Capital Markets Day Transcript - STGW 2025-04-02

Beth Sidhu, Other

Hello everyone and welcome to Stagwell's 2025 Investor Day. My name is Beth Sidhu and I'm the Chief Brand and Communications Officer at Stagwell. We're so glad you've joined us today. We're excited to share our progress to date and news about what's to come. Today, you'll hear first from our Chairman and CEO, Mark Penn, followed by leaders from across our C-suite and our agencies. You'll learn about our plans for what Mark calls our phase two growth, various innovations, and how we're set up for success in the next five years. You can see the agenda from our call here and we'll be taking live questions after the presentations if you have a question please put it in the chat at the top of the screen or email it to ir at stagwell global.com before turning the call over to our ceo and chairman i'd like to remind you that today's remarks include forward-looking statements and non-gap financial measures forward-looking statements about the company including those related to earnings guidance are subject to uncertainties and risk factors addressed in the company's SEC filings, including Stagwell's Form 10-K, filed on March 11, 2025. This morning's press release provides definitions and explanations of non-GAAP financial measures used by the company. Definitions, explanations, and reconciliations of historical non-GAAP financial measures can be found in the company's most recent earnings release, dated February 27, 2025, and on our Form 10-K, available on Stagwell's investor website, stagwellglobal.com investors. A recording of today's Virtual Investor Day will be available on the website after the conclusion of the webcast.

Mark Penn, CEO

With that, please welcome Stagwell's Chairman and CEO, Good morning, and welcome to Stagwell's 2025 Investor Day. Just over nine years ago, I started this company with an assistant and an investment from Steve Ballmer. And here we are today with over $2.8 billion in revenue and having built a machine for the modern marketer, spanning over 50 countries and over 12,000 employees. Today, I and the incredible Stagwell team will share with you our plans for the next phase of growth to hit $5 billion in revenue in the next five years, our five-by-five campaign. $5 billion in five years with no expansion of debt ratios and hitting a 20% margin or $1 billion in adjusted EBITDA. Three years ago, many doubted we would be here at this level. We proved them wrong. We are today the world's fastest-growing major advertising holding company. Investors should ask themselves three simple questions as they listen to the presentations today. One, can Stagwell continue to grow? Two, can Stagwell continue to achieve greater scale? And three, can Stagwell continue to innovate for the marketplace? If you believe, as I do, that we meet the tests of having huge runways for growth, scale, and innovation, then you should be as enthusiastic about joining our efforts as I am. Let me put our accomplishments in context. It took Meta 7 years to reach $3 billion in revenue. It took Microsoft 18. And it took IPG 36 years. We are nudging $3 billion in just 9 years. Let me start off by saying that today Steve Ballmer and I have converted all of our C shares to A shares, which means there is now one single class of common shares in a simplified structure, making us eligible for inclusion in more stock indexes and purchases by an expanded list of funds. We're holding this investor day today because I think phase one of our growth is now complete and we are beginning phase two that will take us to the next level in phase one we acquired and grew best-in-class companies like 72 and sunny the harris pole and targeted victory in phase two we're becoming truly scaled marketing network capable of servicing the largest clients holistically with the best combination of creativity and technology in the market Phase two is already underway. Our second half of 2024 total net revenue growth of 11% was more than 400 basis points stronger than our nearest competitor. In the last nine months, we won significant accounts, including big brands like Chevy and Cadillac from General Motors, and new assignments from Visa, Adobe, Starbucks, and Target. Many of these wins came from legacy players. We are taking share. And in just the last few weeks, two of our agencies, 72 and Anomaly, landed on the coveted A-list, and two more, Code and Theory and Gale, were named top B2B agency and top business transformation agency. Stagwell's momentum is building. At this Investor Day, you will learn about the key industry trends that Stagwell is positioned to benefit from, as well as plans we're executing today for increased growth and profits tomorrow. So what further steps will Stagwell take in phase two? First, we're embracing AI smartly. In many ways AI is a huge boost to Stagwell. Clients want a seamless combination of creativity and technology and AI lets us create a new approach combining the best that people could create and the best that AI can do in targeting and distribution. Our digital transformation businesses now consolidated into the code and theory network bring together a diverse set of design and engineering assets that specialize in the last mile. Technology touched by and used by consumers. We believe that every digital experience will need to be reimagined over the next few years to incorporate AI. Code and theory is on the front lines of helping even tech companies utilize and deploy this ai technology you'll see some of the latest applications of agentic ai a powerful technology that will have to be customized and incorporated into virtually every consumer brand experience and we are widening our offerings to clients by offering adobe marketing integration as a new service which brings together a company's internal marketing software into one coherent system. At an Adobe conference two weeks ago, we drew almost 700 demos and leads for this new line of business. I firmly believe that AI is set to change the world over the next decade, and we are set to take advantage of it. Today, we are appointing John Cahan as our chief AI officer. John headed data and analytics at Microsoft, where he worked with me and at ibm and has a deep background in the use and application of marketing data he will spearhead many of our ai initiatives second we are in the process of reorganizing our lines of business internally and externally into marketing services media and commerce advocacy digital transformation and finally the stagwell marketing cloud These new ways of organizing the business are in line with how clients buy the services and products. Each is organized to present scaled global operations to the marketplace. This puts our organization in line with how clients want their services delivered. As we organize into these five divisions, we're going to dome it. Call it the Department of Marketing Efficiency, if you will. Many of you may remember my recent interview with Elon Musk at CES. He may be taking out a trillion dollars worth of costs from the federal government, but we've identified approximately 80 to 100 million dollars of annual costs that we can take out of Stagwell as AI and other automation systems build increased efficiency consistent with the delivery of A-class game-changing products like our flagship Super Bowl commercials. We expect that 60 to 70 million dollars of those costs will be taken out by the end of this year and help bring home a robust 2026 with expanded margins. Importantly, we are paid typically on the basis of delivering outputs. So increased efficiency results in lower costs and higher margins against fixed price deliverable contracts and retainers. The kind of work we do for top clients will continue to be of top value. Third, we are innovating internally, leveraging emerging technologies to develop solutions for improving the efficiency and output of our talent. Our media and commerce operations are undergoing major transformations this year. We recently rolled out version one of the Stagwell ID graph with 130 million unique emails. We are working throughout this year to add another 10 new sources of our proprietary data from our operations that will take this number to over a billion. These data sources include everything from the 50,000 survey interviews our research businesses like Bayer, Harris Poll, and NRG do each week to the location and shopping data we have from the People platform. Our IDGraph team is also starting to work with Palantir to pilot deploying advanced targeting using military-grade AI platforms that will, if successful, be incorporated into our client offerings. We're working hand-in-hand with Adobe to build a state-of-the-art content management machine that combines as many as 20 different agency operations to create, manage, and deliver the right content to the right person. This together gives us a content flywheel competitive with anyone in the marketplace, including Publicis and Dentsu. When it comes to our marketing services, which are just under 40% of the company's overall work, we will soon unveil our new central production operation. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on outside production and more of those costs will be captured internally by this new group. While others are treating creativity as disposable, we are making major inroads in the industry with top-level award-winning human creativity, the one service that can never be duplicated by computers. Together, when these tools are completed later this year, our marketing services and media and commerce divisions will be well positioned to gain share and up-level clients to win bigger contracts. Fourth, we've opened up major initiatives in Asia and the Mideast to enhance our global coverage in a smart way. Consulam and Leaders, two of our newest Mideast firms, are enabling a steady stream of new opportunities in the region, while acquiring 10 offices in Asia from ADK will greatly expand our footprint on the other side of the world. Geographic expansion opens us up to bigger, more extensive global contracts for integrated creative and media accounts. We'll continue to grow our international presence and we'll use our powerful m&a platform to do it effective m&a is a key part of our growth strategy it's why you need to focus when you analyze us not just on organic growth but also on total growth we have the capability of reinvesting our free cash flow at low multiples and making strategic dispositions to accelerate our growth and climb the ladder of scale fifth the advocacy group includes our communication public affairs and campaign operations in the last two years we've built our own text messaging platform wonder cave and are now expanding into more digital services for campaigns in what continues to be a secular growth market 2026 and 2028 are going to be big likely the biggest political years in u.s history with a 50-50 Congress and two presidential primaries. We're already well-positioned with leading candidates in some of the biggest races while growing our online fundraising capability. Sixth, the Stagwell Marketing Cloud is coming together with great new products for research, communications, and AI and augmented reality experiences. The Harris Quest Brand Terminal has over 150 corporate clients now, and bearer which monitors brand value recently won a multi-year multi-country assignment from visa we added global media intelligence with unicepta will soon announce two major multi-year contracts including one with the european commission's directorate general for communications the cloud will demo some of their latest innovations today we anticipate software sales being about five percent of the business this year up from less than two percent in 2024 I expect revenue to more than double during phase two and to show profitability by the end of 2026, when development costs will go down by about 50%. There are significant margin and investor value opportunities in the future of the marketing cloud business. So why should you believe we can achieve this kind of growth? We're already doing it. The overall Stagwell brand is growing in value. We regularly have three or four times our market share and share of voice. and have developed successful brand programs such as Sport Beach, bringing together name, athletes, and brands, and the future of news, which has brought together much of the news industry behind quality news advertising. Ask a marketer today if they've heard of Stagwell, and they'll generally talk enviously of the company that is the fast, challenging, the conventional way of doing things. They may be one of the behemoths that got too big and is shedding employees and companies. or at a company that's too small to keep clients of scale. We pride ourselves on being the Goldilocks company. Combine this with our expanding geographical presence, and you can see why we are being invited to and winning even larger, more global pitches. In 2022, our new business pipeline was about a billion dollars. It was about 1.2 billion in 2023, and last year it grew to 1.4 billion. Our net new business wins have grown significantly in the last four quarters to $382 billion, $111 million larger than the figure in 2023, $169 million larger than 2022. Last year we didn't just win multiple $10 million contracts, we started to win $20 and $30 million contracts. Larger pitches and growing net new business means that our customer relationships are growing too. Our top 10 clients generate more than $400 million in net revenue annually, and our average top 25 relationship is now worth approximately $25 million, an 18% increase from 2021. You don't achieve this growth and this kind of momentum by accident. I know I've shared a lot today. But I want to reinforce our key message. Stagwell is on an unstoppable path to being a $5 billion company by the end of 2029. You can be the judge of what a company with a billion dollars in adjusted EBITDA would be worth compared to its present value. We're confident of our ability to achieve this goal. It's based on solid growth projections of about 5% a year for marketing services, 10% for media and commerce, 15% for digital transformation, and 20% for the Stagwell Marketing Cloud. This combined with our platform for strategic acquisitions and needed geographies and key growth markets gets us there. This path to $5 billion has started off well, and with two months of the data behind us, we're confident to reiterate our full year 2025 guidance today. And you can see the ramp building into 2026 with the new technology, cost savings, and political cycle. We're just a teenager as a company and are investing in growing up. There may be external events that sometimes slow us down or speed us up, but in a world of firecracker companies, we're the sure-footed grower on a clearly defined mission in the end all you have to believe is that we have successfully defined all the odds for almost 10 years now and we'll keep right on doing that believe that we can continue to be a successful challenger building market share with a-list services that we will continue to implement and sell ai-based marketing and products and that our strategy affords us the ability to grow to scale and to keep on innovating thank you for listening and now take a moment

Steve Ballmer

also to listen to my core founding investor steve balmer hi i'm steve balmer and nine years ago i made a bet on mark penn to start the first digital first marketing services agency i couldn't be more pleased by what has become stagwell and the great results inspiring results that we've had with stagwell as we look to the future i'm very convinced that mark and his team have a great handle on what it's going to take to use ai and other technologies to continue to transform the marketing services business i'm excited for that future i'm excited for stagwell's future, and I hope you are too. Thanks.

Jason Reid, Other

Good morning. I'm Jason Reed, EVP and Chief Investment Officer at Stagwell Global. Thank you for joining us today. Over the past decade, Stagwell became a $2.8 billion company by leading the industry in agency and technology acquisitions. Today, Stagwell is the premier partner to innovative and challenger brands looking to compete on a global scale, disrupt the legacy holding companies, and build a brighter future for our clients, clients, employees, and shareholders alike. The founding principles of our strategy are threefold. Acquire best-in-class teams with digital-first capabilities. Address the convergence of enterprise budgets between the CMO and the CTO as the connective tissue to the consumer becomes increasingly holistic. And create internal alignment in our go-to-market so we build a lasting and durable organization that is not internally competitive and best serves clients and talent. We combine our acquisitions with industry-leading strategists and creatives throughout the network to deliver the best possible outcomes for enterprises. The result is a platform that accelerates the trajectory of new partners, expands the relationships with our biggest clients, and delivers best-in-class organic growth. Stagwell started in 2015 and 2016 with acquisitions that are core to our capability set. SKDK, a leading democratic public affairs firm, planted our flag in the swiftly growing political marketplace. place. NRG and the Harris Poll added best-in-class market research and strategy. PMX began the formation of our brand performance group and our global media buying operation. And Code and Theory, our now digital transformation flagship, added expertise in reaching the consumer through stunning UI and UX. Over the next four years, we added to these formative platforms. We addressed new mediums and media through MMI, Forward 3D, the search agency, Multiview and Ink Travel. We expanded our presence in Political with Targeted Victory and Wonder Cave on the right, and the addition of Sloan and Seaward Square to SKDK on the left. We delved deeper into research and strategy with Harris X and NRG United. And we continued our investment in digital transformation with the addition of Rhythm, Kettle, and TrueLogic to the Code and Theory Network. In 2021, we completed the acquisition of MDC Partners, a billion-dollar-plus agency group which thrust Stagwell into a different league allowing the company to compete on a global scale with any legacy holding group. We added significant billings to our media operation through Assembly and Gale. We expanded in digital transformation through Instrument on the West Coast and most importantly we brought in award-winning creativity and communications with Anomaly, 72 and Sunny, Crispin, F&B, Allison and Hunter. These remarkable strategic brands drive billions in RFPs through Stagwell, with deep relationships at blue chip clients like General Motors, Starbucks, and Adobe. Our new scale and pipeline only added to our appeal as acquisition partners to emerging brands. We continue to invest in the following years. We added social, digital experiential, multicultural, and AI capabilities with the acquisitions of Movers and Shakers, Leftfield Labs, Team Epiphany, and Barra AI respectively. We charted the course for international expansion with Brand New Galaxy in Warsaw, Huskies in Dublin, W&P in Paris, Pros in Sao Paulo, Unicepto in Cologne, Leaders in Tel Aviv, Create in Dubai, Consulam in Riyadh, and the global assets of ADK, a transformative deal which brings us 10 new offices in key Asian markets. To punctuate our efforts, just weeks ago, Campaign highlighted that Stagwell completed the largest number of deals in 2024 compared to the other holding groups. We intend to keep leading the industry by scaling with new partners both domestically and globally. Our strategy begins with a top-down view of the global economy. We believe that X technology coefficients and population changes that revenue growth is zero-sum game. We intend to grow the digital mix of our offerings to 65% by investing against these macro revenue growth trends. We are impressed by the growth in social and influencer communities and are paying close attention to the fast growing platforms like Reddit. Social and influencer makes creative and communications full funnel, by producing rich audience data, allowing for improved targeting and conversion through the buyer journey. We also find the growth of large retailers in the US remarkable. We're developing end-to-end marketing ecosystems for retailers, closing the loop between in-store, online, loyalty and shopper to drive growth through data and AI enabled customer optimization. Retail media and e-commerce will be a fundamental driver of our business in the future. We see strong growth across cloud platforms and AI implementation. The need to extract, analyze, and implement customer data is of paramount importance. Agentic AI will fundamentally change user interfaces for all websites and applications that touch the consumer where we have the deepest expertise. We believe these drivers will provide secular tailwinds to our digital transformation business over the next decade. While these areas of investment may seem disparate, we believe that each provide a connection and understanding of the digitally connected consumer. We envision a future of highly personalized, efficiently targeted, and beautifully crafted creative campaigns and user interfaces that best serve the interests of both the customer and the enterprise. Staggle has the capabilities and integration across offerings to deliver upon this promise to the world. But the world's a big place, and to serve it we need to continue to increase our geographic We are targeting approximately 40% of our revenue to be outside of North America, which is the right mix to win the largest global mandates. We will remain diligent about our selection of geographies. As sentiment towards nationalism grows in the world's largest economies, we expect modestly tempered GDP growth, but we see incredible optimism in others. Our investments in the Middle East have grown organically over 50% as we see increased appetite from the Kingdom and others in the region to globalize and invest and long-term visions for the future. With the acquisitions of Consulam, Create, and Leaders, we now have more than 500 people in the region providing a broad range of services. We have seen a revitalization in Southeast Asia, led by deregulation and stimulus in Japan, and others following suit. We remain bullish on the area, and now have over 2,000 people in the region following the acquisition of ADK Global. For those tempered markets, we'll be valuation sensitive while we seek to complete our footprint. and for those in acceleration, we'll increase the volume of opportunity that we consider. Stagwell's investment team looks at more than 400 opportunities a year to find the right companies that align with our strategic priorities and challenger culture. We believe the best companies have several attributes. Best-in-class leadership teams who have developed economic flywheels for growth and profitability and who have the right strategic vision for what those businesses can become on the Stagwell platform. Capabilities which have large addressable markets and strong secular tailwinds and the staff and intellectual property to offer them. We seek to serve the best companies in the world and a demonstration of long-term engagements with blue-chip clients are also marks of success. Once we bring a new partner into the network we accelerate their business on the Stagwell platform. Each new investment brings on board a leadership team with a vision for the future. We harness that vision and empower operators with growth services, investment support, and centralized back office functions. Most important and distinct from our competition is the work we do to ensure a consistent, non-competitive, go-to-market approach that puts the client and talent first, getting the right companies to service the right work from the top down. Stagwell is built to generate returns on investments for the long term, not the duration of an earn out, and our services platform ensures that success. Take our media buying business as an example. We first bought a series of high-growth, digital standalone media capabilities. We then achieved vitally important scale through the merger with MDC. We unified our operations under the assembly brand flagship to provide clear internal alignment and back the division with international acquisitions in UK, continental Europe, and Asia. We were able to integrate and manage these disparate assets, creating a unified go-to-market proposition for our clients. The result is a global business of $5 billion in managed media with over 80% digital capabilities. Coding theory is another prime example. Since 2015, we have tucked in a half-dozen entities under this flagship to add significant client presence, digital capability, and engineering with over 1,200 developers as part of the network. Two great examples of this are TrueLogic and Kettle. TrueLogic is a LATAM-based engineering and software development group that has grown at a 42% CAGR under the custodianship of the Code Network. TrueLogic was able to significantly scale its engineering base to service Code's client pipeline efficiently and with great talent. Kettle is a digital design engineering business with a focus on servicing one of the biggest technology companies in the world. The Code Network unlocked the value of that relationship and tripled revenues with that single client alone. While these efforts took many years, as the platform grows, so does its power, and we are observing assets that see more immediate uplift after joining Stagwell. We acquired Barra AI in the second half of last year, and within a few months the company closed a multi-year, multi-million dollar deal with a large global payments company. The validation of joining Stagwell coupled with new client introductions provided for this success story. When our partners succeed, we succeed, on average delivering IRRs in excess of 25% during an earn-out. To further cement this partnership, our deals are 50% paid in stock, creating mutual alignment and interest in the success of the overall platform. The net effect is that for every $100 million of revenue acquired, we immediately recognize $0.30 of stock accretion and $0.75 of stock accretion over the course of these deals. For context, over the last decade, we have acquired over $2 billion in revenue, and we still have ample runway for growth. We do not believe that Wall Street has appropriately layered this value creation into its models, but we will continue to deliver upon this accreted flywheel. Occasionally on our journey of growth, there are companies we deem non-core to our long-term success. The sales of Concentric Life and Reputation Defender represent these instances and tell a story of underlying asset value. We acquired Concentric Life as part of the MDC merger and combined it with Scout, a rare disease marketing specialist, creating a market-leading pharmaceutical business. The scale and scarcity of this asset created significant demand. We made a strategic decision to prioritize other verticals and sold these combined assets for a 4X MOIC after unlocking their combined potential. In the case of Reputation Defender, we identified a consumer technology product that had a suboptimal marketing mix across legacy channels. We identified better areas for media investment through our core digital marketing capabilities and sold the business for a 9x MOIC after improving targeting. Most importantly, we sold these assets for 18 to 30 times EBITDA respectively, which speaks volumes to the standalone value of the underlying assets in Stagwell's portfolio and potential future monetization. Over the past decade, we have created a simple and scalable platform for investment under the Stagwell umbrella. This accretive economic flywheel has gotten us to almost $3 billion in revenue and we expect it will get us to five. We are the premier partner to agencies of the future and believe that we'll continue to outpace our competitors in acquisitions for the next five years after delivering record results in 2024. We seek to bring in new partners who fit our strategic need and challenger culture, delivering the right mix of services to connect consumers and the enterprise in innovative ways that drive efficiencies and success over the long term. And we will do so with discipline, structuring strong deals and offering shared services that create economic value and alignment for all parties. Our select dispositions from time to time should remind investors of the value of our underlying assets at Stagwell. And while we achieve our strategic goals, we estimate we can also create immediate accretion of $1.50 in stock price on down payments and almost $4 in value over the duration of our deals, or more than 50% upside to current prices through acquisition. Our earliest investors made a substantial bet on our ability to generate value through investment and have been rewarded for that belief. We hope that you join us for this next chapter in Stagwell's growth, and thank you for your trust in us for the future.

Beth Sidhu, Other

Thanks so much, Jason. The success of our M&A approach has been crucial to Stagwell's growth and changed the tools we have to pitch, win, and serve our growing client roster. Here to tell us more about how our portfolio comes to life for clients and share why Stagwell wins are Ryan Linder, Chief Growth Officer, and Julia Hammond, President of our Global Solutions Group.

Operator

Hello, everyone.

Ryan Linder, Other

My name is Ryan Linder, Executive Vice President, Global Chief Marketing Officer serve Stagwell. There's one thing you should know about me, and it's this. I spend about 340 days per year in the field, listening to clients, talking to prospects, and winning business. For our friends in the investor community, I think it's important to establish the baseline. This is a story of David and Goliath, of the underdog, those who win against all odds, Stagwell is the definition of a challenger. I've been marketing marketing services for two decades. Over a decade of my career tenure has been spent right here, and I have never seen what I see happening here at Stagwell today. Let me pause for a minute and explain that most of the time, new relationships are created through the pitch process, albeit through opportunities that we create or when we receive RFPs. Once we win a significant assignment, it is an opportunity for us to nurture and grow that client relationship. Three years ago, when we launched the Stagwell of today, the annual Net New Business wins for marketing state marketing services was 213 million dollars today after closing the books on 2024 and as we reported a few weeks back net new business for 2024 was 382 million dollars we were lucky to bring in 50 million a quarter in net new business and now we're hitting 100 million that is a doubling of our ability to win new business. We've seen dramatic increases in the opportunities across creative, media, and digital and business transformation. Let's look at the growth of our pipeline over the last three years to put things into perspective and how the total opportunities have grown year after year. In 2022, our papered pipeline, real opportunities in which we were invited to pitch was $1 billion. In 2023, we hit $1.1 billion in change. In 2024, we had a real deal flow of papered opportunities of $1.3 billion. Remarkable. And we have also improved our conversion rate as we are winning over 30 percent of the opportunities we pitch significantly up over time so what's been happening first we offer a unique blend of creativity and technology exactly the blend that we created to transform marketing and our agencies are at the absolute tip top of their profession second the stagwell brand has been steadily rising in the marketplace brave fierce creativity search consultants and intermediaries who pre-screen us for the for their clients increasingly see us as competitive to the outdated behemoths in the marketplace and are recommending us now more than ever we are considered a modern highly competitive alternative to the big six soon to be the big five whom have monopolized the marketing services landscape for far too long. Third, we are making a transition from marketing individual companies to bringing together teams of agencies against business problems, and the results are bigger contracts and deeper relationships with clients. Our culture of collaboration is a hallmark, okay? Our culture of collaboration means clients get real teams who work together. Voluntary collaboration versus forced integration we now have top 25 client relationships of 25 million and we continue to grow that by hosting what we call inspiration days which allow clients to learn more about the depth of stable offerings outside of the pitch process several of our most significant client partnerships have resulted from these very inspiration sessions later you're going to hear from some clients but let me say that this year we are working towards a goal of amassing a 1.5 billion dollar pipeline and adding new opportunities to bring in government contracts as well we set up an operation called stagwell government which has put us in position to contend for the largest government and public sector contracts available remarkable momentum happening here. Can't wait to share more. And let me say that the opportunities for hitting the five by five plan, five billion in five years, are shiny bright and can be driven by the growing success of Stagwell in the marketplace today and its combination of creativity and technology for the modern marketer. Now I want to tighten up the aperture on a couple of points. Potent creativity and technology. Our agencies are creative powerhouses, led by practitioners, by not holding company bureaucracy. That means clients get teams that are hungry, inventive, and always looking to punch above their fighting weight. We are not safe. We are not comfortable. We are not predictable. We are brave enough to push boundaries, fierce enough to fight for breakthrough ideas, and creative enough to deliver with impact. Our rising profile in the market, whether it be search consultants, clients reaching out direct, referrals, you name it. Our profile and increasingly prominent position in the market has never been stronger. Ask around, I'm sure you'll hear the same. Collaboration by choice, not by force. Our agencies choose to work together. Very hard to find. They collaborate because they see shared opportunity and shared ambition. There's no forced integration, no centralization that kills soul and speed. Instead, our model respects and preserves the entrepreneurial drive that built each agency in the first place. And clients feel that energy. These things are driving real shift in the market, my friends. And clients are saying it themselves. that's the power of relationships the power of showing up brave fierce and client first we're not just growing we're transforming what modern marketing looks like and clients are rewarding us for it i'm going to wrap it out here with four quotes these four quotes were put out into the ether whether it be on linkedin or industry social channels and in our reading this this this gentleman's posts are read and consumed by people on both sides of the desk clients and agency industry alike okay and this is what he had to say about stagwell the digital first challenger that refuses to lose three names are emerging as the future and stagwell is one of them stagwell the challenger that is changing the game stagwell is architecting something so unique and special that clients love Plus, they have the scrappy, street-smart, disruptive mentality that has proven to help them win. Definitely worth an encore. Plus, they have the scrappy, street-smart, disruptive mentality that has now proven to help them win. So now don't take our word for it anymore. I'd like to introduce six of our good friends, our client partners, to talk about why they have chose Stagwell and the work that they're doing with some of our agencies. Thank you for your time.

Operator

Goodbye for now. Hi, I'm Tressie Lieberman.

Tressie Lieberman, Analyst — Client, Starbucks

I'm the Global Chief Brand Officer for Starbucks, and I am a proud client of the team at Stagwell and Anomaly. A few months ago, we had the opportunity to work on a campaign to reintroduce Starbucks to the world. And I can tell you that there is no better partner, fresh insights, incredible creative, but also just a deep partnership. I know they care about Starbucks as much as I do. They're always seeking ways to solve new challenges, bringing us fresh ideas and keeping us one step ahead. So I appreciate the team so much. They have incredible talent and I can't say enough good things.

Operator

Hi, I'm Julia Hammond.

Julia Hammond, Other

I'm the president of Global Solutions. What that means is I get to answer some of the biggest global RFPs that come in from clients. I put together teams from our agencies, digital transformation, media, creative. We compete against the biggest networks like Omnicom, Publicis, Accenture. And I'm here today to talk to you about why we win, what we hear from clients, about the reasons why they choose us over the competition. So here's what we hear. Number one, we are the most creative, hands down, the most creative agencies. And our clients, when they see us, they leave the room inspired. They tell us we show up differently. And to them, that means we're extremely refreshing. They say we're going to push them to be better. What that says to us, we are a challenger. So I'll top line that. We are an inspiring, refreshing challenger. And that's exactly what happened when we won Adobe. Number one, first thing we learned, creativity. Well, it still matters. We might hear left and right all the time that it's all about personalization at scale. But guess what? If you're scaling content, if you're pushing out a ton of stuff and versioning and versioning and versioning, if the creative is not good, it doesn't matter because it's not going to resonate. It's not going to move the needle on business. It's not going to create distinctive brands and draw consumers in to move the needle on business. So no one is better than us. When it comes to building brands that drive distinctive brand value, that is exactly what put us over the finish line when it came to Adobe. Number two, culture. It is absolutely part of our IP. It's one of the biggest things that make us different. So, got a couple of fun pictures in here from our very lengthy journey that came to winning Adobe. be. We traveled four continents to get that one over the finish line and built a team of people from six different agencies that liked each other, trusted each other. But really, what makes us different is that we have a relentless focus on creating the right outcomes for clients because we don't have the problem our competition has, which is reconstructing the empires that have been built since the time before the iphone was invented we are the only network that was created post the digital era our competition is over a hundred years old and they're in the process of reconstructing and fixing we're in the process of building up and so we don't have anyone taking their eye off the ball trying to maintain power we had to just focus on solving client problems and that really comes through. We are able to focus on innovation and really think about what it's going to take to move the needle on client business and that shows when we show up. Finally, when I say we challenge everything, that is a core value that's inside of us at Stagwell that every client, I can tell you right now, it came through in Adobe and it's coming through in every client that we are talking to at the moment because every client wants to be a challenger. Why is that important? Well, because challengers play to win and incumbents play to not lose. It is the difference between playing it safe and trying to grow and everybody needs to grow right now. And when they see our challenger spirit, that absolutely comes through. So when we say when we hear clients tell us that they know we are going to push them to get to a better place it means that they see that value in us and they're going to choose us because we share those core values and really that's a client telling us that's a team that they want to be a part of that's an energy they want to infuse into their organization when we want adobe yeah we want it on creative. We want it on culture. But really, challenging a traditional agency partnership meant we didn't just go to them with a, hey, come buy from us mindset. We challenged the traditional agency partnership and said, it might make sense for us to not just sell to you our services, but what if we created a partnership where we sell to clients together? So what really put us over the finish line was setting up a joint business plan yes we are the creative and social agency of record globally for adobe but we are also a go-to-market joint business partner we are co-selling together to some of adobe's biggest clients digital transformation capabilities and scaled content capabilities digital transformation that is the future and And Adobe is working with us to really bring us in to the clients that they're talking to day in and day out. And we see that as a much more interesting and valuable business model that we can continue to replicate as we go bigger into some of these kinds of forward-leaning contracts. So that's showing up as business results already in the first couple of months of our relationship. We are already over-delivering. We are seeing a 30% upside ahead of plan within six months of our contract. We've already identified 20% growth of pipeline for the first half of this year. our joint business plan and go-to-market model is creating massive amount of traction and we are specifically targeting places where we both want to extend in key markets like in the middle east and asia pacific so this is mutually beneficial and that is a very refreshing and different way of showing up for our clients so i hope that gave you a little bit of a idea of of what makes us different and why we are winning in the marketplace. Thank you for your time today. It was an absolute pleasure.

Maggie Schmarin, Analyst — Client, United Airlines

Hi everyone, I'm Maggie Schmarin, Chief Advertising Officer at United Airlines. Now I just celebrated eight years with the company, but prior to that, I spent my entire career agency side. So trust me when I say, I know both the opportunities and the challenges that come when you're a holding company and you're in the client service sector. It's still something I place a lot of stock in when I'm evaluating the types of partners that we want to bring on and it's why I'm excited to share with all of you just how different and special our relationship is with Stagwell. Now of course it starts with best-in-class work. We get the smartest strategic thinking out of the various Stagwell agencies that we work with than anywhere else I have seen in my career and it results in best-in-class creative that really helps differentiate our brand but beyond that it's all about the relationships the best agency client experience happens when you don't know when the client when the brand ends and the agency or the holding company begins and we live that every single day i personally feel so supported and cared for my brand is cared for i know that we aren't just a line item and a spreadsheet or a logo and a deck it's been a wonderful four years working with stagwell and i'm excited about everything to come

Beth Sidhu, Other

The challenger mindset is a core part of how we show up and it is particularly evident within the Code & Theory Network, the digital transformation unit of Stagwell. Marrying creativity and technology, the Code & Theory Network is a superpower for many of the successful C-suites in the world. Let's hear more about how Code & Theory makes it happen.

Dan Gardner, Chairman

I'm Dan Gardner, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of the Code & Theory Network. Mike Treff, CEO of Code & Theory. So let's set the stage of the Code & Theory Network, which is the digital transformation arm of Stagwell. We have double-digit CAGR since going public. A couple stats around that, which I think our client makeup is really unparalleled, of a quarter of the Fortune 100 are our client partners. We work with 100% of the FAANG, so we are the technology company's technology company. Where it's not the largest companies in the world, we have worked with 18 startups that have either IPO'd or have billion-dollar valuations. We do a tremendous amount in the media and publishing industry with over 200 newsroom transformations and we have over one trillion transactions that flow through our clients on work that we have done and designed for our financial services.

Mike Treff, CEO

And while doing so, we've evolved the way in which we partner with clients and how we engage with them in order to drive new revenue streams and new ways to engage. As an example, over the past few years, we've built out through our network managed services and embedded team capabilities. a few examples of that. For T. Rowe Price, we are their embedded design team working on their global design system for all touch points. In Media and Publishing, for Time Magazine, we are their product and technology managed service. In the e-commerce space, we are the e-commerce design team for all of Stanley Black & Decker and all of their family brands across their e-commerce landscape. So let's talk for a second about where digital transformation is and where it's going. So today's state of play is quite different with respect to digital transformation than it was, call it a decade ago. A decade ago, it was very much focused around making technology decisions driven mostly by CTO organizations and then pushing that through over time to the rest of the organization. Today, we are seeing much more of a pan C-suite merging of those briefs and of those teams. So, for example, when we think about our clients today in digital transformation landscape, it's a combination of the CMO, the CIO, the CTO, all working together to drive full transformation across the business in an integrated and coordinated way. And this is being mandated by CEOs and CFOs who want to see a return on those types of investments. So while the landscape is in a state of constant play and fast-moving change, driven by technology, and certainly whenever that happens, there's a change in customer behaviors. And those changes in customer behaviors have historically been a very good thing for digital transformation. Even further, we're moving beyond three screens and a steering wheel. We're moving to a world where a brand can engage with its customers at any point, anywhere. Things like voice, things like chat, things like GPT, things like glasses. It's all changing what we need to be able to reach and engage and why digital transformation at the core is allowing and building more capability within our client organizations.

Speaker 15

So with that said, before we get into a few key themes that we're seeing, let's just show you a little bit of our work. when technology and creativity converge new industry standards are set the code and theory network is the place where the world's most ambitious brands come to experience change 50 creatives 50 engineers dna designed to build break remake and reinvent everything In 2025, we experienced change, new leadership, new network, same vision, same ambition. We revolutionized how fans engaged with the greatest game on the planet. Built virtual bridges between major leagues and everyday athletes. Now with our busy schedules, sleep unfortunately is sometimes the first thing that we sacrifice and overlook. we use data to tell the story of a nation as it unfolded in real time let's take a look because there's been a lot coming out there in the last couple days launched the next era of ai computing for a trillion dollar company we rewrote the rules for modern publishers again redrew the blueprints for a global electric future transform the narratives and fortunes for millions of small businesses and turned a humble cooler company into a global lifestyle brand as we've always done we will continue to transform our clients and ourselves again and again and that is the one thing we will never change so there are three key shifts that we think are happening in the digital transformation market and we are responding to them first as mike mentioned the isolated

Dan Gardner, Chairman

organization buyer is turning into a horizontally integrated client team. That means across the C-suite, they are looking to buy services to transform their organizations. We have responded and launched our EXT practice, our enterprise experience transformation practice. This is really at the heart of true transformation, changing organizations, changing the products and services, changing the marketing and everything that supports it to reach customers in a different way. This allows a scaled opportunity to have a CX first meaning customer first approach to solving technology opportunities and challenges and problems. There are three unique things why we think we are different than our competition. Firstly we are closer to the customer. So traditional consultants do not touch the customer the way the way we do at Stagwell from the media buying arm to the scaled creativity we have. We are as close as you can get. We understand how to find the customer and drive the customer. Second we have two and a half decades of experience of creating experiences that actually drive lifetime value. That is crucial at a time where technology is changing behaviors. And lastly we have the technology scale to deliver the technology results. What do I mean by that? We have the balance of technology and creativity that is required in today's market to actually come up with the correct solutions and execute on them. We are the only company at scale that has that balance within the Code and Theory and Digital Transformation Network. Of the over 2,000 people we have, half of them are engineers and half of them are creatives. That is a unique balance that you can see by the people and the process that we implement that transforms our clients' business. There is no better example of this practice than what we demonstrated at Adobe Summit just a couple weeks ago. We demonstrated how we can activate, how we bring culture, and we bring customers front and center on the main floor of the Adobe Summit Conference. We were right next to Adobe in a scaled way, demonstrating our solutions on bringing content supply chain solutions to the market and showing how unified brand systems can really transform what a brand is, how a brand can act, and how a brand will leverage technology for the future. This is just the first of many solutions that we are bringing to the market over the next year.

Mike Treff, CEO

Which takes us to key shift two. It is clear, regardless of what research you read, it could be Forrester research, it could be McKinsey research, it doesn't really matter, that there is significant dissatisfaction amongst many large organizations who have invested tremendous amount in software, tremendous amount in MarTech, and a tremendous amount in data, and have not reaped the ROI they want for it. So dissatisfaction with the historically huge spends on technology and infrastructure and software are at an all-time high. And we have to ask ourselves, why is that? And one of the reasons, we believe, is building on what Dan just said, that these decisions were made sort of in isolation from a tech-only perspective versus starting with the customer, starting with people, starting with your organization, and working backwards from that. So it's very clear that when you do a transformation that starts with your end customer and your business goals, moves into your organization and how people will work, how they will operate, what is the way of working we want to build for the future, and then back into what is the technology that enables that, you can unlock far greater ROI than by making the technology decision first and trying to force it through and then retrofit it to customer experiences. And that's why we've built the practice, again, on starting with humans, starting with the end customer, starting with the organization that's going to carry it out, and the ways of working. Now, this leverages pretty significantly a lot of Stagwell's sort of unique research assets, which we think is very important, to drive insights against consumer behavior, to drive insights against new patterns, new opportunities, new customer segments, and using technology-enabled experience solutions to bring those together. So using AI as an example beyond just efficiency but using it more as yes what can we do to unlock new experiences? How can we leverage this data in a unique way? How can we target and segment and differentiate the experiences we want for different customers? How can we create unique experiences that can be AI powered that we couldn't do before but that built on a technology stack that is better used by humans allows for better business results? And a great example of this would be Context Lens. Context Lens was a secondary experience that we built on top of an existing website for RealClear polling. RealClear polling has tremendous amounts of data, huge volumes of information, and especially during an election year, this is critical information. But users often very overwhelmed by that, don't know how to start, don't know how to go deeper. What we did was built a secondary layer that sat on top of the site, all powered by AI, that would move contextually with you as you went through the site offering you a way to get deeper more content surrounded context different polls different opinions and allow you to both be prompted in an anticipatory way additional information and context but also engage directly should you want to prompt it in gpt like experience to bring you further information and drive depth this is an experience that could not have happened previously without differences in consumer behavior and then having a technology stack that enabled you to bring this to consumers. Another great example of leveraging emerging and new technologies, especially AI, to create new experiences is with Google. So Google I.O., you know, huge conference, very important. Google is one of Google's marquee events, especially to the advertising industry. We built a game, a custom game that sort of rode with you, was AI powered, enabled you to go deeper, get better experiences, learn about Google's offerings in a totally interactive and engaging way rather than sitting there and listening to keynote after keynote after keynote after keynote so even something as simple as a b2b conference to drive revenue for a great client in google how can we make that experience more engaging and bring digital transformation from a cx first perspective we built a game using ai that drove understanding knowledge depth and a great experience at google's marquee event so this brings us to the third shift which is service-based models are changing to tech-enabled orchestration service-based models.

Dan Gardner, Chairman

What do I mean by that? It's not enough to just say here are the people in our process. It needs to be powered by technology. We think we have a three-pillar solution that really tackles the market appropriately. Pillar number one is actually small AI. What is small AI? That means bringing AI to the individual employee to empower them to come up with ideas and transform their role to truly get the return on the workforce in the proper way. So that's everything from small tasks to bigger processes to new insights that drive different ways that we can work. That's the first pillar. The second pillar is the midsize transformation. This is where we see gaps in the market. It could be through execution. It could be a process that we do.

Mike Treff, CEO

It could be a way that we could harness data in different ways but it's not the biggest transformation but also it really empowers us to utilize everything across stagwell in really interesting ways and as an example on the medium tier piece we have two examples of you know pocs of ideas of accelerators that we are building we are building and leveraging stagwell's already existing proprietary technology whether it's smc whether it's all the proprietary research assets etc or our investment in adobe and our own systems on content supply chain and automation and acceleration and we're building functionality that we can use for ourselves and that we can use for our clients two examples of this would be one what we're calling marketing savants mark and marketing savant is a tool where ultimately I can go I maybe I'm a small business maybe it's a low spend campaign maybe it's a self-service tool where I can go in put in my documents put in my audience put in my objectives put in materials that'll help our LLM generate campaign concepts I will get campaign concepts. I can interact with the tool. I can refine them. I can ask for new ones. I could give it further instruction. I could creative direct the generative aspects of this. And from there, we can get an additional layer. So now we've gone deeper into a concept. Great. I like the concept. We feel good about it. I can now decide my distribution channels. Maybe I want it on social. I want it on paid and I wanted an email. The tool will create those for you. And at the end of this, you kind of have an all-in-one campaign that's ready to flight. It's flight ready. And whether it's a day or three weeks later I can look at performance in real time as the results come in that's one example a second example something we're calling brand personified brand personified the idea is ultimately eventually and this isn't too far away brand guidelines and brand behaviors are not going to be governed by PDFs they're not going to be governed by like rigid guidelines that don't apply in the real world especially as touch points proliferate especially as some of my interactions are now going to be in perplexity or in ChatGPT. So brand personified is basically building your brand personified in a tool and in a bot that can live anywhere in an ecosystem. Eventually, could it engage directly with consumers? Absolutely. Could it also govern creative development, tell you what's on brand, what's not on brand? Could it act as sort of your partner in making sure you're bringing the best of a brand forward, work with you through creative development processes, help you with insights around different target audiences, how you might reach them deeper, where the brand can play and where it cannot play, of course. So when you think about just these two examples, and there's far more, you have sort of end-to-end creative generation and execution, and then you have the living, breathing personification of a brand that can be expressed multiple touch points across both internal and customer-facing work.

Dan Gardner, Chairman

And the last pillar of our transformation and thinking about how technology aligns with services is the idea that we can have disparate pieces, but they need to come together. Now, we talked about how we have AI changing our relationships with the consumer, like Context Lens was a good example of that. We talked about how we have AI transforming the individual employee and empowering them. We just talked about how we think about AI solving discrete specific tasks. But the last one is how we think about agentic AI from an enterprise level, and this is where the digital transformation network really comes together with the entire Stagwell network to really take the power in ways we never could even have imagined before agentic AI came on the screen. The idea is we are building an orchestration layer. Think of it as an operating orchestration layer. It's an operating system that takes everything from the small AI initiatives to the mid-level initiatives to the discrete challenges, brings it together, brings all our people together in an agentic first way to understand data understand insights understand what's happening across the media landscape understanding what's happening from our experience experiences we're building bring it together to make us as efficient as as smart and effective as possible so that orchestration layer that we are calling the machine that's going to be debuted in a couple months really is the bringing together of the power of everything stagwell has with the power of the advanced technology that we are building under one modern roof that will be unparalleled across the industry and to sum all this up the digital transformation network driven by the code and theory network has a very simple thesis it's in the name code in theory it's the bringing together of creativity and technology to solve problems we have a staff makeup that is unique in the market that no one else has that drives to that half creatives half technology delivering solutions. We then layer on top of that a tech solution, tech platforms that orchestrate everything from the innovation at the employee level to discrete opportunities and gaps that we see in the market to really be the challenger and disruptor to the industry that is meeting the expectations of the new opportunities, the new transformations, the new disruptions that are happening in the market. We are the only company with that balance to deliver the right solutions.

Beth Sidhu, Other

Thanks both. As Dan and Tref mentioned, the platforms and partnerships the Code and Theory Network is building with clients didn't exist 10 years ago, or even five. They're built for the modern C-suite by cohesive teams of creatives and technologists. Let's keep going with creativity with Evan Schutt, CEO of 72 and Sunny. She will share more about how our best-in-class creative agencies are adapting to a changing world.

Evan Shook, CEO

Hi, I'm Evan Shook, Global CEO of 72 and Sunny. I'm here and happy to share with you more about the creative services division inside Stagwell, or as we also like to call them, the demand creation agencies. As you can see, we have some of the best world-class agencies in the world that cover brand, social, influencer, experiential, and research. All of these agencies have a history of driving business results for some of the world's biggest companies, including United airlines visa google microsoft adobe nfl unilever target and more i'm going to speak to you a bit about the creative agency landscape through the lens of what we see at 72 and sunny brand marketing is meant to create demand to spark consumer desire for the product and what it does or says about them that's the business we're in what we've seen through the pandemic was a rise in direct response marketing which is meant to capture demand that really took off but now in the last year and a half, we're seeing brands see diminishing returns from over-focusing on DR. DR has contributed to eroding brand value, over-harvesting of prospects, and addiction to low-margin promotions. Nike and Starbucks are examples of this. You see it not only in the experience of those brands, but also in their stock prices. We're starting to see the shift now back to brand marketing, which positions us in a very strong position. We're seeing a shift more towards a 60-40 mix of brand versus DR. Stagwall agencies, the ones we showed before, are helping to build these powerful brands and generate demand using a mix of proven and innovative strategies. United Airlines was the opposite of a Nike and Starbucks. As part of their United Next plan, they launched their first brand campaign in 10 years in 2021 with 72 and Sunny, called Good Leads The Way. It helps consumers see the brand in a new light. We'll take a look at that work now.

Speaker 36

This is the story of an airline. Actually, it's the story of a business transformation starring one airline, one agency and 100,000 employees who collectively use the power of good to lead the way. But this story begins in the darkest of times.

Ryan Linder, Other

The airlines are really struggling right now.

Speaker 36

In crisis, United saw opportunity.

Speaker 11

And really a unique moment coming out of COVID, whether it's buying airplanes, building simulators, the only airline to negotiate a deal with pilots. We can see the future, and the future is really bright.

Speaker 36

Their goal? Become the biggest and best airline in the world. So together, we set out to transform the United people thought they knew into something better. Enter Good Leads the Way. We've reintroduced United as more than an airline, but a force for good.

Speaker 3

This is the story of an airline. It's a sci-fi story about a piece of trash that fuels a plane to help protect the planet. It's a rescue story to save a connecting flight told over and over and over again. Trust me, you won't want to put this one down. In fact, you can't because you're in it.

Speaker 36

We turned seemingly small product news into desire driving innovations.

Doug Thornell, CEO

So, you want to become a pilot?

Speaker 36

We made aviation initiatives feel urgent and important to everyone.

Ryan Barker, CEO

What's trash?

Speaker 36

We've hired Oscar the Grouch as our chief trash officer. make people love trash got it we want new customers by making people in our high value hubs feel seen cleveland houston broncos fans kansas city chicago this is about more than just football it's about believing and we elevated the customer experience by designing around you at every turn fly at a time that aligns with nap time we transformed the brand driving key brand metrics like nps persuasion preference in a category that lacks differentiation likability and relevance in a hard to love category and we transformed the business helping their stock performance take off over time and becoming number four in s p's 500 list in 2024 and the best thing about this story the good part has just begun While brands focused on DR, 72 and Sunny as we were building brands like United, we also took

Evan Shook, CEO

proactive steps to improve our performance and create a best-in-class creative organization for 2024, 2025, and beyond. We did that by focusing on efficiency. We consolidated our real estate costs and our back office functions, became way more efficient there. We focused on talent optimization, leaning into more senior talent who can land ideas faster and earlier, and a young talent development program to make sure we're growing best in class talent for the future. We also did a culture reset. It's no longer just about coming up with the idea and finding people to make it. We need makers and doers who can come up with the ideas and make the work and the product faster. And of course, we're using AI. We're optimizing that use in production and back office efficiency, everything from drafting MSAs to how we look at the use of Photoshop and editorial. During the same time, we partnered with the NFL. We're a partner of them for over six years, helping transform them from the No Fun League to the most profitable sports league in the world, one with record fandom, up 12 million fans year over year, and a record brand favorability of 24% versus 2019. We'll take a look at that work now.

Speaker 34

This is the story of how the NFL and 72 and Sunny unleashed the joy of football to transform the NFL brand. Sounds easy right? Let's get to work. Back in 2019 the NFL brand was in decline, losing fans and losing relevance.

Speaker 1

NFL first game ratings are way down.

Speaker 34

So as the brand was about to turn 100 years old, we used this moment to reignite the fire and rewrite the playbook.

Speaker 26

Welcome to the hundredth season of the National Football League.

Speaker 34

We started by taking the helmets off our players.

Speaker 26

Oh boy.

Speaker 34

And reminding everyone why they love football we showed how the joy of the game stretched across generations genders and even continents we wanted everybody to feel like football was for them and for fans everywhere to see a new side of the game that they thought they knew what if we wrote them a home character out of the script entirely.

Speaker 44

He wrote it over.

Speaker 16

Guys, not cool. Who said that? She did.

Speaker 34

Today, the NFL brand continues to reach new heights. The game has never been bigger. And by 2028, the entire world will get to experience the joy of the game.

Doug Thornell, CEO

Flag football is now in the Olympics.

Speaker 34

And we can't wait.

Doug Thornell, CEO

That's what I'm talking about.

Evan Shook, CEO

As we look ahead to the next three to five years in the world of creativity and creative agencies or demand creation agencies, we see a very bright future. We see a world of more data-driven brand marketing developed using the amazing research and data we have at our hands at Stagwell to make sure we're zeroing in on demand generation and conversion. We approach this in two ways as we look at our growth audience for our brands. demand harvesters, where we convert audiences who already show signals to buy, and demand generators. We bring in growth audiences who might not have thought to buy before and ensure the market isn't over-harvested. We also know that this is a relationship-based decision that marketers make. We're often their second biggest line item after media. They trust founders and leaders with a track record of success. Luckily, we have many of those strong relationships, and they look to other CEOs and CMOs for recommendations and trust, and we continue to build that network. We also have a diverse portfolio of clients. We don't have a house style or a house category. You saw it on the slide earlier. We have tech, we have sport, we have food, we have travel. We cover all the categories. We've also developed a strategic consultancy, a business consultancy that moves us higher in the organization, often funded by a CEO and a COO, not the CMO, which allows us to essentially write our own briefs and show how we can apply our creative strategy with creative thinkers to big business problems, very action-oriented. We've also dug into our sports partnership practice. As many of you know, sports are the number one live media for audiences, and we're at the center of that universe, given our track record with sports brands and helping non-sports brands play in sport. We're continuing to consult and lead the way with brands on how to engage in negotiating those deals, think about what those deals are, and it has put us in the pole position for the content and activations around those partnerships that also need to be made and implemented. And last but not least, Adobe. Adobe is the largest creative technology company in the world, and they chose us as their agency and Stagwell as their holding company. We're leveraging their tech as customer zero, taking ideas from humans and scaling them to create efficiencies at a global scale, putting us out front of our competitors. One of the big questions we get is how are we using ai i've talked about it in terms of back office and how we use it in pitch process but in and of itself it is not yet creative so the most important role it has for us right now is it frees up time to let our most senior creative leaders and others create and we're prepared for what's next as we continue to evolve i was talking to somebody the other day about how we started working with stagwell and i love the story we didn't even go through a pitch with Stagwell.

Speaker 43

We knew the capabilities and we knew the portfolio of amazing agencies and the brands that they hold alone gave us the confidence and the trust to know that it was the right partner and we've had a great relationship so far with 72 and Sunny to help us with our brand work and now have this collaboration where we can go right to any of the other agencies in the Stagwell house and we've already started to work with Code and Theory and their expertise from a technical side to help us redo our website.

Beth Sidhu, Other

So it's just a really unique different place with unbelievable teams and great talent our creative agencies are truly some of the best in the business and it's clear why they are laser focused on delivering ideas that move people meeting the demand moment wherever it is for the consumer and delivering brand moments that stick on the advocacy side of the business we see much of the same a clear understanding of what people care about and why and scaled innovative ways to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. Our depth of experience in the advocacy arena is unusual for a marketing holding company and we believe it is a key differentiator for us every day, not just every four years. Now let's turn to Zach Moffitt and Doug Thornell, CEOs of Targeted Victory and SKDK respectively.

Zach Moffitt, CEO

I'm Zach Moffitt, CEO of Targeted Victory. Today you're going to hear from me about how we're currently positioned. I'll share a couple of case studies that illustrate the scale and innovation of our company and And why I think that in the next four years, marketing will be more important than ever. We have built the largest political business in the United States by serving as the foundational layer of the fastest growing segment of the political market, direct response. We also have a substantial public affairs business serving multiple Fortune 50 companies, both in DC and at the state level. And our fastest growing sector is our corporate work, providing strategic guidance and crisis communications to companies looking to navigate the risk and reputation challenges that reflect the world we live in today. We believe our ability to function at the speed of a campaign but at the scale of a publicly traded agency is a unique differentiator and provides a huge opportunity for growth over the coming four years. In order to understand our business, it is important to understand the dynamics of the political market. Federal ad spend numbers do not capture billions in additional campaign activity but does serve as a good proxy for the overall growth. You can see the huge step up between 2016 and 2020 as well as the continued increases after however these top line numbers don't show the massive potential within the industry for digital activations over the next decade as we will see a massive shift from broadcast first mindset to one that more accurately reflects voter consumption habits market growth alone is not what's going to drive target victory and to offset a core business that is historically both seasonal and cyclical means we are constantly developing business lines that are always on and built on technical capabilities that create moat in our industry. We differentiate through our stack that is powered by the leaders in the marketing data and AI space. By marrying the most powerful data platforms in the world with our decade-plus historical first-party data insights, we have built the most comprehensive digital marketing program in politics. We have more than 16 billion data points on 56 million voters that we're able to deploy across thousands of organizations. 600,000-plus campaign activities last year drew upon 120 million data points, and we use those insights to auto-generate real time AI-optimized audiences. Additionally, our role as a platform in the market means we can leverage our scaled client demand needs into additional revenue opportunities. This drives our capital investments and acquisition strategy, and what that allows us to do is to turn cost centers into profit centers. Nothing better captures this approach than our venture wonder cave. In response to a market partner's failure during the final 100 days of the 2020 campaign, we developed a proprietary platform in 2021 that over the following year sent 1.6 billion messages but that was just the start. In 2023, we added multi-tenant capabilities along with additional feature sets and the capacity for two-way conversations that start to achieve the goal of true one-to-one mobile communications. With that foundation in place, in 2024, we scaled to 600 plus organizations, sending over four billion messages in a year. In less than four years, we've built a platform that has 40 plus self-serve clients, sent 7.1 billion messages, and service 600 plus clients. Our second example showcases the journey we've been on as a firm to leverage AI within an industry where any mistake could be front page news item. We started by asking the question, which task is the most fixed? Our most obvious pain point was the task of generating marketing content. From ingestion of news sources and client content to training data sets and deployment, we were able to experiment quickly and iterate constantly.

Ryan Barker, CEO

Introducing Cicero, an AI assistant originally developed to generate fundraising copy, allowing you to save time, increase margins, and work more efficiently. And now, we're expanding Cicero to go beyond fundraising, to be a force multiplier across all of our offerings, from customized copy for one-to-one communications, to new business proposals, to audience selection and expansion. Cicero, the engine driving change in 2025 and beyond.

Zach Moffitt, CEO

By the 2024 cycle, fundraising copy was performing at a 25% improvement, which represents tens of millions of net revenue dollars for our clients. Onboarding time for new staff had been reduced by six weeks, and staff have, on average, 15% more time in their week to focus on other client-related tasks. Cicero in 2025 and beyond will become the engine underpinning our entire marketing effort. It will allow us to seamlessly go from content creation to capturing and analyzing real-time performance, which in turn will be fed back into the updated models for new audience generation, then rinse and repeat, all our proprietary data that separates us from our competition. presidential campaign years are so interesting because they provide a snapshot into the future due to the size, scale, and intensity of the efforts. The trends that will drive the coming years make it obvious that the landscape is only getting harder to navigate. The role of the marketer is to be able to move between the micro and the macro of the engagement and take the mass amounts of data being generated and deliver one-to-one marketing at scale. We now have the ability to tailor the right message to the right audience at the right time and capture those outcomes and use them to optimize the next deployment. Yet while this is possible to achieve, it is also extremely difficult to execute and the delta between words and action is only becoming more apparent. Firms without access to proprietary first-party data will struggle, and systems that are not built from the customer up will fail. However, once you have the plumbing in place, you will then have the ability to take that infrastructure and leverage it against larger opportunities. The Stagwell Marketing and PR vertical provide a substantial set of growth drivers for these tools to be reconfigured and deployed to drive margin and results. The application of AI on top of this creates further operational leverage, allowing organizations to invest in expertise and higher quality execution while reducing costs associated with middle management. 2024 was a wake-up call for recalibrating strategies to meet new coalitions and execution realities. The traditional playbook is dead, and disruption will bring opportunities for those that can seize it. The size of the U.S. economy will continue the expansion of political spending. And the reality is that DC today is the center of everything and that will continue to drive corporate and public affairs growth at a substantial rate. Thank you.

Doug Thornell, CEO

So when people ask me, why do I love working at SKDK? The answer is simple. We do impactful work that matters. I'm Doug Thornell, CEO of SKDK. And for the last 40 years, we've been helping our clients achieve victories avoid crises and tell their stories while our firm was born in the political world we have grown and scaled to work with fortune 500 companies startups philanthropies and non-profits while still bringing that campaign mindset to everything that we do that means speed innovation senior level engagement and an obsession with winning no firm combines strategy storytelling, and integrated media better than we do. We're the trusted partner to solve your toughest challenges, be it in business, culture, sports, or media. We're proud to be Stagwell's very first acquisition, and we channel that very same challenger mindset in how we compete, adapt, and deliver for our clients. Behind every success is a strategy, a message, and a team that knows how to deliver. Whether it was strengthening community support for Disney or driving awareness for engagement for America's semi-quincentennial, say that three times, our work didn't just make headlines, it made an impact. Here's how we did it. The Walt Disney Company was facing political pressure and hometown dissatisfaction that put a toll on business operations. Disney tapped SKDK to develop a strategy and a narrative shift. Using insights from SKDK's research, we developed a new narrative, leveraging Disney magic to strengthen community support. To help engage key stakeholders, SKDK developed innovative cross-platform ads to tell Disney's story, highlighting the company's commitment to the community and employees. Through this ongoing effort, SKDK transformed the narrative and strengthen Disney's favorability among key stakeholders. The insights from the research not only helped with a community engagement effort, but informed messaging to Disney cast members and key elected officials in both Anaheim and Orange County. Additionally, we scaled these insights to help Disney and other regions, including Hong Kong, Paris, and Shanghai, improving external messaging and business strategies globally for the brand. Following a challenging time for the organization and against the backdrop of a deeply polarized nation, America250 tapped SKDK to lead a multi-year effort focused on bringing Americans together to commemorate our nation's 250th anniversary by developing a unifying message and transforming the organization to effectively operate in a more nimble, modern way. Starting with precise research, SKDK crafted a resonant message and brand identity. We created engaging content, including long-form videos, and collaborated with influencers for nationwide reach. Partnering with Major League Baseball, Nextdoor, and YWCA, we launched a public engagement effort supported by a digital presence, media blitz, and ad campaign. We maintained momentum by engaging with historic events, attracting media attention, new partners and sponsors, and developing new programs to raise awareness and drive engagement. We took an organization that was built for the past and got it ready for the future. Through an integrated approach, we transformed America 250 as it prepared to reach all 350 million Americans by 2026. We're proud of our history, but the future we are building is even brighter. Our goal, to be the leading strategic communications and integrated media firm in the country and help drive Stagwell's march to be a $5 billion company in the next five years. To do this, we plan to expand our public affairs and advisory work into high growth markets all across the US. That will help our business continue to scale, ensuring we are in the front lines of the most important policy and business conversations in all parts of the country. Our integrated media team is best in class and only getting better. SKDK Creative Studios is using innovative AI-driven tools to help our storytellers and creators produce more authentic, compelling content. In advocacy, we're positioned to deliver more strategy, content, and advertising for some of the biggest companies, nonprofits, and campaigns in the country. We're launching a new proprietary text messaging platform, creating another tool for candidates, causes, and companies to reach and mobilize their audiences. Sloan & Company, our cutting-edge corporate communications firm, is focused on four areas. The rapid convergence of sports, entertainment, media, and technology, healthcare solutions, the burgeoning crypto industry, and intelligence and AI-driven media tools that will help fuel business success. Sports is a key investment for us, and our advisory practice, Jasper Sports, is quickly becoming a leader, advising some of the biggest brands, teams, and athletes in the industry. And we will continue to attract and develop the best strategists and storytellers in the business. While a lot has changed in our industry, one thing remains constant, the kind of people who make SKDK and our work so impactful. I'm so proud that SKDK is a part of the Stagwell Network, where we can tackle any challenge together.

Beth Sidhu, Other

Thank you, Zach and Doug. Now we'll go to James Townsend, who leads our media and commerce segment. Nowhere does our promise of growth, scale, and innovation come to life as clearly as within our media work, where a combination of successful multinational acquisitions, marquee clients, and connected solutions allows us to work smarter and faster. JT, over to you.

James Townsend, CEO

Hello and welcome, everybody.

James Townsend, CEO

My name is James Townsend, and I'm the Global CEO of the Data Media Portfolio here at Stagwell. I'm going to talk about the market we see, why it's suited to our challenger proposition, the foundations we've laid, a little bit of work, and the five growth engines we're going to bring to bear and into the future. The market's growing. It will exceed a trillion dollars for the first time this year. and we've been investing in the highest growth parts of that growing market with digital data and tech assets that we've been choreographing ever since in service to our clients. And those clients are looking to consolidate. They're looking to put more into less, which we consider to be an opportunity for business partnership. We also see a media landscape that's growing and fragmenting. That is an opportunity for media choreography. The walls of the walled gardens will continue to go up and we need to be able to help our clients navigate that in service to their consumers. And a consequence of that is a huge content explosion, needing production and distribution, optimisation and measurement. This again is a massive business opportunity for us and a significant need for those modern marketeers. And our base is good. It's a strong base. It's $5 billion in media. It's over $200 million of one business. It's 23% EBITDA growth last year at a healthy margin of 20%, all under a strong top-line performance. Scale, growth and innovation has stable foundations. And those foundations have been built deliberately with complementary, not duplicative propositions, helping us grow internationally as we are with the acquisition of ADK most recently, or equally with adjacent services that support our data and media spine. Pleasingly, the portfolio having grown more than double since 2020. But it's the organisation and the proposition of how we bring that to market that's most important. Connected solutions are what our clients are seeking. And so having our people and our clients be able to navigate against those now scaled assets is absolutely essential. $200 million in one business is also complimented by $200 million in shared revenues, suggesting that that consolidating client is looking to us as a business partner. And scale is both geographic and also in our media investments. When we think about geography, it used to be a badge of honor for our competitors to talk about the amount of people in the amount of places they had not so much now we want to build the right amount of teams in hub and center of excellence designed orgs to marry up and match and reflect that of our clients and use technology to deploy media all around the world we have 35 offices in 25 countries we're in enough places and the right places to help sow of those modern clients and those modern clients have come in great numbers and we expect those relationships to grow and also for more to continue to join stagwell they are seeing an alternative they're seeing a different proposition and a data digital and tech based one and what does that look like it looks like technologies that we've built and designed ourselves and with clients like stage and assembly data driven tech enabled and ai infused with more than 70 of the apps on the operating system ai driven or equally their modern media mix with more than 75 of our investments now digital, over-investing ahead of our competition in high growth areas like CTV, or social environments like TikTok, or helping win in that retail media explosion, and deliberate M&A that complements that data and media spine, like Pep Group, helping us with content distribution globally, or equally Brand New Galaxy, helping us win in e-commerce. And all of this wrapped up in more than 70% of our engagements, now some form of performance-based or outcome-driven model gives us confidence that we're reflecting a client-centric business that absolutely reflects that modern marketeer's needs. Let's look at some work from the Lenovo team to bring this to life. Now let's look at some of the work we've been doing for Ralph Lauren to help them enrich and drive maturity in their digital environments, bringing brand and performance dollars together to increase profitability for the business all around Europe. I'm now going to finish with our five growth engines that are going to take us into the future and build on the foundations laid. High growth media, trading innovation, scaled adjacent services, retail media and scaled AI driven ID graph. We'll continue to double down the high growth areas of the market where our clients are looking to invest more not less and we'll do so ahead of our competitors. Be that increasing our expand in digital and social video now 50% of our investment by 100% this year on environments such as Meta, YouTube, and TikTok. Applying performance media methodology to this at the core and all the way through the funnel is what's helping us win with our clients. Trading innovation. Where many of our competitors think about high volumes of low-cost media and show and offering impressions, we want to talk about business outcomes and tying our emuneration to that. And only we can do that here at Stagwell because of our data advantage. And we look forward to working with our clients' financial imperatives and in service to them not against them adjacent services we see the opportunity to continue to bring in clients through a media or data doorway but then bring them into other opportunities such as crm with gale or business the business with multi-view or exponential experiential activity with vitro and as i said earlier 200 million dollars of shared revenues suggest the organizational model is speaking clearly to our clients Retail Media, we launched a joint venture with Zsakla in Poland last week, where we took the biggest retailer and all of their data across their 6,000 stores and their app usage, and put that into against the collection of eight products that we're bringing to bear that are data-driven and help CPG brands win in that market with a greater understanding of their audiences and their habits. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, and something the team will talk about next is the scaled, AI-driven ID graph. Comparative in scale to our competition and existing ID graphs, but unique in the data sets it uses, because only Stagwell has the research companies and the research propositions that Harris X, Behrer, Uniceptor, the National Research Group can bring to give us a unique perspective of that consumer and what their needs and wants may be. So there you have it, five growth engines built on solid foundations with our digital data and tech-centric media and data proposition. Thank you.

Yin Wenrani, Analyst — Client, MilkTap

Hi, I'm Yin Wenrani, CEO of MilkTap. We're probably best known as the people behind the iconic Got Milk celebrity milk mustache ads. We've enjoyed a great relationship with Gil over the last four years, and I'm proud to report that 2024 was the first year of growth for Dairy Milk in over 15 years, and we could not have done it without Gail. We knew right from the pitch process that Gail was very unique in its ability to blend data and creativity and really solve business problems for us collectively, and being very fluent across the entire complicated channel ecosystem. As someone who has worked both agency and client side for now almost 30 years, I really appreciate how unique Gail is. I know now and always that I have the access to the talent and the capabilities that I need when I need them. I've been really appreciative of the support from the executive leadership team at both Gail and Stagwell on this amazing journey of Milk. Working with a modern agency built for today has truly been a game changer for myself, of my team and for the entire milk industry.

Beth Sidhu, Other

As the media landscape continues to evolve its focus from volume to outcomes, the data underpinning the system is more important than ever, which is why the ID graph that JT mentioned is a priority for us here at Stagwell. Unlike our competition, Stagwell was founded on the thesis that both data and technology are central to the modern marketing landscape. It's why we are well positioned to innovate with the agility of a tech company, building solutions that grow and change to meet the demands of both our clients and our internal workflows. I'll now pass it over to some of our innovation leaders to hear more about how this works in practice. We'll start with Mansoor Basha, CTO of the Stagwell Marketing Cloud, who will share more on the IDE graph.

Mansoor Basha, CTO

Hi, my name is Mansoor Basha, and I am the CTO of the Stagwell Marketing Cloud. I'm excited to share with you one of Stagwell's most valuable and innovative core assets, the Stagwell ID Graph. In our rapidly evolving digital landscape, where privacy regulations are tightening and third-party cookies are disappearing, the ability to understand consumers while respecting their privacy has never been more crucial or more challenging. At its core, the Stagwell ID Graph is our proprietary identity resolution platform that connects disparate data points into a cohesive, actionable understanding of consumers. Unlike conventional data platforms, our ID Graph doesn't just store information, it creates intelligent connections across touchpoints, channels, and devices. The ID Graph serves as our central nervous system that offers our data infrastructure processing and connecting billions of signals to create a privacy-compliant holistic view of consumer behavior. The innovation of our ID graph lies in three key differentiators. First, our hybrid approach to identity resolution. While competitors rely heavily on either probabilistic or deterministic matching, we've engineered a sophisticated system that leverages both methodologies. This means we can identify connections with the confidence of deterministic matches while maintaining the scale of probabilistic approaches. Second, our persistent identity framework is built to thrive in a cookie-less world. When Google finally deprecates third-party cookies in Chrome, many computers might struggle. We've been preparing for years, developing alternative identity markers and contextual intelligence that doesn't rely on conventional tracking mechanisms. Third, our real-time processing capability sets us apart. The Stagwell ID Graph doesn't just provide historical insights. It processes data in milliseconds, allowing our clients to act on insights instantly, whether that's adjusting a programmatic bid or personalizing a website experience. We are in the phase of growing our data build-out, but we are seeing some early proof points. A global CPG client leveraged our ID Graph to reduce media waste significantly while increasing conversion rates by 25 percent. A DTC retailer identified roughly three million high-value prospects that were invisible in their previous targeting approach. What makes the Stagwell ID Graph a differentiated asset versus our competitors is our unique combination of proprietary data, technical infrastructure, and strategic applications that are difficult to replicate. Looking ahead, we're continuing to invest in the ID Graph through, one, expanded international coverage, particularly in emerging markets. Two, exploring a partnership with Palantir for enhanced AI and machine learning capabilities for predictive modeling. Three, specialized vertical solutions for high-growth sectors like financial services and the technology sector. Four, strategic data acquisition to strengthen our proprietary assets. The Stagwell ID graph represents not just a technology investment, but a fundamental strategic asset that differentiates us in the market. It powers our better outcomes for our clients, creates barriers to competition, and positions us for sustained growth as the digital landscape continues to evolve. Thank you for your time.

Mike Treff, CEO

Hey, everybody. I'm Mike Treff, CEO of Code & Theory, and I'm extremely excited to talk to you today about one of Stagwell's most boundary-pushing new platforms. We call it The Machine. The Machine is our AI-powered end-to-end operating system that unifies software, data, collaboration environments, and technology, enhancing our capabilities, streamlining our workflows, and driving better results for us and most importantly our clients at its core the machine unifies data first-party second-party third-party data any data source we can get and of course proprietary data across the stagwell network to centralize all these workflows deliver insights fast and of course support scaled content creation and real-time performance reporting this accelerates outcomes for our clients it allows all levels of our team and our business to elevate we're going to leverage things that are proprietary to us. One of the things that's most important to leverage is the Stagwell Marketing Cloud where we've built a portfolio of products fit for purpose that together become an incredible source of first-party and third-party data. So what we want to do with Stagwell Marketing Cloud is make it easy to use it. So the machine will minimize setup time for any of the products across the Stagwell Marketing Cloud so we can tailor solutions to client needs, drive progress with precision, and orchestrate every phase of work from ideation to execution through one source of truth and a single unified interface the result is smarter more holistic more precise insights and better performance from day one we put those insights to work to guide creative media and experience design not just collecting data and reporting on data for the sake of it if the data is not affecting real-time decisions if it's not autonomously allowing our work to improve then it's not doing the right thing so our design creative and media planning talent is the best in the world we know that and the machine will just amplify that work allowing them to move faster and more effectively it's going to meet them where they are in their software this is extremely important we are not here to change everybody's workflows we are not here to insist that ourselves and our clients operating completely new ways that are foreign to them that would create almost a slowdown and more of a change management nightmare than you would want. We're here to meet people where they are in their software, connecting insights and feedback to design decisions and portability. We do this through mini-machines. The idea of a mini-machine is an interface layer that sits on top of whatever software suite you might be in, be it the Adobe suite, maybe you're in Salesforce, maybe you're in Figma, maybe you're in Stage. But we will bring our mini-machines to the worker to bring to them real-time insights, performance information, potentially allow them to queue and pull information that might make their work better get creative recommendations targeting recommendations segmentation options these mini machines are critical because they allow you to continue to do the things you do best in your craft and meeting you where you are while integrating to the larger machine architecture where collaboration and workflows unify between agencies inter-agencies and clients so the only way to do this is to build from an open source and open stack perspective and that's exactly how we built the machine to plug into wherever you are The machine will make production seamless and scalable through connections with tools like, as we mentioned, Adobe's content supply chain ecosystem. We can allow for scaled, resonant content creation at high velocity and high specificity. Because at the end of the day, it's about performance, and that's our business philosophy, performance. That's why the machine integrates with Stage, our real-time media distribution and analysis platform, so we can have real-time data enabling precise and dynamic media placement, maximizing every dollar spent. Campaigns launch fast, they scale across every channel, they are optimized to every touchpoint, they drive seamless engagement and real results. So unlike our competitors, and look we know that our competitors have been building these systems for years and years and years, we are the first to build it starting in the AI era. Everyone else will be retrofitting their stacks, their machines, their operating systems to work for an agentic world, to work for a world where data, data unification composability are the most important things the legacy companies are built on outdated technology stacks they're disconnected across CRMs CDPs workflows that weren't designed for the pace the speed and the expectation of today we're building it AI first where intelligence powers every workflow every routine every operation from the ground up there's no retrofitting there's no add-ons just API driven systems built for speed interoperability and rapid scale so looking ahead the machine will continue to evolve with the incorporation of agents we're going to get more and more agentic as the technology allows us to do so to allow in specialized tasks from automation to insight generation to analysis and reporting and why is this important this is important because we want our people spending time on the most high value tasks we want our people focused on building technology on great strategy on breakthrough creativity we don't want our staff focused on production tasks things that can be automated we want high value time for our teams not low value productivity for our teams so we want to build a system that allows for every minute spent to be a more valuable minute this will obviously increase productivity the automation of tasks to free up bandwidth is going to be an exponential value add to ourselves and to our client whether it's in the volume of assets the go-to- pipelines the real-time creative and execution streamlining costs and driving greater ROI that is the power of machine both for ourselves and for our clients and so we're not just trying to get to parity we're not just trying to level the playing field we are trying to redefine the standards of what agency performance and client satisfaction should be this is a forward-thinking approach it positions stagwell at the forefront of innovation it enables us to to compete and win against industry giants and cement ourselves as the challenger network. Thank you so much for your time.

John Cahan, Other

Hi, I'm John Cahan, the Chief AI Officer of Stagwell. Over the last four decades, I've been involved in every facet of data and AI, from product development to marketing and sales. Working closely with the top executives at two iconic companies, IBM and Microsoft, I helped shape strategy related to AI, including the building of the data platform that powers Microsoft Azure today. I've known Mark for many years and jumped at the opportunity to collaborate with him when the Stagwall team launched the Marketing Cloud a few years ago, serving as the Chairman of the Board of Advisors for SMC. Today, I'm delighted to join Stagwall as the first Chief AI Officer. Why is this role needed at Stagwall? The marketing services industry is ripe for AI-led disruption. My personal mission is to open up data in AI for shareholder and societal good. AI will enable marketers to achieve more than they've ever done before, eliminating repetitive tasks, developing actionable insights, creating more customized, scalable content and targeting capabilities. Stagwell is at the forefront of this AI-driven shift. My role is to spearhead the integration and development of AI across Stagwell's global network. The focus is on creating innovative solutions that allow our Stagwell agencies and, most importantly, our customers to focus on what matters most, delivering unprecedented value for their business and our shareholders. You've just heard some of the innovations that the teams are working on to leverage the most advanced AI tools in the marketplace, our unique data sets, and Stagwell's expertise across marketing services. The Stagwell's Marketing Cloud products are empowering the modern marketer today. I am pleased to be able to introduce Elspeth Rollert, the CEO of Stagwell Marketing Cloud, to discuss these industry-leading tools. Thank you.

Elspeth Rollert, CEO

Good morning. My name is Elspeth Rollert, and I am the CEO of the Stagwell Marketing Cloud. Before joining Stagwell, I worked at IBM, Microsoft, and Uber, where I saw firsthand the power of breakthrough technology to not only change how we work, but to change lives. I am here now at the Stagwell Marketing Cloud because we are delivering breakthrough SaaS and DAS products across marketing disciplines to change modern marketers' lives for the better by changing how they harness the power of technology to drive outcomes. We are masters of our craft, And I deeply believe that our team's industry expertise, along with Stagwell's proprietary data, award-winning network, and ambitious clients, give us a competitive advantage in a competitive marketplace. Looking ahead, SMC's focus is shifting from pure development to more of a sales-driven mindset. With our sales, not development, team growing the fastest. And that is why I'm more bullish than ever and am pleased to report that we are on track for double-digit growth in 2025 while driving EBITDA improvement with an aim of delivering positive EBITDA heading into 2027. And we've only just begun. We will continue to be a growth engine for Stagwell. We anticipate delivering approximately 25% total revenue growth on an annualized basis, resulting in more than a quarter of a billion dollars of revenue by year-end 2029. Now today, the solutions we go to market with are aligned with Stagwell's strengths across research, communications, creative, and media. Our research suite of products, Harris Quest Research, is led by the Harris Poll, a leader in research for the past 60 years. In 2024, we've seen strong growth in our brand tracking and intelligence tools, two of which you will see demos of shortly. Blue chip clients across industries, from finance to retail to tech, are expanding to new markets with these tools, relying on them to deliver trusted, real-time, AI-powered insights across the globe. Our communication suite of products, named Profit Comms Tech, has expanded tremendously in size and capabilities in 2024, with the acquisition of Tel Aviv-based leaders and IMAI, a digital agency specializing in influencer marketing and social commerce, and an influencer marketing SaaS platform, respectively, and Cologne-based Unicepta, a global media intelligence provider. These acquisitions represent our commitment to growing our capabilities and geographic footprint. Our creative and media suite of products and platforms have two key components. The Creative and Media Studio uses first, third, and proprietary data to inform AI-driven insights that predict and fine-tune campaign outcomes. And our advanced media platforms, which offers a number of media channels that allow partners to target customers in unique ways, like our innovative around platform for live events, which we will demo shortly. Today, SMC's go-to-market motion is driven by a combination of digital channels, partners, and our sales team. and we innovate with strategic tech partners like Google, who we work with as a strategic cloud partner and AI provider, and Adobe, who we're integrating their industry-leading creative tools into our products. Now, I'd like to show you a few SMC product demos that demonstrate the range and power of our capabilities, the capabilities that attract and retain our customers. Let's start with QuestBrand from the Harris Poll. QuestBrand deepens the understanding of your brand and its competition by allowing you to track progress over time with concrete metrics.

Justin Pincus, Other

Hi, I'm Justin Pincus, Managing Director of QuestBrand by the Harris Poll. Think of QuestBrand as a health tracker for your brand. Startups use it to build momentum. Mature brands watch for warning signs. Backed by 60-plus years of equity research, it delivers real-time insights across awareness, perception, emotion, and conversion. We collect fresh data daily via online surveys with real people, balanced GenPop, age 18+, across 20 global markets, and we can launch new ones in just two to four weeks. For fast-growing brands like Celsius and Poppy, it's all about traction. With Quest Brand, you can track familiarity and momentum week over week, especially among Gen Z and Millennials. Looking at the end of this trend line, you can see a clear pop for Liquid Death. Not only is looking at traction and how you're doing with the market a use case for Quest Brand, but so is campaign tracking and measurement. After Liquid Death Super Bowl ad, it's very clear to see a lift among Gen Z. With daily tracking, you don't have to wait weeks to measure impact. you can see it now. And speaking of seeing things now, when the EV tariff news broke in Canada, Tesla's brand momentum dipped. Not only that, but if we look at the percentage of consumers in Canada that say that they would never consider purchasing the brand, those rates also jumped overnight. With Quest Brand, you don't miss the moment. Once you see something you like, you can save that view down immediately into our report builder where everything is live and easily exportable bottom line brand health doesn't just live in spreadsheets it evolves and so should your tracking that is quest brand thank you barra.ai revolutionizes the way brands track and measure the financial implications of brand investments it bridges the gap between marketing and finance to create a company snapshot that is both deeply granular and widely comprehensive hi i'm ryan barker ceo and founder of bara.ai bara is the world's only predictive brand tech platform that links brand

Ryan Barker, CEO

strategy directly to business outcomes it helps you understand the real financial impact of brand investments so you can make smarter faster decisions that actually move the needle here's how. First, connect brand to business. Instead of just tracking brand metrics, Barra shows how those metrics impact real business outcomes like sales, growth, and KPIs, making brand performance measurable and accountable. Second, explain brand changes. Wondering why your brand score dipped last quarter? Barra helps you understand what's behind the shift so you can act with clarity, not guesswork. Third, eliminate brand blind spots. With over 130 metrics across demographic, geographic, attitudinal, and behavioral data, Bera gives you a full 360-degree view of your brand's strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. Who's this for? Marketing leaders, brand strategists, CMOs, and growth teams at consumer-facing companies, especially those in retail, CPG, hospitality, and tech who need real-time insights to compete and win. Barra.i delivers the intelligence you need to transform brand data into business results. No guesswork, no wasted spend, just smart predictive brand strategy faster than ever.

Elspeth Rollert, CEO

And now we'll hear about Unicepta's powerful AI-powered media analysis and intelligence tool that observes more than 460 million sources of information every single day. by combining AI-powered technologies with human expertise and judgment.

James, Other

Hi, everyone. I'm James. I'm an Account Director at Uniceptor here in the UK, and I'm going to give you a brief overview of our Mind portal. Mind is an advanced media intelligence platform that transforms complex data into clear, actionable insights. It empowers comms teams using both cutting-edge technology and human expertise, helping them analyze vast amounts of data. It enables fast, precise and relevant insights through advanced search, filtering, AI-powered analytics and automated reporting. Here's how it works. So Mind has advanced search and filtering, meaning more targeted queries and automated tagging, streamlined research and categorization. It has customizable dashboards and alerts, so personalized views and real-time notifications ensure key developments are never missed. It has AI-powered analytics, so trend detection, sentiment analysis, and predictive insights help identify relevant media dynamics early on. It has flexible reporting, so customizable reports with visual analytics for clearer communication. And all of this with seamless integration, so it works effortlessly with existing workflows and tools to increase efficiency. In terms of why a prospect will buy it, well, in today's fast paced media landscape, staying ahead requires intelligence tools. Mind helps professionals cut through the noise, focus on critical insights, and make smarter, faster decisions. It enhances efficiency, reduces manual effort, and ensures communicators always have the most relevant data at their fingertips.

Elspeth Rollert, CEO

Smart Assets is an AI-driven creative effectiveness platform that brings creative and media together, ensuring their ads hit the mark every time.

Asif Chowdhury

Hi, I'm Asif Chowdhury from Stagwell Marketing Cloud. Today, I'm excited to introduce Smart Assets, the creative effectiveness platform that helps brands drive higher return on ad spend by understanding exactly what makes impactful creative. The process is simple but powerful. Creative teams upload assets. The tools instantly score them based on media and branding best practices. It checks for things like local presence, key message clarity, and whether the ad meets platform-specific requirements like Instagram or TikTok guidelines. Smartassets uses AI and behavioral psychology to tag in great creative elements, things like emotional tone, product visibility, or CTA strength. It helps teams manage global assets in one place and avoid wasting media spend on underperforming content. Our users see measurable results. One luxury beauty brand found 121% uplift in return on ad spend after using smart assets to optimize their creatives, using insights derived from the previous year of performance data.

Elspeth Rollert, CEO

So if you're looking to scale creative, improve brand governance, or just stop wasting spend on weak assets, smart assets can help you make every piece of creative count lastly around brings something very different to the smc family with its b2b and b2c proposition it's an entirely new way to layer augmented reality based marketing onto live events hi my name is josh beaty and i'm the founder and ceo of around around is redefining live sports entertainment with shared augmented reality connecting mobile and broadcast into a powerful new mass medium.

Josh Beaty, CEO

Around is the first shared AR platform designed to engage every fan in the stadium, whether on their phone or on the video board, making the entire crowd part of the action. With Around, stadiums aren't just venues, they become interactive playgrounds. Our technology turns the smartphone into a game controller connected to the rest of the stadium. Broadcast is also able to integrate our immersive experiences into their cameras for connected video board and streaming potential creating moments where fans don't just watch the game they are part of it around is frictionless scalable and 100 browser based so fans can scan and localize at any stadium instantly becoming part of a shared stadium-wide experience why are teams like the rams minnesota united and the athletics adopting around because this is the future of fan engagement a fully interactive mass medium that transforms spectators into active participants and sponsor activations into real-time interactive moments it's game on as demonstrated in the product

Elspeth Rollert, CEO

demo videos smc is empowering modern marketers through technology leaning into the powerful ways in which AI and AR, optimized workflows and more are fundamentally changing and enhancing the way they work. The team and I are relentlessly committed to delivering best-in-class solutions, ones that are seamlessly powered by Stagwell's proprietary data and enriched with cutting-edge AI-powered features that ensure our solutions are relevant and actionable today. And we're not Not stopping there. Our evolution will take us beyond standalone applications. This summer, we'll launch the first iteration of the Stagwell Marketing Cloud Platform, a unified ecosystem, one place for our customers to package and purchase all of their products. This is more than just an upgrade. It reflects a key shift in how we work. Our vision for the platform is to continue to harness the power of our data, the oxygen to AI, making it accessible and actionable for marketers no matter their specialty. By integrating AI into every facet of the platform, we aim to streamline repetitive tasks, create more scalable and performative content, and ultimately build a 24-7 marketing platform with Stagwell AI agents that empower marketers to achieve more wherever they are. This is just the beginning of our journey as we lead the way in transforming the future of marketing.

Ed Pilkington, Analyst — Client, Diageo

Hi, it's Ed Pilkington here at Diageo. We really value the relationship that we have with Stagwell. We work across multiple Stagwell agencies, across multiple disciplines and across many, many of our brands. And in some cases, those relationships actually go back many, many years and have been highly fruitful. What do we value about working with Stagwell across those different partners, different agencies, is we get great thinking, great strategy up front based on insight and cultural savviness and connectedness. And then we get big creative ideas, some big thinking, which translates into great work, which is always really, really well executed. There's a real craft to the work that we get. And we also really appreciate just the relationships that we've got, the ability to pick up the phone, to talk through issues and opportunities and get to great solutions for our brands and our business. And we appreciate that.

Speaker 26

Thank you so much. that was great now we're going to move on to our next segment let's take a look good afternoon i'm ryan green stagwell's chief operating officer stagwell has made meaningful progress on delivering the combined 65 million dollars in cost savings since the merger over the next 18 to 24 months we expect to implement further cost saving measures resulting in an additional 80 to 100 million dollars in savings while some of these new savings will come from expanding our existing shared services and real estate consolidation initiatives we anticipate the bulk will come from ai driven technologies that will allow our employees to work more efficiently we expect to find tech driven efficiencies throughout nearly every step of the creative content production and delivery workflows summarized into the following five key areas. First, in planning and asset management, we can deliver more efficient production workflows and faster content delivery by centralizing the storage and organization of digital assets and automating the related production tasks. Second, our newly engineered system will deliver significant time savings through AI-assisted content creation, faster revision processing, and reduced time in asset discovery. Third, leveraging AI, we can increase the speed of content variation for faster A-B testing. This, coupled with automated content publishing functionality, will allow us to improve personalized digital experiences. Fourth, we will be able to increase collaboration and reduce project turnaround times by enabling easier management of client feedback, a more efficient review and approval process, and faster access to content for client presentations. And finally, our technology will allow quicker access to content performance data, leading to improved analysis and streamlined content planning workflows. The result will be more strategic recommendations, faster campaign optimization, and data-driven results. Through this process, we will be able to significantly improve the efficiency of our teams by eliminating repetitive tasks and streamlining day-to-day work. Ultimately, this will allow our teams to focus on what matters most, delivering best-in-class work that helps our customers transform their brands. We will be using a variety of Stagwell proprietary products and technologies, many of which are powered by Adobe and Google. Implementation is currently underway, and we expect the power of these tools to increase over time. Accuracy and usability will also improve, expanding the number of use cases our technology-enabled content supply chain can impact. We anticipate $60 to $70 million of cost savings to be actioned by the end of 2025 and reflected in our 2026 results. The remainder of the savings will be actioned by the end of 2026 and will have a meaningful impact on our adjusted EBITDA. We believe our approach is both a tool for saving costs and a way to supercharge Stagwell's delivery for our customers. We look forward to updating you on our progress in the coming quarters.

Frank Lanuto, CFO

Hi, I'm Frank Lanuto, Chief Financial Officer at Stagwell. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for Stagwell's 2025 Investor Day. Just over three years ago, at our very first Investor Day, we outlined our growth and efficiency strategies, as well as our financial targets, for the ensuing four years. We exited 2024 with strong growth and are on track to achieve those goals as we continue to disrupt the legacy advertising industry and focus on becoming the best-in-class marketing services company in the world. Today, I'll provide a summary of our financial growth since the merger, dig into greater detail around implemented cost savings initiatives, and then provide a view into the changes we're making to position us for future profitable growth. Starting with the 2024 annual results, we reported revenue of $2.8 billion, an increase of 12% over the prior year, led by 13% growth in digital transformation, 19% growth in Stagwell Marketing Cloud, and 10% growth in outperformance media and data capability. We also reported adjusted EBITDA of $411 million, an increase of 14% over the prior year, with a margin as a percentage of net revenue of 18%, an improvement of 120 basis points over 2023. In 2024, we also remediated the material weakness in internal controls, as our efforts to build an efficient and streamlined financial reporting organization have succeeded. Looking at our progress over the last three years, in fiscal 21, Stagwell reported revenue of $2.2 billion, with 87% of our revenue derived in North America, and more than 50% driven by our creativity and communications capabilities. The $2.8 billion in revenue reported at the end of 24 represents a total increase of more than 28 percent over fiscal 21 representing an annualized growth rate of approximately nine percent these results outpaced our peers in the u.s with the annualized growth rate more than 350 basis points higher than our nearest competitor geographically revenue outside of north america has grown 41 since 21 and the percentage of revenue contribution from outside of north america to 16%. As Mark and Jason both noted in their remarks, international growth is a significant component of our future strategy, and we expect international as a percentage of total revenue to grow steadily over the next few years. Revenue contribution by capability has also shifted positively, with digital increasing to 53% and traditional creative and communications reflections, reflecting 47% of revenues in Fiscal 24. The shift is a result of a combination of our focused M&A, as well as stronger organic growth and our digital capabilities. Turning Costs In 2021, we outlined a path to achieving $30 million in annualized cost savings following the merger. This figure was achieved by mid-23 through a combination of actions, including the expansion of our shared services platform real estate consolidation and benefits of scale with respect to technology and compensation related costs along the way we identified opportunities for further savings and announced a second initiative to reduce annual costs by an additional 35 million in 2024 we closed offices and consolidated further into campuses in london toronto los Angeles and New York. The annualized impact of these moves will be approximately $14 million. We're also evaluating additional opportunities for consolidation in other markets over the next 24 months. Turning to technology, during 2024, our deployment of AI driven automation combined with the real estate actions discussed above and the elimination of redundant technology will generate more than five million dollars in annualized savings. And with respect to BackOffice, we completed the implementation of various technologies, including a new management and reporting financial platform across our financial functions, as well as continuing to roll out our global HR platform to our agencies. These actions will not only provide greater visibility into the business performance but will also help to deliver more than 11 million dollars in annual savings. In total our actions have resulted in the achievement of more than 30 million dollars in the savings of the incremental 35 million we announced. Looking to the future, as Mark discussed, Stagwell is on a path to being a five billion dollar revenue company with one billion dollars in adjusted EBITDA by the end of 2029. This is our 5x5 plan. What does that mean for the company profile? Over the next five years, we expect to deliver 12% compounded annual total revenue growth, building to annual adjusted EBITDA of $1 billion. There are three driving factors to delivering our plan, industry-leading organic growth in each of our new reporting segments, a creative M&A, adding new capabilities and geographies, and a laser focus on leveraging technology and scale to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Let me expand on each of these drivers. Starting with organic growth, we expect growth of approximately 9% compounded annually over the next five years. The foundation for growth is rooted in our digital-first, customer-centric approach to servicing our clients. Stagwell is optimally positioned to redefine the way marketing is done. We are the Goldilocks company, not too big and needing to shed employees, and not too small and struggling to keep scale clients. Our strategy is working. the value of the RFPs we've been invited to has grown from about $1 billion in fiscal 22 to north of $1.3 billion in fiscal 24. We are winning with some of the largest companies in the world, including General Motors, Starbucks, and Adobe. And our trailing 12-month net new business wins are now in excess of $380 million, almost 80% higher than in fiscal 22. each of our new segments is poised to deliver industry-leading revenue growth over the next five years in marketing services we expect revenue to grow at about five percent annually over the last 12 months our creative businesses have demonstrated the ability to win larger global remits from some of the world's largest companies as we continue to scale globally we believe we are uniquely positioned to deliver best-in-class growth. In media and commerce, we anticipate annual growth of approximately 10%, becoming a more than $1 billion business line by the end of 2029. As we discussed, with a focus on performance-outcome-driven media buying, approximately 80% of managed media and digital channels, a major innovation in our tech stack, media and commerce is firmly established in the highest growth parts of the market. Digital transformation will grow more rapidly with annual growth approximately by 15 percent. We are on the cusp of an AI driven wave of digital transformation. All companies will need to reimagine the way they engage with the consumer and AI will power it. We believe our digital transformation businesses are uniquely positioned to help companies with this mission. The new advocacy segment is an exciting growth opportunity for Stagwell. The biannual political cycle will be somewhat leveled out by the addition of our public relations and public affairs businesses. This segment can deliver 20% revenue growth over two-year periods, or roughly 10% per year. And finally, Stagwell Marketing Cloud is still in its early days, but as Elsbeth discussed, we have significant momentum. As we ramp up our sales force and our products continue to gain traction within the market, we expect to see annual organic revenue growth approach 25%. Turning to M&A, Stagwell will continue to focus on acquiring high-potential businesses that expand our capabilities and geographic reach. We have the ability to reinvest our free cash to accelerate growth and increase scale. Our goal is to acquire $100 million in revenue each year. This revenue should grow at approximately 15% annually. As Jason noted, we fundamentally believe that the street is not fully recognizing the value our M&A platform delivers, And we are committed to lowering this growth while expanding adjusted EBITDA to $1 billion of annual revenue by year-end 2029. Increased scale throughout our business will drive some of this. Compensation and headcount will expand more slowly than revenue, driving margins upward. But we will be proactive in taking additional steps to grow adjusted EBITDA margins with our DOME initiative. As Ryan described, we are launching a new initiative that will deliver 80 to 100 million in cost savings over the next 18 to 24 months. The majority of these savings will come from an increase in employee productivity, driven by the expanded deployment of AI-driven technologies. This should drive a step function improvement in adjusted EBITDA margin of more than 150 basis points in fiscal 26, followed by further improvement in 27. As our employees become more productive using these tools, our business scales, and the business mix shifts towards higher margin digital transformation and software, we will drive adjusted EBITDA margins on revenue to approximately 20%, a figure that will lead the industry. The foundation for our ambitious five by five growth plan is in place, which leads us today to reiterate our full year guidance consisting of approximately 8% total growth in net revenue, adjusted EBITDA between 410 and 460 million, free cash flow conversion in excess of 45%, and adjusted earnings per share between 75 In summary, when I look at Stagwell's track record of superior growth, its portfolio of services grounded in digital transformation, a best-in-class platform for accretive M&A, the growing list of major global customers, and the innovation in delivering disruptive AI-based products, I am confident in Stagwell's ability to achieve the 5x5 goal that we have outlined here today. With that, I would like to hand the call over to Ben Allenson, our Head of Investor Relations, for our Q&A session. If you would like to ask any questions, please drop them in the chat function.

Ben Allanson, Head of Investor Relations

Thanks very much. We've got a number of questions here, and we obviously want to make sure it's open. Please do continue sending them through if you have any that you'd like us to ask. Mark, let's kick it off here. A question from Laura Martin over at Needham. Given your success as a challenger brand and taking on the big six, soon to be big five agencies, can you talk about what your moats are? What prevents that next entry from potentially displacing Stagper?

Mark Penn, CEO

Well, first of all, since we're really the first company to get to this scale in, as far as I can see, 40 or more years, I think there obviously is a moat to companies getting to full scale in marketing services and digital transformation. and that we're breaking through that. And why are we breaking through that natural mode? We're breaking it through because we have the right combination, I think, across all services, whereas some people just pick one service and try to go with that. So we're across creativity, digital transformation, media, and products. I think advocacy is a special mode in and of itself because I think it's a core service to what we provide, but it's also differentiating in terms of the way that we have approached it, particularly as a form of high innovation, digital first marketing. So and I think that we're now kind of the kind of the right inflection point here as the as the behemoth struggle to incorporate technology and AI. and are on the way down, we're on the way up, able to gobble up the latest of technology kind of at a lower cost curve and in a more nimble innovation curve. And I hope people have enjoyed the demos and the videos and the clarity of where we're going on all this. So I think all of those things really contribute to this being a moment for Stagwell and a unique moment at that one.

Ben Allanson, Head of Investor Relations

Maybe we can just play off the advocacy point. I'd like to throw it to Zach quickly. We've had some questions about sort of advocacy as a sort of a synergy point with the rest of the business. Maybe we could just ask about some of the innovations you are developing within Targeted Victory and within the advocacy vertical, which you think can ultimately be expanded out to broader marketing services use cases. Absolutely.

Zach Moffitt, CEO

I mean, both the case studies that we highlighted, specifically Wonder Cave is the one that I would look to in our capacity for a text messaging platform that really has the capacity to scale infinitely i mean we've put seven billion messages through it so far and we think we're in the first inning of that so that's a product that can be used by anyone in the advocacy space and really activation is a core differential but also the leveraging of cicero and ai everything's going to help we saw our 37 staff production this year relative to two years ago so we're finding those successes from leveraging the platform using the technology to really drive the growth and efficiency of the advocacy market fantastic let's stay on the ai side of things and and for mansoor

Ben Allanson, Head of Investor Relations

and for and for tref um we got a question about sort of given our focus on ai how do we think about holding responsible use of data within the id graph and within our kind of innovations as well as kind of more broadly the ai privacy side of things maybe mansoor you might want to handle some of that yeah sure i mean starting off with when you look at just the id graph itself our our focus, a tantamount focus is on the privacy aspect of how do we bring external data sources, our internal data sources and mix them together.

Mansoor Basha, CTO

And to do that with client data, we have to be very careful about how we address what privacy standards are required for that. So we have built based on privacy audits and we are also innovating and scaling it with differential privacy and other new techniques and methodologies for that. The focus of our innovative stand inside that is that it's not just the plain room approach to it, but also in understanding what is it that the customers are looking for in a privacy secure manner for them. Now, if you extend that into AI, what we are trying to do is not only work with the LLM providers to get enterprise grade LLM, but we work directly with the LLM providers and say, this has to be super private. We are working on behalf of our clients. We want zero proof possibility that any of this data goes back into your LLM training models. And then on top of that, the applications which we build, we make sure that they are SOC 2 compliant. We make sure that the way we present the data and approach that data and access for our clients are not differentiated in some way for other people to be able to capture some of that information. So we try to focus on providing clear houses which are clean, collected, and at the same time, We try to make sure that it's a scalable solution across.

Mike Treff, CEO

And I would just add from the client perspective, you know, we're implementing AI forward solutions into our client organizations. You know, certainly our approach has been to meet our clients where they are with respect to their maturity on the AI curve. So many organizations are, you know, focused on experimentation. Many organizations are further along and focused on really implementing full end to end AI enabled solutions. And our approach has been to meet them where they are. And certainly, you see in the market, you know, the major software providers are moving forward very quickly in terms of adapting, you know, indemnification and privacy and making sure that that works. I mean, specifically, you can see that with Adobe, you know, one of our key partners on this, which is going to just move the whole market forward from a comfort perspective. Let's pivot to Elspeth quickly.

Ben Allanson, Head of Investor Relations

And then we've had some questions come in talking about the next couple of years for the Stagwell Marketing Cloud. Obviously, products are really beginning to gain some traction in the market, as you talked about in your presentation. As we look at the next couple of years, can you maybe elaborate on the shift to sort of maybe more of a sales like motion as well as sort of the way we're thinking about that sort of pathway to admission of being, you know, getting to profitability on the EBITDA basis by year end 2026? Maybe you can elaborate on some of that.

Elspeth Rollert, CEO

Yeah, absolutely. Look, you heard me say this in the presentation, but we're more bullish than ever that we're in market with industry leading products and we have strong momentum and we're doubling down on that because we believe we can drive growth in the marketplace. so let me just give you like a few kind of proof points of that you saw a presentation from quest brand and baraday ai two of our brand measurement products quest brand we built in-house only a few years ago today we track over 1700 brands worldwide have more than 150 clients on the platform with baraday ai an acquisition that we did last year we've already won a multi-year multi-million dollar multi-market deal with a global payments provider. We're breaking through with strong revenue growth on these products with blue chip clients. And those investments that we've made in that product, again, we're going to continue to build off of that scale and really see that top line growth. With our recent acquisition of Unicepta that only happened in December, we've already landed a six-figure deal with an insurance provider in the U.S. already in Q1. UNICEF has been largely unknown in the U.S. We're taking our sales and marketing capabilities, building on a team in U.S., bringing a proposition that's been very, very strong in Europe to date and bringing that to the U.S. and capturing share. Again, driving growth based off of the investments that we've made in the products that we have today. Also, you didn't see this in the demos and something we haven't talked about as much, but our DAS offerings. We have the people platform, which is very strong in location, intelligence and audience measurement. We have very strong retention and growth in this product. And you're going to continue to see us double down in sales, specialized sales in this category. So ultimately, we believe over the past couple of years, you know, Mark describes us as a teenager. We've only been around the block a little bit here. but you're going to see us take that shift from more of that investment in the products and engineering and really shift towards sales and marketing and drive that top line growth and scale off of the foundational work that we've done over the past few years to realize that hockey stick growth that we are expecting.

Jason Reid, Other

Shifting a little bit on the M&A side of things, jason we've got some questions um particularly around international you know could you maybe elaborate a little bit on on on how we select different markets that we're going into what are some of the key dynamics we're seeing in some of these international markets and then the next piece of it is um what might be the margin impact moving into some of these new markets as well sure sure i think i think a great example is is what's taking place in the middle east uh you're seeing incredible acceleration in gdb gdp growth there and it's a reason that we're targeting the market and as I mentioned earlier on organically those businesses grew 50% but it's it's really sort of a two-way street so if you think about both leaders in Tel Aviv and Consulam in Riyadh these are these are companies and teams that have incredible relationships that were able to sell in core core capabilities like research digital transformation but it's really accelerating that growth but but it really goes both ways and also just touched upon this in in unicefda which which is based in germany um that's that's an asset that's really well known uh in europe and also in the uk that has no real us presence and we just landed our first huge contract um if you scope the market for what they do in the us it's it's in the hundreds of millions of dollars so i think that's just the beginning of where we can go uh and the margin front you know i think it's less geographic it's still more capability focused right so when you have technology platforms at leaders and unicefda or a highly consultative approach um at consulum um this can actually lift margin those are above average margins um you know relative to to to the um another question that we came up from an investor sort of more broadly about profile of the kind of companies that we acquire in m a moving forward any kind of thoughts on any shifts that might happen there any particular areas that we're really really going to be focused on over the next 12 to 24 months in those particular in those particular areas i think you'll just see us continue to be focused on on on high gdp gdp growth areas and capabilities that we need uh to land and expand and really win uh global clients um you know i think the the the flywheel that we've created today we can continue to simply expand upon um i want to pivot to sort of three key announcements that we're making today.

Ben Allanson, Head of Investor Relations

The first is around reorganizing of some of our business lines to more accurately reflect the way our clients ultimately want to buy and services to be delivered. Jay, could you maybe sort of elaborate on some of the rationale in a little bit more detail for making this change?

Jay Leveton

Yeah, no, I think you've got on the right point, Ben. I think when you think about sort of how to put the businesses together in a way that clients think about how they buy, I think when you look at the verticals now, marketing services, whether it's creative, social, research, experiential, that tends to be more in a CMO type of bucket. When you look at digital transformation, it can be a CMO, but it could also be a CIO, a CTO, or any other type of player on any side of that realm. And then if you look at media, it can be a CMO or a head of media as well. So I think, and then digital transfer, and then the marketing cloud can also be on the marketing side, but that's from full service down to sort of platform self-service. So I think overall, this was about sort of simplifying the business, making it easier for people to knock on the right doors. But more importantly, as Mark mentioned from the beginning, was this is about through the prism of growth and scale and innovation. And the growth and the scale innovation can happen in each of these four verticals. And that growth can happen globally at scale for our creative businesses. It can happen globally at scale with our digital transformation businesses. And the innovation happens in those businesses together at a larger size and a larger scale. So I think that's really why we did it. And we think it's important that clients have an easy, simplified way to understand where they go and the right way to buy our services.

Ben Allanson, Head of Investor Relations

And timeline on these changes, obviously, still working through it. We've emphasized that we're progressing on all the business in the second half of the And I think second half of the year is right.

Jay Leveton

And I think we'll work through that.

Ben Allanson, Head of Investor Relations

But I think overall, you'll see the simplification take a little bit. of time but i think just before the end of the year will be great um ryan i want to ask a little bit about the 80 to 100 million dollars of cost savings that we've announced today um big target ambitious target obviously driven by ai is a key driver of that increasing efficiency for our businesses but you know we have a question what are some of the barriers maybe to possibly achieving those over the course of the next you know 18 to 24 months at the time frame that we've got there What are the things that might ultimately slow us down or speed us up in being able to achieve these things?

Ryan Greene, COO

Sure. I believe it really comes down to two things, which is effectively the risk of managing change management, but also full adoption in what we're deploying. We have to make sure these tools are implemented and used consistently across all of our workflows as a standard for our company. And that's why we're taking an approach of both a top-down change management perspective to support each of our brands in their adoption, but also ensuring that we're enabling a bottoms-up where when we need to or how we need to customize for each of our brands, they get the most out of the tools to realize the benefit. And I think we're also choosing technologies that are also familiar with our teams. In addition to what we're building, now our teams are requesting for functional use cases. You know, we have things like Adobe and Google that are also empowering a lot of our back-end AI tools. And so there's going to be a learning curve, but we're working towards minimizing the impact, really accelerating the adoption, and supporting them through the change management to realize the whole benefit.

Ben Allanson, Head of Investor Relations

Great. I wanted to go back to a question we'd asked a little bit earlier on, and that was of Evan and JT. It seemed like we had a little bit of an audio issue with Evan's answer. So I kind of wanted to just revisit that a little bit, just talking about the comments you made about that DR and brand and how customers are ultimately thinking about it, how we're recommending to customers. So maybe you could just re-elaborate on kind of that shift that's going on in the market, Evan.

Evan Shook, CEO

Right. And I think that evolution is less of a clear line and a divide as you continue to innovate what brand marketing looks like. there's very few pieces of brand marketing you put out in the world today that also don't drive consumers to action that don't continue to help our clients grow which ultimately helps us grow so it's a balance between the two and i think it's it's more of a cycle sometimes than a funnel where we need to make sure we're developing comms at the highest level that is consistent all the way through which allows us as an agency to continue to create all the different tiers of content that does drive to action while also building the value in the brand that ultimately drives decision making but a big piece of that is close partnership with a media company which

James Townsend, CEO

lucky to have James as a partner here and as we work with our clients of how we continue to do best in class and make sure creative and media are very close together to deliver the best impact so I'll let James pick up on how the media works from there yeah thanks I mean I think in building on what you said yes i mean we are seeing as i said our investment profile now growth to five billion dollars plus of investments we're making for our clients and north of 80 percent of those are digital in some form or another and many of those channels really do house the ability to deliver a brand experience and a conversion opportunity so we have seen digitization the maturity of the market develop in our favor actually the business was born in performance but it's added brand assets along the way from a media group point of view and i think part of the reason why we've seen that growth double over the last three years is it's not just the scale of the media organization it is what everyone talked about it's the fact that the organizational design of stagwell um does deliver on and encourage that collaborative um that collaborative opportunity in terms of shared revenues shared scopes um and shared knowledge so i think the combination of our digital roots the organizational design and as mark described earlier the sort of goldilocks scale that we've arrived at i think is really giving us the advantage to be able to deliver on brand performance marketing not brand and or performance marketing um let's move to mark and then i'm gonna have a question for everyone and then we'll go back to

Ben Allanson, Head of Investor Relations

mark so so we'll kick off with mark about the conversion of class a's sorry class c's to class a shares today um question here just a little bit on timing when are we expecting this to happen and just a little bit of maybe the support that it has from from the various large shareholders yourself steve etc and and sort of how we're thinking about it is there a need to sell shares what are we thinking about here and could you maybe elaborate on the thoughtful process behind why now uh sure um all shareholders agreed uh this was an opportune time to convert from c to A. Our primary motivation was to simplify the capital structure so that more funds and

Mark Penn, CEO

more indexes who look for a single class company would increase the liquidity. Look, the focus here is Steve and I are long-term holders. Steve has a reputation for being the longest-term And I think if you've heard my talk, I'm thrilled that we've gotten phase one and zero to three billion. And phase two, I think, is the exciting next journey for this company and its value. We think shareholder value is undervalued right now. This was a good time for us to convert and continue to build value in the shares and attract liquidity so that people get rid of this complex thing that they can't really analyze. Now, there's one class. Everybody is class A. Of course, everybody's got the same boats. And that's why we did it now. Undervaluation and good opportunity to build liquidity.

Ben Allanson, Head of Investor Relations

I'm going to open this up a little bit more broadly because I think it's a really interesting question. question um and so to to zach to evan to dan to jt um it'd be great to kind of get an answer this which is and elspeth as well you know what is the most pressing demand that customers are making of your businesses right now what is that one thing that everyone is really really keyed in on um perhaps maybe we'll start off with dan and then we can we can move around yeah i mean if i was say the one thing it's that uh in the last year or two there's been overspend on tech with not enough results and they are coming to us because we have the growth scale and innovation to actually

Dan Gardner, Chairman

drive actual usage of the emerging technology in a way that actually gets their growth scale and innovation so that is the number one thing that we see in the market for the people are coming to us elspeth maybe on the marketing cloud side of things yeah what i would say is analysis paralysis There's more data than ever out there in the world.

Elspeth Rollert, CEO

How do I quickly synthesize this data, make sense of it and take action? So again, going back to what we were talking about with some of our brand measurement products, what we're talking about with media analysis and intelligence, help me make sense of this and take action because the world couldn't be moving faster. And so how do you get tools and systems? And quite frankly, as we look to build out the Seguil Marketing Cloud platform, bring in various data sets to quickly integrate them together. They're going to come from a number of different sources and make the organization more intelligent, intelligent, work from a single, more single sources of truth and move the strategy forward.

James Townsend, CEO

JT, media buying, media strategy, how are things thinking? you yeah I mean there's there's two there's two requests and they're held in the same same weight really help me change now and become a future forward and don't stop me growing so help me continue to grow and deliver quarter a quarter annually and drive my business forward whilst also affecting change management within the client organization be that media teams going to centers of excellence or bringing technology and data literacy into those organizations it's change and don't slow down on growth so it absolutely is transformation and growth that's evident your thoughts on the creative side of things yes uh brand relevance make my brand matter in the world build a platform that has staying power

Evan Shook, CEO

but it is also flexible for all the different types of communications we have to put out internal external different levels of it is required and deliver results we are here ultimately to deliver results for the cmos and ceos and the shareholders of those companies and by doing so that's where we grow our scope with them but it's brand relevance and results Zach your thoughts on particularly in the political and the advocacy side of things look I think in the political side it's always performance it's the capacity to leverage your first point data and actually perform I mean that's why it's a business it's kind of it's cold and it's calculating because there's always an output I think on the advocacy side people are trying to understand message dissemination and relevancy I think what you have in a

Zach Moffitt, CEO

presidential is it gives you a snapshot into the future I think everyone's trying to understand now how do we navigate this new world order of information where content creators parody with what you see networks and I think people are looking for people who have insights I think that's why they gravitate to mark in the team on the risk reputation because you get an opportunity to look into the future make determinations to help drive your decisions and I think everyone's trying to understand because we're watching in real time a new you know execution occurring out of dc and dc is becoming the center of so many decisions i think in the market right now in north america i think we're close to wrapping up but i wanted to finally have a final question to mark here um you know jaggle's reiterating guidance today

Mark Penn, CEO

uh we don't provide quarterly guidance but perhaps you could just go into a little bit more detail about the cadence of the year how we're thinking about q1 q2 q3 how ultimately that the cadence of the year is going to flow through and what we're thinking about obviously without the quarterly aspect sure i i don't envy the job of an analyst uh looking uh looking at our company in the sense that there are a lot of ebbs and flows going on all the time right we have an ebb and flow on the political cycle and so q1 is going to be the lowest point in the political cycle and then we have an ebb and flow of kind of the you know the the shopper marketing purchase cycle, right? Which also tends to be weighted towards Q3 and Q4. So we don't do quarter by quarter guidance, even though internally we budget clearly on a monthly and quarterly basis. And so it's important to say coming off of a high growth, you know, year, then into the political cycle that doesn't, you know, that is a zero political cycle in the first quarter. that typically you look for us to be, you know, slower in that first quarter of the non-political cycle, building in the second quarter and moving in the third and fourth quarter to what is the crescendo of the year. And then in particular, second, you know, business we win in the second quarter, it's still business that's going to manifest itself in the third and fourth quarter, whereas business we win in the third and fourth quarter really bumps into next year. So it's an unenviable task to get the purchase and both the combination of the purchase and the political cycle in. Needless to say, as I always like to point out, we started at zero nine years ago. We're here today, you know, nudging three billion.

Ben Allanson, Head of Investor Relations

And I think we have a very comprehensive plan to get it from here in the next phase of this business. um actually one more for you which just came through and it's a little bit strategic in kind of how we're thinking about things question was obviously a little bit of volatility and around the political cycle in advocacy um have we ever thought about maybe spinning that business off and then also another question which kind of goes in similar vein a lot of a lot of work we've done on the aggregated first second third party data um however you've seen a world where we might sell some of our own data or some of those services to external clients? I think there's a big question, but we'd just like to get your thoughts on that.

Mark Penn, CEO

Yeah, first on advocacy. Advocacy is a critical part of our moat. It differentiates us. It builds on, I think, some of the great skills. I think it also has a number of offshoot products like the test messaging platform. We're going to more of our commercial clients and say, hey, do you have to put it on TV to reach people when we could reach people through text messaging. So it puts us right in the heart and the sweet spot of understanding advanced digital-first communications. I think it's an absolute critical part. When I look at things that could be spinoff, I will look at things that are really either not part of the model, as we thought with Concentra, or I'll look at something like a fast-growing tech product that could have a high value like something like a round. As a round gets to more and more stadiums and more and more sports, could that, once that gets to 50 or 100 stadiums, is that something that we're not getting full value for that might be spinoff? Much more likely to spinoff a high-value tech product like that than the advocacy, which is really core to, I think, the business and how it's going to grow and develop. great and maybe just on the first second third party data and how we're maybe thinking about that is there sort of an opportunity to maybe sell some of that in the future i mean i i think that number one we generate a lot of proprietary data we're doing over 40 000 interviews we've got the uh we've got the people platform we understand location of people where they go how they shop we really have a tremendous understanding of their attitudes we have incredible databases basis of brand, our ability to create targeted look-alike audiences through our data is now being fully harnessed through the creation of the Stagwell ID graph. And on top of that, which we're also testing now in a new, as I announced with Palantir, using Palantir's kind of advanced elements, but yes, we already sell some of our data. We have unique data sets coming out of the National Research Group, relative to entertainment, moviegoers, and streaming listeners. We're already beginning to put that on the marketplace as a first step. But we are going to both look to utilize our data in the most advanced ways, teaming up with Palantir on these new test projects to use more military-grade targeting on our data. And two, make this a really integral part of the media offering that we're making. And three, we will put some of it on the marketplace as well.

Ben Allanson, Head of Investor Relations

Obviously, a lot of conversation going on in the market today, a lot of rumblings around macro uncertainty in general, tariffs obviously being a key topic of conversation. Could you maybe talk a little bit about that? Maybe give your own personal perspective on kind of what's going on as well as any customer commentary you might be able to share? And then the other piece of the puzzle is, you know, what's going to be the impact on Stagwell that we think?

Mark Penn, CEO

Well, I think there's no question that some economic uncertainty, at least among the high-level economic communities, is out there. I detect much less so among the consumers themselves in the surveys that we're doing. Look, I think Wall Street, as usual, tends to overblow things and underblow them at the same time. Only about 11% of our economy is imported. If tariffs hit 50% of that by 25%, that would be a 1% impact on the economy, something that happens in a month of inflation. So I don't really know why there's been such exaggerated reaction to it. Hopefully, the president's comments today at 4 o'clock will have increased certainty because we know that the uncertainty from day to day has certainly been driving a lot of questions. In terms of our clients, I think obviously the auto industry will be affected by tariffs. They seem to be the primary target of that. I don't know that there's a lot of other big impacts of the tariffs, depending upon what we actually see. Again, I think a lot of this has been overblown in the marketplace, considering the size of the economy, the size of the tariffs, what they actually affect. So I think that what we still have here to come into play are the deregulation effects and the tax cuts, which were really always meant to be the primary drivers of the economy. And you're going to have to take that in totality as we see all of these policy measures develop. I would not, if I were Trump, have gone with tariffs first. I would have done the other things first as he did last time, but clearly that's what he's decided to do. Great.

Ben Allanson, Head of Investor Relations

Perfect. Let's maybe have it a little bit and talk a little bit about digital transformation, both Michael and Dan. You know, a lot of questions about obviously challenging 2023, but kind of moving into 2024, sort of a really nice recovery in the back half of the year in particular, and looking into 25, some real sort of, I think optimism might be the right way of putting it. Could you both maybe just expand a little bit about that? What is it that gets you so excited about where we're going in 25 and beyond on the digital transformation side of things?

Dan Gardner, Chairman

Yeah, I'll start. We're at the point of a technology cycle where it's not good enough to just talk. You actually have to deliver results. And we're finally seeing sort of uh companies realizing they have to do something it's it's it's it's not an option anymore it's not theoretical we see that companies have spent a lot in tech and we saw that bad impact a couple you know two years ago where they had to pull back but now they're realizing we have to spend things are changing behaviors are changing the way we do work is changing and they're expecting roi on that we believe our cx first approach to digital transformation and the balance of half our company being technologists and half being creatives is the right mix and solutions to uh to really solve what are the the unique opportunities which are behaviors are changed that means platforms uh have the opportunity to be differentiated and deliver new exceptional value new ways to do a constant supply chain that allows us to have messages reach consumers in new and innovative ways so to us this is the golden era of creativity and especially where creativity meets technology that's really we were built to do that so it's an exciting time yeah good stuff jt i think a really interesting question kind of coming here um evan you talked in your section about uh about effectively the dip in direct response this change towards brand marketing

Ben Allanson, Head of Investor Relations

and i think it's for both of you here is sort of maybe you could give a little bit more color on that. For JT, what's the impact going to be on media mix moving forward of that particular change?

James Townsend, CEO

I mean, I think I'd really speak to the $5 billion I talked about and the fact that 80% of that is some form of digital plan or buy. I think Evan makes an excellent point, which is that so much of those environments now, those channels now, I've really seen a collapsing of the funnel. You know, there is now a coming together of both brand and performance in single environments, specifically in social, which is becoming the larger part of the media ecosystem. So the opportunity to give a brand experience and then deliver a direct response is really the marriage of brand and performance marketing coming together. And I think when you look at the ingredients we've got in terms of our investment profile, but also the assets we've acquired over the last four or five years, it really is in service to this trend coming to maturity now.

Ben Allanson, Head of Investor Relations

So we feel like we've got the right balance in terms of geographic footprint, but more importantly, in terms of the products and services and the brand performance mix and investments fantastic let's let's let's shift a little bit towards the financials if that's okay and i think this question is for both mark and for frank um you know the guidance we have out of the long-term guidance the five billion dollar five by five plan includes a billion dollars of ebitda in the in the conversation could we maybe spend a little bit of time talking through that pathway to sort of margin expansion over time, a little bit of kind of how we're kind of going to get to what is effectively a 20% margin on gap revenue moving forward. What are some of the key drivers that we're kind of excited about in that particular era? And maybe we'll go Frank first, and then Mark can elaborate.

Frank Lanuto, CFO

Well, I think you heard, there are a couple of things. One thing I think you heard Ryan talk about the initiatives that we're embarking on right now. We expect that those initiatives by deploying more AI into the organization will increase employee productivity and should drive the margins up. We're thinking that for 2026, we should see north of 150 basis point improvement just from that, and that there will be further accretion in 2027, pushing it even further up. I think as you start to see, you add up to 250 basis points, 300 basis points, we're starting to close in on the billion dollars as a percentage of revenue that we're talking about here.

Ben Allanson, Head of Investor Relations

But Mark, anything you'd like to add on that in terms of the margin expansion side of the story?

Mark Penn, CEO

You know, it's really critical and in line with the progress we have made from zero to here. I think it's predicated, when you look at it, at continuing to push forward in scale. That scale means that the central overhead will then get amortized over a larger spread of business to improve margin. It's based on implementing AI. And as we've outlined, it's significant, I think, reduction in costs to produce our work. I think it's also predicated on an improved revenue mix, right, as we'll continue to grow digital transformation faster. And digital transformation tends to be on the higher end, you know, of the margin business. Our software products also will be in market during this period, all of which I think give us an improving margin picture. and i think that what we really set is the goal i call it the five by five by one plan right where we get a billion dollars of evita out of five billion dollars of revenue given where we're going and then finally i think what you get is a bigger mix of more global clients as we continue to scale up again i always ask the three questions do you believe that we can continue to grow do you believe that we can continue to scale we have an incredible nine year record on that And can we continue to innovate? And as we continue to innovate, these three factors, I think, make us highly investable.

Ben Allanson, Head of Investor Relations

That's the end of our questions. Mark, I'd like to hand it back over to you just for some closing thoughts, some closing comments.

Mark Penn, CEO

First, thank you all for spending your time to learn something more about Stagwell, our plans, what we're doing. I hope you see that this is a really outstanding team of people. They have deep professional knowledge. These are not just managers. They're people who have come up through the industries that they're in. They are highly motivated. They are highly dedicated. They are stock owners themselves. One of our rules has been to fully invest the management team with the shareholders. We're going to put, I think, a very strong focus on building what we think should get the proper investor value as we grow here in this next phase of growth i've tried to show you that we have really unlimited paths of growth limited passive scale and an incredible store of innovation that we are applying applying to an industry that that is in transformation and transition mode to an all addressable notion of virtually you know every ahead i think that we've kind of outlined how we're going to organize our businesses simply the way customers look at it, marketing services, media and commerce, digital transformation, advocacy, and Stagwell Marketing Cloud. We've shown how software sales itself has gone from 2% to 5% of the business and will continue to grow. We are investing, as I've said in the earnings calls, about $20 million a quarter. I expect to continue to do that through this quarter and through this year and sometime half of mid-year, be able to drop that investment as we're really fully in the marketplace. But that's a core element of growth. So is digital transformation in a world of AI where virtually every website and every consumer experience has to be redone. We are leaders, and Dan and his group, in agentic AI, which is exactly the technology that is going to be utilized for brands to communicate in incredible new ways, not just through ads, but through technology experiences, you know, with their consumers. We're operating at the forefront of that. And then in general, we are scaling up our ability to handle bigger and bigger clients. And with that, come incredible economies of scale. But you look at the clients we've brought in in the last six months, whether it's Starbucks, Visa, General Motors, Panera Bread. These are incredible big names that two or three years ago, frankly, Stagwell wouldn't have been considered poor. Today, we are right at the forefront of what marketers are looking for. We are right in the sweet spot of considerations that we're moving forward with how we are building our technology spine to really be state-of-the-art for consumers. And we're going to cap it off with what I call the five-by-five-by-one plan to get to $5 billion in revenue within the next five years and to get to a margin that will generate a billion dollars of EBITDA. I hope you'll come along with us on that journey. Thank you.

Dan Gardner, Chairman

Thank you very much.