Should we get started? Okay, great. Super. All right, I'm happy to have back at the conference this year, Omnicom. With us today we have John Wren, Chairman and CEO, Phil Angelastro, EVP and CFO, and at the end, Paolo Yuvienco, CTO. Thanks so much for being here today, guys. John, maybe I'll start with you. You recently reported your first full quarter following the IPG acquisition, and maybe we could start there. Can you update us on where things stand with integration and how the merits of the deal look relative to your initial expectations? Okay. Well, we're well on target with our synergies and what we had promised. Most of the synergies we promised this year were real estate-related initially, and then labor. Real estate, probably $150 million. That was taken care of and immediately, almost day one. The second part was labor. The labor started December 1st and goes through the first part of it goes through just about now, and that was the duplication of management because we didn't need as much middle management as each company had, and we made a lot of changes and consolidations. That was positive. We sunsetted quite a number of brands. To get to the final answer, probably about $150 million-$160 million of labor was done in the first quarter. You'll see a lot more of that being completed as when we report the next quarter. The synergies are well on target. Later on in the year, we have plans to outsource our accounting function for the most part and certain IT functions, which we believe we can hand over to experts, get a better result in the product. You'll see most of those benefits coming in late in the, I would say almost the fourth quarter by the time they come through. into 2027, yeah. Yeah, certainly into 2027. That, in terms of hitting the targets, which it was $900 million, I think, for this year, what did we say from? $900 million, and then total, $1 billion. Right that comes between 2027 and 2028. Yeah, a lesser amount in 2028. We're well on track there. We're on track, we've changed our approach. We've centralized quite a bit, we're doing more and more of that, including the way we actually hunt for business. If I had to categorize or classify how both companies operated prior to the merger, we essentially waited to be invited to a pitch. We're being far more aggressive now. We're identifying companies that we believe we can bring value to, we're going out and trying to stimulate the conversation even though the company's not stimulating it. That is just beginning, we have a great group of people who are working on that, we think that will yield additional growth to us as we get further and further into the year. We've always, one, we batted above average when it comes to a pitch that somebody else calls. We're going out now and creating this environment because we think we have the tools, and we think we have Omni, which I'll let Paolo talk about later, which actually differentiates us quite a bit and can add value to clients. There's even things that have been discovered which I wasn't aware of in a conversation which I'm sure you'll get to, which will be LiveRamp. We used to be partners because they were part of Acxiom. We were, we had lengthy conversations with our folks yesterday, and we found out that like General Motors, where we don't do the media, we license the Omni platform to them. We're engaging and trying to stimulate conversations with clients in far different ways than ever before. Last but not least, and we'll see how this works, we're changing the incentive programs we have for individuals in the operating companies for 2026 to be more specific about focus on growth in their individual markets. The big global pitches come up, they come up by themselves, but there's quite a bit we can do to help ourselves in some of the larger local market business that we've otherwise not really focused on in the past. Just one clarification in terms of the synergies as far as 2026 goes. You know, we're confident that we will get the $900 million in cost reduction synergies. We expect 75%-80% of that to flow through to EBIT for the year. Right. You saw our margins in the first quarter. We'll be continuing to keep those, I think. John, when you announced the deal on December 24th, I remember there was a lot of early concern on talent or client exodus. I'm curious, you know, what's been the experience to date, especially as you've consolidated some of the offerings on the creative side? We have very little. Nothing in terms of individuals that were noticeable that would cause me any angst or so. There were a couple of clients that I think we lost because we deserved to lose, not coming out of Omnicom, but coming out of Interpublic, because of the pricing, where we were getting paid in excess of what we would normally charge. That became very obvious. There was also a change in management in one case, and we got what we deserved, but we learned from it. Got it. From a business mix standpoint, you've used this moment in time to reorient the portfolio. You've announced dispositions of agencies, I think that previously contributed over $3 billion in revenue. I guess first, John, what's the key takeaway investors should have on the new Omnicom and where you're looking to operate? Then Phil, maybe you could just update us on the status of those dispositions. Sure. Well, the world's gotten even more and more complex than it was. Where we're focused on media-related assets, which in the first quarter were 62%, I think, of our revenue. Or excuse me, 52%. 56% 50%, 56%. We expect it to be 61% by the time we get to the full year. That, plus the creative assets that we have. The creative assets are not fully reorganized just yet. That connectivity, clients are increasingly looking for and open to, looking at assigning us their entire portfolio. The only industry I would say that isn't, and it's very wise that they're not, is some of the studios, right? If you have a choice, you pick the two biggest, because that's where you can get the most bang for them. Other than that, there's generally been selection of a single agency answering all the complex needs of that client, and also embedding Omni, which we use now as an operating system, and we're increasingly training our groups into its uses, and it's changing every day, which I'm sure Paolo will talk about in a few minutes. Why don't we just follow up on that point. In January, you launched the new Omni, layering Acxiom data, AI tools across the organization. Paolo, if you wanna take it, maybe you could just speak to some of the changes, the advantage of own data, maybe where you're seeing the early ROI on this iteration of the platform. Sure. I think everyone probably knows this by now, that data is really the fuel to artificial intelligence and really getting the most out of artificial intelligence. Acxiom was such a critical part, component part of the IPG acquisition because of that. Using that to fuel our ecosystem and drive deeper level of intelligence across our clients' work is super critical. More specifically, Acxiom's Real ID, which effectively connects 2.9 or 2.6 billion individuals across the globe, 98% of addressable adults in the U.S. I think connecting that to our commerce data, to our cultural data, and all the signals that we've been collecting over the years, connecting that to the capabilities, specifically around media, commerce, and CRM, is delivering exceptional results even in these early days for many of our clients already. We've seen things like within financial services, one of the top five financial services companies in the world, I think we announced, we said this and stated this on Investor Day, we were driving 25% increase in customer acquisition for certain parts of their business. Within one of our CPG clients, connecting kind of the retail transaction data with all of the wealth of behavioral data taken from Acxiom, we were driving a 15% increase across their investments, so their marketing investments. Data has significantly shifted kind of our ability to drive better and faster outcomes for clients. Omni, which Omnicom has had as an operating system for several years now, really allows us to actually propagate that across the entire enterprise and organization and every facet of our disciplines to drive those customer, those client results. All right. As you know, Dave, we relaunched Omni at the beginning of the year, and, you know, continue to improve it as we go. We took the best parts of Omnicom's platform and the best parts of IPG's platform, and essentially, you know, enhanced the platform that we use today. There'll be more investment in the platform as we go throughout 2026 and beyond. Certainly the things that Paolo's talking about, you know, are gonna only be enhanced by the new, the new improved platform. I don't know, Paolo, if you want to add. Yeah, I was just about to add that. Go ahead. I was gonna say that the real kind of shift is this agentic framework, which Omnicom started that journey roughly two years ago, of building an agentic framework that would effectively orchestrate our marketing workflows using AI and generative AI. Having that layered on top of the data ecosystem and the business intelligence that resides within each one of our disciplines has been a game changer for us, and has allowed us effectively to lead in certain areas like agentic media buying, synthetic audience creation and deployment, as well as creative execution and production. With regards to your media practice, and you mentioned at Q1 I think it was 56% of the overall revenue. You know, even prior to the merger, this was a leading growth segment for you. Maybe we can just review some of the industry or Omnicom specific factors that have been driving that performance. I think, well, one, at this point we're the largest in the world. That gives us permission to sit and negotiate almost in every market the best deals we can possibly cut for our clients, and we've been doing that. One of the interesting things that happened in the merger is there was a pretty fair balance in terms of the people that were let go between Omnicom people Interpublic people. One of the major changes we made, which I think is a vast improvement to our approach and what our profitability from that media growth is going to be, was we took the investment approach and people that were at IPG and we actually purged ourselves of the way we were approaching it at Omnicom prior to the deal, and those are the people who are leading that aspect of the business today. That's brought fresh eyes into that area and created better deals actually, I think, than we would've otherwise gotten to. Prior to that we were more bottoms up, now we're more top down. Those deals are available for us to show the benefit to our clients and to share it with our clients. I think that makes us more competitive in the long run. Media, our CRM assets, which are closely connected to that, were operating completely separate. They're motivated and incented now to work more closely together. Between now and Cannes you'll see we're reorganizing that aspect of our business. Those announcements will come out in the next two or three weeks. That plus our Flywheel Commerce Cloud. You know, one thing that we didn't talk about is we are one of two companies that I'm aware of, because when we started and the engineers we started with are friends with the ones who built Amazon, we have a direct API into Amazon. In addition to all the other data that we collect, we get that feed in real time every single day. When you look through that and somebody, you don't even have to be terribly technological to understand it, we know quite a bit about every human being in the room and outside the room and roaming around the world. It certainly has an impact on what we can do from a media perspective as far as how the data is integrated. Yeah which you might wanna comment on, Paolo. Bringing all that data together gives us, I think, the highest fidelity view of consumers around the globe. We understand not just their behaviors, we not only understand the cultural kind of significance of those behaviors given all the cultural data that we've collected, but we understand the transactions that are happening across the ecosystem of marketplaces. That in effect gives us probably a quite a unique view, that I don't think any other holding company or any other entity for that matter can provide around what consumers are doing, and ultimately what they want. That again gives us the advantage to then drive better messaging and better targeting for our clients. One just one last clarification, David. You know, I had said 56%, it was actually 52% in the first quarter. We expect it to be 56% by the time we get to the fourth quarter, going forward to grow from there. Okay. Okay. Maybe, staying on media, bringing it a little topical. Yesterday we saw the announcement of Publicis buying LiveRamp. There's a couple of different ways to unpack this, but why don't we start here. Omnicom is a customer of LiveRamp. Does this potentially create a challenge or a conflict for you, given your data would presumably sit with a competitor? Is there a need for adjustment on your part? Yeah. There's a contract between LiveRamp and us and it's mutual. It nets to zero. It's they pay us $50 million for data every year, we pay $50 million for other services and other products that LiveRamp, we can acquire in other places. You have to go back in time a little bit. Acxiom and LiveRamp were one- Yep until Interpublic purchased them. They separated, Paolo knows more, because LiveRamp to function and to be of any value to a client had to be Switzerland. Couldn't be integrated into Acxiom and what we ultimately planned to do with it and did with it, as opposed to what Interpublic was slow to do with Acxiom. We had a plan. There was a plan in place that any connection as a result, since they were once together and they were doing different things, there's a lot of closeness between those people. They even went to market together in addition to the contracts we had with each other. Those contracts run till the very first quarter of 2028, and as a result, Acxiom had plans to completely rid itself and come up with a Real ID by the beginning of 2028, no longer having to depend on LiveRamp at all. That changed yesterday afternoon when I moved that drop dead date to yesterday a year from now, where we'll be completely separated from them, even if we have to invest a little money to honor our contract for the balance of the year. Why don't you comment, Paolo? When Paolo wants you. Yeah, I think in the near term it doesn't change much, right? No, it's changing. If we're partnering with LiveRamp through our Acxiom relationship, that is not gonna change. As John said, over the last five years, Acxiom has been building out Real ID, effectively as an alternative and more modern version of an identity solution. That identity solution is cloud native. It is interoperable by nature, which means that it can utilize any other identity graph, including the Ramp ID from LiveRamp, UID from The Trade Desk, and various others, to then integrate that graph on behalf of our clients. Again, there's no change in the immediate future, but there has been plans in place over the last few years already to start migrating existing clients and customers and new customers to basically own their own identity graph through the Real ID solution. That is always kind of the take that we've pushed, the narrative that we've pushed with clients, is that they should own their graph, they should own their data, and that privacy is the number one thing that we think about, and there's no better company to execute on that and that narrative than Acxiom. Right. I hate talking about competitors, as I, at least after 30 years should have that reputation of staying out of everybody's business except for my own. I don't see there's any way that you can get any value keeping LiveRamp independent of the rest of your infrastructure and owning it. That'll change over time. They still have to get clearance from the FTC to get this approved, you know, It'll take some time to get it done. We've just accelerated some of the actions we were always planning to take. I guess, John, coming off this, there'll probably be a natural question from investors about your own media offering. Does, you know, yesterday's announcement change your view on your assets and, you know, what you have entering RFPs? Maybe for Paolo, I guess I'm interested in how you viewed some of the points in the presentation around data co-creation and its role in agentic, and maybe you can just speak a little bit to your efforts to date on agentic so far and some of your initiatives. Sure. We have our own roadmap in terms of things that we're improving upon and ways that we're expanding our media offerings or capabilities through the Omni platform, including, and Paolo can speak to this too, direct to publisher connections, as opposed to having to go through DSPs and SSPs and et cetera. That is always on our roadmap. That will keep our media operation, I think, well in advance of most of our competitors and make us very attractive to clients. Because right now there's a lot of martech companies that sit between the advertiser and the publisher, and as you have to go through those different martech companies, they're taking a toll. I think technology's advancing fast enough that certainly within the next two years, that will be simplified quite a bit, and benefiting both our clients and us. Paolo, I don't know what you want to add. Yeah. I think we were very early on in realizing that agents, and more specifically agents with using generative AI was going to be the future. Two years ago, we embarked on a journey on building our agentic framework on top of the Omni system, and now it is fully embedded into Omni. That agentic framework is quite mature and robust in its ability to actually drive all sorts of different automations and, more importantly, to surface our proprietary intelligence and data into every facet of the marketing life cycle. As part of that journey, because we were so mature in our agentic capabilities, we started, as we've publicly stated in the past, last summer on really trying to understand some of the new protocols that were emerging around media buying, and things like AdCP, AMP, looking to see how we would integrate those capabilities into our system. At CES, we announced that we started testing those pipes with real dollars, but not for real clients, and were successful in doing so. What we recently announced is that we actually have now started to test those pipes with real clients and real dollars flowing through. It's still quite small and very much still in the experimental stages, hasn't scaled across, you know, media budgets, but what we're trying to do is lay the groundwork for what the future of agentic media looks like. As it relates to LiveRamp and kind of the statements around agentic capabilities, it's worth noting that we did not use LiveRamp for any of our agentic media buys. It was not necessary because our whole thesis around agentic media is around the idea of shortening the media supply chain. That doesn't mean that we're eliminating every part of the media supply chain, but shortening that path in order to drive a greater percentage of working media dollars for our clients. Efficiency place is a key tenant of why we're doing this. Additionally, it's about driving effectiveness of those media buys. By shortening the path, You know, with every hop in the media supply chain and supply path, you lose a certain level of fidelity across the ecosystem, even if you're using kind of identity solutions. What we're able to do in shortening that path is actually increase the fidelity and visibility of consumers that we're actually targeting, and coupled with our data solution in Acxiom and our identity graph with Real ID, we're actually, you know, in the tests that we've done, we've seen significant increases in effectiveness in the areas of the media buys that we've done. Now again, it's very early days, so it's still kind of we're still laying the foundation for this all. What we're ensuring is that we are laying the path so that our clients can leverage that once it becomes a scaled offering. Maybe we'll switch gears. John, I just wanted to go back to something you talked a bit earlier about, which is integrated wins with the work, kind of crosses creative media, production. Maybe you can just discuss the model, kind of what it means in terms of the scope of work, retention with clients, the advantages to them. Sure. Well, one of the key advantages we have is using Omni as a platform across all of our crafts, all of our various marketing services, broadens the perspective of our employees. Suddenly, a great creative person who might have an idea doesn't have the time in the past to look at what data is actually out there, which Omni can bring to them very quickly and maybe stimulate different approaches than they would've otherwise started with, improving the value of that product. By having everything together or doing most of the work together, it's much easier to, one, take complexity out. Two, to be more focused on the client's business problems as well as what their marketing issues are. It takes out bureaucracy, layers of people that are representing one craft or another craft. I think by doing all that, the client benefits, they'll be able to see the benefits in real time. Some clients who are interested will be trained on how to use the Omni platform. I would imagine over time, because this changes quite quickly, they might decide to take certain aspects of that in-house, which is just fine. That's something we're very much used to and we, I think without exception, we've always collaborated with. This different approach is nice. It sounds great as I sit around my operating committee and talk about it, and everybody smiles because I'm the one bringing it up. We've also changed the incentives for how people get rather significant bonuses and what we want them to accomplish. Omnicom never really did that before. Omnicom rewarded its executives for the success that they had, but never with an intended purpose other than simply growth. All right. Also when you get into a situation like this, and we found this to be true already, you wind up with multi-year contracts with the client because they know that you're gonna make certain investments going into it, and it's only fair to have multi-year relationships in order to sustain those. That's very beneficial to our business. I mean, in advertising marketing, there's typically a 15% churn of people changing. Vendors are always pitching business every single year. Well, as you extend your client relationship, you get to focus more on the things that you want to, as opposed to things that are being put to you. I don't know if you wanna add anything, Philip or Paolo, you can. I think the integration is something certainly that we can do. We can do it at a global scale. It's something that clients ultimately want, 'cause it benefits the clients. They can streamline the vendor relationships that they have. They can see the value in the product that truly gets delivered in a truly integrated solution. If clients didn't need it, want it, and ask for it, you know, we certainly would respond probably in a, in a little different way. Ultimately we're trying to meet our clients' needs, you know, make the investments in the business accordingly. John- Yeah before Yeah, I was gonna say, before we run out of time, I have to ask you about current trends. Obviously, there's a lot to consider with the macro, just wanted to check in on the latest you're hearing from clients in terms of how they're thinking about spending or project commitments. Well, many of things that we've talked about here today are topical. Clients wanna hear about it, and it benefits us, given the state of where we are, because we can typically prove, because we have the tools, how we're optimizing their marketing dollars. When I can prove to you that you'll get $1.40 back for every dollar that you'll invest, you might not invest a dollar, you might put $0.20 in your pocket, but you'll invest some of it. Therefore, you know, increasing the organic growth I'm getting from existing clients. The other topics at the moment are, as you would imagine, global in nature and the impact of what's going on in the Middle East, and how quickly is it gonna come to my market and affect my products. Oddly enough, nobody's happy about the situation at all. Nobody has any positive things to say other than they wish it was over quickly. None of them are predicting that it's gonna have an immediate impact on their business, this, so far in terms of what they're projecting. Now, also, this is probably getting a little off script, they also believe that the government will try to pull rabbits out of their hat between now and the midterm elections in order to preserve their position, so they see yet unidentified benefits that are gonna come their way, which may offset some of these challenges. Most of them have gone through and cleaned up or reorganized their supply chain, and it's really the price of oil and its impact that becomes very topical today. Phil, maybe one last one. Sure. You talked about $900 million run rate synergies. You talked about what would impact this year. There's the ultimate $1.5 billion target. It's a common question, but how do you kinda think about the out years, you know, the flow through and balancing kind of that versus, you know, need for reinvestment, just given all the change in the industry? Well, I think it is a balance for sure. I think we're certainly comfortable with the estimates we put out, and we're confident we can get the cost reductions achieved as we go, you know, through 2026 and into 2027 and 2028. What the world's gonna look like, what the technology landscape is gonna look like, what the marketing ecosystem's gonna look like, you know, we're certainly way off. We know technology and the way consumers buy stuff is gonna continue to change quite rapidly. One thing we know is we will continue to invest in the business and invest in the platform, so that we can deliver what our clients need and deliver it in a efficient and effective way. It's hard to say how much of that's gonna flow through, but certainly, you know, our goal is, you know, to achieve the savings and to deliver as much of it as we can. But at the same time, invest in a sustainable platform. Sustainable in terms of, you know, ongoing growth of the business. Okay. With that, we're out of time. John, Phil, Paolo thanks so much for being here. Thanks. Thanks for having us. Thank you all. Great to see you.