby did very well. The other thing I wanted to show you is the daily questions. So you can see here on the daily questions, which continent would you like to explore on a future vacation? So these are light hearted. They're about engagement. We don't reward people for answering these, but they really like doing it, because they're fun. And what happens when you answer them is that we then tell you what everybody else said. So you know where you fit in, and people really like that. And again, like chat, like many of our other things, it's another way in to moving from being a content consumer to being a content creator. So that's almost everything I wanted to show you on the site. Just before we move on to what's next, I just wanted to highlight what happens next in terms of the platform. So hopefully, you've heard something, you've seen something, you've come here and you think, I really want to be a member or I really want to buy a product from you. What do I do next? And we have a number of ways of helping you do that. So at the top here, we have the business menu. So if you want to work with us, you know what you're looking for, and that's great. You can go straight in here. If you don't, there's a link at the bottom, it will take you to the business website. But we also have over here the opportunity to sign in and key to sign up. So if you want to be a member or you want to create a free business account, you can. And Charlie will talk more about some of the data that we allow you to have for free, but those are those opportunities there. And again, if I go down, you'll see we have 2 really clear [ quarter ] actions here, so this is for our potential panelists. If you want to join our community, this is how you do it. If you want to know what people think about working with us, about being our panel members, you can go through and see those excellent trust pilot ratings we were talking about earlier. And finally, we have the business links. So again, following that explore, plan, activate track methodology, this is how you would engage with us again on the business level. So that's everything I wanted to show about the demo. We will take questions at the end. I will also be available outside with my laptop if you want to dig more into the Idris data. But I did want to take just a moment to talk about what's next. So as I said at the beginning, we have made the U.K. and the U.S. platforms look -- websites look more alike, and that's because we have a strategy of unification. I talked about 13 different websites and that's great, but we would like to bring them into one. There are some practical reasons for that. Obviously, it will be more efficient from a resource point of view if we're just managing one platform. But more importantly, it's about who we are, that the YouGov Public Portal is the one place you go to find anything and everything. And we want to be able to showcase our multi-jurisdictional capabilities in one place. The other things we're looking at, a greater personalization. So at the moment, people come to us and their consumer data, we would like them to be able to track things they're interested in, and we will push that to them. We would like to use that perhaps as a vehicle for soft membership. So there's a lot of things around that, that we're looking at as well. And hopefully, we'll be able to do some more of that at a future date. So that's everything I wanted to share with you. Thank you very much for your time. I'll hand over to Sarah.

Thank you very much for that, Charlie. Hi, everyone. I'm Sarah Francis. I've been at YouGov for around 2 years now, and I'm responsible for our Member part of our platform and our overall member experience. It's really great to be here with you today to talk about what we're doing to engage our members all around the world and encourage them to share data with us. Our Member Portal is the launch part of our 24 million members around the world to join, share their data and finally, to get rewarded. They put a huge amount of trust in us every single day, as Stephan's mentioned. Collectively, they share 8 million data points every day, and that number is constantly growing. The value of that data is enormous. It's huge to us, it's huge to our clients, and it powers everything we do as a business. We also know that the value of that data grows the longer a member stays engaged. And as we've all touched on so far, trust, the trust our members have in us is the foundation of that long-term relationship that is so important to us. So I'm going to read you a quote now from one of our members. "For the longest time, I've been absolutely certain no one heard or understood the average person, but my YouGov experience has been remarkable. I couldn't have asked for more. Someone out there is listening and amplifying small voices." And that kind of sums up what we're doing with our public data, with our public mission, and that's why member experience is so important to us. We know that a great experience correlates with really high-quality data, long-term membership and higher trust. So as you know, the data we collect tells a story and it tells that story over time. That story is about what the world thinks, to everything from Harry Potter and Harry Styles to Prince Harry and Harry Bo. And those stories are invaluable to the brands and the businesses and to the thousands of others that we track. So in today's demo, I'm going to show you what our Member Portal looks like now, including the recent innovations that we've made, and I'm going to share how we optimize at each point for member lifetime value. But first, I think it's really important that you understand how everything I'm going to show you fits together conceptually. So we have one Member Portal, and we have many ways to engage. Our approach is really pragmatic. We know that the world is changing all the time. We know that technology is constantly evolving, and there are lots of different ways to share data and lots of different companies that our members can share data with. So on our part, we make it really easy for them to do it, and we make sure that they are fairly rewarded for the data that they share. As most of you will be aware, we've made a number of acquisitions in recent years. And our focus over the last 12 months has been on integrating these into our product ecosystem. So you can see a ring, on the outer ring, we've got YouGov Chat and YouGov FreeWall. And these act as innovative ways into the panel that have mass market appeal. In the center, we have our global panel. So these are the 24 million people around the world. They participate in market research every day. And finally, in the center, we have YouGov Plus. So I'm going to come on to that a little bit later, but it's our recently launched ID verified premium tier of membership, and it's comprised of our most active, engaged and long-term members. Now let's take a look. So I'm going to start where Charlie finished on the U.S. public data website. And I've arrived on Snoop Dogg's page because I've seen a list of rap music artists, and he was #1. And I'm a big fan of Snoop, and you'll learn why later, but I'm going to show you how the chat section works on here and how that's a route into our panel. So as Charlie and Stephan have already mentioned, part of our social mission is to give people the opportunity to talk about things that they're passionate about, that they care about. And I am a big fan of Snoop, so I'm going to come along here, click this Answer Now button. This pops up a little chat, and first, I'm asked what I think about music artist, Snoop Dogg. So as a huge fan, I'm going to say I have a positive opinion about him, and then asked how strongly I hold that opinion. So again, big fan. Very strongly. And then finally, I'm asked why I feel this way, and this is really important because we're not just tracking the what, we're tracking the why. And these comments that we're collecting here, we've got millions of them, help us build that encyclopedia of public data that's so important to us. So I'm going to type a little note in here. Just, I love his music. Something nice and simple. Then I'm asked if I want to see what other people think about Snoop. And one thing that we find consistently when we speak to members of our panel and others is that they really care about how they fit into the world, how their opinions are compared to other people's. So like most people do, I'm going to click this View Comments button, and this is where we prompt them to share some information with us and start the journey to becoming a panel member. So they confirm their country, I'm on the U.S. site, so it defaults to the U.S. and to my e-mail address. And then I'm asked to confirm that, that e-mail address belongs to me, so I'm sure you'll all be familiar with, from many websites. That will pop up on my phone, and I also have the option here to subscribe to receive daily invites to chat about things that matter to me, hot topics. We're going to say yes to that option, and now, I can finally see what other people think to Snoop. So we always try and present a balanced view of public opinion. We don't skew one way or another. So in the first section, I can see thoughts from people who answered the same, so big fans. And then a bit further down, I can see thoughts from people who answer differently, and I can interact with these comments as well. So I can say if I agree or disagree with them using these little icons here. This is essentially data about data. So we've got the what people think, we've got the why they think it and we've got what they think to what other people think, which is a bit of a tongue twister. This allows us to understand public opinion and understand how united or divided the public is on certain topics. All of these comments are fully moderated before they're published, and so in another use of AI, we have a machine learning algorithm that moderates these. It's been trained on over 5 million comments over the past 1.5 years. And this makes sure that we filter out what we need to, but we also provide a space where legitimate, strongly-held opinions can be shared. And in the background, I have received an e-mail with a link to the Member Portal, which is what I'll show you now. So next up, we have our Member Portal. So this is what members around the world will generally interact with in order to launch the different types of research opportunities that we have available for them. So I'm not going to talk about YouGov Plus right now, I'll come back to that later. But as you know, we have so many ways of sharing data. We have research surveys. So these are the research surveys that we conduct on behalf of clients or the ones that power our data products. We have flash surveys. So these have been designed and built by our clients directly in our self-service platform. These require a really quick response, so we call those flash surveys. Members can upload their data, so this could be lots of different types of data here. It could be their Netflix viewing history, it could be their Steam gaming history, it could be their financial transaction history from their bank account. They can even install software if they want, it's optional, so that we can securely ethically track what they're browsing on the internet and report on that. And this section, this [indiscernible], we call it, is personalized to each member. So we're not asking the data that we don't need from them, and crucially, they aren't asked. They're not invited to opportunities that aren't open to them. So if for example, we only needed data about Netflix history from 18 to 24-year-old males, we could show this card about Netflix, just to 18 to 24-year-old males. So that means it's financially efficient for us as well. As Stephan mentioned, one of the parts of our -- we call it our panel promise, is that if we invite you to a survey or an activity, we'll make sure that there's always something for you to do, and that again helps us build that trust with our member base and keeps them sticking around for longer. It's been part of our panel promise for over a decade, and it's something our members love. Scrolling down, the next section is all about engagement. So these activities are things that members do for fun, they do them to have a voice, and they tend to be about topics that are going to be of interest to them. So you've already seen the daily questions. So I'm on the U.K. site at the moment, we're asking should more homes to be built on the green belt and about rent reforms. So these are quite serious today. We also have this Rate Everything widget, and it's completely randomized what you see, but members can rate, we call them entities, things that they may have heard of, and tell us what they think to them. And we collect hundreds of thousands of these every day. Then scrolling a little bit further down, you can see our Daily Chat, and today's topic is all about summer travel and whether people are spending more or less are about the same as usual. And you can scroll through the topics and see what we've been talking about recently. And we know that members who engage with these types of activities, these fun voice activities, tend to stay around for longer. They tend to be our more valuable members because they feel like they're able to talk about things that are important to them. A very recent innovation that we've launched, Stephan hinted about YouGov Safe, where you can actually download the data that you've shared and control that. We've now started to show our members, how they're progressing with us. So giving them a rank, showing them their lifetime earnings, enabling them to track things like their response rate and how they compare to others. Finally, on the dashboard, we've got our rewards section. So we've recently expanded this. We worked in partnership with our members to do that to make sure we have the right types of rewards in each market, and we've also automated it. So when you reach the threshold now to cash out your points, you get your reward within seconds. And again, this is building trust, a crucial part of that journey. What we don't want is members to cash out and then leave, stop sharing data. We want them to keep coming back and sharing more with us. So that's what we've done. And we have started to roll that out globally, and that will be done by the end of our financial year. This is a huge part of trust building, as I said, and it's one of the reasons why our Trustpilot score is 4.5. The industry average is 3.6. We're well above that, and we are currently top in the industry and intending to stay there. So I'm now going to show you YouGov Plus, which as I mentioned earlier, is our new premium tier membership. It's ID verified, and it's for our most active and engaged members. So I'm going to go through a live verification flow, so you can see how that works. It's going to be fun. And then I'll talk to you through the different types of activities that our YouGov Plus members will have access to. So handpicked members are shown this little card to join YouGov Plus. We've made it black to appear premium. Tried various options, this was the winner. And here, they see a simple introduction that explains the benefits of joining, what they can expect from us and what we expect from them in return. So they will unlock high points activities, gain early access to new features, get a welcome bonus. But in return, we expect them to verify they are who they say they are. I'm going to get started, I'm going to confirm that I'm happy to join. And then asked to enter my details exactly as they appear on my ID, so you're all learning my middle name. And I actually have my passport with me, so that I can do this live. We partnered with a company called Yoti for ID verification. So rather than building that ourselves, we've partnered. It keeps the cost down for us and it also ensures that we're managing that risk. So if I now click Verify my ID, I'm taken to the flow. It's explained to me really clearly, photo of my ID is needed, and a quick scan of my face to make sure it's not a photo of a passport and then a photo of a photo, so check if I'm alive. We built in smartphone integration here as well, and the reason for that is because cameras on phones are just so much better. So rather than a blurry webcam picture, I'll hand off to my phone, take a photo. So this is not going to be terribly entertaining for you this next couple of minutes, but I will narrate what's happening on my screen. So I'm scanning the QR code, I'm sure we're all familiar with how that works, and you can see it's transferred over to my phone. It's now asking me for the issuing country for my ID, which is the U.K., and it's a passport. Now it wants to access the camera, so it can take a little photo. I'm going to do that now. So uploading. It's happy with the photo, and it now wants a quick scan of my face. So that's the liveness check, so a little selfie to make sure that I am actually moving and human and alive. So it's asking me to scan my face, move a little bit. And in the background, it's taking a very, very short video. So that worked, and it directs me back to the desktop to continue the journey. So as you can imagine, that can sometimes take a little while. Hopefully, it won't, so I can show you the tasks in a second. But to cover those cases where it might take a little while in the background, we remind them that they need to wait for an e-mail that will come in the background. So if I hit refresh, you can see I've now got this new, branded YouGov Plus part at the top and a new section on my dashboard called YouGov Plus. And here are a number of examples of activities that we're going to be asking these Plus numbers to do. So we're calling these asynchronous tasks. So a survey is something you do, you take part in it, and you finish it in one session. An asynchronous task might be leaving the house and noting down every advert you see, how many are there, what are they for, coming back and logging them, might be keeping a diary. It might be more of a call activity like recording a video review of your favorite game. There are lots of different types of activities we can do here, and we're working with clients to determine what those will be. So you can see there's some examples here, reviewing our internal ESG policy, understanding what Google knows about a person, mystery shopping, joining a LinkedIn community and uploading their energy -- smart meter readings. And once the task is done, before we issue points to these, we give our members -- we ask them to rate the task, and that's for 2 reasons. One is so that we can give that feedback to our clients, and secondly, so that we start to send members more of what interests them, so we can build up that model and maximize the chances of high response rates. So I'm going to click Claim Points and just show you. It's a very, very simple 1 to 5-star rating system. You'll see that, that disappears. And in the background, my points have been added. So that's YouGov Plus. So today, you have seen from me the 3 different tiers of engagement. So chat, mass market, the regular panel and then this score in our YouGov Plus premium tier. I've shown you how we built that trust and how important that trust is to us; the trust of our members to encourage that long-term membership that's so valuable to us. And now I'm going to hand over to Charlie, who is going to show you how the member data that we've collected is transformed within our client portal.

All right. Thank you, Sarah. Hello, everybody. My name is Charlie. I'm Charlie #2. I'm our VP of Data Products, and I've been at YouGov for about 10 years now. So I'd like to start by just recapping what we've shown you so far with these demonstrations. We began with Charlie #1, who went through the public facing experience, highlighting how we're able to entice new members, generate commercial leads and establish ourselves as the leading source of public opinion data. We then heard from Sarah, who's taken us through the member experience and what it's like to join that community and have that voice heard. Showing you how we can engage our members, build trust and ultimately collect vast amounts of high-value connected data. I'm now going to bring this full circle, to show you how clients then leverage that data and the journey they go on as they use our products and services. My goal is to show you not only what a fantastic experience they have and why they keep coming back for more, but also how throughout those interactions, we're able to promote discovery of our broader suite of products and services. So I'm going to start here on, really, where Charlie #1 left off. We're going to show you a little bit of a public data article. I'm going to pretend that I'm a client, this experience for [ Reveal ] Who in just a minute, and I've landed on this article. Now I might have come here because I was e-mailed it by our marketing team, I might have googled it. Or simply, I might have known that YouGov's website is the place to go for this kind of public opinion and perception data. So I've consumed the article, I've enjoyed it, I've been inspired by it, and I want to do more. I want to use the data that sort of powered this and many other things. So I'm going to sign in. And as I said, I'm going to be a client, so I'm just going to sign in here as a client. And for this example, I'm going to pretend to be booking.com, the online travel agency. And at this point, hopefully, I can reveal why we've been showing you these various random examples. I don't think Charlie has an Idris Elba obsession, maybe she does, but there was a reason behind why we were showing you Idris for those examples. So here we are on the client portal, the YouGov platform. Now this is a true platform with complete interoperability between our different services. It knows who I am. I've logged in, you can see Hello Charlie. It knows who I am, it knows my title, it knows my industry. And crucially, it knows what I have but also what I don't yet have. And so that ability for us to show you the rest of YouGov is going to hopefully shine through as I take you through different steps of the client portal. So I'm going to start here in the top left-hand corner, this side bar. So this exists on all of our products and services, and it enables our clients to move seamlessly between the different products they subscribe to as well as seeing those that they yet don't have. So you can see currently, my products include YouGov Profiles, that's our audience segmentation tool; YouGov BrandIndex, that's our daily brand tracking tool; I'm a big user of YouGov Surveys, that's our self-serve capability, which we're going to show you in a minute; and then, of course, I'm accessing my data via YouGov Crunch, the advanced analytics tool that Stephan referenced earlier. And then you can see below, the opportunity to discover a new product. So I mentioned that we encourage and reward our members for sharing their own private personal data, in this case, in the form of transaction data. And that then manifests here as the product YouGov Finance. So I may want to check that out, explore this and learn more or of course, explore our full product suite. I come back to main site. At the top, you can see a dedicated section to YouGov Surveys. We are going to run one of these live, so I'll come back to that in a short while. But further down, we now see our 2 flagship syndicated data products. Profiles there on the left-hand side, as I said, audience segmentation tool. And then BrandIndex on the right, Daily Brand Tracker. Now as I said, I am in this example subscribing to both. Lucky me. But if I wasn't yet a subscriber to one of these products, instead what I would see is our lite version, a sort of teaser or a taster of the data. So I can explore some of that data, free data, before it then asks me to get in touch for a demonstration. So we're able to entice people, show them a little bit and get them excited really about what might be in store if they took a demo or subscribe to that product. So we can generate leads directly there from the platform and the other tools. Here, we highlight how the data then fits into your clients' typical workflow. So from exploring and planning with the Profiles tool, through to then activating and tracking using our daily BrandIndex survey, and that's what we're going to go through as a real example today. We keep going down. We get into the insights and ideas. So it knew I would travel, it would curate this content to be more engaging and more interesting to me as a travel-based client. Articles, again, that might inspire me, show me a little bit more, the rest of the data we have at YouGov. And again, it just shows how this is the one-stop shop for all of your research needs. There's a reason to come here, not just to access my products, but to also engage with content and learn and be inspired. Further down still, we then get into the contact and support area. So down here, we can see the opportunity to book a demo, if I've seen something that did pique my interest. I could also engage with live chat. So here, live chat on the bottom right-hand corner, that's the ability to talk to a real person. They're going to be part of our 24-hour day, 5 days a week global support team based offshore that can pick up any of those immediate questions one might have to redirect or to bring in someone else to support them if needed. And then bottom right-hand corner, we have our help center. So this is where clients can go to access FAQs, user guides, webinars, anything they might need to know in order to really use and get the best value from their subscriptions with us. So ultimately, what we're able to do there with the chatbot and the self-serve features but also have that ability to talk to someone is appeal and support across the full spectrum of service needs, which enables us not only to suit our clients' preferences. Many clients do just want self-serve. They just want to get what they want when they need it and not have to speak to someone, we've got them covered. But we also have some of those bigger clients, some of the blue chip clients, where they do want that white glove service. They do want to speak to an expert research and get that ability to have consultation and guidance, so we can direct our resources where it's best suited. So let's scroll back up to the top now, and we're actually going to go for a live example. I have prepared some of these analyses just to save you the pain of watching me type, and we're going to start here in our profiles tool. So as I said, booking.com, and my brief is to develop a campaign -- an advertising campaign that's going to try and move some of our considerers through to being actual users. So we know these people are considering us from our BrandIndex data, and that's the basis of my audience here. So you might see this booking.com considerers. So I created this audience, I'm going to compare and contrast that to the general population for context to understand what makes our target group unique. Now on the left-hand side, you can see the data [ tree. ] These are all the different variables that you can access to understand this audience. So from basic demographics and psychographics through to consumer behaviors, brand use, the media consumption or ratings data, and this is all going to be fresh and relevant and recent data. However, the better vision group of you may have noticed, we have actually -- we've gone back in time. As you can see, we're in the U.S. and we're in 2022 -- early 2022. So actually, one here is go back in time to explore a particular campaign that booking.com ran, which was, and a bit of a spoiler alert, a Super Bowl campaign. So that's what we're going to do. If you remember the Super Bowl from last year, you might even remember the campaign. But that ability to go back in time is crucial. It's a differentiator. It's a big USP of ours, because as soon as the client subscribes, they can access those historical data sets. They can literally time travel and go back and see what were the insights or the makeup of that particular audience back then, and compare and contrast to now. We'll see that even stronger with the BrandIndex tool with our history of data. So let's start our campaign building idea with some consumer behavior data. And we're going to take a look at some sports data, and we're going to show you whether or not, in fact, the Super Bowl was a good choice. Obviously, I wouldn't be showing you this if I didn't think it was a smart choice. We're going to show you whether or not actually NFL fans are going to be found more likely amongst this particular audience. So if I bring in these sports followed [ core ], we can see right at the top of the list there, football, the NFL. That is the top liked and followed sports amongst our booking.com considers, and it's over-indexing by a substantial margin against the general population. So a good start. The Super Bowl is likely to have been a good pick. If I move across the next tab, we're then just going to go a layer deeper. I'm going to drill in further to this audience that booking.com considers and combine it with the NFL fandom. So here, we're now going to look at NFL fans considering booking.com. So if we are going to do a Super Bowl campaign, this is ultimately the audience we want to reach or will be reaching, and therefore, need to make sure the content is going to resonate. And now, we're looking at some statements about advertising. So part of our psychographics around advertising, you can see the long, long list here on the left-hand side. And I want to draw out a couple of different statements here that are going to help us decide the best content for the campaign. So first of all, they do expect advertisements to entertain them. They enjoy watching advertisements with their favorite celebrities, and they do pay attention to the ads at events. So again, Super Bowl is looking like a great choice. And you can probably see where I'm going with this. Celebrities, they want to see an advert with their favorite celebrity. So of course, this is where our good friend, Idris Elba, comes in. We can use Profiles data to understand whether or not Idris Elba would have been or was an effective choice for this particular campaign. And you probably, again, guessed that it was a good choice, otherwise we wouldn't have been showing you this, but yes, Idris Elba has a high proportion of positive people that fill into this NFL fans considering booking.com compared to the general population. So Idris was a good choice. Now I'm obviously not here to pick holes in the campaign that they did. It was a great campaign, and it was very successful, and Idris was a great choice. But just to highlight how our data could go even further, and if I actually sort our entire list, it's not Morgan Freeman. It's actually Jon Hamm, would have been perhaps the best bang for your buck type of option as it has that biggest differentiator against the general population. So that was a sort of step further they could have gone with our database. Now, we're going to move shortly now into the tracking phase. So at this point in this hypothetical example, we've used the data to create the campaign, to plan the campaign, and we're ready to launch and then track. Now before we do, I want to highlight the ability to then conduct custom research as part of the syndicated world. And this is one of, if not our biggest USP, when it comes to why we're different; why we're doing data and research differently. So on the left-hand side, you might have been able to spot this custom folder. So if I did do custom research, what I can then do is not only use the Profiles data to target a very specific, very granular, very unique audiences, but I can also then load that data or collect back into the Profiles tool that's unlocking those unrivaled cross tabbing capabilities. The tens, if not hundreds of thousands of variables in here, I can then actually explore in great depth amongst my custom research. So what we're seeing is clients understand that, recognizing that, experiencing that, and the light bulb moment of, why would I commission custom research with anyone else? I can't get that same level of connection that YouGov could offer, and I can do all my work with YouGov and benefit from that cross tabbing, from that connection and that rich data that comes with YouGov Research. So let's take a little bit of a closer look at that. So I'm going to come now back to our side bar, and I'm going to dive straight into our self-serve tool. So here we are on the homepage of YouGov Surveys. You can see some of the work I've been doing recently as part of booking.com, but I'm going to start a new one. Ordinarily, I'd go to Create Survey, but again, in the interest of not watching me type, I'm going to go for every step but with things already typed in. So firstly, creating a new survey with the name here, we're going to go with something I hope that everyone in the audience will find interesting and may have your own opinions on, what is the better city, Rome or Paris? Probably quite a divisive opinion, but let's see. We're going to go across the [ GB ] for our data set, and we're going to build our own audience. We can [indiscernible], but we're actually going to leverage that ability, again, that unique ability of leveraging the syndicated data to target audiences. Without having to screen, without having to go and spend more money, I can just simply, as a prospect, use the data that we already have. So here on the left-hand side, you'll see a similar structure to what we just had in Profiles, all the different sections of [indiscernible] types of variables we could use to create the audience. I've gone with something using our brand's data, and in fact, I've looked at consideration or those who are considering booking.com or their close competitor, Expedia. I've decided I want to survey 500 people, so that's already set up for me. And then I've typed out my question. Now anybody could do this. You don't need to be a researcher. You don't need to know how to create the perfect questions. You don't have to have coding abilities. You simply can just type. You can do this, right? So I've given it a name or the question rather, which city would you prefer to visit for a weekend city break, Rome or Paris? I then type in my answer options, Rome, Paris, and I've got a Not Sure option. I can even randomize, so those 2 will flip around as appropriate. And on the right-hand side, you can see a preview, so I know exactly how it's going to look. So again, it's very easy. It's very simple. It's very intuitive. You don't need training. You just simply need to follow the instructions on the screen. And I click through to the final stage now of reviewing and launching. Now I've chosen this particular instance because I want data back quickly. To actually expedite this, I'm going to pay more, but I want to do that because I need the data right away. So I've chosen here to get the results within an hour. So that's an option for clients that might have a pitch or a burning need for data, and they can do that here and get that data back very, very quickly. It's given me a price per respondence, it's a very clear pricing calculator. I could change my number, if I said, well, you know what I want to spend a bit more with less, I can do that right here and it's given me a total. Now in this example, I have a credit bank that's going to make things a bit easier for me in the future as I want to commission more and more work here, but there are options to pay with a credit card or to request an invoice. So we're appealing to all different ways that people need to ultimately pay for this work. And once I'm happy and ready, I pay and publish. It was that simple. So what's going to happen now is that, that draft or that survey is ready to launch, and it's just going to get checked by, again, our CenX teams. They're going to have a look and make sure there was no glaring errors, nothing offensive, nothing political so that it's good to go. It's going to happen very, very quickly, and I'll get an e-mail in the background saying it's live, it's good to go. You can check it out. We'll have a look in a moment and see how many responses we've already got just in that short period of time. Okay. So let's just now move on to BrandIndex. So BrandIndex is now the tracking phase of the work we're doing here as part of Booking.com. And this first chart I want to show you now is looking at -- here was the Super Bowl, I've dropped an event line via the tool. We're looking at a line chart. And in purple, we have Booking.com amongst those NFL fans. So I've carried that same audience through. Everything so far as part of that same journey, stay-logged in, seamlessly move between the platform, and I can just simply now see whether or not that was a success. In red, we have Booking.com in the general population, so that kind of context of whether or not this truly was a good performance. And as you can see, this purple line really does shoot up after the Super Bowl. This is advertising awareness is the metric, and we've gone from around 10% to over 20% at its peak. So we more than doubled our advertising awareness. So it's great news for Booking.com. They can be very, very happy about that. But let's add more context because that's not the full story. What about how they're doing against their competition. So if I move over to another chart I've created, we can see now red here is still Booking.com. And we're showing now green as Expedia, their closest competitor. We're looking at the general population, there's the Super Bowl. There's that nice increase they had, at which point we were able to briefly overtake Expedia. And over that kind of rest of the year, we were pretty much neck and neck but it's actually more recently in 2023, we've been able to extend the gap now and almost reverse that trend. So as I mentioned with profiles, that ability to leverage historical data is incredibly powerful. Again, clients get that from the minute they subscribe. They can go back in time and see their long-term performance, getting further context and getting a detailed picture of what they're doing and where they're going. It's also very valuable for modeling or various kind of efforts to use this to compare to real-world data because, again, of the granularity and the long-term data we have available. The last bit of data from BrandIndex I want to show you is the global context. So now what we're doing is using across 28 different markets here, Booking.com's consideration performance to see exactly how we're doing on a global level. So the global scalability of BrandIndex, again, is a big selling point. It's consistent methodology. So you can compare one country to another across the 54 markets that we're tracking BrandIndex currently. So in this case, for Booking.com, I can see, Italy happens to be our best-performing market, where over half of the population are actually considering Booking.com. And I can contrast that to Japan, where the news is not so good and actually, we're only down nearly 5% for consideration. And the U.S. over here, we can see somewhat sort of middle of the pack as far as that consideration level. So if I'm Booking.com here, of course, what I then want to do is probably understand more about, well, what's going on in Japan. And that's where profiles would come back into play. We could dive into profiles in Japan and learn more about the considerers and how we could perhaps speak to them differently because there are no doubt there's some cultural differences as far as how we should curate that campaign. The last thing I'd probably want to do as this type of client in this type of situation is, again, use that time traveler ability. So if I go back to this chart where we can see some of these trends over the past year, with profiles, what I could now do is actually isolate the point in time at which I'm most interested to know what was going on. So if it was around the campaign here with the Super Bowl, I could actually use the data set that aligns with that period, look at data from the 90 days around the Super Bowl and analyze that specific audience, thus learning about those who wear outerwear during the Super Bowl. So again, it's that time traveler ability. It's that freedom to explore any audience I might want at any time. So the last thing I'm going to do before handing back over to Stephan is just come back to our surveys and just take a look and see how we're doing. So we've already got 22 people complete that survey just in that amount of time that I was talking through the BrandIndex data. And if you find me during the Q&A or in the break, I'll be able to tell you [indiscernible] maybe you have your own opinions. You can see if you align with this population, and we can even explore that data and crunch and leverage those cross-tabbing capabilities I've been speaking about. Okay. So that does it for me. I'm going to hand over to Stephan and we're going to get into some Q&A.

Thank you, Charlie. All right. So nearly ready to go into the market overview from Alex. Just to -- I'm going to skip that one, just to go to what are our strategic ambitions. And I would say here that we have a very good reason to trust YouGov on delivering on things that we said we'll do. If you remember back in 2014, we set out a plan -- a 5-year plan. And we thought -- a lot of people thought we will be crazy to trouble our profits over that period and to do it by becoming -- by going from basically a mainly custom research company to a mainly getting most of its revenue, more than 50% of its revenue from data products and data services as opposed to custom research. And we did that over that 5 years. We became known more than anything for our data products and we doubled our revenue in that period and we quintupled, not a beautiful word, but it's a beautiful number, 5x EPS growth over those 5 years. And we delivered that. We actually slightly over delivered that. And then we set ourselves an even tougher piece, which was to quadruple EPS. And obviously, we don't know exactly where we are on that. We can't talk about that. But if you look at our numbers that you see, as you already know from our half year results that in year -- in the first half of this last year, we've almost got as much revenue in as we got in the first year of the plan 4 years ago. So whether that's doubling, it's not quite, but there -- well, the second half is always different -- a little bit stronger than the first half. You can see that we're well on the way to a very strong performance. And indeed, we've been increasing our profit margin, and we're on a pretty good journey towards our targets. We don't know yet how that will end, and we can't speak, of course, about the second half at all. Now the reason I'm showing you that is, I'm saying we actually did all of that at the same time investing heavily in a strategic plan that we set out to actually become a platform -- to build the platform, not so much to become the platform company. That's what's coming next. But to build a platform. And I'm not reading going through all of those pieces. But obviously, we had a significant investment in technology. A lot of the things you've seen now require some quite serious heavy lifting to get that data fusion and interoperability. We've expanded our panel significantly across the globe. We've reorganized and strengthened our sales organization and put a lot more effort into our key global accounts. We've created efficiency through the CenX model, the outsourcing to other countries and we've acquired and integrated some smallish bolt-on acquisitions. So while we were doing all of that, we also achieved a pretty significant -- have been achieving a pretty significant increase in our performance. And therefore, I hope that you will take us seriously when we say we want to be the world's #1 market research company. And we think that is a realistic ambition because of this not-so-secret source that -- I've certainly been going on about it. You've heard about it from each of our other presenters, of the importance of an engaged panel producing connected data. We are saying that everything about the future is about this. If you don't have the sample, if you don't have the longevity of the sample, if you don't have the ability to take as Charlie Taylor showed us, you can't look 2 years back at a campaign and talk to those -- some of those people 2 years ago and put them into a sample today, and see what change there's been and all of this stuff and find out why. If you can't do those things, then you're not making use of the strength of the Internet, of connected data and very soon of AI. All of those things are in our area. They all require the things that we've invested in to become the universal infrastructure of trusted data sharing. That underpins the whole piece. If you're not trusted, if you cannot get people to share their data with you freely, you cannot do the things that we are doing, and you cannot take advantage of what's happening in the world in terms of AI and in terms of the aspirations of clients. So [indiscernible] a very -- not a dead horse, a very exciting horse, our social mission is to make people's opinions heard for the benefit of the wider community. And that isn't something we just tack on as an ESG bid. It is fundamental to what we do. Without that, none of the rest can happen. That underpins the quality of our data and the producing of -- with producing sustainable social value. Benefits the public, making their opinions heard and being able to trust us and benefits the business in terms of fabulous, reliable, deep, rich connected data. It all fits together. And now I would like to hand over to Alex, who's over here.

We thought it was useful to start with the platform so that you can have at least some context in terms of what's our market opportunity and how we're addressing client needs. We're going to go through a couple of slides just to talk about how big is this market and could also talk about some trends. When we did this in 2019, we used ESOMAR which is an industry body which sizes our market. The market definition was $46 billion. We've seen an expansion of the addressable market over the last few years to include reporting and tech-enabled. But we're still very much pointing at established research, which is 49% of the market. I just want to make a point that the sort of box there that has online, if you can't read it from back, its online, mobile quantitative studies, online mobile qualitative. If you add up all the numbers, that comes up to the 49%. The industry has moved predominantly digital. And obviously, that is a space that we have a competitive advantage at and we feel that we have a long way to go. I also want to talk within the established research on the far right-hand side, this is a geographic breakdown of that 49%. The U.S. is by far the biggest market, it's 44% of the market. And then from that, it drops down to -- it's the U.K. as the next biggest, China, France, Germany, and then it's a very long tail of rest of world. We're represented in most major markets, but we're definitely in international rather than a global company. And as we sort of demonstrate the platform, particularly from the member's perspective, this is where we see there's a real advantage for us being able to address the entire market. I just want to make the point, the established research sector is growing by 5%. We have consistently outperformed the market, and we certainly see that. And it's always difficult, the [ RNS ], you've already seen our targets, but we anticipate having well above industry growth for this foreseeable future. I just want to call out the 2 other sectors. Tech-enabled research includes some Martech, I include Salesforce and Adobe. We don't think of them as companies that we compete against. But there is a space in tech-enabled where we may find some adjacency and may start to move into that and certainly some of the self-service capability we've been talking about begins to move us into that sector. And of course, for the traditional reporting, our ability to sell data, that's not something you can do with the credit card yet, but we do see there is ability for us to also move into that market. So we find ourselves stating the obvious, we're still relatively small in a very significant -- in a very big market. I want to specifically talk about the U.S. If you have been following us for a while, we talk a lot about the U.S. It is the biggest market, just to give you an idea of how underpenetrated we are, the overall market and this links to the established research number is $20 billion. In FY '22, we generated GBP 100 million. We're building a lot of momentum in the U.S., but we still feel we have a long way to go, but we are pleased with our progress. And in a moment, we'll be -- well after the break, we'll be introducing Jason, who is coming from the U.S. as a client. It is the market where we have the most sophisticated users of research. Our model is high quality, large-scale quantitative either data products or studies. Our model suits the buyers in the U.S. very well. You'll see 30 of our top 50 clients based in the U.S. What's really encouraging in terms of how much further we can go is when we demonstrate the value to clients and particularly our most data savvy clients, they do more with us. And you'll see in FY '22, we had 48% revenue growth in our top 30 U.S. clients. Part of that is driven by doing more in the U.S., but it's also being driven by doing more multinational work as we expand our panel capability. We've been on the right side of industry trends for quite some time. Clearly, online is now a well-established methodology. What we have seen in recent years, and there's been a lot of investment in the sector, is automation, and that leads into AI and no doubt, we'll have some questions on that. But also in-housing. In-housing is clients starting to take research internally. I'll pick up on the self-service. A lot of our clients now have a platform like Qualtrics, where they're sending surveys to their own researchers. What that speaks to is clients are now reinvesting in ability to run their own surveys that will suit us as we move into more of an ability to help them do their workflow with the platform, but they're also investing in using tools. So these areas of investments are accelerating a few trends, and we feel we're very well placed to take advantage of that, faster delivery, Stephan mentioned at the very beginning, research used to take weeks, if not months, it's now moving faster and Charlie has got a demonstration running on a near real-time delivery of results. Quality is becoming increasingly important in our sector. If you follow the sector, you'll have seen there's a company [ Stint ] in our space, which has been very public about having challenges with fraud. This industry has always had a problem with fraud. And I think you'll see in some of the capability that we're building around verification that Sarah showed us. It's something we've always been able to stand behind with our public results that we put out, but increasingly being able to differentiate ourselves by being able to stand behind the providence of our data, we think will be increasingly a competitive advantage. Another one is self-service, and we are seeing clients investing more in tools and there is not a consistent platform for people to do their work. So we think as we develop and make the platform ever easier to use, we'll start to capture more of the generous researchers workflow. And speaking to that trend on and expansion of the definition of the market, we're seeing an increased number of non-traditional researchers coming to us. And that's quite an important point. We want to have a digital path to purchase where we can capture a large number of clients that can come to us. who may not have thought it was possible to go to a market research company, and we believe, obviously, being able to find us online and [indiscernible] online is the way to do that. This is an analysis done by GreenBook, that's an industry commentator on trend. This is a pullout from the report in 2022 on why the buyers select a market research company, the front may be a little bit small, but just to give you an idea of what we're looking at, the red is a key decision factor and the purple is a significant decision factor. The top 3 are data quality, service quality and general pricing and that's where we think we have a great model that we can support our clients with. Data quality, as I mentioned, it's something that really is coming to the [indiscernible] clients and taking an increasing interest in where does this data come from, what is it that we are receiving. Historically for us, one of the challenges has been incumbency effect. You can't quite see it in this, but the 5th one relationship has dropped down over the last few years, and that's benefiting us. After COVID, more clients are receptive to looking at new solutions. They certainly aren't asking you to be in market in 100 different countries in order to support them on a local level. Clients are becoming much more comfortable having a full virtual client solution. And we think, again, coming back to a global platform, that will suit us very well. This is purposely a busy side -- slide. As Stephan mentioned, it's a very fragmented market. At the bottom, we've got essentially the workflow of how you run a traditional, a standard research project from scoping and designing all the way through to delivery. Because it's such a complex workflow. What you will find is very few companies do all of this. And I think we are uniquely placed in that we have our own technology, we have our own panel that allows us to create a unified offer to our clients. But because you have so many steps, what you will find is some of these areas, you will have companies that just focus on these specific areas. And so we call out YouGov Surveys, I've mentioned Qualtrics, the SurveyMonkey is a famous consumer-facing brand. These are companies that only do survey systems. Sample providers there, we've got Dynata, which is the biggest in the market, we've got Cint, which is a listed panel provider. These are companies that just organize and manage panels to sell to research agencies. I want to make this point. Very few companies have invested in the way that we have over the last few years. In terms of being able to support not only from a delivery perspective, but fundamentally, the panel and having a consistent panel that we believe drives huge value for our clients. Just to give a flavor of who we compete with or who sits within the various buckets, these linked back to the previous slides, the survey solutions. But fundamentally, this industry is dominated by 4 giants, Kantar, Nielsen, Ipsos, GfK. I should have mentioned at the beginning when we were talking about the market size. In each of those 3 sections, the giants are all multibillion plus companies. And certainly, as we look towards our future, that's where we believe we should be in the longer term. We are mapping out the plan to really compete at a global level against these main players. But we also have -- the full service companies also compete in syndicated data. You will see Kantar and Ipsos for example, but we have some specific competitors in our syndicated data space, GWI, Savanta, Harris, Morning Consult. We put the survey solutions in there in sort of -- and customer experience in sort of dotted boxes. These are not direct competitors to us, but it's clients in-house research. They're starting to use self-service tools and third-party panels in order to run research. And so part of our positioning around the platform is to be able to bring some of that in work. And Sundip later on will talk about some of the adjacencies that we may move into. We're just about to go for a break. After the break, we're going to introduce sorry, sorry, sorry. I preempted. Well, let me just finish this slide. Ultimately, what we're presenting in the platform is the culmination of many years of investing. The work that Stephan mentioned around the panel is putting it in a highly differentiated place where we do have the best panel. We prove that over and over and over again. We believe having a panel is a differentiator. We don't think of it as a commodity from that panel then comes the best data. And I do make this point, we think this is a key thing that clients will care increasingly about. And of course, for us, creating the best tools, you'll have heard us talk extensive about Crunch. But as we evolve, making our tools much more client-friendly, so a generalist market research and even beyond market research departments are starting to use our tools. We think that the package of those 3 things creates a unique proposition. Before we get to break, I think we...

So we wanted to finish the first half with a quick Q&A just on the platform bit and especially to the 3 presentations that we had of the different -- of the 3 different parts. So in the second half, we're going to hear from a very important customer, and we're going to hear more about the go-to-market strategy and our targets and our way of measuring our performance and all of those things. But we want you to really have understood and explored the idea of the platform itself. So it'd be great to have a moment or 2 with questions that you have for these 3. Yes, Steve?

Steve Liechti from Numis. Just I guess, 2 questions. One is on the panel. You've made a great presentation about -- and talk through the quality of the panel all through. Can you just spend one second just to sort of say, well, if we speak to Kantar, they tell us they've got a great high-quality panel or it's also GfK. Can you just spend a minute just sort of explaining why your panel is different to theirs. So that's the first question on the panel. And second is just on the size of the panel now, it's 24 million, you're not global completely. What do you think is the right size for your panel to give -- to fulfill your expectations and challenges. And then secondly, just on the platform itself. You talked about investing in it and the foundations that you put in place. As far as you're concerned, are the foundations now all in place, is everything done for the panel viewed then to sort of deliver the next stage, which is becoming your platform business?

Well, on the number, first of all, and this is something I say guardedly, the number that we give is the number as defined by the industry. It uses all kinds of crazy ways of defining it. And this is something about right to contact. People who say they have 24 million, 48 million, some say 2 billion. These numbers are based on very broad definitions of panel. If you're actually talking about who you can contact at any time in a real survey like we are running right now, that is a much smaller proportion of that because of the terrifically large amount of churn and the way that panel size is defined by the industry. We cannot use a different number from the industry because for obvious reasons, right? We have to use the same number but it is nothing like the number that is claimed, especially people who say 2 billion and things that -- it's ludicrous, right, but there are people that basically say the size of Facebook is the size of their panel because they can advertise on Facebook and reach people that way. So I'm not going to go into that until -- our hope is one day and not very far away to entirely redefine how panel is measured. It isn't big enough in order to give in all of the countries, the representativity that you want or indeed to get into niche groups. So if you wanted to talk to people who are fans of luxury handbags, for example, in Romania, you couldn't do it. There's just not -- no one's got a panel that's going to reach a large enough group for that. And that's one of the things that you really notice is when you have clients asking for things, early adopters of something or whatever or young people who are into a particular area of entertainment or whatever it is and to find representative samples of those companies start scrambling around, seeing what they can make, steal or borrow from each other's panels. So there's -- we will never have enough panel to do everything that we want to do, and we will keep growing that. The difference is that we want to increasingly engage in panel without it being something that cost us what it cost before. And so when Sarah talked about the outside group there, and maybe you can talk a little bit about the chat experience and how some of that is different from other panels, which is the first part of Steve's question, we are looking at ways of significantly reducing the cost of acquisition. We've already got to just over GBP 1 per acquisition via chat and free wall compared to GBP 4 or GBP 5 by our traditional methods. So we're driving that down. The more that we gamify, which is what you've been seeing on our member platform bid, the more we can make that enjoyable, the lower we can go. And in fact, people who indulge in chat don't get paid at all and yet give us valuable information. And maybe you could just address that, Sarah?

So just to build on that, the experience itself is engaging, and its own reward. So it's true intrinsic reward we're talking about, not just shiny badge, for example. And chat has built into it a mechanism to show you what other people have answered as you answer the questions. So it's dynamic. It's not weighted data. But that in itself adds to that engaging experience and leads to higher through rates, so people complete more and a higher likelihood of them coming back and doing more of that type of survey.

Steve, you also asked about parts of the platform and how much more we have to build. It will, of course, never end. I mean, you don't ever get to the perfect platform. There are always more things we want to add more interoperability, more -- I mean, just talking about AI is a whole new world, right? It's going to need a new team, which we are building a small team because we're not inventors in AI. We are users of AI. It's very important to distinguish that. We don't have to have a large AI team, but we need people who understand large language models and so on. And we obviously have a chief scientist who is at the forefront of these things. So there will always be more to do. But I think you'll continue to see the margin grow faster than our investments. So I think we can manage to keep making it better. But it is now the thing that we described a year or 2 ago. We're at that point. We're actually a little further than we said we would be on that. More questions? Yes.

Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt. I just got 3, please. On the Plus members, what's the value of having plus members? Is it just to reduce and control the fraud or is there a value for clients on the client side? Is it more -- they pay more to have surveys on panelists, which have been checked. So that's the one. Second one is, how are you getting users to come to your public page and then to engage on that? Is it through social media channels or is it through Google Search, et cetera? And the final one is, how does clients in-housing affect you as in if a client wants to do surveys on their own customers using Qualtrics for example, can they then input that data into platforms to combine with profiles or BrandIndex?

I'll come to that last question myself at the end. First to Charlie on how do people come to the public data. And how many are coming at the moment? And we haven't really launched the -- we haven't launched the public data site to the public, I mean, in a big way yet, we haven't marketed. How many people are coming?

Yes. It's a really good question. We get people in all ways is a simple answer. We do have some active campaigns, we get organic traffic through Google, we get people via Twitter. A lot of it comes through because people have read or heard or content that we've put out there and they want to follow up on that. So it comes through in a variety of ways. I want to say, but I'm going to look at Jonathan for that accuracy here, that I think last year, we had about 9.5 million visitors coming through organic search. And we see a correlation in the countries where we have public content available. We see a greater percentage of our users coming from nonpaid for means. If that answers your question.

Thanks, Charlie. And Sarah, again, YouGov Plus, what's the point of it?

So it's not just about the ID verification, it's about the different types of activities that they'll be able to run with people on that subset of the panel. So because they're long-term trusted highly engaged members, we can ask them to do things that we wouldn't necessarily send to somebody who joined YouGov a week ago. So for example, it's an off-the-cuff but go and take a picture of your fridge every day of the week, can upload it 7 days in a row. I can't think of a reason why people might want to know that, but that's an example. And we know that they'll follow the instructions and the data that we get back will be in the right format. So that's what we're exploring with clients at the moment to see the possibilities that, that gives us beyond ID verification.

Thanks. Yes. And another example, Very live, one of our big customers in the luxury brands area wants to do a new way of doing mystery shopping and actually having people go to the stores and see how they're treated when they -- maybe don't look like people with a lot of money to spend and so on there. Our panelists, our YouGov Plus panelists will do that, they're very reliable. They're very -- these are the people that we most rely upon. On the identity part, we will see how this goes. We only launched this a few days ago. But -- and we haven't -- again, we haven't pushed it out there yet. But we think we probably will go and try to government ID, everybody on the panel by which I mean we will ask them to do that and tell them that if they have a government ID, this is not quite the same as YouGov, you don't have to necessarily do all the other stuff, but if you have an ID, you'll be paid more because we know they will -- that will be a premium, we can get an extra premium that more than covers the cost to us. So that we will pay you more for being ID-ed. It's -- we've definitely noticed -- the industry has noticed an increase in fraud so we've significantly increased our efforts against that. As Alex said, our very public polling shows that we have -- and the accuracy that we test ourselves against shows how reliable our panel is, but we're doing everything possible to go out against any problems there. As for the last, I don't know, Charlie, if you have something to add to -- I mean, I know we don't do that at the moment, and I have something to say about that. But what can clients using their own users, and so do with us.

Yes. It's a really interesting area for us. Obviously, we have ways through our own data to identify customers of said brands. And of course, the benefit of doing the surveys with us would then be the more seamless connections, right, as well as the ability to see beyond just your customers, which would, of course, be a very biased view. However, of course, clients do still want to be able to say, look, we've got our database. We've got these people. Can we survey them? And we have examples where we have been able to integrate with clients' own databases. And well, frankly, when it does happen, it's a real win-win. Often, we're even able to then encourage those people to join the panel, thus unlocking those connections and, of course, growing our panel in doing so. So it's definitely something we have capabilities to do. I don't think the in-housing means that that's going to suddenly become the way and the only way because, as I said, I think there's still benefits in going out there and getting the rest of the data beyond that, right? It's often a thing where we'll see behavioral data, right, is obviously a big, big trend, and everyone wants behavioral data. But that's only going to get you so far. You still need to know what people think, and that's where our data can come in. So yes, it's happening, but we're aligned with that.

I want to add that, in fact, one of the expenses we did was with a very -- a major broadcaster and we did a big experiment on this. And we did find it very valuable. And we have -- and it says in the pack somewhere in a very -- don't big it up, but we are extremely interested in adding customer experience to our offer. So that's something that we have missing. We want to be -- have a unified offer. We don't have a proper customer experience offer at the moment, and we are going to do that but that's in the future because our experiments show that there's huge value between mixing the 2 types of work, and no one does both of those well at the moment together. More questions?

It's Rob Chantry, Berenberg. Just a couple of questions, please. Firstly, have you got any learnings or forecast on how you think behavior of this type of platform could differ by country specifically kind of developed versus developing markets, niches versus cities versus urban versus rural, et cetera, some learnings and how you think that could evolve? And secondly, you touched on, I guess, the cost of panel member acquisition and how it's evolved. Could you just kind of give us a bit more background data on that and kind of detailing color on how you see that evolving as you scale the ultimate size of the panel?

Well, on differences, I don't know if you have something to add to that. But I mean, the truth is U.K. and U.S. are the areas that we've done the big work on. And I don't think there are big differences there. But smaller countries or -- so all the rest, I should say, we have a very much more light-touch approach, and we will be globalizing that. So I can't give you a useful piece there. Another thing I can tell you much more about the cost of the parts other than the acquisition costs that I mentioned of GBP 4 to GBP 5 for U.K. and U.S. acquisition, it's actually not that different in other countries, and it being something like 1/5 of that using the technique of the free wall, which, by the way, is just being granted a patent. That's when we -- a U.S. patent, I believe that is when we can intervene in premium content with a survey. But in our case, it's -- we have very high success in engaging people not just to click one thing, but actually to stay with us, something like 1/5 of the people go on to continue a longer survey for nothing instead of going to the premium article they wanted. So it's a very successful way of us engaging people without paying them. But I can't give you more estimates on panel spend, et cetera. I mean, Alex, I'm sure, will turn to that at the end of the session.

Bridie from Stifel. Just as your platform has got more and more sophisticated, can you just talk about how that's reflected in your pricing power in general, either amongst your existing clients or in terms of pitching for new business?

We haven't actually changed our pricing much at the moment. And maybe that's something that is to come. But we've made our first -- and this sounds crazy, but we made our first increase in our survey in our -- what used to be called Omnibus real-time, now we just call them surveys. But that price went up by about 25% for the first time in 20 years. The cost of a question on the Omnibus has stayed the same for 20 years, and we just raised it by 25%. But it isn't actually because of what we can say about our panelist, there's been a lot of downward pressure on prices but I'm pleased to say that we have successfully increased our prices a bit.

The way we've been seeing is growth in your client roster and usage offsetting actually deflation bar sort of quite recently.

Yes. It's -- I mean the more we use the system, obviously, the more value we get at the -- so it's -- growing the use of the system is the most important thing for us right now.

Fiona Orford-Williams from Edison. When we were looking at the product demo, we've seen quite a lot of other content that's there to engage people. How much of that's been generated in-house? And where else is it coming from? And are you paying for it?

That's a really good question. The vast majority of the written content, the articles, that's our in-house team. Obviously, when you're looking at trackers and that kind of thing, then that's a survey data that's feeding through. We have a couple of external journalists that write for us, [ John Humphrys ], but the majority of the written content is generated in-house. I don't know if anybody noticed on the feature page, we have a recent article about the [indiscernible] habits of gentlemen around Europe. I would encourage you to take a look at that if you didn't. That was inspired by a request from a Guardian journalist. I would definitely encourage you to read that article. But yes, generally.

It's Johnathan Barrett from Panmure. You'll be glad to know I've only got one question for you. With regard to the unified offer that you talked about earlier on, do clients need to perceive that every component is the best in the market to buy? Or do they just need to believe that the overall effect or the sum of the parts is the best solution for them. You might say that all of your components are the best in the market, but just want to get a feel of how the clients look at the unified offer.

It's very varied. I mean the -- some clients want to deal with one person and one team and obviously prefer company to be able to do all of it. And we've -- time has not been able to get work that we weren't seen to be -- to have experience in, for example, recently, somebody wanted a component to be -- to have more expertise in understanding the market more consultancy, if you like, and they wanted the consultancy and the data gathering to be put together, and we don't do consultancy and we don't want to go to consultancy. So there are companies that do much more on the consultancy side. I think as people want to increasingly do things themselves, and that is a very clear trend that more and more of our clients want to actually do their own work. We recently had a discussion with a major Swiss client who used our self-service work and was looking to see how much more we could do for them because they are trying to in-house as much of their work as they can. They will obviously want to do as many different things with one supplier rather than lots, but there has been no concept really of a unified offer in the market to compare against. Nobody has a proper unified offer. Thanks. Well, we'll break then for coffee and return with hearing from a client. Thank you very much.

My name is Nicole Pike and I lead our global Esports and gaming practice here at YouGov as well as our sports business out of the U.S. I'm here to present the second half of the program and to introduce you to one of our top clients that comes from the video game space. Jason Sanchez leads strategy and insights at Riot Games, one of the world's largest and most successful gaming publishers, and he is here to talk to you today all the way from the U.S. about his experience working with YouGov. Jason?

Thank you, Nicole. So as I go through this, if I mention names, that's probably somebody that sits on Nicole's team, so just FYI for context. So first and foremost, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Jason Sanchez. I've been at Riot for 5 years. We've been a client of YouGov for just over 2 years now. As Nicole mentioned, I lead the central research team under our enterprise pillar, which covers the entire portfolio for Riot games. So that includes our games, entertainment, Esports and publishing. So that basically means that I get to talk to a lot of people across the organization about research. So before we get into it, I want to talk a little bit about who Riot Games is because you guys may not be familiar with them. Like our players, many of us are gamers ourselves, which means that I get to go to work dress like this, and I always have an excuse to play games at work. It's literally in my job description. But really at Riot Games, we aspire to be the most player-focused gaming company in the world, period. We strive to create genre defining games that players can enjoy for years on end in a world where they have so many choices of the things that they can play, where they can play and how they can play. It's really humbling to know that League of Legends came out over 13 years ago and is still one of the biggest games in the world. So we currently publish 5 live titles. We've got a list of the titles that we publish here. Five of them are live. We've also published some games under our Riot Forge umbrella, which expand upon the League of Legends universe. But we're more than just games. So we also bring award-winning entertainment to our fans. When I say fans, I mean gamers and non-gamers alike. We've reached them through entertainment such as Riot Music, we have some really kick-out music videos. Our Emmy Award-winning TV series, Arcane which you may have seen on Netflix, and if you haven't, you should check it out because it's really good. And of course, Esports. We have international events that can sell out very large stadiums. In fact, we are running our mid-season invitational right here in London now. I think it runs for one more week at the Copper Box Arena. So if you haven't had a chance to check it out, you should buy a ticket, go look, the energy is phenomenal. Now I mentioned that Riot aspires to be the most player-focused gaming company in the world. And what does that mean? So we've broken it down into 6 key pillars that along with our master core equity metric helps us to understand how we're delivering against player expectations. First and foremost, puts players first. So if you go to Riot, one of the things that you may hear is player experience first. This is the ethos on which Riot Games was created. We make games for our players. We want to understand what is important to them so that we can prioritize that when we create new games or we continue to work on the games that we've developed. The player experience is always foremost in our decision-making process. Second one, makes games worth playing. I think that's pretty self-explanatory. We want to make games that our players want to play, tells great stories. So our games should be rooted in worlds with stories and characters that our players can love and relate to. But we shouldn't be afraid to expand that experience beyond games. As I mentioned Arcane, our TV series. This is a great example of where we brought the [indiscernible] from our game, out into the world where we're extending beyond just our gamers and you can go watch that on your TV or your computer or smartphone or whatever. Exceeds expectations. Not only are we continually striving to improve our products, but we want to surprise and delight our players. It's one reason why people want to keep coming back because there's always something new for them to engage with. Invest in the ecosystem. So Riot Games is the leader in Esports in a number of categories. And we wouldn't be there if it weren't for our player community. So we should continue to support, celebrate and invest in our player community because they are the reasons why we're here today. And entrusted and loved. So it's probably no surprise to this group that brand advocacy is critical to a strong brand. And we want our players to trust us. We want them to love us. And ultimately, we want them to be proud to play the games that we make. Now some of you are probably thinking that these attributes look like something that we would want to track and measure over time, and you would be right. And that's where YouGov comes in. But before I get into that, I want to go back in time a little bit. And so now you get the Spice Girls picture. So back in 2020 before we started working with YouGov, we have a global tracking program in place with another vendor, and we have some concerns. The data that was coming back was volatile month to month. And it made it hard for us to see if our performance was due to something like a data issue or whether things were actually happening in the market. There were issues in getting the requisite number of completes in certain markets. And so sampling was a primary concern of ours. Furthermore, there was the sense that we weren't getting the value out of the relationship that we felt that we should, given the size and the scope of the program. We were spending an incredible amount of time reviewing the data, curating the data, transforming the data into Tableau dashboards and not nearly enough time analyzing the data, bringing those insights to life for our executives. And many times, it felt like our account executive on the other side was just trying to get us to upsell us instead of helping us to get the most value out of the work that we're already doing. So our needs didn't really seem outrageous and so we put it up for RFP. And so let me tell you what we want, what we really, really want, right? So we want quality sample so that we can have quality data that seems to be a common theme today. We wanted consistency month-over-month, and we wanted to feel like we were getting a good value for our players' money. And as a bonus, anything that could make my team's life easier, would help us because it would help us spend more time with the data and less time with project management. Now why did we choose YouGov? At the heart of the decision, YouGov was based on our belief that they could provide reliable, high-quality sample on a consistent basis at a global scale. Now we have multiple teams within Riot who have great researchers that love to get their hands dirty with the data. So our priority really was making sure that we have the best data possible so that they could run all the awesome analyses that they were looking to do. And at the end of the day, we had more confidence in data -- YouGov's ability to deliver on this high-quality sample and thus, data compared to the other companies that we were looking at. So that was the heart of what we did. But there were other differentiators that I think made YouGov stand apart that we were really excited about. The first one is YouGov's Crunch platform. So I mentioned before that we were spending a ton of hours transforming the data into Tableau. And then when it breaks, when we get new data coming in, you get to fix it and so forth. The YouGov Crunch platform takes that away from us. So I can go in there, my stakeholders can go in there and we can look at dashboards the YouGov team has already helped us to build. We can look at different cross tabs, analyze data, pull it into Excel and kind of create our own visualization for it. So that was a real differentiator for us because it saves us time. We also subscribed to several markets within the BrandIndex. Now this isn't a tool that my team personally uses a lot, but it has proven invaluable to our Esports and our corporate sponsorship teams because they take that data and they're able to create these pitches that they can bring into potential sponsorship deals. And so that helps us to grow our esports business and so forth. And then kind of last but not least, YouGov Profiles. Now this lets us to extend our insights into data that we don't include in our custom studies because we have a limited amount of space in the research ones that we do. And so the ability to be able to take data that YouGov asked as part of their syndicated ones and merge it with our own helps us to create this enhanced data set that then we can then use to broaden our audience profiling as a result. So I do want to give a shout out to Alan and Austin on the YouGov team because they are the ones that help merge this stuff together. And I remember the first time they showed it to us, wow, this is really cool. And I actually built this whole deck for our head of comps person. It's like how many Americans believe in aliens and so forth is really cool. All that said, the primary reason that we stayed with YouGov is the customer service. So Nicole, Scott, Jonathan, the entire team, they are what I would consider to be my force multiplier. One of the big reasons why my team has been able to have an outsized impact on our org this year is because I don't have to spend the time doing the product management. They run trainings for my stakeholders. They hold office hours every other week. They handle ad hoc data request. And in many cases, they're actually talking to my stakeholders directly on their needs and without necessarily needing to interface through me, which saves me a ton of time. That means that I get to spend more time with the data, extracting more value from it and ultimately having a bigger impact across our organization. So I want to take the time now to talk a little bit about some of the work that we do with YouGov. So you can kind of see up here, we do a decent amount of work with you guys. As one of our trusted partners, like we feel comfortable leveraging the expertise that you guys have and the quality data that you have to do things like our brand and IP tracking, product demand sizing, the audience insights, market segmentation and so forth. This isn't all of them, but this is kind of a good sense of what we do. Now in the interest of time, I just want to focus in on one of them, which is the market segmentation, which is honestly one that I am the most excited about. So as a player-focused game company, we always strive to understand our players better. And you know that pretty much any client would be like, hey, I wish that I had a segmentation that we could use across the organization that we could all align behind. But in reality, you're just happy if like the marketing team uses it. Now we actually did it at Riot. We created a segmentation across 7 different markets, 81 unique market profiles that allow us to dig really deep into the regional findings, but also with the ability to combine those 81 because it's a very willy amount of segments into 8 global profiles that we can basically use for practicality purposes. Now in terms of how the different teams and pillars at Riot use this, our leadership and our enterprise teams use the segmentation to create this common framework, this common language around the direction of our strategy for our portfolio, whereas our game teams may look at it at a more specific use case for their products and understand who is playing their games, why they play their games and ultimately, what's important to our players. We've introduced this into something that we call the game experience rooms, which is a biweekly meeting of some of the most senior level executives at Riot where we need to discuss kind of the future direction of our products and our product features. And then finally, our publishing team uses the segmentation and both the global and the regional levels to create these audience profiles that they can share with our creative and our agency partners to develop more resident marketing and reach our players where they are. I could go on and on because I love talking about the segmentation. We have over 600 slides that we've created for this and counting but I think you guys get the point. So what could elevate the YouGov experience? I would say that over the past couple of years, our relationship with YouGov has been largely positive. And I credit part of this to the fact that we have periodic check-ins to make sure that we're tackling problems before they really become problems. But that doesn't mean that there aren't some areas that I think that we could do better. So I'll go down this, make the value obvious. So when I talk about value here, I'm not really referring to pricing, although it should be understood that as a client, I always want your most competitive best price upfront, and I don't want to have to negotiate for it. But instead, what I mean here is that we collect so much data across the work that we do and yet it seems like we barely scratch the surface of it. And one of the primary focuses of my team this year is not to do a lot of new research per se is to really go deeper into the work that we already have, it's to spend more time delving the depths of the data. And where YouGov can really help us out is, you guys know everything about your syndicated. You know the work that we do on the custom side, better than anybody else. No one is in a better position to demonstrate the value and how to leverage this data more effectively than YouGov is. So help us to make that full value unlock, make the value obvious to us. Secondly, quality. This probably should be first, but I didn't do it in the slides. So anyways, this is one of the main reasons why we chose YouGov to begin with, and it comes in many forms. So one of the things that we've been working with on our client team this time -- this year has been to improve upon cleaning up our data files and our dashboards. But this is one area that we cannot be complacent on. We cannot sacrifice quality. It is the reason why we do research, the reason why we've chosen YouGov. And so that's something that cannot slip. Advanced analytics needs, data needs. So Charlie and crew talked to you about some of the things that they had the demos. It was cool to see them, so thank you for sharing. I do think that there is the opportunity to beef up YouGov's data processing and data visualization tools and the ability to handle more complex data sets. So you can take this with a grain of salt because Riot is probably a little more data sophisticated than a number of our clients. But think about the ability to have like a raw data feed or an API, where the data is flowing straight from Crunch into our data warehouse. That could unlock a lot of awesome capabilities for us to leverage our internal data with our external data from YouGov and marry those 2 together. At a minimum, even like the ability to export a file from Crunch that is easily able to be uploaded into like data bricks or use to create a Tableau dashboard for those enhanced visualization exercises would be really cool for more data sophisticated clients. And then finally, don't be shy, be proactive. So in many ways, this is really a continuation of the make value obvious front. But the longer that I work with YouGov, the more you should be able to understand my business, anticipate my needs and either recommend new ways of looking at something or doing something or just do it. You don't even have to ask me just like hey, we did this analysis for you. Bringing those ideas to the table will unlock those conversations and we can discuss whether it's something that makes sense to pursue or maybe it will spark new ideas. But it has the added benefit of making me feel like we're partners because you're thinking about my business. And that's something that I truly appreciate. So that's a lot of challenge accepted. Like I said, I definitely appreciate having the conversations with Nicole and Jonathan on a quarterly basis to go through our accounts and we're never shy to kind of bring something up when we have any issues and concerns and they've been very good at addressing those things proactively. But hopefully, this gives you guys some ideas of ways that you can help to elevate the experience for clients like myself. And that's really it. I wouldn't be here if I didn't think that this relationship wasn't worth investing in. We do a lot of work with YouGov. Huge shout out to Nicole and her team for all the work that they've done. They've been incredible to work with. They've made my life easier, and we truly do appreciate the relationship that we've built with them. So I know we've got some time for Q&A. So I will go ahead and open it up to the Board.

That was really helpful. I have 2 questions, and I'm pretty sure you'll be able to answer one of them. So my first question is, one of the things that we as an analyst community and investors have been scratching our head about over the last couple of years, given the weaker macro economy, some difficulties in the video game sector, for instance, is when companies are going through more troubling times, do you need more data or is this an area that you potentially would seek to scale back?

No, it's a good question. I will preface it by saying that Riot benefited in a lot of ways with COVID and kind of the economic pressures that entailed. We've also launched a lot of new products. So for us, when I joined Riot 5 years ago, research really wasn't a priority for a lot of the areas of the business. And I came in for publishing and they didn't really use data at all. That was one of the reasons why I got hired. I would say that the hunger for research probably started bottoms up and has grown. So at this point, it's at the point where even our highest level executives are asking for this information. So they're hungry for it. So I don't foresee us necessarily pulling back, although cost constraints are real, right? So there are always a thing -- that's one of the reasons why we're trying to do more with what we've got because we've already invested a lot of money into doing this research. And so our focus, I think, has been not necessarily to spend more money or to pull back but to make sure that we're getting the full value for what we're doing right now.

And my second question is, what percentage of Americans believe in aliens?

It was something -- it was like 46% or something. So I did this like a year ago, and it was like the percent that believe in heaven, the percent that believe in aliens and then we got into boring stuff about like their favorite beer brands and stuff like that.

Steve Liechti from Numis. I wouldn't be so rude to ask how much you pay YouGov in revenues. But I suppose some questions around what you pay them. If you took your position now in year 2 of the relationship, is that right? Has the revenue that you pay YouGov increased over that period and given what you just said, can you see that revenue increasing further from here in terms of the additional services that they're providing. So that's the first question. And then maybe just flesh out, how do you pay? Do you pay a subscription, do you pay transactional time fees or what just any sort of shape of the revenues you can give us?

Sure. So this is multipart. So one, like I handle my budget directly, but I also have visibility into other parts of Riot that may be spending their own budgets. I would say, overall, the amount that we've spent has increased. And for a number of reasons. So our core brand tracking was the primary entry point for us for YouGov. And I believe as part of that, and that was just as I was joining the [ BizHealth ] team, we also had subscriptions to certain brand profiles and BrandIndex things. Now the cost burden of like the subscription services has actually transitioned away from my team primarily, and it's getting picked up by Esports and corporate sponsorships because they're the ones that are leveraging that data far more, it's really valuable for them and they're going out and creating pitches. It's a little bit less valuable for me on the BrandIndex side because we already have such a wealth of information through our custom tracking. I'd say, last year, we did a lot of what I would consider, not one-offs, but sort of studies that you might do on a periodic basis, so you might do them once every 2, 3 or 4 years. So the market segmentation is an example of that. You're not going to do that every year. Product demand sizing. That's something that comes up when we're developing new products, which may be once every year, maybe once every 2 years, it's hard to say because it follows our R&D pipeline. I will say that other teams have seen the work that we've done and have signed up. And so Nicole can probably speak to this better, but Esports is a big one. Even the publishing team is like, hey, who should we use? And we're like, you should use YouGov because they have this common definition. So when we go out to people, we usually go out to what we call core gamers, which are gamers that are 13 to 40 years of age, they play at least 4 hours a week on platform, and they have to play with something that we call competitive genres and not -- they can't just play like Solitaire or Candy Crush. And so we have this common definition that we use across all of Riot. So it doesn't matter like which team, as long as they're going after core gamers, they're using that same definition. I don't know if that answers all of your questions, but...

Just trying to get the -- so if you had to take a guess, how much of your revenue is subscription on a long-term contract.

How much of it with YouGov? I'd actually say that it's the minority. I think a lot -- we do a lot of custom work. The brand tracker is custom, the demand sizing is custom, the segmentations are custom. Almost all of the work that my team does is custom, I'd say, it's probably like 90% of what we do. So I believe the Esports stuff is primarily custom. The publishing stuff is primarily custom. So the syndicated really is more around the partnership's programs.

Just coming back to your comments about what YouGov does to you. Would it be helpful if YouGov offered consulting services on the data analysis?

So we do use advanced analytics for some of our custom work. I would say -- I guess it depends on how you're defining consulting services. So we have...

You're taking a lot of the work in-house at the end. So you're taking on that piece of the work as it were. Do you need that external interpretation and insight as well to increase the value of the data you bought?