Okay. Good day, everyone, and welcome back to the UBS TMT Conference. This is now the 50th year that we've been running on Wall Street. Unbreakable. Longest running on Wall Street. Thank you very much indeed for coming. It's nice to actually host you in person. It's the last couple of years where it's been virtual. Good to see you. Appreciate it. Thank you very much indeed. Just for some housekeeping, I've got an iPad up here. So if there's any sort of questions out there from the floor, please send through, and I'll be able to pick them up on here. But now, maybe to start off quickly, Philippe, just I think that talking to investors, it's been an interesting year for all the advertisers, and particularly for the agencies. And I think if we go back to the start of the year, no one would have thought going into the third quarter that for the first time nearly on record, the advertising agency companies have actually outperformed their digital counterparts. And so it's been a surprisingly strong performance against a sort of weaker macro backdrop. So maybe as a starting point, maybe you can just reflect on what's happened through the start of the year in terms of reasons for that outperformance and what's been driving the performance for yourselves? I mean, that's a lot of questions in one because it's sort of predicated on having a point of view about what's happening to the platforms. And in some of our conversations over the course of the day today, we have been talking a bit about the dynamics of that performance. We just sort of say, how are we as an industry or as our sector performing as opposed to kind of how we as Interpublic are performing, which is, in our case, I think a continuation of a four or five-year cycle or a journey that reflects a lot of choices that we made. So I would say that our performance and possibly sector performance comes down to decisions and choices that we make so that we can be valuable and resource clients in sorting for and navigating this very, very complex environment that's been sort of taking hold as technology impacted media, as that then played out into kind of consumer behavior, and then as data began to play a more prominent role in informing marketer decisions about where and how to invest money and where and how to engage consumers in ways that could have direct business outcomes. So for us, that's part of it. Now, where we are on the cycle vis-à-vis what next year brings, why a very strong 2021 at the macro level has led to a lot of uncertainty this year, whether that again is just a factor of how the cycle has played out, clearly what's taking place geopolitically, but I think it demonstrates that there are a set of assets in our portfolio that hadn't been there a decade ago, even seven years ago, and that they're useful to clients in a world that's complicated and where they're trying to get more clarity around the benefit that they get from spending their marketing dollars. I mean, if you look at the growth rate as we've come through the year, how much has actually inflationary had a positive tailwind on your numbers? I know that's very modest. I mean, I think for us, we've never. I don't know how many of us have lived through inflation at the rate that we're seeing now. But the fact that our contracts do have inflation baked into them in the sense that it creates a circumstance where we can engage with a client and talk about whether that can be something that we will pass through. And it's essentially about getting the best talent to help them solve these kinds of issues. And if you're looking for your partner to have strong data science capabilities or strong digital media capabilities or in the healthcare space for us, there's the understanding that everybody benefits if we're able to either keep that talent or recruit that talent. But that's not a given. It's a conversation that you have with a client on a sort of case-by-case basis. It's really de minimis in our numbers today. It's becoming a conversation that we have with clients at the appropriate time, either as a contract comes up or as we start planning for a new year. Does that become a positive tailwind when as we go into next year then? Should we think about that? It depends. It depends on how successful we are in those conversations and where things sit with any one of those clients. I mean, I think that the nature of the model that we run. We talk a lot about wanting to diversify the revenue streams, and yet the underlying nature of an equity model with a lot of flex built into it is a benefit as we go into potentially a challenging time, and again, I'm sorry. I'm not looking at anybody on this side of the room, but it's just kind of like the climate, but if you think about how we run our business, we're really, really measured and thoughtful around the revenue has to come in before we staff behind it, so there's always going to be a benefit there. Freelance is going to be a component part of how we solve for, again, client briefs, so there's a benefit there, and then the incentive piece is meaningful to kind of our pay mix, and it's entirely aligned with the two metrics that we're accountable to our owners on, which is organic revenue growth and margin, so I think that it definitely is a benefit to us as we think about the uncertainty. I can't tell you for a fact that it's going to lead to X, Y, or Z as a headwind. I think of it more as a really effective stopgap more than a tailwind or headwind. Okay. Just before we sort of switch gears to another sort of different question, is that if we look at where we are now, that obviously looking at your numbers, particularly on the creative side and some of your peers, the creative side of the business has got been much stronger than I think probably some people would have given credit for this year. I mean, your numbers first quarter were 11.2, then 8.5, then 6.7, and actually it was very strong numbers. Can you maybe talk through the relative strength of that creativity and what's been driving that? Sure. I think that as you all know, because you all spend time looking hard and paying attention to both adjacent sectors, our sectors, and then us relative to peers or competitors, our healthcare agency business is in that sector. And that's a business that we've been super clear for a long time is performing well for us, has for a long time, has been a space where we've been really focused on developing that skill set and focusing on that as an opportunity. I think many of you will have heard me say it's not a client mix. It's a capability for us, really. And so I think that probably throws off some of what you just played out. I mean, we're seeing our large creative agency businesses, creative ad networks perform well. They're positive, but they're not at the number that sort of healthcare is accretive to that sector or that segment. If we look at IPG relative to the industry, I mean, it's now being, I think, on numbers, you've outperformed the industry or your peer group since 2014. And if you look at the numbers where we'll land this year, I think your numbers will probably be up 14%-15% relative to 2009 on an index basis in the industry up at 10%. Can you just maybe talk about what's been driving that outperformance? And And particularly when we look forward to the next three years, how IPG continues to try and differentiate itself to keep that sort of outperformance? Sure. I mean, I think the outperformance again is something that's looking around the room. The only number of folks we've spoken at different points in kind of on the journey, it's definitely been our media business. Our media business is powered by data, which if you go back quite a few years, we were basically building ourselves inside of our media business, inside of Mediabrands and capabilities that are in programmatic and then over time with a data stack. Acxiom, which has helped us move faster down that track, and its data business is quite healthy. Its core business, because it's long-term contracts and pretty sizable scale-up builds, doesn't necessarily have the same growth rates, but we're comfortable with that. Our healthcare business, which has been a very strong grower and is helpful to us, both top and bottom line, kind of at the group level. Then in the last 24 months, sort of post-reopening, the experiential and event businesses have performed well for us. I think that's actually where a lot of that kind of comes in. I think that integrating multiple capabilities and being more solutions-oriented with clients has been helpful for us, trying to focus more on kind of accountable outcomes and accountable marketing and business transformation work with clients as during the pandemic, they dealt with the reality that they actually had to sort of stop saying the word e-commerce and actually doing that kind of activity. That's another area that's been helpful to us. I think there isn't a major strategic shift coming our way in terms of how we look to kind of continue to build on that record. Can we maybe sort of switch to sort of next year in terms of ad budgets? Obviously, the ad panel this morning, as we touched on earlier, was probably, I don't know, 4.5%-6% growth in terms of advertising outlook. I mean, can you maybe give us some early indications in terms of what your clients are thinking about, how things are shaping for 2023? I mean, not really. I mean, I don't mean to disappoint here, but I think what we shared when we talked about kind of third quarter and our look to the balance of the year, still, which is that there is a ton of uncertainty that people are either sort of holding off and/or just they're looking to keep options open, or they're asking us to help them think through what the shift will look like if they move to more performance, media activity, kind of the kinds of things that would have in the day been referred to as lower funnel. But I don't think that I could say to you for a fact that in looking at our clients, they know I think their cycles are getting tighter, so they're not looking at 2023 holistically, although they have to, right? They have to think about how they're going to go into the upfront. They have to think about the extent to which they're going to kind of engage with some of the new opportunities that are out there. I can give you sort of macro trends as in people are more focused on performance. People are more focused on the media that is owned and earned, and they're looking for ways to ensure that they're either maximizing that or holding that up as a way to then decide whether the kind of media that they have to go out and purchase really should factor into their planning, and then with our teams, we literally, Ellen and I just started the forward planning process, which runs through December and usually the first half, if not all of January, with our teams, and we're a business made up of a series of businesses. So I don't think it makes sense to get kind of ahead of the process. It's somewhat helpful to see what you said, which is that there seems to be consensus that the media spend part of what happens with the media owners, at least for us, given that we run a media business that's entirely agnostic and that is more about advising clients on how to spend the money than being volume-driven ourselves. I don't think that that's going to, I think the big question mark is just the macro around if it's a relatively modest downturn, I think all of the things we're talking about will do. I think what was discussed this morning, when you have folks seeing a relatively short impact of the downturn, where you begin to see the light kind of at the middle of next year. So that's what we'll probably plan more conservatively than that in terms of our costs. But typically, obviously, at the start of the year, you'll probably start to see that cost price on a- I think you'll probably be seeing occasional bits of news, dribs and drabs of news coming out of our various agencies to say that people are beginning to think about, I mean, we've got places in our business where people are hiring, where we're growing, and we see really interesting stuff because the performance inside the portfolio has variability to it. So there are parts of the business, as I said, that are accretive to our results. And there you still have the need for a lot of the newer forward-looking skill sets. And then other places where people are going to position to with the understanding that 2023 doesn't have the visibility we'd prefer to have. In terms of sort of things like payment terms, changes that we saw through previous downturns, is there any sort of indications in terms of clients who are asking for changes in payment terms to help them through what potentially can happen next year, or are these still part of the discussion for next year? That has not sort of reared its head as yet, which isn't to say that it won't. I mean, we're very, very, again, we're super disciplined about that because we just think that there's such downside to, if they really think that you as a provider of, as I said, a certain kind of advisory and as a professional services company is going to start becoming their bank, it's really not a good day, so we're not seeing it, and were we to, I think we would walk away from, I mean, you do hear that it happens, whether it's that some clients are driving for it or some folks in our space are more amenable, but it doesn't seem like a good place to go. You mentioned you talked about a shift in the media businesses towards performance, which obviously naturally helps yourself with where you're positioned in terms of Acxiom and Kinesso. Is there a bigger shift that's happening in terms of where media budget has been allocated and more money is being shifted into performance? I mean, as I said, I think that you're having more discussions around that. That's interesting and a good thing, and I think you have a lot of clients. I mean, I think it would have been a long-term trend anyway, independent of whatever we're going into over the next, whatever it is, 9-12 months forward. Because as proxies go away, as poor quality third-party data becomes less central to how smarter and more sophisticated marketers go to market, obviously we benefit from having a lot of large multinational clients who are somewhere on that sort of journey of how can we be more digital, more data-driven, more outcome-focused. I think that you were going to see that anyway. I think you were going to see the degree to which clients wanted to take control of their first-party data and, as I said, push out and get the most from all the media that's directly adjacent to them as a way to then assess how much they do then kind of across walled gardens with more traditional media owners and those kinds of media, that kind of media inventory. So I think we're going to see that over time anyway. I think you're going to sort of see the kind of brand and performance become either more of a continuum or just get sort of kind of accordioned. So yeah. If we took the healthcare side of the business as we go into next year, I mean, how resilient is that as a business model if things really do unwind? I don't think anything if the macroeconomic shock is really significant. I kind of go gravity applies to anything, right? So you drop me out of a 20th-story window. I can be super fit. It's still not going to be a good day when I hit the ground, right? So I guess I would say we definitely see the data business and the media business that is powered by the data business and healthcare. I believe there's more resilience there. On healthcare specifically, if you look at kind of consumer surveys, whether it's across geography or even across most socioeconomic kind of groupings, there are things that people get around to eliminating from a personal budget or addressing or trying to figure out ways to save on less. Booze is one of them, but so is healthcare. But no, I mean, I think it's true. It's weird, but it shows up in a lot of those, and people's pets, by the way. But so the healthcare business has a series of things about it. So the nature of what you're taking to market is more vital to people's lives. So that's one thing. And then the way in which we go to market is more sort of sophisticated, has science behind it, and has kind of specificity around who I'm speaking to and the regulations around how I speak to them and what happens when that complicated marketing program goes into market. So I think we see that as likely to be more resilient. This can also involve in terms of where we're at the moment, is how sort of confident are we going into the fourth quarter and the full year? I mean, we've had others on the stage basically hosting a peer review of years, and they were saying 80%-85% visibility on Q4. Things are still looking good. I don't know if there's any commentary that you'd like to put out there in terms of what Q4 is shaping, and particularly, obviously, in relation to the project-based work that has some impact in the fourth quarter. Sort of intrigued as to how they decide they've got that level of, because that seems really precise in a business where you're activating a ton, a ton, a ton of projects for a lot of clients. I don't think I'd answer it by saying that you would get, I guess what I'd say to you is we were super clear, whatever it was, six or seven weeks ago, as to where and how we saw the fourth quarter, and nothing has changed since that we would feel that we wouldn't have an obligation to say something's changed, so that would be a way that I would address the question. I think it's also interesting that they're saying that they've got that because it is a quarter that, because it's so much of the kind of project-based work we're talking, project-based, excuse me, that we're talking about is. It is holiday themed, right? And so we'll see it when we see it, but the quarter does lean heavily into that last month, and we don't provide in-quarter guidance. But the tenor is what we shared with the investor community, which is clients are wanting to keep some measure of optionality, and yet we work with big clients who don't want to drop off consumers' radar, don't want to lose the connectivity and the dialogue that they've got with clients, and have nothing to make in the fourth quarter. So I wouldn't. I'm not going to go 82%. No, that wasn't, I wasn't pitching that. No, no. I'm just intrigued that that's how they. That's an interesting way to approach it. If we go into some pitch activities next year, sort of where does IPG sit in terms of, is it more on defense? Is it more on the offensive? What are the opportunities? I mean, I think we'll see more net new to us. I think we'll see pitch activity in the media space, maybe more than we have. And everybody, we've also had this moment of, is it going to toggle back on again after COVID? So if there was pent-up demand from 2020, and it was interesting because I don't know that we saw what everybody assumed would be the case. And then, I mean, I think that's probably where we'll see it. We see a fair bit of activity in the healthcare space, although that often doesn't kind of get to trade publications, things of that nature, just because that's a client community that's much more kind of stick-to-your-knitting, don't put your business out in the world. And then, I mean, I think it'll probably be either U.S. or global more than. I mean, I don't think Europe feels like it's going to be challenged. And there's some large multinationals based out of Europe, so it might modestly tamp down activity because some of those companies will just be going, "Do we need that headache in the middle of whatever else they're going through?" Right? Nice. [Please.] If we look at sort of previous cycles and where we're going, obviously, the business model is probably very different from where we were with previous economic cycles. Can you sort of maybe touch in terms of how you think the model is now positioned for this cycle and how more defensive it is relative to any sort of macro weakness that may come through? I mean, I think we've been talking about it a bit just in the rest of the conversation that we've been having, right? So I mean, you'd have to go back to 2008, 2009 to, I think, have something that's like for like because I think 2020 was just so anomalous and just so weird, right, in that companies were very, very concerned about liquidity. So the knee-jerk of shutting digital media off was the only, it was the only place they could go to basically just cancel inventory quickly. And so the question is, are clients sort of smart enough to know that that wasn't a perfect answer, but that given that there was just this unprecedented level of uncertainty, they went there, got it. And then consumers were at home, and clearly, the economy's contracted, but there was a lot of kind of government subsidy of consumption going on. I just don't see 2020 as a thing that is going to be super kind of helpful or instructive in terms of thinking about it. Then you've got to go back a ways. I think you get to some of what we're talking about, which is in the day when you went through that contraction, that kind of macro recession, which was obviously everywhere and driven by something else, which I think you all know better than we do, obviously, because what the trigger of that contraction was. You had far fewer, I mean, the range of activity that was very one-to-one was really limited for kind of our sector overall. You wouldn't have had kind of performance media. You wouldn't have had digital media in general. You wouldn't have had a data piece to the business, which with us is very closely connected to the media piece. So I mean, all of those are qualitatively different than what you had kind of the last go-around. You would have had a lot less sophistication around and specialization around your healthcare business. And for us, there's IPG Health, but then there are also pretty sizable healthcare clients inside of Mediabrands. And so that is relative to our portfolio. That's a pretty sizable part of the mix now, which isn't to say that we don't have businesses that we're still trying to take on that. We've been evolving to where it's professional services with a layer of some kind of intelligence baked into it. And some parts of our business are further behind on that. So I think project businesses will definitely still be impacted. On consumer advertising, I guess it's hard to tell because it'll be at least in part how much has that agency factored in kind of an audience-led approach to how they interact with clients or what is their mix? Because I think the impact of the recession is also going to be pretty disparate client sector to client sector. And so if we look at sort of profitability of the business, I mean, if we go think about margins into next year, I mean, how do we think about the puts and takes in terms of 2023, but then if we look at beyond that in terms of what are the structural drivers for higher profitability coming out of 2023? Okay. Well, I'll take that. I think probably backwards. So where there's growth, we've consistently demonstrated that we can take that growth and turn it into incremental margin, and we believe that there's still opportunity to do that if we're taking kind of whatever the one-off of 2023 is off the table. And so I think the underlying model has upside to it there. And then I think the underlying model in kind of out years has incremental margin from some of the things that I mentioned earlier around new revenue streams, which we think will be more profitable, and we're still in the relatively early stages, true pay-for-performance, productizing some of our offerings, licensing some of the tools and the IP that we build on top of the data layer. So for the long term, we see continued margin upside on the business. The puts and takes as you go into 2023, there's just been so much volatility with, and so this year, the incentive will be beneficial relative to 2021, but reflective of the fact that 2021 was exceptional performance. This year will be, we believe, strong performance. I think that I mentioned earlier, we've got other levers that will be very thoughtful and very vigilant around as we head into 2023, which are sort of other components of kind of the PSRS side of things. We are looking at our business in the same way that, I mean, so we're looking at sort of internal business transformation because there is process in our place that has sort of built up over time, right? You still do certain things in a scaled media business or in a major, in a big global network in our world in ways that can be made either more efficient because you're going to do it offshore, or you're going to get more productivity in your higher-end employees with new skill sets because you're not burdening them with things that are kind of repetitive or can be done elsewhere, so we're looking hard at that as another place, and so I think for 2023, it's sort of a function of, as you said, kind of what does a downturn look like and how disciplined can we be so that we can, again, I can't speak to where on growth or net- close net to zero. I mean, you'll hear us say that we're challenging ourselves and looking at holding margin at flat. I mean, we see a—we've got kind of line of sight to that. So 2023 does have a question mark, but beyond it, we see a lot of opportunity. When you say holding margin flat, so what sort of top-line consideration is that based on? I mean, it becomes a lot about where you would see. We were talking earlier about what's more resilient and what's not. And so a lot of it would just do with. It would have to do with the mix of. We already have a portfolio where you've got a range of performance outcomes in terms of some of our businesses perform quite well and are accretive to margin, some less so. So it's sort of you have to sort of go, "All right, what would be impacted?" So as I was saying earlier, your project businesses would be more impacted. They're also, as you see it now, the ones that have kind of a ways to go on getting them to where we'd like to see them in terms of profitability, whether it's by rethinking business processes, things of that nature. So it's a hard one to answer until we start moving through it and can actually see where the moving parts are. Okay. But I mean, that's a positive outcome if you can hold margins flat, presumably next year, depending on where that growth outlook sits. That's what we would, okay, whatever you're going to call it, and that's what we would aspire to. Yeah. Can we just talk about sort of capital allocation as well in terms of what the plans are for next year and going forward? I mean, it's funny because Ellen and I have been doing this, whether it was at Mediabrands or now here. So there isn't a big strategic left turn. And on capital allocation, it's sort of the same in that we were focused and thoughtful and huge credit to our team in delivering off of the Acxiom deal. And as soon as that got basically ticked off the list, we got back into share repurchase. We've been really clear for a long time that we are committed to both that and growing the dividend, which we have for some time now and continue to do through the uncertainty of 2020. We've tended to really, really push hard and kick tires on, "Can we build it ourselves before we have to go kind of do scale acquisition?" I mean, of the big players in our space over 10 years plus, we've probably been the most disciplined in that regard and still able to do what we've done growth-wise. So kind of we feel like those are the three pieces and going to be very kind of stay-the-course-y. I mean, we still have to, what for us is a meaningful deal in the commerce space. So we might be looking at things range and bearing in that area, but nothing Acxiom side. So yeah, capital allocation is something that we believe. You touched on that in terms of adding capabilities around commerce. And obviously, people have talked about connected TVs as an example of other areas of growth pockets within the industry. What other sort of core capabilities do you think that you might need or would like to have on a sort of three-year view? I'd say commerce a lot. I'd say commerce is clearly the biggest area of focus. That means a lot of things, though, right? Because that means something like a RafterOne to take us much further and faster on the Salesforce platform where we've got, we're very strong in other areas. I think performance media, retail media, but not, again, we don't believe in owning media. So given that we run a media sort of offering that is more about advisory to clients and less about volume, so I think it would be expertise around or toolsets and some tech that folks have built that help you sort of the part of e-com that is marketplace-driven, that is sort of kind of taking data, marrying it with more tech, and being smarter about how you help clients kind of invest or activate in some of those areas. I mean, that's kind of the, I mean, there's certain things in commerce where design can be very helpful because you're physically showing up at retail. So maybe there's something there. But again, it would have to have a way to plug back into the tech stack. Okay. So we're conscious of time. I think we've got time for another couple of questions. I don't know if there's any other questions coming in or not. If not, maybe just a couple more for me. Just on inflation, obviously, you touched and said at the start of the equation that there wasn't really any sort of major impacts from a revenue standpoint. Can we just talk more about what you're trying to do in terms of the offset from the talent side around inflation, around outsourcing, offshoring, and what's talent looking like in terms of churn in the industry? Sure. I mean, I think that we talked a lot about, and we'll come back at it. We've seen modest impacts on our salary line. We believe that to be manageable. It may help that in building our more tech-enabled businesses going back four or five years, the answer was never to sort of solve for that by trying to bring in or recruit that talent by thinking that we could compete with the major platforms for that talent. So we were always solving for that in a way that was, I think, fairly nimble. So whether that was finding secondary markets where you had strong tech talent domestically, where you could essentially bring in the skill set, or finding people who had tried, whether it was a platform or whether it was the startup world, and were at a point in their career trajectory where for them, it was less about the huge, maybe non-existent pot of gold, and it was more about, "I actually have a mortgage, and I know that if I help you build out some of this tech, you'll still be here for a while." And it's interesting because I get to work on lots of different kinds of problems. And our teams sourced talent, neurodiverse talent. There were lots of ways that we were kind of in the place where you'd expect us to feel that pressure most dramatically. So we've always said that we see that as manageable. We've seen less churn in the last three months, which I think is indicative of. Is that across all the practices, or is that specifically? No, that's in the places where we're looking to do the most hiring, which are in the parts of the business that are kind of the higher growth and the ones where we've still kept those recs open and given people to understand that they can go find that talent. So in a sense, you're seeing at least some of the dislocation in tech show up. So that's oddly maybe kind of helpful because you're seeing a lot of folks kind of running into issues because you're seeing those big, big numbers of kind of reductions at the platform and some of the tech companies. So kind of we're still good with we have seen some inflation there. It doesn't keep us from getting to our goals or the targets we set around margin, whether it's this year or in out years. We are going to rethink how you take the work that distracts your higher-value people in certain markets and finding new ways of getting that work done. And then I think we talked a bit about whether it's a cost we can and how that conversation with clients happens around passing that cost on. So yeah, nothing dramatic to add to that. Thank you very much. I think we're out of time. So Philippe, thank you very much indeed for coming in today. Much appreciated. Thank you. And again, apologies to everybody who I was rude to over there. It's just like.