Philippe Krakowsky: Yeah. And then the AI question is obviously a very broad one. And on our last call, and even in the prepared remarks, we talked a bit about the extent to which it has been part of our business for some time in the places where you have more data and more precision, the ability to do addressable work, a lot of modeling being done to identify not only audiences, but business opportunity. So it’s really baked into what we do in our Media business, what we’ve been doing, obviously, at Acxiom for a long time. And then for some of our larger clients where we do integrated solutions that use the breadth of IPG and our engine. I think the thing that is clearly evolving, and maybe it’s just an opportunity to talk a little bit about kind of what we announced with Adobe is, how and to what extent do you, you want the benefit of what the creative parts of the business and ideation brings to the party, because clients’ brands are so valuable, and the way in which they leverage that IP is so important.
And yet any part of what we do, if it’s not connected to a larger whole and if it’s not increasingly quantifiable, risks being less valuable over time. And so for us, the connectivity that GenStudio gives us, I was sort of talking about that content supply chain technology. So it integrates Gen AI in a way where literally any piece of content we produce for a client, how it’s created, where we store it, how teams share it and gets passed back and forth, approved, iterated, often with the use of AI, all of that happens in one place, and then we connect that into what we’re doing with Acxiom and KINESSO and what we’ve been doing with data. So then when you tag it, when you push it out to the segments that you’ve identified, we have the ability to link up all that information, and then we can really understand kind of creative effectiveness in a way that we haven’t before, right.
How often was the asset used? How did consumers react to it or interact with it? So clearly, AI is going to give us this incremental layer in these solutions that we build for clients. And so for more of our creative agencies, for the Experiential and PR agencies are leaning in. And so what you’re trying to do is demonstrate that you can connect the data layer to content, and then iterate and optimize that content, and then connect it all the way through to an event, to commerce. I think, as with any tech, there is lots of focus. We’ve talked about how we’re beyond the point at where we’re experimenting with it. We’re actually implementing it pretty broadly across the Board with lots of clients and also bringing them up to speed on how it gets used.
But we’re clearly looking at things that could be disruptive. And yet, as an industry, we’ve fared pretty well in the past when there have been disruptive technologies that have come along going back 15 years ago to the advent of the platforms.
Craig Huber: Great. Thank you.
Philippe Krakowsky: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Jason Bazinet with Citi. You may go ahead.
Jason Bazinet: Hey, how’s it going? I just had a quick question on M&A since you called it out in your prepared remarks, other than the strategic fit, are there any sort of financial guidelines that are important to you if you do M&A? Additive to organic growth or helpful to margins or accretive to adjusted earnings?
Philippe Krakowsky: I mean, look, I think we’ve always been very disciplined in the way that we approach this and I think that notwithstanding the fact that obviously you need something which strategically is going to, as I said, enhance capabilities or be complementary to what we do in the areas where we’re seeing more demand from clients, but we’re always going to be disciplined in keeping some of the parameters you laid out in mind. And even the one-time when we did something very, very significant for us and we’ve had competitors who are kind of much more consistently in market for deals at that scale and I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here. You saw us be very thoughtful about and disciplined in terms of delivering and in terms of sort of how we incorporated that into the Group. So I don’t know that I can give you a specific guideline. It’s also not going to impact. As I said, our commitment to capital return.
Jason Bazinet: Understood. Thank you.
Philippe Krakowsky: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Tim Nollen with Macquarie. You may go ahead.
Tim Nollen: Thanks very much. I have actually an industry question and curious how it ties into your work specifically. Philippe, I’m wondering about Google’s decision to delay the deprecation of the Chrome cookie, which they announced last night. Just wondering in general, like what kind of work are you doing with brand advertiser clients to prepare for deprecation of the cookie? And how, if at all, does this delay affect your business?
Philippe Krakowsky: Well, look, I think to your point, it’s not news in that, this is something that was announced and that has now been delayed a number of times. I think marketers have been thinking about and asking for advice on how it is that we’re going to continue to get the benefits of a certain kind of, of data. And again, I think people have become much more sophisticated over time in understanding that there are also limitations to proxy data or many clients have been much more focused on leveraging their own first-party data and creating their own identity graph and having, I’d say, more control over their own destiny or more autonomy when it comes to operating in this world where you’ve got all sorts of disparate data sources and obviously the kinds of changes that were announced yesterday.
So given the strength of our data capabilities, we’ve been ready for this for some time. We think it probably represents incremental opportunity. And then it hasn’t really changed conversations with marketers, because we’ve been thinking through how it is that you use cohorts, how it is that you find, as I said, ways to leverage your own first-party data or do data sharing, create and create sort of second-party data pools with any number of partners. So I don’t see it as a particularly dramatic development. I don’t think our people do.
