In this quarter, you obviously saw us increase it. And that’s clearly the strategy because over the long term, consistent levels of advertising play out for brands the best.
Operator: Our next question comes from Andrea Teixeira of JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Andrea Teixeira: Thank you. Good morning. Noel, you mentioned the balanced volume and pricing, obviously, impressive to see some of the green shoots in Africa and Eurasia. Can you talk also about the brand support above the line you mentioned in North America and elaborate more on that? And obviously, that has been a main drag to global volumes. And I understand it takes time, of course, to see volume share rebound. But do you see in terms of like when should we see some improvement there as you talk to your customers? And then sorry to get a second part of the question, but I want to understand also your impressive rebound in margins in the quarter came through. Even looking at your prepared remarks, you mentioned raw material and packaging, you still ahead of 540 basis points negative impact.
So I’m thinking about the cadence of this inflation, if you can comment and then how we can expect that from here? I know you reiterated margins up, but I just want to see to the P&L, what would be the puts and takes there? Thank you.
Noel Wallace: Sure. Thanks, Andrea and good morning. So on above the line expenses, obviously, when you’re in an environment of inflation and recovering cost and taking pricing either through list prices or revenue growth management, it involves a reallocation of your promotional dollars for two reasons. One, you want to ensure that when you’re taking list price increases, you see that pricing in the market and you get consistency of implementation around the retail environment. So that was an important part of the second quarter pricing we took in North America. To do that, you need to pull back on some of your promotional volumes. That was done, one, because some of those promotional volumes are unprofitable. So as I mentioned earlier, we are very focused in North America on building brand health and getting back to consistent delivery of share growth with advertising and innovation through simply — and simply taking some of the reliance on promotions away.
Did we pull back a little bit too much perhaps? But we’re going to be very thoughtful moving forward on how we put grocery net back into the North America business to ensure that we continue to grow margins and obviously grow share at the same time. But we will ensure that, that happens in the back half. But I can tell you that we’re going to be very thoughtful on how we approach all the categories relative to promotions to ensure we maintain the margins in the P&L. And around the world, I think we were quite consistent with the above the line where we had list price increases. We were managing promotions. We’ll have a little bit easier comps as we’ve talked about on pricing — harder comps on pricing in the back half, but easier on volume.
So I think we’ll see a better balance between our organic growth as we move through the back half of the year, but we’ll still see a little bit of pricing moving through, as I mentioned, upfront. On the margin line, clearly, very pleased with the progress that we’re making both at the gross profit level and the operating margin level. And I remind everyone that our gross profit does not include logistics and cost of goods. So if you take logistics, obviously, we had a very strong quarter relative to gross profit acceleration. And our SG&A was down despite the fact that we took a 20% — we implemented a 20% increase in advertising. Let me turn it over to Stan. He can give you a little bit of color on how we’re thinking about raw materials phasing out through the balance of the second half.
