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

Good morning, everybody. I'm Ben Swinburne, Morgan Stanley's media analyst. Quick disclosure on my end. Please note that important disclosures, including my personal holdings disclosures and Morgan Stanley disclosures all appear as a handout available in the registration area and on the Morgan Stanley public website. Happy to welcome back to the conference, I think maybe for the first time in person.

First time live.

Yes, first time live as CEO, Philippe Krakowsky from Interpublic Group. I think all of you are aware, but Interpublic is one of the world's premier advertising and marketing services companies with agency brands covering the spectrum of disciplines and specialties, and Philippe has held the CEO role for over a year. Philippe, thanks for being here.

Thank you. Nice to see you.

Nice to see you. So I'm sure you've had a lot of investor questions already this morning. I'd like to start with how you think the marketing world has changed, if at all, given what's gone on in the last couple of years, and how does that impact how you have set the priorities for the company looking forward?

Hasn't changed at all. I think what's interesting is that the change is knowing us as well as you do, we set the company up where we made a series of decisions that were strategic in nature going back 5, 6 years that I think were consistent with or predicated on a series of changes. And so what we've seen, I think, is less a dramatic change or any kind of -- the direction of travel is the same. I think what we've seen is that the speed of travel is clearly kind of accelerated. And so it's not a question to my mind of any need to course correct. I think it's just to continue to push against a lot of what you know we've been focused on, whether it's incorporating data and tech into our offerings, whether it's helping clients get more precise with the interactions that they have with consumers or, I think, last, whether it's integrating all of the services, all of the marketing services pieces and then this data and technology layer. So nothing net new, but definitely it's exciting, but it's challenging.

And you guys laid out guidance for this year for organic growth of about 5%. How should investors view that in the context of the overall landscape and your competition where IPG has been outperforming for many years. You've spoiled your shareholders to some extent. And whether or not you view that as having some conservatism baked in given you've guided for the year, and it's early in the year.

I mean, our process is really thorough. So our process comes bottom -- it's a diversified business. Whether you think about that globally or you think about the fact that we're talking about [indiscernible], all-in range and bearing 5,000 clients. So you go bottoms up, you clearly look at the macro and factor that in. To your point, relative to peers, going back quite a few years now, we're the only player in our space that's been growing ahead of GDP. And I think if you look at that 5% over the last years, we've done 5% or better, I think, 5x. And in that same period, our competitors collectively have done 5% or better 5 times. And 3 of those times were last year. So we think it is indicative of where the business is. And as I said on our call, with that performance, our 2-year stack, our 3-year stack would still be twice the industry average. So I think it's reflective of the world as we see it, a strong set of assets, and then some uncertainty that's not specific to us.

Yes. So on that not specific to you uncertainty, I want to ask about what's been happening in Europe and sort of how you think about exposure at IPG and whether you're seeing any client reactions to what is happening overseas.

Well, I think that when we guided the not specific to us, I think it was actually more modest potential impact of supply chain. It was clearly actions that we're going to be taking around sort of how is the [ Fed ] going to address the broader kind of inflationary environment. So that was definitely not factored in. It's really early yet to answer the question. I think that the focus right now is very specific to Ukraine, Russia. And so over the weekend, I was talking to the leaders of some of our senior most clients, and they're trying to sort out how they're going to deal with having people on the ground in one or both of those markets. I mean I think for us, Ukraine is an affiliate market, and Russia is maybe 1/10 of a point of revenue because, as you know, we don't take principle positions in media in the way that Russia trades as a market, means we don't have a media business there. So we just have a very small set of creative businesses. But I think the bigger issue is just what does the knock-on effect look like for the region given that this is clearly likely going to go on for a bit. But I don't think any of us know the answer to that yet. At the moment, it's still kind of day by day, week by week. But we're not seeing an impact as yet.

Got it. And so going back to the 5% as we think about -- I think you have 1 more sort of easy comp quarter and then things started to normalize through the rest of the year. But what are the parts of the business that you would highlight to us are really the growth drivers for the company that might be leading the way and growing faster than the overall portfolio?

I think that it's consistent with what you've seen for a couple of years. So I think it's clearly going to be media, data and tech, and then health care. And in the case of both media and health care, they're the parts of our business that have been most forward leaning and incorporating data and analytics and a technology layer into the business. Then I think that regionally, we're strong in certain places in the U.S., Latin America, so I think you're going to continue to see that. And then when we grow -- last year, we talked about the fact that growth with existing clients was a big driver of net overall growth. So we also see opportunity to take our top 10, top 15 clients and bring them into more of the sort of suite of offerings.

Let me ask you about media, it's probably one of the largest, if not the largest revenue buckets by discipline for you guys. And I think investors over the years have oscillated between thinking whether that's the shift to digital is good or bad for the holding companies in IPG. But what's happening inside the media business with addressability and what do you guys -- what have you put in place product wise to make that a tailwind to the business?

I mean it has been a tailwind because I think we diverged from a number of folks in our space going back, I'd say, again, 5, 6, 7 years. So our media model is not a model that is sort of predicated on volume or a model in which by not taking principal positions and being agnostic to the channels that we use to help clients sort of invest their marketing dollars, it's never for us been a question of, oh, where does that sit? Is that good or bad for us? I mean it's been an advisory model and really more consultative in nature. And then it is the place where, as you've seen the shift to digital, there's been this massive inflow of data. And so obviously, every time you're out there putting a message out into the world, there's a lot of signal that's coming back. And so what we've done over a couple of years is we incubated and built a programmatic business inside of there. We've obviously also, in the last couple of years, been building out e-comm capabilities within the search and SEO business that's there. So I think that we -- I think we're clear, it's a growth driver for us. It's also a place where we've seen upside. It's been accretive profit-wise, and we think that continues.

And so as we think about trends like the growth in addressable media, like we had Roku CEO yesterday here talking about Connected TV. We talked about attribution. Disney was talking about that as they introduced advertising in Disney+. So those things help grow your business faster? You could talk about why growing addressability attribution is something that IPG benefits from, given that there's a lot of companies offering tools to advertisers and wanting to be paid for those tools.

Sure. I mean I think that we, obviously, as the partner to whom or with whom they've been going to market, have line of sight and an understanding of their business goals, their brands and what we're trying to achieve in a way that folks who are somewhere in the ecosystem but not the partner that they're trusting to help them accomplish those goals. And then with the addition of Acxiom a couple of years ago, we have both the expertise around handling first-party data and putting first-party data to work, which, again, is another layer that differentiates us kind of in the broad ecosystem there. So I think it makes a ton of sense that people are pivoting in this direction because I think it will become impossible to have any kind of a relationship or to have any kind of company that goes to market no longer believe that they should have a line of sight into who am I reaching, how clear am I able -- to what extent and with granularity can I identify the audience and the why of what I'm interacting with an audience. But again, from where we sit, all of that plays very well into the capabilities we've got and what we've been sort of building for a couple of years now.

Yes. So when we think about companies like The Trade Desk and other ad DSPs and ad tech platforms around media who are building businesses with some pretty healthy take rates, do you look at those as frenemies, partners? How do you think about that as -- the client is only going to want to pay so many people so much money, right, over time?

Sure. And I think the client has been -- the client community as a whole has been saying, okay, how do I get away from traditional media, which are the least measurable, which are the most sort of work with me with some degree of either faith or would rather -- with poor stand-ins for the audience. So again, that's why I think you see so many of the large scale traditional media owners starting to implement a playbook that looks a lot like what you would get on one of the platforms or this idea of some kind of unique identifier. So that makes a ton of sense. I think that something like The Trade Desk, when we launched very recently, our product from our technology platform that allows you to match up identity, whether it's on the open web or in the platform world, The Trade Desk was and is still -- was our first partner on that. So I think that there -- I mean I don't know if I'd call them frenemies per se, though. I mean they live in the ecosystem with us. I think that the ecosystem will stand out. I think that there isn't necessarily going to be a place for an untold number of folks who help you understand. So there'll be a few currencies in the space. There'll be a few players who are not the platforms who are able to help you onboard and push your messages out. And then there'll be providers of the specialty service that might be particularly distinctive or unique if you're in an industry sector, for example. But I think, to our mind, there will be some thinning out of that, but those are just going to be -- they're going to be partners to us. They're going to be folks with whom we transact, each of whom brings some part of the picture that you need to then get that 360 view that the client is looking for.

And do you think clients today, as we come out of the knock-wood pandemic and you see all this pent-up demand or maybe less fee focused than they were in the years before the pandemic, we used to hear about short-termism and all the pressure from client turnover on fees. Is this just a different environment right now? Is that part of why the numbers have been so strong across the industry? Or am I overreacting to the most recent data point...

It's interesting. I had a meeting with a very senior client recently. And the understanding -- the commitment to brand as a driver of business outcomes is definitely there. And in this case, it's a client for whom the input costs are going to factor -- they make consumer packaged goods. So it was interesting and heartening to hear them say the way that we get through this is by investing in the brands and by having the power of the brands as consumers prioritize and make decisions mean that we're in the consideration set or we're winning there. I think that a lot of clients are, back to your very first question, it's definitely accelerated trends that we knew were coming, and therefore, I think the need to be direct-to-consumer. The need to know how to compete when, across a lot of industries, people are worried that non-incumbents are going to show up and disintermediate them, whether they're net new companies that are sort of showing up, born digital, or whether they're some of the very large players who clearly are taking share by virtue of their business model. So I don't think the growth has been about -- I think if you could prove that what you do works, that clearly gets you a long ways in those conversations. You see a broad range of client sort of preparedness to either invest, understanding of the more sophisticated tools. And you see some clients for whom it's still regrettably -- that stuff is super complicated, I just like you to show up and do the same thing for some meaningful percent less or I'm going to look to consolidate, and it's going to be just about costs. So I don't know that I'd tell you that there's one prevailing opinion at the moment.

And maybe one last question on sort of media away from buying and planning, which is on creative. I think creative has been an area that at least the investor perspective is it's maybe a bit of a headwind to growth relative to other disciplines. How would you size out the opportunity and create whether some of the kind of pressures on cost of production, et cetera, have [ disrepated ]?

It's not -- I mean, it hasn't been growing as fast as the parts of the business that I mentioned to you. It still plays an important role in the mix. And so I think, as I said to you, I think it's the -- when you show up with breadth and when you can be sort of from a marketing service point of view, the systems integrator for a client, there's a lot of value there. And I think, as I'm sure you will hear 100x over the next 1.5 days, content is still really important. And so people are taking on immense amounts of content. How they take it on and what -- how you define it. So whether it's an influencer, you can have a really significant impact on consumers' purchase decision if that consumer is a certain demographic, for example, age wise, or whether it's the sort of use cases in which you are trying to still achieve a lot of awareness very, very quickly or whether it's how do you take brand messaging and then the performance side of things and begin to connect them up. So I think it will definitely continue to play a part in -- an important part in what we do. I don't think that it will work if it's divorced from the rest of the ecosystem. So it's -- we use Acxiom data and we've built behavioral science teams that allow us to then do this very, very tight audience mapping, and then that is built into the insights that then lead to some of the creative work. So I mean it's evolving, and I think that was what will help us think about some of the larger client wins in some of the more traditional parts of the portfolio. And a lot of them are being fueled by that. So I think it's just going to have to be drawn more closely into the overall offering.

Got it. You guys are going to be reporting to us a third segment. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what drove the decision to add more disclosure. I mean maybe what you hope to -- hope we will all get from that as you -- as we look forward?

Well, it's a hard one to solve for because on some of our large clients, what we deliver is incredibly tight, and it is a fully integrated offering. And as you know, last year, a lot of our growth came from large -- our largest clients and they were buying some of these more data-driven, higher-value services. So it's not a -- there's no perfect answer to, "Oh, here's how we can show you a set of segments that will sink to how we're really delivering on the ground with clients." And then as I said, we're trying to get more uptake for the data and tech layer across more and more of the portfolio. But the thinking was that the business has definitely evolved. And as you said at the outset, we've done well for a number of years now because we were early to and have been trying to integrate them. So I don't think it will be a perfect -- so I don't think it will be a -- we're not holding up a mirror and telling you this is exactly what it is because it's so multidimensional. And when we go to market, it's so custom. And then when we implement with a client, because it's a service and now a service plus some of these tech and data-driven capabilities. But what we wanted to do was just evolve from right now where you look at IAN and what -- people who have been around for a long time still would have called CMG, but DXTRA. And that seems like, all right, we need to try to do better to at least give you line of sight into how the business is evolving. It's not going to be adequate to what's really happening day to day. But clearly, we've always been pushed forward on -- we've always tried to be sort of transparent about where and what's going on in the business. So it's a step.

Okay. So not to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like the data and tech layer that's helped drive growth is something we'll get a better sense of.

Yes, up to a point. It's just -- it's hard to, like I said, sequester it because it's so connected to media. And because it's connected to the health care agencies, which are still agencies and they still do a lot of, let's say, some of the ad agencies do. So there's been a certain amount of no matter how we split it, we end up going, "Yes, this isn't perfect."

Yes. Understood. Okay. let's shift to margins. You guys, I think, guided to [ 16.6 ] for '22, which is a little bit of a dip from last year. Just talk about margin expectations and how you think about the puts and takes in '22 and then what we should expect beyond this year in terms of opportunities to drive margins in the business, which are at record highs for the company.

Look, I think it's sort of -- it's a continuum, right? So you kind of go through the pandemic. We said we want the company to come out of this, not knowing how long or deep it would be a healthier company. So you've got a 2-year horizon when it's 280 basis points of improvement, a 4-year horizon is probably 400 basis points. And there were so many moving parts because the pandemic has just been so challenging and complicated in the '20, went in very deep and there was just immense uncertainty. And so the restructuring that we did there was about kind of delayering and also about taking out some of the capabilities that were really very rearview mirror that were areas of the business that we didn't think we were going to need or need as much of on a go-forward basis. And so that's a layer of cost that doesn't come back. Over a period of time, when there's growth in the business, we've consistently demonstrated that we can turn growth into incremental margins. So that's an area where, again, we think you'll see that. We're confident that you'll see that. But the return was so steep in the back half of the year last year. And so you've got all of these other very distinctive moving parts where temp help won't be at the levels it was, incentive compensation will normalize and it's set -- it resets every year, and you have to earn it every year. And the things that we incentivize are the things that I think you're all focused on and should be focused on, which is organic growth and margin. T&E, which was obviously bizarrely and historically low, is going to come back. And I think that's good because that means we're going to be in settings like this, and we're going to be in rooms with clients, and we're going to be kind of with colleagues which I think is particularly important for these new ways of working where we're innovating and pulling the more -- the marketing service, the creative, the idea part of the business, and we're integrating it with the precision and the technology and the data. So that will come back. We don't know to what level that will come back. So I think that those puts and takes got us to -- and that 4-year trajectory you got us to our guidance for this year. But we see opportunity for continued expansion. Because the other thing that you factor in increasingly now is what we call the higher-value services with the data and the tech, whether that's licensing our IP to clients, whether that's true performance arrangements where we have the capacity to demonstrate what the decisions that we're helping to drive or the programs we're putting into the market are driving. And we're interested in taking some of that upside. So I think those are incremental upsides to it. So it's just -- yes, there's a lot more moving parts than there would be in a normal 12-month period.

Right, right. Okay. We have a few minutes left. I want to see if the audience has any questions, welcome to raise your hand and just wait for the microphone. While we wait, maybe just coming back to the war for talent. What's the market like for you guys on the hiring front? And are you seeing enough inflation that it sort of drives an impact to the business?

I don't think we're different than anybody in that we are seeing some inflation, we think it's manageable, and we factored that into our thinking when we put our targets out there. And I think there are folks in the room, we've discussed this in the past, Ben, you and I have discussed this in the past, that there's a certain -- like on the outer edge of the talent that we need in the analytics space and in the tech space and around data, there were places that as we built this, we weren't actually competing in, regardless. So if you had an incredibly high-end engineer who was going to go to one of the large sort of players in the valley or if you had somebody who really needed to or wanted to believe that the start-up opportunity was the opportunity of a lifetime. And so we've been pretty resourceful and thoughtful and we've gotten quite good at identifying a range of -- I mean, sadly, back to your very first question, some of the Kinesso teams to build some of our tech are in Ukraine, and we are figuring out how to -- we have figured out how to get any number of them and their families looked after. But I think that the talent environment is very competitive, and we have to sort of be resourceful. We do show up with a bunch of advantages, the breadth of the kinds of problems we solve, the scope that takes you maybe internationally, the scale of the clients themselves. And I guess it's also -- do you believe that the labor market stays this way? Is this a new normal or is this a moment in time? And I'm probably betting more than it's the latter.

Right. Right. Okay. Maybe one last question before we run out of time. We've got some interesting new disclosures from Amazon and Walmart this year on their advertising businesses, which are enormous, I may say so. And retail media is something we hear more and more about, which I think fits into a lot of the interesting things you guys are doing at IPG. Can you talk about that part of the ad market and kind of what IPG is doing to capture the growth there?

Absolutely. I mean, I think that for our clients, options in terms of where and how they can go to find scale digital platforms with a lot of kind of rigor around addressability and measurement is a net positive. I think they're really intrigued by that. And then to your point, because we've got the ability to handle and process and we know what to do to then take that first-party data and activate it, those are just new areas for us to then say to clients, we can help you sort this out, we can help you navigate it, we can figure out where it should fit into your mix, we can help you kind of assess whether it's more or less valuable than other ways that you're going into market. So we're excited by that opportunity, and we think that -- to your point, those are going to be kind of important platforms going forward.

Some of the things that we've seen around privacy with IDFA and what we're going to see with cookies make platforms like those even more compelling given their data set.

I think it's a fair assumption, yes.

Yes. Yes. Okay. All right. Well, we covered a lot, Philippe. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, everybody.

Thank you.