Thank you, Mandy. Just pause while the machine is cranked up for the webcast. Good afternoon, everybody. As Mandy just said, I'm Phil Thomas. I'm the CEO of Ascential Intelligence & Events. Again, thank you very much for joining us here, those of you here in Amsterdam, for this Capital Markets Day. Welcome to you here in the room, and also to those of you joining on the webcast. Especially those in the room, thank you so much for making the time, coming over and seeing us and listening to us. We really appreciate it. Today, we're going to talk about our events business, which is the standalone business that will remain as Ascential plc after the various changes that are going to happen in the coming months. As you can see from this slide, Mandy and I will be first giving an overview of the business, the overall business, building on what we presented at Ascential's full year financial results for 2022 back in March. You'll then be hearing from each of our brand leaders, who will share an in-depth presentation on each of our brands. That's LIONS, WARC and Money20/20, of course. We'll have a short break, as Mandy mentioned, and we're expecting to finish at 6:00 P.M. at the absolute latest. We'll be having four sessions for questions. Firstly, at the end of each of the brand presentations, you'll have an opportunity to ask the brand leaders your questions. At the very end of today's session, Mandy and I will cover broader questions about the Ascential business. For those of you on the webcast, please send your questions via the text function, and we will read them out and ask them here in the room. As you can see from this slide, there are going to be six presenters today, myself and Mandy for the overview, Simon, who runs LIONS, Paul, who runs WARC, and Tracy and Scarlett for Money20/20. Before we start, as ever, I'd like to draw your attention to this fascinating disclaimer. It's an important disclaimer, though, particularly important so far as it relates to forward-looking statements, please do take that on board. Today, as I said, our first presentation is about the business itself, the overall business, and Mandy and I will be taking you through this in a fair bit of detail. I hope you could see when you had the walk around Money20/20 just now, what our core belief is. We believe in the power of collaboration to drive innovation and economic growth. we at Ascential are committed to providing the tools and the platforms to help businesses connect, network, and thrive. At the core of the model are these incredible, truly exceptional event platforms that define the industries they serve. We serve two core markets, the marketing industry through LIONS and the financial technology or fintech industry through Money20/20. It's important to note, though, that while we use these shorthand descriptions of our markets, in fact, our customers come from a really wide range of businesses and industries. For instance, LIONS, we also have customers like Amazon and Samsung, entertainment customers like Netflix and Disney, and professional service businesses as customers like Capgemini and Boston Consulting Group, even automotive companies like Hyundai. Money20/20, as you'll hear later on, is so much more than just a fintech event. Among our customers are 18 of the USA's top 20 banks. Our key strengths, shown here, are what we believe make us a really attractive proposition, and what differentiates us from our competitors. I want to really explore these key strengths in detail so that everybody understands why we think this business is so special. As a reminder, we're market leaders because of the premium nature of our events, which is reflected, for example, in the delegate ticketing price that we charge, the multiple product types, and hence the different revenue streams that we have across our brands, and the reach the brands give us, both in terms of geographical spread, but also the depth of customer type. Sitting alongside all of this, and maybe because of this, we have a really highly attractive financial profile, which Mandy is going to go into in a little bit more detail later. Critically, our levers for growth in the future demonstrate a really clear path for expansion, both through organic and inorganic means across current and new markets, as well as using pricing opportunities and product innovation. I'm going to look at these opportunities in a bit more detail after Mandy's spoken. Let's just describe the markets that we serve and why we're in these markets and why they're so exciting. As I'll explain in a minute, we've been rationalizing our event portfolio for more than a decade, and we now serve these extremely attractive end markets with event brands, both of which are close to generating GBP 100 million each. That makes them very, very rare as event brands of scale. When looking at our portfolio, and this will go to our acquisition strategy, we're very, very clear on what makes an attractive end market. For an event to grow, as ours have, to such a significant scale, the event must serve an end market that is large, growing, fluid, and preferably disrupted by technology. It's this disruption that's really key to our growth, and it's our ability to adapt to the changes in the end market that allow us to attract new customers, new entrants, and broaden our base. In addition, when markets are disrupted, that there's a really important role for events themselves as a convening place for people to make sense of the industry they work in and the future of that industry, and to face the challenges that they have in common. If you look at the marketing industry on the left, which shows specifically global ad spend from last year, research from GroupM estimates that global advertising spend of $860 billion in 2023, and is currently growing by 6% a year. Despite the global uncertainty, brands are continuing to spend in advertising that gives them digital flexibility and the returns they're looking for. If you look at the fintech industry on the right here on this chart, the real growth engine of the financial services sector, Boston Consulting Group and QED Investors estimate it's worth $366 billion annually today and will grow at 20% per year. The U.S., Europe, and the U.K., as well as Asia Pacific, will all grow strongly and remain large and important fintech markets. It's really clear to us that our addressable markets are sizable and that there's still significant opportunities for growth within them. Our strategy for growth is simple: to leverage our opportunity through product innovation and the acquisition of bolt-on businesses that complement our existing markets, as well as looking at other end markets that will fulfill our very strict criteria for where we want to play with our events. Talk about that a bit later in a minute. Let's look at our business model and what makes it special. I hope you saw in your walk around just now at Money20/20, we build ecosystems in which our customers can do business, network, and learn. This chart explains how the distinct elements of our business model serve those customer needs and how they work together. Our strategy is clear. We use the power of our events to build the capabilities, relationships, and data that allows us to provide other products and services. You can see here that events and the awards benchmark in LIONS case, are the very core of the proposition, with insight and advisory services wrapped around them. LIONS showcases the power of its model in its entirety. Cannes Lions is at the epicenter of the segment, supported by bolt-on, highly complementary products like WARC and The Work. Money20/20 is at a different level of maturity. We're working on a digital proposition to offer that complementary service to our events customers and achieve the same effect for this end market. How does it really work? If we look from left to right, at the core of the LIONS brands is the awards benchmark. It's the awards that drive the physical event in Cannes and provide its focus. Indeed, such is the power of this creative benchmark that in 2021, we even managed to hold the awards in a purely digital format. We had no event in Cannes at all. We matched the equivalent revenues that we'd had in 2019. Moving beyond the awards benchmark, our customers repeatedly attend our premium global events, which sit at the very heart of their industry and fuel the connections, the business, and the learning. These are tentpole events in their sectors with a delegate ticket price, as I mentioned, and sponsorship average order value reflecting the value we give our customers. Our events provide us with healthy margins and strong cash generation. We're able to leverage the relationships, and this is the really important thing, we leverage the relationships and the insights that the event offers us to deliver insight, learning, research, and data. We're only able to do this successfully because of how well we understand our customers and the data we hold. Being able to deliver insight in this way through subscriptions, gives us the benefit of an all year round revenue stream and predictable revenue stream. Finally, from these insights, the content, the first-party data we hold, we're able to deliver tailored, relevant advisory services to transform our customers' businesses, focusing, to date anyway, on the marketing and creativity industries. Advisory, of course, is lower margin. It's highly strategic in terms of building those relationships that enable us to develop and cross-sell other products. The non-event revenues that sit at the core, like the benchmark, or otherwise wrap around our event platforms, like advisory, like insight subscriptions, make up a third of our overall revenue base. It's important to understand that a third of our revenue does not need a physical event for it to take place. This is, we believe, an industry-leading proportion, which in itself provides further opportunities for growth. Our ability to diversify event revenue between sponsorship on the ground and delegate payments is also a really powerful tool that most event organizers don't have. Highly unusual in our experience. In our experience, most event or trade show organizers really rely on selling space and then attracting either free or very low-paying visitors to attend. It's just not our model. Our model is completely different. This business model reflects a considered set of really strategic decisions for us to focus our business. Let's look at that in a bit more detail. We really do believe that our business is extraordinary. Firstly, because our premium event brands set the global standard and sit at the heart of their industries. As an attendee to Cannes Lions or Money20/20, you can find yourself center stage with a global audience in a world-class forum. Our events and products define their category, representing a hallmark of quality and a clear point of reference for the industries we serve. The history of our brands is unparalleled. Cannes Lions turns 70 this year, WARC celebrates its 40th birthday in 2025, Money20/20 has been there since the very beginning of the Fintech boom, more than a decade ago. This history reflects our standing in the industries we serve and our ability to evolve and adapt to their changing needs, because we are innovators, and we're leaders in innovation. We're always developing new ways to differentiate ourselves from the competition. All of our brands, LIONS, WARC, and Money20/20, were first movers in this space, and now we're delivering at scale. Secondly, our benchmark, our unique benchmark data, sets us way apart from our competitors. LIONS and WARC are clear examples here. Their benchmarking and ranking of marketing excellence and effectiveness globally is used throughout the industry. As I mentioned, we're exploring ways of how we can create a similar impact on Money20/20 through a similar digital proposition. Lastly, our market-leading NPS scores and high levels of returning customers are a common thread throughout our businesses. You'll hear more about who our customers really are and how they feel about our products in the upcoming brand presentations. Let's talk about exactly how we split our revenue streams and how they've developed over time. By harnessing our distinct characteristics, we've been able to create a business with what we believe is a highly attractive financial profile. One of the most important elements of our profile is our diverse mix of revenue streams, which is extremely uncommon, if not unique, in events businesses. As a result of our deliberately deliberate strategy of streamlining our business and focusing our business, we've been able to achieve a revenue mix more equally balanced between event-driven and non-event driven revenues. That's illustrated on these two charts. If you look at the chart on the left, 2016 revenues, 98% of which came from a physical event. This mix shows the revenues before we bought WARC, which obviously adds subscription revenue, and before we had started to develop our advisory and consultancy services. The chart on the right shows us today, using 2022 revenues. You can see that not only have we grown subscriptions from 2% - 15% of our revenues, we've also added a new revenue stream, advisory. We've also grown our sponsorship revenues from 27% - 33%, which gives much more balance to the events themselves. Of course, in order to achieve this balance, we've sought to reduce our reliance on certain revenue streams. You can see here that as a proposition, delegates and benchmark revenues have decreased. That's not to say the absolute numbers have decreased, of course, it's just that the percentage of the pie has decreased, which is exactly what we wanted to achieve. The pivot to digital awards in 2021 means that our benchmark revenues are no longer needed, no longer need an event to drive them, meaning that 1/3 of our revenue is now not reliant on a physical event. I'd like to be really clear here, before the pandemic, we didn't know that we could run our benchmark awards for Cannes Lions without the physical event. We now know that we can do that extremely successfully. We also benefit from high levels of recurring revenues. When you look at our 2021 customers, more than 85% of these, by value, return the following year, which is another powerful statement about the impact of our brands across our customer base. This diversification and the recurring nature of our revenues, in combination with our healthy profit margins, focused approach to capital allocation, and the strong cash generative nature of our business, stand us in great stead for the future. Before handing back to Mandy on the financials, I want to end this introductory section to give you a bit more detail about why we have ended up with two powerful event platforms. It is not by accident. Over the past 12 years, we've executed a really deliberate strategy to focus our business and the brands that sit at the core of the business. This chart illustrates how we've done that. We've transformed our events portfolio over time. On the left, you can see the shape of the business in 2010. We ran the most events we've ever run in 2010, 285 events. Now we run just three across two distinct brands. This has been a deliberate policy to focus the business, because we've never believed there is any competitive advantage from having a long tail of small events, like many of our competitors do. For us, the opposite has proved true. We found it so much easier to drive growth when we're absolutely focused on events of very significant scale. You can see that as we focused our offering and reduced the number of events, we've also increased our revenue and our profit. Our revenue has doubled from GBP 92 million to over GBP 180 million in this period, and equally, our profit has increased. Our EBITDA from GBP 31 million to more than GBP 70 million, more than doubling. This is proof on one chart, we believe that our strategy of fewer premium events is the right one to follow. Our events sit at the very heart of their industries, and their scale truly makes a difference. It's this really focused approach to capital allocation, only investing in and retaining those very few events that deliver against our criteria, that has led us to where we are today. I'll now hand over to Mandy, who's going to give you a little more detail about our financial profile. Thank you, Phil. I'm now going to give you a financial overview of our events business, and this is what we are expecting Ascential plc to become at the completion of our ongoing strategic review process. On this slide, you can see the shape of the business from the numbers, the 2022 numbers that we reported back in March. Because of the sort of longer-run nature of an event like this, and to give you more context, I've measured all of our 2022 numbers against 2019 to give a more prudent and relevant comparison, which is with our business prior to the pandemic. As you can see, our events, or as you've heard, our events business essentially comprises two elements, each contributing a significant amount, approaching GBP 100 million of revenue, the marketing business, and then just slightly smaller, the financial technology business. Both of them, of course, demonstrated extremely strong growth in 2022, with those 2021 prior year comparatives, flattered by the lower levels of activity as we emerged from the pandemic. It is notable that both of our businesses, on a combined basis in 2022, were already growing at 6% compound, measured across the three pandemic years, or 20% in total compared to the 2019 pre-COVID benchmark. That was without, in 2022, the return yet of our Asian delegates to Cannes Lions or of the return of Money20/20 Asia, which you'll hear more about for 2024 later. In terms of margin, both businesses demonstrate very good profitability, the charts are shown here before the share that we, Ascential Events, will take of the Ascential plc standalone costs, those were GBP 21 million in total in 2022. We have here EBITDA margins well above 30%, and EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, of over GBP 70 million. It's worth noting, we mentioned and focused on this in our results announcement, that the margin of the marketing business has not yet recovered to 2019 levels, in part due to the significant proportion of Asian delegates which could not attend last year's festival. Also, it's worth noting that in marketing, the fastest-growing revenue lines, as you'll hear from Simon, are sponsorship, and these have significant delivery costs relative to the very low costs of an incremental delegate pass, a delegate stream of revenue. You'll also notice from this slide that the low capital needs of the business, and thus the low depreciation, mean that the operating, the adjusted operating profit of the events business is just under GBP 70 million. Again, that's before considering our share of Central Ascential plc costs when we stand alone. Now, we're going to turn over and consider in more detail the elements of our financial profile that we believe makes it a very attractive business. First, looking at our long-run revenue history. We have a long record, this is a 10-year chart, of really strong constant currency, organic revenue growth. We've grown revenue at a compound rate of 15% per annum over the last 10 years, even including the COVID years, and our revenues are now standing close to GBP 200 million. If you look, as I've mentioned, previously, if you look at the revenue performance over the last three years, which are the COVID years, 2019-2022, we have compound annual growth rate of 6%, which more closely maps to our targeted medium-term growth targets for revenue. Turning to profit, on the next slide, you can see that our profits have also grown strongly over the same 10-year period, with EBITDA, as I've mentioned, now over GBP 70 million prior to the PLC cost allocation. As I mentioned before, those margins in marketing still have some way to come from the return of the Asian delegates, who we hope to see back in force at the festival this year. It's also worth noting that we have deliberately chosen to invest fully in both of our segments during the time of the pandemic. Hopefully, you saw that as for those of you in the room in Amsterdam, as we just toured the show floor. It was somewhat of a bold move and one which we have seen accelerating our revenue growth, but not yet playing out in terms of those margins. Turning now to cash, and our cash flow fundamentals, which are, of course, our cash generation and our capital needs. As you will doubtless know, because of the forward bookings within events, combined with the upfront billings of subscriptions, our business has structurally negative working capital, which means, of course, that as we grow, we benefit from working capital inflows because we're being paid before we recognize the revenue. This graph at the top of the page shows our monthly working capital trend from 2022. Here you can see that on average, this business operates at a net negative working capital of last year was GBP 47 million. Which means, of course, that we have strong positive operating cash conversion in excess of 100% of EBITDA converting into cash each year. Ours is a business, if we look to the bottom of this chart, that has low capital needs, and we require CapEx on average, equivalent to just 2%-3% of revenue on an annual basis. This means that when taken with a medium-term cash tax rate of 26%-27%, our free cash flow conversion after CapEx and tax is over 70%. Almost in conclusion, this is a business of scale with a long track record of strong growth, excellent cash generation, low capital needs, and plenty of ambition and opportunity for continued expansion. I'd like to end my section, though, by outlining our own medium-term aspirations for the events business financial performance. Yeah. Sorry, there we go. Over the medium term, we are targeting revenue growth in the mid to high single digits. Some years it will be a bit higher, some years a little lower. On average, this is the average rate of revenue growth that we are targeting over a medium-term horizon. Based on bearing standalone PLC costs of around GBP 11 million, half of that GBP 21 million that I mentioned earlier, we target medium-term adjusted EBITDA margins in the low to mid-thirties. We expect CapEx, based on those low capital needs, to be 2%-3% of revenue, whilst our effective tax rate coming from our two largest jurisdictions in the U.K. and the U.S., should be in the range of 26%-27%. We're not going to be giving guidance today on either our future leverage policy or on our future dividend policy. We're going to finalize that point as we finalize the outcomes of our strategic review. We'll, of course, include it in the circular to shareholders seeking approval for that strategic review conclusion. However, I can say that we do expect to operate the future Ascential plc at low levels of leverage and to pay a healthy dividend. I hope you'll agree that Ascential Events has a standout financial profile and one which should deliver excellent shareholder returns. I'm now going to pass up back to Phil to wrap up with the conclusion of our overview of Ascential Events. Thanks very much, Mandy. What is the plan then, to leverage our strengths and to continue to grow into the future? Well, as I said at the start of this presentation, there are a range of organic levers that we can continue to pull to drive revenue growth forward and profit growth forward. Firstly, market penetration. We'll go deeper into our existing markets, as we have done for many years. Really good example of this is the revenue growth from companies in the media and technology industry. Revenues from those companies has grown at around 20% compound from 2019 to 2022. It's a great reflection, I think, of how we can embed ourselves in a market and then pivot and adapt to different customer needs. Next, we'll expand into new geographies. Our Money20/20 Europe show, which you've experienced today, and those of you in the room, was only launched seven years ago in 2016, and delivered GBP 24 million of revenue last year. Next year, of course, we're expanding back into Asia with our first show in Thailand, in Bangkok. Pricing. Because we are focused on these really scaled events, we can continually improve them, and that improvement in products and services gives us headroom on pricing. Great example of that is our recent investment in Money20/20 US during the pandemic, which has helped us increase sponsorship average order value by 70% since 2019. Finally, we're always innovating, trying to find new ways to serve our customers. The pivot from an in-person awards to a digital awards process in 2021, for instance, demonstrates our agility and our flexibility to embrace digital technologies. Of course, we'll also look at inorganic growth, targeted M&A, both horizontal and vertical. WARC, which you'll hear about in a minute, is a brilliant example of a bolt-on. This M&A allows us, as in WARC's case, to serve the core customers of LIONS with new products and services, and deliver excellent growth and shareholder returns. When we acquired WARC in 2018, we already knew the business well. It partnered at Cannes Lions for many years and shares many of the same customers as LIONS across the marketing ecosystem. Its offering, which is optimizing marketing effectiveness, is incredibly complementary to the creative benchmark of LIONS. The close collaboration and the advantages of common ownership are really significant, partly because it gives full access to the LIONS platform. WARC has been able to drive revenue and profits. That in 2022, it delivered an annual return on investment of 18% on the GBP 24 million that we paid for the business back in 2018. There are other targets out there that will meet similar profiles. Lastly, there's the opportunity to acquire in adjacent markets. As I said before, as you well know, we serve two industries today: marketing and financial technology. We shouldn't forget that the latter, through Money20/20, was an adjacent market that was entered back in 2014. Where we've achieved significant returns. In fact, an annual return on investment of 38% in 2022. Looking forward, while it's not essential to our growth strategy, and of course, it's impossible to forecast, we will be alert to opportunities of entering another vertical, a different industry, and create what we've created with LIONS and Money20/20 for a third pillar, while maintaining our highly disciplined approach to capital allocation and shareholder returns. I hope you found this overview of our events business useful. I hope we've explained why we think it's very special and very different from what people would normally consider to be an events business. Now we have the opportunity to hear from one of our brand leaders. Let's turn to the marketing segment. The platform that we pre-present to customers that we serve through the marketing segment is LIONS. Within LIONS, there are various different products and platforms that operate around the tentpole event, Cannes Lions. In a minute, Simon Cook, who's the CEO of LIONS, will explain how it all fits together and why it works so brilliantly. The biggest of the digital platforms in the marketing segment is WARC, and later today, Paul Coxhill, the CEO of WARC, will talk to you about his platform and how it connects with LIONS. This slide draws out the relative sizes of the two businesses. In terms of revenues, LIONS reported GBP 99 million in 2022, of which WARC made up GBP 21 million. LIONS and WARC, as you can appreciate, serve a similar customer group, as you'll hear about today. For this reason, when we present the figures and the revenue splits for you, it will consolidate LIONS and WARC together, given their shared customer characteristics. Okay, that's enough from me and Mandy, I think. Let me hand you over now to Simon Cook, who's the chief executive of LIONS. Simon, thank you very much. Good afternoon. Thank you very much to Phil and to Mandy. I'm Simon. I'm Simon Cook. I'm the CEO of LIONS. I have to say, it's quite unusual being here, 'cause for those of you that have done this before, you'll know that we usually do take place in Cannes LIONS, which is coming up fast. It takes place in less than two weeks. Gearing up for that. Look, we're gonna be looking at the full breadth of the LIONS business today, but as the Cannes LIONS Festival of Creativity will be taking place in less than two weeks' time, here's a reminder, for those of you who haven't been before, how it all comes together. There we go, an impression from the event last year. The next one coming up soon. First of all, wanted to talk a little bit about who we are, but more specifically, what we do and why. As some of you may be aware, LIONS is the definitive global benchmark and year-round destination for everyone in the business of brand creativity. Before we get into the what, I'm gonna talk a little bit about the why. We exist because our customers need the data, the evidence. They also need the arguments to make the case for creativity, so that they can create the best possible work to optimize their sales and ultimately prove the value of what they do. We exist because our awards benchmark sets the global bar for the most impactful and creative work, and it also recognizes the people and the businesses behind it. The rankings and the benchmarks that we deliver every year inform the global community and allow them to measure their own performance, the performance of their competitors, but also to understand who to work with and why. In practice, that means that we provide events, as Phil described, notably our flagship event, Cannes Lions, as you saw there, and year-round insight throughout the year through our subscription products, including the rankings and benchmarks I mentioned. Also newer to the group of products that we have, advisory services that help the breadth of our customers, in particular, brand marketers, establish the conditions for success. Let's take a look at our history and how we got here. This year marks the 70th edition of the awards and the festival, as Phil mentioned. Because we're a long-established business, we're in a very unique position. Our heritage, also our global status, and the 70 years' worth of data that we hold, help us maintain our position as a market-leading organization. A large part of our growth over the years can be directly attributed to product innovation. In other words, having the flexibility to offer new products and services whilst constantly evolving our offer to match the shifting landscape and the needs of our different customers. As well as product innovation, we've successfully moved into new markets, expanding our global footprint, tapping into adjacent markets and customer groups, and diversifying our customer base. The timeline you can see on the slide here shows you just some of the key strategic decisions that we've made over the last 70 years as part of our growth story. To pull out a few, we launched in 1954, and since then, we've continued to expand our awards categories and constantly evolve them. In 2007 and 2009, respectively, we expanded our footprint into regional events and awards with the introduction of Dubai Lynx and Spikes Asia, and also Eurobest. In 2014 and 2017, we launched Lions Health and Lions Entertainment, and this year we've moved into gaming. In 2017, we launched the advisory arm of our business, so consultancy services. In 2018, we relaunched our digital subscription business, The Work, which houses examples of best practice and insight from over 250,000 pieces of creative work from our 70-year history. In the same year, 2018, we expanded our subscription product offering through the acquisition of WARC, which you'll be hearing more about after this session. Some of you may remember that we reset our awards categories back in 2018 to create a more streamlined and a more focused awards offer. That was a significant update to our offer and something that we delivered very much in consultation with the industry and our customers. In 2020, during the pandemic, we launched LIONS Live, which is a new entry point and a digital service that covers key moments from our flagship event, and that service continues today to serve a wealth of customers around the world. In summary, our success today has really been built on our ability to create, to innovate, and to evolve. As you can see here, we have decades of examples of how we do this. We stay close to our customers and the shifts in the industry landscape, and we suit the changing needs of our community. That has allowed us to build a really strong, well-diversified business that is well set up for future success and growth. This slide gives you an overview of our business model and the customer mix in terms of geography, and the two charts really do demonstrate how we've diversified over the years. Firstly, if we take a look at the top chart, we've evolved our revenue mix over time so that it now includes benchmarking, that's the LIONS Awards, events, including delegates, so that's the sale of festival passes, and sponsorship fees, and that's as well as subscriptions and advisory. In 2022, you'll notice that over half or 57% of our revenues come from outside of the event. If we look at the bottom chart and our customer base by geography, we can see that the Americas contributes the most revenue of 54%, which broadly reflects the distribution of advertising spend globally, closely followed by Europe and then Asia. Of course, as Phil said, last year's travel restrictions in Asia, particularly China, meant that delegates were unable to attend the event in person. This year, that's one area where we expect to see good growth. One of the most distinctive assets is really the sheer scale of our tentpole event, Cannes Lions. The awards brought in more than 25,000 entries, and we also welcomed over 11,000 delegates to the festival last year. In 2023, as usual, we will be announcing shortly our awards entry volumes ahead of the festival, which is coming up fast. Let's take a look now at our customers. As you can see here, we also benefit from a strong mix of different customers. We've shifted that mix over time to ensure that we have a full ecosystem represented. As you can see here, this has resulted in a decrease in share of revenue percentage from the four largest agency holding companies. Brands have been a big focus over the past few years. We've developed new product offerings that directly cater to the needs of those brand customers, including the Global CMO Council, Cannes Curated, which is a white glove concierge experience for very time-poor marketers at the festival, and also other networking and content-led opportunities with the brand customer very much in mind. We've worked hard to ensure that our customer mix is balanced between agencies and the increasing proportion of brands that come to the festival. 21% of overall revenue, up from 13% in 2017. Looking in-depth at our agency customers, you can see from the top four advertising holding companies now account for less than 1/3 of our revenues, having accounted for 39% in 2017. We've also seen growth in revenue from other agency networks as well as we've evolved to tap into new and adjacent markets. We also serve our tech and media platforms. We've seen increased engagement with them over the last few years. Twitter, Spotify, Google are a good example of this. We've developed new opportunities for a wider set of media platforms throughout the festival offering. Okay, we're going to take a look at our revenue mix and what we mean by each type, so how we make money. We have multiple levers to drive revenue growth, and breaking them down, we have the benchmark or benchmarking, and this relates to fees paid to enter the creative work into our awards program. Benchmarking represented 28% of revenues in 2022, and we have 25,000 entries, each paying on average a little over EUR 1,000 an entry. On delegates, at 27% in 2022, delegate ticket sales represent our second largest revenue stream. Our passes are available in a range of different prices to suit varying customer needs and budgets. The average revenue per pass sold in 2022 was just over EUR 3,800. On sponsorship, that now represents 16% of our 2022 revenues. Sponsorship revenues are made up of the fees for festival presence, activations, more traditional sponsorship. The average order value for sponsorship for 2022 was an average of EUR 200,000. Subscriptions, well, across all of our subscriptions platforms, including WARC, subscriptions represented 24% of our revenues last year. For advisory, at 5% of revenue, this is a small but growing stream for one of our products, which is of high strategic value. Our advisory work gives us a route into our customers' businesses, and we deliver creative transformation programs, which also allows us to reinforce the prominence of the benchmark and also the festival experience itself. Our three biggest customer types are brands, agencies, and media and tech platforms. I'll start with brands. Quite simply, we work with the majority of the world's leading brands, and participation is growing year-on-year, which is very encouraging. Chief marketing officers tell us that they come to Cannes Lions because they want to understand how to make highly creative and effective work that drive their revenues. For the agencies, we work with all the leading advertising creative agencies globally. They attend Cannes Lions, they enter the awards, and they subscribe to our digital subscription platforms. On media and tech platforms, again, this is a growing segment for us. We work with all the major players in this space. We are building deeper relationships with them all the time. Moving on to the specifics around our customer or customer personas, we consider various customer needs across these types of organizations that you can see here. Our three primary personas allow us to understand the customer need and how our products and services solve their very distinct challenges. For the brands, well, the brands are one growing customer group. Both the CMO and the CEO are increasingly interested in creativity that drives business. As you can see from the quote here from a global beer brand, creativity is high on their agenda. They say creativity and LIONS are now considered a key metric for growth, so much so that LIONS wins are now included in their annual report. On agencies, chief creative officers are not only keen to win LIONS to attract new talent and to attract new business and clients, but because they're often personally measured on it, so there's a personal investment. Throughout the year as well, agency talent requires inspiration, exposure to best practice, and the trends and insights to keep their thinking current, to understand what's coming next. Quite simply, our data tells us that the agencies that subscribe to The Work platform are more likely to win LIONS than non-subscribers. It's a tool that really encourages excellence. On media and tech platforms, they are increasingly an important group for us, and we're seeing strong growth in this area. Customers like Amazon will attend the festival this year, building on their presence in previous years, because for them, as you can see here, it's an efficient use of time. They say there's nothing else quite like it, because they know that all of their customers will be in attendance. If we think about what this slide could have looked like just 10 years ago, it would have probably only featured the chief creative officers. Today, we're really fortunate to have that endorsement and that breadth of endorsement from leading global brands right through to some of the most innovative companies in the world today. It's a stark but positive contrast. If we think about how our products serve our customers more specifically, for the benchmark, the creative benchmark describes our awards, the LIONS. They've been part of the festival since the very beginning and remain the foundation of our business. It feeds every part of our business. Customers pay a fee to enter our awards, which can be judged virtually or in person, and awarded to winners at Cannes Lions. On the events, our events sit at the heart of how we build community and the network effect, and that's primarily at Cannes Lions, which kicks off in just two weeks, and our smaller regional events in MENA and Asia as well. Benchmarking, sponsorship, and of course, delegate fees are the core revenue streams for our main festival. For insights, depending on the customer need, this would be delivered through LIONS' expanding set of subscription products, including WARC, and the information and insights our customers gain throughout the year further cement our position at the heart of the industry and beyond the events that we run. For advisory, our advisory offer drives creative transformation for our customers, and we work with many global brands to help them embed the cultures, the capabilities that allow them to produce consistently creative and effective work. More importantly, our advisory customers, we find, are more likely to enter the awards, more likely to attend the festival and to subscribe to our subscription service. Over the next couple of slides, we're gonna look in more detail at the different parts of the product offer, starting off with the awards benchmark. Now, the journey to creating LION-winning work isn't easy. Just 3% of all of the submissions win a LION, and for a Grand Prix, which is the ultimate accolade, it's less than 0.01%. This year, as part of a campaign, we wanted to acknowledge our customers' commitment to winning a LION. The campaign I'm about to show you captures just some of the anticipation, some of the excitement associated with preparing to enter, but also to win. I'm exhausted just watching it. Hopefully, that gives you an indication of some of the anticipation that people will be feeling right now about the possibility of picking up a Lion this year. Looking in more detail at the awards program then, we're fortunate enough to regularly see the positive effects that come from winning a Lion. A few years ago, we asked a small, independent innovation company, who entered for the first time, what it meant to them to win a Grand Prix. The founder of what3words, who you may have heard of, responded: "Well, Simon, it's simple. People now take my calls." Quite the impact, and as I said, it isn't easy to win. In 2022, there were 25,000 entries into the LIONS awards. Although the awards have existed for 70 years, they have evolved a lot in that time to ensure that they remain relevant and to change to reflect industry shifts. Over the years, we've been able to navigate disruption by pivoting to respond to industry trends and changes through recategorization or reconfiguration of the awards program we have. This makes us hugely resilient to disruption in the industry, and also it pushes us to keep innovating. If you look at one of our largest and longest-serving awards, the Print category, volumes have decreased dramatically over the recent years, for obvious reasons. The decline, though, has been more than offset by the introduction of new LIONS, so that continuous evolution is very, very important. If we zoom in and look at the last decade, which is arguably the fastest period of evolution for our awards, it really does offer us a view into how the overall marketing and creative landscape has changed over time, and I'll pull out a few highlights. Launching Lions Health back in 2014 was really significant because it provided a completely new vertical or industry, constrained by the obvious limitations and legislation, with a benchmark of their own, that has encouraged an entire vertical to raise the collective bar for creativity. Responding to the shift in digital and shifts towards commerce, we launched Creative Commerce, Brand Experience, and Social & Influencer categories in 2018, so it was a big year for digital. Equally, in 2019, we launched the Entertainment Lions for Sport, which is another new customer set. In 2023, so this year, we've launched the Creative Gaming Lions, and the reason we've decided to do that is because through analyzing our own data, we've seen the number of LIONS winners that feature gaming rise by 74% in the last five years. We're excited to see the results this year, and hopefully a new set of customers stepping up on the stage to be recognized for creative excellence in gaming. As you may be aware, the LIONS are given out during the festival, but we're also capable, as Phil said, of running them independently as well. One of the learnings from the pandemic. Our awards process kicks off long before the festival begins itself, now we're going to take a look at what happens when our delegates get there. As we said, it's sort of our mantra, and at LIONS, we believe in the power of in-person events to create opportunities for our customers. Our customers also believe in the power of our event to deliver against those outcomes, and that's really demonstrated in our pass pricing and structure. You can see here how the structure of our passes is set up to deliver a premium experience, and also to enable access to the event for the next generation or our future customer. At the premium end, our Platinum passes consistently sell out months before the event actually takes place, and they do every year. Our pricing mix sits alongside a range of products and services that we offer our delegates, and that allows us to attract different types of customer at different levels. As I mentioned earlier, Cannes Curated, which is a program of curated content and learning for the brand side customers, has grown from nothing when we launched it in 2018 to become a GBP 3 million product. Keeping very close to the customer need and what they need from our event. We've delivered and deliberately retained our digital pass consistently since the pandemic and alongside the physical festival, to ensure that key parts of our content program, including stream sessions and also behind-the-scenes sessions for our community around the world who can't attend, and we provide access to the festival for junior and mid-weight staff as well as senior decision-makers. We understand the importance of bringing entry-level roles into the LIONS community early on to establish relationships with our future customers as they grow into their careers. Finally, a quote from Kathleen Hall, who's the Chief Brand Officer at Microsoft, which I think just really captures the essence of why Cannes Lions is often described as an unmissable event. She calls it her creative boost that she needs annually. Alongside our delegates and our sponsors, they play a very important role in the commercial success of our event. With our sponsors, we continue to deepen the relationship and grow their spend with us, and continue to show up in Cannes in increasingly interesting ways that really help enhance the overall experience for our delegates. Major brands like Netflix, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft have become sponsors over the years, and some of these brands have been with us for a long time now. Google, for example, joined us in 2010 and remains with us today. It isn't just about branding and billboard presence at a standard event. We offer content consultancy, we provide bespoke learning programs, competitions and awards, thought leadership, and of course, the very spectacular physical activations themselves. These pictures show just some of the 2022 activations you would have seen whilst walking down the Croisette. We have an Amazon Port, Meta Beach, and Reddit Explorer Club. Overall, since 2015, the revenue has grown at compound annual growth of 15%. Now let's take a look at our subscription products and The Work. The Work is our intelligence platform, powered by the awards benchmark, and our other subscription revenue comes from WARC, which Paul Coxhill is gonna talk you through shortly. The Work really is an innovation story in many ways. We've worked really hard to grow the platform and expand the offer from being an archive or a database, a repository of the work, to something quite powerful, a tool for data and analytics. Our users can learn how to create exceptional work that impacts culture and also drives measurable business growth. Our customers get to understand what true creative excellence really looks like by surfacing the latest data, expert insights, and advice. The left-hand side chart shows that since its relaunch in 2018, we've grown revenues from GBP 1.1 million - GBP 4.2 million, at a compound growth rate of 16%. Importantly, and key to this growth, we've now driven our retention rates close to 100%, and it's a product that we'll continue to develop and grow to meet the broader needs of the customers that we serve. On the right-hand side, that gives you an indication of our longer term plans for growth. As it stands, The Work really majors in benchmarking, but over time, we will grow that platform and create new entry points for the diversified mix of customers that we have. The vision for our digital subscription products, collectively, is that they become the digital destination for everyone in the business of brand marketing and creativity for growth. Now we've looked at each of the different revenue streams in turn, let's take a step back and summarize the various paths to growth that we believe we have. We have three levers for growth, and I'll walk through each one in turn. The first is product innovation. As we've seen, LIONS has always been a business that has used creativity and innovation to drive growth. Products such as Cannes Curated, I mentioned earlier, LIONS Advisory, which is our consultancy arm, and the new Lion Award for Gaming, are all very recent and successful additions, and they deliver against very specific customer needs. One example of this is the introduction of the Creative Brand Marketer Pass this year, designed specifically for brands. We will continue to develop new revenue streams and expand our digital subscription business, ultimately creating new paths to growth through new products. Next up, penetration of existing markets. Here are three examples of how we do this. We go deeper into existing markets. Media platforms are a really good example of this. Secondly, we also have the ability to introduce new products and services in new industry verticals, and there's a lot of unexplored sectors, and the luxury market is just one example of this. Number three, in order to deepen our penetration of existing markets, we can also adjust the structure of our product offering to introduce new entry points for new customer sets, as we have done with LIONS Events, LIONS Insights, and LIONS Advisory. For pricing, in terms of pricing, we have the opportunity to drive yield in both delegates and award entries, and our average order values across sponsorship and advisory. This really reflects the value that our customers place in quality rather than just pure volume. When we look at the benchmark, this is brought to life with our Titanium Lions, which is the one to win, the most valuable lion in our pride. Other examples from our event proposition include the Platinum Pass, which, as I said, sells out every year. Cannes Curated, which is also a very, very high demand product, and the increasing average order value of our sponsor activations, as well as the high value points we're able to maintain across our subs platform, and the high demand we experience across our creative transformation and advisory services. As I mentioned, on delegates in particular, we continue to see extremely strong appetite for products such as the Platinum Pass, curated experiences, and corporate hospitality, suggesting that there continues to be headroom for expanding these top-tier offers. That brings us to a summary of our key strengths. So I hope everything I've said today reinforces that LIONS remains the global number one in what we do, an esteemed, established part of the industry we've served for 70 years. One of our key strengths is our expanded product offer, which allows us to leverage that strong proposition and network effect to solve customer problems through our events, but also insight and advisory, allowing us to deepen our relationship with brands and agency customers, and enabling us to maintain yield as an important growth driver. Our awards, the LIONS, remain the ultimate accolade for our entire industry. Our customers tell us that winning a LION, quite simply, is life-changing and remains so to this day. The individuals and the work that we celebrate provide a benchmark, but also a reference point for the entire industry. We have a strong financial profile with clear opportunities for growth across new verticals, continuing to leverage the strong position that we maintain today. Importantly, going back to quality, our NPS scores remain market leading, more than 50, emphasizing the extremely high standards that we set for ourselves when it comes to delivering high-value products for our customers that provide us with a firm foundation for this exceptional brand. Thank you very much. Would anyone like to ask a question? Yes, over here first. Yeah, it's Nick Dempsey from Barclays. I've got two, actually. Okay. If we go back to sort of 2018, when Publicis pulled out for a year, that put a bit of stress on the event. There was lots of tense conversations with the other holding companies. Didn't seem to do Publicis that much harm. They came back triumphantly the next year. They got a lot of publicity out of it. Why won't one of them do that again and force a bit of a commercial rethink, which I think is how I'd summarize 2018? Sorry, another question, if you don't mind. Sure, yeah. Yeah, I mean, ad agency growth is pretty good at the moment. We track all of that. Nobody really thinks it's gonna be good through the very back end of this year and into next year. People worry about the economic conditions. To what extent, when we're thinking of Cannes 2024, should we worry about the same kind of impact of an economic weaker period as we've seen in the past? Given the more diversified revenue streams you've got now, do you think you'd be a lot more protected? I think I'll start with the end of that question, which is yes, because we have made huge efforts to diversify over recent years. In 2018, for reference, that goes back to a call from some of our customers or feedback from some of our customers to create a more focused, more streamlined set of categories that sit under our awards. That's something we carried out in consultation with the industry. I think based on the investment that we've seen from the holdcos since then, that we've been able to maintain, that puts us in a really strong position. On diversity of customers, I think we covered that. Does that cover your second part of the question? Yeah, I guess if I look at the customer base that you've diversified into, they're all still pretty economically sensitive. Yeah. I wonder if it makes any difference that you have diversified the types of customers, if those people are all broadly marketing and advertising exposed, therefore, in an economic downturn, have some stress. I think with the media platforms especially, is interesting, because with everything we've heard this year, we're expecting a positive presence from the platforms who are coming this year. As I mentioned, they are growing their investment with us year-on-year, I think as the Amazon example showed us there, they're coming because all of their customers are there. They're increasingly telling us that Cannes Lions is part of their growth program. We are a factor in that, which I think really helps us. Thank you. Yes? The mic is coming your way. Thank you very much. I have two questions, please. Of course. The first one, you said that the margins last year were below 2019 levels due to the absence of Asian delegates. Do you think they will reach 2019 levels this year as these delegates are back, or will it take longer? I think with Asia, with China specifically, as we mentioned, it was very difficult for them to come to the festival last year for obvious reasons. We would expect, a degree of growth coming back this year. On the margins, Mandy, I don't know if you want to take that one? Mic number one. Actually, it's just come on. Thank you. We are not giving specific brand level margin guidance, certainly when talked about in a one-year profile. I think the second part of my introduction indicated that there were two factors. The second is that effectively, the business is now driving revenues, and they're becoming a big part of the business from sponsorship, which has significant costs associated with it. I wouldn't be expecting the margins to go back to that 46% we saw in 2019 in this current year because of that factor. We're growing the profit, but not necessarily with all those sort of very high-level margin revenue streams. Thank you. Secondly, I understand it's early days, but can you comment or do you have a view as to how generative AI may impact creative work and the demand for benchmarks? If you come to the festival in two weeks' time, the conversations will be dominated by it. Do we have a view from an Ascential level on that? No, I think from your industry experience. From our industry experience, look, I think one of the things that the stages at Cannes Lions really highlight are latest trends. Deliberately, we provide the platform for those debates to take place, and that's part of the appeal for our customers. From our experience, though, with our own product, I think what it allows us to do is, as I mentioned earlier, have a really broad view of the trends that are coming down the tracks and how we might adjust because of that. We've seen trends come and go, and I think it'll become more interesting when AI actually becomes a normal part of the ecosystem. Actually supporting creativity and enhancing it, rather than detracting or posing any great threat. Thank you. Just one from me. You mentioned Amazon. I think you actually expanded your physical footprint last year to accommodate them, and there was suggestion it may go a bit further this year. Are you physically landlocked from here and sort of there's nowhere else you can go? 'cause you don't kind of call out space as a driver. Would you ever consider moving from Cannes if that became an issue? I think with space, our reference point are some of the other events that take place throughout the year. You may be aware that with the film festival, for example, especially during its heyday, occupy a much bigger footprint or has done in the past than Cannes Lions ever has. There is room for flex, there's room for growth. Because of our very tight relationship with the city, they are very keen to grow with us. We can leverage that relationship to help unlock new inventory, but also new spaces, new parts of the city that are currently untapped. Any other questions? Okay, thank you very much. Thank you, Simon. Thank you, Simon. That completes the first part of our presentation. We are now going to take a coffee break. We are running slightly ahead of time, so we're going to take a 30-minute break, and we're going to pause the webcast and come back. After the webcast, we'll be back 10 minutes to the hour. We're gonna take a 30-minute coffee break. Thank you all very much. Great. Thank you, and welcome back. Welcome back to the webcast as well. I'm very pleased to introduce you to Paul Coxhill, the Chief Executive of WARC, a very important part of marketing, the marketing segment that LIONS, and Simon Cook has just been telling you all about. Thanks very much, Paul. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you, Mandy. As Mandy said, I'm Paul Coxhill, CEO of WARC. I've worked for Ascential now for 11 years and led the WARC business since we acquired the company in 2018. Prior to that, I actually spent 20 years as a marketer, 17 years of which were in financial services. 13 years of those at Barclays and four years at a fintech scale-up. Actually, that's been great preparation to run a marketing business that also is part of the same family as Money20/20. That's helping us be more joined up across our brands as well within the business as we go forward. More on that later. Let's get into WARC. Firstly, it is WARC. It's not WARC or any other pronunciation that all sorts of other people will hear, and we actually make a bit of a virtue of that in our campaigns sometimes about how different people in different cultures talk about the business. WARC started life as the World Advertising Research Center, and is the global authority on marketing effectiveness. Before I go any further, though, I think it's important to reflect on exactly what we mean when we talk about marketing effectiveness. Consider this challenge: CEOs, as we all know, have a goal to grow their business. They'll often turn to marketing to help them to do that, but sometimes they worry that much of that spend might be wasted, it might be diluted to margin, or it might be misdirected. It's the old Wanamaker quote from the nineteenth century, "Half my advertising spend is wasted, I just don't know which half." There is still a lack of trust that the money will be well spent. Marketing is like any other profession. There are known knowns that have always worked and continue to do so, and there are things, of course, that change as new knowledge is acquired and new opportunities to do things differently emerge. Too often, marketers don't make their case well, and the boardroom discussion descends into everyone thinks they know how to do marketing. Marketers can stand on the shoulders of those that have gone before, rather than starting again, and can build a stronger relationship with their CFO and their CEO to drive demonstrable growth. It could also be, though, behavior change or sales, whatever their effectiveness goal is, and that's where WARC comes in. We exist to ensure marketers, with their partners, develop and execute the right strategy and plans to meet their corporate goals, including driving growth and ROI. Whether that's how and where to spend a growing budget in the happy times to drive market share, or how to drive the same sales level as now with a smaller budget, we provide tools and insights to help marketers and CEOs make the right decisions about how to do marketing and where to spend their money to make the most impact. As you can imagine, in difficult macroeconomic times, the need for our products becomes more urgent than ever before. As the global authority on marketing effectiveness, we provide rigorous and unbiased evidence, expertise, guidance, and benchmarks to enable marketers to drive growth and return on investment. Our brand purpose is to save the world from ineffective marketing by putting evidence at the heart of every marketing decision. As you've just heard from Simon, WARC is an incredibly important part of the overall LIONS product offer. It's clear why WARC and LIONS are highly complementary businesses, given that we serve similar end markets, albeit with different solutions. We work very closely together. Here's a short video that brings our digital subscription product, WARC, and our insights to life. WARC was established almost 40 years ago. We're firmly part of our industry and have been for decades, just like LIONS. WARC has grown at pace since being acquired by Ascential in 2018, and a lot of that growth has come from innovation. In the last few years, we've launched products at pace to serve emerging customer needs and new markets. For example, our advisory offer in 2019, our China-facing sites and expanded team in 2020, a focus on data science and the power of using AI for translation in 2021, and then more recently, in 2022, launching a WARC Digital Commerce and Marketing Effectiveness Platform subscriptions offering. We'll have more on that later. It's also important to note, linking to what's been said already, that WARC only made sense as an acquisition because of Ascential's strength in the marketing segment through LIONS, given the complementary nature of our customer groups, products, and services, and the opportunity to capitalize on synergies. This virtuous circle has played an important role in the growth we've seen over the last four years, with the two brands creating joint IPs, such as the Creative Effectiveness Ladder and joint advisory offerings. WARC's presence at the Cannes Lions Festival has grown every year, and this year will be bigger than ever, as you'll hear more about later on. Now, to give you a bit of an overview of the business, the charts on this slide take you through our business model and customer mix in terms of geography and customer type. Firstly, it's important to note that our revenue comes predominantly from subscriptions. A revenue type, of course, that's highly recurring in nature, and our revenue rates are consistently over 95%. Looking at our customer base by geography, you can see that the Americas contribute the most revenue. However, as we'll see shortly, this region is still under-penetrated for us compared to Europe and is a key part of our growth plans. Already, we've had success in growing this region, we now get approximately 44% of our revenues from North America, up from 37% in 2021. Another notable increase is our revenue from brands, which has increased to 32% in 2022, up from 22% in 2021. In addition, our NPS, a measure of customer satisfaction, continues to increase with a jump of 10 points last year. Let's turn to look at our customers. This slide gives you a feeling for our core customer groups across brand, agencies, and media and tech platforms. You'll notice that we categorize our customers very similarly to LIONS. We see overlap of different customers from the same organizations who buy our distinct products and services. It's this multi-pronged approach that allows us to really deepen relationships with these customers and understand and respond to what they truly need from us. Since we acquired WARC, we've worked to expand our addressable market, including adding products for media owners and brands, and so mix of customers has evolved over those last few years. We've accelerated subscriptions growth from outside of agency groups, for example, in CPG, tech, retail, and media. In the latter, we've also seen a lot of advisory growth, building upon strong usage of our subscriptions insight products. For example, LinkedIn has become a key partner of ours. As well as their subscription deal, we've built out a recurring advisory revenue stream with thought leadership pieces launched at Cannes Lions, including a B2B Effectiveness Ladder that's become an industry standard over the last two years. This year, we'll build on this with a new strategic marketing framework, which is also going to launch at Cannes Lions. Our innovation strategy is driven by evolving customer needs. Now let's look at what our different customer persona groups look like. On this slide, you can see a real customer from each of our core customer groups, brand, agency, and media owners, and three very different roles: chief marketing officers, chief strategy officers, and chief revenue officers. You'll note the difference in their challenges, from our CMO wanting insight on marketing effectiveness to drive brand performance, to our chief strategy officer looking for input to win pitches for new business, to our chief revenue officer, who's looking for data and insight to demonstrate the impact their platform has on their clients' businesses, i.e., why brands should use their platform or channel rather than another. The quotes here also show the breadth of our impact on our customers' businesses, from the power of our insights, to the breadth of the platform, to our role as a key provider of actionable insights. Now let's turn to talk a bit about our products. Our portfolio of products has evolved over the past few years, as shown on the earlier slide on milestones. On this slide, though, you can see the breadth of the WARC offer. We organize our revenues into broadly two types: insights and advisory. Insights, delivered by subscriptions, caters for all our customer personas with a range of products with specific goals, as outlined here in these four columns: WARC Strategy, WARC Media, WARC Creative, and our newest offer, WARC Digital Commerce. Advisory sits as a complementary offer across all these insight products, with a focus on bespoke consultancy, thought leadership, and learning through our WARC Academy workshops and new e-learning propositions. Rather than thinking about us as a set of products, customers are increasingly engaging with us as a solution provider by combining our platform insights with learning and advisory programs to make their marketing or organization more effective and to deliver greater performance for their shareholders. When we acquired WARC, the only choice our customer had was to subscribe to our single digital product and magazine. Now, they will typically start with our WARC Strategy product, which our subscribers take as the foundation stone for everything else, and then add one or more of the other subscription modules and/or learning and advisory programs to build out their relationship with us. This has driven our average client value up by 58% over the last four years. Further innovation in the platform over the last two years has helped maintain our growth rates. Now let's reflect on some of the levers for that growth. Firstly, as mentioned earlier, we have an enormous opportunity to grow internationally. The U.S., as mentioned, is already our biggest market by revenue, but our penetration in this biggest ad market in the world is still relatively small. Indeed, if we were to achieve the same penetration in the U.S. that we have in the U.K., we would add $25 million of revenue to the business. Elsewhere, we'll also continue, of course, to invest in APAC from our Singapore base. Secondly, we've demonstrated our ability to extend our offering into adjacent markets, most recently through the launch last year of the Marketing Effectiveness Platform, a repositioned version of our digital offering. This is a great example of us expanding our offering from our core strategist persona into brand, media, and creative practitioners. Third, our strong product offerings and our high levels of customer satisfaction allow us to embed annual automatic renewal mechanisms within our subscription agreements, which grow individual contracts in line with RPI. Lastly, and key to our pricing strength, is our ability to innovate within our product set, some examples of which we'll consider on the following slide. Supporting this, we recently refreshed our pricing structure to offer customers greater incentives to upgrade and add products from adjacent verticals. Now let's look ahead at what's new for 2023. Firstly, creative impact. This is another collaboration with LIONS, our deepest yet. What it will see this time is WARC and LIONS delivering a curated content stream, focusing on creative effectiveness at the Cannes Lions Festival this June. This builds on the multi-year presence that Phil mentioned earlier, that WARC has had at the festival, and is in direct response to LIONS client feedback on how much they enjoyed the content in 2022, and a desire for actionable, impactful content, particularly in a challenged economic environment. We expect this to have a positive impact on LIONS' delegate sales by attracting a new audience to the festival, and for WARC to then leverage the content to drive subscriptions growth in the second half of 2023. Second, for this year, academy and expansion into e-learning. Education is an important part of how we connect to our customers and is another way of monetizing our content and expertise. This year, we're launching a program of executive training and our first fully digital e-learning program on the principles of marketing effectiveness. This will drive further growth in our advisory business line and attract a new customer set who may not be familiar with WARC. The program content connects back into the subscription platform to drive a circular impact on the core business. Third, our diversity, equity, and inclusion hub. Not only is supporting DEI, of course, the right thing to do, diversity in advertising demonstrably makes a difference to effective marketing outcomes. This online resource features the latest best practice, research, and guidance to enable marketers to implement successful DEI strategies and enables us, as WARC, to build brand fame around an important industry issue. Lastly, product innovation. We're enhancing our products across the Marketing Effectiveness Platform to ensure that we're constantly responding to industry shifts and customer needs. This includes the launch of our own API feed to embed WARC subscription services into client workflow and their intranets, and a new Portuguese language site, powered again by AI translation, to drive growth in LATAM. We expect this to support our subscriptions growth plans in half two and beyond. As you've heard today, WARC is evolving rapidly into a must-have solution for our customers. I'd like to conclude by reflecting on what we see as the key strengths of this business. Firstly, we're the clear number one in our market, and are long-established. We have a strong brand that attracts top talent and partners from across the globe, demonstrated by our presence here at Money20/20, as well as, of course, at Cannes Lions. While there are indeed, of course, other services in the marketing ecosystem, there is no one else who does what we do with our focus on marketing effectiveness, a focus that's more relevant now than ever in a fast-changing world that marketers otherwise may struggle to navigate. Second, we have a high profile in our industry, showcasing creators, judges, entrants, and other partners through our content and awards offerings. We also, like LIONS, celebrate exceptional work within the industry through our WARC Rankings and WARC Awards for Effectiveness, which are announced at Cannes Lions, and these benchmarks really help to build the WARC brand. As we mentioned, we enjoy extremely high retention rates with highly satisfied and loyal customers. This allows us to develop and cross-sell new products, driving average order growth from a solid existing base. Lastly, we see an extensive runway for growth from both product innovation and, as you've heard, a huge opportunity to grow internationally, where headroom is significant. Just a word on how you can see WARC showing up at Money20/20. David Tiltman, our Global Head of Content, presented this morning on marketing effectiveness in financial services, and tomorrow, Kavita, from our advisory team, will be hosting a panel of speakers as well. This is part of a wider move for WARC and Money20/20 to partner to bring our marketing expertise to the financial services audience, thereby attracting a new audience to the event and, of course, more awareness of WARC. We'll be delivering an entire stream of content at Money20/20 Vegas, and are discussing the same for APAC. If you have time tomorrow, do check out Kavita's session. Thank you, and I'll now take any questions. Over in the middle there. Just one from me. In terms of that U.S. opportunity, can you just expand a little bit on that? 'Cause, I mean, that's obviously would be a doubling of the revenues of the existing business. Are there competitive products in the market that make it more difficult? Are there things that you can kind of, what are you doing proactively to go after that, and how quickly can you scale it, do you think? Yeah. It's important to say that WARC's had a presence in the U.S. for many years, we've accelerated that presence over the last few years to get to the point where it's already our biggest market. The opportunity for large-scale hold cos, independent agencies, and brands in the U.S. is significant because it's the biggest ad market in the world. We've invested ahead of that by putting a dedicated content team, sales team, data science team, and a marketing team into the market. That's really helped accelerate the growth over the last few years. Over the medium term, we're very confident that we can attain that value. Any other questions? Nick. Yeah, it's Nick Dempsey from Barclays. Can you just give us some sense of how much of a boost to your subscriptions Cannes Lions represents? Is it something really noticeable commercially for you in the year that after June, you get a notable uplift, or would it not be something that we should focus on too much? Yeah, that's a great question. That, I wouldn't say there's an immediate impact directly in Q3, for example, Nick. We see two things. I think, firstly, we see the Cannes Lions reinforcing the importance of the WARC brand to our existing customers or the customers that we've talked about on there. Our commercial team are there in anger to try and generate new leads and new opportunities. We normally see that Cannes Lions will actually help us over a full 12-month cycle, rather than just over the next three months, because you wanna build big relationships for large tickets and not just land lots of small ones in the next couple of months. There must be others. You said there's no one that does exactly what you do, but there must be businesses. You know, marketing effectiveness is obviously a big topic, as you mentioned at the start. Yeah. That kind of 50% comment's been around for decades. Yes. What are examples of businesses that are doing something related or a bit analogous to what you do? You know, why are they not as effective, I guess, or why is their model not as effective as yours? This is a really good question. Often, brands will use agencies to actually help them answer some of that question. Actually, agencies, in turn, are using us to help them to help their brands. We kind of reach in at all parts of the value chain and the ecosystem. You see some of the news services, like Ad Age and Adweek, trying to provide snippets of marketing effectiveness. Because their main purpose of existence is news, they're not going into the depth, the scale, the curation, the depth of expertise and models and data and tools that we've got. Companies like Forrester and Gartner nibble around the edges of it, but they're much more generic in what they're doing, so they're not singularly focused on this topic to the level of depth with, for example, 23,000 results-driven case studies that we have on our platform. That's why we say there really is no one else who has that focus on this issue to really drive results, and we reach in at all parts of that value chain. Why do the agencies need your help to assess this? I mean, you know, they've been doing this for years. You, they should have these case studies themselves. Is that because you're able to, you know, look at examples across the different agencies or? Exactly. You know, agencies were the first customers of WARC 40 years ago, we've been embedded in that agency ecosystem from the very beginning of the WARC business. They will turn to us for inspiration, for pitches, for example. They'll look at other case studies. Let's take an example of agency X is launching a new car in the German market and wants to know how to do that effectively. They can refer to 23,000 case studies of what's worked in the past on our database, either in that industry or adjacent industries. We also have our media spend and media costs forecasts to help them figure out where to allocate their budget. We are a tool that agencies, in particular, will turn to help them to grow relationships with their existing clients, but also to help them win new business. More of a financial question. As you grow into new geographies, to what extent are you leveraging your existing resources and work and kind of database, I guess? I guess, the core of my question is, as you grow new geographies, Is that kind of margin accretive to the business overall? Yeah, there's an awful lot that's, if I go back to that case study database, that's a global database, so we don't need to go and get new case studies for a new market. What we found in the U.S. was it was important to have a U.S. content team to be talking in a U.S. voice, so we've invested in that already. There are some markets, though, that we go for a more global approach, and we've grown very successfully through that. We don't think every market we go into, we need to invest in lots of extra resource. APAC, for example, we operate from a hub in Singapore. We don't have resource in every market in APAC, and that works very effectively for us. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. I wanted to ask a question around the content that customers find within The Work. Can you please tell us a little bit more about to what extent that's proprietary, how content is maintained, and also the key differences with the other intelligence platform, The Work? Probably, I'm not gonna get the pronunciation right, but you know, the one we were talking about within the Cannes Lions. Yeah. Okay. I'll take that one first, 'cause Simon and I launched The Work together back in 2018. The Work is a repository of all of the, I think that Simon mentioned, all the entries to Cannes Lions, which is about 230,000 entries going back over many decades. It has less of a focus on content and insight beyond that, but we are starting to move more in that direction. At its core, creatives will come to The Work platform to get creative inspiration to develop amazing campaigns. The Work platform has a more of an emphasis on best practice, on white papers, thought leadership, on data. There's a heavy use of data in The Work platform. For example, we take data from Amazon, Kroger, Walmart, Target in the U.S. to help brands understand how they're performing at high level on digital commerce platforms. We've got a singular focus in WARC on marketing effectiveness, whereas The Work platform is focused more on creative inspiration and intelligence. What we're finding is that increasingly we're able to package and sell those things together, and that's certainly an area we want to explore a lot more going forward. Just a word on the WARC content. We have, you mentioned about proprietary, so we have a team of now just over 40 analysts, journalists, and data scientists who are creating the content on WARC. About 65% of it now is WARC, pure WARC I.P., but then the other 35%, including the case studies, and partnerships with some organizations like Euromonitor, reports that they provide that turn up on our platform. When we acquired the business, it was the other way around. It was about 35% WARC I.P., so we've really focused on transitioning that over the last few years. To what extent do you work with any other digital commerce business? There seems to be some overlap, and will you lose any advantages that you had with digital commerce being part of the group? We work with the digital commerce part of Ascential now to take some, a summary level of the data that shows up in some of their platform products. We saw an opportunity to bridge the divide or the lack of awareness between marketers and e-commerce professionals and practitioners. You've got real deep expertise in the e-commerce practitioners who want data down at SKU level, and that's the, that's the piece that the DC offering really serves in the other part of Ascential. Marketers just didn't really understand the language of digital commerce, and they weren't having a joined-up conversation, which was creating an issue as to where budget should be allocated. We developed our proposition at a summary brand level, which takes the data from the digital commerce business, summarizes it, so that brand managers and marketers can understand where they might want to invest between Kroger, Amazon, Walmart, and then, of course, versus TV, versus radio, versus out of home, with the wider insight you have from WARC. We've got long-term agreements in place to continue to get that data, so there's no risk. Second question is just around the retention number that you talked about. Is very, very strong. What is that on, say, a customer basis? If I look at, say, I'm guessing that's net retention, so it includes the expansion? That's value retention, yeah. Okay. Yeah. What would it be if you just looked at, say, revenue-weighted retention. Volume. without the expansion or the volume? You want to cover that? Yeah, volume retention is around 90%. Okay. Yep. As we said on the slide, value retention is over 95%. Okay, great. Thank you. Okay, any other questions? All right. Thank you, everybody. Thanks very much to Paul Coxhill, and that completes the part of our day, which is about the marketing segment. We're just about to welcome to the stage, Tracey Davies and Scarlett Sieber, the Chief Executive and Chief Strategy and Growth Officer of Money20/20, respectively. We're absolutely thrilled. They're rather busy this week 'cause putting on this show, as I'm sure those of you who have seen it, is quite a big undertaking. That we're thrilled that they've been able to take some time out of their schedule, serving the customers, to come and talk to us. This is the last brand session of the day. Welcome, Tracey and Scarlett. Get to the podium. Okay, good afternoon. Oops! Here we go. Firstly, it's our great pleasure to have you here at Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam. As Mandy just said, I'm Tracey Davies. I'm the CEO of Money20/20, which makes up our financial technology segment. I know that many of you had a guided tour earlier that I heard was very eventful. And you've seen firsthand the experiences wrapped with world-class speakers and content, the conversations and connections. I know that some of the people are joining us via live stream, so I'd like to start with a short video to set the scene. Got back late, woke up early. It's here. West Palm. You're in a place where ideas happen, and people that are changing the world are all around you. I haven't been to any other place where people are so open to hear you and make business together. 35 meetings over that 24-hour period. Very well curated, I'm telling you. There's this incredible amount of energy and buzz in the air. You guys got to share that moment is incredibly important. Community is everything. It's a genuine work family that I built through the Amplify program. There's a lot of accomplishments that come out of that group. Some of our partners go from being small, early-stage startups to really, like, established players is so inspiring. I think I was literally at one point in three meetings. What goes into making Money20/20 happen is absolutely mind-blowing. Think of it basically like a movie. You're waiting to see the excitement on other people's faces. First, you start out, you get those butterflies, and you don't know what's gonna come out? Am I gonna have the sauce today? Am I gonna have the juice? I show up, I try to be my authentic self. Don't overthink it. It's not about me or my presentation, but it is about how we can add value to the people that is in the audience. Being in the presence of so many people building so many amazing things. This impact that we make on the fintech space. Let's go do it again, baby! Let's go do it again. Money20/20, I hope you agree, does not look like what you might have imagined a show for this sector to look like. What I'd like to do is lead you through a detailed briefing on Money20/20. Firstly, just a reminder of our revenues. In 2022, Money20/20 delivered GBP 80 million of revenue across both shows. To what we do. We are an ecosystem show. You're going to hear that quite a lot today, and that means that we represent and have here multiple segments of the industry because modern money, digital money, is built on partnership. We serve the entire financial technology community. To sort of spell that out, payments, banks, tech, VCs, startups, and regulators are our core, but also merchants, retailers, and brands who have payments at their core. Later on, Scarlett's going to give you a more detailed overview of the ecosystem that we bring together. We often talk about incumbent companies and insurgent companies, and we'll talk around particular customer personas of this. For us, incumbents are traditional companies such as banks, but also people like Visa, Mastercard. What I would say is these companies are transforming, as we know, modernizing and challenging the new guard, the new companies, often obviously with M&A and incredible levels of investment. For us, insurgents are the new guard of companies, many of whom that you will know have emerged after 2008, so Stripe, Square, Plaid, Adyen, et cetera. At the heart of what we do is doing business, and whether that be signing deals, building pipeline, seeking investment, finding businesses to buy or invest in, or finding opportunities. Probably The Economist puts it better than I could. "Money20/20 is the place where the rock stars of fintech come to cut deals and court investors." What I'm going to do next is actually focus in a little more deeply on this, where Money does business. It is a critical part. It is the DNA. I'm going to walk you through how that happens, much of which you will have seen if you saw the show today. The first thing to say is that we use technology to underpin the business that gets done here, and by that, I clearly mean the app that powers our show. I'm going to explain the three ways that business gets done here. We talk a lot about serendipity. You don't know who you don't know. If we start with the serendipity image, there's an expression at Money20/20 is, "Everyone is here." Time and time again, the anecdotes that I get are: I've been trying to meet X company, X person. I couldn't get a meeting with them, and I met them at Money20/20. Of course, then there is the random business. You meet someone you didn't know you needed to know until now. That happens when you have the whole ecosystem as we do in one place, with a let's-do-business mindset. That, as we know, does not happen and cannot happen on Zoom. In terms of planned meetings, you will have seen as you walked the show, lots of booths. Here we have stands, as we call them, in Europe. Here's an example of a Cardlytics stand from Vegas 2022. We are a premium show. The companies that you see on the floor invest a lot of money and attention in terms of, you know, how they plan their activations and critically, how they plan their return on their investment. The key business development people roaming on the show will have probably a minimum of 75% of all their meetings booked seven to 14 days out, if not earlier, leaving a small gap for flyby or new business that, you know, comes to their stands or their meeting rooms. Here, and especially in Vegas, you will see lots and lots of meeting rooms booked out all day in 30-minute slots. Companies have teams planning this weeks and months ahead. We enable this by publishing the delegate list at least six weeks pre the show and using social media tools so that they can manage and plan their presence. Finally, to talk about the Connections Lounge. We have used an app at the show for many years. In 2018, we evolved to use meeting booking technology and broking technology. There's sort of two aspects to it, and those of you who've played with the app will have seen. You can search the full attendee list with various filters to find the company, the person, geography, job titles that you want, or the engine, the AI engine will suggest people that it thinks you should meet. This all drives our ability to set up one-to-one or group meetings via the app. They take place in a way you would like, predominantly in the Connections Lounge out on the show floor. What I'd make clear is that we can only measure the meetings that we can see via the app. There are hundreds and thousands of meetings taking place out there. I'm going to give you some data based on what we can see and measure. In Europe, we saw between 2021 and 2022, the meeting volume via the app double from 7,000 meetings taking place to over 14,000 last year. The latest data that I checked earlier this morning is we're already through 19,000 meetings this week, and obviously, as you'll know, there's still over a day of the show to run. We're seeing a very strong upward trend in meetings. To summarize, meetings and doing business are at the heart of the show globally. Companies plan and focus for the ROI they need way ahead, and we enable and have powered the acceleration of this via our app technology and continue to do so. Now I'd like to talk about our network effect at Money20/20. What I want to talk about is, you know, how the show works, and I'm going to talk around various points. I said that I was going to labor the ecosystem point. If I say it again, you know, we have the whole ecosystem, and by that I mean the component parts, banks, payments, VCs, startups, et cetera. Financial services is a complex, digitally led, global, interconnected industry, and all aspects of the industry are here at scale, and that is the absolutely critical starting point to our network effect. Probably best demonstrated by what Anne Boden at Starling said is: "Everyone is here every year, and it's getting bigger and bigger." The second point that's really important to note is that the C-suite is here. We have, since 2012, and continuously with our volume growth, maintained a very high C-suite ratio of about 25%. That really matters because it is integral, obviously, to business getting done because the decision-makers are here. you know, as you can see, you know, few others can guarantee the concentration of senior leaders that we do. A critical part, and we'll probably touch on this, is that there is a amazing selection of startups and VCs here, and they are the critical startups, the critical ingredient in fintech. Incredible excitement, dynamism, and innovation on the new companies coming through, and particularly as they scale. Many of them have, you know, started with us, grown with us, and gone on to be established players. Stripe, Adyen, Plaid, Airwallex, et cetera. In 2022, to give you a data point, there were over 1,800 startups across both shows. The VC community is here, big, small. VCs want to meet startups want to meet them. We also have corporate M&A here and other companies who want to buy or invest startups. Of course, entrepreneurs, startup entrepreneurs, want to meet other entrepreneurs. Then, two final elements that are interlinked. There are hundreds of announcements that get made during Money20/20. You may not know that originally, Apple's facial recognition technology was announced at a Money20/20 in Vegas. Uber Money was announced here, and that's because so much of the media are here. Last year, to give you some data, there were 273 announcements across both shows and 471 media attendees. To give you an example of that, you know, CNBC broadcast live from here last night, to the U.S.. You know, we have broadcast and all types of media. It is a critical part of our network effect. Now on to our journey and where we are today. I guess the first thing to note is we were founded in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, 2009, as regulatory bodies moved focus to consumers and fintech exploded. Key things to note, as I'm sure you're aware, Ascential plc acquired Money20/20 in 2014, two years after the first show. The USA. was our starting place. We expanded into Europe in 2016, followed by Asia in 2018. We're going to talk specifically about Asia in a moment. We paused Asia for COVID, and it comes back next year, and Scarlett is going to talk about that specifically. I would highlight, Money20/20 operates as regional scale shows, which is different to what you will know and have heard of Cannes Lions Festival, that reflects the structure of our industry. Money is global and ubiquitous, money itself is highly regional. It's regulated at country level or a regional level. When you think of Money20/20 USA, it is an 80% North American show, with 20% rest of world coming in to do business. Europe, 80% European, 20% rest of world, Asia will be similarly. It's a different structure to our sister event. A few things to note, during the pandemic, we were paused briefly, we used this opportunity to rethink the shows. You will have seen on the video and those who walked around the show, this is a very different kind of feel. I guess what I would say is, at our heart, we've always believed to deliver a fun experience, and we don't wish to take away from the seriousness of money as a topic in our industry. The business gets done here, it's important that people enjoy their experience and have fun while they're doing it, and that duality is really quite important and has been in our DNA since the beginning. Two things on the COVID pause, which for us was one year, because both shows ran in 2021. We did two key things. We re-edited the whole show completely, working with one of the world's leading creative agencies, who work with many brands, but including Cirque du Soleil. We reimagined, and we invested an increased amount in the level of experience, including the circular floor plan, which is pretty unusual in most shows. The second thing we did was add key global thought leadership to our expert team, with Scarlett joining during that period, but lots of other expertise as well to add to the expertise we already had. Finally, we continue to operate in a big, strong market, but we've accelerated our performance by delivering, in my view, a better quality product, delivering that experience I talked about, but increased ROI return on investment for our customers. The one way we measure that is, obviously, net promoter score. We saw an uplift of circa 20% post-COVID. Overall, we now deliver GBP 80 million of revenue, based on 2022's performance, which represents compound annual growth of around 10%. We've seen strong uplift in our customer numbers. We're going to look a little deeper at the business of Money20/20. The first thing I'd say, there's obviously quite a lot of data points on this chart. I guess the overriding sort of perspective I would give you is that we are a very balanced, high-quality business. I'm going to take the three circles on the left, starting with the top one in terms of the split of our income. We have a high degree of delegate revenue, with 44% of our income coming from what we call ticket revenue and 56% of sponsorship. I know this is quite an important area, so I'm going to come back in a little bit more detail on this in a moment. If we take the one on geographic mix, the chart on the left shows that we're very balanced geographically, with 60%, 62% coming from North America, clearly reflecting that the USA show, Las Vegas, is our first show and our oldest show, and you know, now 11, 12 years old. Europe is younger, only launched in 2016. The comment I would make is you'll see the 6% Asia revenue, which reflects revenue, both in sponsorship and attendees from Asia who attend Europe or USA. As I explained about the regionality, that's people coming in from the region to either the show or the USA one. If we look at the customer mix, back to the sort of broad ecosystem that we've served, you can see the various breakdowns, but I guess I would highlight, you know, banks is about 15% of our mix and crypto blockchain, 6%. You can also see some of our key stats that you'll be familiar with from our results. The other thing I'd highlight that is our, less than 2% comes from our biggest customer. Now, I said that I would focus in more detail on delegate and sponsorship revenue. 44% comes from ticket sales to delegates who attend the show, and these are premium price tickets, with the final price for the show this week, about three and a half thousand euros. We have our premium price passes, but also a range of other passes for startups, retailers, government, et cetera. Our average order value here is around GBP 2,300. The balance, the 56% coming from sponsorship, breaks down into really three areas. You will have seen lots of stands and booths on the show floor, for those of you that saw it. That's companies buying spaces to showcase their products and services, using that space to attract new business and meet existing customers. There's a lot of brand sponsorship, from digital and physical signage to sponsorship of evening events such as the Money in the Park, our event last night, or the street party that we're hosting tonight. Finally, meeting rooms. We know how important doing business is at this show is another key part of our makeup of our income. The average order value of our sponsorship business is around GBP 48,000, and many of our customers will buy a combination of these products. What I would like to do is hand over to Scarlett Sieber, our Chief Growth and Strategy Officer. Scarlett is an industry expert, a published author on this industry, and a regular contributor to the media. As Scarlett will tell you, she's had a multi-year relationship with Money20/20, way before she became an employee. I'm delighted to hand to Scarlett, who will give you a fuller intro. Scarlett? Thank you, Tracey. I'm not sure this is made for 188 centimeter person, but I'll try my best. Okay. As Tracey said, I come from the industry, and one of the things before I get started and walk you through the rest of the slides, is to say that I have seen this product from every angle. I come from the banking world. I'm a fintech expert. I was the CIO of a public bank before this, but I've seen the product. I've been a sponsor of the show, I've been an attendee of the show, I've been a speaker of the show, and I've been a track chair of the show. Back in 2019, I worked with Tracey, and I was advising her, and I was actually running the main stage in Vegas from a content perspective before taking this role, which I've now been in for two years. This slide shows you that our industry is large. Another complex slide. It's global, it's complex, it's interconnected. The heart of what we do is about how money moves, how it's stored, how it's regulated, and kept safe. Our attendees come from banks, all aspects of payments, technology, cloud to tech, bank stacks, VCs, advisory firms, the world-leading regulators, and everything in between. This graphic gives you a small sense of what that looks like. What I'd also want to make clear is this ecosystem is not fixed. It's evolving. It changes. Since 2012, new segments have expanded and been added, this will continue to change as innovation and technology continues to flow. We have been seeing the impact of machine learning and AI for a while in fraud detection and prevention, which the development of OpenAI and generative AI, if you've walked around the show, you've probably seen those buzzwords everywhere. This will clearly continue to be a growth area for us. Other new areas that have been added and transformed are regulation technology, again, not a big surprise, and compliance technology. Another area set for further growth and developments this year and beyond. An area that is really close to my heart and another big trend is around embedded fintech. As Tracey mentioned, I did write a book about this in the past 12 months. Embedded fintech is where non-financial organizations start to use financial products. Think of things like automotive companies, integrating loans or even insurance sales. Money20/20 identified this topic before it went mainstream and has led and commented on it for quite some time, and critically guided our customers on this topic. We've been doing this and this type of work since 2012. We've identified emerging trends, people, technologies, and companies and brought them together. Let's look at our strength in a couple of these sectors. In 2022, if you look at the numbers on the right for you, 18 of the 20 top U.S. banks were in attendance. We did business with them in one of the two ways that Tracey talked about. 16 of the 20 largest fintechs. Let's look a little bit closer at our customers by type. Here are a few of our key personas. As an ecosystem show, we have multiple customer types, but today I want to focus on five of the biggest and most important. Tracey talked about the C-suite and how we have a high percentage of attendance. Let's look a little bit closer at these folks. Bank CEOs and key leadership team members are a big focus area for us for speaking, of course, but also attending and their brands being present here. As we say on the prior slide, 18 of 20 US banks did business with us last year. Most of the individuals attend one to two conferences a year. Money20/20 is always on that list. In 2021, Ana Botín, who's the executive chairman of Santander, spoke here in Europe on one of that big stage not so long ago, outlining her case for an overhaul of regulation of banks. She said: "Money20/20 represents a major and unique opportunity to connect with everyone in one place." Let's talk about the insurgent companies. New fintech organizations like Adyen, Marqeta, Stripe, Tink, Plaid. You've probably seen these names as you've walked across the show. These are companies that have grown and grown up at Money20/20. We could give you many examples of John and Patrick Collison, the cofounders of Stripe, speaking on these stages as their companies have scaled, to Jack Dorsey, to Jason Gardner of Marqeta. Jason has said: "Money20/20 was the first show we did, and we have grown together." To startups. Effectively, pre-scale startups. As you have heard, we had more than 1,800 attend in 2022. They're critical to our success now, and in the future of Money20/20, we hope to help facilitate a platform for them where they can't get anywhere else. Tracey mentioned the CNBC coverage that went on last night. If you had seen it, you'd seen that we had had a record number of startups in Europe with us this year. The other two I'd like to highlight is VCs. From boutique to global, they're here, not just looking for new deals, which, of course, they are, but they're checking out new segments, they're validating their investment thesises, and showcasing their current investments. Of course, every startup here is wanting to get the cash, make contact with them, whether they're funding now or in the future. Last but not least, partnership and biz dev folks. They cut across every segment, from banks to payment to tech. They're here doing deals. They are the massive drivers of our meeting culture. Whatever the persona type, we can really summarize the needs of our customers to four key buckets. Connect me. I need to meet X, I need to meet Y. It all happens here. Inspire me or inspiration. Many aspiring startups want to meet and do business with scaleups. The entrepreneurs, especially, who've created their modern fintechs, are amongst our biggest draws, whether that be Stripe, Starling, Marqeta, Uber, Apple, PayPal. People want to hear their stories and inspire their own, what worked and what didn't, lessons learned, and case studies that are very impactful. I'll give you an example of one that just happened yesterday. He is the type of entrepreneur that this industry loves. Uri Levine is the cofounder of Waze. Many of you have probably heard of it, most of you have probably used it, also of Moovit, the Waze for public transportation. What you may not know is Uri Levine is also a serial entrepreneur in Fintech, including Personetics and many others. One of the things that really interestingly about Uri Levine, we brought him on stage, on our main stage, we have a competition element, where at the end there's an encore. I was not surprised at all to find out that Uri won right afterwards, and the crowd wanted him back. These are the type of people that we're talking about when we're talking about being inspired. The entrepreneurs in the larger industry really look up to this type of person. Next, you have inform me. A year ago, ChatGPT was a whisper. Today, everyone wants to know what's going on with it. Go back to the year since we found it, and you can replace this with any of the other buzzwords: blockchain, open banking, ICOs, better known as ICOs for a lot of you, embedded fintech tokens. People come here to keep abreast of the trends, understand them, and they want to know how it impacts them. Finally, amplify me. People are talking about ideas they want to promote new products, new partnerships, new companies. This is the platform for that globally, and Tracey gave you a lot of stat from the type of announcements and things that happen across our show. We have three levers for growth, which have not changed since I shared this with you last year at the last Capital Markets Day. The first is around product innovation. As we have outlined, we are a young brand compared to LIONS and The Work, which you've heard from already, and we're in a dynamic global industry. We believe we have more organic growth to focus on, driven largely by product innovation. As you heard from Tracey, revenue has grown strongly. We have and continue to grow strongly, accelerating post-COVID. We have invested heavily in the product during COVID to deliver the strongest product, and we've seen that high increase in the net promoter score. We have seen strong uplifts in companies using our show and what they invest, i.e., the sponsor side of the model, and then we also have a strong uplift on the delegate side of the model. I'm going to talk about the Asia launch in a moment, but this is clearly a geographic expansion, but we also have geographical opportunities with the rest of the world attendees who are coming to the other shows. For example, in the U.S., we see a fast-growing attendance from LATAM. We have a lot of opportunity, and we've now launched Money20/20 World Tours. These are community-based events running between the shows to engage the fintech community of that geography. Just in the past year, there's a lot of names, just warning in advance, Tel Aviv, CDMX, better known as Mexico City, São Paulo, Bangkok, Stockholm, Berlin, Paris, Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco. We're connecting with the ecosystem wherever they are. On average, these events have over 250 attendees, only 10% have ever been to one of our live shows previously. In fact, nearly 90% of the registrants for these World Tours have not previously sat within our marketing database. New digital innovation. Last year, we referenced our desire and opportunity to move beyond just events, as we are now working on our digital intelligence product that we are testing with customers. I will stress that this is at the very early stage. We will keep you posted on its progress. This time last year, we talked about our desire to launch again in Asia, following our COVID pause. Let me play a short video for you before I brief you fully. Money20/20, the place where money does business. The biggest fintech players making game-changing connections in incredible destinations. With another one coming soon. Money20/20 Asia. Money20/20, April 2024 in Bangkok. Now let's turn on that second lever for a second. Our upcoming show in Asia next year. In Las Vegas last year, we announced our third show, joining us in Bangkok, which will take place in April 2024 at the Queen Sirikit Convention Center. Let me talk about why Asia and our plans for the show. This show is running in Thailand and focused on the Asian financial technology ecosystem in exactly the same way that the U.S. and Europe are focused on their regions and attendance. That 80/20 dynamic that Tracey mentioned. Money20/20 Asia will be the same. Let's look at why the Asia Fintech market is so important for us. Asia is home to many of the world's largest Fintechs, including China, India, and Southeast Asia. Looking at the BCG 2023 report, outpacing even the U.S. with a 27% growth rate. Asia Pacific is poised to become the world's top Fintech market by 2030. Southeast Asia holds large underbanked populations, with Asia's consumer spending forecasted to grow rapidly. Boom is driven by strong demand for innovative financial solutions and the region's large population and emerging middle class. They are the fastest-growing consumer markets in the world by growth of the consumer class between 2020 and 2030. Mobile payments, digital banking, investment technology are among the fastest-growing segments. As for Money20/20 Asia, we paused the show in 2020 due to COVID after two editions. For our move back to Asia, we are taking a few key actions. We have chosen to fully operate the team in Asia with more Asian expertise and local leadership expert in the Asia ecosystem, working closely with the other two shows. This represents a large increase in investment. We worked with our global and local customers to decide on the location, and it was unanimous that Bangkok should be our new home. This is not just because of the dynamic financial technology scene that has been emerging in the past few years and the progressive regulatory scene, but also because Thailand and Bangkok are seen as exciting destinations in the region, just as our other shows, and you're in one of them now, has great destination cities. Finally, we've also learned that Money20/20 works best when it is not in a major financial center. The meeting culture that Tracey described at the start of this really does predict on people coming for all the majority of the show, not popping in for an hour, then leaving for the rest of the day. You'll see a very different pattern if we were to locate this in, say, a Singapore, a New York City, or a London. That was a really critical part in our decision-making of choosing Bangkok. Money20/20 Asia is making great progress already with sponsorship and delegates trading. My team has confirmed already 35+ speakers from 11+ countries, completely spanning the larger ecosystem regulators, the biggest payment companies, the biggest banks, unicorns, startups, you name it, we have it all. We are projected with 150+ speakers with some of the most exciting names in the region. As we do at all our shows, we'll be bringing together the household names with some of the more exciting insurgent companies. Asia has so many of these. With that, I'm going to hand it back over to Tracey. Thank you. You can. Final slide to close, then we will take questions. Just as a summary, we are the global number one, bringing the ecosystem together, and we believe we have extended that strength post-COVID. I talked about the strong or the Money20/20 network effect. Everyone being here is really important, the ecosystem, the decision-makers, the VCs, the startups, the richness of that ecosystem, and the announcements in the media are a critical part of how that works. As you've seen with the strength of, as Scarlett referenced, 18 of the 20 US banks doing business with us. We believe we are a focal point for the industry. This is where the industry does business, as I referenced the 19,000 meetings that we've seen this year, up from 14,000 last year. As Scarlett outlined, we have multiple opportunities and levers for continued growth, and we have seen increasing and high levels of satisfaction with the uplift in the NPS that we saw after COVID. With that concludes the sort of briefing, and we would be delighted to take your questions. One second. Could you tell us, it would be useful for us to know who you are and which organization as well, as we don't know many of you by name. Yeah, it's Nick Dempsey from Barclays. Hi, Nick. I've got two questions. Just you showed us that 56% of your revenues is what you refer to as sponsorship. Yeah. Can you try and break that down between the buying space and the brand sponsorship elements, roughly? In my experience with events, the brand sponsorship line is more volatile than the buying space line, so I want to try to understand that. The second question, just looking at the Asia plans, was a challenge last time that you had the Singapore FinTech Festival in November, as quite a significant competition. Do you think that it will be less of an issue to have that big beast in Southeast Asia, FinTech, events up against you? Yeah. Okay, thank you. On the breakdown of the sponsorship income, more than half of our income is what we would call booth or stands. We don't break it down any further, just to give you the overview. Sorry, I didn't hear the question. Of the total or of the 56%? Of the 56%. I just- Of the 56%, more than half is booths. To your point about Asia, and specifically competition, I think, you referenced the Singapore FinTech Festival. I mean, it's a very different kind of event. For those that don't know, the Singapore FinTech Festival is a government-owned festival, designed to promote the Singapore FinTech ecosystem, it's very much about Singapore. Money20/20's proposition is about Southeast Asia and the whole ecosystem. We're not favoring one country or one location. We consider ourself to be a very, very different type of event, and, you know, are very confident about the outlook for our Asian launch or come back to the market in 2024. We're a very different kind of event. Thank you. Hello. Yep. Oh, the mic's coming, sorry, so we can hear you. Thank you, and good afternoon. I'm Sami Kassab from BNP Paribas Exane. Hi. I have one question. It looks as if the revenues from the U.S. show is more than twice the revenues from the European shows, but the number of delegates in the U.S. is less than twice, so the yield seems to be different. Can you discuss whether there are any structural differences in yields? Yep Between the two shows, or whether we can think that the European yield will go up towards the American one? Yep, I can certainly answer that. I mean, what I'd say is the U.S. show has the larger revenue because of the age. I mean, it was the first one, and as I said, Europe launched later, 2016. There is no major difference in the delegate yield on the two shows. The end price of both shows here is three and a half thousand euros, and in the U.S. is about three and a half thousand dollars. The structure and pricing and sort of quantum of the pricing is actually pretty identical across both shows, and similarly will be in Asia. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Any other questions? Mandy has a question or a... Hello, Tracey. Mandy Gradden, Ascential. I've got a question that's come in from an investor, one of our top 10 investors. I think this is a great opportunity to talk about events more widely 'cause I know you and Scarlett are quite expert in this. The investor has asked where AI could be an opportunity for our events business. Give some examples. Yep -of where we can use that as an opportunity, and also a threat to our business, to our business model. That was the. Okay investor's question. Well, I'll take. Probably it would be good if I take it for the business of Money20/20. I think it would be good for Scarlett to comment on AI from an industry perspective, potentially there. I mean, we see it as an opportunity, and as I said, with the way that we have moved in the direction of using the app as the underpinning technology of how people do business here, part of the functionality of that is machine learning that understands the types of people that you want to meet and then finds more of those kind of people. We have already been using a, I guess, you would call it, quite a simplistic version of machine learning since 2018 in the show. We see opportunity in how AI will be an opportunity for us to connect people more meaningfully over the coming years. I think that is definitely an opportunity. I can't think of any specific risks. I mean, we will also start to leverage it, I think, in areas like customer service, et cetera. We already use live chat and those kinds of functionalities to serve our customers better. I'm slightly going on the glass house for lots of opportunities. What I would say, though, Scarlet, we're seeing, you know, each year there is a buzzword, a subject that goes crazy, and we've probably got to say that AI is the topic of this week. Can you just comment on that for the financial services industry more generally? Yeah, I think, as you said, AI is certainly not a new topic. It's not a new concept within our industry. Because of what's been happening at the larger macro level with things like ChatGPT and others, we've been seeing more of a focus on it. You'll see outside, and what you've seen across the show already in the first day and a half, and you'll continue to see, is all the different use cases of AI from the ethical implications, high-level theories, to actual use cases. Some of the biggest banks in the world, one of them actually speaking, probably, they might have already spoken by now, they did, we're talking about how they've actually utilized it. I would just say to the first part of the question, in terms of how we can. I'll just elaborate on the point that you made. As we continue to grow and scale, we have an enormous amount of data, so however we can utilize technology to make that part simpler and allow us to bring the extra magic sauce is a benefit for us. While technology can do a lot of things, there is nothing that quite replicates the moments that happen here in person, and people always continue to prioritize that, because at the end of the day, people are people, and especially as we talked about the composition of our ecosystem. If you have spent any time with early-stage entrepreneurs and VCs, the math and the data shows you all the stuff, but in the early stages, it's about the gut feeling and liking the human, and AI can't replicate that. The moments that we bring together with people together really help that happen. It could help us do it at more scale, which I think would be helpful. Hi. Hi, Alex Fortune, Black Sheep. I used to hear the buzzword geo-cloning in the events world, where you would take an event and then replicate it in lots of different countries, and it generally was a bit of a graveyard. It didn't work. It diluted the original one, and it's hard to differentiate in the new location. Maybe it made the travel a little bit shorter, but you've done it really, really well. One of the few examples that have done it well, I think. Is that down to, as you described, very different payment structures in each region, each country even, and so there's very different content, different people, different partners, and that makes it more relevant? I definitely think that is some of it, the structure of our industry, the regional, the local, you know, the fact that, you know, everyone here is talking about open banking. I think the composition and structure of our industry is regional. I think, you know, those points we were making about the 80/20, I do think that lens is part of the reason we've been successful, because it reflects the structure of the industry, basically. What I would say, I mean, we obviously have a very clear formula of how we put the show together. You know, experience, content, and connections, effectively, is what you've seen. That formula does not change. Whether you go to Vegas, here, or when you go to Bangkok, the formula is the same. How we produce that, how we deliver that in each location is quite different. There's a lot of commonality, but there's also a lot of local experience. The teams are based locally, so I think there is what we can do as a formula, then how we hyper localize that to Amsterdam, America, you know, and Thailand. I think fundamentally, I would say the structure of our industry lends us to that. Just to add one point on that, I think we talked about this with Asia, but it's true for the U.S. and Europe as well. We make sure that the team that we have and the talent that we have is locus focused on that industry. Because the complexities of fintech, as an example, the team that we have are experts in the U.S. industry. They know everything about the regulators. The team in Europe are experts on that industry, the team in Asia as well. I think another part of it is back to the human side of it. As you said, there's parts of it that are formulaic, that we make sure is a consistent experience. Even today, I've met at least four or five people who've been to our U.S. show, never been to our Europe show, and they're like, "This feels so different." Depending on where you are, the cultures are different, and we make sure, and we're going to do the same thing with Asia, that we don't go and just have a Europe or a U.S. Asia show. It's going to be a show by that continent, for that continent, and we've already invested quite heavily in that. To add to that point, the app is the same in all three markets, so it's the same. You know, that's where there's commonality. Thank you for the question. Are there any other questions from the room, or from the live stream, or from Mandy herself? Oh, no, here's a question. Gareth Davies from Numis, just possibly for Mandy. Typically, show launch year, loss, then year 1, break even, and you make profit in year three. Is that the way we should be thinking about the financial profile for Asia? I'd give that to Mandy, so she can answer, so the webcast can see us. Yes, as a typical profile, we would certainly expect in 2023, for example, to be investing several million GBP in the launch of Asia with zero revenue until 2024. We would hope that the scale of the show that we deliver, and certainly this was the case when Asia launched in 2018 and when it ran in 2018 and 2019. In both years, it made profits, but these were in the sort of low double digits rather than into the sort of mid-double digit sort of margin. Depending on how the show takes off thereafter, it's always very hard to determine how big anything is going to be when you're straight into a new industry. You would expect that to tend towards the overall margins for this segment, which you saw last year was 37%, tend towards that segment thereafter. Certainly, loss in 2023, low-ish profits in 2024, and then it, depending on trajectory, we should get to show margins shortly thereafter. Are there any other questions? Seems like not. There are no further questions on the webcast, so Phil, I think, is going to finish. Thank you. Thank you very much, Tracey and Scarlett. Thanks for giving us your time on such a busy day. Really appreciate it. I'm just going to finish off. Before we have some Q&A for myself and Mandy, I just want to finish off by reflecting perhaps on some of the key strengths of the business that we've covered today during the course of these sessions. I hope you'll agree that this really is an exceptional business. Certainly made me feel very proud watching the team present what they've achieved over the last few years. Our brands are not just number one in their markets, but number one by a really significant margin. And they're acknowledged, I think, as setting the benchmark in their respective industries for absolute excellence. Any of you who've been to our events will know that they are unique in the experience that they provide. These factors, they create moats and really high barriers to entry, but even more importantly, I think, high barriers to success. Anyone can launch an event, as we well know. Anyone can try and do what we do, but doing it to the standard that these teams do it every single day is very, very difficult. In addition to that, as you've heard today, the diverse revenue streams that we have provide so many different opportunities for growth. I would ask you, when you think about Ascential going forward, not to think of us as a typical events company. Typical events companies have very, very few levers for growth, very few products, very few opportunities. As you've heard today, we have multiple, multiple products, and products within products to help us to drive growth. All of that combines with our high level of customer returns, returning revenues, our high levels of customer satisfaction, which has been a theme throughout the day and something that we take extremely seriously, and that produces this very attractive, competitive position that we're in. It produces this financial profile that naturally results in this very strong operating model. Altogether, we believe that all of these strengths that you've heard about today present a really compelling case within a standalone business for Ascential plc going forward, and we're really delighted and proud, as I say, to have had the opportunity to present that to you today. I'd like to now return to our audience, both in the room and on the webcast, for any final questions on the business for myself and Mandy. We've got one straight away from Nick. Maybe before. Yeah. Yeah, Nick Dempsey from Barclays. I've got three, I'm afraid. First of all, on the revenue growth target of mid to high single-digit organic, can I just check, sorry, mid to mid-high single-digit growth, is that organic, or if you were to do some of the acquisitions that you talked about, would you include that in that revenue growth target? Second question, in terms of the margin, low to mid-30s, in 2022, I think based on the way you're doing it, half of the corporate costs, we get to 33%, so we're right in the middle of low to mid-30s. Does that mean that despite lots of the interesting growth levers that you talked about today, that we never get any margin improvement? Last question, back end of March, full year results, you were telling us for Cannes Lions that the bookings were up 50% year-on-year. Can you give us some broad indication of how that is now, given that I guess the award entries come into the picture a bit more than delegates now? Shall I take the last one and you take the first two, Mandy? In terms of Cannes Lions bookings, that 50% year-on-year number that we quoted at the 2022 results was very much for our sponsorship revenues and our early partnership revenues. At that stage, if you remember back in March, those of you who know the business will know that our visibility on forward bookings for awards and delegates wouldn't allow us to include those in there. I think I said at the time that we shouldn't expect Cannes Lions to grow by 50% year-on-year, despite that early, very strong trading. We're happy with our position as we go into the festival itself, but that 50%, just to be really specific, was to do with our partnership revenues, not our many other revenue streams. Mandy, we've got the margin question and the growth question. I just add to that last point, Simon made the point that within 10 days' time, we'll be publishing those award entries, that will obviously give you some volume-related information regarding the progress of Cannes Lions 2023. The answer to your first question, which was, is our revenue guidance of mid-to-high single-digit, purely organic, constant currency? Yes, is the answer. That doesn't include any guidance, I don't think we would give guidance in respect to potential future acquisitions, inorganic growth. In terms of the guidance of low-to-mid-30s and whether or not we are guiding to margin accretion over time, clearly, we have been busy finalizing what the standalone cost base of Ascential events as a PLC is. You can see that obviously we fall within that margin range of low to mid-30s. Whilst we can see opportunities for margin accretion over time, it is not the main driver of profit growth over time, and that really is driven by the changing customer base that we see in some of our largest products, like Cannes Lions. With the sponsorship really growing, you know, by far the fastest at the moment, that obviously impacts margins, and of course, things like investing in Money20/20 Asia also does. I think, you know, over time. You know, expect some very small margin accretion. We felt that the range of low to mid-30s still put us very much at the top of the pack in terms of comparables and was appropriate guidance for this stage in our evolution. Silvia? Thank you. It's Silvia Cuneo from Deutsche Bank. Just one question. Earlier in the presentation, you mentioned you might be looking to expand to a third pillar beyond the marketing and fintech industries. I was wondering if you could tell us about what features a potential new platform might have? Like, what end market could be interesting, and would that be like in the early days of development or more established type of events? Yeah, any color about how to think about expansion. Yes, absolutely. Just to go back to an earlier slide, we've ended up serving the two markets we serve very deliberately. When I took over the events of Ascential, the Ascential events, we had many tens of markets and many tens of events, and we've deliberately ended up with these particular markets. The characteristics that they have are, firstly, that they are global, secondly, that they are large, thirdly, that they're growing, and fourthly, that they're digitally disrupted. Marketing and financial technology services tick all of those boxes to a very large degree. I think the first point is if we were looking into a third industry, a third market segment, it would need to tick those boxes. Obviously, there are quite a lot of industries like that. You know, you can think of some off the top of your head. Education is currently massively digitally disrupted, healthcare is massively digitally disrupted, and there are others as well. I think that gives you some indication that we won't be looking to launch a concrete trade show anytime soon, or indeed, any event that is either regional or too national in its makeup, because we've divested events like that deliberately in the past. I think those are the criteria. When it comes to the specific events themselves that we'd be interested in acquiring, scale isn't necessarily the issue because if you look at Money20/20's history, when we acquired it, the year we acquired it, I think it made $8 million revenue. You can see that we've massively increased that. It's about the opportunity that we can see rather than the scale of the business that we might be buying. If we can see that opportunity, then we'd be very interested. In terms of the actual event that we would be interested in acquiring, it would need to have certain characteristics that our events already do. One of those characteristics is to have a delegate fee to attend. The reason that's so important is because if you can charge a reasonable fee to attend, then clearly within your show, you have IP and content of genuine value. If you have genuine content and IP of value within your show, you can then slice and dice that in different ways to create other products and services later on. It just gives a sense of the quality of an event if you are charging for it. Too many events either don't charge or they charge very little. Those are the kind of parameters. Now, we've got a list, of course, as you can imagine, of potential targets, and what we find is those targets are likely to be entrepreneur-led, maybe owner, manager-led, very unlikely to be run by an incumbent. And they are out there, you know, they definitely exist, and it's just a question of us finding the right opportunity at the right time. I think finally, it's just important to emphasize that this is one part of the growth plan. It's certainly not the growth plan. We've got real opportunities for growth organically within the brands themselves and through bolt-on acquisitions into the markets that we already serve. I hope that answers your question. Anything to add to that, Mandy? No, but I do have a question from the webcast. Okay. This one's for you, Phil, and it's from an investor. How decentralized is our organization? Are marketing and financial services managed entirely separate, separately and incentivized on their own P&L, and is there much collaboration between the brands? Yeah, I mean, that's a two-part question, really. The incentivization is very specific and focused. The teams, as you can see, really understand their end market, have been working in the end market for many, many years and are very focused on their own businesses. That is how we structure the business going forward. Ascential will be structured going forward with as minimal Ascential costs as we possibly can create. However, there are obviously many opportunities for leveraging capabilities across the businesses. To give you an example, there are many teams here who will be going from Amsterdam to Cannes, maybe going home for a couple of days in between, but those teams include our logistics team, they include our delegate services team, our on-site registration team, many of our technology team. At the back end, there are many opportunities to leverage capabilities across the two businesses, but the management teams and the people that run the brands themselves are very, very focused specifically on their brands. Just on the Money20/20 Asia show, when we look at the total fintech space in Europe, it's a lot smaller than the U.S., so it's not surprising that the Vegas shows have significantly higher revenues than the Amsterdam one. But on your slide, you have Asia being, you know, at least in a few years' time, similar scale in the fintech space to the U.S. Is your ambition that it's more of a Vegas scale show than a Europe show? If not, why would that be? I think you've got to Just with Europe, you've got the little caveat on Europe, which I think Scarlett mentioned or Tracey mentioned, is that it is a much younger show. We've got growth ambitions for Europe as well, for sure. I think Europe will continue to grow, certainly based on recent years and recent experience. In terms of the scale of the opportunity in Asia, the caveat to that is that if you look at especially the U.S., and to a lesser extent, Europe, there is a kind of homogeny to the regulatory system that you don't have in Asia. You can have a European show where people are broadly speaking about very similar regulatory issues, and certainly in the U.S., of course, it's identical, it's one jurisdiction. The challenge in Asia is that you've got multiple jurisdictions, multiple rulings, multiple regulators, therefore, the common ground isn't as big. If there was a drag on the growth of Asia, it would be that. It certainly wouldn't be the scale and the size of the market itself. That sounds like potentially the logical conclusion is to have more than one Asian show. Is that, is that fair? Relatedly, does South America constitute another potential extension of the brand over time as well? It's quite different, I guess, to the U.S. I think one of your colleagues mentioned the or it may have been yourself, mentioned the challenge of geo-cloning. The challenge And one of the big challenges of geo-cloning, in my experience, is that you slice it too thinly. I think to your first point about Asia perhaps fragmenting into more than one show, you would have to balance that with, hang on a minute, do we really want seven very small shows, or can we create something that is Pan Asia? I think that's yet to be proven because I think the regulatory framework in Asia is coming together, if anything. We'll just have to see how that pans out. Give us a year or two, and we'll be able to answer that question more deeply. Latin America is a very interesting case as well, because when you think about geo-cloning, there is a point at which it's not worth doing for the exact reason that you mentioned before, which is that the scale won't be there. That's often driven by the size of the market and the scale of the market. Latin America has its own challenges. One of them is the distinction between Brazil, Portuguese-speaking Brazil, and Hispanic Latin America. You're immediately splitting it more or less in two, and you've got to somehow appeal to all of those people. What we're doing with Latin America is we are building out in Las Vegas, more and more elements of interest to Latin American organizations, to test the water, to see whether we can create something that is of interest to them, and then we'll think about whether that's our next area of growth. If there are no more questions in the room, I have one more, which I'm gonna ask myself. All right, let me just read it. Given the aim to keep leverage low and to pay a healthy dividend, do you have enough ammunition for M&A without being dependent on equity holders and general market conditions? If not, why not pay... Why pay a dividend? I think one of the reasons that we weren't specific in our guidance today about either leverage levels or about dividend levels is because these things are still being worked through. As Phil and the team have identified, there are opportunities for the business to grow by inorganic means. Obviously, organic growth, we can see that we can fund within the margin envelope of the numbers that we've been giving to you. There is a range of what healthy dividend could mean. It's something we're very alive to. We certainly don't intend to be funding our inorganic opportunities through coming to the market, and we will balance that through what we announce to the market at the point we put a shareholder circular out, and that will cover off both of those elements. I think, Phil, it's time for you to wrap if there are no further questions. Yeah. Okay. Really, it's just a question now of thanking you again for being here and to just reiterate that really one of the main purposes of today, the main point of today was to explain two things, really. The first was that when people think about events businesses, they think about certain kinds of organizations. What we wanted to do today was just to paint a picture of how you can create and run a very different kind of organization through having event platforms. I hope that what we've done is really explain in fair amount of detail why this business is different from what people would consider to be a typical events business for all the different reasons that we've discussed. The second thing that we wanted to do was to explain just how excited we are about the future of this business, and how we see the future of Ascential plc, as it will be, as one of really exciting growth and lots of opportunities. I hope you could tell from the presentations that you've heard today, that the team are very high quality. I hope you were as impressed as I was listening to them to talk about their brands and their ambition for growth, and the opportunities that we've got with this business. I look forward to working with all of you. I hope you've got a really clear idea now of what our offering is. You can now decide what you make of it. Hopefully, we've answered as transparently, as honestly as we possibly can, all your questions. You understand who we are, you understand why we exist in this world, you understand what we're trying to achieve and where we're going, and you can now make your judgments about that. Before you do make your judgments about that, we're gonna be able to go for a drink, hopefully, and go for dinner together and enjoy the rest of Money20/20 in Amsterdam. Mandy, are you gonna now explain to us what we do next? I am. I think you are. First of all, we're going to close the webcast. Is it closed?