... you all for coming along today to our Capital Markets Day. Now where's the clicker? That's the important thing. That's the essential piece. We have three aims for today. The first is to showcase the power of our decentralized model. When you compete with the caterers, it's never good. The second is to really just talk about AI, how it's impacting our business, how we are using it to drive growth within the organization, and the third is really to try and talk a bit more about the ambition we have, which is to double the revenues in five years and also the profitability.
In terms of how that shapes out as an agenda, first, you get me, I'm afraid, which is to sort of talk to you about who we are and why we win, capture a bit more about the ambition. Then you actually get the real people, the people who actually do the work within our company, who talk to real customers, actually deliver real revenue. They don't just come and talk to investors, which is clearly not a real job. Then you get Peter, who's gonna recap the trading update, and talk a little bit about the outlook. And then we'll go into Q&A, and for those of you who need a drink after that, you can stay and have a drink. So in terms of who we are and why we win, there...
You know, firstly, you know, we, we need to kind of get you to understand the business that we are and, and, and how we're structured. We're basically broken down into these four different areas, and this chart is sort of not just a chart to show you that, but it's also to sort of introduce you to the people that you're gonna meet later. Firstly, we have Delivery. That's two businesses for us. One is lead gen, demand gen, the other is connected commerce. Connected commerce is a huge, rapidly growing market. Sam Knights, who runs our SMG business, sitting over here, is gonna come and really talk you through that business and how that's developing for us and what you can expect from us in that respect. But it's, it's really a very data-centric part of our business.
It's one of those where we use a tremendous amount of data to drive customer interactions, essentially. Second, another hugely data-dependent part of our business is Insights, and that's really, in our case, two different businesses. One is a business that's built around a CDP or a customer data platform, and the other is really what you would have called a market research business. Increasingly, we're calling it a data business. It's probably our closest analog to YouGov. Roger Perowne is gonna be talking you through Savanta, which is the biggest part of that, again. Thirdly, you have Transform. This is... They would hate me to use the word consulting, and in fact, I'm sure David Schraa, who's gonna be presenting on behalf of Mach49, will come and nobble me later for that.
But it's the side of our business that really helps people maximize the value of their organization. In some cases, for Mach49, that's building new products, building new companies, creating new ventures. Through our Transform business, it is literally redesigning really knotty problems within organizations. But it also, in our sort of financial businesses in that space, it can be helping them go through IPOs and figuring out how to position them in the correct way. The last area is Engage. This is probably the area that we were best known for. Certainly 10 years ago, this was all we were. This is the part of our business that was sort of a traditional public relations business, morphed into a more digital marketing business, and has continued to morph into areas like e-commerce and very specialized areas of communications.
And that area, you'll get Stacey Bernstein. She's gonna be joining us by video. She's in California at the moment, and she runs our M Booth Health business, which is actually based out of New York. How does our model work? Why do we continue to actually do relatively well compared to the rest of the market? At the center of what we do is we help companies solve very complex problems, and we do it relatively quickly. Most of our customers come to us with something that is not easy to do, that they need a specialist to solve, and they need it done yesterday. You know, we talk about the speed of the Internet. Actually, increasingly now, we're talking about the speed of AI. But wrapped around that are a bunch of different ways that we enable success.
Firstly, it is that we have very specialized businesses. You know, they aren't just something that does everything. We're not a department store that sells a little bit of everything and has salespeople that sort of wander around, and one minute are selling shampoo, and another minute are selling shirts. You know, these are people who understand very detailed vertical markets, who understand very specific product categories, so they can get up to speed on problems very quickly, and they can help their, their clients solve the problem very quickly. And they also build products, you know, specifically to do that. Secondly, we don't engage with customers just for the sake of it. In other words, we don't take on a customer if we don't think we can actually be successful for them. In other words, we don't just go for checkbooks.
We could boost our revenues if that was how we would do it, but it would be short term. We want customers who are going to be very sticky and who are gonna stay with us for a very long term, long time. And if you look at our top 20 customers, what you see is this remarkable list of people who've been with us forever. You know, they don't sort of hire you for three months and then disappear. They hire you in usually, actually, in a relatively small capacity, and then we just are annoying, and we stick around, and we grow, and we grow, and we grow. And then, you know, henceforth, you know, we've worked with the likes of Microsoft, the likes of, Amazon, the likes of IBM, you know, American Express, all of these kinds of companies for decades.
It's not that we've worked with them for two minutes. The next aspect is incentivizing our teams. We are a very decentralized business, as I've already said, and the incentives are very decentralized, too, which means that they can run their business the way that they think is right for their customer. Which also, though, means that if, for some reason, the other part of Next 15 isn't doing too well, their incentives still work. They can still go off and deliver really good success, which means they don't just give up because they're thinking, "Well, my share scheme isn't gonna pay out. My bonus isn't gonna pay out," whatever it might be. They still push for that finish line, which is why you see our margins still stay very healthy.
'Cause even if one of our businesses is maybe not having such a good time, the rest are still pushing as hard as they can. We incentivize teams, you know... I'm sorry, I've already talked about that. We do think more like a product business. So we used to be very service-organized, you know, in the sense of we thought about it in terms of time and materials. You know, literally, that was the way we priced everything. Increasingly, it is outcome-based, because actually, that's really what the customer is buying. You know, they are saying to, to us, "This is the outcome that we're looking for." The pricing is then judged on that, and then, really, as far as we're concerned, it's a question of how efficiently can we create a product so that it will actually deliver that outcome?
You know, what we're finding is customers don't care. What they do care about is, did I get to that outcome as quickly as I could possibly get to it? We embed data and technology. That's no big surprise. You know, I don't, I think that any marketing or consulting business that's not doing that these days is essentially on a death spiral. There's just no way out if you're not doing that.
The last thing, which I think is, it seems like a small thing, but actually is a pretty big thing, is we do have these very localized incentives, and every now and again, there are things that get in the way of that, which is that something like AI comes along, and we'll say, "Right, you should invest heavily in that." The incentives don't necessarily work for that because it might say, you know, "Okay, you need to invest X," and they're going, "Well, actually, that's gonna impact my P&L," you know, so how do we manage that? We always have this saying internally, which is, "Don't let the incentive get in the way of doing the right thing." And that applies for something like AI. It applies for something like opening a business in a new market or, you know, literally a new vertical market.
You know, so in other words, we constantly in the center are looking at these things and just saying, "Are we making sure that the business is doing the right thing for the long term?" And that therefore, that if we need to rejig the incentive to make sure that that is the case, we will do that. And that, as I say, it may seem like a small thing, but actually, it's an incredibly powerful way of making sure that you stay sort of focused on the North Star. Next 15 is a platform. You know, we basically support a whole bunch of different businesses. I'm not gonna read through all of these things, but effectively, it breaks down into three-these three different areas. There is thought leadership, growth support, and, you know, what we call a connected opportunity.
A good example of that is, you know, effectively, we are coaches and mentors to the CEOs of the different businesses. You know, we spend quite a lot of time, these guys will testify to it, where it feels a bit like a therapist's couch, where we're just trying to make sure that they really have their arms around the problem that they're really trying to solve. That they have got the resources that they need. That, you know, if this is a journey that they've not been on before, and many of them haven't, you know, if they're gonna launch into a new market like the U.S. or something, that we can really help them think through what is gonna be involved in that, so that they're actually very well prepared for it.
On growth support, you know, no surprise, when we acquire quite a lot of companies, build companies, that can create a tremendous amount of inefficiency. And so, not surprisingly, in the center, we spend a tremendous amount of time just trying to pick a way of finding, okay, is there some cleverer way to do this so that we can take cost out without it reducing the experience for the organization? And, you know, just that has to be one of those continual exercises because things change, organizations change, you know, there is a new way of doing something, and, you know, we just have to move constantly through that curve. On the connected opportunity, you know, we see tremendous opportunity to collaborate across the group. We're very picky about how we do that.
I would say that this is still an area where we could do more. You know, we've seen some really good examples. The BBC this year has been a great example for us in that respect. You know, where we brought the businesses together, and we are increasingly finding ourselves pitching as Next 15 in a bunch of different situations, and certainly in some of the government situations, we're finding ourselves pitching that way. It gives us scale, and it, from a client perspective, that gives them a comfort factor. You know, we're a 4,000+-person organization, which is not huge, but it's big enough for most customers. You know, from their perspective, yes, it ticks a huge box. But what it's also doing is enabling us to Connect together some really clever ways of solving a customer problem.
which they themselves would really struggle to do, you know. So we can package it up for them. It feels very seamless, and our guys are getting very good at actually making that work. AI, I am actually not going to talk to this slide, you'll be pleased to know. I'm going to let the businesses talk to that. But effectively, it is really, you know, efficiency, effectiveness, and innovation. Those are the three things that we're focused on. In terms of our ambition, we stated this at the interim. We, you know, we are, we are ambitious. You know, we want to take our connected commerce business from being sort of roughly GBP 100 million to GBP 300 million. In other words, we're pretty close to tripling the size of that part of the business in that time frame.
We're wanting to take our data business from GBP 60 million- GBP 200 million. Again, a pretty huge jump. The other two look less ambitious. I think that's partly because when we were running the math, we realized, okay, we're going to massively overshoot if we're not careful here. We're going to be giving you a promise that there's no way of delivering it. But actually, the opportunity in those spaces is no less great. In this slide, hopefully, you'll start to understand why. On the left, the sort of vertical axis, are what we call the mega markets. These are the markets that we want to do business in. So technology, healthcare, professional and financial services, public sector, and consumer passions.
Those, to us, are if we can just really be successful in those vertical markets, we know we can build a huge business. And then there are these four, really, what you would call product areas that come across those. So customer experience, data-driven decisions, sales engagement, and digital transformation. The black dots on here represent the revenue that we're currently generating. The gray dot represent really the market opportunity. And what you see in here is, you know, in technology, which is what I think a lot of people know us for, we, we do have a reasonable representation in a space like customer experience, but we still have a lot of growth opportunity there. And then you go across technology, and you see even greater opportunity in areas like data-driven decisions and digital transformation.
If you look at healthcare, you know, healthcare, we are a relatively small player, a tiny player. It is a massive market, and we have a huge opportunity, literally right across the board within the company. In professional financial services, you know, it's a space where we are doing a lot in digital transformation, and we are increasingly starting to do quite a bit of that work in government. But, you know, again, the market opportunity for us is massive. You'll see a blank spot on sales engagement in public sector, and that's because at this point, we do nothing in that space, and we haven't yet really figured out what the opportunity is. We know it's not zero, but we're not a hundred percent sure how big it is.
In public sector, digital transformation, as I mentioned, it is already a hugely growing part of our business. What we are realizing through the Engine acquisition, which sort of took us into this space, is the scope for us to get onto bigger and bigger. I forgot the name of the word. What do we use for those? Well, not rosters, but anyway. The government puts out these essentially ability to tender things, and they're scale-dependent on the kind of agencies or consultancies that they want to work on these things. Some of these things are in the tens, hundreds of millions GBP. We have been on, because of the size of Transform, some relatively small tenders, you know, in the sort of GBP 5 million sort of range.
What we are seeing is the opportunity as Next 15 to go into some of the much, much larger assignments. So we believe there's actually some huge growth potential there. Lastly, on this slide, consumer passions, sales engagement. You know, our SMG business is doing a phenomenal job in that space, but their growth opportunity, as you'll probably see from Sam's presentation, is really quite stunning. At that point, I get to hand over to Sam.
No pressure. Nice to meet you all. My name's Sam. I'm the CEO of SMG, and I've got the delight to introduce our business to you today. My background is from Procter & Gamble, so I was there for nearly a decade. Worked across the marketing streams for some of the brands like Gillette and Pampers and Fairy in the UK before moving to Geneva and running the marketing for Gillette in Western Europe. And then after that, I joined two founders 11 years ago to start this, SMG, and we're three years into our journey with Next 15. And today I'm going to tell you a little bit about us, who we are, what we do, a little bit about the market that we exist in, and what's happening there.
I'm going to try and bring it to life because I know these things can be quite theoretical. So we're going to show you a real case study that we're working on at the moment. Then Tim and the guys have asked me to be a little bit honest with you about what it's like to be part of Next 15. So, I'll talk to you a little bit about what that's been like over the last three years before finishing with a little bit about our ambitions for the future. But first, let's set the context of the market that we work in. So SMG are specialists in an area of advertising called retail media, and retail media is any media that targets people while they're shopping, often at the point of purchase. This has been around forever, okay?
When I was doing Gillette advertising, it was a really important part of what we did as marketeers to make sure that when you walked into a Boots or when you walked into a Tesco, you couldn't miss the Gillette Fusion launch, okay? So this is not something new.... But over the last two or three years, this area of advertising has really accelerated because the things that we can do with it are much more sophisticated, and there are three key drivers to that. The first is that consumer behavior has changed. So I don't know about you, but if you think about what you used to do a decade ago, you used to go into a Tesco and Asda and do a big shop.
You had a shopping list, you'd buy everything you needed, and then you'd top up during the week in places like a Co-op, for example. And then you might pop into John Lewis and research and buy a telly or go into Currys. But these were occasions, okay, that happened, and you'd switch from what we call a consumer mindset, where you're kind of considering, to a purchase mindset, where you're actually a shopper. And brands set themselves up like that. You had brand marketeers who do the amazing TV advertising that would make you consider, and then you had shopper teams that would actually think about how you communicate to shoppers at the point of purchase. That world no longer exists, okay? Just today, I've bought two things on Amazon. I've surfed something on Instagram that I can buy immediately.
I've already been into Co-op, and I'm probably likely to go into Tesco later on. I am shopping all of the time, and all of the advertising that I can see and that I'm served is shoppable. I can literally click a link and buy today. Consumer behavior has changed, which means that this part of marketing, retail media, is much more important. The other thing that's changed is the growing importance of data from retail loyalty schemes. These are not new either. Tesco Clubcard has been around over 20 years. I'm sure a lot of the room in here are members of that. Things like Boots Advantage Card has over 16 million members, has been around a long time. But what's changed is what we can do with that data.
Over COVID, these retailers have seen a huge amount of data come through their e-commerce sites, which shows browsing behavior, which shows purchase behavior. They've then enhanced the loyalty card data through things like membership pricing. So if you go into Tesco now, you have to get Clubcard to get the deals that through. So that data has increased exponentially, the amount that those retailers have. On the other side, what's happening is that brands are becoming more thirsty for the data because of something called the cookie deprecation, which I know a lot of you will know about. But essentially, the way that brands target their digital advertising is through something called a cookie.
So when you go onto different websites, you drop a cookie crumb, that's picked up, and then that allows us to say, "Right, they're interested in these types of things, therefore, I'm gonna target them with my advertising." At the end of the next year, that will no longer exist. Apple have already stopped doing it. And so the brands are faced with a challenge where they're saying, "How do I target my advertising more effectively? I need big sources of data." And the retailers are saying, "We've got that sources of data, and we've got opt-ins, and we've got the requirements from a privacy perspective to use that data to serve advertising to brands as well." And so the loyalty scheme datas are becoming the way that brands can target their digital advertising more effectively.
So as a Gillette advertiser, I can say, "I want to see 18-24-year-olds who are interested in X, Y, Z," and I can target them through the Boots Advantage Card data, not just through Boots.com, not just in Boots stores, but anywhere you can see a digital advert, whether that be Meta, whether that be Spotify, YouTube, we can link it all the way up the horizon now. And then finally, the third most exciting thing is the technology that allows us to measure it. Because we're using retail data to target these customers, we can track what they do afterwards. And so not only can we target efficient audiences, we can then see whether they go on to buy. And so from a brand point of view, this is the Holy Grail. This is about really efficiently targeting people and knowing the impact of that advertising.
So they want to invest more in this area, and the retailers are very happy for them to invest more in this area because it's high-margin media activation for them, too. As a result, retail media is in exponential growth. It is the fastest-growing part of the advertising mix. Boston Consulting Group have forecasted that it will reach over $100 billion in the US market alone by 2027, and many projections indicate that it will exceed TV revenue, and that includes Connected TV, a year later. So that will represent about 15% of total advertising spend. Huge exponential growth. SMG are really well positioned to win in this environment. Hopefully, you'll see today we've got an established model.
We've been working in this area for over a decade, and we service all parts of the retail media ecosystem: brands, retailers, and agencies. We have an amazing piece of technology called Plan-Apps and brilliant capabilities in our centers of excellence, and we also have a proven track record of delivery for clients and partners, too. So who are SMG? We're a group of three specialist retail media agencies. Easiest way to think about it: we have a sell-side business, which is called Threefold, and they set up mini media agencies within retailers to create the environment for those brands to utilize that data, to utilize that media opportunity to run campaigns in their environments. And they work with the likes of Boots, Co-op, The Very Group, Morrisons, among others, and new ones coming on all the time.
Then you have our buy side part of the business, which is almost the flip of that model, and they work with people like Pladis, like Diageo, like McCain, to help them to plan, execute, evaluate, and manage campaigns across all retail. So they'll run campaigns across Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's, all together in a holistic way, and sit as part of their marketing teams to execute. And then the third is our technology business called Plan-Apps. All of the activity that's run by Threefold, that's run by Capture, all of the results that go into the measurement sit within one platform that we've developed in-house, which allows brands to optimize their spend in-flight and manage their campaigns as well.
There are certain brands, certain people like Unilever, people like, Coca-Cola, people like, PepsiCo, who just want a subscription to our software because they've got people in-house that can do a lot of this work, and we gladly offer that to them, too. So people are subscribing to this software, and we're getting SaaS fees as a result of the data. And obviously, as the Threefold business grows, as the Capture grows, the Capture side of the business grows, so does Plan Apps, and so does the data, and the cleverness of that system grow as well. To give you some example of the scale of our business now, we're by far the largest in this space in the UK. We trade over GBP 1 million every day of retail media. We've evaluated over GBP 1.2 billion of retail media channels.
That data sits within Plan-Apps, and nobody else has it. We have a large company footprint in the U.K. We're projecting by the end of next year, we'll be over 40% of the retail media share of grocery in the U.K. And thanks to the work we've done with Next 15, we've just opened an office in the U.S., and we're in the very early stages of growing that business with our first client on board. We have over 830 different advertisers, 281 employees, and we're really, really proud that we're actually one of the top 100 best large companies to work for by the best companies this year, too. So that's all good in theory. What does that actually mean?
So one of the clients that we've just started working with is Boots, and over the last two years, we've built something called the Boots Media Group, BMG. Boots Media Group is an internal media agency that uses Boots Advantage Card data to harness the scale, reach, data, and connectivity to achieve high-performing connected campaigns for those brands. We've built a team of 41 people that are all Threefold employees, SMG employees, but actually sit within Boots themselves, and they run 5,000 campaigns for over 500 brands. We build technology for Boots. We've built something called A360, which is a first-party data engine, which connects that Advantage Card data into other channels. We've done deals with people like ITV, Global, and Spotify, and Meta to be able to use that data through the pipes. Sounds easy, it's quite complicated.
We've launched 20 new media products over the time, and all of the campaigns that we run, that data is going into Plan-Apps and is being evaluated in Plan-Apps. Okay? Give you an example of what one of those campaigns might look like. I'm sure you all are very familiar with Fenty, which is the makeup brand by Rihanna. Earlier this year, they wanted to launch their new faces of Fenty, and they chose Boots as a partner to find those faces for their advertising campaigns. They used the Advantage Card data to identify high-propensity users, consumers, that might be interested. We used ECRM, and social, and Meta to invite those customers into store to experience the Fenty experience, match their colors, match their foundations with their skin type, and then buy the product.
This was also supported by proximity above the line, things like digital out-of-home, also Spotify, Instagram as well, and also brought online into the e-commerce website as well. This campaign alone delivered over 50 million impressions, grew Fenty's market share, and delivered a really positive return on investment, and obviously showed a great return for the investment that they put into Boots, too. Even Rihanna commented that it was a good campaign, one of the highlights of the year. It's good for the brands, but also it's great for Boots as well, because the better these campaigns perform, the more advertising they're seeing go into their channels as well. They've seen a 60% advertising investment year-on-year since we've started working together. That was 20% over what they were targeting and delivered a 40% retail media network profit growth year-on-year.
You can imagine for retailers, in retail, as you all know, it's a very tight margin business. This is high-margin activity, and so it has a really, really important part to play in their overall P&L. But not only that, it also delivers some extra benefits in the way that they work with their brands. Rather than it becoming a trading relationship, this becomes a joint business planning relationship. You can imagine the different conversation that Fenty are having with Boots versus the one that they were having before as a result of these capabilities, and you can see some of the quotes on the right-hand side from the CMO and the CCO in terms of the difference it's made for them as well. So that's SMG. What's it been like being part of Next 15?
Well, you'd expect me to tell you it's been brilliant, but it really has. We're into our third year in the journey. We've already doubled the size of our business. We've invested ahead of the curve. We've gone from just over 100 employees to 280 today, and that's as a result of a number of different factors. Firstly, the financial incentives and the investment to scale has given us confidence to do things that we just wouldn't have done with our own money. Biggest part of that is investing in the U.S. as well.
Having the structure and the capability to allow us to set up a team and an office out there is a huge undertaking that would have been impossible for us to do on our own, but we could do very simply with the support of Tim, and Peter, and JP, and the guys around. But on top of that, probably some of the more subtle things that's changed is the provision of expert shared services, things like legal and data protection, that as a smaller business, we weren't credible in. But the fact that we're part of Next 15 has allowed us to win clients like Boots, like Morrisons, like the clients that we'll announce over the coming, the coming year, because we're far more credible in that space with the shared services. But finally, and most importantly, I think...
When we were acquired by Next 15, we had the choice of being part of this group or being part of another media network. And the biggest change was that being part of Next 15 allowed us to stay us, allowed us to keep our leadership in place, allowed us to keep our culture, allowed us to keep what made SMG, SMG. And that's been a really important part of our growth over the last three years. The train did not come off the rails, it just accelerated down it. And so as we look forward, we do so with great ambition and loads of excitement. In just three years, we want to become the global leader in this space with a strong international presence, significant market share, a really reputable brand, and a mission to positively disrupt the industry.
The five strategic drivers to that are obviously rapid expansion into North America, continuing to do what we're doing in the U.K., and protecting and growing that market share. This is a nascent industry that we need to grow, so we're positively disrupting that industry with unique capabilities, with deals and technology, and becoming the go-to authority with a highly recognized brand, and obviously, and most importantly, continuing to invest in our people and our company culture. And a big part of that growth comes into what we're doing with our technology as well, and that's where AI has a huge part to play. We have the most amount of data in this space in our industry, and AI has a really important part to play in allowing us to access that data in ways that makes it effective for brands to use.
So things like provision of post-campaign analytics, commentary, smart, predictive media planning, audience building, dynamic media pricing, optimal media allocation technology, all become available with AI. And we've already invested in a standalone team, which is working on this and the development of our Plan-Apps technology over the coming years to keep it ahead of the market. So in summary, we're working in a really exciting part of the advertising mix. Retail media is significant growth, and we're well-placed to succeed. We've got a really diversified model with both buy side, sell side, and Plan-Apps offering, which provide us a really stable foundation for growth. We have opportunities both in the U.K., but increasingly in North America as well, and being part of the Next 15 group has enabled our ability to scale up and capitalize on those market opportunities. So that's our business. Thanks very much for your time.
Hi. Slight change of style and change of topic. So my name's Roger Perowne. I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO of Savanta. Savanta is an international market research business. It was formed from the bringing together of a number of elite agencies almost five years ago. And it's got a very clear aim to really offer the scale of the big competitors, but with a much more sort of boutique and expert feel from those smaller sort of specialists that we've acquired over time. We're a little different from our competitors in the sense that we've used these acquisitions to fund our own data platform, as Tim alluded to earlier. We...
This is different because most providers in the market are either software-led, they're expert-led, or they are respondent-led, so they tend to sit in one part of the market. But almost all projects need all aspects of that skill set. So we've been really busy buying and building our software and buying companies along the way, and it's a incredibly effective and profitable strategy because you remove all of the cost of sales along the way. And most market research firms are pretty low margin because all of the money is being spent with the software firms, the panel providers, and so on.
When you remove all of these costs, not only are you more nimble and can offer actually what clients want, you know, which is real-time data often or, or, or new, tools, new dashboards, et cetera, but it also allows us, to, really help these other companies to perform, to a much greater degree. And in fact, just, we've just literally completed our latest acquisition, last night in Canada. But going back a bit, we, joined Next 15 in 2014. And in partnership with Tim and, and the Next 15 board, we've managed to use that strategy to... in a, in a relatively low growth market, to go from a GBP 1 million business, and now up to a GBP 50 million business, nine years, less than nine years later.
That growth has been funded around about half of it's organic, and about half of it has been acquired, fully funded through Next 15, making that capital available to us. Over this time, we've also expanded the footprint of the business. Starting in the U.K., we now have a GBP 20 million business or just shy of in the U.S. and North America. We've recently moved into Asia, and just in the last 6 months, opened an office in Europe as well. Again, hugely helped by Next 15's support from a legal offices and expertise, you know, on tap.
And one last thing on Next 15, while I'm on it, is we also now supply most of the agencies internally, which makes it quite an effective sales channel as well, so we appreciate that. You know, it's always good to get new clients. But, you know, finally, on this slide, we're also incredibly proud that over the last two or three years, we've had a very successful graduate recruitment program and have now trained 100 new grads into this industry in the last few years. Sort of generating the next tier of research. In fact, we've just completed our last one on Friday. My God, they're clever! You know, it is astonishing how smart the next generation is. They are... AI runs through them already. We are all in trouble.
So until I lose my job, I'll keep talking. So what are the main trends that we are facing? Clearly, artificial intelligence covers everything, but we believe, because of this investment, I feel like nine years of investing heavily in this platform is finally coming through. The number of times I had to defend it to my colleagues in the pub after hours, "Why are we investing in our own technology?" Finally, AI has saved me, and makes us look really ahead of the curve. Because what fundamentally is AI? Well, first of all, is automation, and to allow automation to happen, you have to have it be simpler.
You have to actually be able to offer an end-to-end clear process, where data travels through a platform, rather than be forever trying to hook together different systems. Then from there, you can be faster, and then finally better. Well, again, for us, AI is actually a great thing. It allows us to do lots and lots of very menial and dull tasks, much, much faster, whether that's coding, open-end respondents, et cetera. But it also provides the opportunity for a whole load of new tools, which I'll come on to shortly. It's speeding up this convergence. I said respondent or software or expertise. Well, it's convergence around through AI, but also in the marketplace, puts us in a very good place because we already are a unified offer.
We didn't need to protect our multiple and stay a software company or vice versa. We actually get the advantage of all aspects from the beginning. LLMs, you know, they are hungry for information, and we provide enormous amounts of it, whether it's our daily brand tracking around the world or work for our clients. So it's great to be able to have a new opportunity as it goes to the market. And then finally, you know, research is. It's critical that we take it up into the C-suite. And one of the things I will talk about shortly is how we are doing that, how we are growing our activation and consulting offer to ensure that research is embedded at the highest level and not just within an insight team.
So fundamentally, our strategy is to harness the power of AI, to Innovate, connect, which I'll talk about in a moment, and consult. So what do I mean by Innovate? Well, as I said, we've been lucky to invest in this platform for a long time. Market research is incredibly fiddly. It's a bit like creating a car factory. There are lots of bits of it that, you know, it's not just a big bit of metal. Occasionally, you have to do more clever things and put in the headlights and so on. Well, market research is the same. There are lots and lots of ways of, getting it wrong, I suppose, along that user journey, whether it's identifying clear, client needs, exactly what the problem is.
Ensuring that you have the highest quality respondents, ensuring your programming and scripting is perfect, and there are no issues there. Ensuring it's all cleaned and weighted according to exactly what the market is, and thus provides the highest quality outputs, whether it's in dashboards or reports and so forth. Well, because we've been set up to have that absolute soup to nuts approach, it means that AI is perfect to put through that platform, through that system, and really get some of the benefits from it. And a good example of that, and what we've been investing more heavily in recent times, is our own panel. We've been a little bit late to market.
I like to think of us a bit like Apple, but we're going to get it better than everyone else. We, we only launched our own panel two months ago. I was asked this question in one of these sessions about four years ago: "Why aren't you doing your own panel?" And I scoffed at it, saying, "It's so cheap, it's not necessary." But there are problems with the industry. You know, the panels out there, the quality is quite... is, is a bit flaky, and AI makes you more vulnerable, where you've got very, smart robots, in essence, taking surveys, and it can be hard, to catch them out. So what we did is we launched our own panel, and it has been a huge success.
Not only is it absolutely industry-leading in terms of quality, we've only had literally under 2% in terms of rejection, versus about 15%, for the marketplace, as a whole, but it also allows us to Innovate. So all of the new question types, the automated video capture, voice capture, questionnaires that you can do, when you have complete control of end-to-end, and indeed the respondent experience, because it's done on a smartphone, and you know exactly how it is being done, it allows for the highest quality information. And also it is incredibly profitable. I'd forgotten just how profitable panels are, when you run them effectively. So, you know, we will be investing very heavily in this, in this product going forward.
In addition, we've launched a number of new other products. One, we've added an AI layer to BrandVue, our always-on daily tracker. It's a competitor to YouGov's BrandIndex, and it's performing incredibly well. We've just launched in the States as well as the EU 5, so we hope to grow that substantially. We now then offer with TrendVue another layer on top of some of these products, where you've got our trend scanning products, giving you an always-on view of what the big issues are that marketers need to know in their industry.
And then, finally, in recent times, we've launched Insight Fountain just last week, which gives clients a chatbot access to all of the research they've ever run with us. So, it'll actually digest all of their research and allow them to go and question it. And one of the things about a lot of clients is that they run the same studies over and over again, not realizing that it's already actually sitting within their business, much of the ideas. But it also leaves them contacting us to do the blind spots that they don't have and serving them to a greater degree. So innovation is at heart.
Perhaps one of the most exciting, and it sort of reminds me a little bit of SMG in a, in a different way, is the connect side of the business. So, as I said, earlier, we believe the panel that we have launched and are is growing fast, alongside the Vue platform, is a huge opportunity to not only launch, you know, to deliver the highest quality of data, but ensure that it is in the format that our clients want, on an on-demand basis. And increasingly, that will be their own chatbots and their own word-based discovery processes and not just reading charts. You know, we aim to really try and become the sort of AWS of the industry.
At the moment, there are a lot of these providers, whether software panels and so forth, you know, they are in a sense, quite rent-seeking a lot of their behavior. And what we think is we can offer the entire industry a high-quality panel and service, whether that's media agencies, brands, and indeed, market research firms. Actually, the competitors of our core business are absolutely fine. As long as it's all on our system and platform, then we should be able to offer enterprise solutions to these insight teams all around the world. And a nice example of that at the moment is we're now delivering several global research programs for a major international bank, both brand and advertising programs, always on, delivered entirely through the Vue platform, with multiple self-service deliverables for the clients.
You know, it is more of a Tableu solution. We do have people involved as well, but from their point of view, they can access this information all around the world whenever they want it, and it's pretty advanced deliverables. You know, it's quadruple the size of the account this year, and we think we can go much further. So, I've talked about Innovate, talked about the connect side of the business, and then finally, the consulting side. Well, the final aspect of our growth plan is to better penetrate the C-suite. We are well on the way to developing an activation consulting unit, and we'll likely bolster this with some bolt-on acquisitions in due course.
This not only helps to embed our research to the highest levels, but it also provides a layer on top of the brand customer and market information that we're already providing to clients, whether that's to help them grow their brand or enhance their customer experiences or improve their employee proposition. And that we believe that makes us more vital and sticky in the industry. So to sum up, well, you know, I've been here nine years. I'm hoping they'll keep me a little longer before those grads take my job. I think it's a hugely exciting time. I think Savanta is really ideally placed.
My strategy that I set out all those years ago finally is coming to an apex, and we can really leverage AI and hopefully continue that journey beyond GBP 50 million onwards to whatever number was on that chart earlier. Just have to keep going. And that's everything. So thank you. Good afternoon. My name is David Schraa. I'm co-CEO and member of the board of Mach49. Before Mach49, I helped lead seven startups. Three were venture-backed or self-funded, and four were built inside of Fortune 500 companies, including SAP software and Dun & Bradstreet. Now, in that world, we built Mach49. Mach49, well, let me tell you a little bit about them. Let me also tell you what value we deliver to our clients, and most importantly, why we are positioned to win in this marketplace.
So who are we? Well, for the world's largest companies, growth is not only essential, it's existential. Mach49 helps leaders unlock disruptive new growth through venture building and venture investing at speed and at scale. What does that mean? It means we are in the business of survival. A recent PwC survey of 4,400 CEOs, 40% said they would no longer be economically viable in the next 10 years without new growth or disruptive growth. That is the value Mach49 delivers.
... We do that by answering three questions with our clients. First, how can a large company grow and thrive in an adapt or die environment? Business is undergoing momentous shift. AI is changing all the rules. Small companies are eating large companies' lunches. What is a company to do in this environment? How does a large corporation create new growth and returns outside of its quarterly EBITDA-driven core? We need a radical change. Traditional M&A, new market entry, even thinking about digital transformation doesn't cut it anymore. What about how can ambitious talent inside of a large firm be activated to build value? Most Fortune 500 CEOs are shocked to find out how much entrepreneurial talent exists within their companies.
In fact, when I work with CEOs, the Fortune 500, it is almost inevitably during one time they reach over to me and say, "What did you do to my team? That's not the one I sent you." It's really important that we can find the environment, the processes, the governance that is going to release these people and make them successful. In short, how and where do we find new growth for large organizations? Venture-driven growth is Mach49's answer. It consists of two components. Firstly, it consists of venture building, and secondly, venture investing. It's hard. This is really hard work, and it's not only difficult once, you have to do it repeatedly. You have to build a portfolio and pipeline of new ventures.
In essence, giving an engine of growth to these large organizations over time, so they can be reborn again and again and again. So what is venture building? Venture building is starting a new company inside of a large organization. Everything from idea through to revenue and on into scale. Venture investing is the deploying of capital to create growth opportunities, doing things like creating investment funds, looking at strategic partnerships and targeted M&A opportunities. Now, yes, Tim, we are not management consultants. We are emphatically not management consultants. We build and operate businesses. We do not write strategic documents. We love to compete against management consultants because they cannot keep up with us on our differentiators. A few of those: We pioneered and lead this area of venture-driven growth and have done so for 10 years. Secondly, we only do one thing, and we do it exceptionally well.
Thirdly, we are 100% focused on execution. We work side by side and shoulder to shoulder with our client teams. We help them build new businesses, and we transfer the skills to them to let them do that again on their own without us. We build capability, not dependency. Also, we literally wrote the book, The Unicorn Within, which in this last month reached Harvard Business Review's all-time impact list, along with these books like The Innovator's Dilemma, right? These are books that have changed the face of business and how leaders work, and this is ours. But most importantly, it's our people. What is a Mach49er? Well, a typical Mach49er has founded six businesses. Together, we have raised $6.4 billion to keep those businesses going. 145 of those have already had successful exits.
563 are still in the market operating. But we're not just startup people. We also work in large organizations. At Mach49, we have been in 292 of the Fortune 500, and we've done it in senior roles, almost 10 years average experience in CXO. That is Mach49. Now, we've done that globally because our clients are global, and they're in every industry you can possibly imagine. The only thing that makes them consistent is their ambition for growth, and what we do is give them the levers of growth and the courage to go on those journeys. Here's one example: Rich Kramer, the CEO of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. We have worked with Rich and his team for over four years. We've built ventures with him. We have helped him build his investment side.
But most importantly, everything we've done has been focused on one thing that Rich wants to accomplish: to move the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company out of tire and rubber into mobility. Now, our clients all look like Rich and Goodyear. They are the board of directors and C-suites of the Global 1,000, the largest companies in the world. They're in industries undergoing tectonic shift, and they all want to have a portfolio of growth opportunities to allow them to move into the future and continue their paths of growth as an organization. Now, let me talk about another one of our clients, Schneider Electric. Schneider is the most sustainable firm in the Global 100 list. We've worked for over five years with Schneider, all of it on sustainability. We've built four ventures with them around sustainability.
We have created a EUR 500 million fund for investments in sustainability. The four ventures we've built: Clipsal Solar, the number one solar-as-a-service provider in Australia; Dash Energy, connecting energy brokers and suppliers to sell services to businesses; eIQ Mobility, providing one-stop electrification solutions for commercial fleets; and Mavric Solutions, the first-to-market service managing a company's on-premise power and cooling assets sustainably. That EUR 500 million fund has had 34 investments to date. All of them have the biggest energy management problems facing the world. By the way, the fact that the people of Mach49 are our key is recognized by our clients, too, as you can see in this quote from Gregoire. "Entrepreneurship is a business where people matter, and Mach49 is the top of the art." So where do we go from here? Our strategy consists of three pieces. First, lead.
Framing and claiming the venture-driven growth area as our own. Differentiating, finally, hopefully, all of that from the management consulting firms, and ultimately, making venture-driven growth a board-level imperative. Secondly, disrupting. Disrupting ourselves by continuing to leverage AI in our service-driven pieces of the business and in software to allow us to help our clients become more effective, to have better outcomes, and to more efficiently address the marketplaces. And to grow, to expand our footprint geographically, most recently in the Middle East and North Africa, by going down market. So we have cohorts now of middle-market companies, organizations working together, who are non-competitive, to allow them to get synergies of cost to be able to work with us. Shift: software as a way to actually change what we do from a service perspective into a subscription perspective. And brand ventures.
This is an example of us getting deeper into a specific industry, in this case, consumer markets. And so why does this strategy and our assets put us in a place where we can win? Well, first and foremost, it creates moats, moats against any of the competitors who want to come chase us. A 10-year leadership position, the most experienced team by far in the industry, a 90% client retention rate. And we work with clients all the way from idea through to scale. This is a multi-year journey, and we can expand and work with them through that entire effort. Secondly, looking at the mid-market, expanding our opportunities. Shift, which you just saw on the previous slide, is an AI-powered, on-demand growth platform. We've been developing this for more than two years.
It's based in large part on the book, The Unicorn Within, and so it uses our methodology and approach that no one else has. It leverages AI in many different ways, synthetic customer personas. It does AI in terms of interview outreach. It uses AI for synthesis of research being done online in many more ways. All of this, as I just mentioned, as a way to take the service business we do and move it into software, so we can actually be more effective and efficient for new groups of people in the mid-market. And consumer brands. I just mentioned about brand ventures on the previous slide. That's unlocking brand value through new venture building. What that really means is using a company's brand as a core asset on which to build a new venture. So give you an example.
What if you could imagine Jameson opening and operating a fleet of Irish pubs around the world based solely on their name? Now, another advantage we have is Next 15 and all the things we can do with them, and there are many. I'm going to focus on two that just touch on the two points I just covered. First and foremost, having a meaningful opportunity to mutually expand our revenue and footprint, particularly in the consumer side. With brand ventures, we are now moving as Mach49 into a core area of strength for Next 15 and its entire portfolio. Now, together, we can build product, we can penetrate customers, we can find sales opportunities as a unit, not as individual companies. And also leveraging the AI expertise of Next 15 and all the other portfolio companies. You've already heard from a couple of the other folks.
I mean, market research and customer insight AI permeates all of us. We are going to take advantage of that to get the efficiencies of cost, as well as the effectiveness of world-class operations around these particular areas. So what does it all mean? Well, Mach49 is a successful, high-margin growing business. We deliver high-value strategic services more successfully than any company in our space. Hopefully, you've also seen this. We have a strong customer need for our venture-driven growth and growing addressable market in the mid-market and geographically. We are confident about the future as we disrupt our own business model through new technologies. We are not waiting for someone else to disrupt us. And lastly, we have a lot of runway to leverage and support Next 15's ecosystem. So in short, Mach49, what are we about? Survival.
We help the largest companies in the world survive, the brands we all know. In creating new businesses where they can actually address the problems of the world, we're making life and society better at the same time. Thank you for your time.... Where's Stacey? Oh, there's Stacey. Hi, Stacey.
Hi, how's it going? I apologize that I'm not there in person, but I'm in California to pitch a piece of business, which I'm sure this audience would love to hear. So anyway, I'm Stacey Bernstein. I am the CEO of M Booth Health. I've spent most of, pretty much my entire career at two of the largest agencies, communications agencies in the world. And I came to M Booth Health about two years ago because I saw an opportunity through Next 15 to really do something different and deliver a different solution in the marketplace, and I want to tell you about that today. So who are we? We are an integrated health communications agency. We only work within healthcare. We're about 68 people covering everything from research and Insights to digital and social media, to earned media, crisis management.
But probably most importantly, we're a really seasoned and tenured team. About 25% of our staff hold advanced degrees in health, an average of 10 years of experience across each of our team members, and that really speaks to the fact that, you know, if you work at M Booth Health, it's because you've dedicated your career to improving health outcomes around the world, and that is what we exist to do. About a year ago, we rebranded the agency under this promise of We Choose to Challenge. The idea here is that we exist to challenge norms, to defy the status quo of health communications, all in service of effectively improving the health and lives of those who need it most. That challenge mentality has truly never been more important.
We are in a world now where health exists in the most rapid state of change that we've ever seen. So when we think about what that means for our clients, you know, all of our clients essentially want three things: They want to improve reputation, they want to drive loyalty, and they want to drive sales or funding, whether they're private or public sector. But in today's environment, all of those things are threatened by the changes that we're seeing. We have a world where, you know, in post-COVID, every brand is a healthcare brand. So our clients aren't just competing with other healthcare companies to tell their story, they're competing with Apple and Samsung and some of the best marketers in the world, and that changes the way that they have to communicate.
Certainly, in the U.S., a tumultuous landscape that tilts both in our client's favor and certainly against that, and changes on an ongoing basis, and navigating that, to keep their business stable is incredibly important. The industry as a whole, healthcare was always seen as a vertical. It has gone horizontal, and so we have clients that are struggling with, okay, we're a health communications team, and we have to figure out how to compete with Amazon now, and that's a totally different dynamic. Obviously, technology upending traditional business models in pharma and biotech alone, just the pace of innovation, from clinical trial to getting a drug to market, has been rapidly accelerated. Again, certainly in the U.S., but arguably around the world, the entire field of science is now under attack.
So things that we used to just take for granted that people would believe and understand, we now have to fight harder to get that information into our audience's minds and convince them. And then, probably, most importantly for us, and I'm going to come back to this, is a changing definition of the American patient. When we think about demographic shifts in the U.S., what the patient here looks like is fundamentally changing and will continue to do so over the next five-10 years. So, in this environment, our point of view is that value is everything. In communications, you know, it was always like you'd do a big stunt with a celebrity, and you'd raise a bunch of awareness, and somewhere down the line, that would lead to talking about the value that you bring to the world.
You can't communicate that way in this environment. In this environment, you have to lead with value. You have to lead with your inherent value to the world, and that will be rewarded with awareness. So for us, our approach is all about science and rigor to identify what is our client's unique value to the world in today's landscape, which is often different than what they might think it is. We then reorient their story to translate that audience, that value to new audiences, because the audiences that we're communicating with have fundamentally changed. We're in a world now where everyone is educated and steeped in healthcare. You have consumers reading clinical trials and medical journals. So how do we translate that value to those new audiences? And then how do we entrench that value in the fabric of health, both now and in the future?
For us, we do this across three sectors. So marketing communications is really our pharma, biotech device business. We obviously work for some of the large players and established brands, but also some up-and-comers, some really interesting smaller biotechs and medical device companies that are emerging as leaders. Public affairs, which is really the legacy of this agency. That's our issues-oriented work with government, NGOs, health systems, etc. And then social impact, very closely tied to public affairs, but this is our purpose-driven work that really has a lot of meaning behind it and, and gets our name on the map when we're working with the UNICEFs and the INGOs of the world. Across all of these clients, we have capabilities built to drive results. So deep sector expertise that I just mentioned, functional excellence across every discipline you could possibly imagine within communications.
So everything from scientific communications to health equity, internal comms, corporate communications, and then bold activation capabilities. Basically, for us, we have the capabilities of a large agency, but with the senior attention and nimbleness of a small one, everything that we do designed to drive measurable impact. And we've seen that impact through some of our really meaningful work at the forefront of health. I'm gonna show you two quick examples of some of the recent work that we've done. The first is actually a partnership with Savanta. We, we work very closely with Savanta across a number of our clients, and this was for UNICEF USA, that came to us and said, "Look, we need, we need a platform.
We need to have something to say around climate change." And when we dug in and did the research, we did a global survey of youth around the world, and what we uncovered is that everyone's talking about climate change, but youth are feeling anxious. Eco-anxiety is a thing, but they're also very optimistic. They feel like they're the generation that's gonna solve this. And so there's an opportunity for UNICEF to drive a dialogue around this eco-optimism and eco-activism, and how do they position themselves as the organization that is building a platform for the next generation to take action against climate change? So really shifting the dialogue and positioning UNICEF as a leader among the global youth. A very different case study would be in our pharma biotech work, and that is for Organon. Organon is a spin-off from Merck.
They spun off about two years ago, I believe. We are their social media agency of record. So our initial ask was: Establish us as a women's health company. No one knows who we are. How do we break through and really resonate with women and OB-GYNs in particular? And so we took that into their brands, and so for Nexplanon, which is their long-acting birth control, really tapped into Gen Z trends. You see Nexplanon chill on the right-hand side here. How do we break through in the feed and drive product awareness, and intent to prescribe?
Now we're doing that with their, their latest biosimilar, which is competing with Humira. Humira is possibly the biggest marketed drug in the world, certainly in the U.S. How do we go up against the big guy in a nimble way on social and show people on Humira that there is a lower cost option? When we look at our business overall and sort of what's next, we really feel like we are primed for growth. We're about $23 million right now. We've seen a 64% revenue increase in the last three years, and probably of most interest to this audience, an 82% profit increase. So really, that just shows that, yes, we are growing and we're hyper-focused on growth, but we're also a responsible business that is spending our money wisely and really looking at what's next.
When we think about how are we going to continue to propel our growth, rooted in what I believe are unmatched client relationships, you see that in a nine-year average client tenure, great satisfaction scores. But really our growth strategy moving forward is a few core areas. One, this idea of winning without competing, which as somebody who's in California, to compete for a piece of business right now, I love, which is really just leveraging our relationships. When I got here about two years ago, I reimagined our leadership team. We're now able to tap into our previous client relationships, get those projects that are just under the procurement threshold, prove our worth, and then be incredibly well-positioned for the agency of record pitches, which is what we're doing here tomorrow.
Brand differentiation, again, being able to deliver everything that a large agency can give you, but with the attention and nimbleness and unmatched expertise of a small one. We're very focused on talent and culture, proving that you can be at an agency and do great work, but also love where you work, and that proved out. You know, we ended last year with a 95% retention rate. From a sector growth perspective, we are hyper-focused on pharma and biotech. This is the biggest opportunity from a revenue standpoint. Obviously, incredible stability and growth potential, so we're really doubling down there. And then from a point of differentiation, I mentioned earlier the changing demographic of the American patient. Health Equity is a huge area of focus for us.
If you think about what's happening in the U.S., and you go to the next slide, as we look at demographic shifts in the United States alone, health inequities are really poised to become the greatest public health threat of our time. So historically, we talk about health equity, companies look at it as a charity. You know, you would make a donation to a few groups and sort of check a box. Now, we live in a world where health inequities are going to put everyone's business at risk because the audiences that you need to reach are the audiences that have historically been marginalized, that have had poor experiences with the health system.
And so for us, really being at the center of where health meets equity, helping our clients understand that we can help them make their business equitable, but we can also make equity great business. And so we're starting to do that with some of our clients now in really meaningful ways, working with the American Society of Clinical Oncology on raising sort of a dialogue around racial disparities in cancer outcomes, and how might we solve that? Working with a major insurer who we did some research for and uncovered that there is a massive amount of stigma among young Black women when it comes to Medicaid. And so how do we tap into influencers to sort of lift the veil of what Medicaid really is and drive enrollment?
Then with one of our larger biotech companies, really drawing a line in the sand and having them take a leadership position, that health inequities are the symptoms, and racism is the disease. They are here not just to cure the diseases that their drugs treat, but also to fix the systemic inequities that exist in our healthcare system. We're also doubling down on thought leadership in this area as well. Earlier this year, we released what we called Chosen Circles, which was research around how Black Americans navigate health decision-making. Agency thought leadership, it's always great to see media coverage and impressions, and we got all of that. But for us, this is an inroad with current and prospective clients. So we did 12 different presentations to those prospects. We saw a 25% increase in organic growth opportunities as a result of this one report alone.
And next year, well, next week, sorry, we'll be releasing the second cut of this data, which will focus on the LGBTQ plus community. So with all of that, you know, we, we have a very firm vision, and I think a great opportunity. It is very much supported by Next 15. I, I mentioned earlier, I spent my entire career with the two largest communication agencies in the world. Next 15, enabling us to do what's right for our business, run our business, and not get in our way, but be there to support us to grow. Obviously, them being willing to make investments where investments are needed. For us, certainly as a U.S.-only agency right now, the global scale of Next 15 is critical.
So being able to say that we do have a global footprint in all of the markets that matter, and being able to tap into that footprint has been essential for our growth. And then lastly, expertise. You know, Tim talked about some of the thinking and Insights around artificial intelligence, around data. Being able to tap into that expertise for us has been immensely helpful as we look to future-proof and continue to grow our business. So with that, I will say thank you and turn it over to Tim.
Thanks, Stacey. Good afternoon, everybody. Oh, sorry, I got some...
There is a video coming.
Oh, sorry. You're telling me so. Sorry.
We work with our clients to define, to build, and to optimize technology and data solutions that either drive efficiency in their organization or power growth and the outcomes that our client organizations are looking for. We launch programs with clients like Public Health England to combine data science with behavioral change and technology to deliver the Couch to 5K app.
Agent3 is a $30 million business, which specializes in helping our customers target and engage their key prospects and key accounts through the use of data, technology, and content, or the three agents of change, hence our name Agent3.
We've been working with a number of clients on developing proof of concepts to really demonstrate the power of AI in operation, and how we can both combine the large language models and AI engineering with the data sets that are unique to clients. Unlocking those data sets is where AI will be really powerful. With Department for Education, we've been working with them on a proof of concept for test engineering and test governance, which really helps them drive efficiency within that organization and will ultimately let you do things like generate synthetic test data, which we estimate, if rolled out, would drive 70% efficiency in that part of the process.
When we talk about accelerating times of value for customers, where we've actually done that for one of our customers is, in optimizing one of their client advocacy hubs, where we used AI to drive a 940% increase in engagement in one month, saving the client four hours.
The creative principle around which our business is based is Make Better. We Make Better for our clients, for our staff, and for society, and AI has the opportunity to be transformational for all of those three things.
Our vision is a place where every brand can easily Connect, access, analyze, and activate all their customer data. We do that with a solution, Unilyze, our AI-enabled real-time data platform that connects millions of customers to billions of interactions. Using Unilyze, our clients are able to access huge amounts of first-party data to enable data-driven decisioning and great customer experiences.
For our clients, AI can be quite a challenging topic, and so we do everything we possibly can to help them understand the implications of AI. We've published ethical guidelines on our website. We've explained those to them, and in some cases, actually trained some of the staff of their marketing departments, for instance, with Sky. Certainly shortening the process of decision making. It's certainly improving the quality of the output. It still requires us to do great creative thinking and great creative output, but we're very much in the process of supporting those endeavors.
A case that really illustrates the power of Gen AI for us, and how it's making a real difference in transforming our business and our client partnerships, is the work we've been doing with Bacardi for their brand, Patrón. And so what we did is we created, around Margarita Day, the Patrón Dream Margarita Generator, and we realized that no other brand yet had trained AI on their brand assets to do anything that had a consumer interactive component. Everything else was static. And so this took on a life of its own. I mean, the site had 29,000 pieces of art created in a week. It had 41,000 unique visits, and then it had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of click-throughs to Patrón partners who sold Patrón by the bottle.
This was proof of concept that Gen AI was gonna be a real, and is a real accelerator in our business. Certainly, as we think creatively and in ways to Connect with the customer.
Unilyze's website personalization engine brings in a customer's historical activity, their predictive future value, and matches it with their current context. Large language model-generated creative is then delivered on the fly, matched to a customer's context to create truly relevant experiences. This means that marketers who previously might have struggled to generate several iterations of a website creative, can now generate hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
A lot of our clients, in the way that they're looking at digital services, so putting their content out on social channels, that's quite a manually intensive job at the moment. What we have done is taken some of that work away. We've automated that. We've built in tone of voice within a product. We've built in their particular client, their product set, and are now starting to use both the knowledge of the product and the knowledge of a tone of voice to create meaningful copy. The output of that is a 50% reduction in the time it takes for quite highly skilled individuals to do the work they were previously doing.
The opportunity is huge. We know that when we start working with clients at a base level, when it comes to personalization of customer experiences and targeting of campaigns, our solutions have a huge impact in driving incremental revenue.
We see in Gen AI, for example, a real future to accelerate not just our creative thinking, but the way we apply it to our business and our clients' business. We're excited about the power of AI for the future.
Right, take two. Good afternoon, everybody. As I'm sure you're aware, we issued a trading update this morning, for the third quarter, and that showed an improvement in our organic growth to 2.5%, compared to a modest decline in the first half. And that was really sort of boosted by SMG. Thank you, Sam, for a phenomenal sort of Q3, but also, I think we, you know, we had definitely sort of improvement across the board. Broadly, the trends we saw in the first half sort of continued into Q3. We had growth in three of our segments, and it's only really Engage where we saw some, you know, reasonably modest declines, really based on some client delays. I think that is part of our sort of frustration at the moment.
There's a lot of money out there, but actually getting clients to commit, I think, is still a bit of a challenge in some places. That meant that overall, our organic revenue was flat for the first nine months. But overall, we were up 2.6% in total revenue, boosted by some acquisitions. And actually, I think currency was slightly negative in the first nine months. And to date, we bought around just under two million of our shares. I think I've been slightly surprised how slow it's been. I think there's been a struggle to find sellers of our shares, but overall, we've committed to trying to buy 10 million this financial year, by the end of January.
I think we're going to review at that stage, you know, the effects of this and whether actually it's a good thing to do going forward. In terms of finishing the year, we're sort of confident we're gonna meet both our institute expectations. I think we are seeing a few green shoots, and there's definitely a lot more pitching out there. Again, whether we're gonna win, whether the client's actually gonna commit the money, and whether they'll spend, you know, before the end of the year, but we're definitely seeing a few green shoots in terms of pitching. Margins, which we're very proud of, and, you know, we work very hard to sort of protect that. I think we're gonna be up a little bit.
A lot of that, I think, is driven by the decentralized model Tim talked about, where we have chief execs who are very much focused on their own performance and, you know, they're reacting in real time to sort of changes in demand from their clients. So I think, again, that is really helping. And our balance sheet remains very strong. We talked about having modest net debt at the end of January. That's assuming some bolt-on acquisitions, and, you know, Roger completed one this morning, and I think there's a few more in the hopper. So yes, I think, you know, we've got a lot of flexibility in our balance sheet.
We're looking to complete a bank refinancing in the next week or so, which will increase our facilities from GBP 100 million to GBP 150 million, which will give us a bit more sort of power as we go forward. And in terms of the big question we have in terms of how are we gonna get to, you know, that sort of doubling of revenue, I think it's an ambitious target, but, you know, you'd have heard from four of our brands today, which represent roughly a third of our revenue. So, you know, quite a good representation of our businesses. And I think they're all really growth-oriented. I think our decentralized modeling creates that entrepreneurial culture where the brands really want to, want to go for growth, and, you know, we're the center of there to really help facilitate that.
AI, I think, is gonna be, in the short term, more about efficiency and effectiveness, and I think every one of our brands has an AI-dedicated team looking at how to become more efficient. And, you know, we had a meeting with MHP yesterday, who are looking at, you know, ways where, you know, some parts of their value chain, they reckon they can take sort of 30% out of the time. So I think there's a lot of work being done. In the short term, more about, you know, the table stakes of how do we make our business more efficient and effective? But going forward, there's a lot of development, which John Di Pietro, our COO, is championing in terms of new product developments, and I think, you know, quite a few of our brands have been talking about that today.
In terms of M&A, I think, as you know, we've been very active. I think I've lost count to the number of acquisitions we've done for Savanta over the last eight years. It's probably somewhere above 12, but I think each of them have added value, and, you know, I'm absolutely convinced we're going to continue down that path. The big acquisition we did last year of Engine, which is we're in the sort of building, as you're probably aware, that cost us GBP 65 million cash, and this year will deliver about GBP 18 million of operating profit. So I think we've had a very good track record of, you know, being opportunistic in terms of finding, you know, really good strategic acquisitions. We're never the biggest payer. We're actually quite proud of that.
Actually, what we tend to do when it comes to acquisitions is use the sort of actually SMG will be SMG. And, you know, Sam and I have spent many times discussing as to why we won that particular situation, and it was all about love-bombing the management team, absolutely convincing them that we're the right home, we'd invest in them, we'd really keep them, you know, their special source. And I think that's such a big, big part of us. I think given the current market, I think the uncertainty means that we have been more focused on bolt-ons, but hopefully next year, you know, once the market opens up a little bit, I'm convinced we're gonna get back more onto the strategic acquisition front.
Come on, note. Give it back to Tim.
Final thoughts. Peter's left me his notes. I might use those. Hopefully, what you've got a real sense of today is the quality of the businesses that sit underneath the Next 15 umbrella. I think when we come to see you, you hear a lot about Next 15, but it's really just a lot about the numbers. And I hope what you've taken from today is actually there are some stunning businesses within this portfolio. And, you know, these definitely aren't just the four that are the best. It was, you know, we just picked four because we wanted to have one from each of the different areas, and we could equally have found another bunch that you would have equally been impressed with. The great news is they are all really embracing AI. We're not fighting that battle with them.
They're all seeing huge opportunity from it. You know, they're seeing ways to improve the product, improve the service, you know, really, you know, drive efficiency out of it, as Peter mentioned. But, you know, if they continue to think like a product business, it won't be a threat to them. It'll be this, this huge opportunity. You know, Peter talked about the fact that, you know, we are sort of steady as we go for the rest of this year. It does feel like we are running into a very, very strong headwind. You know, the economic headwind that has been running, or that we've been running into, is definitely very, very different from the very strong tailwind we had in our last financial year. If the wind just stops, we are going to fly.
I think that's certainly the feeling within the organization, is we have a tremendous number of businesses who are actually making enormous progress and in a really good shape. They're incredibly healthy businesses. They're not sort of businesses that are sort of struggling with, you know, an overweight staff cost or, you know, an inefficient set of processes and all the rest of it. They are businesses that are, you know, really in a great place. You know, we've very much said to people, we knew this year was going to be a tough economy in which to do things, but let's take advantage of that. Let's not say to ourselves, let's just hide, hunker down, and do nothing.
Let's use this as an opportunity to make our businesses better, to make our products better, to embrace AI, and come out of this a better organization than we went in, which was a philosophy we very much embraced during COVID. This has been more challenging, if I'm completely honest with you, than COVID. COVID turned out to be sort of three-six months of difficulty for us and no more. This has been a longer period for us to deal with that challenge, and our customers have found it harder. But, you know, and that was partly because the governments basically stepped in and kind of funded everybody to carry on. The governments aren't clearly in a position to do that at this stage.
But I am very, very confident that when we come through this cycle, and as Peter said, we're seeing green shoots, the technology part of our client base is very much stabilized, and we're seeing growth in certain areas. You know, by the middle of next year, we could see that that growth should start to really kick in and start to return. At that point, I'm gonna open up for questions. I'm gonna try and welcome these guys onto the Val Doonican stools, as we've been calling them. For the younger ones in the audience, that's just a reference you'll have to Google.
Probably lost on Stacey.
Yes, it was lost on Stacey, and we just didn't explain it to her 'cause we're mean like that. I'll start at the front and work around. Sorry. That's right. Yes, it's you. Oh, oh, okay. Steve-
Sorry, I've got the mic.
Yeah.
So Steve Liechti from Numis. Can I do 3? One is, can you just give us a little bit more color on the color on the green shoots? You talked about more pitching, tech clients stabilized. What do you mean by stabilized? You know, are you actually seeing things move there? And you said growth in some areas. Where exactly? So that that's the first question. And last, well, the second two questions really to David on Mach49. One is just help us get our heads around the scalability of the business in that I guess we look at it as a lot of very experienced private equity VC guys who are super experienced.
How can you scale that capability to make it a business that continues to grow in the way that it has? And then the second question within that is just talk us through the sort of DX or digital transformation COVID hangover that we're seeing in a lot of the sort of more mainstream digital transformation businesses. Is that affecting your business? And following that through, does the end of free money mean anything to the whole concept of venture that you're focusing in on? Thanks.
I'll buy David a bit of time to unravel that. That wasn't really-
Three questions.
I was gonna say that that wasn't two questions, but anyway. In terms of the green shoots, I think the green shoots have actually been there right across the organization. It's not just sort of particular to one particular part of the org, of the business. You know, we're seeing new business activity has picked up pretty dramatically, in fact, in the third quarter, right across the organization. You know, we do typically see an uptick in new business in the third quarter. You usually have sort of the early part of the second quarter and the third quarter are the periods, and the summer, it just disappears completely. And then over the Christmas holidays, it, not surprisingly, also tends to vanish. Look, Q3 has been kind of bonkers, to be perfectly honest.
And it's been in consumer, it's been in tech, it's been, you know, in all of the different four segments in which we do business. Some of that we know is procurement going out and just simply looking to reprice certain things. We know that always happens in, you know, in tougher economies. So, you know, we have to be a little bit skeptical of some of that, and that's what, you know, the point I made earlier about just make sure that this is a job we know we can do and delight a customer on.
So if it is a customer coming to you with what looks like a budget that does not look realistic for the task, then you just have to walk away because you know what procurement is doing, and you just have to say, right, that's not an assignment that we can be successful at, because essentially, really, all they want is the job done as cheaply as is possible. And we're just not the right partner for a project like that. In terms of, you know, areas where you are seeing very specific growth, unsurprisingly, you know, SMG, this is just a very, very hot market right now and looks like it's going to be that way for quite a long period of time.
As you know, Sam alluded, you know, as cookies essentially disappear as a form of targeting people, that is only gonna carry on. But there are, you know, there are lots of other areas, areas within lead gen and demand gen, that's just going to carry on being very effective. Anything where you can see a very direct correlation between the amount of money you spend and the result for the customer, that's where money is going to. You know, customers are just taking money from anything that's difficult to measure and putting it into things that it's easy to measure. And then it's really just a question of effectiveness.
They look at people like us, they look at the platforms, the technology that we've built, the data that we use, the ways that we therefore go around solving those problems, and they say, "Okay, you know, at the very least, your business has to have a really robust methodology." And then beyond that, it then has to translate into, do you have basically code? Is there a way that you could encode this activity so that it becomes repeatable, so that in some cases it becomes self-service, so that the customer is then, you know, essentially able to do a big piece of the job themselves. You know, this. You know, I mentioned at the beginning this piece about, you know, our customers come to us with difficult problems, things that are hard to solve.
That does sit at the root of why they work with somebody like us. But equally, we recognize that sort of fast-forward 5-10 years from now, that sort of dependency issue with technology is going to evolve. So we need to be quite happy to embrace that and evolve with it. So if we can create the platforms, if we can create, you know, the sources of data, then actually, if the client is doing it themselves, we don't really care, because we still have a very good revenue stream. If anything, we have a more profitable, more lucrative revenue stream. I don't know if I've bought David enough time, but hopefully I have.
I've definitely forgotten what the three questions were. No. Let's start off with the scalability question. So the answer is, we have actually been evolving and dealing with the scalability issue since the day we were born. The standard and the process of Mach49's creation was around developing a methodology that we could actually follow to allow our clients to be able to create these new growth engines, whether it be on the investment side or whether it be on the building side. Now, that has one big advantage for us. As we develop a methodology, we don't have to then keep using the same expensive resources to execute that methodology. We can start to use other resources to help support it, and that was the second phase of our growth in terms of becoming scalable.
After that, we started to realize we could start to leverage other technologies to help support our people, to make them more efficient in doing what they were doing. So for example, AI is a classic one. By having AI in place, we can do things like basic process and pattern recognition of what do we look at in terms of the kinds of business we should be building for this company? What are the ways in which it can be executed? How can we do that in a way that actually generates and guarantees us that we're addressing the right customer and the right niche in the market, et cetera. So that then became a way to get our people more efficient.
So now I'm. I've gone from one very experienced person to a team of mixed, and now, in fact, that experienced person can be spread across multiples while I'm also mixing, and now I'm even more efficient. So the model keeps evolving. With AI, we see even more, and you saw the references to going to the mid-market and starting to use and leverage some of the software and technologies and AI techniques to allow us to replace service with software almost entirely. So as we continue to evolve, we're well aware of that being a key factor that has to continue to grow with us.
You know, as I like to joke, we've always, from the beginning, started with a bunch of old guys sitting around drinking beer, figuring out, "How the hell did we build these things together, and what can we do to make them replicable?" And we've just taken that and put it on steroids. Relative to the digital transformation piece, I guess in some ways, maybe you'll need to restate the question for me. As I look at it, we have serviced almost entirely, I shouldn't say entirely, that's too strong a statement. We've serviced a large part, very, what people consider traditional industrial manufacturing types of industries. That's where we have been. The folks where you would think would not be as sophisticated in terms of this kind of work.
But in fact, what we've seen in terms of the process and evolution is that, you know, the digital investments they tried to make did not produce the results they were looking for. They were looking for these growth opportunities. And so when we came into the market, we started to find success immediately with people, as you saw on those boards, like the Stanley Black & Deckers of the world, these people who are heavy industrial folks. And our names got around, and we started in penetrating more and more and more. And so I don't think we've seen digital transformation as a threat in any way or a slowing down of investment in us.
In fact, it was probably the right grease to skid, to grease the skids for us to be able to do what we have done as a follow-on to that. You had one more piece to that question.
Yeah. Sorry, just to follow up on that, what I was really asking was, did your business artificially accelerate through and post-COVID as people allocated more funds to digital, and now they're going more into cost-cutting mode and therefore cutting back? So that's really the sort of short-term question.
So, are they cutting back? Is that really the question?
Yeah, and then the longer-term one is, what does the end of free money mean to that whole sort of process?
Yeah. So we'll start the second question first then. I mean, the free money piece is not really core to the business that we create, because we're not looking for—Most of our clients are not building businesses to be spun out and invested in, right? They're building businesses to change their own growth trajectories and the business that they, that they will become in the future. So that really hasn't been a major factor for us. Now, there are... Some of our clients do spin things out, and so, yes, it's been harder to get some outside money with that. But that's been a very, very small piece of the business and very small impact, in, in working with us.
In terms of, you know, the digital piece and sort of the drop-off because of, you know, I guess, cost, I guess, was really the question, if people are falling off? In fact, it's interesting. I would say, to sort of echo what Tim said, in the last year, we've seen a very consistent set of patterns among our clients, which is those who have worked with us any time in the past continue and accelerate, in fact, their investments in doing this. And so our business continues to grow and grow very healthy because we continue to have these folks who keep coming back more, for more and more and more and more and growing their investment in us.
I would say that we've probably seen a little bit of either flattening, maybe a little bit of slowing down in terms of new labels who might be interested in coming and working with us, in the last year. But I agree 100% with Tim. We're seeing that unwind already. So I think that that time has passed in terms of what we experienced as any kind of a slowdown, and it didn't have a material impact on the business.
We have... You get to choose the mic.
Yeah, thanks a million. It's Kieran Donnelly from Berenberg, three for myself also. Sam, maybe just to start with you, could you just expand on the strategy with the North American expansion? Is there kind of clients you're currently working with are pulling you into North America, or it's just starting from scratch?
It's a great question, and I don't know whether this is working. Yeah, is that working now? Yeah. So it's a mixture of both. Obviously, you'll have seen from our client roster that there's some big retailers that have big presences in the U.S. Also, we have engaged with a number of different retail partners already in the U.S. and started some consultancies, which should lead to managed service.
In terms of the strategy, if you think about our three businesses, the Threefold side, the Capture side, and the Plan-Apps side, our strategy is to lead with Threefold, to gain a retail partner, which then enables us to build the connections with the CPG brands, that's what they call the FMCG brands over there, to enable us then to build the Capture model out and to build the Plan-Apps model out. And so, we've now got a small team based out in New York, which already been, fully funded by the fees that we've generated. And on top of that, we've agreed an investment plan with Tim and Next 15 to accelerate that growth over the next year.
Brilliant. Secondly, just on Insights, I think, I believe you said half of the growth is organic previously, and half it was from M&A. I guess, as we look out at to the medium-term targets, what's going to be the split of organic and M&A-driven growth for the medium-term targets?
I mean, I would, I would expect it to be about the same. I don't see why anything should change. I think what normally happens through M&A is the first year we leave them alone, the second year we reorganize them, and then the third year, they are a bit like the Borg. They are brought within the stable and do everything that we want them to do. And you know what? That has worked. I think it's now 15, is the one we did yesterday, so we've sort of got a bit of a playbook. There is minimal, you know, cost savings directly from making redundancies. We try and do that organically or try and grow the business. And so... And we always look after the entrepreneurs, which I think is critical.
And when you set that up in that way, I think you-
... It is basically about respect. I know it's old-fashioned, but I think that way they continue to grow. They'd normally grow through the earn-out, because they're obviously incentivized to, and then by the time we have assimilated them, and they're all speaking Klingon, then we've normally got global clients working with them, and so on. So I think it I would expect it to be the same. I think the difference now is that we probably have to buy bigger firms, otherwise it doesn't make the material impact. This was a year of actually not very many acquisitions, or at least just towards the end of the year, we have some. So I think that will be more challenging, but then we have a much more established platform and experience to pull it off.
The very first major deal we did was the same again as what we were, 40-80, and that was very hard. But now buying a 40-person business, we've just bought a 50-person business, is relatively straightforward, so I think you learn over time.
Brilliant. Just thirdly, on Mach49. It's quite difficult to, I guess, quantify the value that you add to the customers you work with. Could you just give an insight into how you price the offering?
The price is set as an outcome-based project price. So we literally say: We are building this business for you, everywhere from idea through to however far they want to go. And here will be the price and the timing for Delivery. And at that point in time, that's a promised outcome, and honestly, if they need us to do more because we haven't got the outcome, we keep going. So, but the outcomes are pretty measurable, right? We're talking about them delivering on creation of business plans and quantified plans about how they're actually gonna perform over time, and then they get measured against that by what we would call a new venture board. That is an internal, usually C-suite, set of people who are responsible for managing and measuring that business.
So we get measured on their success just as they get measured on their success, whether or not they reach those final results.
Then maybe just very quickly, if we look at your pipeline at the moment, how does it break down between existing client relationships and new client relationships?
At this very moment, I probably couldn't honestly tell you. The pipeline in terms of... I mean, the revenue dollars in the last year, let's say, were largely around existing relationships and expanding them, not around new. But I don't know the exact percentages off the top of my head. We have a very healthy business. I can tell you that much.
It's Fiona Orford-Williams at Edison . My questions are all about collaboration, really. Firstly, you talked about doing more pitches under the Next 15 banner. So can you tell us a bit more about how those come about, who leads it, how you make sure you've got the right mix of people in the room, and how people communicate across the different companies? And as an adjunct to that, SMG, you talk about North America, we've just heard your answer there, but do you get support from other people in the group to inform the way you're actually looking to establish that business? And the third sort of collab question is about AI. You talked about having teams in the different parts.
How do you, everything's moving so quickly, how do you make sure that everybody's on top of the best of the outcomes from the different parts of the group?
So the last one is really easy. The last one's relatively straightforward. So we have an entire Slack channel that is devoted to the AI teams, and every, all the people across all of the businesses who are building the products are on that. It is very, very clear that if you are building something, you will put the code for that into GitHub, so that literally anybody can go in from any of the different businesses and see what's being built. They can look at the quality of the code, and they can decide, is what you're doing better than what we're doing? And if it is, then they'll abandon what they're doing, and they'll just build on top of, you know, whatever.
But equally, there's a lot of communication saying, "We're building this." People are, you know, being very open, and nobody's... You know, we've definitely, I think, done a good job of making people realize that there's no value in creating something and hiding it from the rest of the group. That actually, you will get as much benefit from this as, you know, as you give, if you like, because we're all in this together, is kind of the approach. You know, so... And that is working extremely well. To the question about the collaboration piece, at the moment, leads come in from literally all over the place. You know, and they'll come in, sometimes they will come in at Next 15 level, but more routinely, they will come in at an individual business level.
You know, somebody will see an opportunity that, you know, comes to them, and they'll look at it, and they'll kind of go: This is bigger than something that we could do. It will require some other part of the group. And then they will very typically bring it. We have a central team that actually works on that, that's part of the Next 15 team, and they will then go out and do all the legwork in terms of, like, bringing all of the right people together to be involved in whatever the RFP process is or whatever it is. And that is actually getting better and better. It was, if I'm really honest, sort of 12, 18 months ago, it was pretty rusty.
And it was a little kind of hokey in the sense of it was like I would spot something or Peter would spot something or whatever, and we'd be like: Oh, there's an opportunity over there, and people go, "Oh, that's a good idea. We should go do that." And now it's becoming much more automated, again, using just technology to do that, so that, you know, all of the new business people in all of the different parts of the organization are connected up. And, you know, we do have this tracker for all of the new business that goes out every two weeks to everybody, so everybody knows what is being bid on.
And so if something looks like, "Well, what are you bidding on that for?" You can go and find out, and if it looks like something where you're like, "I should be involved in that," then you can get involved. And so that actually does work reasonably well. As I said today earlier, I think we could do a much better job at that, but that's just been a function of just how busy everybody's been, to be perfectly honest. I don't think there's any ill intent. I don't think it's anything more than we just need to learn how to do this, and the more we do it, the better we get at it. You know, and we're seeing interestingly, the government roster stuff is proving a really effective way to do that because actually, their processes are so freaking complicated.
Penny, our chairman, who's gonna be watching this, is gonna be very pleased that I didn't swear, 'cause apparently, they keep having to bleep me out on all of the videos from these things. I caught myself at the last second there. But their processes are so long that actually it's sort of proving a really good way for us to learn how to really tightly integrate things in an RFP process. In other words, we're learning at the government's expense, but that's okay. I can't remember what the other part of the question was.
It was about SMG and the support that they've had from other parts-
Oh, right.
of the grouping.
Yeah, it's been, it's been really valuable. Just the guy to my left, Roger, he's from scratch, built a business which is now, what? 30%-40% of your revenue?
Yeah, I think.
Yeah, in the US. So we talk all the time. We were literally just talking about it before we came in here. Also, you saw Dale on the video from M Booth. Big business out in the US. We work very closely. We actually sit next to her when I'm in New York, and we discuss joint clients. They obviously work with people like P&G, and there's a lot of opportunity there, as well as Stacey, who obviously works in the health department with us. I work with Boots, so there's a lot of, lot of connections that enable us to do that.
But the biggest kind of benefit for us has been some of the central services, so the legal, the HR, the support, really basic stuff like, you know, setting up a business in the U.S. and, and setting up a legal entity, finding the right people, making sure you've got the right employment contracts. All of that, that would take, you know, an entrepreneur who's doing it on their own, weeks to figure out; we can do in hours and days, and that's made a massive difference to us.
Jessica.
Hi, afternoon. It's Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt. Just got free, following the trend. First one, I think, for Roger. You know, we've heard you talk about your offering, and YouGov comes up a lot. Can you just help us understand how you differentiate from YouGov? You know, how your offer differs from what they offer, and, you know, what you think you do better or parts of their offering that you aspire to do more of, et cetera. And then the second one is for Sam. Sam, can I just understand how your monetization model works? Is it project-based, or do you get a percentage of sales, and is there a potential for the latter, if that's not the case? And the third one, probably for Peter.
You know, as we go into FY 25, you know, is there certain client wins or step-ups in the revenue that you anticipate, which is already in the pipeline that gives you confidence for the growth next year?
So quickly, comparing Savanta and YouGov, I mean, first of all, I think YouGov is a fantastic company. You know, we have to respect that it's worth more than Next 15. So to be even compared is a privilege. What have they done well? I mean, first of all, they've taken it globally. I think that is quite a challenge. They're now launching products in literally 40 markets at once, and I think that has been their great focus. They've focused on those big global buyers.
You know, in my opinion, with quite standardized products, I think AI is making some standardized products look a little basic, and I think there are other players in the market, which I won't go into, which I think have been a little caught out, that were scaling very quickly, in a pre-AI age, if that's the right term, and now in a world where actually people want scale and complexity, I think it can be a bit more, a bit more challenging. And I suppose the key differentiator from us is, first of all, we are tech-enabled end-to-end. Very few players are Ipsos, YouGov, Kantar, would not actually have it end-to-end. Which is a surprise to me as well. They would tend to use vendors from outside, but we still embrace the expertise.
So, for example, we have a wealth team, you know, that does major projects for incredible brands, all the brands that we all aspire to own or admire from afar. And it is that expertise that keeps them coming back. You know, if you're working for a major international auction house, you can't just offer them a standard product. You need to know that market, know that customer, know how to deal with them, know how to help them, and that takes real expertise. So we still believe in the human.
... I think, you know, YouGov has tended to focus on the process and the data. It has worked brilliantly, so I'm not gonna criticize it, but as a researcher, I still think the human plays a role for a while longer.
The question was on our kind of commercial models. So if you think about the three different sides of the business, on the Plan-Apps business, obviously, we talked about subscriptions and SaaS fees. But there are so also some add-ons in terms of fees, like extra evaluations and insight Delivery. On the Threefold side, it's a mix of what we term fees for retainers, for teams. So you can imagine, you know, there's a fee for the team, and then we take a revenue share of the incremental investment that goes into that retailer. And the balance between the retainer and the revenue share is we're really flexible on, depending on the ambition or belief of the retailer.
We actually prefer a higher revenue share than we do retainer because we believe in our ability to grow it, probably more so than the retailer does at that early stage. And then on the Capture side, the buy side, it's a fee-based model that's normally based on a retainer, and there's incremental opportunity there through media commissions, as well as SaaS fees for Plan-Apps and extra investment in some consultancy as well.
Yeah, in terms of your question in of sort of what committed revenue we have, I mean, if you go across the you know each of the four segments, the data side tends to start the year sort of 60%-70% booked, and I imagine that would sort of continue going forward. You know, I think Roger has seen incremental revenue growth going forward as the year goes on. So I think that feels in good shape. Engage, I think, you know, we, that's the area where probably some of our tech clients, you know, have cut back, and we're definitely seeing. I mean, M Booth, I think, had, you know, have 14 sort of $1 million pitches on at the moment. Now, are they gonna win them all? Probably not.
Actually, is the money gonna turn out to be there? But, you know, we're definitely seeing in that space, probably more activity than we've seen before. So I think there's definitely a level of confidence going into next year. On Transform, you know, these guys have got the most crazy pipeline. Again, it's sort of converting, and actually, almost the worry is actually, are you gonna, if you win too many, have you got the resourcing? So I think there's an interesting challenge there, which I'm sure you will. That's your job, I know. And then I think on Delivery, yeah, we're seeing some good signs. You know, it, I'm slightly frustrated. There's a few client wins, which we can't talk about because of, you know, confidentiality and not being able to launch.
But so I'm sort of cautiously optimistic about next year. I think when it comes to our pre-close statement, at the end of January, I think we'll be in a much better place. We'll have gone through a full budget process, and I think we'll be able to talk much more openly. So it's a slightly bad time to ask 'cause we're literally about to start the budget process. But, you know, and sometimes I think, you know, trying to understand what's gonna happen in January is hard enough, let alone sort of next year. But no, I think there's definitely much more optimism around, and, you know, I think we are feeling more positively down for a while.
You can have three questions.
Thank you. I will. So I, I'm not sure whether this is a question for Tim or for Stacey, but obviously, M Booth Health has, has been doing very well through a period in time where the rest of the Engage division hasn't. So I was just wondering, is that simply a function of your end markets, or is M Booth Health doing something differently from some of the other agencies that perhaps they could emulate? That would be my, my first question.
Yeah. I'll spare Stacey the forecasting question, effectively. So it... I think it's two things. It is, one, it is a countercyclical market. You know, it is not one of these that is reliant on how is the economy doing. It is reliant on basically the healthcare market as a whole, and the healthcare market in the U.S. is just innately growing. So you've just got actually a tailwind from that perspective for growth, and that will continue. There's no real indication that is going to change. Even if you sort of fast-forward into a potential administration change, you know, at the end of next year, it really won't change government policy in a way that should negatively impact our business. The second is, we are a relatively small player, so we can capture market share.
Stacey has built a remarkably strong team. I mean, it, you know, she talks about the average sort of tenure of the people, ten years. You know, that, in that world is, you're starting, you know, and a lot of the people are, who are at the senior levels in that business have been there a lot more, you know, have had much longer, you know, tenure. Then you're into a position where you can bring really incredibly highly skilled people to the table. And, you know, given that part I mentioned earlier about people with complex problems wanting to move quickly, that's a team that can do that. And so that, you know, to her point, is a very, very attractive proposition.
So she's able to go into situations where the RFP is potentially really quite large, you know, multimillion-dollar RFPs, and actually has a very realistic chance of being able to win those because she has a strong enough team and a strong enough capability in order to be able to do that. So in other words, she has two things. One is a tailwind from just a naturally growing market, and secondly, you know, she has lots of market share to capture because she's still a relatively small player.
Thank you. And then two for Sam, if that's okay. I mean, we've been hearing for some time from the big global agencies and big tech platforms like Criteo about retail media. Can you just kind of sort of explain to us where you fit in in that ecosystem, how you work with those big companies? And I suppose in doing that, sort of you know, help us understand how you're out-trading them and winning these big clients in the U.K. So that would be my first question. And then my second question is, I'm just trying to understand the growth runway, 'cause it seems like a lot of the big retail companies, supermarkets now have retail media networks.
You're associated with a number of those, which is great, and also a lot of the big specialist retailers as well. You know, are we at the point where we're sort of getting towards the top? You know, can you just sort of provide some insight as to, you know, kind of where this market can go?
Yeah, really good questions. So starting with the Criteo example, so we work really closely with Criteo. They provide a really important channel in the retail media mix, which is search and sponsored product on e-commerce, and to a certain extent, off-site as well. What they don't do is any of the in-store activity or any of the proximity activity that we do on top, and we work with a number of other providers like Criteo to do that. And so the role that we provide for the retailers is putting together the full retail media network that is omni-channel across the campaigns, and we are an agnostic tech provider that help to bring in partners like Criteo into that mix as well.
So it's a range of, from the very early question of how do we start this thing, from consultancy all the way through to providing the teams that run the sales service, that run the operations service, that operate the insight and the evaluation service, all the way through to bringing in the ad tech partners that you need to run the full service agency. And in that way, we're really, really unique, and there are very few that do the similar thing for us. And it's interesting, as we've entered into the UK...
into the U.S. market, what we're hearing from retailers is that they, they've already signed up a lot of these ad tech partners, but they're not able to bring it together to align it with their merchandising teams and their category teams, and that's where we're getting a lot of our new business from, in terms of helping them to pull together the right structures, the right teams, both externally and internally, to make it work in the right way for those retail partners and those clients as well. And then, the second question was about the growth opportunity. And I think there's two areas.
If you look at the UK, there's still a significant growth opportunity in terms of some of the big retailers in the UK, who perhaps are early on their journey that could help, and I think that provides a great run rate for the next two-three years for us on the Threefold side. I think there's also a huge growth opportunity on the Capture side of the business, as brands are moving more of their marketing into the retail-enabled space of media. Coming at it from a retail side, as Capture do, means that we're starting to attract some of the advertising dollars that would normally go into larger advertising agencies into the Capture media model, into the buy side, and there is a huge growth opportunity there as well. But then, the big opportunity, obviously, is geographically, too.
When you look at the U.S., there's a huge amount of mid-market Tier Two, Tier One retailers who need help, to the point where the size that we predict the U.S. market to be could be very significant within a few years, just based on the scale of those retailers, and that's without even looking at other markets like APAC.
Thank you. And a final one, if I may, just for Roger. And this is following up on an earlier question, and I guess it's just a question again about scale and the investment requirements. So you know, if I sort of understood correctly, what you were trying to say is that you kind of have to be good at everything these days. You can't just be good at software, just be an expert here. You have to pull it all together, and you kind of have to have this, you know, an end-to-end platform. And I'm just trying to understand, obviously, you've grown very quickly, and scaled very rapidly, but you're still, compared to the other players out there, quite small.
You know, are you gonna have to outinvest them, I suppose, is the question, in terms of the platform and the platform itself, and also potentially the panel?
I mean, I'm always amazed how moderately good our competitors' platforms are, considering how many people they have making them. I mean, some of them will literally have thousands of developers, and partly this is because they are software companies. If you are a software company, everything you do has to be bulletproof, whereas when you're an operator of your own software for end clients, who are not paying for software, they're paying for the solution they want, it's an enormous advantage, because you don't have to solve every single problem that any user would need to pay. Because they're paying for a license, they will not accept any downtime or whatever. As a result, we're doing what some of these companies do with literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people, with 45 developers in Cambridge. Our panel was developed by three people.
I mean, I'm not sure they ever slept for a few days or a few months even, but it's already better. It's outperforming the competitors by huge margins, because it's end to end. I don't think it's really about investment. I think it's about really, can we operate better? That will be the key. We've actually created the platforms now. Now, we have to find the front doors and the people to operate them effectively, and take them internationally. As much as anything, that's a sales problem, and we have embraced that wholeheartedly. We, 10% of our team are in the commercial team, purely selling and serving, not doing any doing, which is quite unusual in market research. Whereas normally you sort of sell and do.
But the trouble is, if you sell and do, you don't wanna—you almost resent selling, 'cause you then think, "Oh, my God, I've got to do it." So I think, I don't see there's any particular limitations. I think... Look, I'm not gonna say there aren't gonna be some headwinds along the way. There will be, but, I hope we're still quite at the foothills, and we have to grow another 50 times to keep Tim happy, otherwise, you know, I, I get, you know, in the kneecaps. So, yeah, fingers crossed, we can keep going.
Thank you. We've got a few questions from the webcast. First one's from Matthew Beddall from Havelock London. Tim, how would you characterize the relative importance of M&A-driven growth versus organic growth going forwards?
I don't think you can make one more important than the other, to be perfectly honest. I think they both play a very important role in our future. To be honest, it's all about creating the best solution for the customer as quickly as we can. You know, if buying a solution is the best way to do that, it gets the solution into the customer's hand quicker, then we'll do that. If building it is going to produce a better outcome, we'll build it. You know, we want organic growth, there's no doubt about that. You know, that's always clearly the best way to grow. It's clearly, you know, a more economic model in lots of ways.
But at the end of the day, you know, it is about getting the right solution into the customer's hands as quickly as you can.
And we've got a further question from Caspar Erskine from Liberum. With Savanta, how is your Brand Vue panel being built out? What upfront cost is being put into growing this, or is this largely organic via existing channels? Has been an expensive process for YouGov, similar ambitions.
You know, I wish I'd done it years ago. I think one of you guys told me to as well, and I said, "No, no, no, too expensive." It's... I mean, I've never made a cash machine like the BrandVue panel. Month two, it made us GBP 70,000 net profit from two people just coding away and doing nothing, no operations or anything. And that is month two. I think we can do so, so much more. And, you know, it's, it's a lot easier than trying to sell and service complex research projects. So, how does it cost us?
I think the precise cost, it was almost zero, because it was two people who are capitalized fully on our balance sheet, who made it in a team with one support, all from Cambridge. Total heroes. The panel, the way we recruited them was just, we had some email databases from the past, from old lists and things that we had permission to, and we just recruited through that. We really look after the respondent experience. I'll just tell... If you can give me 30 seconds. The classic respondent experience, if you are doing a survey, I'm sure you've done them in the past, is you're asked endlessly the same questions over and over again, to then eventually qualify for a survey, then you're asked the same questions again. I mean, it is that stupid.
When you join this panel, you put in, you do a seven- or eight-minute survey, you're paid for it. We will never ask you again. We know what-- We may update it once a year, some questions, 'cause it, you might change your pets or whatever, but we don't think you're gonna change your age. Unless you can change your year of birth, I think it's not worth asking it again. As a result, it's so much better experience for the respondents, better data, it's cheaper. Every question we script, so it's all much, much more elegantly done. We actually care about the experience, and it's, as I said, I wish I'd done it many years ago.
Superb. Thank you. Tim, we're just about out of time, so I'm gonna pass it back to you for any closing remarks.
I'm not sure I have really any, because I think we've pretty much covered everything. I would, I would love to make sure that if you do have questions, and I know there were a bunch of hands that were going up, that you feel free to stick around, and we'll quite happily answer those. A huge thank you for everybody showing up. I think we managed to stick kind of close to time, but, yeah, thank you so much for coming.