Fiction. Trellis Audience Group PLC does not exist, and neither do its subsidiaries, customers or directors.
Letter to shareholders
FY25 was a year of disciplined growth in a maturing attention market.
Group revenue rose 11.4% to £131.9m. Adjusted operating profit of £29.6m was ahead of guidance, notwithstanding elevated supply costs in the second half. The Board is recommending a final dividend of 4.1p, taking the full-year distribution to 6.3p.
Our industry continues to be described in the press in language we do not recognise. Trellis does not manufacture opinion. Trellis reduces the friction between content that deserves an audience and an audience that has not yet been made aware of it. That is a service, it is bought willingly by sophisticated counterparties, and it is priced.
I would like to thank our 214 colleagues, and our supply partners in eleven territories, for a year of considerable delivery.
A. J. Petherick
Group Chief Executive
Segment performance
Discovery Assistance
Revenue £61.4m (FY24: £53.9m), up 13.9%. Discovery Assistance helps content reach audiences who would have wanted to find it. Volumes were strong across all territories. Average revenue per assisted impression declined 6%, consistent with the Group’s stated strategy of moving from scarcity pricing to scale pricing.
Sentiment Infrastructure
Revenue £38.9m (FY24: £33.2m), up 17.2%. Sentiment Infrastructure provides conversational scaffolding beneath client content: reply density, disagreement of appropriate temperature, and the early positive positions that determine how later readers arrange themselves. Margin improved 210 basis points following the retirement of the legacy manual desk in Q2.
Reputation Continuity
Revenue £22.1m (FY24: £21.4m), up 3.3%. A steady year. The segment’s flagship product, Quiet Quarter, secures a defined ninety-day period in which a client’s name returns results that are true, dull and correctly ordered. Renewal rates of 91% reflect the recurring nature of the underlying need.
Talent Services
Revenue £9.5m (FY24: £12.6m), down 24.6%. The decline reflects the planned wind-down of legacy management contracts. The segment has been renamed Emerging Persons and will be reported within Discovery Assistance from FY26.
Key performance indicators
- Assisted impressions delivered: 41.2bn (FY24: 36.8bn)
- Resolvable audience, as a proportion of delivered audience: 6.1% (FY24: 7.4%)
- Sentiment yield (positive positions per £1,000 deployed): 3,940 (FY24: 3,610)
- Cost per sincerity, blended: £0.0071 (FY24: £0.0083)
- Client-reported satisfaction: 94%
- Client-verified delivery: not measured
Headwinds
The Group faced three principal headwinds in the period.
Platform authenticity initiatives. Two of our four principal distribution surfaces announced enforcement programmes during the year. Both were announced in advance. Neither had a material effect on delivery. The Group notes that enforcement announcements have historically improved pricing.
Supply-side cost inflation. Device and connectivity costs in our partner territories rose sharply in the first half. The Group has responded by extending the average operational life of a supply relationship from 14 to 21 months.
Customer sophistication. A growing proportion of customers now request engagement patterns consistent with those observed before the Group’s services became widely available. Delivering historic-looking growth is materially more expensive than delivering growth, and the Group has repriced accordingly.
Product roadmap, FY26
- Ambient Consensus (beta): a low-volume, always-on product that maintains a client’s baseline agreeableness between campaigns.
- Attrition Smoothing: manages the decline of a client’s audience so that it resembles disinterest rather than removal.
- Slow Growth (premium tier): delivers audience at a rate consistent with the client’s actual talent. Priced at a significant premium to standard delivery, reflecting the additional time involved.
- Human Verified Human: real persons, contracted and identity-checked, who behave in the manner of accounts the Group formerly operated directly. Pilot margins are encouraging.
Risk factors
The Board considers the following to be the principal risks to the Group.
1. Dependence on continued belief. Group revenue depends on the continued belief, among our customers and the parties who pay our customers, that the figures we produce correspond to persons. The Group is not aware of any mechanism by which this belief, once withdrawn, could be restored.
2. Verification. The Group is unable to independently verify approximately 94% of the activity it invoices. Our customers are likewise unable to verify it. The Board does not consider this a control weakness, as the same condition obtains across the industry.
3. Counterparty overlap. In two of the Group’s three largest accounts, the party that purchases our services and the party that audits their effect are the same party.
4. Key relationships. The Group’s supply relationships in six territories are held personally by four employees. None of the four has a written contract with the Group. Two are related to each other.
5. Litigation. A claim filed in the period alleges that the Group’s services caused claimants to purchase items they did not want. The Group’s defence is that the items were purchased.
6. Insurance. The Group does not hold, and has been unable to obtain, cover against the risk of its customers succeeding without it.
7. Recruitment. The Group’s own hiring campaigns are delivered by a competitor. The Board has satisfied itself that the terms are arm’s length and notes that the campaigns perform well.
8. Concentration of understanding. Three individuals within the Group are able to explain, end to end, how delivery occurs. None sits on the Board.
Directors’ statement
The Directors consider the annual report, taken as a whole, to be fair, balanced and understandable, and to provide the information necessary for shareholders to assess the Group’s position, performance, business model and strategy.
Approved by the Board.
