Omnicom Group Inc (OMC) — Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Thank you for joining our first quarter 2026 earnings call. With me today are John Wren, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Phil Angelastro, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. On our website, omc.com, you will find a press release and a presentation covering the information we'll review today. An archived webcast will be available when today's call concludes. Before we start, I'd like to remind everyone to read the forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial and other information that we've included at the end of our investor presentation. Certain of the statements made today may constitute forward-looking statements. These represent our present expectations and relevant factors that could cause actual results to differ materially are listed in our earnings materials and in our SEC filings, including our 2025 Form 10-K. During the course of today's call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP measures. You can find the reconciliation of these to the nearest comparable GAAP measures in the presentation materials. We will begin the call with an overview of our business from John, then Phil will review our financial results. And after our prepared remarks, we will open the line for your questions. I'll now hand the call over to John.

Thank you, Greg, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to share highlights from our first quarter as the new Omnicom. Since closing the Interpublic acquisition just before the holidays, we've seen momentum and cohesive growth across the organization. Our steady progress is reflected in our strong financial performance in the first quarter. As you'll recall from our fourth quarter call and Investor Day, we've strategically repositioned our portfolio for growth. As part of the portfolio realignment, we identified planned asset sales and disposition of businesses with approximately $3.2 billion of annual revenue, of which approximately $1 billion was disposed of in the first quarter. Our plan is to sell or exit the remaining assets in the next several quarters. To clarify our focus on the operations that will drive growth we've excluded assets held for sale and planned disposition from our core operations. Revenue from core operations was $5.6 billion in the first quarter, which increased $345 million when compared to Q1 2025 revenue from core operations for the combined Omnicom and Interpublic. Organic revenue growth was 3.9%. We also updated our revenue reporting to reflect our integrated operating model, which is central to driving our growth. Phil will walk through the details of our reporting changes in his remarks. One point I wanted to discuss was the increase in EBITDA performance. Our adjusted EBITDA margin increased 240 basis points to 14.8% as compared to the combined operations for Q1 2025. Our non-GAAP adjusted EPS in the quarter, which excludes after-tax costs for repositioning, dispositions and acquisition, integration expenses and amortization of intangibles, was $1.90 per share, an increase of 11.8% versus Q1 2025. Our solid performance for the quarter was the result of us realigning our portfolio for growth and moving decisively on our integration efforts. By integrating our capabilities upon closing, we merged or sunset more than 20 major agency brands with a long tail of smaller brands. This allowed us to quickly bring together the best talent from across the new Omnicom. Combined with our integrated client leaders and new strategy and growth teams, our efforts have translated into new business wins. In the first quarter, these include IBM, GSK, John Deere, Little Caesars, Acadia Pharmaceuticals and Baileys. We're not just winning new clients, we're expanding our relationships with existing ones. Our integrated approach is making it easier for clients to access all their marketing and sales needs from a single partner. This model has gained traction across a number of our clients, including Clorox, Dyson, Delta, Exxon, Kroger, Merck and Unilever. Our growth from integrated services is helping to diversify our revenue streams and deepen our client relationships, underscoring the strength of our offerings. As we discussed at our Investor Day last month, Omni, our AI-enabled intelligent sales and marketing platform, is connecting our talent, data and services. We've scaled our next generation of Omni across the entire organization in Q1, putting the latest Agentic AI tools in the hands of all of our employees. The new Omni is delivering on multiple fronts, driving stronger media performance, greater addressability and improved measurement, increasing speed to activation and enhancing ROI with Acxiom's Real ID, improving performance across retail and commerce channels and enabling more effective marketing and client outcomes through deeper integrations with partners like Adobe and Amazon. We also made significant progress to accelerate collaboration across the group. Throughout the quarter, we continued to move into hub building locations, deploy common HR and IT platforms and migrate teams to shared workflow systems. As we look ahead, we will continue to work towards the initiatives we've communicated in our prior calls, including $900 million in 2026 cost reduction synergies and $1.5 billion by mid-2028, $5 billion in share repurchases over the next 12 months, including a $2.5 billion accelerated share repurchase program currently being executed. Through the ASR and open market purchases, we repurchased $2.8 billion of shares through the first quarter. Planned asset sales and dispositions of businesses with approximately $3.2 billion of annual revenue, dispositions with approximately $1 billion in annual revenue have already been completed. We will continue to evaluate our portfolio to ensure we remain positioned for growth. Overall, I'm pleased with how we've executed in the first quarter. Our results clearly demonstrate the significant benefits of the combination for our people, clients and shareholders. While we remain bullish about the combination for the year ahead, we're also mindful of the broader geopolitical environment. The ongoing conflict in the Middle East, which represents less than 2.5% of our revenue, continues to create uncertainty in the region and across the world. As always, we are prioritizing the safety of our people in the region and monitoring developments closely so we can adapt quickly to changes that impact our business. Before I close, I want to thank every member of the Omnicom team for their outstanding efforts. None of this progress would have been possible without the exceptional commitment and hard work of our people over these past few months. With that, I'll turn it over to Phil to walk through our quarterly financial results.

Thanks, John. This is our first quarterly report as a new Omnicom with Interpublic's operations included for the full 90 days of the quarter. We started the year with strong performance in revenue growth and cost reduction with a meaningful amount of synergies flowing through to EBITDA, while we continue to invest for future growth. We're making significant progress integrating Interpublic's operations and positioning our portfolio for growth. I will start on Slide 3. We know that there are a lot of moving pieces right now, and we want to make things easy for you to understand. This slide should help. It presents what we call our core operations. Our core operations are comprised of our operating businesses, excluding dispositions and assets held for sale. To ensure it's clear, our main focus in driving the company forward is on our core operations. As we talked about at Investor Day, our core operations are the result of our ongoing strategic repositioning of the portfolio for growth and reflect our sharpened focus on the highest growing, most connected parts of our business. Businesses included in the dispositions and held-for-sale category will be sold in 2026, and they represented less than 5% of our adjusted operating income in the first quarter. And our only priority regarding these businesses is to complete these disposals in a timely fashion. This slide also presents operating income and EBITDA on a non-GAAP adjusted basis, excluding severance and repositioning costs, loss on dispositions and acquisition integration costs. For comparison purposes on this slide, we've included 2025 prior year combined amounts prepared on a similar basis. As you can see, revenue from core operations grew 6.7% in total. Adjusted EBITDA grew $180 million or over 27% and adjusted EBITDA margin increased to 14.8% from 12.4%, primarily driven by cost reduction synergies from the acquisition of Interpublic. We are pleased with this strong performance on both revenue and adjusted EBITDA, and we are on track to achieve our operating plans and targets for the year. Turning to Slide 4. We present our reported results as we traditionally have as well as the related non-GAAP adjusted amounts. This slide presents our reported results, including all entities, core operations, dispositions that occurred during the quarter for the period that they were part of Omnicom and entities that are classified as held for sale. Since these are reported results, the 2025 presentation reflects the prior year results of Omnicom and does not include Interpublic. The center column for each period shows the applicable non-GAAP adjustments. In the first quarter of 2026, we recorded integration-related costs of $59 million, which are recorded on the SG&A expense line. We recorded a loss on dispositions of $34 million, and we recorded severance and repositioning costs of $4 million. When considering the change in operating income on both a reported and adjusted basis, note that it includes $117 million of amortization expense related to the intangible assets acquired from Interpublic, an increase of $96 million compared to 2025. The change in operating income also reflects a $16 million increase in depreciation expense. Below operating income, net interest expense increased to $72 million from $29 million in Q1 of 2025, an increase of $43 million, primarily resulting from assuming Interpublic's debt of approximately $3 billion in Q4 2025. Interest expense in Q1 2026 increased by $60 million, primarily from interest expense from Interpublic, which added approximately $47 million, of which $3 million is noncash interest and higher interest expense resulting from refinancing activity completed during the first quarter of 2026, which resulted in approximately $1 billion of incremental long-term debt. Note, Q1 includes one month of the incremental interest expense from the new debt issuance. Additionally, interest income increased this quarter by $17 million to $47 million, primarily due to interest income earned on higher average cash balances, including cash acquired with Interpublic. Our adjusted tax rate of 26% was down slightly from 26.7% in 2025. For 2026, we expect our annual tax rate to also be 26%. Income from equity investments and noncontrolling interest declined by $4 million in total. Finally, non-GAAP adjusted diluted EPS grew 11.8% to $1.90 from $1.70 last year. Our fully diluted weighted average shares outstanding for Q1 2026 were 299.2 million. Actual shares outstanding at March 31, 2026, were 285.3 million compared to 313.4 million at year-end December 31, 2025, and compared to 196.1 million shares at March 31, 2025. On a year-over-year basis, our share count increased from last year due to shares issued for the Interpublic acquisition, but they also declined as a result of our share repurchase activity, which I will discuss later. Now let's review our business in more detail, beginning with the components of our revenue change on Slide 5. To assist in understanding the drivers of our underlying business, we've included an analysis of our growth beginning with core operations, which excludes businesses that have been disposed of or are classified as held for sale. In the first quarter of 2025 presented on a combined Omnicom Interpublic basis, revenue for Q1 2026 increased by 2.7% from positive foreign exchange rate changes and by 3.9% from organic growth. We expect FX will continue to be positive in 2026. And assuming recent FX rates stay the same, will benefit our reported revenue for the year by approximately 1%. Relative to our traditional presentation in this table, there is no row for acquisition and disposition revenue because there were no acquisitions during the quarter. And as we have noted, dispositions have been removed from the opening balance of core operations revenue. Turning to Slide 6, you can see our core operations revenue by discipline. Presentation of our disciplines has been updated from 2025. As we discussed at Investor Day, the strategic reshaping of our portfolio through the Interpublic acquisition will result in a business with more than half of our revenue coming from the faster-growing integrated media business. Integrated Media includes our media, commerce, data, CRM and consulting and content automation businesses. Revenue from our core operations in the first quarter of 2026 for Integrated Media was approximately 52% of our revenues. And for advertising was 17% Health, 10%; PR 12%; and Experiential & Other, 10%. Q1 revenue growth from core operations was as follows: Integrated Media led the way with very strong growth in the high single digits. PR and experiential and other grew in the quarter mid-single digits. Health had positive growth and advertising was down in Q1. We're not providing detailed prior year combined revenue balances or organic growth by discipline or region because our integration process is ongoing, and we continue to evaluate the portfolio. Slide 7 shows our core operations revenue by region. As we highlighted when we announced the Interpublic acquisition, the transaction gives us greater relative exposure in the U.S., which was 61% of revenues this quarter. Together, the U.K. and Europe were 21%, followed by Asia Pacific at 9%. In Q1, revenue growth in the U.S. was strong and delivered mid-single-digit growth. Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific were also up low single digits. And the U.K. and Middle East and Africa declined. Slide 8 is our revenue weighted by the industry sectors of our clients. Because the first quarter of 2026 reflects a full quarter of Interpublic, there are some changes worth noting relative to the prior year Omnicom 2025 amounts. The largest changes were the pharma and health and auto categories. There were small changes to our other categories, which moved up or down 1 or 2 points with increases in financial services, retail and services and decreases in food and beverage, travel and entertainment and government. Now please turn to Slide 9 for our year-to-date free cash flow summary. The 70% increase relative to last year was driven by the addition of Interpublic and improved performance in Omnicom's business. Free cash flow definition excludes changes in operating capital, which is seasonal with the first quarter generally the largest use of cash during the year. There's a reconciliation in the appendix that shows the change in operating capital for the quarter was flat compared to the change from the first quarter of last year. For the 3 months ended March 31, 2025, our primary uses of free cash flow included $252 million of cash paid for dividends to common shareholders and another $12 million for dividends to noncontrolling interest shareholders. Dividend payments increased year-over-year as a result of the shares issued for the Interpublic acquisition and an increase in our quarterly dividend payment. Quarterly dividend payment approximates the combined dividend payments made by Omnicom and Interpublic in Q1 of 2025. Capital expenditures were $61 million, higher than the prior year due to the Interpublic acquisition, but at the same overall level relative to the size of the business. Total contingent purchase price payments and payments for the acquisitions of noncontrolling interests were $16 million. Finally, our share repurchase activity for the first quarter was $2.8 billion, excluding proceeds from stock plans of $16 million. The majority of this resulted from our accelerated share repurchase program, which drove a significant reduction in shares outstanding to 285.3 million as of March 31, 2026, a reduction of 28.1 million shares from December 31, 2025. We have significant remaining capacity under our $5 billion total share repurchase plan, and our plan is to complete the $5 billion over the next 12 months or by the end of April 2027. We estimate that relative to our shares outstanding at December 31, 2025, of 313.4 million shares, we will see our share count decline approximately 11% to 12% by December 31, 2026, and that weighted average shares outstanding for the year will decline approximately 8% to 9%. Slide 10 is a summary of our credit, liquidity and debt maturities. At the end of Q1 2026, our gross long-term debt was $10.2 billion. Since December 31, 2025, our debt is approximately $1 billion higher, reflecting the retirement of our $1.4 billion, 3.6% senior notes due April 15, 2026, and the issuance of new senior notes totaling $2.3 billion, including $1.7 billion of U.S. dollar-denominated notes at a weighted average coupon of 4.9% and $600 million of euro-denominated notes at a 3.85% coupon. The maturities range from 3 years to 10 years, which you can see in the maturity chart on this page. Our next maturity is not until July of 2027. Net interest expense is expected to increase by approximately $200 million in 2026 compared to 2025. Of this increase, $13 million is noncash interest. The change is primarily driven by higher interest expense from the inclusion of Interpublic's debt, the refinancing I just described as well as interest on incremental commercial paper borrowings of approximately $10 million and lower interest income on cash balances of approximately $20 million, primarily due to lower forecasted short-term interest rates on invested cash. Please note that the total and net leverage ratios on this slide, which compares the last 12 months ended March 31, 2026 and 2025, reflect the full assumption of Interpublic's debt, but only four months of Interpublic's EBITDA results are included in the comparison. However, at March 31, 2026, we're in compliance with the leverage ratio covenant in our credit facility, which makes pro forma adjustments for the impact of the acquisition. The calculation of total debt to pro forma adjusted EBITDA done in accordance with the definition in our credit agreement results in a total leverage ratio of 2.5x. Our cash equivalents and short-term investments at the end of the quarter were $4.3 billion. Our liquidity also includes an undrawn $3.5 billion revolving credit facility, which backstops our $3 billion commercial paper program. In closing, we completed our first full quarter as the new Omnicom. Our operations delivered solid top and bottom line growth. We are realizing significant cost reduction synergies while investing for future growth. Our balance sheet is strong, and we are deploying capital for the benefit of shareholders in the long run. I will now ask the operator to please open the lines up for questions and answers.

First, I was wondering if you could talk a little more about some of the revenue by discipline. So I was just wondering if we could get some underlying trends or even growth rates, especially of what you're seeing in integrated media versus advertising versus health to kind of understand the trajectories. You talked a lot about those disciplines at the Investor Day. So I would love to understand how they're trending. And then, Phil, I was just wondering if you care to provide any additional update to the adjusted EPS growth guidance. I think the prior guidance is double digit. I mean you said that the share count alone gets you to 8% to 9% this year. So it seems like it's going to be a very, very healthy interpretation of double digit, and we saw some of that in the first quarter results. So I was wondering how we can think about maybe some guardrails around where EPS growth can come in for the year.

So I'll give some detail and then John can add some color. But as far as the disciplines go, as I said in my prepared remarks, Integrated Media certainly led the way in terms of growing high single digits. PR and experiential and other grew mid-single digits. Health was positive for the year, low single digits and advertising was down. I think there's an awful lot going on as we integrate all these businesses, and we're certainly pleased with our progress to date and the growth to date. But in terms of additional details with specifics, that's about as specific as we're going to get this early in the year in our first full 90-day quarter. In terms of trends, you want to give some comments, John?

Yes. Steven, the only thing I would add to what Phil said is, as I mentioned in my comments, we remain very healthy in terms of competition and in winning our fair share of new business. That's impressive considering we're bringing two large organizations together in a very short period of time. We're functioning very well. If there is an underlying trend, it's that clients, especially given changes in the industry landscape, are increasingly focused on selecting a single provider to handle most of their needs. During the quarter we were able to extend multiyear contracts with a number of clients, and that's a focus we will continue to work on as the year progresses. That gives us security and a better ability to plan going forward. Our size and influence are contributing to this, as are the state-of-the-art investments we've made in Omni AI and the breakthroughs and contributions we're making there. That's all I would add to the color Phil mentioned.

Yes. Then I'll answer the EPS question. So certainly, we're pleased in the first quarter. Diluted EPS grew almost 12%. I think as we go through the rest of the quarters for the year, when we talk about double digit, I think at this point, we'd certainly say we expect probably the quarters as they roll out are going to be higher double digits than the first quarter performance. I think at this point, we're going to leave it at that. But we're certainly pleased with the quarter, and we expect good performance to continue on that front.

John, just with the integration, I wanted to see if you could comment a bit more on healthcare and PR. I think these were 2 areas you talked in the past about the scale of combining with IPG and the opportunity going forward. So kind of what's been the experience to date? And what are you seeing generally across these disciplines? And then, Phil, I'll revisit the Investor Day. Also, you guys had provided an expectation of 4% constant currency growth for the core businesses. That was well within the kind of macro volatility we've seen, but just I was curious if there was any update there to give.

Sure. The healthcare business, combining IPG's size and ours, is extraordinary. We have an incredible amount of talent and representation across the entire pharma sector, which attracts the best people and means every pharma company has to speak to us if they want to do anything with their marketing. PR is a different kind of business, and we've continued to grow it. In the past we've been affected by elections, but any negative impact is behind us from 2025, so we have favorable comps ahead. I'm happy with the performance of those units going forward. There's a lot of integration as well, and we expect synergies to come more from the PR business than from the healthcare business. Overall it's quite positive. It's a solid contributor to our growth, and we expect it to continue that way.

Regarding the question on organic growth at Investor Day and the 4% reference, certainly, as I said in my prepared remarks, we're on track to achieve our operating plans and targets, and that would include the organic growth reference as well. So we're not changing that expectation at this point in time, but we're certainly comfortable with what we said at Investor Day.

I just had a handful of questions around the disposed businesses and core operations. I guess the first one is, why did you decide to sort of focus the reporting on core operations? Why do you think that's the right way to look at the business? All right. I think and maybe I'm misremembering, you guys gave a rough benchmark of about 10% EBITDA margins for the disposed businesses. And if I'm looking at the Slide 3, which is quite helpful, it looks a bit lower than that. And then third, I was just struck by the disposed businesses, if I'm doing the math right, it looks like they shrink, I don't know, 16% or something like that year-over-year, which is far worse than I would have thought any business would be performing even a bad business to put it that way, that you might be disposing. So those are my 3.

I mean you could repeat that, the last question, you're talking about the performance of the disposed businesses?

So some of those businesses that we're disposing of were actually disposed of. So there was a meaningful impact; as we said on the year-end call in February, we had closed on the sale of an experiential business, Jack Morton, the day before February 15. So in that example, the first quarter has 1.5 months of their revenue, but it doesn't have the second 1.5 months in the quarter. So the revenues are down because the business was sold. So it isn't a performance issue; it's just a timing of when the dispositions occur.

And Jason, I'm glad you asked the question. When we closed the transaction and reviewed our businesses, we evaluated which businesses will continue to grow and which are delivering a fair margin for the effort we put in. The initial list of $3.2 billion of companies we decided to hold for resale was based on poor margin performance and unreliable growth. After that filter, the governing filter was whether the business is necessary for our clients and whether our clients are asking for it. We concluded they were not. There are a number of businesses on that list; some are not terribly large, but there are many units because we're spread throughout the world. We are working to dispose of them, and if there were another way to remove them from our financial statements we would do it. Until we dispose of them, though, we have to account for them, which is why we placed them in the columns shown on Slide 3. Maybe at Investor Day we were a little optimistic or generous when we said the margins for these businesses are 10 percent. It turns out their margins are probably lower than that. What was interesting coming out of Investor Day is that we had not clearly communicated the distinction: what we are now calling core are the operations we plan to focus on and that will contribute to Omnicom’s ongoing growth, and the noncore assets you see will hopefully disappear as we dispose of them throughout the rest of the year.

Yes. Well just one other piece of input in terms of the margin. Certainly, the margins will likely vary by quarter. So as we get through the year and we get through this process, the historical reference is what we made. The historical reference was about 10% for that group. We'll see how each of the quarters play out. But certainly, it's a focus of ours to move expeditiously to complete those dispositions.

I can't wait for the day that you never have to ask me that question, but I do appreciate you asking it.

I've got a couple actually related to really what a lot of people would think of as your core businesses, which are the media planning and buying businesses and then the creative business. On the media planning, John, you made a brief reference to Agentic AI. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about as these LLMs come more and more to market and enable direct communication amongst the various parties in the value chain. And as Omnicom is doing a lot of principal media buying itself, can you more directly go to publishers yourselves in ways that you have not before? And then on the creative side, I just want to push again why the advertising business was down. And I'm wondering if there might be something of a trade-off with production, which I think you hold in your integrated media business, which you said was growing high single digits. Is there maybe a little bit of a trade-off between creative advertising and production?

There are a couple of very interesting questions. I'll answer some of them, and then I'll refer to Paolo, who leads our AI work, to answer others, Tim. Right now the quest across the major players is to build more direct relationships with publishers. That is an objective, and it's something we are investing in today. If you go back to the Internet days of the '90s, you'd see there's always a messy middle between the client, the advertiser, what they pay for media, and reaching the consumer. A lot of MarTech becomes exciting for a moment or two and then fades away; most of those businesses don't last very long. Today there are intermediaries that stand between us and the publishers and they take a toll, which is ultimately borne by clients and by the industry. That's something we're clearly working on and you should feel free to keep asking about. On the question of quality, I'll turn to Paolo, but let me say our platform is not only a common way for our people to communicate with clients and to analyze problems, the quality of our data gives us more insight. Data by itself doesn't mean much unless you use it properly. We believe we have the best data in the industry right now, and that enables our creative, smart thinkers to generate different ideas and explore new opportunities. Part of the Agentic revolution is that it reduces the need for manual or semi-manual work, such as assembling Excel spreadsheets and other routine tasks, which in the simplest terms makes us more productive. We believe the contribution of our creative teams, combined with the scale and influence of our media cloud, will sustain and grow profits in parts of the business, offsetting any declines from automation and efficiency gains. The quarter proves it: we grew 4% in a complicated environment having been together as a company for only 90 days. Paolo, do you want to add anything?

Sure. Tim, I can address the Agentic media buying. As we mentioned at Investor Day, Omnicom is really leading the charge from our perspective on Agentic media and the Agentic media ecosystem. We're first to market with things like AdCP, which is a protocol being defined and evolved around Agentic media buying. I also mentioned at Investor Day that we had already tested the pipes and been able to have money flow through to actually buy inventory available on certain publishers. Since then, we've executed real media buys for several clients using our agent framework, doing agent-to-agent buying, which shortens the media supply chain, as John articulated. How do we drive higher value for our clients, deliver a greater amount of working media dollars for our clients, and ultimately make the entire process more efficient and effective.

If you have a follow-up for Paolo on that, go right ahead.

Yes. Can I ask a follow-up? Everything you're saying makes sense. I wonder what happens to your pricing models and your ability to price your services in a world where, as you said, Paolo, the media supply chain is shortening. Are you in a position of strength to leverage that to secure better pricing terms for your clients? So far, you seem to be doing well for yourselves as well.

Yes. The whole environment is expanding, Tim, and we will be rewarded as a result. What we're talking about is taking out, in effect, the lower-cost types of efforts that contribute to our revenue. Increasingly, we're moving toward performance. That's a change and it's ongoing. Nothing happens overnight, even though I know everybody wants everything to be overnight. And the higher-quality people, with higher-quality approaches, are reaching more customers, selling more product, and building better brands. That's where we sit. That's why our clients trust us and buy our products. As a result, we will be paid a very fair price for the efforts we put in because we've made these investments.

Yes. Just to close out on the production question, relative to our $23 billion annual base, it is not a substantial component in dollar value. The key part of the business that is in integrated media is the intelligent content automation business, which is closely integrated with media and our platform. That's what we were distinguishing at Investor Day.

I have one for John, Paolo and then one for Phil. John, I've got to date myself. I remember when Interpublic bought Acxiom and I asked you about that strategy of buying Acxiom, and it wasn't the right time for you to buy it. Now it is the second bullet point on the momentum of your company. So what have you found 4 months into owning Acxiom? How has the integration helped you? And how does that give you an edge from maybe where the asset was used previously at IPG? And then for Phil, on Page 14, thanks for all the color. But would you ever put out a core and pro forma operating expense details so we can actually build models that work on a pro forma basis on a core basis, too, on the cost side?

I can't go back completely to 2018 and remember everything I was thinking, although I'm accused of remembering every number that I see. At Acxiom, I think Interpublic at the time paid $2 billion for the company. Five years later, I paid $9 billion for all of Interpublic. So I think my waiting paid off from an economic point of view. But most importantly, and this was true then and it's certainly true now, the quality and the fidelity of the data that Acxiom gathers has not changed in that five- or seven-year period. Because they've worked principally for regulated industries in the finance sector and the pharma sector, their data is not as haphazard as consumer data can be. It has to have fidelity because there are a lot of laws and regulations that govern it. We're able to ingest and use this to develop our Acxiom customer ID methodology, and I'll let Paolo comment a little bit on that. It's been a real contributor to our overall efforts. To be fair, we probably weren't ready for it in 2018, but we're certainly ready for it now that we've bought it.

Yes. I would add to that, Michael, that especially now with kind of the proliferation of artificial intelligence and more specifically generative AI and how we've incorporated into almost every facet of the marketing life cycle, the ability for us to actually drive value from that data is greater now than it's ever been. And it is exponentially more powerful for our clients.

So just on the specific question, you asked, Michael. Given the size of the acquisition, not every number of schedule related to the prior year data is perfectly comparable. That certainly, we understand, and we're working towards that. We're happy to take any follow-up questions that you have on the detail, certainly offline, no problem.

Two of them. Do you have any better visibility on how much proceeds you think you're going to get from the planned disposals? I can see you've fetched $152 million in Q1, but interested in your views for the year. And then maybe for John, in terms of new business, one of your peers seems to have a bit of a revival of late. I'm just wondering if you're seeing a bit of a change in the pricing dynamics? Are you seeing potentially any pricing pressure around those pitches more so than usual? I understand there's always a bit of price pressure around those.

Sure. With respect to your first question, restate it for me, please, Adrien, just so I answer it properly.

I think it's visibility on the pricing.

On the pricing...

Yes. No. As you saw, if you looked at our cash flow statements, there was money made on the sale of, principally, Jack Morton. There are a number of companies from which we expect to receive proceeds from the sale of a significant number of the units we're holding in that bucket. Some are just disposals. There are businesses we need to run through the process on because they are very low growth. They've been around for a long time, but in some cases they're in countries where shutting them down or paying proper severance and other costs would cost us money. We've accrued for the downside as best we could. So we're looking to sell and generate positive cash flow. I don't think it's going to add much to our net income for the year; rather, it will generate additional cash.

Certainly, we have an expectation, but it's really very difficult to estimate what those proceeds are going to be. And we certainly don't want to give you any inaccurate expectations regarding what they're going to be. And when those deals happen and proceeds come in, we're certainly going to keep you updated and let you know.

And Adrien, after listening to me for years, as I said earlier to our question, I'd love to see these things off of my P&L and not talk about them anymore, but that's not going to make me give them away either. So we're pretty confident that over the next several quarters, we can get through most of them. And we have teams doing this and outsiders. We're focused on new business and growing our business and getting the teams that we brought together functioning in a proper way. So that's why we even call them core assets. That's where most of our focus is. There's a bunch of accountants running around trying to sell these things. And what was the second question?

Yes, it's on the new business environment.

Competitive pricing. Yes and I certainly know the ones you're talking about, there's been 2 or 3. Everyone strikes me as if I've just been defeated because I hate losing. And some of it has to do with competitive pricing, but we win more than our fair share, and we'll continue to win more than our fair share. And every loss, there's no such thing that's coming in the second. Believe me, I do a root-cause analysis of why we lost it to try to cure for the next opportunity that we have. So yes, we lost but not much, and I'm not happy about it.