The Interpublic Group of Companies, Inc. (IPG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. So we'll get started. We are very happy to have back at the conference Interpublic Group, Philippe Krakowsky, CEO. Thanks so much for being here.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Sure. So I thought we'd start with the merger with Omnicom, which you will be joining as Co-President and COO and which you'll represent as a Board member. You've had around 6 months to further plan for the upcoming deal. How has your level of conviction shifted around this? And what are you most focused on going into the transaction close?

Well, look, I mean, as you will have heard, and I think it's sort of a matter of common knowledge, John and I spent a lot of time talking about and thinking about this prior to agreeing to the acquisition. And so I think that, that level of thought has gone into it so that your question around level of conviction. There was a great deal. There continues to be a great deal. And when you think about all of the things that we can unlock in the way of capabilities about kind of what's happening in our industry, as in many industries where the rate of change is accelerating the importance of technology and data. Also, there's a really significant kind of value unlock there. So there's a very high level of conviction and excitement about being able to close this and get to the other side of it. And then in terms of where the focus is, you've heard on the Omnicom side about where and how the efficiency part of the story will play out. And there's been a lot of specificity around the cost synergies and how it is that putting these 2 large public entities together is going to clearly be a value driver. I think that in conversations with clients, there's a lot of interest in so many of the ways in which what we can jointly bring to them is very powerful. So I mean, to my mind, that's the place where kind of I would lean in and be most [ insighted ] about kind of what can be done once we're through the regulatory period.

Okay. Philippe, holding companies are to state plainly, people have the organizations. They house agencies with fairly unique cultures. I guess what's your level of confidence that your various advertising and marketing services groups will integrate well into the Omnicom parent structure?

Well, I mean, back to a lot of time went into thinking this through. And obviously, in this interim period, the pendency, you get feedback and input from not only a client side, but your own organizations. I think that there's a lot of consonance that the 2 cultures are -- we know each other quite well from having competed against one another for a very long time. We do have some flow of talent. Often, it's been like clear that it's back and forth from Omnicom to us or vice versa. And I think that there is kind of -- back to your word earlier conviction, there's an understanding or a commitment to the fact that what we are -- we're a professional service business that's increasingly informed by and run off of this data and tech platform piece, but that the individuals, the talent that sits inside of our, as you put it, our operating units, our agency brands, is a really important part of how you bring clients into the fold, how you activate those capabilities. And so we've been spending time with those folks. The sense we've got is that all the client-facing components of our respective companies are eager because they'll have this more comprehensive more modern set of tools to bring to bear. So we have -- again, we feel really good about kind of how the cultures will fit and the fact that how we work kind of the values we have and the trajectory strategically has been pretty aligned.

Got it. At the deal announcement, there was certainly a lot of investor focus on client conflict and maybe you just sort of answered at the risk of talent leaving. But six months later, this looks kind of overblown. Would you concur with that? Do you think you're kind of in the clear on this front with the risk of spurring reviews or something of the like?

That depends how superstitious -- like why are you asking me this question. Look, I think we were pretty overt from the beginning that the benefits are very evident, and that the nature of our business has evolved quite a bit. And what we do has a lot of complexity to it and that sophistication and the breadth of what we do meant that the industry has kind of moved past what the headlines immediately told you kind of were going to be the case. And so you work off of the data set that is now 6 months old and a lot of those headlines around, like you said, talent, clients, et cetera, have been overblown. I'm going to knock wood somewhere. And I think we also -- I think that the nature of what we're trying to do has gotten the attention of a couple of our competitors, and there is kind of concern on their part. And so some of that noise is being stoked by people who would have a vested interest in that being the case. So we're going to stay focused on clients. That's -- we're very client-centric companies and our people, and we're going to kind of just keep moving through it. But so far, so good.

And to put this issue to bed, it sounds like the idea of conflict, right, wasn't even necessarily an issue going into this, hasn't been an issue for maybe a number of years.

Again, I think that the -- if you think about the industry as it was 10, 15-plus years ago as opposed to what it is now in terms of the sophistication of services, the focus on applying data and tech to get to outcomes, the way in which we integrate and take a lot of complexity out of the equation and help clients do big things across a lot of -- across geography or across -- so I do think that the industry has kind of moved past that perceptual hurdle as of some time ago.

Got it. Maybe just staying one more with the deal. I wanted to see if you could provide your view on the regulatory process from here, including in the U.S., where you are currently in a second review with the FTC?

There's -- you would know better than most. There's -- you can say, relatively speaking, not a whole lot. But we were clear at the outset that we thought that this is a deal that would close in the back half of this year. We haven't seen anything in the process to date. It's sort of not consistent with what we expected. And we are still on track to close in the back half of this year. You've heard as we've cleared hurdles, whether that was shareholder approval, which was very, very strong in both cases. And what's now 7 out of the 18 jurisdictions that have given us the thumbs up. So we're just moving through the process, and we're confident it's going to get us to where we said it would when we started.

Got it. Maybe shifting gears away from the deal. So you recently reiterated your organic growth guide at minus 1% to minus 2% for the year. That's net of account losses or a handful of account losses, and you framed the media environment through April as steady. I think investors have been surprised by the advertising resilience observed generally through this recent earnings period. And curious, as you speak to marketers regularly, maybe what do you think has missed about how they approach kind of spending into periods of volatility.

Sure. And by the way, for those of you in the audience, there's like on the left-hand side, I'm sorry to talk and not look at you, but blinding light. So look, I mean, I think that what may be underappreciated is that our clients are very sophisticated. They've got a lot of tools at their disposal. They -- they see the engagement with consumers as something that happens across -- thank you, across a range of channels, across very, very complex customer journeys that are also not only complex, but very, very unique person by person. And so they make the kind of decisions that we're talking about in a way that's very informed. And so they're aware and they see, like all of us, that there's a lot of uncertainty out there and that the situation -- it's pretty fluid, right? At any given point in time, you don't necessarily know what's going on at the macro level or at the policy level is going to sort of play its way out or when the impact will be felt. And so it's -- the conversations are very consistent with what we outlined about a month ago, which is that there's thought being given and we're very engaged with clients in sort of scenario planning, thinking through when and how one might move to these contingency plans, what it will mean in terms of capability mix or media, shifting media channels, thinking about from a consumer messaging or outreach point of view, whether you're dialing up certain things, whether you kind of the value part of the equation for the consumer matters more. But at this point, it's still the case that the discussions are about kind of planning for those eventualities not acting upon those plans. And if that changes, we've got a lot of different skill sets and capabilities to help them through those processes. But so far, it's kind of status quo to what it was about a month ago.

Got it. Stripping out the recent new business losses from your guide, I think you've talked to current underlying growth at plus 1% to plus 1.5%. So just separate from the Omnicom merger and any revenue synergies, how would you think about the path of getting IPG kind of back to some of the organic levels you were executing at a few years ago?

I mean I think we were pretty clear throughout that the parts of our business that have worked very well over time. Media was clearly a driver for us, and there's a lot of kind of media plus data in our case, which allows us to help clients get accountability against the marketing dollar spent and really plan for and get to outcomes. That's an area where we've had very strong performance, but there was a kind of dimension to that offering that the market had become sort of more -- it had privileged it or it had sort of reintroduced it into the mix because it had been deemphasized for a number of years. And that's sort of principal capability where you have proprietary trading of some kind. So I think that, that's something that we built over the course of the year last year. And that would be a portion of it. I think that we've been building out our commerce capabilities, and we've got some conspicuous strengths there. But one of the things that we're very excited about is that Omnicom made that commit, did a significant acquisition getting to be about 1.5 years, maybe plus ago and bought flywheel. So we would be likely building or perhaps doing some kind of M&A around that. We did a modest sized deal towards the end of the year last year that bought a data set and a -- and some technology around commerce data into the group, but we would be more leaned into that, but I think we'll unlock a lot of that on the other side of the deal. There's a lot of interest on our folks parts and on clients' part in terms of what will flywheel do and then what will the data capabilities of a flywheel plus Acxiom give us in terms of our understanding of consumers kind of from the right at purchase or next to point of purchase in the digital ecosystem, all the way through what Acxiom gives us, which is an understanding of the consumer, very, very powerful data management capability and first-party data set, that is people-based and privacy compliant and that combination will be very powerful, we believe. So if we were not moving through this, I think it's some of the areas that we've talked about previously.

I go back to your comment for a second there on principal because you said for a number of years, maybe it wasn't -- there wasn't a heightened need for that and then there was. What kind of shifted? Was it -- there was a concern about what principal meant and that went away? Or was it more just, hey, we need this certainty and principal kind of offers that?

I mean I think certainty and certainty around value is something that might have more currency, no pun intended right now, just given the uncertainty that we're seeing maybe going back a few years, given what took place, obviously, with kind of interest rates, a long period of inexpensive money. But I also think that some things happened inside of the -- kind of inside of the media ecosystem and you've got different range of inventory and kind of more media owners who are kind of leaned into trading in that way. So I think it's both. It's the media ecosystem and then it's some of the macro.

Got it. Okay. And then you have kind of cited a prior lack of a principal media buying offer as sort of a factor in some of the new business that's weighing on organic growth this year. You have started to kind of scale this up. Kind of curious how this has maybe changed conversations in the RFP process.

Well, it's not universal. So there are clearly circumstances in clients where you see that it's going to be part of their kind of decision matrix and other circumstances where for a whole host of reasons, it's maybe not as prominent. In our case, the fact that we've spent last 12 months moving pretty quickly to put it in place and do so in a way that we think has the appropriate sort of underlying systems and that we're managing and mitigating kind of all of the moving parts of having the model in place. There are definitely circumstances where when we show up and it's in place, it's kind of added to the competitiveness of what, as I said earlier, has always been kind of one of, if not our kind of standout offering. And as you said, we've won without it in the early parts, the middle part of last year, notwithstanding 1 of the 2 of these large losses. But we're definitely seeing it as a net plus in that where -- like with any business, you sort of prequalify the situation and you understand what the success metrics are going to be. But if something is heading in that direction, we now have the ability to kind of lean into that or to rotate into that with part of our solution.

Maybe just one last one on new business. Have you seen any change in the pace of RFPs coming to the pipe there? We've heard different notions right about what the economy could mean for that, that it would potentially slow processes down, right? Maybe marketers don't want to engage in expensive process RFP while the economy is bad -- potentially going into a bad cycle.

I mean I think that's still a little bit more anecdotal. But yes, I do think that we're seeing sort of average level of reviews, pitch activity industry-wide, not particularly -- it's not -- doesn't stand out as extremely busy or particularly light. But it stands to reason that if you sort of think about the back half of the year, given the uncertainty and as we're saying, given the conversations with clients are about kind of contingency planning and thinking through kind of what might be -- I think it probably modestly decreases the likelihood that somebody wants to add that incremental level of just -- it's a lot of work. It taxes your teams as a -- if you're a marketer to a meaningful degree. If you feel strongly you want a new partner, you're going to move forward anyway, right? If you think that kind of there's going to be opportunity in that. But at the margins, it would probably kind of slow people down a little.

Got it. In your last earnings release, you highlighted strong contribution from Acxiom, not just on a stand-alone basis, but also in its activation of data across your agencies. Can you speak a bit to the advantage of maybe a recurring business like Acxiom in the current environment, but kind of also to how that data is now being leveraged at IPG relative to maybe your competitive set?

Sure. I mean we've always talked about the fact that it is a -- as a business model, it has long-term contracts built into it. So advantageous, given that the rest of the business, say, on the other end of the spectrum, you've got the project-based businesses. In terms of kind of how we deploy it and sort of what we tap into, it's been very kind of complementary, instrumental and really kind of baked into how we go to market with our media offering. And has consistently over -- since '18 when it became part of the group and up until this last 18- to 24-month period on the media side, it clearly helped fuel a very strong performance there. It's something we use increasingly across the group. I'd say, in the last 6 to 12 months with the advent of GenAI, we've added capabilities or what we would call consoles to the operating system that we use Interact sort of the technology layer that's allowed us to activate to use that data, whether it's to do planning, audience identification and planning work, whether it's to do activation work kind of in the media business, we've added capabilities that allow professionals from across the group to tap into it. So there's kind of a technology and an AI layer. And so what you now have is the ability to use the data no matter where you sit in our world, whether you are a planner at a public relations firm or an ad agency, whether you are wanting to pretest messages against sort of synthetic AI-powered persona based on the Acxiom data, whether you're doing scale, content generation for personalized sort of content kind of across an integrated client or a client that sits inside one of our larger ad agencies. So the use cases for Acxiom have grown a lot for the years and the ability to then build business models that sit underneath that so that you can bring the same level of sort of precision and accountability that we've seen in the media business, the data business, the performance marketing business to the rest of the portfolio. Now that's still work in progress, but that's what gets us excited about Acxiom sort of full stop and then even more so when you think about the totality of the offering that will exist on the other side of the acquisition.

Got it. Health care has been a standout area for IPG for several years. The performance recently is dominated by a single account loss. As you start to lap that, how should performance for the vertical look? And how should we think about the drug pipeline as a potential near-term driver?

Well, I mean, look, I think that's an industry where there clearly is a measure of back to the sort of contingency scenario planning. I think that there's a lot of thought being given to might there be some underlying shifts to how those companies go to market, but they'll still need to be in market. And broadly speaking to your question, there's a lot of innovation that's still going on. There's still a pretty rich pipeline. Obviously, you think about one class of drugs that has just come on to the market in the past year. And I think that as with anything that's really kind of transformational, you're going to find all sorts of sort of incremental or what today would look like off-label uses. So we still see it as a long-term -- there may be some kind of volatility in the immediate term, but we still see that as a very strong long-term driver. And if you think about maybe even just domestically, obviously, but across the world, it's a really important part of the economy, right? It's a really big part of the economy. So it's going to sort out ways to continue to innovate and bring product to market, and we still see lots of reasons for growth, whether it's the innovation side or the population that is kind of moving through different demographically kind of moving into parts of the cycle where there's going to want to be the opportunity to find ways to have that sort of improve either health outcomes or quality of health.

It's really early, but any conversation around the executive actions this week as it relates to the industry and any feedback you've...

Not that I'm aware of yet, but I'm actually going to go spend time with some of those clients as of this evening. So -- got me, but I'm sure it will be a topic of discussion.

Too bad, we didn't have you tomorrow. Okay. Creative is a disciplined core to holding companies. It's definitely undergoing a lot of changes. Maybe just talk about the current state there. Maybe the vision also a couple of years from now as sort of the tech changes to a point where you can really kind of track the performance of the content and do attribution on it.

Well, look, I mean, back to your first question about things that we and Omnicom have in common, right? I mean we're both -- they both are holding companies where the creativity and the creative side of the house has been kind of an area of strength for us for a long time. And so the way that I tend to think about what's possible is that ideas are still going to be really powerful and that people still take information on board and make decisions and actually kind of synthesize and the kind of make meaning based on kind of stories that they hear so storytelling and narrative and that part of the business is not going to cease to be an important part of the business. I think that what needs to happen is some of what you were asking about a few minutes ago, which is how does that sit and live inside of this rich ecosystem where what we have is technology on the content creation and content delivery side that's powerful, data assets that are powerful so that we can tag those assets as they go out into the world, understand how people are interacting with or reacting to those assets. And so I think that there's the opportunity to -- you mentioned on the AI question to take those parts of the business and have them benefit from technology and data. And if you think about what the combined company will be able to do, the power of the balance sheet that we'll have and the fact that our investments in tech will not only not be constrained, but there'll then be ones that we can push out against this bigger platform. So we'll get those platform benefits, I think, to those investments. So I think that there's going to be the opportunity to take those businesses and evolve their business models so that they'll be both top and bottom line benefits to kind of those more creative or more traditional businesses. But it's a part of the business where both Omnicom and we have a lot of strength.

Got it. With Q4 earnings, IPG announced accelerated business transformation program. I think in our view, this has flown a bit under the radar just because of the OMC deal, especially when considering the savings generated. Maybe just can you speak to the program? Why was this necessary even absent the Omnicom merger kind of what's been executed to date?

Well, I mean, we've been pretty clear for a long time as a management team that we see it as our responsibility to keep looking for ways to operate this business in ways that -- it does 2 things, right? Because if you think about the transformation program and you look at kind of the fine print as it were, those benefits, those savings are net of reinvestment, right? And so you've got technology coming into the space, which, as I said, is one of the reasons why we're kind of excited about what the 2 companies can do together. But independent of that, the thinking has been what does that enable in the way of ways of working? How do we kind of put that to work in our business so that we can free up resource for either kind of higher order and higher value services solutions kind of delivery to clients. And then also is it the case that if you were building a company that's scaled like ours is pretty federated because I think the sector was, in many cases, put together through M&A without the technology to kind of create these platforms. So this is something that made sense. You would have seen it kind of in our filings around the merger, what we saw as the potential kind of long-term margin upside for the business. And so kind of we're moving through the centralization of certain corporate functions, finance functions, HR functions, and that's a big driver of this. And then from a ways of working, it's thinking about production is one center of excellence, analytics, given that we do so much more for clients, supporting clients there. And then some -- kind of at the level of a subregion or regional, we probably had some duplication. But all of that is work that we're doing anyway because it's not work that overlaps with that meaningful cost synergy opportunity that we see for the merged entity.

Got it. All right. We are exactly out of time. Thank you, Philippe.

Thank you. Happy to be here.