Thanks for your time, everyone. Just very conscious that some of you may know Hitwise, some of you will never have heard of us. So just to give you a bit of a background about us and what we do, I head up the UK retail side of the business, so if any of you have any questions afterwards about, you know, how we work with current clients in the industry, then please feel free to come and ask - the more questions the better. So just a bit of background about us and what we do, a really, really simple way to describe Hitwise and kind of what we're about is it's almost like having all the great data that you'd get from your site-centric tool, but for all of your competitors and for the whole internet.

What really makes us different is it's all about the scale. In the UK, for example, we have a pool of just under 3.5 million people, and we see everything they do online. We can see how they've got to a site, what they've done when they're inside a website, whether they bought or not, what products they've looked at, and what they do afterwards. So we've got this big pool of people and we can see their entire digital footprint.

Some few stats there about the kind of coverage that we've got and some of the numbers that we work with. You think about keywords, for instance, it's 160 million monthly keywords that we track, so big, big, big scalable data. I'm going to be speaking to you a little bit firstly about just the subscription box industry, some of the key trends I'm seeing with my clients, and what we're pulling out from a digital perspective.

Just to give you a bit of a background in terms of how I'm defining the subscription box industry, what I've done is I've taken the top 170 websites that contribute to the subscription box economy online, and I'm treating that as the industry. Feel free to ask any questions about how you can customize that afterwards as well, because you can obviously slice and dice that.

So just a couple of top trends to call out. This is data from over the last three years, so we hold three years' worth of historical data, and the reason that's important is, obviously, just so we can get a bit of context in terms of growth online. What we're seeing here, so you can see the years down here at the bottom actually, when you take the subscription box as an industry, actually only accounts for 0.2% of the entire traffic that's driven to the retail industry online - so any kind of transactional retailer. So actually, in volumes, it's really small, but purely from a growth perspective. You know, just last year over the year of 2017, it's grown by 30%, which when you compare that to a lot of the other umbrellas under the retail space, that's really, really significant - so that's one of the biggest sub-growing industries.

Every year I do a webinar for my clients about what happened over Christmas and Black Friday, and subscription boxes and personalization is in my seven years at Hitwise something that I call out every single year. If I just break this down a bit more granular over the last couple of years, what we can really see here is if you look at 2015... Actually, this is pretty even split between traffic to subscription box sites for November and December. So in 2015, we saw 4.5 million visits in November and December - pretty much even across those two months. Similar trend really for 2016, November and December were pretty even. But what we saw last year was a massive, massive shift - we can see here that November had 12% more visits for the subscription box industry compared to the month of December - so really, really big shift there. And the reason behind that was, obviously, as I'm sure you guys have guessed, Black Friday, Cyber Week, and discounting in the run-up to Christmas.

When we break down the kind of overall umbrella of the subscription box industry, what's purely driving that shift or mainly driving the shift, in fact, is the subcategory of fashion and beauty. They're the ones that are really seeing the biggest uptick in terms of the shift to November-type traffic.

It's 21% higher year-on-year than it was in December the year before - food and alcohol is pretty flat as is lifestyle sites. Now this really actually surprised me and some of my colleagues when I was putting this together, when we start to break down each of the different subcategories under, again, that umbrella of subscription boxes, what we can see here is within fashion and beauty, as an example (again, if anyone wants the detail behind how I've defined fashion and beauty, then feel free just to ask afterwards) you can see the top players here are, Look Fantastic, Harry's, Birchbox, food and alcohol there too, and this is purely just based on visits.

We do have the ability to pull actual conversions data, so people that are actually buying stuff rather than just looking at stuff online, and then you can see lifestyle, which is kind of pets, stationery, that kind of thing. But, actually, this is the kind of data that our clients are currently using to really keep their finger on the pulse when it comes to disruptors.

Harry's is a brand that I've been asked about and had a lot of frantic calls over OND last year about Harry's, and how they were disrupting the industry, and some of their routes to market. These are kind of some of the top rises year-on-year for October, November, December of 2017 versus the same time period for the year before and again, there is a lot of detail that sits behind this. For example, you guys might be saying, "Well, okay, it's fine to know that Harry's, they're a market disruptor. But how have they done that?" That's what our data is about, it’s building those attribution models and saying, "Well, tell me everything they've done that's led to that surge in traffic."

These are some of the trends that actually sit behind some of the brands that are disrupting the industry. If I take that period of Q4 for 2017 versus the same time period for the year before, here are some of the top disruptive search terms that are driving more clicks now than they were a year ago. So you can see what's really driving the big growth from a fashion and beauty perspective are some of these terms here.

Food and alcohol, guess that comes as no real surprise. Gin baubles were...I think it was 1,500 and something percent year-on-year shift in the demand, so that's one of the huge, huge, huge trends that we saw with gin, but it's very much across categories. Then you can see some of the lifestyle shifts there and how you can actually really action this data is things like PPC, then also informing product mix.

So a lot of our clients use our data to inform their buying and their merchandising decisions as well. What I've spoken about already is really just understanding overall trends, so it's very much kind of from a traffic perspective. What we can also do is actually have a look and see what audiences sit behind that demand. Knowing about the top-level traffic demands, the audiences that actually sit behind the demand for subscription boxes. Here is a typical example of what a subscription box shopper looked like for Q4 in 2017 - we've got a skew towards the 18 to 24s, skew towards females with a higher propensity to be from the southeast of London and the southwest of London, and then personal income.

It's slightly divided here in the sense that you've got the low-income earners and then the over 50k earners, so that was a typical shopper in Q4 last year. But, actually, when we look at the year-on-year shift, so how has the subscription box profile demographically changed year-on-year, we're seeing the biggest surge in shift to the over 45s from an age perspective - so a 40% year-on-year uptick in that demographic. The biggest one we saw was the males, and there is a couple of key niche brands, actually, coming back to the Harry's example that I referenced earlier that actually sits behind that.

But that's a really significant uptick in males year-on-year, 125%. London and east of England, the two postal areas that we're seeing the biggest uptick in year-on-year shift from as well, and the personal income between 40 and 50k.

Some of you guys in the room may be familiar with Kantar TGI. They are a huge market research company and one of our biggest data partners. There's a lot of attitudinal data that sits behind the profiles that they provide to us and that sits inside our platform. So what I've done here is I've just done a bit of digging into the subscription box shopper and pulled out a few kind of attitudinal and lifestyle statements that they're much more likely to care about versus the UK average person.

You can see here just a couple of examples. A lot of interesting stuff that came out here, but you can see what they're much more likely to indicate that they care about versus the UK average person -  external recommendations, celebrity endorsements, fair trade, vegetarian and veganism to a certain extent actually came up quite significantly when I was pulling this data. That's really from a content messaging upsell, cross-sell perspective, that's what the actionable data from this slide is.

When we start to break down that industry into the three core pillars, you can see some key kind of demographic profile differences between those four sets. You can see, obviously, fashion and beauty, slightly younger demographic, primarily female, the more kind of urban profile, and the lower-income. Whereas food and alcohol has got a bigger skew towards males and a significantly higher personal income bracket there.

Some of our clients that we work with in this industry are actually using this data to a certain extent, to inform their pricing and their cross-sell and upsell opportunity strategy as well. We noticed as well a couple of interesting year-on-year shifts in terms of the kind of consumers that are shopping for these subscription boxes and then the overlap between some of the other sub-areas. If we look, for example, at the subscription box shopper for fashion and beauty, what we're seeing here is a 90% year-on-year shift in the propensity to also be shopping for food and alcohol subscription boxes.

You can really start to see what, again, some of the overlap is and some of the wider interests from an engagement targeting perspective. Those ones are the key ones to call out, really the biggest shift in fashion and beauty and food and alcohol overlap and also fashion and beauty and lifestyle overlap as well.

Now I'm going to do a bit of a deep dive into some examples for Birchbox. So collaboration is obviously a key part of anyone's strategy in this industry, and we just pulled out a couple of examples of best practice. A lot of our clients are using our data to inform their collaboration strategy, but also to measure. So it's, obviously, a frequent thing that's being done by Birchbox.

A couple of key examples for last year and the beginning of this year as well, and (I just thought it'd be a really nice, interesting story to tell behind how successful some of those collaborations were), what our data allows you to do is, as I've referenced a couple of times before, is profile the demographic of not just people visiting your site, but people also transacting on your website. We can do the same for any potential brands you're looking to collaborate with and the power of that data is really the ability to showcase the value of your customers and the kind of differences in customers that you have versus some of the brands that you're looking to collaborate with. What that looks like before you collaborate with someone and then some of the key shifts after you've collaborated with someone.

So if we take a couple of examples here for the Birchbox collaboration with Vogue here in red, we can see a 25% uptick in traffic overlap after that campaign, Matthew Williamson 59%, and then Ohh Deer, which is kind of more of a stationery brand, 267% upshift. There's a lot of actual raw numbers that sit behind that. After the session, feel free to speak to me about any of the numbers that sit behind that. The previous slide looked at the uptick in traffic to Vogue, Matthew Williamson, and Ohh Deer, and then equally you can see that the benefit there from an uptick in terms of the Birchbox audience as well. So, again, if you look at Ohh Deer, that's a really nice example to call out, it's a 250% uptick in their audience as a result of that collaboration.

To give a bit of context in terms of what these audiences look like ahead of the collaboration. Pre-collaboration, what we saw is that Birchbox had just over 110,000 audience size. The way I've defined this audience, is either visits to the Birchbox website or searches for Birchbox subscription box. Again, you can be creative with how you define that audience.

Before the collaboration, Ohh Deer, 33,300 audience size, actually only has an audience overlap of 1,000. There are some similarities but also some key differences there in terms of the kinds of demographics that they were attracting before the collaboration, primarily actually, around income and regional penetration. Ohh Deer have a bit more of a skew towards females as well and you can see some of the key audience shifts. Not only are we seeing the actual size of the audience increase, so that combined audience size before the campaign was 1,000, and then you can see it almost quadrupled over the course of that campaign. So really, really important in terms of the actual size of that audience increase.

But also, it's important to look at the qualitative as well as the quantitative figures here, and you can see the mutual audience shifts which was deemed hugely successful on both parts. A couple of trends that we are seeing and predicting for 2018, as I was speaking to some of you earlier, we were having coffee in the other room, and saying about how Amazon typically can... I get asked a lot of questions about Amazon, and that Amazon has got the reach, and then potentially, they're going to start to look at getting the loyalty. That's a really, really big threat for us as a business.

So how can we mitigate that? And I'm having a lot of conversations with my clients at the moment about using some of these recommendations - how you can mitigate the risk around that, customizing products, personalizing products, building loyalty before competitors are getting the loyalty from their customers, and just using data in a really, really smart way to start to target new emerging segments that we can see in the industry. Really understanding the audience that sit behind the demand so you can target them accordingly.

Point one, I guess, is really all about understanding who are the audiences that sit behind the demand for your boxes and then understanding everything they're doing online. How do they search? How can I use that to inform my PPC strategy? What websites do they hang out on? Working for my acquisition strategy, where do they live offline? And then the same for your competitor brands as well. Again, there's a lot of detail that sits behind these, so if anyone has any questions after the session, then do feel free to come and ask. Thank you, everyone.