Omnicom Group Inc. (NYSE:OMC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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John Wren: Sure. I don’t think we’ve recovered completely the inflation that we faced. When you look at this, from Western Europe, US and then emerging markets, inflation has been more severe. We haven’t had some pricing flexibility but not to the extent of how fast inflation has risen. Now we’re hoping that inflation has stabilized, and we’ll start to enjoy the benefits of that. The other thing which impacts our business is actually an account the day you win it, the next 90 days is probably the least profitable time that you’ll have that account because you’re ramping up staff and you’re changing organizations in order to accommodate and not drop any balls as the business has passed from one of our competitors to us. So that has some kind — that has an impact not on unit pricing but on the overall costs that we face as we adjust and staff up for these events.

More precise than that, I can’t really be. I don’t have any hard data which supports specific areas in the company. One of the reasons, though, that we’ve been able to expand our base in offshore and near-shore markets for more of the functions that we have to fulfill in order to complete our job, we’ve gotten better at that. We’ve grown the staff from — we’ve doubled it in this past year. And I think in my comments we’ve said that we expect that to grow two to three times over the next 24 months because we have the infrastructure now to accommodate that growth. That gives us a bit of relief on the inflation that we haven’t been able to pass on to our clients, so by doing things differently.

Craig Huber: And my final question, if I could just see if everybody has questions on this project-related work in the fourth quarter. Historically, maybe the range is $200 million to $250 million in the fourth quarter. I’m curious, embedded in your 3.5% to 5% organic growth number for the year target, what are you guys assuming for project-related work in the fourth quarter versus the year-ago number? Is that roughly flat, on the bottom end of your 3.5% to 5% number? How should we think about that?

Phil Angelastro: We don’t really have a number, Craig. I think certainly, every one of our businesses has some expectations regarding project work in the fourth quarter. The key for us is, when we meet with them, ensuring they’re not keeping staff on hand hoping to get new business as we head into the fourth quarter and then the cost structure is out of whack with their expected revenues. They need to have some historical analysis, and we’ve got plenty of that in order for our agencies to have certain amounts of project spend in their forecast. But typically, they’re incentivized to benefit from capturing that year-end project spend. And our clients, by and large, want to spend the rest of their budget and grow their businesses through the end of the year.

So those factors typically help us and help our clients to get to the point where we can capture a significant amount of that spend. But we don’t have a hard and fast number. Blank percent of the $200 million to $250 million is in the forecast, but certainly, some of it in the forecast. But we’re pretty conservative about how much our agencies can put in their forecasts because the last thing we want is people to be hiring ahead of the revenue or keeping people around that don’t necessarily have anything to do if the revenue doesn’t come through. That’s a pretty consistent practice we followed for quite some time.

Craig Huber: Great. Thank you, Phil and John. I appreciate that.

Phil Angelastro: Sure.

Operator: And with that, that does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your participation and for using AT&T teleconferencing service. You may now disconnect.

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