Good morning, everybody. I'm here in London. This is our Q3 trading update, and on my left, I have Scott Spirit, and on his left, we have Jean-Benoit Berty, and then on my right, Mary Basterfield. The presentation will cover five things. First, a trading update from Mary, then a little bit from Scott on market momentum and client analysis, and then I'll come back with a brief summary and outlook, and we'll have Q&A, so Mary, over to you. Thank you, Martin. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. Trading conditions in the third quarter remain challenging due to the global macroeconomic backdrop and continuing high interest rates. There was also some underperformance against our addressable markets. These trends impacted marketing spend, especially from some of our larger technology clients, and our technology services practice continued to be affected by a reduction in activity from one of our larger clients. Reported revenue was down 19% at $198 million, with some impact from foreign exchange rates, especially the dollar to pound. On a like-for-like basis, revenue was down 17%. Reported net revenue decreased 15% to $179 million, or 13% like-for-like. We have continued to take action on costs and are making a significant reduction in the number of Monks across the company. Given slower-than-expected trading in Q3 and current client activity levels, we anticipate a low double-digit reduction in full-year net revenue on a like-for-like basis. Due to these continuing revenue challenges, and despite our increased focus on cost reduction, we now expect like-for-like operational EBITDA to be slightly below last year. As in previous years, financial performance will be heavily weighted to the final quarter. Net debt at the end of September was $180 million, with leverage at 2.2 times. We continue to expect net debt to be in the range of $150 million-$190 million at the year-end. Let's look now at the performance of each practice. My comments here are all on a like-for-like basis. Content's net revenue for the quarter was down 9%, reflecting a slight sequential improvement quarter on quarter, but not as much as expected given a softer prior-year comparator. Clients continued to be cautious, and there were lower levels of activity with some of our larger technology clients. We remain focused on reducing our cost base in content to improve efficiency and protect margin. Data and digital media net revenue was stable year-on-year, showing sequential improvement, and the practice managed its costs against activity levels. Technology services declined 42%, driven by the expected reduction in activity with one key client, as well as longer sales cycles for new business. From a regional perspective, net revenue was down 15% in the Americas, though there was strong growth in LATAM. EMEA grew 1%, driven by growth in Germany, and our smallest region, APAC, was down 21% due to weaker trading in Australia and Southeast Asia. So, in summary, as trading conditions remain challenging, we continue to focus on managing cost and driving efficiency, and are taking significant action in the fourth quarter to protect margin. Our expectations for the full year are that like-for-like net revenue will be down by low double digits. And we now anticipate that 2024 Operational EBITDA will be slightly below the prior year on a like-for-like basis. Thank you. And with that, I will pass to Scott. Thanks, Mary. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining. When we look at the addressable markets, the major digital platforms continue to perform on the revenue side, with 14% growth in Q3 and a projected 15% growth for the year. Growth is anticipated to moderate in 2025, but still be in the low double digits. That continues to contrast with our own performance so far, given that our revenues are aligned with tech company marketing spend, and we are still seeing caution from our clients, particularly technology clients. The large platforms have increased their CapEx spending by over 50% to almost $300 billion this year, largely as they invest heavily in AI, and this has had a negative impact on their marketing spend. However, we do see the negative trends in sales and marketing expenses moderating in Q3 and projected to moderate in Q4 too this year, pointing to a potentially more stable environment in 2025. For tech services, this is a more difficult market, which slowed in 2023 and is flat to negative in 2024. We actually had a strong 2023, so the negative market trends have caught up with us in 2024, driven by the reduced spend with one large financial services client and longer sales cycles. Most of our client categories were stable in Q2, with technology still by far the main category, representing 44% of our revenue. The main change continues to be the decline in financial services category, again largely driven by the aforementioned decline in spend with one of our clients in the tech services practice. The continued softness we're seeing in technology client spend and that specific financial services client, which has reduced spend, have had a negative effect on the average revenue size of our top 10, 20, and 50 clients. Now, while we continue to see headwinds with some of our larger clients, this is primarily driven by reduced spending rather than any specific client losses. On the positive side, our progress in new business, particularly driven by interest in our Monks.Flow AI offering, has helped to drive an increase in clients at the top of the funnel, which we hope to develop into larger relationships in 2025. Our sales pipeline is healthy, driven by our three new go-to-market propositions: Orchestration Partner, Real-Time Brands, and Glassbox Media. These are all starting to resonate strongly with clients. With that, I'll hand you to Martin for the summary. Thanks, Scott, and thanks, Mary. Just to summarize what we see at the end of Q3, third quarter, we saw net revenue decrease by just over 12% on a like-for-like basis, and that primarily reflected lower activity in our content practice and an expected reduction, as announced previously, with one of our larger tech services clients. Year-to-date, net revenue is down just over 13%, 13.2% on a like-for-like basis. We maintain, as Mary said, a very disciplined and a very active approach on managing our cost base, with a focus on driving efficiency across the company, as well as on utilization, availability, and pricing. Net debt at the end of September was GBP 180 million, and the range for the year, our targeted range, as you know, is between GBP 150 million- GBP 190 million for the year-end, and we've now completed all the material M&A payments for prior combinations. Given the slower-than-expected trading in third quarter and current client activity levels, we now expect that like-for-like net revenue for 2024 will be down low double digits, with like-for-like Operational EBITDA just slightly below the prior year. Our targeted range for net debt at year-end, as I mentioned before, remains in the range of GBP 150 million -GBP 190 million. We now have three new go-to-market propositions. The first, Orchestration Partner. The second, Real-Time Brands, and the third, Glassbox Media. They are all starting to resonate strongly with our clients. These are built around Hyper-personalization at scale, driven by AI, around social media and brand strategy, and last but not least, around transparent media planning and buying. We remain very confident in our strategy, in our business model, and our talent, together with our scale client relationships, and that they position us well for growth in the longer term. So, with that as background, George, we can open up now for Q&A. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Sorrel. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask an audio question, please press star one on the top of the keypad. Please also ensure that your mute function is not activated in order to let you see and reach your equipment. So that is star one for questions. Our very first question today is coming from Laura Metayer, calling from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Morning, everyone. Two questions from me, please. The first one is, can you tell us a bit more about your three new go-to-market propositions? And the second question is, when you look to 2025, do you think that revenue growth could be positive based on what you're seeing today and the fact that you will have easier prior-year comps? Thank you. Okay, thanks, Laura. Do you want to say, Scott, a little bit about the GTMs? Yeah, so these go-to-market propositions are really helping simplify our offer to clients. And a lot of work's been done on them over the past few months, and they're now being rolled out to clients, both existing and new. So the first one, they really address three of the key challenges, I think, that marketers face. The first one, as Martin described, was the Orchestration Partner. I think the challenge this is addressing is really the complexity that marketers see. So this is where they have a lot of fragmentation, a lot of additional overlapping cost, and they really want speed and quality. So our offer here is very much built around Monks.Flow, which we introduced and spent a lot of time on in the last presentation. And it's really around making sure that clients get the right message to the right audience in the right channel in a faster and cheaper way. It's a core capability for us. It's very much what drove our GM win and what we do for a lot of the large tech clients and FMCG clients that we have. The second one is called Real-Time Brands. And this is really around helping clients keep their brands relevant and current in a cluttered and fast-moving world. So for this, it's taking the best of our social, our experiential, and our brand and creative capability to bear. Really, it's around always-on brands, not the traditional method of creating a one-time campaign and releasing that, but being in market in a real-time basis with our clients. The final, the third one, which is known as Glassbox Media, is really around media planning and buying. Obviously, for clients, that's the major cost from a marketing perspective, not the agency fees. And I think a lot of clients have concerns that they're either wasting some of that money or their agencies are not being particularly transparent with them. And we've seen a significant increase, if you look at the holding companies, in the sort of principal trading that they're doing, which is their non-transparent trading. So really, for us, this is our focus on fully transparent media operations, leveraging AI to make sure that clients are managing and measuring their investments, and also leveraging our close relationships with the major media owners out there, so Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and others. So we call it Glassbox for that transparency, whereas I think the model in the industry is shifting very much to a black box approach. Those are the three go-to-markets that we're focused on, all underpinned by data and technology. Yeah, I think it's premature, Laura, to talk about 2025. We're in the midst of our three-year planning process. We look at the next three years. So we'll be looking at 2025, 2026, and 2027 from a strategic, structural point of view. I think just make one observation. Mary can add. On tech clients, there's been some people who've been saying that tech clients have started to spend more. We saw years of efficiency or a year of efficiency in one well-known case, which probably is developing into a longer period of efficiency if you look at their published numbers, one tech client. The picture with tech clients is mixed. I would say tech spending on advertising and marketing is stabilizing. I wouldn't say it's increasing at this level, but it's certainly stabilizing in some cases. In some cases, we're seeing increases. In some cases, we're still seeing decreases. But I think overall, you can deduce that it's beginning to stabilize in the tech area. The uncertainties around two major markets, first, the election in America obviously has now been resolved. And the uncertainty around the budget post the election success of the Labour government has now been resolved. So I think probably you'll see a little bit more decision-making by clients in our biggest market, North America, and one of our biggest other markets, the U.K. We'll see, I think, a release of decision-making as opposed to delay. Mary, do you want to add anything in terms of the planning process for next year's budgeting process? Thanks, Martin. Hi, Laura. Yeah, so we are, as Martin said, we are in the middle of our three-year planning and budgeting cycle. That will come to fruition, and then we will give guidance on 2025 with the full year results. So, too early to call at the moment. Thank you. Thank you. No questions, Laura. We'll now move to Julien Roch of Barclays. Please go ahead. Yes, good morning, everybody. Coming back on Laura's question and Scott's answer, so on Orchestration Partner, address the complexity that marketers see, speed and quality, making sure clients get the right message to the right audience on the right channel. So can you explain a bit what does it do? Because historically, your main business, Media.Monks, was digital production, right? You had one idea, and you were creating 5,000 ads. And then you with MightyHive at programmatic. And now you give us three things that are somewhat different from what you had. So if you could come back on that and develop some more. And then on Glassbox Media, are you doing the whole thing, or is it just planning and verification, and clients can use an agency, but then you check exactly what you're doing? So some more colors on those three new products is my main question. Yeah, they're not new products in some senses. As Scott mentioned, they're more focused and more delineated. Glassbox Media really is around more transparency. As you know, we focus on digital media planning and buying. We buy about, I think it's about $6 billion of digital media, primarily from the three biggest Western platforms. But really, it is about transparency in the planning and buying process. We run an open book, with the exception of the Brazilian market, which is not legislated, but the practice is to have a non-transparent market. But I think one of the primary problems that clients have is transparency. Even in an AI age and a blockchain-driven or affected world, we still have significant lack of transparency. And as I said before, we run an open book. On the first, the area of targeting the foundational agency or that foundational model is fundamental to what we do. It's not quite as you described it, Julien, and it's not one piece of creative or content that's distributed in thousands of executions. I mean, I call the model Netflix on steroids, and it utilizes first-party data and signals from the platforms, primarily the six biggest platforms, three in the West and three in the East, to deliver personalization at scale and at a scale with AI that we haven't seen before. Yeah, of all the things that we're doing, probably the area that is the most interesting to CMOs and CIOs and catches their attention most certainly at the moment and has driven a number of the case studies that Scott referred to in his description of the three areas, I would say that hyper-personalization at scale, delivering content at scale is the one that is where we're seeing the greatest interest. It drives most of the marketing transformation exercises that we're doing and is a very significant development given AI. So with that as background, Scott, do you want to add to that? No, I think you've covered most of it. I mean, just the point that these are not free new services. These are really, I guess, a modern expression or updated expression of the services that we offer. The traditional production capabilities are very much baked into that Orchestration Partner offering, but it's a very sort of contemporary version of that, leveraging Monks.Flow, leveraging the relationships and connections we have with the big tech platforms. So yeah, I think that really covers it. Yeah, the second area, real-time, is about the application of social media to brand and brand development. So again, it's a re-articulation of things that we've been doing historically and a more focused execution in three areas of what we do. Anything else? Okay, [Scott]. Go ahead. Yeah, so on your three-year budget, it's too early to give us a number. But if we're to think about it in underlying market and market share, what's your view of the underlying market? If you look at digital media, digital transformation, I mean, basically the market you play in, what kind of steady-state growth rate we can expect the next couple of years, do you feel? Difficult to forecast one year, let alone three. You said three-year budget. These are plans for three years, and the budget is really a focus on 2025. If we look at, I think, what's happening in the addressable markets that Scott mentioned, ad spending this year will hit $1 trillion for the first time. Of that $1 trillion, $700 billion will be digital. This excludes mainland China. And $300 billion will be traditional. The digital piece we've seen with Q3 reporting by most of the major tech platforms, they're going, as Scott said, by high double digits or anywhere between 11%-12% to 20% plus, depending on which platform you're talking about. So the ad revenue growth for the digital platforms continues to be very strong. Traditional media, if you net out political advertising, and not all traditional media are affected in the same way, but you net out political advertising following the U.S. election, traditional media probably fell again this year by 0%-5% if you didn't have live sports and by 5%-10% or even more if you didn't have live sports. So I would expect those trends to continue. The more pertinent thing for us is two things or two things for us. The first is what I touched on in terms of tech spending on advertising and marketing. Margins, clearly, the big tech platforms are moving spend from OpEx to CapEx, and you, as analysts and others, are very focused on the amounts of money that are being invested in AI-driven CapEx. One of the reasons that we've seen in 2023 and 2024, ad revenues expand on the digital platforms, but their advertising and marketing decrease is because of that phenomenon. That is likely to continue, maybe not at high rates as we've seen before in terms of CapEx. And as I said, I think the OpEx is sort of bottoming out generally from a tech spending point of view. It hasn't increased in our experience, but I think it's bottoming out against, obviously, easier comparatives year to year. On the tech services side, currently, it's pretty flat. If you look at the competitive components in the industry, it varies from competitor to competitor as to what's happening there. Some are showing some growth, but most are showing sort of anemic growth. Whether that improves as we go into 2025 or not, we shall see. I think the removal of political uncertainty in terms of the election and the budget in the U.K. probably helps. But you do have sort of geopolitical stuff. And with the Trump administration, the volatility is likely to increase, I would say, geopolitically in terms of the question marks that people are already raising even 24 - 48 hours after the election results. So we'll have to see how that pans out. But I think the good news is that the U.S. election is out of the way, and the budget is out of the way, and there's a little bit more of a clearer picture. But the two principal determinants for us are going to be in the short to medium term is what happens on ad marketing spending by tech companies and also what happens in tech services in terms of a re-emergence of spending there. Again, the removal of uncertainty, as I mentioned before, will help in that area too. Do you want to add anything, Mary? No, I think we're good. Scott? No. Okay. Okay, very clear. Thank you. Thank you, Julien. We'll now move to Steve Liechti of Deutsche Numis. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Yeah, morning, everybody. Thanks for taking the questions. I've got three. One is on content. You did talk about it, to be fair, but just it surprised me in terms of the decline against easier comps. And if you do the two-year like-for-like, it kind of looks materially worse than the previous periods. Can you just give us more comfort or more depth in terms of what's going on there? I hear what you're saying about tech clients, but just flesh out, is it losing its share? You're cutting costs aggressively. Is that affecting the revenue line now as well, worse than you'd expected? Anything you can give me there? That's the first question. Second question is tech spend by quarter. Are you able to give us the sort of tech spend year-on-year in the first half on a like-for-like basis and then into the third quarter on a like-for-like basis? And then the third one, you commented a bit on Trump. One presumes he's better for U.S. companies' profits overall. Just to kind of shoot from the hip view from your end in terms of what that means for you as a business. You talked about the geopolitical volatility, yes, but anything else you can give us at this stage? That would be great. Thanks. Okay, I'll come on the last question. Mary, you want to talk a little on content? I think you should look at the three-year stack. And you look at it, if you go back to 2022 and look at 2023 and 2024, I think you get a better picture about what happened on content. Obviously, the content was driven extremely strongly by what happened with COVID and the pandemic. And I think we've seen over the last couple of years reactions there. But primarily, it's what we've said before in relation to tech spending. Our client list is still very heavily, it's almost half of our revenues come from the tech sector. And for good or bad, that's what determines what's happening principally in content, what's happening there. I would say that on Trump, I mean, it's good news from an American point of view, a North American point of view, which is our principal market. The president-elect has talked about reducing corporate tax rates from 21% - 15%. He's talked about reducing personal tax for expats outside the U.S., but also in the context of the U.S. economy. Whilst U.S. business doesn't like to talk about it, I think basically U.S. business wanted to see a Trump administration because it means low tax and low regulation. Although the picture on regulation for the tech companies perhaps is a little bit more mixed. The fact that tech entrepreneurs, and one in particular, will have obviously significant influence, if not participation in the government, probably helps. So I think from a North American point of view, the opportunity, and we are, so businesses which have strong North American business activities and foreign businesses which have strong U.S. activities, I think are going to be in a good position. The position is going to be much more mixed for European companies because of tariffs. I think South America benefits as well, and that's good for us too. Contiguous nature of the markets in South America and with supply chains now being fragmented post-Taiwan risk or as a result of Taiwan risk and climate change and flooding. And just- in- time, manufacturing is not the theme of the day. It's supply chains which are much more varied. So South America as a contiguous region is really important, I think, from a North American context. So I think outside in Europe, it's going to be more difficult because of the threat of tariffs. The China-U.S. relationship is likely to be quite a difficult one. Maybe they'll find some modus vivendi, but it's likely to be increasing friction, and that will have an impact on the rest of Asia. China, I think, will do more trade with the Global South and will reorient itself if that friction develops. So I think the picture is good in summary for North America, but much more varied outside. So that's your sort of first and third question. I mean, do you want to say something about tech, Mary? Yes. So obviously, technology clients are about 44% of our revenue and have a major bearing on the performance of content in particular. And we've obviously called out the growth rates for content, but we won't comment specifically on the technology clients in isolation. But as we said, we continue to see caution and budget constraints from those clients. Do you want to say something on tech services, which I think? Yes. So on technology services, so as we've flagged several times before, we have a significant reduction from one key client, which is playing into the numbers. So that reduction began in Q4 2023. We have seen a small amount of revenue in the first half of 2024, but then that has decreased in Q3. And that's driven the increase in the decrease in growth rates of technology services in the quarter. Does that cover your question? Yeah. If you're not giving me the tech spend by quarter, it does. Yeah. Thanks for that. Can I just push you a bit on the content side? Just really what I was trying to get at there was I hear about the tech and stuff like that, but you've been pushing it pretty hard in terms of the cost side and stuff like that. I just want to make sure that you're not cutting into the fact you're not losing market share in that business in any way. Anything you can give me there. Thanks. It's difficult to, from the published data competitively, it's difficult to come to a conclusion on that. We don't really see, from the point of view of the holding companies, defined comparisons. I mean, if you're focusing specifically on content or, let's say, what we call foundational agency work, it's quite difficult to dig out from those numbers what's happening. You can dig it out on media, and you can dig it out on traditional creative services, but not that. In our own case, I mean, I think the principal challenge, and JB and Jean-Benoit Berty can talk a little bit about that, we're really trying to balance the revenues that we have in content with the cost. Do you want to talk a little bit about billability, utilization, and pricing? Yes, of course. So we continue to push on simplification and unification. What that means is that we strive for greater efficiencies, better processes, better use of tools to leverage our pool of resources much better across our revenue stream. And we will continue to do that. In a declining revenue cycle, obviously, it makes it a bit more challenging. But we are very much addressing that aspect of it, and we want to make sure that we best serve our clients and the revenue that we generate with our best pool of resources. Does that cover what you wanted to cover there? Yep, that's fine. Thank you. Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you have any questions or follow-up questions, please do press star one at this time. We'll now move to Tom Singlehurst of Citi. Please go ahead. Yes. Thank you for taking the question. It's Tom here from Citi. I suppose the first question is maybe a slightly existential one, so I apologize for that. But I mean, if we look at IPG, they've sort of tagged some challenges with Huge and R/GA, and they're sort of earmarked them for sale. WPP, AKQA's obviously had some challenges. And I suppose the common thread appears to be that these are sort of originally digital-first agencies that just don't necessarily have the scale to be fully differentiated versus, I guess, a sort of larger number of bigger agencies that are ultimately sort of slowly adapting to how the landscape has evolved. And I suppose the question is, is what you're seeing genuinely just a sort of cyclical working through the tech pressures, or is there something that you have in common with those sort of types of agencies? And if so, how do you resolve it? Is for example, scale a big factor? So that was the first question. And then the second one, I mean, you've obviously had some great success with new business. I just would love to get a sense of whether, especially given Mary's comment about the timing of the technology services drag, whether we should think about sort of that just being a tailwind from new business starting in the fourth quarter or at least in the first quarter of next year, some sense of when we should expect that to sort of kick in meaningfully and help. Thank you very much. Yeah, it's difficult to say because when you, for example, talk about AKQA, does that include Grey or not? Because if I remember rightly, AKQA was merged with Grey, and Grey would tend to be more a traditional creative operation. I can't talk to Huge and R/GA because obviously I haven't seen the figures. So it's more difficult to say that. I think the more important comparatives for us would be the more specialist companies, Tom. So if you could dig out data on Dept or a Brandtech and Oliver and Jellyfish, if you can look at those rather than broader comparisons that might reflect more mixed activity. There's a lot of talk about consolidation in the industry. When you refer to scale, is it about consolidation? And I think the jury is out on that. But for every sort of Coca-Cola, which, if I remember rightly, was only 75% of their marketing spend that was consolidated, and another 25% was left out there for specialists. That's at one end, and then you have sort of GM at the other end, which is for small creative or smaller creative outfits with us as a foundational agency, so I think it's very mixed. I think the primary driver of what you're talking about is tech spend. I mean, ad spend is diametrically opposed to marketing spend. If you plot it on the graph, and it might be worth doing this, what ad revenues look like and what marketing spend look like, you would get two diverging lines, particularly in 2023 and 2024. I mean, somebody wrote to us yesterday and said there was a 90% correlation between Meta's advertising and marketing spend and our top line. I haven't checked that out. And Meta is one of our largest clients. It's in our top five, if I remember rightly. So there would be a causal link there. But I think that's the primary driver. I can't talk to AKQA, Huge, and R/GA, one, because does it include Grey? Two, if it doesn't include Grey, what are their tech clients? I think their biggest client was Nike, if I remember rightly. So I'm not sure, and I don't know what the Huge, R/GA base is. So very difficult to say. But I think that's the primary driver. And then aligned to that is what I've touched on before. The tech companies are now spending, I was looking at Amazon's CapEx spend. It's huge on an annual basis. I think it's almost as much as $100 billion. And it's huge on an annual basis. Looking at that, it's quite clear they've switched OpEx to CapEx for AI in the areas of compute and energy in order to execute expansion of AI capacity and capability. I think that's what's going on at the moment. Does that mean we should diversify more outside? I don't think it's a question of scale, to answer your question. We are getting very significant traction in discussions with clients on the area we covered with Julien, the hyper-personalization at scale, the foundational agency, whatever you want to call it. We're getting some very significant interest. I would say virtually every packaged goods company is looking carefully at what their future marketing model would look like. And it looks like much of it looks very similar to the sort of models that we're exploring and developing in the automotive sector and in the packaged goods clients that we work with and in the two major case studies that were launched at Cannes this year around Google Hatch and Meta Forever 21. So I'm not sure that it's about scale. I'm not sure it's about consolidation of rosters. I think it's about capability and execution in AI-driven transformation in the areas that we've been talking about, principally three: copywriting and visualization, hyper-personalization, and media planning and buying. So I think that's where it's going to be. But to get a complete picture, you'd have to look at several private equity firms who have made investments in the areas that we're talking about. They're private. You don't see the data. You'd have to look at what's been happening to their top line and the bottom line in order to figure that out. Does that cover it? On the timing of new business. Well, so we started working, for example, with GM on July the 1st. It's had a small impact in Q3 and Q4. And I think the major impact will start from Q2 of next year. Got it. Very clear. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, sir. We do not have any further questions. I can call back over to Sir Martin for any additional closing remarks. Okay. Thank you, everybody. Thank you for joining us. We have another call later on with our U.S. audience. There may have been some on this call who got up a little bit earlier, so thank you for joining us, and we'll see you next year with our full year results. In the meantime, if you have any further questions for Mary, Scott, Jean-Benoit, or myself, please don't hesitate to let us know. Thank you very much.