verification, which is important in this business. We found ways to really streamline that process. You know, I rattled off a few in the prepared remarks. Those are just a few of the things that we're doing that where AI is bringing real advantage. When you put it all together, it's just driving better execution rates and efficiency.
Greg, I would just add to that that we talked about this really to start the year and after last quarter as well, just the investments we're making in that business to sustain the growth. So you're seeing that here in Q2. You'll see it in the second half of the year, you know, really proud of the team to be able to put up, you know, nearly 20% revenue growth in that degree of incremental margin improvement. But I think I will make sure we just reiterate that, you know, we're preparing and getting the business in a place where we can continue to sustain this rate of growth, do it in a very high quality way. And as you saw this quarter, we hit that, you know, that 95% execution.
So puts us in a great place to be able to really grow the second half of the year into 2027. yep okay great thanks for the holy color congrats on the quarter i'll pass it off thank you your next question comes from the line of luke morrison with can accord luke your line is now open hey guys uh thanks for for taking the question here so i i think you called out cpg merchandising projects as a relative bright spot possibly a leading indicator for the rest of branded uh can can you just help me understand sort of like the underlying mix there you know
is client spend rotating within that segment um are you seeing a mix shift like help help me understand what's happening with that comment so if you think about that business um two of the big drivers of the branded services are you know kind of headquarters selling or where we represent a client at headquarters and then retail merchandising where we are sending folks in to execute in-store. And you're seeing persistent challenges within stock in a lot of category, not every category, but probably a majority of categories across the store. And there's a lot of reasons for that at retail. And you're not going to sell it if it's not on the shelf. And I think our clients understand that. So you're seeing an increase in project work so that you've got contracted continuity work and if you look back maybe a year ago projects were call it you know maybe 15 percent of our total work in this space in the first half now they're close to a little under 25 percent and so we saw a pretty nice lift in project work a little over 20 percent year over year which is telling us that sort of unplanned need and or opportunity to either get more display space on the floor or remediate out of stocks. And we see, as we look forward and have conversations with clients, both current and perspective, we see an opportunity to lean into this business. And it's a syndicated business. We have some direct teams, but obviously we can see, realize pretty decent margins when you're utilizing an existing force out there um against multiple clients to to solve problems and then we've also put some investment into this area in becoming more alert based and um you know these folks were typically allocated by time so going into stores every week every two weeks every four weeks on behalf of clients we're starting to pilot and realize great results and making it more alert-based where we get a scan or a read from a store and we actually just go in a drawn-down display.
Yeah, yeah, the priority here. As I look at experiential, you know, it's both low-margin segment. So help me just think through, like, what closes that gap? Is it, you know, labor efficiency? Is it event mix? Is there something else there?
Yeah, just to kind of address that in a couple different ways. You know, overall, when modeling that's occurring this year with branded services down and experiential up, you're going to have that kind of weight on the margin profile of the business. You know, we couldn't help but reinvest back in the business this year as well. So you're seeing a little less incremental margin and experiential this quarter, but it's all deliberate. And I would just say, again, puts us in a great place to be able to sustain the growth going forward. If I look ahead, you know, we talk about a path towards stabilization for branded services. So that's what we still see us on that path. Just maybe it's a little slower, but I think you're going to see that slow and gradual improvement in the rate of decline there. You're seeing really good growth and experiential. And then retailer, we talked about that being able to grow in the second half of the year. So you're going to have some equalization, if I can say it that way, of the margin across the businesses as one grows and one declines. And you're going to have, you've got investments that are influencing that. And then you've got the benefit of the stabilization of branded services that will allow us to achieve that, you know, kind of margin stability, ultimately margin growth next year.
Understood. I'll pass it on. Thank you.
There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Dave for closing remarks.
We want to thank everybody for joining and we look forward to connecting with this group.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.
