Noel Wallace: Yeah. Thanks, Jason. So again, we are taking aggressive pricing across the Hill’s business, as you’ve seen through the recent quarters and we continue to see some inflationary prices on ag prices. Now do we think that’s going to continue into ’24? Unlikely, but we want to assure we continue to take pricing this year to recover that. Is there a number that we’re targeting? No. We want to continue to do this in a very thoughtful way. We see real opportunities to continue to grow both gross profit and operating margin at Hill’s in a healthy way quarter-to-quarter moving out, particularly given the pricing that we’ll see flow through the back half of the P&L and hopefully a more benign cost environment. We also have mixed opportunities that we’re very focused on as we get the new Tonganoxie up and running and the wet — and we get wet capacity building that will allow a little bit of margin accretion on mix.
So we’re pleased with that. We’re getting the productivity through the plants operating more efficiently. So we’ll see that. And obviously, as the private label business comes off, that will be a natural organic accretion to both gross profit and operating profit at the end. So good aspects to – as we see the business projecting over time. We’re going to ensure that we’re competitive relative to pricing in the market. We’re going to continue to ensure that we keep the high levels of advertising there on the Hill’s business, which you saw in the quarter. So overall, we feel pretty good about the phasing of gross profit accretion moving forward.
Operator: Our next question will come from Steve Powers of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Stephen Powers: Hey. Thanks and good morning. I wanted to ask more of a general question on the state of the advertising industry as you see it. You talked obviously making increases, the 20% increase this quarter. I guess the question I’m left with is just how you’re seeing the efficacy of that advertising. Do you believe the efficacy is up commensurate with the increased dollar investment or is there inflation or other dynamics cutting into that efficacy just as you the environment today as you plan ahead?
Noel Wallace: Yeah. Thanks, Steve and good morning. I’ll take you back to CAGNY, when Eve (ph) presented a lot of our digital advancement and the digital transformation and ultimately how our focus on digital advertising is yielding a much higher ROI, we have the ability to analytically measure that much more effectively than we have in the past. Our copy effectiveness is getting much better. So we’re seeing the efficacy delivered there through the brand health measures that I talked about earlier. We’re obviously spending more money on generating first-party data. That allows us to obviously look more holistically across the market and get more targeted media that’s more personalized and effective, which has been terrific. And as I mentioned upfront, the non-promoted volume share in the U.S. is a big metric for us because that clearly indicates that our advertising is driving more non-promoted share.
So we were up about 100 basis points in non-promoted share and that’s excellent. That’s exactly what we want. Now we may have pulled back, as I mentioned, a little too much on the promotion, but we’ll get the balance right as we move forward. So the efficacy overall, we’re very pleased. And that’s clearly demonstrated in some of the market share performances as we have around the world, where we’ve had elevated advertising to support that, particularly across some of the brands — non-Colgate brands. I mentioned Sanex in Europe. We talked about the Suavitel business and the Axion business in Mexico, which is obviously well supported. So overall, we see a more healthy balance of advertising across our categories. And over time, this is going to lead to more sustainable growth.
