Evening, everyone. I'm Oli Green, and I am Executive Chairman of Brave Bison. I've been in my role now for coming up on two years, but I've actually worked in the digital media marketing and technology space for the past 10 years. Prior to joining Brave Bison, I was the CEO of a business called Tangent, which is a sort of top 100 technology agency, which is actually where I worked with our now CFO, Philippa Norridge, and also my brother, Theo.
Good evening, everyone. My name's Theo Green, and I'm the Chief Growth Officer of Brave Bison. Like Oli said, we previously worked together. Before that, I worked in private equity. I worked for a firm called Brockton Capital, where we had assets under management of around $1.5 billion.
Also on our board is our CFO, Philippa Norridge. After graduating from Oxford, Philippa went on to qualify as an accountant with a firm called Moore Kingston Smith, which is a sort of marketing and advertising specific accountancy firm. And then she's worked at lots of other sort of marketing and advertising firms, including Albion, which was incredibly successful, based in London, and MullenLowe, which is part of the global network IPG. Philippa has tons of relevant experience. Also on our board is a man named Matt Law. Matt also has fantastic experience, having been Global Chief Operating Officer at AnalogFolk, which is an independent agency network, and Matt is currently a partner at a venture capital firm called Outlier Ventures.
Before Theo goes into some numbers, I just wanted to sort of give everyone a little bit of an overview as to who Brave Bison are and what we do. We go to market as a social and digital media company, and really, we have two parts to our business, two business models, two sort of streams of revenue. The first stream of revenue comes from our media network, and our media network is essentially a portfolio of channels that exist on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat. Our channels that we own and operate generate advertising revenue when the platforms themselves, so Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, they put advertising into our content, and that advertising generates us a commission.
Our channels are very varied in terms of the content. We have channels in sports, in music, in cooking, in fitness, and in entertainment. Like I said, our channels are sort of multi-platform, and we are experts in growing social communities and growing digital online audiences. The second part of our business is a digital advertising and technology agency, and this is where we work with global brands, large enterprises on a whole spectrum of different sort of work and different services. We have a social media offering where we consult with brands on how to operate on social marketing platforms like Facebook and like Instagram, and these clients love the fact that the best case study we have is an enormous Facebook page or an enormous Instagram community.
We also manage paid media on behalf of clients, and we also build e-commerce platforms for very large retailers on technology like SAP, Salesforce, and BigCommerce. I should say that myself and Theo are the largest shareholders of Brave Bison. We've been buying into the business since 2019, so sort of midway through 2019, and we put GBP 1 million into the business in a fundraising back in September.
This is just an excerpt from a trading update that we did in January. 2021 was a really transformational year for us. In the last 12 months, we really have begun to realize what we see as the full potential of the business. In January, we were delighted to announce our first ever statutory profit. We announced revenue growth of almost 50% to GBP 21 million. We increased our margins, and we generated GBP 2.9 million of cash in the second half of the year alone. We made a very accretive acquisition that has massively increased our access to new clients, as well as bringing in, like Oli said, new services that we can offer those clients. We finished the year in a very strong financial position.
We had around GBP 6 million of cash at the end of December. Business in the last 12 months has been very strong. I think also we've been one of the winners of COVID, and particularly that last quarter of 2021 was very robust. That has given us a decent amount of momentum that has continued into 2022. The latest market forecasts that are here from our broker have Brave Bison generating almost GBP 30 million of revenue for 2022, and that's the year ending December. That would be a 36% increase year-on-year. We'd also have a significant operating margin there. The forecast is for an adjusted EBITDA of GBP 2.7 million.
As Oli talked before, we have two sides to our business, and these businesses work very closely together. The business model is different, but fundamentally they're pointing in the same direction. This growth has really been fueled by both of our business units. As you can see, we're looking to generate around 50% of our business from our media sales, from selling eyeballs, and 50% of our business from selling time, selling services. That's roughly where the split should be for 2022, which is a big difference from 2020, and it's grown quite significantly. Our performance has been driven by a series of very carefully considered and very carefully delivered operational improvements.
In Q1, we launched a new TikTok channel called The Wave House, which I'll touch on later. We started from scratch and brought a new agency proposition to market, which involved helping brands run their social media accounts, run their Instagram channels. We also won numerous clients in that line of business, and we announced our first positive trading update by July. For the half year, we announced a half year of profits, which at the time was the first of its time and cash generation. In August, we acquired a business called Greenlight. It was a digital advertising and technology business.
We bought the business for GBP 6.75 million, and we raised GBP 6.2 million in a share placing. Apart from allowing us to buy the business, it was very helpful to bring a range of new institutional shareholders onto our register, which again, we'll touch on later. By Q4, we'd managed even more client wins, and the integration between Greenlight and our existing business was completed. The synergies came in through earlier and quicker and larger than we expected. We had a very successful end of year on our YouTube network and on our Snapchat network. By January 2022, we had issued our third positive trading update in 13 months, and we upgraded our forecast for 2022.
What does 2022 look like? First of all, we're extremely excited about the upcoming launch of our revised look and feel, our new brand for Brave Bison. Our new brand will include our original social media capabilities and our media network, but it will also include all of the capabilities that we acquired in Greenlight. We're very excited about this because it means that we can go to market and win bigger clients and clients that are gonna be buying multiple products and services from us. Whereas before we might have been looking for clients that are spending between GBP 500,000 to GBP 1 million, we're now gonna be looking for clients that are gonna be spending up to GBP 2 million a year with us.
The second thing we're really excited about is actually growing our digital media network. We're constantly talking to new partners, be it media companies, creators or sports federations about joining our network and plugging into the massive expertise we have in growing social and digital communities. We're also thinking about launching lots more of our own shows. We have a suite of about 10 Snapchat shows, and we're constantly coming up with new ideas about how to launch new content formats for new audiences. The third thing we're looking to do this year is really tighten up our operating model. We have realized, as Theo said, a number of synergies since the Greenlight transaction last year, but we think there are probably a few more to come, and we're especially interested in reviewing property costs.
The fourth thing that we're really excited about is our sort of distributed operating model, this idea of having a workforce that is not just in London, that is not just in Singapore, but actually distributed across a much sort of bigger area. We found that our workforce, our staff have been incredibly productive over the past two years. They really can work from home extremely well. What we're beginning to do is actually hire in a much more distributed fashion. We're hiring in South Africa, we're hiring in Portugal, we're hiring in Spain, and we're actually about to open up an office in Bulgaria, which we're extremely excited about.
The fifth thing that Theo and I have always been excited about is really sort of as well as growing our business organically, we are excited about tactical and very sort of targeted M&A. We generate cash at Brave Bison, and the Brave Bison brand and proposition is very attractive to entrepreneurs that want a chapter two. Our business model is hybrid and it is unique. Very few other businesses in our space have both a sort of digital advertising technology agency as well as the media network. Lots of entrepreneurs approach Theo and I about joining the company.
The last thing that I would say that we're very excited about for this year is really to increase our communications with the market and increase our sort of communications with shareholders, as well as developing and growing our board, which is something that we're keen to do over the coming months.
Now that we've given you a rough overview of where Brave Bison is today, we thought it'd be worth spending some time just discussing how Brave Bison actually makes money. What do we actually do? The simplest way to think about us is a broadcaster for the digital age. We own and we operate these channels, and they exist on all the new forms of media, all the platforms like Facebook, like YouTube, like Snapchat, and audiences watch these channels. Advertising is inserted into that content, which generates advertising revenue, which we share with the platforms. The business model in itself is fairly simple. We don't do any of the selling. That's all done for us by YouTube, by Facebook, by Google. The platform that we're strongest on at the moment is YouTube.
YouTube is a brilliant and growing platform that has been around the longest versus most of its competitors, but it's also still probably one of the most dynamic places to publish content. Here we don't own channels. We run channels on behalf of other people. These are generally high-profile organizations that have libraries of content, and we run them under contract for two, sometimes three years. Current customers are people like the U.S. Open, the PGA TOUR, and Comic Relief. We have very strong franchises in those areas.
We're also very strong on Snapchat. Snapchat has grown very rapidly in the last few years. It's a predominantly U.S.-based platform, and it has a very young audience. Here we own our own IP. We own our own channels, and we have channels that range from haircuts. This channel here is very popular. It's called Slick. And we also have channels on celebrity gossip, on cooking, on a whole range of things. TikTok is obviously a very exciting platform that everyone's talking about at the moment. Here we partnered with a specialist agency, and we found five creators, five TikTok stars in the U.K. and the U.S.
We flew them over to London during the first lockdown of 2021, and we put them up in an enormous house down in Surrey, and we filmed them for 8 weeks. We published the content that we filmed out on YouTube, out on Facebook, all at the same time. It was an incredibly popular show, people watched it, and we won a number of awards. I'm now gonna talk to you guys a little bit about our digital advertising and technology agency. First of all, it's worth us pointing out that we run our agency into three distinct business units: Brave Bison Social and Influencer, Brave Bison Performance, and Brave Bison Commerce.
Brave Bison Social is really where we consult with brands on how to work on different social media platforms. A client might come to us and say, "Okay, we wanna launch on TikTok, but we don't really understand the platform, we don't really understand the content, we don't really understand the audience. Can you help us?" We consult, we put together strategies, we also actually create content for clients. We're also getting more and more into this influencer marketing space, which is basically where we use influencers, so people on social media platforms that have very big audiences, and we use them to drive awareness and shift product on behalf of clients. It's a massively growing space, and it's a really important part of our business.
Brave Bison Performance is where we manage paid media campaigns on behalf of our clients. A client will come to us and say, "Okay, I've got this amount of budget, and I need to generate this amount of revenue. Which channels should I be using? Should I be using Facebook? Should I be using Google? Should I be using YouTube? Which channels? Please can you help me spend it?" We do that on a global basis for a number of really big, large enterprise B2C and B2B clients. Brave Bison Commerce is where we design and build commerce platforms, so transactional websites for retailers, both in the B2C and B2B space.
We build those platforms on technology from Salesforce, SAP, and BigCommerce, three massive software giants that create and license tech to clients all over the world. This is an image from a campaign that we ran with one of Vodafone's youth brands called VOXI, and they approached us for help basically increasing subscriptions to their new VOXI SIM card, which was targeted at a younger audience because it gave the young audience endless social media time. We used influencers, like the image that you can see on the screen, to promote VOXI on both TikTok and Instagram, and we're now working with VOXI on a recurring basis, driving signups to that SIM card on a monthly basis. We're their influencer marketing partner.
We also work with New Balance across Europe. They have appointed us to manage their digital marketing spend, and we do so across a number of different markets, and our team is able to run campaigns using a number of different languages, and they're a really long-standing client of ours. We also work with Müller, the global consumer products group. We run a website for them for one of their brands called Milk & More, which is a milk and grocery service. This sort of transactional website is extremely complicated. It ties in with a number of their different sort of back-end enterprise systems, and we're constantly supporting them, upgrading them, rolling out new features, and rolling out new enhancements.
As you can see here, we work with a really broad range of clients, lots of logos that you'll recognize. We don't particularly sort of focus on one sector, although we're probably working more and more with e-commerce, tech, and gaming businesses, all of which have really done incredibly well over the last two years. I would stress that a lot of these clients come to us for help with their own businesses because of the fact that we are experts in growing and developing social and digital communities, and they love the fact that we're not just an agency. We do this for ourselves. We're responsible for basically building some of the biggest Facebook pages, the biggest YouTube networks, and the biggest Snap shows on the internet.
This is very much our vision for Brave Bison moving forward. We're really keen to grow and develop the capabilities and services that we can sell to clients, and you can see that a number of services we already have, and some we're looking to either buy or develop ourselves and grow ourselves over the coming months. These are all very much digital services, and they're very much in demand right now.
On the right-hand side of this chart, you can see our existing media network as well as the beginnings of other networks that we're looking to grow and buy into, and these include gaming communities, even more Snapchat shows, podcasts, really any sort of digital audience that we think we can monetize through advertising. I think that what we're really excited about longer term is actually going beyond advertising. We recognize that there are a number of companies in the States that once they have a very loyal and engaged community on a certain platform, they can actually monetize that community above advertising and start to sell that community digital and physical products. E-commerce is something that we'll go even further into in the future. Also things like subscription, digital product subscription is something that we're really excited about moving forward.
Just quickly to touch on our shareholder register. Obviously management is a big part of this. Oli and I own 22.5% of the business. In addition, we have a CFO who's bought shares in the business and is incentivized through options. We also have a sort of strong and growing institutional base. CIP Merchant Capital, Lombard Odier, Trium Capital, Premier Miton and Risk Capital Partners all came into the recent fundraising that we did. We think that's an important feature to flag here. Overall, there is quite a tight free float in this business, especially given that the majority of the shares are held quite closely. Finally, an investment case that we thought might be helpful to summarize.
We only have 1 minute left. First and foremost, we think this is a very exciting market. It's not just Brave Bison. There are other businesses out there that are operating in this space. Our core markets are growing, and they're growing very rapidly. Last year, digital advertising is supposed to have grown by 30%, and we certainly expect it to grow double digits for the next few years. Brave Bison has a proven and an aligned management team. We are big investors in this business, not just because we started it. We actually came and bought shares in this business. We bought shares to get control of it, and then we bought shares again.
In addition to that, we took no salaries in 2020, and we took limited salaries in 2021. The majority of our compensation going forward is all comes from the share price. We think Brave Bison has very high quality fundamentals. The business is profitable. It's cash generative. It has a balance sheet with GBP 4.7 million of net cash. Because of the previous business plans, the business floated a while ago in a different guise. It has around GBP 50 million of tax losses, which means we don't expect to be paying a huge amount of corporation tax for the foreseeable future. It has a very attractive recurring income profile.
Brave Bison's clients, particularly on the agency side, are signed up to one-year agreements, sometimes as long as two. Additionally, on the channel side of the business, of course, we don't know exactly what revenue is gonna bring in on a monthly basis, but we have the last two, three years worth of track record. It's a very stable, repeatable revenue base. Finally, just that business model I think as Oli touched on. We're not building this as an advertising holding company. This isn't a collection of agencies. Fundamentally, we think these two business models work really well together. One is highly scalable. We're selling eyeballs, and one is working with clients fundamentally on buying those eyeballs on the other side of the aisle. We think that that could become very exciting. Now we'll open up for questions.
Excellent. The answer is in a few different ways. Some briefs are very revenue driven, and because everything's digital, there's very good data behind all of the campaigns that we run. In some cases, clients are looking for engagement, so it could be follower growth or comments or likes or shares. And those metrics are more sort of brand awareness driven. Typically, clients are either looking for performance or they're looking for sort of brand love and brand awareness. On the awareness side, you've got the sort of more soft metrics like likes and follows and sort of anything on social that points to brand affinity. On the performance side, we're able to track everything back to an actual sale, a transaction. That's how they measure us.
I mean, it varies massively. There's an old bias that if it's on social media, it must be young. That's absolutely not the case anymore. It certainly depends what pockets you're looking at. We know that the Snapchat network is very young. We know that it's U.S., and we know that it's actually even younger than they said it is based on most people that look at the data outside of Snapchat. Equally, because we're running channels that have a specific focus, let's say like golf or tennis, actually, you find that the average age can come up. There's no specific age range necessarily now. We see sort of YouTube being as broad a church as Netflix now. Everyone's on it, so it doesn't really matter. Absolutely.
We have offices in London and Singapore that service clients from a sort of hub perspective. Between those two territories, we probably service Japan and parts of Southeast Asia. We'll have a U.K. office that will service either a client that wants to come into the U.K. from the U.S. or a U.K. client. As Oli said, we work with New Balance, which is a U.S. business, but actually we market to 22 territories there. We preach quite a sort of globalized model, right? We can run these campaigns in any country. The search engine works the same. Google works the same in all these different territories. As long as it's Google, we can do it.
We're certainly a very ambitious management team. We want to grow quickly. There's massive opportunity in our space, both organically, but also from a sort of M&A perspective. I can't really comment on the sort of whether or not we would be an M&A target, but certainly we get lots of inbounds around businesses that are interested in talking to us and understanding our business model.
We know lots of the sort of entrepreneurs within the U.K. media and marketing scene that know of us and have followed our sort of progress over the last few years and are interested in chatting to us about what a tie-up might look like. There are certainly competitors of ours in the private markets that have been bought by private equity actually in the past sort of few months even. It's definitely a hot space because of all the growth that it is happening in it. Right now it's all 100% advertising. That's something that we see certainly continuing for the foreseeable future. We have noticed some people successfully executing a subscription-led business model.
It's quite a large pivot, and it certainly takes some time, but we don't see why, for as long as our channels continue to improve and the audiences become as strong, that can't happen going forward. I think if anything, it's getting easier and easier and easier to offer a subscription to a customer because it can be done through a third-party platform like Patreon or Substack. We hope to end up there certainly. It's about 75%.
75, yeah.
Yeah. About 75% is contractual recurring. That's anything that isn't a project, basically. We're very loud on platforms like LinkedIn.
Mm-hmm.
Lots of the work that we do is quite visual, and so it's very easy to shout about it, talk about it, because it's really sort of sexy, creative, interesting work. I think that we get lots of referrals because in our sort of space, brand managers, social media managers tend to move around from client to client, and so they bring us with them. We do have salespeople that are tasked with, you know, net new names and also sort of partnerships people. They're talking to tech platforms like SAP and Salesforce about customers that they have that might be looking to do an upgrade or a sort of new feature rollout, and we're the partner that they recommend to help them with that sort of new gig.