Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the WPP 2021 interim results conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question answer session, at which time, if you wish to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone keypad. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to hand the conference over to WPP CEO, Mr. Mark Read. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our 2021 interim results. I'm here in London with John Rogers, our CFO, and Peregrine Riviere, who heads our investor relations team. We'll take you through the results and then answer any questions you have at the end. I think turn to page 2 to read the cautionary statement before we go through the results. I'll just briefly cover the highlights before handing over to John to talk you through our financial performance. Turning to page 4, I think we saw a strong performance in the first half of the year. If you look at net sales growth, we led our peers that have reported so far. I think that reflects really a pretty strong performance across the board geographically, by business sector and by client sector, with revenues as pass through costs the first half up 11% against the backdrop of being down 9.5% in the first half of last year. An acceleration in performance from Q1 of 3.1% to 19.3%, so close to 20% net sales growth in the second quarter. As I said, we had strong growth across the board in our integrated agencies, our public relations firms, and our specialist agencies, a particularly strong performance from GroupM. I think the results also reflected a shift in business mix to the faster-growing areas of our business within communications, into digital media, commerce media, but also within the areas of e-commerce, or experience, commerce, and technology. We saw that percentage increase from 25% to 26%. We've had, I think, I'd say a respectable or solid start so far in terms of new business. We'll get into that a little bit later. I think you've probably seen slightly stronger performance in creative than media than we did last year. Actually, our creative performance was extremely good. We won Holding Company of the Year at the 2021 Cannes Lions, the first time that we've done that since 2017. Overall, the results enable us to increase our dividend by 25% and return further funding to our shareholders through GBP 248 million in share buybacks with another GBP 250 million to come in the second half of the year. Net-net, we're raising our guidance really for the second time this year for revenues partly cost to 9%-10% and our operating margin being at the upper end of the range that we set out at the beginning of the year. I think we've seen really good momentum across the business. John will talk you through both the revenue and profit performance, I think it takes us back to 2019 levels, a year ahead of plan and a positive two-year stack of 0.5% for the first half, but improving to 1.3% for the second quarter. Good momentum going into the back half of this year and into next year. John, do you want to take everyone through the financial performance? Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everyone. Straight into the headline income statement on slide 6. We've got revenue less pass-through cost for the half of GBP 4.899 billion, which is up 5% on a reported basis given the currency drag, and up 11% on a like-for-like basis. All of which delivers an operating profit of GBP 590 million, up 54.4%. Taking account of income from associates, net finance costs, and of course tax, delivers a profit after tax of GBP 387 million, up 82.8% year -on -year. Adjusting for non-controlling interests delivers profit attributable to shareholders of GBP 353 million, up 84.9% year -on -year. The diluted EPS of GBP 28.7, up 86.4% year -on -year. An operating margin for the first half of 12.1%, up 3.9 percentage points year -on -year. For good measure, EBITDA of GBP 699 million, up 45.7% year -on -year. Clearly a strong half. Moving now to the reconciliation of the headline operating profit to reported operating profit. We start off with a headline operating profit of GBP 590 million in the half. Adjusting for amortization, restructuring costs, both COVID and transformation driven, and also other costs, gives an adjustment of GBP 106 million and a reported operating profit of GBP 484 million. Obviously significantly ahead of last year given the goodwill impairments and the investment write-downs that we made this time last year. Coming on now to performance within the different segments, and onto global integrated agencies. Delivered an overall net revenue, less pass-through costs of just over GBP 4 billion, up 10.9% on a like-to-like basis, and also very pleasingly up 0.4% versus 2019. Some really strong growth. Delivering a profit of GBP 483 million, up 71.1%, and a margin of 11.9%, up 4.7 points. You can see in the graph below the trajectory of that growth, and you can see the building momentum. Q1 -on -Q1 versus Q2 -on -Q2, you can see the momentum building in the business as we travel through the year. The highlights, GroupM up 17% in the half and 28.6% in the second quarter. Really strong performance driven by recovery in global advertising spend, and driven, of course, by our Xaxis and Finecast businesses. Also encouraging two-year growth from both GroupM and VMLY&R, and indeed, double digits like-for-like growth in Q2 for Hogarth, Wunderman Thompson, and very good growth from Ogilvy. Very encouraging performance from Ogilvy, a strong performance in Q2. Overall, strong performance all round. Coming on now to public relations, which is an area that didn't suffer as much under COVID as some of our other segments. Overall revenue, less pass-through costs, GBP 429 million, up 7.4% on a like-to-like basis, and also good growth versus 2019, up 2.6%. Profit in at GBP 63 million, down 11.7%, and margin of 14.8%, down 2.1 percentage points. We saw continued strong growth, particularly driven, of course, by demand for strategic advice. BCW and Hill+ Knowlton both growing double-digit like-to-like in Q2. Finsbury Glover Hering merger is now completed. The margin was a little bit challenging down year-on-year, driven principally by an investment in our people and some of the merger related costs associated with FGH actually dragging the margin down in the first half. Coming on now to our specialist agencies, where we've really seen a rapid recovery in areas like brand consulting. The revenue, less pass-through costs, of GBP 401 million, up 17.1% on a like-to-like basis and 3.3% versus 2019. Very strong growth and recovery versus 2019. Headline operating profit of 44%, up 56%, and margin of 11%, up 2.8 points. Really strong performance. There's been a real resurgence in demand for brand consulting, so Landor, Superunion, and Design Bridge all performing very strongly. Also significant growth at CMI, which is our specialist healthcare media business. Moving on now to the performance across our major markets. Good recovery in the U.S., 12.6% growth in Q2, and that also reflects growth on 2019 at 1.8%. Really encouraging performance in one of our major markets. The same for the U.K., growth of 31.8% in Q2, off a slightly weaker quarter this time last year at -23.3%, but encouragingly on a two-year basis, up 1.1% versus 2019. Again, we're seeing good growth on that 2019 base. Germany even better performance, 20.3% in the quarter. That's actually up 6.3% on a two-year basis versus 2019. Greater China, a little bit more disappointing. We were actually just up in the quarter, but down 1.7% on a two-year basis. We are seeing an improving trajectory, and we do expect to see growth come through in the second half of the year. Australia, we saw some recovery in Q2, but still negative on a two-year basis. Now, of course, we've brought the business back into 100% ownership. We're very optimistic about driving stronger future performance. Coming on now to our other major markets. India up 30% in the quarter on the back of a weak performance in Q2 of last year. Nonetheless up 1.3% on the half overall. France, a little bit more disappointing, actually down 10.8% on 2019, albeit some recovery in Q2 at 27.9%. Canada are up on a two-year basis and up 33.5% in the quarter. Italy, really strong recovery at 52.7%, a massive growth in the quarter and actually up 7% on a two-year basis as well. We're seeing great recovery in Italy. Spain, a little bit more challenging, up 15.8% in the quarter, down on a two-year basis, down 2.8% on a two-year basis. France and Spain, a little bit more to go before we see full recovery, but strong performance in the other markets I've mentioned. Coming on now to our overall headline operating margin. Staff costs, pre incentives at GBP 3.2 billion, actually down 1.3% year-on-year. Establishment costs, GBP 265 million, down 15.7%, reflecting the great work of our campus program. IT costs actually up 1.5% to GBP 278 million, reflecting the investment that we're making in that area. Personnel costs down 40.3%, reflecting the lower travel and accommodation costs. Delivering overall operating profit pre-incentives of GBP 834 million, which is up 94% year-on-year. Very strong performance. As you can see from the numbers, we're investing significantly in our incentive pool this year, reflecting the tremendous hard work of all our colleagues across the business. In the first half, the cost was GBP 244 million, delivering GBP 590 million of operating profit, up 54.4%. When actually we look at the operating profit margins on a pre-incentive basis, we stand at 17% for the half year, which is up 7.8 margin points year-on-year. Because of our investment in incentives, the post-incentive margin is 12.1%, up 3.9 points year-on-year. It's still strong relative performance year-on-year. Another way of looking at that is displayed on the next slide where we show the margin bridge half -on -half. You can see there the benefits of the operating leverage come through fewer people at 4.3% margin points, and the benefits of our property specialty delivering 1.3% margin points, the lower travel costs delivering 0.8% margin points, IT at 0.2%, and other G&A 1.1,% followed by, if you like, a drag of 3.8%% driven by this significant investment in our incentive pools year -on -year. To give you a little bit of shape for the second half, where we're expecting to see is less operating leverage come through in the second half. That 4.3% we think will largely disappear, driven by salary increases coming through and also additional recruitment to meet increasing growth. On the establishment costs, I'd expect to see a similar benefit in the second half come through. On personnel costs, I think that will be lower in the second half of the year, particularly as travel, of course, comes back in the second half. IT will be similar. There will be less of a drag on incentives given year-on-year. We actually made quite a large accrual in the second half of last year, reflecting the strong performance in the second half, accrued the bonus. So the drag on incentives in the second half will be less. Overall, we would expect to outturn the year at the upper end of our margin guidance range of 13.5%-14%. Towards the 14% range is where we'd expect to outturn. Coming on now to our progress on transformation and the longer term savings. You see on the left-hand side there, the savings that we talked about, the GBP 600 million gross savings we're expecting to deliver by 2025. For those of you may remember that we also showed a chart which showed the phasing of those gross savings and delivering what we anticipate to be GBP 200 million of gross savings in 2021. I'm going to give you a little bit of a state now as to what I think the full year will deliver, and of course, we'll report in more detail on this at the year end itself. I would forecast the full year procurement savings in the order of GBP 50 million or so. Real estate savings in the order of GBP 100 million. Savings through shared services and further simplification of the business about GBP 15 million. Actually travel and accommodation savings for the full year of about GBP 150 million. Of course, some of those will come back in the future. They're not all permanent. I'd expect about GBP 80 million of that GBP 150 million to reverse, giving a net GBP 70 million. When I add the GBP 50 million, the GBP 100 million, the GBP 15 million and the GBP 70 million, that's about GBP 230 million of savings we anticipate for the full year. Slightly ahead of our target of GBP 200 million, which we communicated back at the Capital Markets Day. Really good progress against our target, and that's what gives me comfort to confirm our guidance for 2023 at 15.5%-16%. We've got real line of sight of how we're going to deliver that margin improvement as we progress through 2022 and 2023. Coming on now to some of the different areas and the work that we're doing. As many of you will know, we recruited Rachel Higham to lead our IT function from BT. She's made a fantastic start. We've identified significant opportunities for savings and doing things more efficiently. We've got a very clear roadmap now as to how we're going to progress over the next few years and how we're going to reduce the gap between our current cost base and the industry benchmark. We've also brought in Dawn Winchester to very specifically lead our Workday project and also the work that we're doing on our target operating model to become more efficient across finance and HR. We're making great progress on shared services. We're already starting to migrate countries like the U.K., U.A.E., China, and Singapore into our five regional shared service hubs in Shanghai, Mumbai, Malaysia, Dallas, and Mexico. We've also brought in very strong talent here as well in the form of Suzanne Leopoldi-Nichols to head up our Global Business Services program. She comes in from UPS and is really leading the charge on driving forward our shared services strategy. On procurement, as I mentioned earlier, we made a strong start in delivering savings there in the GBP 2 billion or so of indirect spend. That function is being led by Tig Matthews. We've got here are some examples on our car fleet, on our pharmacy benefits. There's others in FM, telephony, and so forth, where we are driving cost out through our buying scale across the organization. Property, making tremendous progress. The further 10 campuses to go by the end of this year. We're on track to have the vast majority of our people in campuses, 65 campuses by 2025. We're doing great work on our business unit rationalization. We've targeted actually to take out about 500 legal entities this year, and more work to go in the years ahead. Already we're delivering travel savings, as I communicated earlier. We feel that we've got some really strong initiatives across the transformation program, and of course, we'll give you a much more detailed update when we come to our year end. In terms of our free cash flow and free cash flow conversion, again, you'll see we start off at the top of the page with operating profit of GBP 484 million, making adjustments for depreciation, lease payments, working capital, net interest, tax, and capital expenditure, and earn outs delivering an outflow of GBP 345 million for the half year. That obviously compares to an outflow of GBP 825 million for 2020. The improvement obviously being driven by stronger operational performance, stronger working capital management, and lower tax and earn-outs. Coming on now to the uses of those cash flow on slide 17. We talk here about, obviously, we've got expenditure on acquisitions. Australia, we brought that business in to own it 100%. Mark mentioned earlier on dti, as an investment in Brazil, various U.K. investments and also Numerator, which is a Kantar investment. You see the cost of those GBP 252 million on the page in terms of outflows. Again, in terms of share repurchases for the year, GBP 298 million at the bottom half, delivering an overall net cash flow of GBP 852 million negative versus GBP 950 million at the same time last year. Just coming on now to bridging the debt year-over-year. This time last year, GBP 2.7 billion of debt, strong operating cash flow, obviously offset by lease payments, CapEx, tax, acquisitions, very strong performance in our trade network and capital, most of which was delivered in the second half of last year, of course, share buybacks, dividends. Overall, a reduction in our net debt by GBP 1.2 billion to GBP 1.5 billion, and that's GBP 1.1 billion on a constant currency basis. Very strong deleveraging across our business, which of course is reflected in our leverage metrics on the next page, where we show available liquidity. It's actually stepped up a little bit year-on-year to GBP 5.1 billion. Interest cover has improved to 8.3 x, and our rolling average net debt to headline EBITDA has reduced to 1.1 x, which is actually below our 1.5x-1.75x guidance. Actually, we expect to close the year below that 1.5x-1.75x stated range also. Coming on now to the impact of FX on revenue less pass-through cost. We signaled this at the start of the year. We've had year-to-date a headwind of 5.8%. We expect a similar, slightly lower headwind for the remainder of the year, but overall, for the full year, an adjustment of - 5% as a result of exchange rate shifts. Coming on now to my last slide, an update on dividends, buybacks and guidance. We're declaring an interim dividend of GBP 0.125, up 25% year-on-year. We've completed the first phase of share buybacks in the half of GBP 248 million. We expect to complete an additional GBP 350 million planned for half two. As Mark has already alluded to, we are updating our guidance for 2021. Like-to-like revenue less pass-through costs grow at 9%-10%. It was previously mid-single digits. Equally, headline operating margin towards the upper end of our range, 13.5%-14%, so close to 14%. CapEx and network and capital guidance remains the same with CapEx at GBP 450 million-GBP 500 million and a small network capital outflow of GBP 200 million-GBP 300 million. I think it's important to remind everyone, of course, that there remain short-term uncertainties, what with the various variants of COVID, travel restrictions and the economic outlook, et cetera. Nonetheless, we've had very positive momentum in the first half of the year. As we look here, we would expect that momentum to continue into the second half and equally into 2022. Therefore, our medium-term guidance remains unchanged. In particular, our margin guidance of 15.5%-16% for 2023, where we now have really good visibility as how we're going to segue towards that number between now 2022 and 2023. With that, I'll hand over to Mark to give you a business update. Thank you. Thanks very much, John. I've just got a few comments for me to make on the business, but we'll get quickly to the Q&A. On page 23, I think it's clear that we see attractive growth opportunities for WPP and that the changes we've made in terms of integrating our business, simplifying the structure, investing in creativity and digital media and data and technology do allow us to capture them. I think if you look on page 23, there are four sort of, we call them post-COVID. They were not, I think, really through COVID yet, post-COVID structural growth drivers to call out. The first is if you look at ad spend, we're expecting a CAGR of 6.9% over the next three years. This chart, a little complicated, but it shows, I think, how GroupM have consistently raised both the estimate of the size and the estimate of the growth of the advertising market over the last three years. We are seeing good, strong growth in the advertising market overall over the next three years. Particularly within that, digital media growing closer to 10% over the next three years. I think there's strong structural growth in our core markets, and that's reflected in the strength of GroupM's performance in the first half of this year. I think the third to call out is the long-term potential for growth in e-commerce. It's an area where we've been investing for a number of years within WPP and as part of our restructuring over the last two years. We've really put e-commerce at the heart of many of our businesses and invested significantly in that. I think the fourth point to make in the bottom right is really the importance of what we do for clients and that the results that we see in the first half of this year are more fundamental than just a rebound in activity. If you look at the three areas of consumer packaged goods, technology, and healthcare that make up together about 54% of our sales, we're seeing strong growth on a two-year basis. Those sectors that grew well in 2020 or had very resilient performance in 2020, we're seeing continued growth in 2021 in the first half of the year, and we expect that to continue into the second half and into 2022. I think it talks to the long-term growth possibility and perhaps really the realization or the recommitment of our clients to invest in marketing as the economy recovers. On page 24, we talked about the changes that we've made, and I'd like to highlight a few of those in terms of how we look at the business within our global integrated agencies. In media, I mentioned GroupM. We've seen 3.7% growth on a two-year basis in GroupM. I think that talks to the strong structural growth opportunities that we see inside our media businesses. Now 43% digital, and that digital area is growing very quickly. You can see within e-commerce-driven media, it's up 61% in the first half. Finecast, our connected television business, is up 113%, and Xaxis itself is up 56% in the first half of the year as clients earlier in the year, we announced we appointed Brendan Moorcroft as the CEO, and that's forming a key part of our response from a number of major reviews that we're going through. On the creative front, we now have four distinctive global creative networks, and we're particularly pleased, I mentioned at the beginning, to be awarded Holding Company of the Year at the 2021 Cannes Lions. The first time we've done that since 2017. I remind you within those businesses, we do have strong positions in e-commerce, in marketing technology. They're not in any way just advertising agencies, they're integrated agencies capable of helping clients connect with their consumers, sell products across all channels, and all media. We've commented before about the strength of our public relations and public affairs businesses that reflected in their two-year performance, we now have three strong global networks, BCW, Hill+Knowlton, and Finsbury Glover Hering that's come together very well in the first half of the year. We're increasingly seeing that public relations and public affairs services integrated into our overall offer as reflected in the Walgreens Boots assignment and continued investment in reputation, in employee communications, and purpose. Historically, in a downturn, PR has been one of the areas most affected. We haven't seen that this time. I think that bodes well for the future. Lastly, within specialist communications, I've called out CMI that John Rogers mentioned, also the growth we've seen in our branding identity companies as clients reinvest in innovation, in new product launches, and in corporate activity, and that's reflected in their performance. On page 25, to touch briefly on new business. Coming into the year, we had a very strong performance in 2020 where we led all the new business tables by some metric, particularly in media, and MediaCom had an excellent performance last year, as did all the GroupM agencies. This year, I think the performance probably has been a little bit more balanced towards creative than media. I think that's actually a good thing that shows that our creative agencies are coming back more strongly and reflects the investment we made creatively. I'd say that Wavemaker in particular had a strong start to the year in new business. There have been a couple of clients that we would a strong win in the second half of the year. On page 26, I mentioned our performance at Cannes. I think just to call out on this page the contribution from each of our creative agencies and indeed our media and design agencies in Cannes. Each of our major networks won a Grand Prix, which I think is fantastic result. Superunion won a Grand Prix in design the first time in some years that a design company really reflected a contribution from across the company. On page 27, as we talked about before, we mentioned in our ESG day, purpose is increasingly a strong driver of our business, and nine of our top 10 clients are working with us on purpose-related activities. That goes from helping them to develop their ESG strategy to specific product initiatives that support it, through to helping them to communicate what they're doing in the purpose arena. I think those are really the highlights of the year from a business perspective so far. On page 28, in the summary, I think we recovered 2019 levels a year ahead of what we expect and what we set out in December 2020. We got good momentum going into the second half and into next year. That reflects, let's say, strong client demand across a range of our services in all major geographies, but also that some markets are still sadly impacted by COVID. We do have strong structural growth opportunities resulting from the shifting consumer behavior to digital media and e-commerce channels, growth in some of the key client sectors like consumer packaged goods, healthcare, and technology. I remind people of the strength of WPP's geographic footprint, particularly in markets like India, Brazil, China, Indonesia, that have long-term strong structural growth opportunities. We have made good progress in our broader agenda around creativity, around purpose, new services. John highlighted the importance of our transformation program, not just to improve our margin, but also to free up money to invest in our business. In conclusion, I think we're collectively very pleased with the results. We'd like to thank our clients for their support, our people for their hard work. I think net-net, the results do demonstrate the long-term viability, the great adaptability, and the power of our business model, I think bode well for the future. Thank you all for listening. We'll take questions. Thank you, sir. If you would like to ask a question at this time, please press star and one on your telephone. Please ensure that the mute function on your telephone is switched off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. If you are also watching the webcast, please make sure to mute the computer's volume to prevent feedback through the phone while asking a question. If you find that your question has already been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing the hash key. Again, please press star and one to ask a question. We will pause for a moment to allow everyone to signal. We will now take our first question from Tom Singlehurst from Citi. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Yeah. Thanks for taking the question. It's Tom here. Hi, Tom. Hi, Tom. Yeah. Two questions, one on revenue broadly and one on cost. On the revenue side, obviously, there's a genuine concern we're entering a period of higher cost inflation. I'm just wondering whether you could give us some sort of high level comments on the vulnerability of marketing investment to input cost inflation. There's historically been a perception that marketing might be used as a buffer to offset input cost inflation elsewhere. Is that still a risk, do you think, across the second half, or do you think we've seen a shift in perception such that marketing itself is seen as an input cost in its own right? That was the first question. On the second question, as far as I can tell, looking at the commitment to incentives for the full year as measured as a percentage of EBIT pre-incentives, it's pretty much as high as it's ever been, going all the way back to the beginning of the millennium. The question is this. Are you actually spending more in absolute terms on incentives than the original plan? What does that mean for 2022 onwards? Do you continue to spend at that level in relative terms, or does the sharing of the proceeds of super normal growth become a bit more balanced? Thank you. Okay. I'll tackle the first question, and John will tackle the second. Look, I think that, what we're seeing is an investment or reinvestment by clients in marketing as the economy recovers. If you look within consumer packaged goods, I point out on a two-year basis, we're seeing growth of 7.2%, so really good growth across both years. We do hear from a number of CPG companies that there are pressure on input costs and some of that's being passed on to retailers and consumers through inflation. I think historically, inflation probably being viewed as sort of broadly positive to marketing spend. What you're talking about is inflation and input prices without the ability to pass those on to the end consumer, and clearly, I think we're seeing that from some clients. We're not seeing that in all of our CPG clients, and I think net-net, we don't expect that to change things substantially in the second half. John, do you want to take incentives? Yeah, sure. Let me just give you a reasonably long answer on this question to help you shape your thinking for the first and second half. Just to give you a little bit of a shape, obviously in the first half, we're reporting overall incentives costs at GBP 244 million. Based on our current performance and trajectory, I would expect that to broadly land for the full year at about just north of GBP 450 million, there or thereabout. [audio distortion] but that's just to give you a little bit of flavor the full year. Just for reference, that compares to GBP 185 million for last year and GBP 294 million in 2019. Clearly a step up year-on-year, both versus 2019 and 2020. As Mark says, reflecting significant half, and we believe it's important to reward our colleagues with a strong bonus. Having had quite a tough year last year, it would be great to be able to reward our colleagues with a strong bonus for this year, reflecting the strong performance. I would imagine it being about north of GBP 450 million, but it's a little bit higher than what I would describe as being the normalized position. I would expect the normalized position going forward to be somewhere between GBP 300 million and GBP 350 million, with this year being a step above where we would expect to be on a normalized basis. All else being equal, going into 2022, we'd expect our bonus charge in the ordinary course of the business to be somewhere between GBP 300 million-GBP 350 million. We will therefore benefit from a little bit of a tailwind going into 2022 in margin point terms of about 1- 1.5 margin points because of that normalization of the bonus. Obviously, we'd hope to be paying out a much bigger bonus than that in 2022, but we'd only be doing so off the back of a very strong performance, and therefore it would fund itself. Hopefully that's a pretty full answer to the question. It gives you a little bit of a guidance as to how we see the bonus charge shaping over time and where it sits relative to a normal period. Perfect. Very comprehensive. Thank you very much. Thank you. Your next question comes from Matti Littunen from Bernstein. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Hello, good morning. First question on creative. You gave the recovery rate over two years for VMLY&R, but I was just wondering if you could give us a rough indication of what that would look like across the creative agency business. A second question on the very strong performance in commerce. It seems like you're going further into commerce marketing now with the e-commerce expansion and perhaps historically you did in the physical trade promotion world. Could you give us a bit of commentary on, does that mean that you see e-commerce trade promotion and media as a fundamentally better business opportunity than trade promotion was in the physical world or what sort of explains that? Finally, a bit related to that bonus question earlier that you just answered. You seem to have retained much more staff than particularly the U.S. peers in 2020. Do you think it gives you an advantage now in the current market for talent as you go further into the post-recovery growth? Thank you very much. Why don't I tackle the commerce question and then John can talk to the first. The reality is that given the technology changes that are taking place, the worlds of marketing and sales and content are inevitably converging, and the historic divide between the sales department and the marketing department in many of our clients is coming closer together. We're starting to build new relationships with the heads of sales like we might have done with the head of marketing. I think we're seeing a kind of strategic convergence of those worlds. Whereas historically through Fitch, we may have designed stores, our involvement in building e-commerce websites is much more fundamental. I remind you that we just re-platformed NET-A-PORTER. We worked with Sainsbury's to build sainsburys.co.uk, so an enterprise level grocery website, and we've built and will continue to work very closely with Selfridges on their e-commerce efforts. That's just here in the U.K. I think this convergence gives us good opportunity from a build perspective and from a media perspective to get into new markets, and I think that that's a three to five year and ongoing opportunity. John, do you want to give some color on the creative? Just on the two-year wrap on the creative. Across our global integrated agencies, we are up 0.4% versus 2019. That is across Ogilvy, Wunderman Thompson, VMLY&R, AKQA, GroupM, and Hogarth. Within that GroupM is actually up 3.7% on 2019. If you stripped out GroupM from that, we would be slightly down on 2019 levels across Ogilvy, Wunderman Thompson, VMLY&R, and AKQA Group and Hogarth, but not by much. We're actually pretty pleased with the performance. As we said six months ago, we expected it to take two years to recover back to 2019 levels, and we basically got back to 2019 levels in the creative agencies in one year. We're slightly shy of that, but we'd expect to see continued momentum come through in the second half. We're pretty pleased with performance. In particular, actually, I'd call out Ogilvy as well, which quarter-on-quarter delivered a really strong growth in the second quarter. Very pleasing to see the impact of Andy Main and his new management team really driving performance in the Ogilvy business. On the point around bonus and staff churn, are we seeing a benefit? Difficult to comment relative to our competition, of course. I think we're seeing churn levels across our business, which are clearly a big step up on last year, unsurprisingly, because last year, of course, most people were in lockdown. Actually, if you look at our churn levels versus 2019, we're not dissimilar across the business. There's pockets in certain markets, in certain areas, but actually we're not dissimilar. I think what you hear some of our peers reporting is a big step up in churn. I would say that we do see an advantage because of that. Churn levels are still relatively high, but maybe we do see a relatively strong performance versus our peers. Clearly staff churn does cost the business a lot of money. The extent to which we can manage that and drive that down, we see as being a very positive thing. Of course, a lot of the work that we're doing in integrating and bringing together our people management systems across the business, we hope in the long run will deliver further benefits to how we can give our people the career paths that they're looking for across all of our different agencies and reduce that churn even further. I expect we'll see some benefit, but very difficult to quantify, frankly. Very helpful. Thank you, Mark and John. Thank you. Your next question comes from Sarah Simon from Berenberg. Yeah. Hi. Most of my question's been answered, but I just had one on, Mark, you've obviously highlighted e-commerce as an opportunity. I was just interested to know whether you looked at the CitrusAd deal or am I right in thinking that actually your focus on e-commerce is less about the media side of it and more about the kind of implementation and strategy? Just a quick comment there would be helpful. Thanks. Yeah, look, I'm not going to comment on a particular transaction, but I think we want our involvement to be very broad in e-commerce. I think it relates to really every aspect of our business, from advising clients on their e-commerce strategy. Thinking through, when do they go direct to consumer? How do they sell best through traditional retailers? How do they take advantage of Instacart? Carolyn Everson, you may have noticed, who worked very closely with Facebook and she's gone to Instacart. How we help them spend their money through their media business, how they get data from e-commerce companies to help target not just their marketing spend, but drive innovation. I think that e-commerce is a real fundamental change in how clients sell. If you look at John Donahoe's statement from Nike last year, he attributed their investments in e-commerce, not just to being able to sell to consumers during the pandemic, but to improvements in their products innovation, through insights they generated, through reductions in stock levels, through looking at consumer demand. I think it's pretty fundamental and I think a big area of conversation that we have with every client. Okay. That's helpful. Thanks. Yeah. Thank you. Your next question comes from Julien Roch from Barclays. Yes. Good morning, Mark. Good morning, John. Morning. My first question is on buyback. It was part of the Investor Day target, but it was supposed to start in full year 2023, and you're starting in the second half of 2021. Will we have a buyback in full year 2022 as well, basically regular buyback are starting from now? That's my first question. My second one is on new services. They went from 25% in 2019 to 26%. When you gave us the 25% split for 2019, you gave us a tech commerce and experience breakdown. Do you want to provide the same breakdown, or should we forget those three categories and just think about a new service bucket given to us twice a year? What was the organic growth of that new service bucket in the first half? That's my second question. The last one is on net -new business, $2.9 billion, which is okay. It's in line with 2019, but below 2018 and 2017. You were, however, the only agency losing media billing in the first half, according to COMvergence, as highlighted by another agency slide. Net -net, based on accounts that have changed hand this year so far, will net -new business have a negative, neutral, or positive impact on organic next year? Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Why don't I take the net -new business number, and then John Rogers can talk to you about buybacks and the sort of specific disclosure. Look, I think as you say, we had an excellent year in new business this year. Last year actually. We had an excellent 2020, particularly in media. I'd say we've had a solid performance this year. It's not spectacular, but it's not bad. It's been much stronger, I'd say, on the creative side of the business than it has been on the media side. I think we were not successful in the Stellantis reviews, a very quick review, and that skewed the results. I have studied the chart to which you refer to in some detail, and perhaps we should have an off the record conversation about its composition. I think it includes new business wins and retentions. I think it merits further investigation. Okay. Loud and clear. Julien, just coming on to your questions on share buybacks. Obviously, we did the GBP 250 million in the first half. We're announcing up to GBP 350 million in the second half. We've already clearly indicated that that would put us below our stated balance sheet range on net debt to EBITDA of 1.5x-1.75x. Again, if you refer back to our capital allocation policy at our Capital Markets Day in December, obviously anything outside that range, we would, all else being equal, intend to pay back to shareholders through further share buybacks. I don't want to forecast too much, but obviously, all else being equal, given that we'll outturn the year below that metric of 1.5x-1.75x, there is clearly the possibility of future potential share buybacks. Albeit, we don't know necessarily what was going to happen between now and then. Acquisition opportunities may come along, et cetera, or further growth investment opportunities may come along. All else being equal, hopefully you can draw your conclusions from what I've just said. In relation to the split between communications and commerce experience and technology, we're not going to break that out in detail every time we report it. We may come to it at the year-end and break out in a little bit more detail. Obviously, it moves relatively slowly over time, and hence, I think breaking it out every single time isn't going to necessarily always tell you the right story. We're pleased with the progression that we've made. We said that we're going, obviously, from 25% to 40% between now and 2025, and this 1% shift reflects steady linear progression against that target. We're pleased with the progress. I think it's really also important to highlight, of course, that within the communications bucket, the 74%, there are some massively fast-growing businesses. That contains most of our media business. We've already talked about the great progress we've seen on GroupM in the first half. On indication of how much that new service bucket grew in the first half on an organic basis? I suppose we are up double digit. I'll let you do the math on it. Obviously it's grown from 25% to 26%, you can work it out. We'll come back to it at the year-end and give you a bit more detail. Hopefully you can work out the math from the numbers. Okay. Very good. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Your next question comes from Matthew Walker from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Thanks. Good morning. Hi, guys. Hi there. Few questions, please. Hi. The first question was really on the margin side. I think John mentioned that the bonuses net for next year being lower, so let's say it goes from sort of GBP 450 million to GBP 300 million-GBP 350 million with the benefit of 1- 1.5 margin points. I guess you're not necessarily saying that the margin's going to grow that much. Are there any lags that you would point out? Should we basically flow that 1%- 1.5% through for the full year in 2022? That was the first one. The second one was, obviously, there's been some comments around, you discussed inflation. Have you seen any evidence of, I guess you haven't, but any slowing growth in the economy or ad markets that will impact on the second half of the year? That's the second question. Specifically around Facebook, that was one of the key clients. I guess you're not participating in the review according to the press. Can you just explain a bit why not? It seems like not necessarily the most important one, but certainly an important client. Okay. I'll let John handle the margin and bonus question and add to what he wants to say on the second half. We're not seeing any slowdown or anything that you mentioned around inflation or input costs overall with our clients. I think on Facebook, the specific reasons are between us and Facebook. All I'd say is we decided not to proceed with the review, but we continue to work with Facebook in a number of other areas of their business. Matthew, just coming to your point on margin. You're correct in saying that the expectation for this year is circa GBP 400 million-GBP 450 million. Normally, we would expect that to be GBP 300 million-GBP 350 million in a normal year. Of course, we can't really predict that what it will be for next year, depends on the performance of the business. If we perform against plans/consensus, we'd expect to pay out a bonus at that level. Your question was, does all of that flow through? Well, all else being equal of course, all of that flows through. Of course, all else won't be equal. As we look into 2022, we would expect to see additional operating leverage as we grow the business. We'd expect to see a slight drag in relation to personnel costs as travel and accommodation costs come back in. We'd expect to see some additional upside based on establishment costs. We'd expect to see some upside based on incentives, but we'd expect to see some downside looking at the full year, for example, annualization of salary costs, et cetera. There's lots and lots of moving parts in that, and we're not going to provide you with guidance for 2022 margin on this call. Clearly, one of the big components is that incentive piece, and that all else being equal gives us the 1%-1.5% tailwind going into 2022. There are the moving parts, both positive and negative, that you will need to take account of. What we are comfortable with is reiterating the guidance for 2023, which reflects the margin of 15.5%-16%. We can see we have got, based on all of those different moving parts and of course the benefits that we are delivering through our transformation program, we are very comfortable in reiterating that margin guidance for 2023. I will leave you to, in the first instance, bridge the gap between the 14% that we expect to outturn in 2021 and the 15.5%-16% in 2023, and the various moving parts that exist for 2022. We'll clearly come back to providing you with more detailed guidance for 2022 at the prelims for this year end. Okay, very clear. Thanks a lot. Thanks. Thank you. Our next question comes from Adrien de Saint Hilaire from Bank of America. Hi. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. First of all, on GroupM, you've mentioned that it grew 4% on a two-year comp. How does that compare to the overall ad market? Also, Mark, you mentioned GroupM is forecasting 7% CAGR for the ad market between now and 2024. Would you expect GroupM to outperform that figure, perform in line, or underperform? Second question that is still around the topic of growth. At the Capital Markets Day, you kind of guided for like 2.5%, 3% like-to-like growth in 2023. Since you're recovering a year ahead of expectation, is that now a fair assumption for 2022, as well? I think that GroupM is gaining market share compared to its competitors or compared to its peers. Its relationship to aggregate ad spend is complicated because much of that growth in digital ad spend is focused on small and medium-sized businesses that are not the traditional clients of GroupM. It's really not necessarily the right comparison to compare it to the aggregate share, but I think that it's a strong business. It's gaining share certainly compared to its traditional peers, and it's gaining share in digital media where it matters. Look, I think on M&A, actually, if you look at our spend in the first half of the year compared to our target, we're on track to hit the target we set out in December for the year as a whole. Some of that did go through Numerator, through our associate, that is in a high growth area of the data investment management business, and it's a quality high growth company. I think we're on track to make our targets, and we have a number of interesting opportunities in our pipeline. Do you want to talk about expectations? Yeah. In relation to growth expectations for 2022 and 2023, you're right, of course, that in 2023 we guided to 2.5%-3% like-for-like growth at the Capital Markets Day, we maintain that guidance for 2023. We're not at this stage going to issue guidance for 2022. Obviously, we've still got six months of this year still to run. We carried very strong momentum through the first half, as evidenced by the numbers today. We would expect that momentum to continue through into the second half of this financial year. We'll obviously wait and see how the second half transpires before we give guidance for 2022 itself. We are comfortable with the longer term guidance of 2.5%-3% like for like coming through in 2023. We've got good momentum in the business at the moment, and we just want to see how we trade over the next six months before we give that guidance for 2022. That's all very clear. Can I just ask a very quick follow-up? Depends on what it is. Of course. Thanks, Mark. No, it will be quick, I hope so. Do you mind telling us how much cost savings will be delivered in 2022 out of the GBP 600 million that you plan to deliver for 2025? Well, Again, I would just refer you back to the charts of the Capital Markets Day, where we outlined the GBP 600 million of gross savings, and we gave you a chart following that which showed how the cost savings progressed over time. It was GBP 200 million of gross savings for this year, GBP 300 million for next year, obviously on a cumulative basis. We're comfortable with that guidance still. It was only ever an approximation as to how we proceed over the next five years, but GBP 200 for this year, GBP 300 for next year on a cumulative basis. We remain comfortable with that approach. All very clear. Thank you. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I would now hand the call over to Mr. Mark Read for further closing remarks. Excellent. Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody, for listening. I think I just conclude with the point I made at the end of the presentation. I think it's a great set of results, so thank you to our clients and our people. I do believe it demonstrates the long-term viability, the adaptability, our ability to really transform a company of 100,000 people over the last three years, and the changes that we've made and the power of our business model. Gentlemen, you may now disconnect.