Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our H1 2022 results. The presentation is on the website. There are about seven sections plus Q&A. Mary will take us through the results. She's with Scott in London, and then Scott will talk about client and market momentum, mergers that have taken place in the first half. Then Wes, who is in Seattle, will talk through our content practice. Chris, who is in Boulder, Colorado, will take us through Data & Digital Media practice. It's the middle of the night for both Wes and Chris. Then DJ has some relief as he's in Rhode Island, so it's a little bit more sane. Then we'll come back to me. I'm in Cologne. Come back to closing to summary and outlook. Molly, who's the operator, will take Q&A. Over to Mary to start on first section. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. I'd like to start with the financial highlights for the first half. Strong top-line momentum continued with gross profit net revenue of GBP 375 million, up 28% on a like-for-like basis. This is ahead of our full year target of 25% set out at the beginning of the year and continues to be well ahead of underlying market growth. Like-for-like gross profit net revenue growth for each quarter was 35% in Q1 and 23% in Q2. The latter against a very strong prior year comparator, which is reflected in the two-year stacks of 67% for Q1 and 88% for Q2. Operational EBITDA was GBP 30 million, reflecting continued investment in hiring for expansion, which ran ahead of gross profit net revenue growth. This resulted in a lower operational EBITDA than predicted, which was down 41% on a like-for-like basis. Operational EBITDA margin also reflects this dynamic and was 8% versus 17% like-for-like in the prior half year. We are taking significant action to manage costs, including a brake on hiring as well as discretionary cost controls. These are having the desired effect and will support our profit delivery in the second half. Adjusted profit before tax was GBP 15 million and adjusted earnings per share were GBP 0.021. We finished the half year with net debt of GBP 136 million, below the guided range due to improving working capital management, and leverage was 1.2 x. Turning to the next slide, I'd like to update you on the work we've been doing on the finance team, processes and controls. We held a full debrief with PwC in May. Our action plan, which is well underway, addresses the areas for improvement we discussed at the full year, and the half year review process has been much smoother. The senior hires we made, including the group financial controller, the CFO for the content practice, the finance transformation lead, and the group treasurer, have created a much stronger team which is working well, and we continue to build out the junior levels. Investment in financial processes and controls has been protected. We have reviewed and redesigned our processes and controls for revenue and cost of sales recognition, and the revised process was in operation for the half year close. We continue to carry out significant work on improving our financial controls and processes, and while we have made good progress, there is still much to do. We'll give you another update at the full year. Moving to the income statement. Revenue grew 60% on a reported basis to GBP 446 million, with like- for- like growth at 31%. Reported gross profit net revenue of GBP 375 million grew 59% or 28% like- for- like. This highlights the continued strong underlying momentum of the business in addition to M&A activity. We have secured two new whopper clients. These are clients which generate over $20 million of revenue per annum, both of which will be fully operational in 2023. This brings the total number of whoppers to eight. Reported operating expenses of GBP 338 million grew 71% or 43% like-for-like. This reflects continued investment for growth, including in whoppers and in specific business areas such as the Metaverse and the Unreal Engine. Within Data & Digital Media, we have also invested in media agency of record capabilities, data, and CRM. Some of this investment in growth was ahead of revenue growth and greater than expected, which has impacted our operational EBITDA for the half year and our expectations for the full year. Operational EBITDA for the six months to June was GBP 30 million, down 12% on a reported basis, and 41% like-for-like. I've given you a breakdown of adjusting items in the table on the left-hand side. You can see that GBP 70 million is investment in M&A and future growth, while a further GBP 24 million relates to amortization of acquired intangibles. Finally, the increase in net finance expense is driven by the euro term loan, which was put in place in August 2021 to fund the greater scale and ambition of the group. This provides us with secure long-term financing. Looking next at our three different practice areas, Content, Data & Digital M edia, and Technology S ervices. My comments here are all on a like-for-like basis. Our largest practice, content, grew strongly, up 26% as we continued to outperform the market. Content's operational EBITDA margin reflects hiring, running ahead of gross profit net revenue growth. We are addressing this through tighter headcount controls, which will result in an improvement in practice margins in the second half. Data & Digital Media gross profit net revenue grew 23%, also ahead of the market with strong growth for the media activation and performance business. DDM's operational EBITDA margin is down versus an exceptionally high prior half year. It also shows the impact of investment for growth and will benefit to some extent in the second half from the cost management measures we've implemented. Technology Services, which from mid-May includes the significant combination TheoremOne, delivered very strong growth. Gross profit net revenue was up 89% with a healthy operational EBITDA margin of around 36%. TheoremOne has performed well in its first four months with the company. Central costs grew as we had guided, reflecting investment in finance, legal, and assurance to support future growth, as we mentioned at the full year. From a regional perspective, we grew strongly across the globe. While the Americas remains our biggest region at 74% of the mix, EMEA was the fastest growing, up 36%, with Americas up 26% and Asia Pacific 28%. Moving to cash flow on the next slide. CapEx of GBP 10 million includes the fit- outs of our new unitary offices in Buenos Aires, New Delhi, and London, as well as investment in IT infrastructure. Interest paid includes payments on the term loan, which was not in place in the first half of last year. We have improved our performance in working capital with an outflow of GBP 8 million compared to GBP 19 million on a smaller base in the prior year. Net, this resulted in a cash outflow of GBP 2 million. The cash spend on combinations was GBP 126 million, including 4 Mile Analytics and TheoremOne, as well as payments relating to prior year activity. This takes net debt to GBP 136 million, which is below the expected range, and we continue to focus on cash management. Before I conclude, I thought it would be helpful to cover our guidance for the full year. We expect continued strong top-line momentum across the practices and are targeting gross profit net revenue growth of 25% like-for-like, supported by a strong pipeline. We are seeing the benefit of our brake on hiring and controls on discretionary costs, and these will improve profit delivery. As previously guided, we expect the year to be weighted to the second half and the fourth quarter, in particular, due to natural seasonality and our trajectory this year. We continue to expect a net finance cash charge of about GBP 16 million. Our guidance for cash contingent consideration is GBP 57 million for the full year, with GBP 21 million due in the second half. In summary, our revised targets issued at the end of July remain unchanged. With expected gross profit net revenue growth of 25% and expected operational EBITDA of approximately GBP 120 million. With that, I will hand over to Scott for the market and client update. Great. Thanks, Mary. Good morning, everybody. As Mary said, I'm gonna update you on our progress with our clients. Also give you a little color on how we're thinking about our top-line growth opportunity in 2023. Finally covering off some of our more recent mergers. I think you're all familiar with our 20 ² client plan, which is our ambition to build large-scale relationships with clients and to have 20 clients of more than $20 million in annual revenue. We launched this back in 2020 when we had Google and another NDA tech client. In 2021, we expanded that to six, adding BMW, Meta, Mondelēz, and HP. As we stand in 2022, we know we have added an additional financial services client to the list. We have a new fashion and luxury client, which is on the run rate and will be $20 million+ for the full year in 2023. We have five additional clients, two in tech, one retail, one media, and one telecom, who are tracking to potentially become whoppers this year or certainly next year. We've identified a further 14 existing clients where we see the potential for them to expand organically to this level in the next couple of years. It's really exciting to see these client relationships blossom, particularly as we expand the touch points and services across our practice areas. Eight of our top 10 clients are now working with us in an integrated fashion across two or more practices versus two at this point back in 2020. Now when you look at our clients from a portfolio perspective, you'll see technology continues to dominate with over 46% of our H1 revenues coming from this sector. The vast majority of our revenue here is with large profitable tech companies such as Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, HP, Salesforce, Adobe, Microsoft, and others under NDA, which themselves continue to grow at significant rates, and in many cases, both partners and clients for our business. We anticipate continuing to be overweight tech going forward, but we have diversified our client base somewhat as a result of new business wins and merger contributions in sectors such as financial services, fashion and luxury, FMCG, and auto. Given our consistent market leading top-line growth, it's not surprising to see that our large client relationships continue to scale. The average revenue size of our top 10 clients has grown almost 80% to $20 million. For our top 20 and top 50 clients, reported revenues have grown 70% year-on-year. The table shows we've more than doubled the number of clients with H1 reported revenues of $10 million or more. We have 57 clients in the $1 million-$10 million bracket versus 35 this time last year. This illustrates the progress I mentioned earlier that we've been making with our 20 ² plan. Now moving on from clients, we wanted to give you some insight into how we're thinking about 2023. We're just kicking off our budget process now, and as are our clients, so we don't have any concrete projections for guidance as yet. We should be in a position to give more precise clarity in November when we report our Q3 figures. That said, we're well aware of the investor questions around our view on growth in 2023, so we wanted to address why we remain optimistic about our ability to deliver significant market leading top line growth despite the macro dark clouds of which we're all aware. Now we've described previously the various addressable markets we operate in, and these continue to be very attractive in 2023. According to various projections, digital media spend is obviously a key market for us. While analog media spend will be flat next year, global digital spend continues to grow at almost 10% in 2023. In fact, our own analysis of various analyst estimates for the top eight platforms shows that their advertising revenue growth in 2023 will be 13%, which is actually an acceleration on the 10% they're expected to deliver this year, which is against incredibly difficult comps from the COVID recovery year last year. Now when you focus in geographically, we see that predictions for U.S. digital media spend are almost 2.5 percentage points higher than the global average. Remember, 74% of S4's revenues are in the Americas with the U.S. by far our largest market. Our data practice is perhaps more correlated with the growth of data services associated with cloud platform penetration. When you look at the top three cloud platforms, they'll grow 30% plus in 2023. As you'll hear from Chris later, our C360.Monks provide services and systems integration around marketing technology platforms. They're all in San Francisco for the big Dreamforce event this year, this week. Their revenues will grow almost 20% in 2023 to $80 billion with services widely assumed to be a multiple of that. When we look at the growth of those MarTech partners, obviously our service revenue is aligned with their growth. Our Technology Services revenues are driven by spend on digital transformation and IT services. These enterprise spends tend to be multi-year budgets with less volatility and exposure to economic cycles. Digital transformation spends are projected to grow at 17% next year. Finally, when you look at market sizes, Ad Age reports the top ten agency holdcos reported revenues of $110 billion in 2021. The top 25 agency networks had revenues of $72 billion. What's more, global consulting revenues are projected to be almost $1 trillion in 2022, and IT services revenue is projected to be $1.3 trillion. Suffice to say, with our pure play exposure to these high growth markets, we do believe that S4 will continue to deliver strong top-line growth. Finally, returning to our clients, given we don't exist without them, this is an edited view of our major client relationships, given we are increasingly covered by NDAs and cannot talk publicly about our relationships. As you see, our client base is made up of high quality, strong growth companies, and this reinforces our confidence in our ability to grow at market leading rates above the growth of our addressable markets as we continue to take share and drive our land and expand strategy. My final section's around the recent mergers that we've done. We completed two mergers in H1 with 4 Mile Analytics, which is a digital analytics company that joined the DDM practice back in January. TheoremOne, which is a large technical services company that joined our Technology Services practice, alongside Zemoga, towards the end of the first half. DJ will cover that in detail. Finally, after the H1, we completed a deal with XX Artists, which is a leading social media and influencer agency based in Los Angeles, and that's part of our content practice. Just to clarify again, the stock components of the completion payments for TheoremOne and XX Artists were priced at GBP 4.25, which was the undisturbed one-month VWAP price pre our audit delay. As we mentioned in the statement, combinations do remain a key part of our growth strategy. However, for the time being, we are focused on organic growth and maximizing the value from our existing business, where the organic momentum remains very strong. With that, I will pass you over to Wes, who will cover off the update on content. Amazing. Thank you, Scott. Hey, everyone. Super happy to give some highlights for H1 for content. Although the very first highlight isn't just about content, I think it also speaks to our ability to integrate and operationalize across our teams. For the very first time in our history, we hit the Forrester Waves in not one, but two specific waves. We're on the Marketing, Creative, and Content Services Wave and the Global Marketing Services Wave. I think mostly confirmation of our strong positioning in market. When you read through the waves, you'll see it talk about our strong offering, strong performance, and I think strong strategy against what the marketplace needs and wants. That positioning, of course, is leading to growth. Scott talked about this a bit earlier on, but we're expanding our existing whopper relationships and in some cases adding a whole whopper to existing strategic scale already. We're minting quite a few new ones. That's exciting. I think to Scott's earlier point, we have eyes on about 13 potentially, which I think is really exciting. With our positioning in market, we're also constantly landing new blue chip logos across the globe. That's mostly for future growth. It takes a bit of time to go from land and expand, but I do think bodes really well for our 20 ² goals, shorthand for 20 whopper clients. Also to Scott's earlier point, really diversifying the industries we operate in, although we're definitely still very heavily focused and weighted towards technology. It's not just about growth, it's also about the work and the quality of the work. Another first in our company, we got added to the top 10 most creative companies globally according to Cannes Lions. Interesting list to be part of, especially when you look at the headcount. We're by far the smallest headcount company on that list, which I think mostly speaks to the amount of great work our teams are doing. Talking about work, if we go to the next slide, we're not just helping clients deliver what needs to happen now. Of course, because of the economic landscape, that can be quite specific. I think our agility and speed has been a real sort of strategic opportunity for us during that space. We're also helping our clients position and be leaders against what is next. We've talked on these calls previously about Web3, about Metaverse. I just wanted to showcase a bit of work because I think if you look at the work, you really get a sense of how at the cutting edge our teams are operating. Three projects to call out. Amazing piece of work that we did for Logitech called the Song Breaker Awards. Music award show on Roblox. At the time of launch, the biggest Roblox experience that was ever created. Really successful. Had more than 6.5 million visitors in the first two weeks. We have lots of really exciting work launching on Roblox in the next few weeks as well for some amazing brands. Second piece of work I want to lift out is the Gucci Vault full-blown NFT primary marketplace we launched for Gucci. I think if you think about NFTs and you think about a brand as luxury, as premium as Gucci, I think it really speaks to the quality of our team and especially the quality of the strategy of our team in these Web3 spaces. The last piece of work I'd like to highlight is an exclusive VR album experience for Horizon Worlds, where we dropped Post Malone's Twelve Carat Toothache album in a VR space. Amazing piece of work, really sort of lifts and elevates what entertainment is in those spaces. I think looking at the overlap between Metaverse, Web3 and VR, I think a really great example of what our team can do. That's the first batch of what I call the case race. As these new sort of technologies and platforms extend, it's important to do industry defining work, and I think our team has really delivered on that, which is really exciting. With that, I'm gonna hand over to Chris. Thanks, Wes. Off the back of a very strong growth and margin result for 2021, our investments in the first half of 2022 in expanding our Data & Digital Media practice and onboarding significant clients are yielding results in our long-term foundational client base. We're working closely with our content and tech pillars to nurture and expand our collective relationships with whoppers and opportunities, including progress in servicing companies like Dell, Molson Coors, Pernod Ricard, Walmart, HP, Netflix, LinkedIn, Unity Technologies, T-Mobile, Mondelēz, Meta, and Amazon. These are all accounts that had a relatively nascent Data & Digital Media presence and are expanding rapidly in 2022. Our growth within these brands has been a testament to our disruptive integrated model, promising seamless end-to-end capabilities with subject matter experts beyond just traditional and digital marketing demands. We have a deep and growing knowledge of the new wave of virtualization in Web3, the Metaverse, virtual reality and new modes of digital consumer behavior. A perfect example of this disruptive work is taking a quick look at our onboarding of Unity Technologies, which is a leading platform in the 2D, 3D and VR gaming space. We are very excited to be their first ever media AOR. A large disruptive company choosing its new marketing partner chooses Media.Monks. We're responsible for media strategy, planning and buying measurement across their global presence. This new business is off the back of our strong content relationship, which is proving out our land and expand model across the pillars. More traditional brands are looking to revamp their digital strategies and approach with our new model as well. We've successfully won and onboarded and launched a global top beauty brand with the successful hiring and onboarding over 60 resources in under eight weeks, which is no small feat in a very competitive market for talent, which shows that our investments in recruiting and talent hubs are paying off with our rapid talent scale capacity and our ability to onboard major media opportunities. We're now off and running with that client and implementing new media strategies with a focus on incrementality as well as new market and product line growth. This global media AOR win is not an isolated growth story for us. We're seeing more and more clients begin to think about their media and consumer data strategy in an increasingly interconnected way and blurring the lines across the consumer journey wherever that consumer may spend time in the future. Our next slide, talk a little bit about our data practice. To be at the forefront of innovation and competition, our clients find themselves reinventing their data strategies from data collection and acquisition, activation and optimization to power everything from marketing and advertising, as well as product design and supply chain decisioning. We're increasingly seeing clients getting smarter at using their data assets, which we help them build foundational technologies for capturing and activating. In 2022, we saw significant injection of our data AOR services into major creative and content relationships, again, with the cross-selling story. The conversation starts with data subject matter experts helping guide our marketing clients through understanding their opportunities for data collection activation. T-Mobile is a great integrated land and expand story, where T-Mobile has now become a whopper for us across our integrated services, in both the content division and our Data & Digital M edia practices. Molson Coors is another amazing case study, where we started to work together with them in 2021 as they started to take control of their digital media and pull it in-house. Molson also kicked off building and cleaning a centralized view of their data sources with multi-touch attribution modeling to optimize all of their media decisioning. Of course, with Molson Coors, you don't necessarily have direct relationships with consumers. They have a channel strategy, but that is changing over time with their nascent data capabilities driving marketing decisioning. The industry is recognizing this amazing integrated work. We were just named as a finalist for Best Commerce Agency Services by AdExchanger. Our transformations consulting group continues to win multiple awards every year. One, Best Use of Digital Programmatic by Campaign US Media Awards in 2022. We are nominated as a finalist for the ANA In-House Excellence Award for Best Media Planning. Of course, none of this would be possible if it wasn't for our strategic relationships with major partners, including Google and Amazon, Salesforce and Adobe. We are this year kicking off a co-building solution for our mutual clients, integrating Amazon Web Services and Amazon Ads, which is a nascent capability that Amazon is investing in heavily this year. Of course, we are working on our relationship with Salesforce, which I'll talk about a little bit later. Our largest partner, Google, we have built a go-to-market proposition jointly with them, that integrates their cloud platform, Google's GCP platform, their Google Ads platform, and their GMP marketing stack or their marketing technology stack. Integrating all of those in a differentiated use case, and bringing that to market together with Google. On the final slide here, I'll talk about our C360.Monks a bit. That is our integrated brand that describes our CRM practice, which did not exist before 2021. We are very proud to say that this year, we had a major presence at Salesforce World Tour, Salesforce Connections, Cannes Lions, and of course, Dreamforce, which the team is at right now drumming up business and showing off our status as a global Salesforce Summit partner, their highest tier of consulting partner. Our Marketing Cloud footprint has expanded to account for over half of our global pipeline. Our momentum isn't slowing as our enterprise clients look to us for more and more embedded services, where we put dedicated people directly on servicing their Salesforce footprint. We are continuing to invest heavily in the future as we scale up our B2C Commerce Cloud certifications and deepen our expertise, and talent in virtualization and Web3. We've also been very excited to launch a pilot with Salesforce as the only partner to launch their NFT Cloud service. Of course, we are uniquely positioned to do that because of our extensive experience in digital creative production across the Web3 space. The team's very proud to announce that we've had our largest engagement win to date, which kicks off in Q3, a $7 million deal, which should yield most of its delivery in 2022. That's it for Data & Digital Media, and I will hand it over to DJ to talk about our tech pillar. Thank you very much, Chris, and good morning, everyone. With this being our first full half year with the tech pillar being part of Media.Monks, I'm very excited to say we're seeing continued strong demand for the tech services that we provide. The beauty of this is an example of land and expand. In the first half, we've been able to double the engagement revenue over 2021, and that is just independently Technology Services. That's not including additional services from other pillars. This is in one of the largest e-commerce brands out there. We're also winning additional clients with this digital transformation work that we do, including a major brick-and-mortar brand that engaged us to build a large dedicated e-commerce digital transformation team in Colombia. The front-end center of excellence, which is a cornerstone of the longer engagements that we have, creating dedicated teams to assist clients in executing their digital transformation, is moving along and was launched in the beginning of this year and very successfully. We're very excited about that and hoping to replicate that for a lot of our other customers. We are still, with the strong demand, one of the top places in LatAm, where the majority of our staff are to work in digital transformation, technology services, and engineering. We received our ISO 27001 certification. This is a big differentiator, especially in working with organizations that require an enormous amount of security, financial services, e-commerce being two of those. We are very, very heavily involved and deep into the collaboration and the integration with the acquisition and merger with TheoremOne. The next slide very quickly is, you know, we are working very closely with TheoremOne. The management sync is working along nicely. Brady Brim-DeForest, who's the CEO, and I are in lockstep in not only co-pitching the work that we do and our combined complementary services, but also making sure that we're sharing resources accordingly and being able to leverage each other and our organizations. TheoremOne was awarded the Inc. 5000 award, obviously in a challenging market. We're still seeing that strong demand, and that growth is there. Adding additional logos, globaledit, Philips, DreamView, and CrowdStreet. When the merger happened, adding a whopper immediately with the First American work that they do, one of their strongest clients that they have. We're working very closely with TheoremOne in making sure that the team members that we have are the right team members as we're continuing to grow this team to feed the demand that we see in the marketplace. With that, I'll pass it back to Sir Martin. Big thank you to everybody for their presentations this morning. Just to summarize, strong top line growth in the first half of 2022 ahead of full year guidance, and that's continued into July and August, rates above 25%. There's further client conversion at scale, progress is being made as As Scott and Wes in particular mentioned to reaching our 20 ² goal. Not just, I would say, in the whoppers, but, you know, we've seen in recent weeks, Wes is on the West Coast, and we've seen expansion of our relationships with a major tech client, with a major packaged goods client, and in discussion with a major financial services client. I think this indicates not just the strength of model, but dissatisfaction with the old model. Good progress, as Mary outlined, in post-audit finance and process upgrades, and that work continues. Obviously, it's vitally important, and we're getting the balance increasingly right. We've taken actions to control the balance sheet and control the cost base in 2022 and beyond. That's epitomized also by improved working capital management. We have sufficient liquidity and with long-dated direct debt maturities. There's continued momentum in all our addressable markets, as Scott touched on. There's optimism for growth in 2023. We haven't started the planning process for 2023-2025 or the budgets. As we've highlighted, even after recent corrections, the forecast by leading analysts for the significantly greater tech platforms around about 13.5% for last year, so for next year. Strong growth in existing clients and new business with a healthy pipeline. The pipeline is running at levels better than we saw last year. From an ESG point of view, we've achieved carbon neutral status ahead of schedule, and we made headway across all of our ESG goals. Of course, last but not least, revised guidance that's approximately GBP 120 million of EBITDA remains unchanged. With that, Molly, we'll turn it over to you for questions. Thank you. If you would like to ask a telephone question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. Please ensure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, that is star one to ask a question. We will take our first question today from Omar Sheikh of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Morning, everyone. I've got three questions, if I may. Maybe the first one for Mary. Just thinking about the margin for next year, I mean, this year you've guided to about 14% at the adjusted EBITDA level. Should we assume that there's some element of non-recurring costs in your cost base this year that won't roll into 2023, you know, in relation to the investment that you've made in financial controls and systems and so on? If so, maybe if you could help us sort of calibrate that would be helpful. Second question is on the new client activity. It looks like you've emphasized a focus on land and expand. You haven't really mentioned much about pitch activity. Is there anything you can add in terms of color on how much sort of pitch activity you're expecting in the next, say, six to 12 months? Whether you expect it to, you know, increase, and if so, whether you might participate in pitches going forward? Finally, one for Martin, maybe. I mean, just given all of the issues that you've experienced during the course of this year, could you maybe just give us a sense maybe of how you're sort of maybe seeking to address staff morale, if that might have been impacted negatively in any way from what's been going on? Maybe if you have some client feedback, you know, are clients noticing what's happening internally at S4, and is that having any impact on the business? Okay, Mary, to kick off... Thanks, Omar. Do you wanna kick off on the margin point? Sure. Good morning, Omar. Obviously we've taken a knock to margins this year. You know, as we've said, we're working very hard to ensure we improve that position both for the short term and the medium term. We expect that will show in our full year results. As Martin mentioned, you know, we are starting the budgeting process for 2023 at the moment, and therefore aren't able to give specific guidance on margins for 2023. I would expect our exit rate from 2022 will support the position as we move into 2023 based on the work we're doing. On your specific question on finance controls and processes, while there are a few smaller one-offs in the work we're doing this year, actually, we're building the team out during the year, and therefore there will be a normalization effect to full year in 2023, so there wouldn't necessarily be an adjustment downwards. Yeah. On the second question, Omar, on pitches, I mean, Wes, I'll ask Wes and Chris maybe, and DJ to chip in, but you know, every day is, in a sense, a pitch. I hinted at it in our summary. I said that, you know, major tech client we've expanded our relationship with just recently. In the last year, Asian packaged goods company we wanna continue. I think we prefer, and the leaders of the practices can express their own views on this. I think we prefer. Wes, how you see pitch activity? Yeah. I think it's a pretty healthy pipeline. To Sir Martin's point, if we would have to choose, expanding within existing relationships tends to be a little easier, takes less investment and higher chance of success. Part of our strategy is also landing, and landing tends to mean you have to win pitches. We do that at a very high clip, I would say, ahead of industry standard. We're always excited to see pitches come in. We picked up a few interesting ones over the last few months that we are not allowed to talk about, but hopefully in future sessions, we can share some more. Yeah, pitch activity is pretty healthy. We win more than we lose, and it's quite a broad range of types of business that comes through the door that way. Okay, Chris, do you wanna comment on DDM? Yeah. From DDM's point of view, when you look at economic headwinds or uncertainty, because of the breadth of our offerings, we offer performance marketing solutions, so you know, very low risk investments that have measurable ROI on the marketing activity. We have an entire group called the Performance. Monks that focuses on nothing but that. A significant number of our larger enterprise clients that might have an existing media relationship with us or are working through a pitch consultant to find new partners, they're finding us at the precipice of a potential economic uncertainty. Of course, there's consolidation. If any brand wants to, or any CFO at a major brand wants to look at different ways to deploy their marketing budgets, going into a very different time post-pandemic, we are showing up in all of the pitch consultants' potential partners. I'd say the pitch activity is increasing to the point where we have to deploy resources on the ones that are the best fit and the highest margin, and I think that's where we're starting to see a big shift in the way that we look at the front end of our business. Expanded relationship with pitch consultants, consolidation performance are where we're seeing a significant healthy pipeline for our business. DJ? Just to add to that. Thank you, Sir Martin. Traditionally, Technology Services don't necessarily do pitches, but what we've found is adding our services to the mix in lockstep with Wes and with Chris in data and content has allowed us to expand that mix of services and differentiate what we do as a group. Not only can we provide the data services, but the content service, but also build the platforms that this sits on is allowing us to Wes' point, win more. We're seeing a lot of activity across the board when we're assisting the other pillars in feeding those RFPs and those pitches. Yeah. Just to your last question, Omar, about staff and people and clients. You know, I don't think the first six months of the year have been easy, to say the least. The audit delays and the reduced target or guidance on EBITDA, you know, have obviously created volatility in terms of market value. At best you could describe that as being neutral, at worst, you could say it's negative. You can't say it's positive. I think the focus for us is on the good people, the quality people inside the organization, and trying to ensure that those people, you know, who had, let's say, options which may be not as well priced, to put it mildly, as they were before, or had restricted stock, that we replace that. We can do that. We have some flexibility to do that and are doing that, but obviously we have to focus on that. I think on the staff side, the digital advertising marketing market remains a strong market. It always has been. It's nothing new to see inflation in terms of salaries. That became particularly acute, I would say, about six months ago. I think the pressure has eased off. We're not the only people to have put a brake on hiring. That's B-R-A-K-E. Some people have put a B-R-E-K on hiring as well. They've gone even further, and I think that's eased the pressure. It's still a very competitive marketplace, and we have to follow that. On the client side, Wes and Chris and DJ can talk for themselves on this, but I'm aware of two cases. One which Wes and Mary and myself dealt with, which was a new client, where we were successful and they raised questions about what had happened, their procurement people did, and we answered all the questions and we proceeded and engaged with them, and it's a significant relationship. The other one was an existing client that asked us to explain what had happened. We gave a full explanation. That satisfied them. Having said that, Omar, to be blunt, you don't know whether people said that they would nix us from a list because of the challenges that we were facing, or we faced. So we don't know. We're a bit blind on that. When you look at the organic growth rate, and you compare it to what's happening in the industry or what's happening in our competitive sets, and we won't bore you with going through them, the three competitive sets, the organic growth rate remains extremely strong, certainly running at three or four times what you see from other companies. I don't think that's had what you suggested or what you implied in terms of clients has had an impact. I mean, Wes or Chris or DJ, any further comments on that? Wes? No. Well, I think that's a fair comment. The two situations in which it was raised didn't turn into a whopper for a sizable new relationship. I think it's fair questions to ask, and I think we have clear and trustworthy answers to explain those questions. We don't know what we don't know. Looking at the pipeline and the new business, it doesn't feel like there is meaningful negative impact. Chris, anything? No. I've been on the phone a couple of times where there's been passive conversation about you know, folks wanting additional details. It's mostly around can you staff quickly enough, and do we get access to the same great talent? The answer is yes in both cases. You know, I think controls around the pace at which we spend to invest, my biggest challenge is picking the right investments 'cause there are so many in growth areas. Of course, we want to go after them. In many cases, it's just a matter of pick and choose. We try and communicate to clients that it's really about our investments, not our client onboarding and ability to pull talent into key accounts. After a quick conversation, we usually don't hear anything about it again. DJ? Yeah. I would echo what Chris just said. It's the closest thing that we've gotten to feedback there is whether or not we'd be able to continue to attract talent, which we have been able to do, and staff the projects that are being assigned to us as long as we continue to and we have been deliver, you know, flawlessly. The clients are focused on that with us. That's what we're seeing. Okay. Molly, further questions? Thank you. We will take our next question from Matthew Walker of Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. Thanks. Good morning, everyone. The first question is, you mentioned some indications about underlying market growth in 2023. Previously you were talking about you know, doubling the company over three years, so having 25% growth for each year. What are your thoughts on that for 2023? Is the doubling number still gonna be possible given the macro? Second thing is on head count. I think you're implying that you need like a 20% margin in the second half of the year. What are you gonna do to achieve that? What are you gonna do with head count in the second half of the year compared to where you were at the end of the first half? Obviously, Sir Martin, your, I think your LTIP's coming up in around about the middle of 2023. Any thoughts on, you know, whether you're, you know, gonna continue with the group, and what your plans are? Sure. Okay. Just on the 2023, we haven't started our budget or our planning for. When you talk about doubling, Matthew, we talk about doubling over a three-year period. You know, if you went back in time. Okay. In 2020, we did 20.4%. I think the year before in 2019, we did 44%. Then I think in 2020, it was 19.4%, and 2021, we did. Here in 2022, we're ahead of 25%. I think, you know, it's early for us to say to you what we think will happen next year, 'cause we haven't done the plan, let alone the budgets. But Scott, do you wanna just say maybe in a little bit more detail, the analysis that we did around the analyst forecast for the platforms to give Matthew an idea of where we think the industry will be? Yeah. As Martin says, we're not, you know, we haven't done our budget yet, so we're not gonna talk about our specific growth in 2023 until we've done that. The point of the section in the presentation that I covered was really hopefully to reassure you that the addressable markets are alive and well, and there's plenty of opportunity there. We're not fearful about 2023, in terms of the opportunity that lies ahead of us, and we'll come back to you in November with clearer guidance around that once we've been through that budgeting process. Okay. Do you wanna say anything about the, you know, the eight? Yeah, I think, I mean, you know, you can look at your own analyst's view of those big platforms. But the reality is, you know, there's a lot of f ocus on the short term of the results of some of those companies. I think some of that can be explained by you know, the comparables that they have. They all had huge Q2s last year as we were bouncing back from COVID and some challenges in Q2 this year. The growth is projected to start again in Q3 and Q4 for those that were challenged. As the analysis shows that actually for those big platforms, and you have to include Apple and TikTok in that because they are growing at triple-digit this year and strong double-digit next year. The overall growth in the industry does remain healthy and will probably be more next year than this year. We'll see how the Q3 and Q4 earnings for those platforms goes. Right. Mary, do you want to talk about headcount? Matthew asked about, you know, we're at 9,100 at the end of June, what it looks like for the rest of the year. Yeah, sure. Matthew, I think in part your question was really about margin delivery in the second half of the year. I would start with a point about the gross profit level that we expect for the full year. Current consensus is around GBP 830 million. We would expect that to be slightly higher, with the addition of XX Artists, but also some FX benefit that we're seeing at the moment. Now, obviously, combined with our natural seasonality, we've got then a higher gross profit figure in the second half. In addition, we have the work we're doing on headcount. I think it's important to be clear that we're not necessarily expecting our headcount to go backwards. It's important to us that we continue to support the business as it grows. What we're doing is being very selective about where we choose to add headcount and also ensuring that we've addressed any areas where we might have inefficiency or duplication. In addition, you know, there continues to be a focus on pricing and commercials, which will also support the profit delivery for the full year. As in previous years, given the seasonality of the business and the trajectory we've seen this year, we will expect Q4 to be our strongest quarter. In preparation for this presentation, as you would expect, we've obviously reviewed the GBP 120 million, and we continue to believe it's a sensible place to set expectations for the full year. Yeah, just. Does that mean that you'll be sort of around? The headcount, Matthew, has stayed at around- No, I just. Sorry, the headcount has stayed around 9,100 for the last two months. I would anticipate, you know, we're being very selective on our hiring. We are, as you heard from my colleagues, we're hiring where necessary and where there is reason to do so. We're also eliminating duplication of resources because there has been some duplication in the business. On your last question, I mean, the plans you referred to don't sort of finish at a fixed date. They continue, and I'll continue. Basically, we're just a continuation of what we've been doing for the last four years. Okay. Thank you. Molly. Thanks a lot. Any further questions? Thank you. Our next question will come from Steve Liechti of Numis. Please go ahead. Yeah, hi there. Thanks. Can I just delve a little bit deeper into your comments, Mary, about the second half margin delivery? You referenced the duplication across the business. Can you just dig into that a bit deeper and sort of give any sort of examples or any quantification, I guess, that you've given that in terms of headcount or whatever? That's the first question. The second point you mentioned on pricing and commercials focus to support profit. Again, can you just dig into that, exactly what you mean there? That's the sort of questions on the second half. It might be worth just sort of talking about the longer-term 20%+ margin, whether you're confident there's no structural reasons in your business why that's changed and you're still confident you can get there, and if so, when? Then finally, question for Chris, the COO position. What does that mean operationally and in practice? I'm really thinking in terms of his position in DDM as well. Thanks. Yeah. Chris, do you wanna start with that one and just explain what you've been doing and maybe the ELT and everything? Sure. I'd be happy to. You know, it's no secret that we are an amalgamation of, I believe over 31 different companies, that experienced a significant and rapid growth in 2020 and 2021, and now even in 2022. We have both organic and inorganic capabilities, delivery engines, different businesses that have all come together that need a foundational platform to operate from. When you talk with our clients about what the benefit of our integrated services is, they can build one relationship with us, and then get access to all of our talent globally. In order to do that logistically, moving headcount, doing resource planning, all of the unfun parts of the engine that we built, we need a foundational system and a way to transact across those clients and across those entities. I have a significant amount of experience doing post-merger integration at Yahoo, for, you know, a good decade. A lot of that learning is now being put into our foundational plans for bringing all of these capabilities together and delivering a sort of a centralized resourcing engine. I'm focusing a lot on that piece of the business, being able to move talent to the right place and the right clients at the right time, as well as helping Mary and helping the financial organizations understand how to measure and appropriately view our business, to give the business leaders an accurate view of how their performance is being measured and being driven. Those are the areas that I'm starting to focus on. Then on the succession planning side of the things in Data & Digital Media, we have some very talented senior executives that have been running the business for the last year, while I've actually been focusing on a lot of this behind the scenes. I'll point out Melissa Wisehart running our media pillar, Tyler Pietz running our data pillar, and Scott Jamieson, who is running our CRM practice. Those are the three major areas that I covered and was the executive sponsor and founder of those businesses. They are progressing quite nicely and dare I say, running it at scale better than I do. That's the new role, and that's the succession planning. Just, you know, we've got today our regular weekly ELT meeting, which Chris organizes and leads. We've got that then. On the question of margins, I mean, I think, Steve, we're still of the view that there's nothing structural that leads us to the view that 20% or 21%, whatever, after central costs, is not achievable. As to when that is, we'll see. We're doing planning for 2025, and we'll see how that develops over the planning period. We'll agree with the objective, but we won't give you a timeframe. Mary, do you wanna deal with the commercials. I think Steve asked for some examples of what we're doing around commercial practices in H2, and also some examples on duplication. Yeah, sure. What we've been doing is reviewing the headcount across the business. Obviously the business has grown very, very quickly. As you might expect, there are a few pockets or there were a few pockets of duplication and a few pockets of inefficiency. Now, over the last couple of months, we've addressed those and are ensuring that the business is operating as efficiently as possible going forward. On the commercial and pricing side, you know, as Wes and Chris and DJ talked about earlier, there's an awful lot of new business coming in now as we move into Q4. The work we're doing is about making sure that our processes for assessing commercials and negotiating commercials operate as smoothly and as quickly as possible to support that growth of the top line. Is that sufficient for you, Steve? Yeah. I suppose in a way, the only question. Just going back to the duplication, any sort of feel in terms of the scale of that? I don't know how you can quantify it in any way, Mary. Maybe it's not a question you can answer, but I just wanna understand how much duplication you think there is in the business, maybe in pound notes or head count or whatever, and how much you've done now and how much is there still to do, if that makes sense. We wouldn't be able to quantify that. I would say it's an element of the cost management work we're doing. It's not the biggest element by a long way. Therefore, I would say it's relatively small, that duplication and inefficiency piece. I think— Okay, that's good. Yeah. That's all right. Bye. Maybe just to amplify it a bit. I mean, Wes, you may have some comments on this. I'm thinking of along the lines of, as we've merged content companies and had deferred consideration periods of a year, there's been a sort of hiatus, if you like, in terms of integration. Do you wanna comment at all about that? How you see that? Yeah. I mean, I think we're saying versions of the same thing. We've brought a lot of teams together. We had a lot of growth across the globe, which meant we hired quite a few people. Took some time to settle down. We had a few teams that had earning periods, which meant that some of the integration process sort of takes a bit of time to speed up. I think we had a great session with a bunch of us a few weeks ago, and I think we're seeing the next level of integration happen as well, which means we're going after some of this duplication. We're figuring out some of the inefficiencies, also because there is just a extremely high level of trust between the executives across the board, which makes that possible. To an extent also by the work that Chris is doing with the ELT. Yeah, there's duplication, but less and less so, and everybody knows that the goal is to run a very efficient business, especially as we sort of line up for more growth. Okay. All right, Steve. Yep. Thanks. All right. Molly? Thank you. If you would like to ask a telephone question, please signal by pressing star one. Our next question will come from Joe Spooner of HSBC. Morning all. Can you just give a sense of kind of what visibility you have now that we're sitting at the end of the third quarter as to the revenues that are there to be collected in the fourth quarter to achieve the guidance you've given for the full year? Then secondly, on that like-for-like gross profit base, obviously there's been acquisitions, there's been FX movements. Can you just update as to what that profit base is that the 25% grows from? Sorry, I don't quite understand that question, Joe. Can you explain that? The like-for-like base from which the business grows obviously changes with FX movements, of which the US dollar has obviously moved quite a lot against sterling. No, the like- That like-for-like basis. Like-for-like is at constant currency. That's correct. The base from which it grows obviously gets adjusted for the FX rates, and those FX rates have been, you know, quite sharp year to date. Just wondering what the base is that the business is growing from with that 25% growth rate. Again, I'm not quite with it. Are you with that, Mary? I don't quite understand the point. I mean, we pro forma from the date of merger. If, you know, if it's Zemoga or TheoremOne, they come in after two or three months, we pro forma it from the second or third month of the previous year. I'm just trying to get my mind around what you're saying in terms of currency. We You then adjust the historics by the FX rates to put it into the current year's FX terms. Obviously the movement in those FX rates has been quite large. I'm just trying to work out, you're talking 25% like-for-like growth rates. I'm just trying to understand what the like-for-like base is that you're growing from, if you like, after all of those latest adjustments. Joe, I might come at it from a slightly different angle, if that's okay. Where we've bought or brought in mergers last year, they then, obviously you have a full year impact on the pro forma. Where businesses have joined p artway through the year, it becomes more complicated. It's hard to give a sort of pro forma base number. What I would say, and the way we're thinking about the numbers and the top line, which I think is at the root of your question is c urrent consensus is around GBP 830 million. I would expect, once all the analysts have included XX Artists, we'll see a lift in that. We'll expect some FX benefit. Our current expectations for gross profit for the year, you know, obviously there's a bit of volatility in the FX, but I would say it's GBP 850 million-GBP 860 million. Perfect. Thank you. On the visibility question you asked. I mean, I think visibility is the same at this time of the year as any other year. You know, we're coming to the end of September, and this is the busiest time of the year. As I said in the summary remarks, July and August has continued as we've seen in the first half in terms of top line, with an improvement starting to come into the second half of the year on profitability. I think visibility, pipeline. Wes, do you wanna comment on pipeline this year versus last year's? It's the same or better, is what I've— Yeah. If we look at the tracking against targets, we're slightly ahead of where we were at this time last year. That in general is feeling steady. We're not seeing any meaningful slowdown, which of course was a potential worry going into the second half. Yeah, from a visibility perspective, it looks— Yeah. I think the only things we've noticed in the last couple of months is a move down the funnel, which, at least in theory, should help us to more activation and performance and sales orientation. Whilst, you know, the great and the good in the industry talk about the importance of maintaining spend, and analysts look at that, you know, the drumbeat from the CEOs and the CFOs is about performance and return on investment and media mix modeling and TV frequency capping and lack of reach on linear and move to digital. That's the drumbeat. I think maybe there's been a little bit of delay in decision-making that we've noticed. Beyond that, I would say it remains pretty strong and the visibility is as strong as it's ever been. Thank you. If I just follow up, I mean, when you look at that 25% like-for-like gross profit guidance, obviously we're in an inflationary environment. I think you're talking about putting more focus on kind of pricing. Is a big element or contribution to that 25% like-for-like pricing? If so, can you- Well, we can't win with you, Joe. I don't care where it bloody well comes from. It can come from volume or pricing. I'll take either. I would encourage you to take either. All right? I mean, it'd be impossible for us. Fair enough. To sit down and separate for you one from the other. I'd go, you know, we are looking at pricing, as Mary said. We're heavily looking at deal desk structures and implementation. That's one of the things that Chris is focused on. It's impossible to, you know, differentiate. I mean, you're suggesting that we achieve 25%, but by pricing, I would say think again. Fair enough. Thank you. Thank you. Molly? That will conclude today's question- and- answer session. Okay. I would now like to turn you back to Sir Martin for any additional or closing remarks. Thanks, Molly. Any further questions? Scott and Mary are in London. I'm in Cologne. DJ, Wes, Chris are accessible anytime. We have another call later, basically for the U.S. audience, but we'll no doubt deal with that shortly. Thank you for joining us and look forward to seeing you for the third quarter.