Good morning, and welcome to LBG Media's 2024 half-year set of results. I'm Solly, founder and CEO of LBG Media, and I'm joined by Richard Jarvis, our CFO. I'm going to take you through some H1 highlights, then hand over to Richard, who's going to run you through our financials, also give you some color on some of our KPIs. He's going to hand over to me, where I'm going to take you through some progress across our different strategic pillars, and ultimately the steps forward that we've made towards our GBP 200 million line of sight. Just to kick off with some highlights, there was many that were referenced in there. To kick off from a financial perspective, we've made significant progress by growing 55% year-on-year, up to GBP 42.3 million, and that's underpinned by strong organic growth of 29% year-on-year.
We've tripled our EBITDA in that half year period to over GBP 10.2 million . Following the cash generative nature of our business, we've grown our cash by GBP 11 million over that half year period. Just to give you some color on each of the different divisions within our business, we operate internally with our direct function, indirect, and U.S. business. On the direct side of our business, we are more relevant than ever across young audiences, and that's put us in a fantastic position when interacting with our clients and customers. We've doubled the 7-figure strategic relationships that we have to up to now 6 different 7-figure plus relationships. That's made up with the likes of Google, Uber, and many other blue-chip brands that we work with.
Just a bit of an example that I want to draw out is the work that we started with Google, which happened around the last World Cup, started to expand into different areas. We began with Google Pixel, helping them integrate into culture, and in that moment, which was the World Cup. Over time, we've continued to grow and build that relationship with Google Pixel, but we've also built into other portfolio brands within their stable, so Google Android, YouTube, and other products. We're very excited about the proposition that Google have around AI and the whole race that they're in to be the go-to place for people when it comes to AI across their different handsets and tools that they have. Working with them closely on how they can drive that across young adults is something that we're working with them on.
In addition to this, our audience and indirect business continues to go from strength to strength. We're now up to nearly 500 million audience members, which is up 20% year-on-year. As well as our social offering building across our different portfolio brands, we've also seen an acceleration in growth across our website propositions. Our different websites are growing in engagement, but also the quality of monetization is also going up, and that now makes up for around 45% of our overall indirect revenues. A very balanced pie when you're looking at that from an indirect perspective. That total area was up 27% year-on-year. The final one for us is our U.S. market, and we all know the opportunity there. It's a $400 billion market.
Our opportunity is to replicate the success that we've had in the U.K. as being the go-to place for young adults in a market that is 8x times the size. Our acquisition of Betches and the progress that we've made organically through our + 140 million audience has only made that accelerate, and we're making very steady and good progress with some significant wins across the likes of Mars, Peacock, Nutella, and a number of other brands. As well as the progress that we've made commercially and also across our proposition, purpose-driven work sits at the heart of LBG and something that is very important to what we do. I'm often asked, "Do you enjoy your job?" The response is always the same, which is we're very fortunate in the sense that we entertain and make millions of people laugh every single day.
In addition to this, we have the opportunity to tackle some big societal issues, and we do that across a number of different pillars, whether that's mental health, the environment, protecting women and girls, and also giving a voice to underrepresented communities. Most recently, one of the issues that we really wanted to get behind and tackle was an issue around spiking, which impacts a lot of people. Our campaign, End Spiking, which was in partnership with a number of others, has been something that we've been making significant progress on. Off the back of the work that we've done and many others that have been campaigning around this area of issue, we've seen the legislation change where it's now recognized, which it wasn't previously, by U.K. law.
I'm now going to hand over to Richard, and then I shall see you on the other side of that.
Super. Thanks, Solly, and really good morning to everyone. It's great to be back here to talk through a more detailed review of our strong first half results, as well as that intro into a few of the KPIs that are featuring in how we're running the business to measure our pace and progress against our goals. Starting with revenue, in H1, we delivered total revenue growth of 55% to GBP 42.3 million. On an organic basis, so excluding Betches, growth was 29% year-on-year. This further demonstrating the strength of the underlying business and has clearly more than offset the reduced revenues associated with the new operating model that we implemented in the ANZ at the start of this year.
This level of growth is higher than the digital advertising market overall, demonstrating the scale and strength of our proposition for brands that want to connect to our young adults using new media channels. Drilling down into our direct revenues, which is where we work directly with brands to develop and produce bespoke advertising campaigns, some of which you've seen clips of, tailored to young adult audiences, who then leverage our large distribution across multiple brands and platforms. Those revenues delivered a very strong result, up 92% year- on- year, or 33% on an organic basis to GBP 22 million. Direct now also accounts for more than 50% of total group revenue for the first time since inception, and this continued and sustained growth is fueled not only by the expansion of our client base, but also by those deepening of relationships with existing clients.
As we expected, there was a positive impact from successful Euros campaigns. That included our partnership on our Snack Wars series with Uber Eats, which was fronted by football talent, as you saw. Those episodes had bigger viewership than the England versus Spain final on the BBC. Betches revenue profile is more weighted towards direct, and we're seeing really positive results in the U.S. with both new and expanding partnerships in H1 with NYX, Mars, Heineken, and Peacock, and very encouraging pipeline and roster of H2 wins under our belt already from a non-endemic perspective. Turning now to indirect, where those revenues are essentially a combination of advertising revenue shares across our social media platforms, as well as programmatic advertising revenue across our own operated web pages.
We've got multiple levers in that regard, but in both cases, a key driver is publishing highly engaging content that our massive audience loves and that they spend longer times watching. Those revenues also demonstrated strong performance in the first half, growing by 28% to GBP 19.7 million. We've previously discussed the potential for web growth, and that element performed very strongly in H1 and now accounts for about 45% of total indirect revenues or GBP 8.9 million. This acceleration reflects operating a number of the levers that we've been focusing on, and alongside investment in people and technology, we've driven higher quality editorial content, alongside increased engagement times and audiences, and ultimately influenced yield strongly with our yield per thousand sessions up approximately 90% year-over-year. In terms of social, we continue to grow our global audience, which as we've said, is up 20% to 494 million.
As indicated as part of our trading update in July, the change in Facebook's commercial model came into effect for all publishers at the end of H1. As opposed to being a volume play, this new model emphasizes engaging and high-quality content, both of which align with our strengths. Whilst this change has created some short-term volatility, revenues remain resilient, and we have demonstrated with every platform changes before in the 12 years that the business has been on that platform, that there is nobody better placed using our audience and reach and our data-driven expertise to be able to adapt positively to these changes.
Alongside that, however, the growth in the way that we are monetizing our web audience and assets has driven greater diversification of our indirect revenues, which means that Facebook, for example, now only is responsible for 22% of group revenue compared to 37% at the time of IPO. That wider diversification of our indirect channel across platforms with the social space and web provides us with further opportunity, and as I said, multiple levers to grow revenues from our audience. Turning now to look at that diversification of revenue in a little bit more detail. The graphic here shows that shift in that overall shape of our revenue distribution from 2021 to today.
Direct has increased its proportion of group revenue, which speaks to the strength of those commercial relationships that we've built and developed, as well as the quality of our content engagement and audiences underpinning that demand. Back in 2021, our mix was weighted more towards social revenues, and in particular, those from Facebook, and we've since leveraged the opportunities across our broader capabilities, and that position today is now much more evenly split between web and social. Strengthening our proposition and revenues around the areas of opportunity and where we've multiple levers reflects the effectiveness of our business model and our agility in reflecting the current and future opportunities. Moving away from revenue and talking next to costs, which in the first half totaled GBP 32 million, which is a total increase of 32%, but primarily due to the addition of Betches' cost base into this year.
From an organic perspective, our costs have overall increased by 9%, which includes a proportional increase to content and production costs that are driving those revenues. Alongside that, a 3%-4% increase in payroll and overheads, net of the costs removed as a result of the changes in the ANZ operating model. Payroll remains our largest cost within the business at 55%, content production at 23%, and overheads at 22%, all demonstrating increases, but again, all carefully managed with the pacing of our growth to deliver operational leverage. Which is a good segue to talk about our profit, where we achieved GBP 10.2 million of adjusted EBITDA in H1, which is a 240% increase year-on-year, marking that significant increase in profitability. This is obviously driven by the collective factors that I've covered, such as the strong revenue performance in the period, including the impact of the Euros activations.
That contribution from Betches, which wasn't on board at this time last year, that well-managed cost pacing and the redeployment of savings from the successful changes in ANZ. Our organic growth was 190%, highlighting the strength of that organic business performance in H1 as well. All of this resulting in a really healthy margin of 24%, up from 11% at this point last year. In terms of cash, at the half year, our cash position was GBP 26.6 million, which was up significantly from GBP 15.8 million at the end of 2023, driven by an improvement in the rate of cash conversion in the period, with that focus on improvements in this area resulting in that significant jump from cash conversion from 79% for last year to 152% in H1, reflecting both the timing of receipts attributable to last year and the operational progress we're making in this area.
This current position and the cash generative nature of our business provide substantial support for both our organic and our M&A ambitions. I next want to talk about some broader KPIs that we're introducing this year. Before I get into numbers, it's important for me to, I guess, make the point that these KPIs reflect elements of how the business is being run on a quarter-by-quarter basis. They feature within a number of metrics we use continually to help us measure and manage how each area is moving forward and the drivers that underpin our internal targets. They work in tandem with how we make business decisions to manage the costs and guide our investment timing decisions. This set of KPIs not only reflect our current successes, but also give us some insight into the momentum across the three growth areas of direct, indirect, and USA.
In terms of direct, our brief conversion at 33% is that strong reflection of our pitches and work being of the highest quality and a reflection of those deeper relationships we have with existing clients and the appeal of our brands and audience to new and prospective advertisers. Linked to that is having a high proportion of revenues from repeat client business, which remains strong at 75%. From a visibility perspective, we're now also sharing a measure that we use, which is the rate of growth in the level of pre-book for the forthcoming quarter. By that quarter, I mean the October to December calendar quarter, which from our perspective is pacing well at this point at 31% ahead of the bookings that we had this time last year. On indirect, we talked about our growth in key audience measures.
We've now also introduced further KPIs on web around our daily average web sessions, as well as the yield on those sessions. While sessions are slightly improved, our yield per session is up, as I said, 90%, benefiting from that focus on high quality content, longer engagement times per session, web platform enhancements, as well as a strong advertiser demand alongside our content. In respect of our social revenue stream, given the Facebook commercial model change at the end of H1, which is changing the metrics across both views and yield, we want those to bed in before we introduce those into our KPIs at this point. We'll do that in the future. Turning finally to the U.S., again, the audience KPI has been mentioned, which is a growing foundation to support our growth ambitions in that market.
On a visibility perspective, we're sharing the same pre-book level for the forthcoming quarter, which from our perspective is pacing really well at 65% up on this point last year, reflective of that recovery from the U.S. challenges in Q4 last year around the writers' strike, which affected the entertainment sector in particular. As you can see, the business is moving in a very positive direction with these KPIs reflecting our strong positioning and momentum as we head into that fourth quarter. We look forward to continuing to share such metrics with you on an ongoing basis. Lastly, before I hand over to Solly, I just want to finish by covering our change in our reporting year end.
As announced as part of the trading update in July, our financial year has changed from the 31st of December to the 30th of September. Our next statutory accounts will be for the nine-month period to the 30th of September. We've made this decision to better guide our business planning and investment pacing, as well as visibility of having that October to December advertising concentration at the beginning of our financial year rather than at the end. Whilst I understand that these kind of changes can sometimes create a period where comparative performance is unclear, I want to emphasize that it's our intention to provide expanded pro forma disclosures within future statements, particularly this year's annual report and the FY 2024 results presentation. Thank you very much for your time.
With that, I'll hand you back over to Solly to cover some key factors around our opportunity, progress, and outlook.
In terms of our market, we are in a brilliant place. The overall advertising market is now made up of 70% of that being digital, and also is set to grow to GBP 1 trillion. Most importantly, we're operating in some of the fastest-growing segments of that, whether that's social media, programmatic, or some of the geo markets that we're operating in. We're very well-positioned to grow and take advantage of that, and I'll talk you through some of the things that we're doing to really lean into that.
One of the interesting statistics that we've also come across recently, which is some research done by Nielsen, is that Gen Z by 2030 is set to be the wealthiest cohort of people in the globe by 2030, which for us, in terms of growth of audience and investment into that, is something that we've been doing very early on and continue to do that. All in all, we're in a healthy place from a market position. We're in the fastest-growing segments. Most importantly for us, we're well-positioned to take advantage of that. The reasons for that are our scale. We now have nearly 500 million audience members, 140 million of those in the U.S.
We generate billions of views and trillions of engagements in total, which tower over some of the biggest household names out there, the BBC, MailOnline, The Guardian, and some of the legacy players that are really going after this audience. We tower over them. We're also well-placed in terms of the tech, the data, and dashboards that we utilize that really powers and drives that audience and engagement. I've often referenced our recent one, which is called Mission Control, which can help you predict how a piece of content's going to perform over a 24-hour, +48 time period that really delves into key performance indicators that drive those views over time and that engagement. We really look at these different KPIs and use that to fuel and power the billions of views and engagement that we have and create bespoke tech and tools that underpins all of that.
As well as the size and scale, we've also built famous brands. If you speak to anyone on the street in the U.K. and you name a few of our brands, you're often met with a big smile. They're certainly known, and in a lot of cases they're loved. This is also the same for the U.S. When I've spent time over in the U.S. and I speak to people about Betches and some of our other brands, we've also got that brand fame and love that we've built over many, many years, and that's also reflected in the celebrities that come to us. Even in the last couple of months, we've worked with Snoop Dogg, who you saw on there, Ryan Reynolds, Thierry Henry, and some other major names. They want to be in front of our audience base and also the credibility of our brands.
All of this also powered with the capabilities that we've built for clients, whether that's the likes of LADnation, our youth-focused panel. It's something that we package up for clients. As that grows, our capability and understanding of those audiences grow. We can offer best-in-class services to the big blue-chip brands that want to tap into those audiences and help them solve their business challenges. We've demonstrated that with some of the big blue-chip brands we've been working with. Just onto how we're progressing across the different strategic pillars that we look at and the progress that we're making to our line of sight of 200 million. We've got a clear set of plans. We've got a people base which we're building on and growing, and we're making some investments into areas that really accelerate us towards this.
From a direct perspective, we are well-positioned to continue to take money from legacy players that are unable to adapt, but also really accelerate into the fastest-growing segments of our market through what we do. We're making great progress with some of the big blue-chip brands that we're working, and I referenced Google, Uber, and a number of others today. From an indirect perspective, we continue to build our size and scale, accelerating both in social but also across the web platforms where we continue to diversify and grow and build in different directions. I also mentioned before about connected TV. This is a very fast-growing part of the market, and something that through our size and scale across YouTube, we've already got an access point into, and in the future, we'll explore even further.
The final one is our U.S. expansion, the largest advertisement market in the world, $400 billion, and we're at the beginning stages of that. We've accelerated our movements into the U.S. with the M&A that we made through Betches. We've now also brought the two operations, our organic operation, and also the acquisition that we made in Betches together, and we're starting to see the benefits of that. The opportunity there is really for us to accelerate into that market where we can be that go-to place for young adults in a market that's eight times the size. All of this, we also have M&A as an accelerator. We've used that with the likes of UNILAD, Betches, and also a number of small bolt-ons, which we've talked about.
We'll continue to look at M&A as an accelerant of this plan, and we're constantly looking at new opportunities, but we're also very careful with what we engage with, and we've demonstrated this with our acquisitions to date. To summarize today, we've had a strong financial performance. We've grown by 55% year-on-year in revenue, underpinned by strong organic growth of 29%. Our EBITDA has grown by 3 x over that period to over GBP 10 million. We're continuing to win deeper and build bigger relationships with clients, which is now up to six, which has doubled year-on-year, working with the likes of Google, Uber, and others. Our U.S. market and opportunity continues to grow with some of the wins that we've made there across Mars, Peacock, Nutella, and also the momentum of our integration.
All in all, we've got strong momentum in the business and are confident in delivering market expectations for our 12 months to December. Thank you very much. I'm going to hand over to questions.
Thanks. It's Ciarán Donnelly from Berenberg. Three for myself. Firstly, if you look at the pre-book data historically, in terms of the direct business and the indication of Q4 performance, I guess how accurate has it been historically?
I think the important thing to draw out the data that we've shared now is that sense of momentum. We're talking about actual bookings, and as you'd expect, there's not 100% mapping to revenue. Aligned with all our historical views of how we use these metrics on a quarter-by-quarter basis, it's a really strong indicator of the momentum that we move forward into the quarter, which is exactly why we're sharing it.
Okay. just to be clear, we shouldn't expect 31% revenue growth in Q4?
Like I said, there's that difference between revenue recognition and bookings, but it's an indication of the strength of our pipeline build and that conversion rate that we talk about.
Okay. Just secondly, in terms of indirect, should we expect web as a proportion of indirect to grow? Will that be a function of web yield being significantly higher than social, or is it going to be web sessions, or a bit of both?
What I would say is there's opportunity across all of our channels for growth. What we've seen and demonstrated on web is an evolution that hasn't just been a set of initiatives that we've focused on this year. It's been a progression of things through the second half of last year as well. There's absolutely more space to grow in terms of volume and yield. The kind of 90% numbers that we see now is that first half old model versus first half new model. I wouldn't suggest that 90% is a sustainable level, but there's certainly more opportunity to go for. On the social side, as I said, I've not shared specific metrics on those yield.
Web yields are, because it's our own platform, obviously much, much stronger than what you'd expect for social. As that new social model stabilizes, we'll be able to understand what the momentum is on that going forward.
Brilliant. Thanks. Just finally from me, maybe Solly, in terms of the strategic M&A you were highlighting, in terms of priorities, should we expect the U.S. as still being the priority in terms of M&A going forward? Could you just give some thought into the strategic priorities in terms of indirect, direct, and U.S. expansion?
Yeah, sure. The three areas that I talked about before, direct, indirect, and the U.S., are laser focuses for us. From an M&A perspective, we're very picky. Betches had a great profile, profitable since day one, brilliant founders, good momentum. Great fit for us in a market that we really see as an opportunity to grow into. We took a number of years to get to that point where we move forward on those conversations that we were having. For us, we're always looking and speaking to potential targets across those different areas of opportunity I talked about. As I say, we're very picky and we're not likely to make any quick movements without thoroughly ensuring that it feels like the right fit and the direction of travel where we're going. The U.S. is a great opportunity we'll look to further and are having conversations in there.
U.K. market is still a major market of growth for us. We talked about the web opportunity, further growth into social, building on our audience. All of those different facets of our direction of travel is what we're looking at different businesses.
Brilliant. Thanks.
Good morning. It's Jonathan Barrett from Panmure. I've just got one question for you. Just on web session lengths, can you give us an idea of what the growth was in half, please?
The growth in engagement times. If I'm honest, off the top of my head, I don't know the exact numbers, but I can come back to you on that.
All right. Thank you.
As I said, what I will say is that is very much an area of opportunity for us, because getting a highly engaged audience that spends more time on our own platforms is a direction of travel that we've been moving onto. That gives more opportunity for presenting advertisers' content alongside those sessions. It's certainly been driving those yields.
Hi, Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt. My first question is just on the roadmap for the U.S. How should we think about kind of the next 12 months? I know with Betches, you've just launched Betches Sports. Is the focus to possibly create new brands over there from Betches, or are you actually looking to kind of focus on expanding the indirect side? I mean, what's the roadmap looking like?
Thank you. Appreciate the singular questions that everyone keeps giving me and building on top of that. We've got fantastic proposition and product out in market there. We are market leaders for young women, millennials, and Gen Z, and they've done a great job of building that across podcasts, across social, and also their web proposition. We continue to evolve, as you mentioned recently, launching Betches Sports, which is a really exciting proposition. We're coming at it from a very authentic angle, and underrepresented audience base in there. We're going to continue to launch products such as Betches Sports, and improve the products that we have. What really is the opportunity within that business, as well as bringing the LADbible Group offering and the Betches offering together, is developing their commercial proposition.
When you compare where they are in the U.S. market versus the U.K., they've made significant progress. They've got good relationships with blue-chip brands. We can see a real opportunity to grow and develop that, whether that is adding the likes of panel offering, different capabilities that we offer clients here in the U.K., and really working with them to accelerate into that. For us, it's an always-on approach on product development. Betches Sports will be the big play for them from a new product launch. The big focus for us is how can we build more seven-figure strategic relationships with clients as we've already started to demonstrate, and build on that commercial offering out there.
Just a second one on web. Obviously, you've had a great yield rise in that product. How much of it is actually you growing your web product over the last year, and how much of that is actually demand?
Just why into that. I think they're both linked actually, in terms of what drives demand for advertisers to be alongside our content as opposed to someone else's is all of the work and the steps that we've taken. It's not a single move that we've made. It's that alignment of really high-quality editorial content that is highly engaging and our audiences love, and contextually, that linkage between advertiser demand and yields for different types of content. We've made investment in our platform to increase the visibility and performance of our websites as well. We've developed and launched UNILAD Tech website this year. All of those facets together are meaning ultimately an element of competition for our inventory which is stacking on top of our editorial focus, and influencing that kind of a growth. I'd say we're
We're operating those multiple lever approach rather than being downstream of the overall yield environment.
Just to add to that as well, on the tech point, we've recently been experimenting with an AI tool. We're constantly doing that across the business. We've seen a significant increase in performance through some of the campaigns that we're running off the back of introducing tools such as that. From a technology perspective, as Richard mentioned, we're constantly looking at ways of evolving and improving either for our audience or clients as well.
Just the final one. You showed the pie charts of the diversification, and so you've mentioned that your CTV is possibly an opportunity in the future. Are there any other kind of revenue streams you're looking at to possibly diversify that pie in the future? Things like e-commerce or subscriptions?
Social remains a big area of focus. When you look at audience time spent on mobile phones, a significant portion, I think over 40%, is spent on social media. It will continue to be a big focus for us in really driving into that Gen Z audiences, we've already demonstrated through the growth of that. Websites, of course, launching other websites, going deeper into areas that we're already strong in, UNILAD Tech being an example of new. Also building bigger, deeper audiences across the likes of LADbible or UNILAD, et cetera. Yes, connected TV is a really interesting opportunity. I think YouTube is by far the most watched streaming platform on TVs now, and we have a big viewership. I think we've just reached 1 billion views across YouTube, and a significant number of subscribers across our proposition there.
You may have seen the likes of Snack Wars, Agree to Disagree, et cetera. That's where the likes of Snoop Dogg and Ryan Reynolds, and some of those other celebrities have been a part of it. Also as well, with the Betches proposition, we've of course brought podcasts into the fold. There's areas which we are constantly exploring, but we take an approach around investment in a manner which we want to see the revenue before we make those investments. Each of those different areas we're evolving at different paces, and are of course excited about them all. We'll continue to build it out as we have done with the diversification of the overall business. That will be a mixture of going deeper whilst also growing into some of those areas I just mentioned.
Thanks very much. Alistair Davies, Investec. Firstly, could you give us any color on the split within direct between the U.K. and the U.S., whether that's in terms of revenues, sort of numbers of customers, and any sense of the average spend per customer? I'll stop there.
Yeah, I'd say U.S. overall, from a direct perspective, represents around GBP 8.5 million-GBP 9 million of our revenue in H1. The rest of it predominantly in the U.K. We've got our Ireland offering, as you know, much less revenue this year from the ANZ because of our shift to that operator model. I don't have precise numbers to hand on average order value. Certainly from the perspective of the U.S., those campaigns that Betches are evolving and developing have got much higher potential because of the size of that market and the number of seven-figure clients in USD terms that they have themselves is improving as well.
Thanks. Secondly, you've obviously got this sort of new model in Australia and New Zealand partnership. Any scope or anything on the horizon of using that model to enter new markets in the foreseeable future?
It's a good question. I think we talked about it previously, that we've certainly been looking in as how this performs as a potential blueprint for monetizing audiences in territories that we wouldn't want to put boots on the ground, and I'd say we're still in that phase. We're very happy with how Val Morgan is performing on that basis, and it was absolutely the right move for us to take, and it's still an area of opportunity for us to do. It's against a stack of priorities, so focus is really important across those core growth lenses that we've got.
Thanks, thirdly, lastly perhaps, sorry. I guess structurally, as your parts of your loyal audience age, how do you sort of think about sort of ensuring your content creation is then sort of attracting new, younger audiences that are coming into that sort of 18- 34 demographic?
Yeah, it's something that we are relentlessly focused on. We're the fastest growing player across Gen Z audiences, and that's across the likes of TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, where these younger audiences are consuming content. YouTube is, of course, a very big player in that. We've got a very broad mix of platform exposure, and our audience lives across all of those. We continue to focus on specific brands that also may appeal to different audience bases. We look at things a little bit differently depending on which brand that we have. It's a major focus of ours and, as I say, across Instagram, TikTok, et cetera, we're growing incredibly fast across that Gen Z audience base. We're starting to think about what that may look like for Gen Alpha, although it's very early days.
I know my young children are often watching YouTube and are starting very young on that basis. We're thinking about how we can do that, and we're very rigorous in terms of setting targets, tracking metrics, and tracking the growth across those. We'll take the same approach across that and make sure that we're innovating and focused on it.
Thank you.
Morning, it's Roddy Davidson from Shore Capital. Thanks for the presentation. A couple of questions from me, sort of unrelated to each other. The first is, could you just give a bit of an insight into how you're doing at the moment in terms of employee retention, whether that's a challenging point? Secondly, just coming back on AI, clearly, you've touched on the opportunities within the business. Flipping that over, what are the sort of guardrails that you've got in place, and what are the more challenging aspects of bringing that into the business, and implementing it successfully? Thanks.
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I'll take both of those. I guess starting with the employment retention, we're very lucky in the sense of our brands are well-known across audience bases, and quite often we get up to 1,000, sometimes 2,000 applications per just one of our job posts. We, of course, headhunt as well, but we're very lucky in the sense of the fame of our brands, and it's great to be working on something that your friends and family know and love and consume. We're good on that basis. In terms of employment retention, yeah, we want the best people and need the best people in order to achieve what we want to achieve. We often refer to the football league tiering of Premier League, Championship, League One, League Two, and then, of course, you've got the Champions League.
Our ambition from starting from just a couple of us around the table in probably no league to where we are now and what we class as the Championship, we're making that step from Championship to Premier League. With that, we know we need to improve the quality internally from a development perspective. We invest in people, give them opportunity to grow. Also as well, bring in great Premier League people. Of course, some people just do not make the cut. Some people are unable to make the step up from Championship to Premier League. We absolutely do our best and work with people to do that. We've had people that have been with us for 10 years. Give you an example of that. The person who heads up sales out in the U.S. started with us 10 years ago.
He's now out there and has taken on that opportunity to really spearhead that and bring that forward. People are absolutely fundamental and front and center of everything that we do. That's our philosophy and approach to things. Of course, we're looking to be Premier League, so we need to behave that way. On the second question around AI, we are constantly experimenting with it. We can see the benefits of AI, and I mentioned it before on how we're using it from a programmatic basis to improve performance of our advertisement for our clients and customers. We're also doing this with things like Captions. I was speaking with one of our team members this morning who was telling me about how we're using ChatGPT to effectively optimize specifically for our brands and utilizing data to do that.
We also are using a number of other tools to experiment and improve what we're doing, and we're really seeing the benefits of embracing that. The guardrails, we have ChatGPT Enterprise, which means that the information that we input in there isn't shared and used to teach other versions of ChatGPT. We're of course, very careful in terms of everything that goes out is verified by the editorial team internally, who work to a strict content set of guidelines. We have humans that are cross-checking each aspect of it. I think it's an ever-evolving landscape. There are dangers of these tools, and I only saw one yesterday, which is called Captions, which you can speak into it and do mouth movements for 60 seconds, and off the back of this, it can then replicate you.
You can give it a script or give it a kind of rough guidance on speaking about something, and all of a sudden you're there speaking about this topic. Also then it can convert it into three other languages or whatever that is. Of course, the great thing about that as a content creator, you can be in 1,000 places at once. The downsides of that is people can replicate and falsify your identity. I think we're in an ever-evolving landscape, and we'll be making sure that we've got strict guidelines in place in developing those. Yeah, I can see the balance of both sides, which is the benefits, but also the dangers of this, and something that we've got to carefully look at over time.
That's very helpful. Thank you.
Two please.
Just one final one from myself. Just in terms of the pre-booking for Q4, should we understand that as the health of the market is improved versus this point last year? Or, I guess, you're taking share? I guess just understanding the health of the market and kind of how we should interpret that number.
Sure. Yeah, I'll kind of talk about it from a health of market, then I think how we kind of respond to KPIs and work to that internally. I'll hand over to Richard. The big thing for us is building those deeper relationships, and really helping brands, clients solve their challenges in market. With the shift towards digital, and the audience base that we have, we're in a really strong position to help do that. The growing insights and technology that we have to offer clients is of course growing. We're seeing progress with that. From a market perspective, we're of course on the right side of it. We're not resting on our laurels of that. We are pushing hard to grow and expand into new opportunities as well. I'll hand over to you in terms of..
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing slightly differently. I think as we're on the right side of a really big market that's growing, and again, that increasing depth of awareness around the kind of solutions that we can create for brands that are wanting to connect with that specific high growth audience that others can't and that we're consistently able to demonstrate. I think it is that right side of a market as well as us having a strongly differentiated high-value proposition.
Thanks. Morning, Alex Pollen from Berenberg. Just a really quick one on the repeat client revenue number and that moderating ever so slightly. Where do you see that settling as you continue to grow? Is there an internal desire to get and keep that at a certain level?
I think as Solly touched on, we want deeper, larger, long-term relationships with clients, which is going to factor into that repeat. The level that we've got, balanced with attracting new clients, as well as you'd expect, is both areas of opportunity for us. That strong repeat client business and going up those tiers of seven-figure clients of a different scale is certainly going to underpin that high level of repeat business that we've got. Yeah, absolutely those kind of levels is part of our internal focus.