Thank you all for coming. It's a great turnout. It's great to see. What we'll be hoping you take away from this is why our platform will win over the competition, and what a platform even is and what platform means to us, where YouGov sits in the market research landscape, how we will continue our growth trajectory, and how we will measure success going forward. I'd like to start by staking our claim as the pioneer of online research. I think it can be fairly said that we are the ones that made online research something real, accurate, impressive. Before us, it was seen as quick and dirty. People used it as a cheap way of doing things. When we came along, we said, "No.
With the right modeling, in the right way, building proper panels that you can build up data around, we can actually get accuracy, and we can get depth of data." That was not in the discussion at that point at all. It was just a quick way of getting some initial views. We created accurate and reliable data where previously, it was a lightweight snapshot. Polling in general was inaccurate. It wasn't just online polling. I mean, that wasn't even attempting to be accurate. I mean, there was no predictive power in those polls before us. Even general traditional polling was having a bad time. They'd got a few elections wrong, and people were questioning whether the methodology still worked.
We came along, and our first three polls quickly established a 1%, or less than 1% level of error, which of course is extremely close. You know, I mean, as polls tend to have 2% or 3% margins of error, we got it down to 1%. While it hasn't always been 1%, it actually has maintained a very low level of error throughout the last 20 odd years. Tracking studies back then were big, heavy, clunky things that happened monthly at best. People would have their annual study. They might have a quarterly one. If they really had the big bucks, they might do a monthly study, but that was about it.
What we now have is huge multidimensional data sets updated daily. It isn't even a matter of, oh, it's a monthly or it's a weekly, it's actually one big data set that is updated every single day, weekends included, automatically. Before us, polls were disconnected snapshots. We created with huge panels, rich connected data. Audience profiling in those days had tens or perhaps a few hundred at most, profiling points, because it was all so expensive. We of course, with our ability to hold on to panel over a period of time, and therefore develop through lots of surveys, more and more profiling points, with YouGov Profiles, you have, well, you actually have thousands, tens of thousands of variables in there, most of them from a single source.
That is to say, it's overlapping. We don't have tens of thousands of points of information for every panelist, but we have at least 1,000 for most of them, and they overlap in a way that we can create proper connected data. Research studies were slow. They took a long time to turn around, sometimes months. Even polling for newspapers was incredibly slow. When we first started working with The Telegraph, they breathed a big sigh of relief because they used to have to get their questions in on a Monday to have something for Saturday or Sunday. That was the speed of turnaround in those days. That was, you know, that was in the year 2000, and it seems incredible to think that was the case.
Of course, now, it's overnight, typically, for our media clients, but it can be even hours. I say, and in fact, data collection is continuous. Finally, analysis was done in clunky old ways, using SPSS and Excel, which didn't obviously do much, data crunching. You can't do much in those. We now have our own proprietary system called Crunch, which is cloud-based, super fast, easy, but actually PhD levels of R level analysis, done through drag and drop. It is the best platform for data of its kind in our space. It's not, you know, it's not, what is it called? Plateau? Not Plateau,
Tableau.
Tableau. It's not Tableau for giant datasets. It's not data visualization, which must come. It is the best way of analyzing the sort of medium large datasets that we have. There's nothing that does that as well. This is a really big change, and a lot of technical innovations in there. The one innovation that is absolutely critical to everything that we do, and that was not done before, and is still not done by anybody else, as far as I know, certainly not at scale, is actually to engage your panel and to treat them well. This is extraordinary if you think about it, because everything that market research does, everything that polling does, is based on human beings being willing to talk to you and tell you about often very private things, often very boring things.
Some of these surveys take 15 minutes, 30 minutes, some of our rivals have survey booklets that take two hours to fill in. That is a really big ask of somebody. If you pay them GBP 0.50 or GBP 1 or even GBP 5 for the one-hour thing, it's not really a great return. How do we expect people to give you quality data in those circumstances? How do we expect them to stay with you for years, which is when their data becomes really valuable? Our most valuable data comes from people that we have known the longest because we have the most information about them, and we have most things to compare it with. Why would you do that if you were a normal person, unless you were treated reasonably well?
I say reasonably well 'cause I don't claim, and some of you may be on our panels, I don't claim it's a beautiful experience. It's definitely better than it was. As an aside, our Trustpilot scores went up from about 3.5 a little while ago to 4.6, I think it is now. Sarah?
4.5.
4.5. Will very shortly be 4.6, because it is improving all the time, and it has some historical numbers in it, and if you read them, you see. To get a 4.5 score, you don't have to be a great mathematician to work out that the majority of people answering those, and it's thousands of ratings? Thousands of ratings in there. The majority of them are giving us five out of five. That's pretty good. I'm saying to you that that is what enables us to do our work. That only if you do this can you be fit for the requirements of clients in the future. Only if you do this do you get rich data, recent data that you can use for AI.
t that in a second, but you can't have skinny, unreliable, old data for AI and hope to make something good out of that. AI doesn't transform junk into something good. It is absolutely critical that we treat people not as commodities, which is what the industry does. It treats people as commodities. It gives them boring surveys, badly written, and expects that data to be good, as I say. The other day, somebody was saying there's a new innovation in panel companies. They're no longer going to not pay you for the screening service. 'Cause what happens if you join a lot of the panel companies is you do one survey, short survey, three or four questions, and it says, "Sorry, you don't suit this survey.
You're not the right person." You do another one, and you don't get paid for that. You do another one, you don't get paid for that. Sometimes you don't get paid at all after five or six of these. Someone says, "Actually, this company is gonna start paying for all of those." We've been doing that since the year 2000. We've been paying people for every single thing that they do for us. In this sense, there's no screening out. You always get a survey. You always get paid. It's fundamental. Imagine what happens if you join a panel and you go to survey after survey and you get kicked out. The first thing you're gonna do is you're gonna lie, aren't you? You're gonna actually say...
You, you'll quickly work out what you're meant to say to get in the survey, that's how fraud starts. We're almost encouraging fraud by making the experience so bad. If it was a good experience and you were paid properly for it, then it might be a different story. You'll hear a little bit about what we're doing about that in that area later. Panel as a commodity is a disaster, and that's what almost everybody else is doing. I would almost say everybody else. For us, we are a public-facing brand. No other panel has a actual proper public-facing brand. A brand that means something. It has a social mission.
YouGov explains itself in its title, and that is something meaningful to people, and that is why they join a panel and stay in a panel. That is why we are still the industry-leading pioneer. Cast your mind back. When was the Theresa May elections? Was that 2016? 2017. In 2017, we used MRP for the first time. We were a pioneer of MRP cause we actually were involved with the people who invented it. We tested it with them. We actually gave them some money towards it. We were the first with that, and we did, that's a machine learning algorithm, essentially same word as AI.
With that, we had the most accurate poll that anyone had ever seen, actually, it was an astonishing one. If you remember, everybody thought Theresa May was gonna win it by a landslide. We said she would lose seats. Everybody ridiculed us. On the night when it happened, constituency after constituency was correct. We didn't just say overall what would happen. We were correct on nearly every constituency, and it was the most incredible performance, and that was using a form of AI of machine learning. That is what you need. You need recent accurate data combined with things like census data in order to be successful in AI. The source data that is required for AI, for the next phase of AI, has to be good data. It has to be recent.
It has to be connected. It has to be rich. Those are the characteristics of ours. Genuinely connected, continuously updated, multi-level profile and tracking, combining behavioral and survey data. That is what you need to input into AI. You can't put a crappy poll into a machine and ChatGPT turns it into something interesting. It won't happen. That is why we believe that we will continue to innovate and continue to lead the industry, even with these, well, not even, especially, with these new tools that are so appropriate to our data. Now, why do we think that we can be that we're in the best position to deliver to clients?
Well, the industry problem, and this is a controversial thing to say, but our industry is dysfunctional, and it's dysfunctional because it's fragmented. Nobody has panels in every country. It's a big ask, so I don't blame anybody. We don't have it. It means that you always have to cobble together for a global study, other people's data, often three or four people, suppliers for a single country, where it's a difficult thing to do. That is gonna be poor data. Even when we do it's gonna be not great data because we're relying on data that we're buying in. Nobody can offer, even in their strong panels. They can't offer the richness of properly representative panels at scale.
Well, most people can do one representative survey, one representative sample. If you actually want to do a large study and have the right number of different levels of education, of income, of minorities and so forth, and even just young people who are very hard to reach, it's difficult to do that at scale. If you have a customer like a luxury brands company, it's very hard to reach the early adopters of expensive things. There are lots and lots of niche cases that nearly all companies want. Even companies that have a large profile will have little niche areas that they want research in, and, well, the whole industry struggles to achieve that. It's, it's very hard to do.
Yes, those are the what's lacking in it. The tools, therefore, also aren't connected. They also don't work across all those countries. It is a fragmented industry, and we believe that the only way to solve that is to have highly engaged panels in every major company, that is to say, with global reach, and that only genuinely connected data can be operationalized properly. Our solution, therefore, is to further improve and deepen the panelist experience. You will see the next stage of that when you see our demos in a moment, where we think we take very seriously the panelist experience, and to globalize further with panel. You know, we've made a lot of advances in that, but we have further to go.
You know, we can do more interesting things like connecting survey data with behavioral data and so forth. That is what we're trying to achieve. Of course, our architecture for that, some of you have seen this before, is this thing which we call a platform. Let's just think for a moment what a platform is. A platform isn't just having a website with a few products on it, because everybody now says they've got a platform. If you look at the, if you look at our rivals', websites, every one of them says platform in it. What does a platform really mean? It means you're bringing together, you're using technology to bring together, different groups, in our case, the public with clients.
It could be car drivers with passengers and so on. In a technological way, in a connected way, and creating value to both sides. That is what we do when we have panelists that are assured of their privacy, that have a good experience, that find what they do interesting, and supply data to people that need to talk to them and then improve services and products back into society. We think that's a virtual circle, and that is what makes us a proper platform company. The essence of it, as I've said twice, I'm gonna say it two or three more times today, is a panel that is large, has scale, is representative, has connected data because it's with you for a long time.
That is the basis of everything. On top of that, we've built the Cube, which is the biggest dataset of its kind that's ever existed. I mean, it has, well, it's certainly billions, probably more data in it. Sarah's probably gonna tell me it's trillions or whatever. It is trillions of data pieces in there, all structured. All of this has a codebook of all the variables you could want, and it's done over time. It's updated every day, and of course, it has lots of different people in it that makes it cubic. That lends itself to analysis. It lends itself to machine learning algorithms and all of that stuff, because it's organized.
On top of that sits Crunch, which I've talked about, which is a highly sophisticated data analysis tool. Those three things together is an engine on which you can build an entire universe of offers, entire. That goes through all the workflows that marketing people have. All of it is connected, and all of it is recent, and all of it is goes towards accuracy. The bar across the side is the interfaces and tech systems that enable this and that allow people to reach that, including the dashboards that let you do self-service. Those four boxes, Crunch, Cube, or Panel, Cube, Crunch, and the interfaces, that is a platform.
That is the basis on which we're doing all of our work going forward, and it's efficient, and it's highly. It creates very valuable data in a very effective way. The bar next to it is CenX. That means our Centres of Excellence. They are outsourced service centers, and they are a good way of giving high-quality service to people and extending the availability over time so that it won't be long before we'll be at 24/7. We're not at 24/7 at the moment. And they are equipped to give templated solutions. That is to say, to do the things that marketers do all the time.
They can help you use the platform to be in a very efficient way, to help you do the self-service and to have a simple level of service. If you're a major customer, with lots of different needs, wanna be on the forefront of experimentation, want someone to work with you and help you develop your ideas and your designs and so forth, then you're gonna go to our Expert Research teams, and of course it's a much more account managed service. That together creates the architecture of our platform. It allows constant data to be produced. You can use it at every level.
You can use it at different types of service, and it is at the forefront of all the developments such as AI. Just because I'd forgotten to mention it before, when I'm talking about AI, we haven't got a section discussing AI, and you probably wanna talk about it in the Q&A, but I should have said that we have at least three different uses of AI at the moment. One is, obviously, to develop the analytics side of it. Another is for interactive surveys. The next stage of collecting data will be to use chat, to have surveys that respond to what you say. It's a much more efficient. We've been testing this.
It's a much more efficient way of collecting data and more fun. And thirdly, sorry, remind me.
Operational.
Yeah, the operational efficiencies. CenX will become more and more processes will be helped by that. All right. Why is it a platform? Again, just to sum it up, not from that sort of more sort of the blocks of it, but to look at it, as you will see in the demos, as three different pieces. The public, we have a very strong, as I say, consumer-facing brand that provides lots of data for the public. We now have essentially an encyclopedia of opinion that we are building, and you will see what that looks like. And in fact, it's live, so you can go and play around with it yourself.
That public data, which most people experience as polls in newspapers, is the one of the reasons, or probably the main reason, why our panelists like interacting with us. Sometimes they say they actually say in feedback, when we just talked about the experience, they say, "Well, it doesn't pay a lot, but I feel as if I'm doing something worthwhile." The sense that there's a public data site, which is growing and growing, it becomes a Wikipedia. As I say, you will see that in a moment. That is a critical part of our tripartite, if you like, platform. That site makes people into members.
It encourages people to become members. Of course, members are the ones that see something valuable happening out of their, out of their surveys, out of their survey work. They also get rewards. They get financial rewards. They also get, with Safe now, where they can download their datasets and get value for those. They can actually get control of their own data that other platforms have on them. In a transparent way, they know exactly how it's being used. They get some control back over their own data.
There are the clients, of course, who pay for it all and get the benefits, and those benefits even go back to the public 'cause, of course, you get improved services and products and so forth. That is our virtuous circle, which is three parts of the platform. At that point, you, of course, want to see the platform, and I now invite up Charlie Brady to show us through, please come up, Charlie, the first part of the platform. I'm gonna replace this and hope not to. There we go.
Thank you very much. Check we're in. Hi. Good afternoon. I'm Charlie Brady. I'm the Product Director for the Public Portal. I started at YouGov in January. This is a baptism of fire. It's been a really exciting few months to be working at YouGov. I'm sure it's exciting all the time, but I've had a really good time. One of the things that I'm gonna show you today is the new Public Portal homepage that we've been working on. Before I do, I just thought I would recap some of Stephan's points about what the Public Portal is and why we have it. The Public Portal is actually an umbrella term for 13 different sites across 10 different jurisdictions, and they're the way in which we make our encyclopedia of public opinion freely available.
The reason we do this is twofold. As Stephan mentioned, YouGov has a social mission to make people's voices heard, and we know from members that this is really valuable to them. They want to be part of the debate. They want to feel they're into that conversation. That's really, really important to us. There is a commercial benefit as well to the public platform, and that is that it creates an environment whereby we attract members and we attract clients. It's quite a straightforward process in a way. We have high-quality data. We have a really good reputation for accuracy, for thoroughness, those kind of things. YouGov is frequently cited in newspapers, on the radio, in Parliament. I often have quite a good time combing through Hansard to see where we got mentioned.
And that means people have heard of us, and they trust us. When they're thinking about joining a panel, when they're thinking about buying product, we're a name in their mind, and they come to us. The other thing is that often, you know, they may change. We may have members who also are clients and that kind of thing. What I thought I would do is I would give you a quick demo of the public portal. I'm gonna show you the U.K. and the U.S. consumer sites. Those are the ones that went live last week with the relaunch, but they're also the ones with the most traffic. We're gonna have a look through them. There will be time for questions after all the demos.
After we've had a look, I'm gonna tell you about some of our plans for what's next. This is the U.K. site. You can see it up there. What I want to draw your attention to first is the search bar. I don't know if any of you are familiar with the site as it looked before, but we've made search much more prominent. There are two reasons for that. One, we want people to be able to find stuff. It's really useful if you know how to search. More importantly, it says a lot about who we are. I mean, it actually says a lot about who we are. Public opinion about anything and everything. More importantly, searching for opinion data is who we are.
You can find anything. We want that to be up there loud and proud. The other thing we've introduced, I'm gonna start typing, I'm hoping you'll be able to see this clearly, is auto-suggest. You can see here I've added in most popular. Most popular actors, most popular airlines. If I change, we have most popular brands. We have most popular business figures. I don't know if anybody's particularly interested in most popular cat breeds. We have a lot of things going on there. It works with names as well. If I type in Boris, if you're interested, you can find out what the U.K. thinks about his competence, his decisiveness, his strengths. It also works for our product.
One of the things I'm gonna do as we work through the demo is I'm gonna point out opportunities at which people who visited this site have the opportunity to move forward into a different relationship with us, relationship as a member or as a client. Here, we're showcasing some of our products, and if that's what you're looking for, we're gonna get you there really fast. Again, two reasons: navigational, obviously, but also another opportunity to showcase the breadth and depth of the content we offer. If I switch to the U.S. site, you'll see it now looks the same. They did look different before, and I will come on to explain why we've made them look similar. You can see the layout's the same, search bar. What I'm gonna talk about now is the purple and green pills that you see under the search bar.
These are a curated search. These are fast ways into key areas of content. At the moment, this is done manually, as in I look at what's going on in the news, what hot topics are, what we know people are searching for, and I curate these. The purple ones go to product. Sorry, the purple ones go to content, and the green ones go to product. Again, another opportunity to move users of this site into a commercial relationship with us. We hope over time these will become responsive. Responsive to what we know people are searching for, responsive to what's going on, but also responsive to what you're looking for. It will begin to learn. Let me show you this. Idris Elba, from a YouGov point of view, is an entity. He's a thing.
A thing is something we have data about. It could be a person, it could be a brand, it could be a group, it could be an issue, but it's something we have opinion data about. Our rated entities have a page. They have a hub, and this is where all of the content we have about Idris leads to. If you're interested in Idris, this is where you're gonna go. You can see here, we know how famous he is in America. We know how popular he is, and if I expand that data, you can see that we have an additional level of granularity there. We can see his fame and popularity by age and also by gender. Surprising to me, he's actually slightly more popular and famous with men than with women. There we go.
It's really good to have snapshots of Idris's fame and popularity or anything, but more importantly, is seeing that over time. If I scroll down here, you'll see the fame and popularity tracker. We track this over time, so we can see trending data, and we can see, for example, that Idris is holding pretty steady, but we saw an increase around about Q1 2022. When Charlie gets to his demo, and there are two Charlies, and I'm sorry about that. When Charlie gets to his demo, he'll explain a little more about that. The other thing that's really important about data is that you have it in context. It's great to know that 58% of America likes Idris, but what does that mean? That's where we go to rankings.
If I move over to the right here, you'll see two lists, contemporary actors and all-time actors. If I open the contemporary actors, this is a ranking. This is the most popular contemporary actors as of Q1 2023. Morgan Freeman's there up at the top. 97% of people have heard of him. 83% of people like him. Idris was 143, so I don't think Mr. Freeman needs to worry just yet. The good news for Idris is he's on the way up. If I hover over Denzel, you see poor Denzel is on the way down at the moment. I'm just gonna go back to Idris' page and show you some more things. I'd like to call your attention to the blue bar, the chat bar.
This also went live last week. This is a really important innovation for us. The assumption is I'm here because I like Idris. I want to know more about Idris Elba or, I don't know, BAND-AID or whatever. I have consumed that content, and I have enjoyed reading that content. The next step is to start creating that content, to take that first step to being a member. This is our most recent innovation in creating that. If I just open this box here, you'll see, "Share your opinion on Idris Elba." Up on the right, loading up, will be a series of questions. Now, I'm not gonna spend much more time on this because actually Sarah's gonna demo what happens next when we get to her 'cause there's a beautiful handoff with the member platform.
The point is that this is an opportunity to get millions of users of this site into active and engaged participation and content creation. I'm gonna go back now to the homepage, and one of the other things I'd like to show you is the browsing. We've done quite a lot of user research, and what we heard was that users would really like a way of understanding the different types of content we have available and also of honing in on subjects that were particularly of interest to them. Again, because we're all about participation, we want to do that too. This is our featured tab. We have a little bit of everything on there. We have, for example, a tracker. I'm just gonna open that so you get a chance to see what a tracker is.
Every week, we ask 1,000 Americans how they're feeling. We have a similar poll running in the U.K. You can see there that we have different things we can pull in and out: stressed, bored, lonely, so on and so forth. Again, you can dive into that by age, education, and gender. We have trackers, and we put those front and center. We have articles, these are beneath here. We also have rankings. You see on the right-hand side there is a brand ranking. The other thing we want to do, as I mentioned, is drill into the subject specific. If I flick onto entertainment, you will see here that all those cards have refreshed, and we're now looking at cards, related to entertainment.
Social media influence, paid film consumption, and rap and hip-hop music artists all over there. You can see right on the far right side there, we've got Snoop Dogg in at number one, Ice Cube at number two, and then LL Cool J. One of the things that I wanted to show you and I didn't show you before, so if you forgive me for going back into Idris, I understand now I'm sounding like I've got an obsession with Idris Elba. I wanted to show you an example of an article. These are a really lovely way of engaging with people. About two weeks ago, we did a poll, who would you like to be the next Bond? Idris came up top. He always does.
Henry Cavill came in second. It went through the list. People were allowed to make their own suggestions. Again, it's a really nice way of engaging with people. People come here because they've seen it in Twitter, it's been quoted in the news, and they want to find out more. If you're interested, people's most favorite Bond is Sean Connery. I don't know how people feel about that. I don't think George Lazenby did very well. The other thing I wanted to show you is the daily questions. You can see here on the daily questions: Which continent would you like to explore on a future vacation? These are light-hearted. They're about engagement. We don't reward people for answering these, but they really like doing it because they're fun.
What happens when you answer them is we then tell you what everybody else said, so you know where you fit in, and people really like that. Again, like chat, like many of our other things, it's another way in to moving from being a content consumer to being a content creator. That's almost everything I wanted to show you on the site. Just before we move on to what's next, I just wanted to highlight what happens next in terms of the platform. Hopefully you've heard something, you've seen something, you've come here, and you think, "Oh, I really wanna be a member," or, "I really want to buy a product from you. What do I do next?" We have a number of ways of helping you do that. At the top here, we have the business menu.
If you wanna work with us, you know what you're looking for, and that's great, you can go straight in here. If you don't, there's a link at the bottom will take you to the business website. We also have over here the opportunity to sign in and key to sign up. If you want to be a member or you want to create a free business account, you can. Charlie will talk more about some of the data that we allow you to have for free, but those are those opportunities there. Again, if I go down, you'll see we have two really clear call to actions here. This is for our potential panelists. If you wanna join our community, this is how you do it.
If you want to know what people think about working with us, about being our panel members, you can go through and see those excellent Trustpilot ratings we were talking about earlier. Finally, we have the business links. Again, following that explore, plan, activate, track methodology, this is how you would engage with us, again, on a business level. That's everything I wanted to show you about the demo. We will take questions at the end. I will also be available outside with my laptop, if you want to dig more into the Idris data. I did wanna take just a moment to talk about what's next. As I said at the beginning, we have made the U.K. and the U.S. platforms look, websites look more alike. That's because we have a strategy of unification. I talked about 13 different websites.
That's great, but we would like to bring them into one. There are some practical reasons for that. Obviously, it'll be more efficient from a resource point of view if we're just managing one platform. More importantly, it's about who we are. That the YouGov public portal is the one place you go to find anything and everything. We want to be able to showcase our multi-jurisdictional capabilities in one place. The other things we're looking at are greater personalization. At the moment, people come to us and they consume our data. We would like them to be able to track things they're interested in, and we will push that to them. We would like to use that perhaps as a vehicle for soft membership. There's a lot of things around that that we're looking at as well.
Hopefully, we'll be able to show you some more of that at a future date. That's everything I wanted to share with you. Thank you very much for your time. I'll hand over to Sarah.
Thank you very much for that, Charlie. Hi, everyone. I'm Sarah Francis. I've been at YouGov for around two years now, and I'm responsible for our member part of our platform and our overall member experience. It's really great to be here with you today, to talk about what we're doing to engage our members all around the world and encourage them to share data with us. Our member portal is the launchpad for our 24 million members around the world to join, share their data, and finally to get rewarded. They put a huge amount of trust in us every single day, as Stephan's mentioned. Collectively, they share 8 million data points every day, and that number is constantly growing. The value of that data is enormous. It's huge to us, it's huge to our clients, and it powers everything we do as a business.
We also know that the value of that data grows the longer a member stays engaged. As we've all touched on so far, the trust our members have in us is the foundation of that long-term relationship that is so important to us. I'm gonna read you a quote now from one of our members. "For the longest time, I've been absolutely certain no one heard or understood the average person. My YouGov experience has been remarkable. I couldn't have asked for more. Someone out there is listening and amplifying small voices." That kinda sums up what we're doing with our public data, with our public mission, and that's why member experience is so important to us. We know that a great experience correlates with really high-quality data, long-term membership, and higher trust.
As you know, the data we collect tells a story, and it tells that story over time. That story is about what the world thinks to everything from Harry Potter and Harry Styles to Prince Harry and HARIBO. Those stories are invaluable to the brands and the businesses and to the thousands of others that we track. In today's demo, I'm gonna show you what our member portal looks like now, including the recent innovations that we've made, and I'm gonna share how we optimize at each point for member lifetime value. First, I think it's really important that you understand how everything I'm gonna show you fits together conceptually. We have one member portal, and we have many ways to engage. Our approach is really pragmatic. We know that the world is changing all the time.
We know that technology is constantly evolving, and there are lots of different ways to share data and lots of different companies that our members can share data with. On our part, we make it really easy for them to do it, and we make sure that they are fairly rewarded for the data that they share. As most of you will be aware, we've made a number of acquisitions in recent years, and our focus over the last 12 months has been on integrating these into our product ecosystem. You can see a ring. On the outer ring, we've got YouGov Chat and YouGov FreeWall, and these act as innovative ways into the panel that have mass market appeal. In the center, we have our global panel. These are the 24 million people around the world they participate in market research every day.
Finally, in the center, we have YouGov Plus. I'm gonna come on to that a little bit later, but it's our recently launched ID verified premium tier of membership, and it's comprised of our most active, engaged, and long-term members. Let's take a look. I'm gonna start where Charlie finished on the U.S. public data website. I've arrived on Snoop Dogg's page because I've seen a list of rap music artists, and he was number one. I'm a big fan of Snoop, and you'll learn why later. I'm gonna show you how the chat section works on here, and how that's a route into our panel. As Charlie and Stephan have already mentioned, part of our social mission is to give people the opportunity to talk about things that they're passionate about, that they care about.
I am a big fan of Snoop, so I'm gonna come along here, click this Answer Now button. This pops up a little chat. First, I'm asked what I think about music artist Snoop Dogg. As a huge fan, I'm gonna say I have a positive opinion about him. I'm then asked how strongly I hold that opinion. Again, big fan, very strongly. Finally, I'm asked why I feel this way. This is really important because we're not just tracking the what, we're tracking the why. These comments that we're collecting here, we've got millions of them, help us build that encyclopedia of public data that's so important to us. I'm gonna type a little note in here. Just I love his music, something nice and simple.
I'm asked if I want to see what other people think about Snoop. One thing that we find consistently when we speak to members of our panel and others is that they really care about how they fit into the world, how their opinions compare to other people's. Like most people do, I'm gonna click this View Comments button. This is where we prompt them to share some information with us and start their journey to becoming a panel member. They confirm their country, I'm on the U.S. site, so it defaults to the U.S. Enter my email address. I'm asked to confirm that that email address belongs to me, as I'm sure you'll all be familiar with from many websites. That will pop up on my phone.
I also have the option here to subscribe to receive daily invites to chat about things that matter to me, hot topics. I'm gonna say yes to that option. Now I can finally see what other people think to Snoop. We always try and present a balanced view of public opinion. We don't skew one way or another. In the first section, I can see thoughts from people who answered the same, so big fans. A bit further down, I can see thoughts from people who answered differently. I can interact with these comments as well. I can say if I agree or disagree with them using these little icons here. This is essentially data about data.
We've got the what people think, we've got the why they think it, and then we've got what they think to what other people think, which is a bit of a tongue twister. This allows us to understand public opinion and understand how united or divided the public is on certain topics. All of these comments are fully moderated before they're published. In another use of AI, we have a machine learning algorithm that moderates these. It's been trained on over five million comments over the past year and a half. This makes sure that we filter out what we need to, but we also provide a space where legitimate, strongly held opinions can be shared. In the background, I have received an email with a link to the member portal, which is what I'll show you now.
Next up, we have our member portal. This is what members around the world will generally interact with in order to launch the different types of research opportunities that we have available for them. I'm not gonna talk about YouGov Plus right now. I'll come back to that later. As you know, we have so many ways of sharing data. We have research surveys. These are the research surveys that we conduct on behalf of clients, or the ones that power our data products. We have flash surveys. These have been designed and built by our clients directly in our self-service platform. These require a really quick response, we call those flash surveys. Members can upload their data. This could be lots of different types of data here.
It could be their Netflix viewing history, it could be their Steam gaming history, it could be their financial transaction history from their bank account. They can even install software if they want, it's optional, so that we can securely, ethically track what they're browsing on the internet and report on that. This section, this task carousel, we call it, is personalized to each member. We're not asking for data that we don't need from them. Crucially, they're not invited to opportunities that aren't open to them. If, for example, we only needed data about Netflix history from 18 to 24-year-old males, we could show this card about Netflix just to 18 to 24-year-old males. That means it's financially efficient for us as well.
As Stephan mentioned, one of the parts of our, we call it our panel promise, is that if we invite you to a survey or an activity, we'll make sure that there's always something for you to do. That, again, helps us build that trust with our member base and keeps them sticking around for longer. It's been part of our panel promise for over a decade, and it's something our members love. Scrolling down. The next section is all about engagement. These activities are things that members do for fun. They do them to have a voice, and they tend to be about topics that are gonna be of interest to them. You've already seen the daily questions. I'm on the U.K. site at the moment. We're asking, "Should more homes be built on the green belt?" and about rent reforms.
These are quite serious today. We also have this rate everything widget, and it's completely randomized what you see. But members can rate, we call them entities, things that they may have heard of, and tell us what they think to them. We collect hundreds of thousands of these every day. Then scrolling a little bit further down, you can see our daily chat. Today's topic is all about summer travel and whether people are spending more, less or about the same as usual. You can scroll through the topics and see what we've been talking about recently. We know that members who engage with these types of activities, these fun voice activities, tend to stay around for longer.
They tend to be our more valuable members, because they feel like they're able to talk about things that are important to them. A very recent innovation that we've launched, Stephan hinted about YouGov Safe, where you can actually download the data that you've shared and control that. We've now started to show our members how they're progressing with us. Giving them a rank, showing them their lifetime earnings, enabling them to track things like their response rate and how they compare to others. Finally, on the dashboard, we've got our reward section. We've recently expanded this. We worked in partnership with our members to do that, to make sure we have the right types of rewards in each market. We've also automated it.
When you reach the threshold now to cash out your points, you get your reward within seconds. Again, this is building trust, a crucial part of that journey. What we don't want is members to cash out and then leave, stop sharing data. We want them to keep coming back and sharing more with us. That's what we've done, and we have started to roll that out globally, and that'll be done by the end of our financial year. This is a huge part of trust building, as I said, and it's one of the reasons why our Trustpilot score is 4.5. The industry average is 3.6. We're well above that, and we are currently top in the industry and intending to stay there. I'm now going to show you YouGov Plus, which, as I mentioned earlier, is our new premium tier membership.
It's ID-verified, and it's for our most active and engaged members. I'm gonna go through a live verification flow, so you can see how that works. It's gonna be fun. I'll talk you through the different types of activities that our YouGov Plus members will have access to. Handpicked members are shown this little card who join YouGov Plus. We've made it black to appear premium. Tried various options. This was the winner. Here they see a simple introduction that explains the benefits of joining, what they can expect from us, and what we expect from them in return. They will unlock high points activities, gain early access to new features, get a welcome bonus, but in return, we expect them to verify they are who they say they are. I'm going to get started.
I'm gonna confirm that I'm happy to join. I'm then asked to enter my details exactly as they appear on my ID. You're all learning my middle name. I actually have my passport with me so that I can do this live. We partnered with a company called Yoti for ID verification, rather than building that ourselves, we've partnered. It keeps the cost down for us, and it also ensures that we're managing that risk. If I now click Verify my ID, I'm taken to the flow. It's explained to me really clearly. A photo of my ID is needed, and a quick scan of my face to make sure it's not a photo of a passport and then a photo of a photo. It checks I'm alive. We built in smartphone integration here as well.
The reason for that is because cameras on phones are just so much better. Rather than a blurry webcam picture, I'll hand off to my phone to take a photo. This is not going to be terribly entertaining for you, this next couple of minutes, but I will narrate what's happening on my screen. I'm scanning the QR code. I'm sure we're all familiar with how that works. You can see it's transferred over to my phone. It's now asking me for the issuing country for my ID, which is the U.K., and it's a passport. It wants to access the camera, so it can take a little photo. I can do that now. It's uploading. It's happy with the photo, and it now wants a quick scan of my face. That's the liveness check.
It's a little selfie to make sure that I am actually moving and human and alive. It's asking me to scan my face, move a little bit. In the background, it's taking a very, very short video. That worked. It directs me back to the desktop to continue the journey. As you can imagine, that can sometimes take a little while. Hopefully, it won't. I can show you the tasks in a second. To cover those cases where it might take a little while in the background, we remind them that they need to wait for an email that will come in the background. If I hit refresh, you can see I've now got this new branded YouGov Plus part at the top and a new section on my dashboard called YouGov Plus.
Here are a number of examples of activities that we're gonna be asking these Plus members to do. We're calling these asynchronous tasks. A survey is something you do, you take part in it, and you finish it in one session. An asynchronous task might be leaving the house and noting down every advert you see, how many are there, what are they for? Coming back and logging them. It might be keeping a diary. It might be more of a qual activity, like recording a video review of your favorite game. There are lots of different types of activities we can do here, and we're working with clients to determine what those will be. You can see there's some examples here.
Reviewing our internal ESG policy, understanding what Google knows about a person, mystery shopping, joining a LinkedIn community, and uploading their energy smart meter readings. Once the task is done, before we issue points for these, we ask them to rate the task, and that's for two reasons. One is so that we can give that valuable feedback to our clients, and secondly, so that we start to send members more of what interests them. We can build up that model and maximize the chances of high response rates. I'm gonna click Claim points and just show you it's very, very simple one to five star rating system. You'll see that that disappears, and in the background, my points have been added.
That's YouGov Plus. Today you have seen from me the three different tiers of engagement. Chat, mass market, the regular panel, and then this core inner YouGov Plus premium tier. I've shown you how we build that trust and how important that trust is to us, the trust of our members to encourage that long-term membership that's so valuable to us. Now I'm gonna hand over to Charlie, who is going to show you how the member data that we've collected is transformed within our client portal.
All right. Thank you, Sarah. Hello, everybody. My name is Charlie. I'm Charlie number two. I'm our VP of Data Products. I've been at YouGov for about 10 years now. I'd like to start by just recapping what we've shown you so far with these demonstrations. We began with Charlie number one, who went through the public-facing experience, highlighting how we're able to entice new members, generate commercial leads, and establish ourselves as the leading source of public opinion data. We heard from Sarah, who's taken us through the member experience, what it's like to join that community and have that voice heard, showing you how we can engage our members, build trust, and ultimately collect vast amounts of high-value connected data.
I'm now gonna bring us full circle to show you how clients then leverage that data and the journey they go on as they use our products and services. My goal is to show you not only what a fantastic experience they have and why they keep coming back for more, but also how throughout those interactions, we're able to promote discovery of our broader suite of products and services. I'm going to start here on really where Charlie number one left off. We're gonna show you a little bit of a public data article. I'm gonna pretend that I'm a client for this experience. We'll reveal who in just a minute. I've landed on this article. I might have come here because I was emailed it by our marketing team.
I might have Googled it, or simply, I might have known that YouGov's website is the place to go for this kind of public opinion and perception data. I've consumed the article, I've enjoyed it, I've been inspired by it, and I wanna do more. I wanna to use the data that sort of powered this and many other things. I'm gonna sign in, and as I said, I'm gonna be a client, I'm just gonna sign in here as a client. For this example, I'm gonna pretend to be Booking.com, the online travel agency, and at this point, hopefully, I can reveal why we've been showing you these various random examples. I don't think Charlie has an Idris Elba obsession. Maybe she does, there was a reason behind why we were showing you Idris for those examples.
Here we are on the client portal, the YouGov platform. This is a true platform with complete interoperability between our different services. It knows who I am. I've logged in. You can see, "Hello, Charlie." It knows who I am. It knows my title. It knows my industry, and crucially, it knows what I have, but also what I don't yet have. That ability for us to show you the rest of YouGov is gonna hopefully shine through as I take you through the different steps of the client portal. I'm gonna start here in the top left-hand corner, this sidebar. This exists on all of our products and services, and it enables our clients to move seamlessly between the different products they subscribe to, as well as seeing those that they yet don't have.
You can see currently, my products include YouGov Profiles. That's our audience segmentation tool. YouGov BrandIndex, that's our daily brand tracking tool. I'm a big user of YouGov Surveys. That's our self-serve capability, which we're gonna show you in a minute. Of course, I'm accessing my data via YouGov Crunch, the advanced analytics tool that Stephan referenced earlier. Here you can see below the opportunity to discover a new product. Sarah mentioned that we encourage and reward our members for sharing their own private personal data, in this case, in the form of transaction data, and that then manifests here as the product YouGov Finance. I may want to check that out, explore this and learn more or, of course, explore our full product suite.
If I come back to the main site, at the top, you can see a dedicated section to YouGov Surveys. We are gonna run one of these live. I'll come back to that in a short while. Further down, we now see our two flagship syndicated data products. Profiles there on the left-hand side, as I said, audience segmentation tool. BrandIndex on the right, daily brand tracker. As I said, I am in this example subscribing to both. Lucky me. If I wasn't yet a subscriber to one of these products, instead, what I would see is our lite version, a sort of teaser or a taster of the data. I can explore some of that data, free data, before it then asks me to get in touch for a demonstration.
We're able to entice people, show them a little bit, and get them excited really about what might be in store if they took a demo or subscribed to that product. We can generate leads directly there from the platform and the other tools. Here we highlight how the data then fits into a client's typical workflow. From exploring and planning with the Profiles tool through to then activating and tracking using our daily BrandIndex survey. That's what we're gonna go through as a real example today. If I keep going down, we get into the insights and ideas. It knew I was travel. It would curate this content to be more engaging, more interesting to me as a travel-based client. Articles, again, that might inspire me, show me a little bit more of the rest of the data we have at YouGov.
Again, it just shows how this is the one-stop shop for all of your research needs. There's a reason to come here, not just to access my products, but to also engage with content and learn and be inspired. Further down still, we then get into the contact and support area. Down here we can see the opportunity to book a demo if I've seen something that did pique my interest. I could also engage with live chat. Here, Live Chat on the bottom right-hand corner, that's the ability to talk to a real person.
They're gonna be part of our 24 hour a day, five days a week global support team, based offshore that can pick up any of those immediate questions someone might have to redirect or to bring in someone else to support them if needed. Bottom right-hand corner, we have our help center. This is where clients can go to access FAQs, user guides, webinars, anything they might need to know in order to really use and, get the best value from their subscriptions with us. Ultimately, what we're able to do there with the chatbot and the self-serve features, but also have that ability to talk to someone, is appeal and support across the full spectrum of service needs, which enables us not only to suit our clients' preferences. Many clients do just want self-serve.
They just want to get what they want when they need it and not have to speak to someone. We've got them covered. We also have some of those bigger clients, some of the blue-chip clients, where they do want that white glove service. They do want to speak to an expert researcher and get that ability to have consultation and guidance. We can direct our resources where it's best suited. Let's scroll back up to the top now, and we're actually going to go for a live example. I have prepared some of these analyses just to save you the pain of watching me type, and we're going to start here in our Profiles tool. As I said, Booking.com, and my brief is to develop a campaign, an advertising campaign that's going to try and move some of our considerers through to being actual users.
We know these people are considering us from our BrandIndex data, and that's the basis of my audience here. You might see this Booking.com considerers. I've created this audience, and I'm gonna compare and contrast that to the general population for context to understand what makes our target group unique. Now on the left-hand side, you can see the data tree. These are all the different variables that you can access to understand this audience. From basic demographics and psychographics through to consumer behaviors, brand use, the media consumption or ratings data, and this is all gonna be fresh and relevant and recent data. However, the better vision group of you may have noticed we have actually, we've gone back in time. If you can see we're in the U.S., and we're in 2022, early 2022.
Actually what we've done here is go back in time to explore a particular campaign that Booking.com ran, which was, and a bit of a spoiler alert, a Super Bowl campaign. That's what we're gonna do. If you remember the Super Bowl from last year, you might even remember the campaign. That ability to go back in time is crucial. It's a differentiator. It's a big USP of ours because as soon as a client subscribes, they can access those historical datasets. They can literally time travel and go back and see what were the insights or the makeup of that particular audience back then and compare and contrast to now. We'll see that even stronger with the BrandIndex tool with our history of data.
Let's start our campaign building idea with some consumer behavior data, and we're gonna take a look at some sports data, and we're gonna show you whether or not, in fact, the Super Bowl was a good choice. Obviously, I wouldn't be showing you this if I didn't think it was a smart choice. We're gonna show you whether or not actually NFL fans are going to be found more likely amongst this particular audience. If I bring in the sports followed core, we can see right at the top of the list there, football, the NFL, that is the top liked and followed sports amongst our Booking.com considerers, and it's over-indexing by a substantial margin against the general population. A good start. The Super Bowl is likely to have been a good pick.
I move across to the next tab, we're then just gonna go a layer deeper. I'm going to drill in further to this audience of Booking.com considerers and combine it with the NFL fandom. Here we're now gonna look at NFL fans considering Booking.com. If we are gonna do a Super Bowl campaign, this is ultimately the audience we want to reach or will be reaching and therefore need to make sure the content is gonna resonate. Now we're looking at some statements about advertising. Part of our psychographics around advertising, you can see the long, long list here on the left-hand side, and I wanna draw out a couple of different statements here that are gonna help us decide the best content for the campaign. First of all, they do expect advertisements to entertain them.
They enjoy watching advertisements with their favorite celebrities, and they do pay attention to the ads at events. Again, Super Bowl is looking like a great choice. You can probably see where I'm going with this. Celebrities, they want to see an advert with their favorite celebrity. Of course, this is where our good friend Idris Elba comes in. We can use Profiles data to understand whether or not Idris Elba would've been or was an effective choice for this particular campaign. You've probably, again, guessed that it was a good choice otherwise we wouldn't have been showing you this. Yes, Idris Elba has a high proportion of positive people that fill into this NFL fans considering Booking.com compared to the general population. Idris was a good choice.
I'm obviously not here to pick holes in the campaign that they did. It was a great campaign, and it was very successful, and Idris was a great choice. Just to highlight how our data could go even further, if I actually sort our entire list, it's not Morgan Freeman, it's actually Jon Hamm would've been perhaps the best bang for your buck type of option, as it has that biggest differentiator against the general population. That's just a sort of step further they could have gone with our database. We're gonna move shortly now into the tracking phase. At this point in this hypothetical example, we've used the data to create the campaign, to plan the campaign, and we're ready to launch and then track.
Before we do, I want to highlight the ability to then conduct custom research as part of this syndicated world. This is one of, if not our biggest USP when it comes to why we're different, why we're doing data and research differently. On the left-hand side, you might have been able to spot this custom folder. If I did do custom research, what I can then do is not only use the Profiles data to target very specific, very granular, very unique audiences, but I can also then load that data I collect back into the Profiles tool, thus unlocking what's unrivaled cross-tabbing capabilities. The tens of the hundreds of thousands of variables in here, I can then actually explore in great depth amongst my custom research.
What we're seeing is clients understand that, recognizing that, experiencing that, and the light bulb moment of why would I commission custom research with anyone else? I can't get that same level of connection that YouGov can offer, and I can do all my work with YouGov and benefit from that cross-tabbing, from that connection and that rich data that comes with YouGov research. Let's take a little bit of a closer look at that. I'm gonna come now back to our sidebar, and I'm gonna dive straight into our self-serve tool. Here we are on the homepage of YouGov Surveys. You can see some of the work I've been doing recently, as part of Booking.com, but I'm gonna start a new one.
Ordinarily, I'd go to Create Survey, but again, in the interest of not watching me type, I'm gonna go through every step, but with things already typed in. Firstly, creating a new survey. The name here, we're gonna go with something I hope that everyone in the audience will find interesting and may have your own opinions on, what is a better city, Rome or Paris? Probably quite a divisive opinion, but let's see. We're gonna go across the GB for our data set, and we're gonna build our own audience. We can go nat rep, but we're actually gonna leverage that ability again, that unique ability of leveraging the syndicated data to target audiences without having to screen, without having to go and spend more money, I can just simply, as a prospect, use the data that we already have.
Here on the left-hand side, you'll see a similar structure to what we just had in YouGov Profiles, all the different sections of the different types of variables we could use to create the audience. I've gone with something using our brands data, and in fact, I've looked at consideration or those who are considering Booking.com or their close competitor, Expedia. I've decided I wanna survey 500 people, so that's all ready and set up for me. I've typed out my question. Now anybody could do this. You don't need to be a researcher. You don't need to know how to create the perfect questions. You don't have to have coding abilities. You simply can just type. You can do this, right? I've given it a name or the question rather.
Which city would you prefer to visit for a weekend city break, Rome or Paris? I've typed in my answer options, Rome, Paris, and I've got a not sure option. I can even randomize, those two will flip around as appropriate. In the right-hand side, you can see a preview, so I know exactly how it's gonna look. Again, it's very easy. It's very simple. It's very intuitive. You don't need training. You just simply need to follow the instructions on the screen. I click through to the final stage now of reviewing and launching. I've chosen this particular instance 'cause I want data back quickly. To actually expedite this, I'm gonna pay more, but I want to do that because I need the data right away. I've chosen here to get the results within an hour.
That's an option for clients that might have a pitch or a burning need for data, and they can do that here and get that data back very, very quickly. It's given me a price per respondent, so it's a very clear pricing calculator. I could change my number if I said, "Well, you know what? I wanna spend a bit more, a bit less." I can do that right here, and it's given me a total. Now in this example, I have a credit bank. That's gonna make things a bit easier for me in the future as I wanna commission more and more work here. There are options to pay with a credit card or to request an invoice. We're appealing to all different ways that people need to ultimately pay for this work.
Once I'm happy and ready, I pay and publish. It was that simple. What's gonna happen now is that that draft or that survey is ready to launch, and it's just gonna get checked by, again, our CenX teams. They're gonna have a look and make sure there was no glaring errors, nothing offensive, nothing political, so that it's good to go. It's gonna happen very, very quickly, and I'll get an email in the background saying, "It's live. It's good to go. You can check it out." We'll have a look in a moment and see how many responses we've already got just in that short period of time. Let's just now move on to BrandIndex. BrandIndex is now the tracking phase of the work we're doing here as part of Booking.com.
This first chart I wanna show you now is looking at. Here was the Super Bowl. I've dropped an event line via the tool. We're looking at a line chart, and in purple we have Booking.com amongst those NFL fans. I've carried that same audience through everything so far as part of that same journey. Stayed logged in, seamlessly moved between the platform, and I can just simply now see whether or not it was a success. In red, we have Booking.com in the general population, so that kind of context of whether or not this truly was a good performance. As you can see, this purple line really does shoot up after the Super Bowl. This is advertising awareness as the metric, and we've gone from around 10% to over 20% at its peak, so we've more than doubled our advertising awareness.
It's great news for Booking.com. They can be very, very happy about that. Let's add more context 'cause that's not the full story. What about how they're doing against their competition? If I move over to another chart I've created, we can see now red here is still Booking.com, and we're showing now green as Expedia, their closest competitor. We're looking at the general population. There's the Super Bowl. There's that nice increase they had, at which point we were able to briefly overtake Expedia, and over that kind of rest of the year, we were pretty much neck and neck. It's actually more recently in 2023 we've been able to extend a gap now and almost reverse that trend. As I mentioned with Profiles, that ability to leverage historical data is incredibly powerful. Clients get that from the minute they subscribe.
They can go back in time and see their long-term performance, getting further context and getting a detailed picture of what they're doing and where they're going. It's also very valuable for modeling or various kind of efforts to use this to compare to real world data because, again, of the granularity and the long-term data we have available. The last bit of data from BrandIndex I wanna show you is the global context. Now what we're doing is using across 28 different markets here, Booking.com's consideration performance to see exactly how we're doing on a global level. The global scalability of BrandIndex, again, is a big selling point. It's consistent methodology, so you can compare one country to another across the 54 markets that we're tracking BrandIndex currently.
In this case with Booking.com, I can see Italy happens to be our best performing market, where over half of the population are actually, considering Booking.com. I can contrast that to Japan, where the news is not so good, and actually we're only down to nearly 5% for consideration. The U.S. over here, we can see, somewhat sort of middle of the pack as far as that consideration level. If I'm Booking.com here, of course, what I then want to do is probably understand more about, well, what's going on in Japan. That's where Profiles would come back into play. We could dive into Profiles in Japan and learn more about the considerers and how we could perhaps speak to them differently.
Of course, there's no doubt there's some cultural differences as far as how we should curate that campaign. The last thing I'd probably want to do as this type of client in this type of situation is again, use that time traveler ability. If I go back to this chart where we can see some of these trends over the past year, with profiles, what I could now do is actually isolate the point in time at which I'm most interested to know what was going on. If it was around the campaign here with the Super Bowl, I could actually use the dataset that aligns with that period, look at data from the 90 days around the Super Bowl, and analyze that specific audience, thus learning about those who were ad aware during the Super Bowl. Again, it's that time traveler ability.
It's that freedom to explore any audience I might want at any time. The last thing I'm gonna do before handing back over to Stephan is just come back to our surveys and just take a look and see how we're doing. We've already got 22 people complete that survey just in that amount of time that I was talking through the BrandIndex data. If you find me during the Q&A or the break, I'll be able to tell you Rome or Paris, maybe you have your own opinions. You can, you can see if you align with this population, and we can even explore that data and Crunch and leverage those cross-tabbing capabilities I've been speaking about. That does it for me. I'm gonna hand over to Stephan, and we're gonna get into some Q&A.
Thank you. Thank you, Charlie. All right, very nearly ready to go on to the market overview from Alex. Just to skip that one, just to go to what are our strategic ambitions. I would say here that we have very good reason to trust YouGov on delivering on things that we said we'll do. If you remember back in 2014, we set out a plan, a five-year plan, and we thought, a lot of people thought it'd be crazy to treble our profits over that period and to do it by becoming, by going from basically a mainly custom research company to a mainly getting most of its revenue, more than 50% of its revenue from data products and data services as opposed to custom research.
We did that over that five years. We became known more than anything for our data products, and we doubled our revenue in that period, and we quintupled, not a beautiful word, but it's a beautiful number, 5x EPS growth over those five years. We delivered that. We actually slightly over-delivered that. Then we set ourselves an even tougher piece, which was to quadruple EPS. Obviously we don't know exactly where we are on that. We can't talk about that.
If you look at our numbers, that you see, as you already know from our half year results, that in a year, in the first half of this last year, we've almost got as much revenue in as we got in the first year of the plan four years ago. Whether that's doubling, it's not quite, but they're... The second half is always different, a little bit stronger than the first half. You can see that we're well on the way to a very strong performance, and indeed, we've been increasing our profit margin, and we're on a pretty good journey towards our targets.
We don't know yet how that will end. We can't speak of course about the second half at all. Now, the reason I'm showing you that is I'm saying we actually did all of that at the same time investing heavily in a strategic plan that we set out to actually become a platform, to build the platform. Not so much to become the platform company, that's what's coming next, but to build the platform. I'm not really going through all of those pieces, obviously, we had a significant investment in technology. A lot of the things you've seen now require some quite serious heavy lifting to get that data fusion and interoperability. We've expanded our panel significantly across the globe.
We've reorganized and strengthened our sales organization and put a lot more effort into our key global accounts. We've created efficiency through the CenX model, the outsourcing to other countries, and we've acquired and integrated some smallish bolt-on acquisitions. While we were doing all of that, we also achieved a pretty significant increase in our performance. Therefore, I hope that you will take us seriously when we say we want to be the world's number one market research company. We think that is a realistic ambition because of this not so secret source that I've certainly been going on about it. You've heard about it from each of our other presenters of the importance of an engaged panel producing connected data.
We are saying that everything about the future is about this. If you don't have the sample, if you don't have the longevity of the sample, if you don't have the ability to take, as Charlie Taylor showed us, you can't look two years back at a campaign and talk to those, some of those people two years ago and put them into a sample today, and see what change there's been and all of this stuff and find out why. If you can't do those things, then you're not making use of the strength of the Internet, of connected data, and very soon of AI. All of those things are in our area. They all require the things that we've invested in to become the universal infrastructure of trusted data sharing.
That underpins the whole piece. If you're not trusted, if you cannot get people to share their data with you freely, you cannot do the things that we are doing, and you cannot take advantage of what's happening in the world in terms of AI and in terms of the aspirations of clients. Flogging a very not a dead horse, a very exciting horse. Our social mission, our social mission is to make people's opinions heard for the benefit of the wider community. That isn't something we just tack on as an ESG bit. It is fundamental to what we do. Without that, none of the rest can happen. That underpins the quality of our data, and the producing of with the producing sustainable social value.
Benefits to the public, making their opinions heard, being able to trust us, and benefits to business in terms of, fabulous, reliable, deep, rich, connected data. It all fits together. I would like to hand over to Alex, who's over here. Sorry.
Hi, everybody. Alex McIntosh, CFO. We thought it was useful to start with the... Have you got the clicker?
Oh.
With the platform, so you can have at least some context in terms of what's our market opportunity and how are we addressing client needs. We're gonna go through a couple of slides just to talk about how big is this market, and critically also talk about some trends. When we did this in 2019, we used ESOMAR, which is an industry body which sizes our market. The market definition was GBP 46 billion. We've seen an expansion of the addressable market over the last few years to include reporting and tech-enabled. We're still very much pointing at established research, which is 49% of the market.
I just wanna make a point that the sort of box there that has online, if you can't read it from the back, it's online, mobile quantitative studies, online mobile qualitative. If you add up all the numbers, that comes up to 49%. The industry has moved predominantly digital, obviously that is a space that we have a competitive advantage at, and we feel that we have a long way to go. I also wanna talk within the established research. On the far right-hand side, this is a geographic breakdown of that 49%. The U.S. is by far the biggest market. It's 44% of the market, from that, it drops down to...
It's the U.K. is the next biggest, China, France, Germany, and then it's a very long tail of rest of world. We're represented in most major markets, but we're definitely an international rather than a global company. As we sort of demonstrate the platform, particularly from the members' perspective, this is where we see there's a real advantage for us being able to address the entire market. I just wanna make the point, the established research sector is growing by 5%. We have consistently outperformed the market, and we certainly see that and it's always difficult with the RNS. You've already seen our targets, but we anticipate having a well above industry growth for the foreseeable future. I just wanna call out the two other sectors. Tech-enabled research includes some MarTech.
It includes Salesforce and Adobe. We don't think of them as, as companies that we compete against. There is a space in tech-enabled where we may find some adjacency and may start to move into that, and certainly some of the self-service capability we've been talking about begins to move us into that sector. Of course, for the traditional reporting, our ability to sell data, that's not something you can do with a credit card yet, but we do see there is ability for us to also move into that market. We find ourselves, stating the obvious, we're still relatively small in a very big market. I wanna specifically talk about the U.S.
If you have been following us for a while, we talk a lot about the U.S. It is the biggest market. Just to give you an idea of how under-penetrated we are. The overall market, and this links to the established research number, is $20 billion. In FY 2022, we generated $100 million. We're building a lot of momentum in the U.S., but we still feel we have a long way to go. We are pleased with our progress, and in a moment, well, after the break, we'll be introducing Jason, who's come up from the U.S. with a client. It is the market where we have the most sophisticated users of research. Our model is high quality, large scale quantitative, either data products or studies.
Our model suits the buyers in the U.S. very well. You'll see 30 of our top 50 clients are based in the U.S. What's really encouraging in terms of how much further we can go is when we demonstrate the value to clients, and particularly our most data-savvy clients, they do more with us. You'll see in FY 2022, we had 48% revenue growth in our top 30 U.S. clients. Part of that's driven by doing more in the U.S., but it's also being driven by doing more multinational work as we expand our panel capability. We've been on the right side of industry trends for quite some time. Clearly, online is now a well-established methodology.
What we have seen in recent years, and there's been a lot of investment in the sector, is automation, and that leads into AI, and no doubt we'll have some questions on that. Also in-housing. In-housing is clients starting to take research internally. I'll pick up on the self-service. A lot of our clients now have a platform like Qualtrics, where they're sending surveys to their own researchers. What that speaks to is clients are now reinvesting in the ability to run their own surveys. That will suit us as we move into more of an ability to help them do their workflow with the platform. They're also investing in using tools.
These areas of investments are accelerating a few trends, and we feel we're very well placed to take advantage of that. Faster delivery, Stephan mentioned at the very beginning. Research used to take weeks, if not months. It's now moving a little faster, and Charlie's got a demonstration running on near real time sort of delivery of results. Quality is becoming increasingly important in our sector. If you follow the sector, you'll have seen there's a company, Cint, in our space, which has been very public about having challenges with fraud. This industry's always had a problem with fraud, and I think you'll see in some of the capability that we're building around verification that Sarah showed us.
It's something we've always been able to stand behind with our public results that we put out. Increasingly, being able to differentiate ourselves by being able to stand behind the provenance of our data, we think will be increasingly a competitive advantage. I won't label it self-service. We are seeing clients investing more in tools. There is not a consistent platform for people to do their work. We think as we develop and make the platform ever easier to use, we'll start to capture more of the generous researchers workflow. Speaking to that trend on an expansion of the definition of the market, we're seeing an increased number of non-traditional researchers coming to us. That's quite an important point.
We want to have a digital path to purchase where we can capture a large number of clients that can come to us, who may not have thought it was possible to go to a market research company, and we believe, obviously, being able to find us online and procure online is the way to do that. This is analysis done by Greenbook. That's an industry commentator on trends. This is a pull out from their report in 2022 on why do buyers select a market research company. The font may be a little bit small, but just to give you an idea of what we're looking at. The red is a key decision factor, and the purple is a significant decision factor. The top three are data quality, service quality, and general pricing.
That's where we think we have a great model that we can support our clients with. Data quality is, as I mentioned, it's something that really is coming to the fore, that clients are taking an increasing interest in where does this data come from? What is it that we are receiving? Historically, for us, one of the challenges has been incumbency effect. You can't quite see it in this, but the fifth one, relationship, has dropped down over the last few years. That's benefiting us. After COVID, more clients are receptive to looking at new solutions. They certainly aren't asking you to be in market in 100 different countries in order to support them on a local level. Clients are becoming much more comfortable having a full virtual client solution.
We think, again, coming back to global platform, that will suit us very well. This is purposely a busy slide. As Stephan mentioned, it's a very fragmented market. At the bottom, we've got essentially the workflow of how you run a traditional, a standard research project from scoping and designing all the way through to delivery. Because it's such a complex workflow, what you will find is very few companies do all of this. I think we are uniquely placed in that we have our own technology, we have our own panel, that allows us to create a unified offer to our clients. Because you have so many steps, what you will find is some of these areas, you will have companies that just focus on these specific areas.
We call out, you've got surveys. I've mentioned Qualtrics. SurveyMonkey is a famous consumer-facing brand. These are companies that only do survey systems. Sample providers there, we've got Dynata, which is the biggest in the market. We've got Cint, which is a listed panel provider. These are companies that just organize and manage panels to sell to research agencies. I wanna make this point. Very few companies have invested in the way that we have over the last few years, in terms of being able to support, not only from a delivery perspective, but fundamentally the panel. Having a consistent panel, we believe drives huge value for our clients. Just give a flavor of who we compete with or who sits within these, the various buckets.
These link back to the previous slides, these survey solutions. fundamentally, this industry is dominated by four giants, Kantar, Nielsen, Ipsos, GfK. I should have mentioned at the beginning when we were talking about the market size, in each of those three sections, the giants are all multi-billion-plus companies. Certainly, as we look towards our future, that's where we believe we should be in the longer term, and we are mapping out the plan to really compete at a global level against these main players. We also have the full service companies also compete in syndicated data. You will see Kantar and Ipsos, for example, we have some specific competitors in our syndicated data space, GWI, Savanta, Harris, Morning Consult. We'll put the survey solutions in there.
Customer experience in dotted boxes. These are not direct competitors to us, but it's clients' in-house research. They're starting to use self-service tools and third-party panels in order to run research. Part of our positioning around the platform is to be able to bring some of that in work. Sunny later on will talk about some of the adjacencies that we may move into. We're just about to go for a break. After the break, we're gonna introduce-
There's been Q&A for.
Sorry, sorry, sorry. I preempted. Well, let me just finish this slide. Ultimately, what we're presenting in the platform is the culmination of many years of investing. The work that Stephan mentioned around the panel is putting us in a highly differentiated place where we do have the best panel. We prove that over and over and over again. We believe having a panel is a differentiator. We don't think of it as a commodity. From that panel then comes the best data. I do make this point. We think this is a key thing that clients will care increasingly about. Of course, for us, creating the best tools, you'll have heard us talk extensively about Crunch.
As we evolve, making our tools much more client-friendly, so that a generalist market research, and even beyond market research departments are starting to use our tools. We think that the package of those three things creates a unique proposition. Before we get to break, I think we.
Yeah. We wanted to finish the first half with a quick Q&A just on the platform bit, and especially to the three presentations that we had of the three different parts. In the second half, we're gonna hear from a very important customer. We're going to hear more about the go-to-market strategy and our targets and our way of measuring our performance and all of those things. We want you to really have understood and explored the idea of the platform itself. It'd be great to have a moment or two with questions that you have for these three. Yes, Steve?
Yeah.
Also, do we?
Yeah.
Thank you. Steve Liechti from Numis. Just I guess two questions. One is on the panel. You've made a great presentation about and talked through the quality of the panel all through. Can you just spend one second just to sort of say, "Well, if we speak to Kantar, they tell us they've got a great high-quality panel or Ipsos or GfK." Can you just spend a minute just sort of explaining why your panel is different to theirs? That's the first question on the panel. Second is, just on the size of the panel now, it's 24 million. You're not global completely. What do you think is the right size for your panel to give... Well, to sort of fulfill your expectations and challenges?
Secondly, just on the platform itself, you talked about investing in it and the foundations that you've put in place. As far as you're concerned, are the foundations now all in place? Is everything done for the panel for you then to sort of deliver the next stage, which is becoming your platform business?
On the number first of all, this is something I say guardedly. The number that we give is the number as defined by the industry. It uses all kinds of crazy ways of defining it. This is something about right to right to contact. People who say they have 24 million, 48 million, some say 2 billion, these numbers are based on very broad definitions of panel. If you're actually talking about who you can contact at any time in a real survey, like we're running right now, that is a much smaller proportion of that because of the terrifically large amount of churn and the way that panel size is defined by the industry. We cannot use a different number from the industry because for obvious reasons, right?
We have to use the same number. It is nothing like the number that is claimed, especially people who say 2 billion and things. It's ludicrous, right? There are people that basically say the size of Facebook is the size of their panel because they can advertise on Facebook and reach people that way. I'm not gonna go into that until we. Our hope is one day, and not very far away, to entirely redefine how panel is measured. It isn't big enough in order to give in all of the countries the representativity that you want or indeed to get into niche groups. If you wanted to talk to people who are fans of luxury handbags, for example, in Romania, you couldn't do it.
There's just not a. No one's got a panel that's gonna reach a civic, you know, a large enough group for that. That's one of the things that you really notice is when you have clients asking for things, early adopters of something or whatever, or young people who are into a particular area of entertainment or whatever it is, and to find representative samples of those, companies start scrambling around seeing what they can beg, steal, or borrow from each other's panels. We will never have enough panel to do everything that we want to do, and we will keep growing that. The difference is that we want to increasingly engage in panel without it being something that costs us what it cost before.
When Sarah talked about the outside group there, and maybe you can talk a little bit about the Chat experience and how some of that is different from other panels, which was the first part of Steve's question. We are looking at ways of significantly reducing the cost of acquisition. We've already got to just over GBP 1 per acquisition via Chat and FreeWall, compared to GBP 4 or GBP 5 by our traditional methods. We're driving that down. The more that we gamify, which is what you've been seeing, on our member platform bit, the more we can make that enjoyable, the lower we can go.
In fact, people who indulge in Chat don't get paid at all and yet give us valuable information. Maybe you could just address that, Sarah.
Yes. Just to build on that. The experience itself is engaging, and it's its own reward. It's true intrinsic reward we're talking about, not just, you know, shiny badge, for example. Chat has built into it a mechanism to show you what other people have answered as you answer the questions. It's dynamic. It's not weighted data. That in itself adds to that engaging experience, and leads to higher through rates, so people complete more, and a higher likelihood of them coming back and doing more of that type of survey.
Thanks. Steve, you also asked about parts of the platform and how much more we have to build. It will, of course, never end. I mean, you don't ever get to the perfect platform. There are always more things we want to add, more interoperability, more... I mean, just talking about AI is a whole new world, right? It's, it's gonna need a new team, which we are building. A small team, because we're not inventors in AI, we are users of AI. It's very important to distinguish that. We don't have to have a large AI team, but we need people who understand large language models and so on. We obviously have a chief scientist who's at the forefront of these things. There will always be more to do.
I think you'll continue to see the margin grow faster than our investments. I think we can manage to keep making it better. It is now the thing that we described a year or two ago. We're at that point. We're actually a little further than we said we would be on that. More questions? Yes.
Hi, it's Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt. I've just got three, please. On the Plus members, what's the value of having Plus members? Is it just to reduce and control the fraud, or is there a value for clients on the client side? Is it more, you know, they pay more to have surveys on panelists which have been checked? That's number one. Second one is, how are you getting users to come to your public page to engage on that? Is it through social media channels, or is it through Google Search, et cetera? The final one is, how does clients in-housing affect you?
As in, if a client wants to do surveys on their own customers using Qualtrics, for example, can they then input that data into platforms to combine with profiles or a BrandIndex?
I'll come to that last question myself at the end. First to Charlie on how do people come to the public data. How many are coming at the moment? We haven't launched the public data site to the public, I mean, in a big way yet. We haven't marketed. How many people are coming?
Yeah, it's a really good question. We get people in all ways, is the simple answer. We do have some active campaigns. We get organic traffic through Google. We get people via Twitter. A lot of it comes through because people have read or heard or, you know, content that we've put out there, they want to follow up on that. It comes through in a variety of ways. I want to say, I'm gonna look at Jonathan for accuracy here, that I think last year we had about 9.5 million visitors coming through organic search. And we see a correlation in the countries where we have public content available, we see a greater percentage of our users coming from non-paid for means. If that answers your question.
Thanks, Charlie. Sarah, again, YouGov Plus, what's the point of it?
Hi. Thank you. It's not just about the ID verification, it's about the different types of activities that they'll be able to run with people on that subset of the panel. Because they're long-term, trusted, highly engaged members, we can ask them to do things that we wouldn't necessarily send to somebody who joined YouGov a week ago. For example, it's an off-the-cuff, but go and take a picture of your fridge every day of the week and upload it seven days in a row. I can't think of a reason why people might want to know that, but that's an example. We know that they'll follow the instructions, and the data that we get back will be in the right format.
That's what we're exploring with clients at the moment, to see the possibilities that that gives us beyond ID verification.
Thanks. Yes, another example, we have Verylive, one of our big customers in the luxury brands area, wants to do a new way of doing mystery shopping, and actually having people go to the stores and see how they're treated, when they're maybe don't look like people with a lot of money to spend on and so on. Our YouGov Plus panelists will do that. They're very reliable. They're very, you know, these are the people that we most rely upon. On the identity part, we will see how this goes.
We only launched this a few days ago. We haven't pushed it out there yet. We think we probably will go and try to ID government ID everybody on the panel. By which I mean, we will ask them to do that and tell them that if they have a government ID, this is not quite the same as YouGov. You don't have to necessarily do all the other stuff, but that if you have an ID, you'll be paid more because we know that will be a premium. We can get an extra premium that more than covers the cost to us. That we will pay you more for being ID'd.
It's a, y ou know, we've definitely noticed, the industry has noticed an increase in fraud. We've significantly increased our efforts against that. Alex said, our very public polling shows that we have, you know, and the accuracy that we test ourselves against shows how reliable our panel is. We're doing everything possible to guard against any problems there. As for the last, I don't know, Charlie, if you have something to add to. I mean, I know we don't do that at the moment, and I have something to say about that. What can clients using their own, their own users and so do with us?
Yeah, it's a really interesting area for us. You know, obviously we have ways through our own data to identify customers of said brands, and of course, the benefit of doing the surveys with us would then be the more seamless connections, right? As well as the ability to see beyond just your customers, which would of course be a very biased view. However, of course, clients do still want to be able to say, "Look, we've got our database. We've got these people. Can we survey them?" We have examples where we have been able to integrate with clients' own databases and, well, frankly, when it does happen, it's a real win-win. Often we're even able to then encourage those people to join the panel, thus unlocking those connections and of course, growing our panel in doing so.
It's definitely something we have capabilities to do. I don't think the in-housing means that that's gonna suddenly become the way and the only way, because as I said, I think there's still benefits in going out there and getting the rest of the data beyond that, right? It's often a thing where we'll see, you know, behavioral data, right? Is obviously a big, big trend, and everyone wants beh avioral data.
That's only gonna get you so far. You still need to know what people think, and that's where our data can come in. Yes, it's happening, but we're aligned with that.
I wanna add that, well, in fact one of the experiments we did was with a very a major broadcaster, and we did a big experiment on this, and we did find it very valuable. We have, and it says in the pack somewhere in a very don't big it up, but we are extremely interested in adding customer experience to our offer. That's something that we have missing. We wanna have a unified offer. We don't have a proper, customer experience, offer at the moment. We are going to do that. That's in the future. Our experiments show, that there's huge value between mixing the two types of work, and no one does both of those well at the moment together.
More questions? Yeah. Sorry. First. Yeah.
Okay. Hi, it's Rob Chantry, Berenberg. Just a couple of questions, please. Firstly, have you got any learnings or forecasts on how you think behavior of this type of platform could differ by country and specifically kind of developed versus developing markets, niches versus cities versus urban versus rural, et cetera? Some learnings and how you think that could evolve. Secondly, you touched on, I guess the cost of panel member acquisition and how that's evolved. Can you just kind of give us a bit more background data on that and kind of detail on current how you see that evolving as you scale the ultimate size of the panel?
Well, on differences, I don't know if you have something to add to that, but I mean, the truth is U.K. and U.S. are the areas that we've done the big work on. I don't think there are big differences there. Smaller countries or so all the rest I should say, we have a very much more light touch approach, and we will be globalizing that. I can't give you a useful piece there. Another thing I can tell you much more about the cost of the parts other than the acquisition costs that I mentioned of GBP 4-GBP 5 for U.K. and U.S. acquisition. It's actually not that different in other countries.
It being something like a fifth of that, using the technique of the FreeWall, which by the way, has just been granted a patent. That's when we. A U.S. patent, I believe. Yeah?
Yep.
Yeah. That is when we can intervene in premium content with a survey. In our case, it's, we have very high success in engaging people, not just to click one thing, but actually to stay with us. Something like a fifth of the people go on to continue a longer survey for nothing instead of going to the premium article they wanted. It's a very successful way of us engaging people without paying them. But I can't give you more estimates on panel spend, et cetera. I mean, Alex will I'm sure return to that at the end of the session.
Thank you. Bridie from Stifel. just as your platform has got more and more sophisticated, can you just talk about how that's reflected in your pricing power in general, either amongst your existing clients or in terms of pitching for new business?
We haven't actually changed our pricing much at the moment. Maybe that's something that is to come. This sounds crazy, but we made our first increase in our survey in what used to be called Omnibus real-time, now we just call them surveys. That price went up by about 25% for the first time in 20 years. The cost of a question on the Omnibus has stayed the same for 20 years, we just raised it by 25%. It isn't actually because of what we can say about our panelists.
There's been a lot of downward pressure on prices, but I'm pleased to say that we have successfully increased our prices a bit.
The growth we've been seeing, sorry.
Hmm?
The growth we've been seeing is growth in your client roster and usage.
Yeah.
... offsetting actually deflation bar sort of quite recently.
Yeah. It's very... I mean, the more we use the system, obviously the more value we get. It's growing the use of the system is the most important thing for us right now. Yeah.
Fiona Orford-Williams from Edison. When we were looking at the product demos, we were seeing quite a lot of other content that's there to engage people. How much of that's been generated in-house, and where is it, else is it coming from, and are you paying for it?
That's a really good question. The vast majority of the written content, the articles, that's our in-house team. Obviously, when you're looking at trackers and that kind of thing, then that's survey data that's feeding through. We have a couple of external journalists that write for us, John Humphrys, but the majority of the written content is generated in-house. I don't know if anybody noticed on the feature page, we have a recent article about the weaning habits of gentlemen around Europe. Would encourage you to take a look at that if you didn't. That was inspired by a request from a Guardian journalist. I would definitely encourage you to read that article. Yeah, generally.
Oh, that's the last question.
Hi, it's Johnathan Barrett from Panmure. You'll be glad to know I've only got one question for you. With regards to the unified offer that you talked about earlier on, do clients need to perceive that every component is the best in the market to buy, or do they just need to believe that the overall effect or the sum of the parts is the best solution for them? You might say that all of your components are the best in the market, but just want to get a feel of how the clients look at the unified offer.
It's, it's very varied. I mean, the some clients want to deal with one person and or one team and obviously prefer somebody to be able to do all of it. We've sometimes not been able to get work that we weren't seen to have experience in. For example, recently, somebody wanted a component to be to have more expertise in understanding the market, more consultancy, if you like, and they wanted the consultancy and the data gathering to be put together, and we don't do consultancy and we don't want to go to consultancy. You know, there are companies that do much more on the consultancy side.
I think as people want to increasingly do things themselves, that is a very clear trend, that more and more of our clients want to actually do their own work. We recently had a discussion with a major Swiss client, who used our self-service work and was looking to see how much more we could do for them because they are trying to in-house as much of their work as they can. They will obviously want to do as many different things with one supplier, rather than rather than lots. There has been no concept really of a unified offer in the market, to compare against. Nobody has a proper unified offer. Thanks. Well, we'll break then for coffee, and return with hearing from a client.
Thank you very much.
My name's Nicole Pike, and I lead our global esports and gaming practice here at YouGov, as well as our sport business out of the U.S. I'm here to present the second half of the program and to introduce you to one of our top clients that comes from the video game space. Jason Sanchez leads strategy and insights at Riot Games, one of the world's largest and most successful gaming publishers. He is here to talk to you today all the way from the U.S., about his experience working with YouGov. Jason.
Thank you, Nicole. As I go through this, if I mention names, that's probably somebody that sits on Nicole's team, so just FYI for context. First and foremost, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. My name's Jason Sanchez. I've been at Riot for five years. We've been a client of YouGov for just over two years now. As Nicole mentioned, I lead the central research team under our enterprise pillar, which covers the entire portfolio for Riot Games. That includes our games, entertainment, esports, and publishing. That basically means that I get to talk to a lot of people across the organization about research. Before we get into it, I wanna talk a little bit about who Riot Games is because you guys may not be familiar with them.
You know, like our players, many of us are gamers ourselves, which means that I get to go to work dressed like this, and I always have an excuse to play games at work. It's literally in my job description. At Riot Games, we aspire to be the most player-focused gaming company in the world, period. We strive to create genre-defining games that players can enjoy for years on end, in a world where they have so many choices of the things that they can play, where they can play, and how they can play. It's really humbling to know that League of Legends came out over 13 years ago and is still one of the biggest games in the world. We currently publish five live titles. I've got a list of the titles that we publish here.
Five of them are live. We've also published some games under our Riot Forge umbrella, which expand upon the League of Legends universe. We're more than just games. We also bring award-winning entertainment to our fans. When I say fans, I mean gamers and non-gamers alike. We've reached them through entertainment such as Riot Music. We have some really kickass music videos. Our Emmy Award-winning TV series, Arcane, which you may have seen on Netflix, and if you haven't, you should check it out 'cause it's really good. Of course, esports. We have international events that can sell out very large stadiums. In fact, we are running our Mid-Season Invitational right here in London now, I think it runs for one more week, at the Copper Box Arena.
If you haven't had a chance to check it out, you should buy a ticket. Go look. The energy is phenomenal. Now, I mentioned that Riot aspires to be the most player-focused gaming company in the world. What does that mean? We've broken it down into six key pillars that, along with our master core equity metric, helps us to understand how we're delivering against player expectations. First and foremost, puts players first. If you go to Riot, one of the things that you may hear is player experience first. This is the ethos on which Riot Games was created. We make games for our players. We want to understand what is important to them so that we can prioritize that when we create new games or we continue to work on the games that we've developed.
The player experience is always foremost in our decision-making process. Second one, makes games worth playing. I think that's pretty self-explanatory. We wanna make games that our players want to play. Tells great stories. Our games should be rooted in worlds with stories and characters that our players can love and relate to. But we shouldn't be afraid to expand that experience beyond games. I mentioned Arcane, our TV series. This is a great example of where we've brought the lore from our game out into the world, where we're extending beyond just our gamers, and you can go watch that on your TV or your computer, your smartphone, whatever. Oops, sorry, go back. Exceeds expectations. Not only are we continually striving to improve our products, but we want to surprise and delight our players.
It's one reason why people want to keep coming back because there's always something new for them to engage with. Invest in the ecosystem. Riot Games is the leader in esports in a number of categories, and we wouldn't be there if it weren't for our player community. We should continue to support, celebrate, and invest in our player community because they are the reasons why we're here today. Entrusted and loved. It's probably no surprise to this group that brand advocacy is critical to a strong brand. We want our players to trust us. We want them to love us. Ultimately, we want them to be proud to play the games that we make.
Some of you are probably thinking that these attributes look like something that we would want to track and measure over time, and you would be right. That's where YouGov comes in. Before I get into that, I wanna go back in time a little bit. Now you get the Spice Girls picture. Back in 2020, before we started working with YouGov, we had a global tracking program in place with another vendor, and we had some concerns. The data that was coming back was volatile month to month, and it made it hard for us to see if our performance was due to something like a data issue or whether things were actually happening in the market.
There were issues in getting the requisite number of completes in certain markets, and, so sampling was a primary concern of ours. You know, furthermore, there was this sense that we weren't getting the value out of the relationship that we felt that we should, given the size and the scope of the program. We were spending an incredible amount of time reviewing the data, QA-ing the data, transforming the data into Tableau dashboards, and not nearly enough time analyzing the data, bringing those insights to life for our executives. Many times it felt like our account executive on the other side was just trying to get us to upsell us instead of helping us to get the most value out of the work that we were already doing. Our needs didn't really seem outrageous, and so we put it up for RFP.
Let me tell you what we want, what we really, really want, right. We want quality sample so that we can have quality data. That seems to be a common theme today. We wanted consistency month-over-month, and we wanted to feel like we were getting a good value for our players' money. As a bonus, anything that could make my team's life easier would help us because it would help us spend more time with the data and less time with project management. Why did we choose YouGov? At the heart of the decision, YouGov was based on our belief that they could provide reliable, high-quality sample on a consistent basis at a global scale. We have multiple teams within Riot who have great researchers that love to get their hands dirty with the data.
Our priority really was making sure that we had the best data possible so that they could run all the awesome analyses that they were looking to do. At the end of the day, we had more confidence in YouGov's ability to deliver on this high-quality sample, and thus data, compared to the other companies that we were looking at. That was the heart of what we did. There were other differentiators that I think made YouGov stand apart that we were really excited about. The first one is YouGov's Crunch platform. I mentioned before that we were spending a ton of hours transforming the data into Tableau. When it breaks, when we get new data coming in, we gotta fix it, and then so forth.
The YouGov Crunch platform kind of takes that away from us. I can go in there, my stakeholders can go in there, and we can look at dashboards the YouGov team has already helped us to build. We can look at different crosstabs, analyze data, pull it into Excel, and kind of create our own visualizations for it. That was a real differentiator for us because it saves us time. We also subscribe to several markets within the BrandIndex. This isn't a tool that my team personally uses a lot, but it has proven invaluable to our esports and our corporate sponsorship teams because they take that data, and they're able to create these pitches that they can bring into potential, sponsorship deals.
That helps us to grow our esports business and so forth. Kinda last but not least, YouGov Profiles. Now, this lets us to extend our insights into data that we don't include in our custom studies because we have a limited amount of space in the research ones that we do. The ability to be able to take data that YouGov asks as part of their syndicated ones and merge it with our own helps us to create this enhanced data set that then we can then use to broaden our audience profiling as a result. I do wanna give a shout-out to Alan and Austin on the YouGov team because they are the ones that help merge this stuff together.
I remember the first time they showed it to us, we're like, "Wow, this is really cool." I actually built this whole deck for our head of comps person. It's like, how many Americans believe in aliens and so forth. It was really cool. All that said, the primary reason that we stayed with YouGov is the customer service. Nicole, Scott, Jonathan, the entire team. They are what I would consider to be my force multiplier. One of the big reasons why my team has been able to have an outsized impact on our org this year is because I don't have to spend the time doing the product management. They run trainings for my stakeholders. They hold office hours every other week.
They handle ad hoc data requests, and in many cases, they're actually talking to my stakeholders directly on their needs and without necessarily needing to interface through me, which saves me a ton of time. That means that I get to spend more time with the data, extracting more value from it and ultimately having a bigger impact across our organization. I wanna take the time now to talk a little bit about some of the work that we do with YouGov. You can kind of see up here, we do a decent amount of work with you guys.
As one of our trusted partners, we feel comfortable leveraging the expertise that you guys have and the quality data that you have to do things like our brand and IP tracking, product demand sizing, the audience insights, market segmentation, and so forth. This isn't all of them, but this is kind of a good sense of what we do. Now in the interest of time, I just wanna focus in on one of them, which is the market segmentation, which is honestly one that I am the most excited about. As a player-focused game company, we always strive to understand our players better.
You know that pretty much any client would be like, "Hey, I wish that I had a segmentation that we could use across the organization that we could all align behind." In reality, you're just happy if, like, the marketing team uses it. We actually did it at Riot. We created a segmentation across seven different markets, 81 unique, market profiles that let us dig really deep into the regional findings, but also with the ability to combine those 81, because it's a very wieldy amount of segments, into eight global profiles, that we can basically use for practicality purposes.
In terms of how the different teams and pillars at Riot use this, our leadership and our enterprise teams use the segmentation to create this common framework, this common language around the direction of our strategy for our portfolio. Whereas our game teams may look at it at a more specific use case for their products and understand who is playing their games, why they play their games, and ultimately what's important to our players. We've introduced this into something that we call the game experience rooms, which is a biweekly meeting of some of the most senior-level executives at Riot, where we meet to discuss kind of the future direction of our products and our product features.
Finally, our publishing team uses the segmentation at both the global and the regional levels to create these audience profiles that they can share with our creative and our agency partners to develop more resonant marketing and reach our players where they are. I could go on and on because I love talking about the segmentation. We have over 600 slides that we've created for this and counting, but I think you guys get the point. What could elevate the YouGov experience? I would say that our, over the past couple of years, our relationship with YouGov has been largely positive, and I credit part of this to the fact that we have periodic check-ins to make sure that we're tackling problems before they really become problems.
That doesn't mean that there aren't some areas that I think that we could do better. I'll go down this. Make the value obvious. When I talk about value here, I'm not really referring to pricing, although it should be understood that as a client, I always want your most competitive, best price up front, and I don't wanna have to negotiate for it. Instead, what I mean here is that we collect so much data across the work that we do, and yet it seems like we barely scratch the surface of it. One of the primary focuses of my team this year is not to do a lot of new research per se. It's to really go deeper into the work that we already have. It's to spend more time delving the depths of the data.
Wh ere YouGov can really help us out is you guys know everything about your syndicated. You know the work that we do on the custom side better than anybody else. No one is in a better position to demonstrate the value in how to leverage this data more effectively than YouGov is. Help us to make that full value unlocked. Make the value obvious to us. Secondly, quality. This probably should be first, but I didn't do it in the slides. Anyways, this is one of the main reasons why we chose YouGov to begin with, and it comes in many forms. One of the things that we've been working with on our client team this year, has been to improve upon cleaning our, cleaning up our data files and our dashboards.
You know, this is one area that we cannot be complacent on. We cannot sacrifice quality. It is the reason why we do research, the reason why we've chosen YouGov, that's something that cannot slip. Advanced analytics needs data needs. Charlie and crew talked to you about some of the things that they had, the demos. It was cool to see them, thank you for sharing. I do think that there is the opportunity to beef up YouGov's data processing and data visualization tools and the ability to handle more complex data sets. You can take this with a grain of salt because Riot is probably a little more data sophisticated than a number of our clients.
Think about the ability to have, like, a raw data feed or an API where the data's flowing straight from Crunch into our data warehouse. That could unlock a lot of awesome capabilities for us to leverage our internal data with our external data from YouGov and marry those two together. You know, at a minimum, even, like, the ability to export a file from Crunch that is easily able to be uploaded into, like, Databricks or used to create a Tableau dashboard for those enhanced visualization exercises would be really cool for more data sophisticated clients. Finally, don't be shy, be proactive. In many ways, this is really a continuation of the make value obvious front.
The longer that I work with YouGov, the more you should be able to understand my business, anticipate my needs, and either recommend new ways of looking at something or doing something or just do it. You don't even have to ask me. Just be like, "Hey, we did this analysis for you." You know, bringing those ideas to the table will unlock those conversations, and we can discuss whether it's something that makes sense to pursue, or maybe it'll spark new ideas. At, you know, it has the added benefit of making me feel like we're partners because you're thinking about my business. That's something that I truly appreciate. You know, that's a lot. Challenge accepted.
You know, like I said, I definitely appreciate having the conversations with Nicole and Jonathan on a quarterly basis to go through our accounts. You know, we're never shy to kind of bring something up when we have any issues or concerns, and they've been very good at addressing those things proactively. Hopefully, this gives you guys some ideas of ways that you can help to elevate the experience for clients like myself. You know, that's really it. You know, I wouldn't be here if I didn't think that this relationship wasn't worth investing in. We do a lot of work with YouGov. You know, huge shout-out to Nicole and her team for all of the work that they've done. They've been incredible to work with. They've made my life easier.
We truly do appreciate the relationship that we've built with them. I know we've got some time for Q&A, so I will go ahead and open it up to the board. All you guys.
Hi. Thanks for that. That was really helpful. I have two questions, and I'm pretty sure you'll be able to answer one of them. My first question is, you know, one of the things that we, as an analyst community and investors have been scratching our head about over the last couple of years, given the weaker macroeconomy, some difficulties in the video game sector, for instance, is when companies are going through more troubling times, do you need more data, or is this an area that you would, you know, potentially would seek to scale back?
No, it's a good, it's a good question. I will preface it by saying that Riot benefited in a lot of ways with COVID and kind of the economic pressures that entailed. We've also launched a lot of new products. For us, when I joined Riot five years ago, research really wasn't a priority for a lot of the areas of the business. I came in for publishing, and they didn't really use data at all. That was one of the reasons why I got hired. I would say that the hunger for research probably started bottoms up and has grown. At this point, it's at the point where, you know, even our highest level executives are asking for this information. They're hungry for it.
I don't foresee us necessarily pulling back, although, you know, cost constraints are real, right? They're always a thing. That's one of the reasons why we're trying to do more with what we've got, because we've already invested a lot of money into doing this research. Our focus, I think, has been not necessarily to spend more money or to pull back, but to make sure that we're getting the full value for what we're doing right now.
Thank you. My second question, is what percentage of Americans believe in aliens?
Oh, man. It was something... It was like 46% or something. I did this, like, a year ago, and it was like the percent that believe in heaven, the percent that believe in aliens, and then we got into boring stuff about, like, their favorite beer brands and stuff like that.
Hi. Steve Liechti from Numis. I wouldn't be so rude to ask how much you pay YouGov in revenues, but I suppose some questions around what you pay them. If you took your position now in year two of the relationship, is that right?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. has the revenue that you pay YouGov increased over that period? Given what you just said, can you see that revenue increasing further from here in terms of the additional services that they're providing? That, that's the first question. Then maybe just flesh out how do you pay. Do you pay a subscription? Do you pay transactional type fees or what? Just any sort of shape of the revenues you can give us.
Sure. This is multi-part. One, like I handle my budget directly, but I also have visibility into other parts of Riot that may be spending their own budgets. I would say overall, the amount that we've spent has increased for a number of reasons. Our core brand tracking was the primary entry point for us for YouGov. I believe as part of that, and that was just as I was joining the biz health team, we also had subscriptions to certain brand profiles and BrandIndex things. Now, the cost burden of like the subscription services has actually transitioned away from my team primarily, and it's getting picked up by esports and corporate sponsorships because they're the ones that are leveraging that data far more. It's really valuable for them when they're going out and creating pitches.
You know, it's a little bit less valuable for me on the BrandIndex side because we already have such a wealth of information through our custom tracking. I'd say last year we did a lot of what I would consider not one-offs, but sort of studies that you might do on a periodic basis. You might do them once every two, three, or four years. The market segmentation is an example of that. You're not gonna do that every year. Product demand sizing, that's something that comes up when we're developing new products, which may be once every year, maybe once every two years. It's hard to say because it follows our R&D pipeline. I will say that other teams have seen the work that we've done and have signed up.
Nicole can probably speak to this better, but esports is a big one. Even the publishing teams is like, "Hey, who should we use?" We're like, "You should use YouGov because they have this common definition." When we go out to people, we usually go out to what we call core gamers, which are gamers that are 13-40 years of age. They play at least four hours a week on one platform, and they have to play something that we call competitive genres. You know, they can't just play, like, Solitaire or Candy Crush. We have this common definition that we use across all of Riot. It doesn't matter, like, which team, as long as they're going after core gamers, they're using that same definition.
I don't know if that answers all of your questions, but...
Yeah, just trying to get the... If you had to take a guess, how much of your revenue is subscription on a long-term contract?
How much of it with YouGov? I'd actually say that it's the minority. I think a lot. We do a lot of custom work. The brand tracker is custom. The demand sizing is custom. The segmentations are custom. Almost all of the work that my team does is custom. I'd say it's probably, like, 90% of what we do. I believe the esports stuff is primarily custom. The publishing stuff is primarily custom. The syndicated really is more around the partnerships programs. All right. I think this will be the last question.
Hi. Just coming back to your comments about what YouGov does to you. Would it be helpful if YouGov offered consulting services on the data analysis?
We do use advanced analytics for some of our custom work. I would say it depends on how you're defining consulting services.
You're doing a lot of the work in-house at the end. You know, you're taking on that piece of the work, as it were. Do you need that external interpretation and insight as well to increase the value of the data you've bought?
I'd say that for us, because we're a little bit more sophisticated and we hire, you know, pretty high caliber researchers, our main focus is to get the data from the analysis, and then we'll probably do that analysis ourself because we're gonna have additional context that YouGov isn't going to have, and we wouldn't provide because it's proprietary.
Thank you.
You're welcome. Cool. Thank you, everybody.
Hi, guys. Sundip Chahal. I'm the Group COO, and I have the pleasure of taking you through the growth plan. I think you'll have seen the numbers that we put out this morning on the RNS. Alex has the pleasure of going into those in detail. I have the joy of just going over them relatively lightly and telling you how we're actually going to achieve those numbers. It's gonna come from three key areas. We have enterprise sales, we have digital sales, greenfield opportunities. I'm gonna take you through the customer journey for both enterprise sales and digital sales, and I will expand on what we mean by greenfield opportunities. At the end, I'm gonna tell you how we're going to operationalize this. But a little bit of housekeeping.
I'll start by telling you what we mean by enterprise sales. This is essentially what we are currently doing. This is our managed service right now. This is really nearly all of our current revenue. In enterprise sales, we have our syndicated data products. You've heard the names already. We have our flagship tracking product, BrandIndex, been going since 2005 in the U.K. It runs in 54 countries. I think Charlie. Charlie will correct me. Yes, 54 countries. And we deliver data the very next day through that product. The other product you may have heard about mentioned today is YouGov Profiles. That is our in-depth planning and media segmentation tool. Currently runs in 49 countries. Looks at Charlie. Yes. And we also have our research services.
Previously you've heard us talk about research, and we've broken it out, and we talk about custom. As Jason just said, majority of the work that we do with Jason would be classed as custom research. Exactly what it says on the tin. It's bespoke. Usually requires a high-level practitioner like Nicole, who'll come in, will design the survey, will design the study, and is sometimes involved on the back end. To answer the question, sorry, I don't know that gentleman's name. For Jason, because they have essentially their in-house team, he doesn't necessarily require as much of Nicole's input on the back end. We do have clients who, depending on that in-house setup, will require someone like Nicole, or even someone like Marcus there back at the...
Depending on what their capabilities are in-house. Now, digital sales, this is all highly additive to our, to our current revenue. These are really the sales that we're gonna be delivering. Can you hear me, guys, okay, yeah? Sorry. These are the sales that we are delivering through the platform, the platform formally launched in May 2023. We've been refining our self-serve proposition. We've been refining that sales process. I'm gonna show you some very early numbers that we've got there. That has been an ongoing process, and we're very pleased with how that's going. Greenfield opportunities, again, no surprises, is what it says on the tin. These are new products that we could potentially launch.
I'll talk you through very top level some of the new products that we've recently launched. There's M&A, and of course, there are branches into. I should have practiced how to say that, put my teeth back in. Into adjacent products. I will take you through a very top level overview of some of those. Right. How are we actually gonna go to market, right? It sounds very grand that go to market, but essentially we have two channels to sell. We have enterprise sales and we have digital sales. The important part of this is that both channels will end up with the client on the platform.
The client can either be finding the platform themselves through that digital process. I will talk you through that, what the customer journey looks like, but they will end up on the platform, or they may be coming from the other end, where our practitioners or our account managers have essentially worked with the client and the data that the client is using is delivered through the platform. Enterprise sales right now, we have over 100 people in our sales and account management teams. 36 at last count in the U.S., and this is essentially how we manage our new business and our account management through these, through these sales professionals.
They work with the likes of Nicole, again, Marcus up there, so our high-level sector experts or research practitioners. They are experts in the platform, experts in the tools, experts in the data, and they deliver that data to the clients through the platform. The focus there is obviously on those very high-level strategic products, monetary values there. If we can make it multi-year, fantastic. Of course, there are generally customized deliverables, again, that are either delivered in person or potentially through the platform. Digital sales, not surprisingly, these are sales that come through our digital channels. This is very much a marketing-led path to purchase. Our marketing teams will drive potential customers through their marketing campaigns to the platform. It's largely light touch, so doesn't involve generally, relatively expensive researchers.
Researchers who are sat behind the scenes are sitting in one of our censuses. Stephan mentioned the CenX, Centres of Excellence. We have four censuses at the moment. We have two in India, one in Romania, and one in Mexico. Very soon, they will become 24/7 to support this process. It's very easy. It's relatively simple to use. You guys have been through the platform, so I'm not going to flog the exciting horse, as Stephan said. It's very high volume, and it's very quick turnaround. The thing is, between both of these, the top channel, some of that can take weeks, potentially even stretching into a year for some of those very large tenders. The bottom path, that can be done in hours. I'm not gonna dwell on this relatively boring slide.
This is the typical journey for a market research customer. We have pre-sales, we have during the project, and then we have the project delivery. There's only one word here that I wanna draw your attention to. It wasn't deliberate, but it does tell a tale. Procure sample. This is really how the industry looks at panel. At going out and buying as if you're going to the market, like you're buying slabs of meat or sheep if this was 1860 or whatever it was. That's not really how we see that, obviously, and everything I think we've told you would make you believe that that's not how we see panelists and certainly not our own panelists. This is the client journey.
This is the current client journey that we have for enterprise sales. It's relatively high level, relatively broad brush. Obviously, there are some variations depending on the client. There's a couple of things I wanna point out. Again, as I said, typical journey time here. At best, probably weeks, and Nicole lives and breathes this every single day. I'm sure she's delighted if she manages to get a client a sign-off in a couple of weeks and deliver data. Typically, it's months, and it can potentially even stretch into years for some of those very, very large projects. How does it start?
Our sales teams essentially are going out either knocking on doors for want of a better term for new business, or it's through our account managers, or it's through our researchers like Nicole. We're working with a client. We're working with someone like Jason. Jason has an idea for a project. He engages with Nicole. They're kinda kicking it about a bit. Just wanna make the point, at this point, Jason is not paying us anything, so he's taking up lots and lots of Nicole's time, but he's a fantastic client, so we're very happy about that. Eventually, they'll finalize the scope. Once they finalize the scope, and we give them the terms, then the contract is signed, and we're very happy that Jason is our client.
All of that time we've invested up until this point, we're obviously not getting paid for it. We're not a consulting service. Typically, we don't charge per hour. We get into the project. Jason works with either Nicole and her team. They design the questionnaire. Again, lots of to-ing and fro-ing. Hopefully, when we were designing the project, Nicole is a professional, she's priced it appropriately. Jason's a very nice guy as well and won't take up too much of our time. I'm sure he'll be a fantastic client on those kind of jobs. They decide on the survey. We have to pick the sample. We look at the panel. We look at what the sample is that's required for the job.
We use our CenX teams to send that survey. We have panel teams that are sitting in the censuses. That is a 24/7 operation because we are constantly launching surveys. They will launch the survey, they'll be working very closely with Nicole's teams to make sure that we're actually hitting those cells that we said we were going to hit, and she's gonna be able to deliver the results back to Jason in a timely manner. The data comes back. We clean it in-house. We use all of our proprietary software. It's delivered on the back end there through Crunch. Potentially there's other customized reports on the top of that. Again, all of that takes a reasonable amount of time. It's not unusual. It's a typical journey in market research. I would say we do it better than most.
We certainly do it better than most of our competitors, and I think you would agree based on our results. We still have areas for huge improvement. Obviously, when we think about enterprise sales, in this next strategic plan, we obviously still need to acquire new clients. Not rocket science. We need more and more of those new clients, but we're also still very under-penetrated in the U.S. You've seen Alex mention that. We have huge headroom there. That is the largest market when it comes to market research. When our clients buy in the U.S., they typically buy big, and they buy globally. That's where the advantage of having global panels really kind of starts hitting home. We also wanna grow in under-penetrated sectors. Excuse me. Did I bring my water?
Nicole is a great example, where we actually went into an adjacent sector. We had a sports team, Nicole, thankfully, came in and joined us, and is obviously now heading up esports as well, and we managed to branch into that, and we were obviously branching into gaming as well, and we work with Jason and Co. Excuse me. We also still have huge opportunity with our existing clients. At this point, obviously, slightly mea culpa, some of our long-term investors will know that we've often talked about how we need to increase our share of wallet with our existing clients. We have moved the needle ever so slightly, and it generally has been in pocket, but we need to do better. There's still huge opportunity there.
80% of our clients are still only buying from one division. Obviously, we have three divisions when we talk about that, so data products, then data services, and research. There's huge opportunity there to grow our share of wallet with our existing clients. We wanna grow the number of subscribers within that. We wanna target longer-term tracking projects. Once the client is in, they find it quite difficult to leave YouGov because of the depth and the quality of our data and hopefully our servicing teams. We also wanna shift more and more of that work that has been done traditionally in the hands of researchers into our CenXs and make it self-serve. Obviously, cut down on those turnaround times.
This is the new digital customer journey. The big thing here, I won't go through every single detail on this. This can be done in hours. You've seen from the demo that Charlie did. Client's gone on, they've logged on, they've created their account. They can start designing their survey immediately. They can, if they wish, engage with one of our CenX researchers to help them. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, those researchers are based in relatively low-cost locations. They can select their sample, they can actually launch their survey. Obviously the survey is checked, as you've seen there, for any issues that we may have in the CenX. Data is collected, it's available in real time. That is literally... I think I watched JBP. I asked about minutes.
He said, "Not minutes yet, but hours." It's not inconceivable that this will be minutes. The data is then delivered through Crunch, and the client gets their data. They will still have the opportunity, should they wish, and obviously, this will be a paid-for service, then they may wish to engage with the likes of Nicole or some of our experts in analyzing that data. Clients can go from either the managed service, which is essentially the enterprise sales route, or the self-service, which is the digital sales, depending on what their requirements are. How are we gonna maximize that digital sales channel? It's a huge long tail. If any of you are aware of this market, a relevant example would be Momentive, formerly known as SurveyMonkey.
They generated something like $400 million of revenue in one year, it just solely in the U.S. I think we would say, not surprisingly, that using our platform, you can do so much more. The potential of that market is, well, I think it's obvious from those numbers. Far year to date, we've conducted, excuse me, 900 interviews, with an average transaction value just under 1,000. On the right-hand side, you can see examples of the surveys that you can conduct. The top few are what you call relatively fluffy. You know, what's your football club, et cetera, et cetera, all the way down to something as complicated as a UNA study to enter a new market.
That's the kind of stuff that typically, you would go to, you would go to a research company, you spend a lot of time essentially, figuring out the survey, and then their scripters would program it. If you already have that survey, you can program it on our system without involving any client-side researcher. Final area, greenfield opportunities. There's three areas there which will be additive to our numbers. First one is newer products. We have recently launched data slices. We obviously have our tracking products BrandIndex. We have the segmentation tool, Profiles. You can now actually buy a slice of data, which is a moment in time, and we've just recently launched that, I think about two months ago, three months ago.
This is, obviously, rather than recognizing the revenue over a period of time, you actually get that revenue that's recognized immediately as soon as that sale is made. It's a great way of actually introducing YouGov to people who essentially are clients who don't really want to take a subscription. We do, we do have a tail of those people for whom a long-term subscription or commitment is not favorable, generally tend to be smaller. We have YouGov Safe, we have YouGov Finance, and of course, we have our advertising solutions. M&A, you've seen us do some M&A in the period, in the previous period. It tends to be either around a region, so we acquired in Switzerland, LINK, we've acquired in Australia, and we've acquired in AsiaPac.
It can be because of the access to tech and people, so we've made some acquisitions there, Rezonence, InConvo, and Portent.io. It can be adjacencies, and as yet unknown potentially or some obvious areas there where we could potentially branch out. Customer experience, ad measurement or ad verification. All of this is gonna have to be delivered. All of this is gonna be the new CEO's job when he turns up. Joking aside, obviously there are certain tenants, certain pillars of the plan that have been agreed. Obviously, the day-to-day operational plan, how he's gonna execute that, will be in the nitty-gritty, shall we say. Obviously, we need to sell, we will sell to more clients.
We will maximize our upsell and cross-sell to existing clients. We need to continue educating people about what YouGov can actually do, and that's not just externally, that's also internally. Our tools and, you know, our presenters do an absolutely fantastic job. Could potentially be a bit more intuitive, and there is work that we could do to do that.
I think, or improved performance management. I think that'll be Alex next.
Okay. Thank you, Sunny.
Cheers.
I'm just gonna take you just back a little bit just to remind everyone of where we've come from. Oh, hang on. Sorry. The slide's slightly different. Sorry. I just wanna remind everybody, we started our first growth plan in FY 2014. It's great to see some new faces, but we've also had some, yeah, some faces here that have followed us on this journey. FY 2014, we looked like a very different company, we had set out a very challenging ambition to be a product-driven business that could scale globally. Over the last nine years, we've demonstrated that we've built a model where we focus on sustainable growth. Throughout this period, you'll have heard Stephan talk about this, we continue to invest for the next phase of growth.
We feel like we're definitely a company that still has a lot of ambition to achieve. I think we're very pleased to have managed to grow each year through whatever trading environment we find ourselves. Clearly, we have been through COVID, we've been through war, we've been through recessionary pressures. You should expect us to continue with our ambition unabated. We certainly, we expect the growth trend to continue going into the next plan. I won't preempt the targets, but everybody's already unfortunately seen them this morning on the RNS. Just to recap, we have focused on the U.S. On the right-hand side, you'll see by region that the U.S. is now our biggest market.
I've just to really labor the point, this will continue being a significant growth driver for the group for the foreseeable future. We are a fairly diversified company by sector, the sectors that we point to. I would say Jason is a typical client. Most of our clients are very data savvy. When you're looking at our sector breakdown, you'll see that our technology clients are the biggest types of clients that buy from us. You'll also see agencies, sports, banking and media owners are also significant buyers. Typically, our clients fit within three main cohorts. They're media owners, they're agencies or they're brands or organizations.
Just to give people a flavor for what we've been doing with our customers, and I would say, Jason's experience is typical. Although Jason's probably more on the right-hand side. At the bottom of the chart, we're giving you a flavor for how a typical client, not typical, how specific clients in this case, increase spend with us over time. The first one, the technology client, that's a client that we've just been doing good work with. It's increasingly giving us more opportunity to pitch for more work. Fairly typical. The top media agency is where we've been able to build a client segmentation on top of our data, really speaking to the case study that Jason gave us.
That gives us something, gives them something hugely beneficial to organize their teams globally with, and you've seen an acceleration of their spend with us. The leading payments provider, that's where we've been able to use data to really bridge that credibility gap. Research is an industry where people start small with you, and as you deliver, they give you more. Data is a great way of leapfrogging that credibility gap. In that situation, we've been able to get a significant subscription, global subscription, contract in place, very quickly. The top slides are looking at clients by spend. Purple slide, the sort of purple line on the right-hand side is the last 12 months as at the 31st of January 2023. We're comparing that to FY 2019.
I do wanna make this point. Sunny had the majority of our revenue comes from existing clients. Existing clients are a real growth driver for the group. We're really pleased to be expanding the number of companies who are doing significant amounts of research with us. You'll see there's a client spending over GBP 500 thousand, a client spending over GBP 1 million. Those numbers have moved significantly in the period. Part of that's been our investment in panels. The more we can support our global clients, the more they will do with us. Part of it also, it's examples like the technology client. We're just demonstrating great quality data, good client service, good value for money in terms of the data being interoperable, where we find opportunities to do more with clients.
We have a unique profile to our client base, you'll see that on the left-hand side. We've got 30% of our revenue comes from clients spending over $1 million, we have a sort of small but large, small but big spending clients that do more with us. We also have a very long tail of clients. 44% that's spending less than $200,000. That speaks to our go-to-market strategy, where we wanna have an enterprise solution which really focuses on taking clients up the value chain, so to speak.
At the same time, being able to capture a longer tail of customers, who may only stay at a small transaction level, but we may find we have customers that do increase their spend with us. You'll have heard us talk relentlessly about focuses on tracking work and subscriptions. Back in 2014 when we started our first growth plan, we had nearly no visibility going into each financial year. We've been really focusing on getting multi-year subscriptions, getting multi-year tracking studies with clients. At the top, you'll see this is a percentage of our revenue each year that we sold at the beginning of the year. We've had a sort of minor blip between 2020 and 2021. That's a COVID impact.
Really at the main chart to really pull out here is the client cohort analysis. The red line is the revenue that we're generating from clients that were clients in FY 2017 or prior. You'll see that as we go from FY 2017 to FY 2022, it's our existing clients that really drive growth, and that's a big part of the platform play. We wanna continue being able to support clients, but at the same time, bring in new clients and also begin to scale them. As we evolve to a platform business, we will change the KPIs that we are disclosing. Historically, we've talked about the three divisions, which Sunny mentioned. We will be collapsing those into two.
It's data products, which is our own proprietary data, and its research. We'll start to give you a flavor for what that looks like. I must stress we're not a SaaS business. We sell our subscriptions on an enterprise basis. There is the potential for us to move into more SaaS type metrics, which we will obviously explain as we evolve our market proposition. To give you an idea, these are companies subscribing. This isn't how many users. For example, Crunch has 90,000 users that are actually using the platform, we don't charge clients on a per seat basis.
Research is very much gonna be continuing to focus on how much tracking work we get from those clients and increasingly looking at how much spend are we getting over certain thresholds. At this moment in time, GBP 500,000 is a significant, but we are starting to see the opportunity to pitch and deliver work into the millions. We'll give a flavor for platform. At this moment in time, that's only surveys, over time, we'll also be able to sell data. You'll be able to procure data with a credit card. I forgot my water. Sorry. Really this is speaking to how much of our revenue can we generate on platform, which is not sales assisted. It's a fully digital path to purchase.
What this all translates to is we are setting a medium-term target, which you can read as three to five years, as a GBP 500 million business. Sort of coming back to, we expect a lot of our growth to come from our existing clients, you know, particularly in the U.S. doing multinational work, but also being able to service a larger number of clients through the platform. With that, we're targeting a median operating profit margin of 25%. We've given some people which is, if you're familiar with our story, some of our margin considerations, we will seek to continue investing, but if we can, we will make that self-financing. We will be increasing the amount of technology we spend as we build out our roadmap.
We currently spend about $12 million. Over the next two years, we expect to increase that to $18 million. Panel development, we had a question earlier. We are seeking to hold panel investment flat. We currently spend about $9 million, but that doesn't mean we're holding the numbers flat and really looking at how do we utilize different technologies to reach a larger group of people is certainly core to the sort of way that the team is looking at how do we expand our panel capability. We have some decisions to make around marketing. We know that we are under-penetrated from a brand perspective in the U.S., and some of our competitors have gone out and spent a huge amount of marketing, which hasn't really worked. We will do this in the YouGov way.
We'll use public data as a way of really bringing people to the platform in a low-cost way, but really fundamentally educating people before they come to our website, so that we're using the benefit of technology and content as a way of getting them into our marketing funnel in a much more effective way. We'll continue ramping up CenX. It has been a powerful driver for delivery and efficiency. Of course, given we are increasing in scale, we will look at increasing heads in a few growth areas. Just a little bit around capital allocation. I mentioned we'll be increasing the amount of technology. We will maintain a progressive digital policy, as Sunny mentioned, we will still target small bolt-on acquisitions.
I just wanna give a recap as to the five pillars of where we see growth coming from over the next medium term. This expanding wallet with existing clients. We want that journey that Jason's gone to be to all of our clients to be able to go through that. We believe having a platform is the way of doing that in a consistent, systematic way. Increasing penetration through new logos, that's bringing new clients into our onto the platform through new business sales or being able to have completely digital sort of path to purchase, as I mentioned. Greater volumes to the YouGov platform will drive revenue, but as I say, will also help educate our clients as to how to use our platform.
With that, we hope to see an increasing amount of our clients' research programs being shifted onto our products and services. Sunny's touched on a couple of products. We will have newer products coming. We will continue innovating in this space and expect some new products to help contribute to our medium-term targets. As I say, finally, we will continue looking at selective bolt-on M&A, which will help in a few key areas. With that, I'd like to hand back to Stephan.
Thank you, Alex. Yeah.
Previous slide earlier on, we've talked about the industry problem being that it is fragmented and is unable to offer a unified solution to clients. Clients are really getting very sophisticated. I mean, you've heard what Jason had to say. He's not a typical client in the sense that obviously a company like Riot Games is especially data savvy. But it is the case that the understanding of data, use of data is becoming, you know, more and more sophisticated in companies.
Jason said, I thought very interestingly, that a lot of the pressure is being bottom-up, that it is actually the people on the ground that want more data to do their work, as well as executives then being persuaded the need for more. I think we're gonna continue to see more and more pressure for more sophisticated solutions. In the meantime, we're seeing a lot of companies talking quite wildly optimistic things about AI. We are very firm believers in the value of AI in the three areas that I've already mentioned, and we've already begun on that.
The idea that AI can somehow replace a sample is to us a form of lunacy and is a profound misunderstanding of what research does and shows really how little some people understand what panels are for and why they're so powerful and why it is ultimately about the sample. Our view is that putting a heavy emphasis on the panel experience, on getting lots more people doing a lot more activity with us, for fun as well as in fewer and fewer cases, I think, for just for money, but also with YouGov Plus, we will be increasing rewards for the hardest to reach groups.
That this is actually the future of research, simply by having more panels of higher quality in more countries, you massively increase the number of people who will work with you. There are places where by having good data, people will come to you because there is no good data in large parts of the world. That is our solution, is to work hard on that side, to keep working on the analytics and processing side, to take full advantage of AI and its extremely good fit with YouGov's structured, robust, recent data. That is the conclusion. We have quite a bit of time, I think. How long, how much do we have?
Half an hour.
Half an hour for Q&A. I'm gonna ask Alex and Sunny to approach the microphone there as well, so we can share the burden of these questions. Yeah. Where are the questions?
Hi. Over here. Hi.
We'll start over there.
Sure.
We haven't heard from you. Yes.
Brilliant. Thank you very much. Just a quick question on the cross-sell piece. What are the internal incentives to try and sort of promote, I guess the other divisions? You say 80% only take one product line. Is there a sort of a kickback internally if you introduce another line? I suppose the example we had from Riot, it seemed the demand came from internally rather than YouGov pushing to the other parts of the business. I guess, are the sales team or relationship management people equipped to cross-sell? Then of the 80% who take just one, do they all need three, or do a lot of them only need one product? Actually, the addressable market isn't the full 80%.
Shall I take it?
Yes, please.
I'll start with the reverse first. Absolutely right. Not all 80% will be buying across all three divisions. Some of that 80% may potentially be really small one-man PR agencies who are using our data services proposition. They are not gonna buy a syndicated product, and they're highly unlikely to buy a custom research piece. There is an element of that long tail that will only possibly ever buy from one or, well, maybe two, if we're lucky. The incentives we have in place. It has worked to a certain degree. It's just not worked well enough everywhere. Part of this is down to the fact that, look, we actually embarked on a relatively ambitious, second five, four-year plan.
There are some parts of it we executed really well, some parts we haven't executed as well as we wanted to. One of the areas is that piece around the incentives. The teams have been incentivized on increasing the spend with clients. Have we got the incentives right in terms of buying across each of those divisions? Sometimes. Sometimes, I'll give you a very real-life example. What we don't want to do is sacrifice something like our highly profit-generating data products in lieu of a custom brand tracker. Those custom brand trackers invariably every client, and Jason will know this, every client essentially has a custom brand tracker.
Some of those we can potentially run and generate relatively decent margins. Some of those we may never want to run. We would much rather we are pushing our syndicated product. Long answer to your question, we have done it well in pieces. We have got the incentives working well. We haven't got them working well as well as we should have. That's something that we're gonna focus on.
I would just add to that obviously I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm only here for a few more months, then we have a new CEO with a very different background. I've been someone very focused on the invention, on the technical product, if you like, on the importance of the data and all of these pieces, which of course are central to us. In Steve, we have somebody with a seat basically in a platform company on the sales and marketing side, in a way that YouGov has never specialized in. It's always been secondary to us.
I think that's actually something that is gonna be additive, a very important new area where we will have more focus, and a more suitable person to do it. Welcome.
I've got just three questions again please. When you look at moving to digital sales, the YouGov data and the YouGov platform becomes very accessible, you know, for clients to use or try out. Does that change the shape of the portfolio of your clients in a sense that right now, would I be right to assume that most of your clients are enterprise, you know, large blue chip clients, whereas once you start going down the digital sales route, you know, then you start going into the small, you know, next step down or the next step down in terms of the client base and, you know, in terms of the market dynamics, how does that split, you know, in terms of the larger blue chip versus the tail? That's number one.
The second one is just on AI, and you've mentioned AI in those three areas. I think it's quite obvious for analytics and the third one, which I don't remember. What I was going to ask is, for CenX, how does AI help? Then just the final one is, on average for U.S. clients, how many research houses will they work with? Is it a matter of replacing other people as you get new clients? Is this a matter of just, you know, they use five research houses and just increasing your share amongst the whole wallet?
All right. Last one, you do. I'll.
Well, I'll do the client. I'll do the first and last. On the client, it depends. That's how we have to then structure how we go to market with our account management teams. We are working with global brands who will either centralize decision-making or be highly decentralized. We have seen over the years, clients are typically spending with fewer vendors. Part of that's being driven by GDPR, really understanding where your data was coming from, washed out quite a lot of companies that could not obviously give our clients comfort on that. You are typically having. It's a mixture of people using very large companies to do global tracking. Coming back to the...
I will pick up on the profile piece that will skew where we, where we generate our revenue from. Also you'll find some specialist boutiques, and this is the area I think we got asked the question on, do we move into consulting? You'll have a variety of different types of specialist boutiques that the big major clients are using for particular methodologies or particular applications, which we're not gonna move into. We really wanna play in sort of in the workflow tools and the data space. To the question on does the profile of our buyer change? I think in the short term, no. The platform will help demonstrate how we really help our clients in a more simplistic, scalable, consistent way.
That's one of the journeys that we've been on as a company is reducing our complexity. We used to be really complicated when we used to explain to everyone how we operated. What we typically see is clients, and I'll use Jason as the example, they're spending the majority of their budget on custom research, and we've been really clear about what type of custom research we want to go for. Tracking studies, I'll repeat some of this, where it's scalable. On panel, we can capture lots of margin from one perspective, but also offer our clients good value for money. That's combined with a subscription. Typically, the way the pricing works is, you are spending a lot more on your tracking studies than you are on a typical subscription.
That will certainly hold true for a while. We'll certainly see more spend coming from big clients on custom trackers. This is a long-term vision where over time we may see many more of our clients coming through and contributing that are spending less money with us, but having no human touch. They're able to do everything in a self-service way.
Yeah. In terms of operations, the operational side and how AI helps CenX and that whole part. First of all, there are lots of operations that are very tedious to do, and the AI can already handle extremely well. We're already using it to create a quant qual product, if you like. That is to say, YouGov is very good at generating open-ended, so text in open-ended questions, because people can, you know, in chat, for example, are expecting to say things. We trigger really great comments on things, which traditionally you then had to have somebody go through and say, "What are they about?" And turn them into data or else, you know, analyze them in some other way.
We can now take 10,000 comments, and ask, and we have done this, and ask ChatGPT or whatever, we're using, to sort those out into the different classifications, for different reasons. Why, for example, are recommenders for certain brands, you know, what is motivating recommenders in some brands versus other brands by different demographics and so on. Our data of adding lots of demographic data to lots and lots of comments is perfectly suited for AI to sort into something that would take a huge amount of time, huge amount of effort, for people to do. It's also gonna be great for things like writing surveys for people. It's already been put into use.
We haven't done that yet, but we've seen that use in one other company, where a self-service platform becomes more sophisticated by helping you write the survey, and essentially, using lots of other surveys that have been written in the past to write a great, or at least a very good standard survey. There are lots of things like that, apart from the more-To us exciting part of interactive interviews and so on, which I think is. I mentioned before, which is really a very important part of changing the whole use or the whole experience of being a survey taker, of being a panelist. I come to you. Yeah.
We'll start with you, Steve, and then we'll go to the back when the microphone gets there, please.
Um.
Yeah.
Yeah. Hi, Steve Liechti. Numis. Yeah, I've probably got three as well. If you take your medium-term targets, and you've defined that as three to five years, just talk us through why you've changed to that relative to your previous sort of three to four years sprints, let's call them.
Mm-hmm.
That's the first question, just to understand your thought process there. Secondly, you said you've got about 100 salesmen people. I think you said about 30-35 in the U.S. As far as you're concerned, given the targets out there in terms of growth and your aspirations in the U.S., have you got your sales teams right in terms of new logos and sort of account management there? And then finally, you talked a lot on the enterprise level about quite a sophisticated or relatively hard work to sort of turn enterprise clients into customers and revenue generating. One of the things we've heard in the market is that a lot of clients are just taking longer to do stuff now and might even be canceling things if they can.
Can you just comment on that at all? I know you're not talking about current trading, but just.
Mm.
Just with that in mind. If I can squeeze in one more.
I was trying to remember them all.
Yeah, yeah, sorry. I can repeat. The other one is I just wanna really nail down that 25% margin target as well, you know, where you've got that number from. Is it. You know, should it be 30% in reality, aspirationally, or just why 25% is the right number?
Yeah. I'm gonna go to you for the.
That's the hard side.
For the second question. I'll do the first, then we'll sort of share some of the other two when we remember them.
I've got them written down here.
No, I know what they are. The first one is why are we going to a different time. There's no particular reason in the sense that, you know, we can't tell the future. We're giving ourselves some more latitude to think about the longer term investment plan, but also we wanna get very. We're gonna move on very quickly with some other parts of this. We would have been giving you. You would have in the market some kind of indication on the three-year. I know you asked me earlier on why haven't we got a three-year number.
My answer to you then, as you know, for everybody else, was that with a new LTIP that we have to go to investors with, and with a new CEO, we have to wait actually a little bit longer than we had expected to, because clearly, the new CEO has to embrace the LTIP target. Obviously, it will be out there then what that target is because we'll have gone to investors. That will happen. That's just delayed because the transition period is a little slower than we had expected. We had expected to. Well, we hired the person in time, but we didn't have him immediately in the company. We have to wait until August the first.
That's the only reason why that has been changed. In terms of the longer term, expectational margin and so forth, I mean, we really are talking about a very fast changing industry. We are talking about exciting things like AI. We do think we can really accelerate our growth with these tools and the ability to beat everybody else on sample, which we think will be increasingly important. Yes, we are of course, wanting to hit the sort of 30% level that a Bloomberg achieves, and we always talked about being the Bloomberg of market research. There's no point in us, you know, making any significant, you know, commitments to a margin that's further out and depending on fast changing technologies. Alex-
Can I take that?
You want to take that?
The sales team thing, yeah. Yeah. We have approximately 100 salespeople globally, around about 30-35 in the U.S. The first thing I would say is more salespeople doesn't necessarily mean more sales. The one thing we have seen is salespeople and sales are not proportional. We have had large sales teams. We have actually performance managed, obviously, with a view to always hitting our number as well. We're also not like SurveyMonkey, that $400 million that I quoted earlier, they also spent $400 million on sales and marketing. I'm sure you would not be delighted if we did that. However, we would love to get more salespeople. It is something, if they can sell, we absolutely are in the market for it.
The other thing to note about the U.S., Nicole is not a salesperson. She's classed as a researcher. In the U.S., we actually have practitioner-led selling, and we have approximately 60 practitioners, I think, Nicole, maybe more, who are essentially the ones who are out there actually engaging with customers aside from our traditionally labeled sales teams. Absolutely, when we can find good salespeople and good salespeople are hard to find, we will be delighted to place them in the U.S., and we are constantly on the lookout for them. Obviously we have to manage our bottom line as well, and we have to manage to a number.
I'll just add a little bit just on the margin point. I did get asked this question recently, "Why bother growth? Why don't you just sweat the assets?" I think it's pretty clear to see, we think we've got a long way to go. You know, we're really going for it in the next plan to become, we're on the way to becoming one of the global giants. We find that the target of having profitable growth as part of our discipline is important to us. I say, we're gonna have the ability to continue investing for growth.
At this moment in time, we're expecting, we'll self-finance part of that, but we also wanna recognize we will find further opportunities as we get into this growth plan to set ourselves up for a much longer term, a longer period of growth.
Yes.
Got to. First of all, just in terms of custom and data coming together as one division, is that just an external and reporting thing, or does something change in terms of bringing the businesses together that might have any financial consequences in terms of efficiencies, et cetera?
The changes are actually somewhat more complicated because they're on two different levels. One is an accounting question, and you can speak to that. Do that first, and then I wanna talk about what the internal name Polaris and Sirius. It's essentially platform help, aided service and customer search at the expert level, how they fit together.
Yeah. Historically, we've organized our teams with a data services team, which is very fast turnaround work. In the U.K., for example, we used to have a dedicated team that serviced a product called Omnibus that actually drives a lot of the media mentions. It's a team that was used to working very fast, a relatively junior team, very simple projects, which over time, actually, this is where self-service is actually better positioned to take that type of work. We actually found there was quite a lot of friction working with it. We had a team dedicated to data services, and then we had a team dedicated to custom, and they used to be very separate. We used to actually spend quite a lot of time telling our custom people not to do certain types of projects.
I do make this point, 2014, we're a very complicated business. Over the years, we've actually brought those two teams closer together, and you can think of it more of it's a spectrum of service. Custom work is where we're doing very large projects or very large trackers on behalf of clients, very hands-on with them. In data services, we're still running questions for them, but it's a lighter touch, but it is essentially the same type of activity. In some countries, we've merged those teams together now. From an accounting perspective, it's not how we look at the business anymore. They are one team. It's the research team. That transition is already happening internally.
Really what it speaks to is actually having part of this done with a self-service platform is the next phase of our evolution. That's why we're making now the decision. We'll include it as one segment.
If you look at the slide that I showed early on with the sort of architectural slide, as it were, the panel, Cube and Crunch and then the interfaces, and on the other side, there was CenX and then Expert Research as we called it. Our internal name for this is Polaris for all of the sort of platform bit and self-service and so on as CenX, and then Sirius for the Expert Research. The reason that we put it that way is because on the left-hand side of that, it's templated. It's what Alex means there by simplifying. Back in the day, every time, I'm talking about sort of pre-2014, every time some
A custom researcher, sorry, a custom client came along with a new project, our researchers would be like thrilled to try and think of 15 new ways of handling that as if it was a science project. You know, instead of applying really well-known templated solutions to the same sorts of things everyone was doing, everybody wanted to try something slightly different. We really got rid of all of that, and that's why that sort of custom research that is sort of endless science project is no longer part of our offer. That has made, you know, that sort of distinction between profitable custom research and profitable products and so on, not so clear at all. Even the complicated stuff is gonna be done by CenX on the platform.
That's really what that's about. That means that big custom projects, big custom trackers and so on, have exactly the same kind of economy, economics as our best large syndicated studies.
Thank you. Thank you. I've got a second one as well. Just in terms of the growth ambition, regionally, you know, Americas has been the sort of the standout in terms of delivering profitable growth over the last four years. The last strat plan has been tremendously successful. How should we think about the next three to five-year journey in terms of regional differentiation? You know, Americas has been mentioned a few times today. You know, in the light of only just sort of scratching the surface, a lot more to go for. How should we think about Europe and Asia Pac, where obviously the profitability and the scale of the business is a lot, you know, a lot lower than it is in the Americas?
Well, I was gonna say America, it remains our absolute number one region to look at, where we're investing in because it is the place where by far the largest share of wallet goes and, you know, they're very sophisticated and demanding in their requirements and interest and excitement about data. And it's much more progressive in that area. It'd be nuts for us to put our number one focus on anywhere else. AsiaPac is the hardest for us to have made an impact on, and obviously we want to do that. It is, again, not the most obvious place to put our second biggest priority. Our second biggest priority, therefore, is Europe.
Now we do see real potential in the EU as a unified panel. We've been working on that in the last few months. Starting to recruit people in every country in a single effort. There is actually no great unified offer in Europe, and we think that we could make headway precisely by being the first to have an actual all-EU panel. It's a fairly straightforward, logistical issue for us, and that's our second and most important target. Do you want to do it?
Yeah.
Hi. Thanks. Maybe the first two, just talk a little bit about data ownership and IP. If I've come to you, and I've asked you to do a load of work for me or this new self-service platform, can you then go and sell it to someone else in six months or make it available to the public or leverage that? If someone else comes in six months and asks you the exact same thing, you have to run it all again? The first question. You mentioned the U.S. a lot, but obviously there's a lot of population in APAC and Asia. If I'm one of your global customers, like Coca-Cola or someone like that, and I wanna know the demographic of my customers in China, who do I go for for that? Or how will you approach a brief like that?
Those are the first two.
Well, it's a very clear answer to the first part, which is that anything that you buy off us as a custom project is yours, and we can't use it for something else unless we've made an agreement that we would do. For example, if there's a case of one very large agency that wanted to add their own special things into our variables, our global variables, because they wanted those in. Some of them are ones that they want to keep uniquely to themselves and are paying for on that basis. Others are things they'd like to see in there but are happy for everybody to use it, and that's then not something that they pay for in the same way.
What you pay for, and by agreement, is what is yours then, and we can't reuse that. On the second part, AsiaPac is a very large population there, and I want to distinguish, if I go back to my previous answer, between having panels and having, you know, significant operations there. One of the reasons America spends so much is it spends so much all over the world. Of course, we want to be able to absorb that work. We have talked about the global panel. We have a very good AsiaPac panel, but we have a long way to make it the best. That is definitely part of that globalization of the panel.
Just a quick follow-up is about Steve, about his incoming. You've obviously set new targets today. How much of a mandate is he gonna have when he comes in from the board? Obviously the strategy is set before he's got here. Did he have any input? Has he been made aware, you know, just come in and execute the strategy? How much wiggle room will he have?
We were very clear when we designed the process of hiring that we have a very clear strategy that we've laid out to you all over the years that we've invested heavily in and that our investors have bought into. That's why they're with us. And there was no question that that strategy changes and that we were hiring on that basis and that anybody that aspired to take that role had to clearly want to continue on that basis. And, you know, it would be strange for us to hire somebody that wanted to put their own imprint on a strategy that we all believed in and invested in. Indeed, it is a great strategy. As you can see, it's paying off very well.
All the people that took part in the process were very much wedded to that, want to deliver on that strategy. That includes, of course, Steve. Steve has been aware of everything. He's allowed to read stuff and clearly he has, and I don't think there'll be any problems there. What we really want, though, is for Steve to add the things that he can do better than that are either not decided yet or that he'll have ideas for improving things. That's very much what we want and what we expect of the CEO. Come to you. First you.
Hi. Thank you. Can I just ask a sort of follow-up question on the quality of your international panels outside of the U.S. and U.K.? I mean, could you give us some sort of sense of how they compare to your U.S. and U.K. panels and ultimately what difference that means to your customers, whether that's in the granularity of what they can use those panels for or the amount of reliance they can place on those panels for delivering essentially correct data which is correct about their customers?
Yeah. Obviously, there's big variation because it's very hard in some regions like India to reach rural sample. It's also, to put it, you know, there's not much money to be made in that region, actually. It's hard in China to run any kind of surveys in some of some kinds, you know? There's all sorts of limitations. For all these places, you do the best you can. I would say that there is certainly a variable quality in the different panels, but that reflects the difficulty that everybody has. I believe that where we have panels, they are as good or better than anybody else's.
I don't think there's anywhere that we run something that isn't to the best of our ability. But, yeah, it's much harder to do it in some areas than others. Of course, you're not going to invest the same effort, in areas where you have very little demand. Right, yeah.
Hi there. It's Dan Cowan from HSBC. Question one, on M&A pipeline, what are the key areas you're looking at? How might that have changed since the last plan? The second one is on Plus, on Members Plus and how that, if you're paying more for that kind of data, it becomes harder to find, can you get a better price for it?
I'll do the second bit. Start with the second.
Yeah, I'll start with the first. We're not seeing a major shift in our acquisition strategy, that's pretty clear. This is an evolution of the strategy. We continue to look for opportunities where we can have access to people, you know, whether that's in a kind of traditional panel sense or new technologies to access people. We prefer to have new technologies to access people. Certain sectors, we talked about some under-penetrated sector. Health is a perfect place for us to play, we currently don't do very much in that sector. Looking at anything that could geographically expand, particularly in the U.S. obviously that we may find some helpful opportunities there.
I think we're getting much clearer around what we would look for from a technology perspective, and we're certainly looking at from an analytics perspective, are there some areas we could be beefing up. I make this point, making it even easier for clients to use our data, dashboarding, democratizing data. There's some like, some potential to look for companies that could accelerate us in that space.
On YouGov Plus, I mean, it's very much still an area of innovation. The principle of paying everybody exactly the same doesn't make much sense because some groups are much harder to find and more valuable because of that. I talk about young people, for example. It's much easier to get pretty much anybody other than sort of youth to join a panel and spend a bit of their time doing that. It's very hard to get 18-25-year-olds. If you pay them, it's actually quite easy to get 18-25-year-olds if you pay them more.
It just doesn't make sense to treat everything the same, and the way that we look at Plus is a way to start experimenting with those things and also to experiment with what other things people can do. For example, you know, again, we've been bringing up AI a lot. AI may bring new demands on data gathering.
Okay.
It'd be easier for us to work with people that are very committed and interested in what they're doing and also where the privacy and the transparency stuff is very clear, that they are, you know, signed up to a more stringent set of rules and feedback and so on. It is very much an area of innovation. There's no question that it would be that the groups that we would pay more would also be worth more.
Right.
To the clients. Steve, sure.
Thanks. I've probably got one, multi-part question then one more specific one for Alex.
That's a clever way of counting it.
For getting loads in, yeah. I guess everything that we've heard today on kind of sales engagement, products, it seems like you're positioning the company a lot more towards those kind of tech-enabled platforms, like Qualtrics, than your more traditional competition with Ipsos and GfK. I guess, is that the defined strategy? Related to that, do you think that is enough differentiation for you to overcome the incumbency problem? The final question within this part would be just as what is your kind of relationship with those tech-enabled platforms? Because you could easily be a partner with them. They don't have any panels. Likewise, they're probably looking at this $48 billion of research spend as quite a good avenue for growth for them. Sorry, that's a really big one.
Then the more specific one for Alex is just, you've put out revenue and margin targets, but just to talk about free cash flow. When you speak to panel costs basically being flat, kind of feels like free cash flow should be scaling a lot more than those two lines. Does that actually just get reabsorbed into software spend, and so it's a linear relationship? Just how you're thinking about that free cash flow line.
The latter. We do expect to constantly be reinvesting. Obviously, there's work to do on the panel side, whether we can really start to take advantage of essentially going from GBP 5- GBP 1, and then really what that looks like from driving more people into the panel. There is a little bit of circularity here. The more we have people coming into the wider panel, the more opportunity we have for self-service tools to generate more revenue. We will see over the next year how that particular piece pans out. Were there questions?
Yeah. On the other part, the differentiator is the technology. And what the technology means for panel experience and what that means for quality and so on. The number one piece is to be able to produce very good quality data for that is suitable for all the new needs that clients have. That is a big differentiator because there isn't anything else happening outside of what we're talking about here that I'm aware of, apart from, if I may guess, somewhat empty promises around AI. Everybody can say we're doing great things, but We'll wait to see about that. In actual concrete terms, no one's doing anything to create connected data in difficult to reach places, other than what we've discussed.
Therefore, I think that's a big differentiator 'cause that's what people need. We definitely want to be, as Jason put it, we are experts in our own system. We are experts in our own data. In that sense, we want to add as much help, expert help, as our big clients justify. We don't want to be having a big layer of consultancy and doing all the things that some of the other giants do. We would rather that they end up, and I think this is perfectly possible, they end up buying our panels. I mean, buying from our panels and quitting the job they do really badly. We'd be quite happy with that arrangement.
I mean, I don't have any answer to your part B about working with other platforms.
Yeah. I've got a question about your digital sales segment there. Could you share some of the considerations around, you know, why you decided to go in this direction? 'Cause it seems to me that, you know, it adds a little bit of risk into your business in terms of increasing economic sensitivity with smaller customers, more credit risk. On top of that, I guess you might cannibalize your enterprise business to some extent when customers want to, you know, get more bang for the buck, and they might go into your self-service platform. Then finally, you know, there seems to be a bit of a tension here with smaller customers designing their own surveys, degrading the panelist experience. You know, the reason why completion rates often go down is because surveys are very boring and long.
If you allow people to access your panel, without any moderation, that may be an issue for your panelists.
I'll start with the end bit and then move across. The one of the purposes that we're definitely using YouGov Plus for is to be the moderator of panel quality. All of our surveys will go to YouGov Plus members first for rating. You know, we're confident that with other tools that we have, this will be a way of ensuring that the quality of the survey experience to YouGov self-service will be high. It is absolutely a danger that we saw, and we have more than one way to address that. For the time being, of course, we'll have them all checked by our experts as well. They are all checked. There is. It happens very quickly, and it's done by CenX.
As I say, putting that through YouGov Plus in the first place, is a great solution, I think, for panelist experience. We think that there's going to be a huge increase in people doing self-serve. We're finding that sophisticated clients actually want both. They want to do some things themselves, and they also want to allow some of their researchers to play around with data. It's a great way in. We don't think it'll replace the enterprise part, and we don't think it'll cannibalize it any more than it has to. It has to cannibalize where that offer is something people want 'cause they'll find it somewhere else. There's no point in us not doing that.
We obviously expect the opposite to be the case, that we will have lots more clients trying us and finding the quality of data good and wanting more of it. You...
Yeah. Just to build up. More clients using our data. The most inefficient thing we currently do is sales. We typically have human beings run every part of our sales, the marketing funnel. We often have to sort of cold call people in the U.S. who may not have heard of us. In the U.K., we still get quite a lot of, "Well, aren't you a political polling company?" We've got a bit of an awareness gap, which obviously content helps us greatly with. Having individual salespeople do that is really inconsistent, and that's one of our challenges in terms of what the client experience is. Fundamentally, having clients aware of what we do is one of the challenges of using a sales force. You have to then demonstrate the value and then work with individual stakeholders.
We'd like to accelerate all of that, increasing more people coming into the marketing funnel, even if it's not just purely digital sales, at least having a consistent customer journey, where we can increase the education of potential clients. It certainly will benefit the existing sales teams as well as being able to take people through purely digital sales.
Thanks. Oh, go on, please. No, no.
It's also to Steve's point as well, in terms of, do we have enough salespeople as well. It's also that democratization of data is a good thing as far as we're concerned. That all of this, the digital funnel, leads into that and builds upon that. The more people that have that data in their hands, can play with our data, we're very happy with that.
With that, we have to end. Thank you very much for coming, and thank you very much for your patience, and your interesting questions. Thalk to you soon.
Thank you.