But we continue to negotiate and most of the deals that we’ve been able to do have been strategic in nature, and they have to be good family members because they have to be able to operate in the environment that Omnicom operates in. You’re correct in making — calling out the fact that we have divested today, we’re constantly reviewing the portfolio and also constantly talking to people through our M&A group who are doing roll-ups in certain areas where we’ve become aware of that, and we have to make decisions that, gee, this company has value to us now but are we going to double down and support it to compete with what we anticipate those roll up is going to be able to accomplish? Or are we going to just take a healthy profit and return it to our shareholders.
And that’s what we’ve elected to do over the course of the last five years. And where an acquisition has become fall short of our standards or we deemed to be too expensive, we’ve not been shy and we spend a lot of money each year investing in building those businesses which are reflected in lowering our margins in many ways. If we were running the business for any short period of time, you could stop some of those investments and increase your margins temporarily but it will hurt long-term growth. So we are constantly looking at the present, learning hopefully from mistakes of the past, but it also with a keen awareness about where our expertise is and where it should continue to be.
Tim Nollen : If I could maybe ask one more. There’s been a lot of discussion this week about AI and this ChatGPT functionality that Microsoft has been investing in. And of course — was it last week, the week before that, we had the DOJ lawsuit against Google. These are huge topics. I don’t expect a precise answer, but just wondering if you have any initial thoughts on how these developments may affect your business in the ad market as a whole?
John Wren : Sure. We ourselves not shy, but found that interesting. We’re constantly looking as a group that is looking to automate part of the functions that we perform on a regular basis. And those are some of the investments that I alluded to. When I first became aware of chat, the first phone call I made was to the Head of PR and as I said, using historic performance, I want to test this product and see, it is good yet as it pretends to be and given an analysis from the people on the ground doing those type of tests as to how they viewed it. And they came back very positively. It’s a good product. It’s not a perfect product. I think when Microsoft really integrates it into its system, it will be able to ramp up, so it doesn’t crash just right now, it has a lot of people trying to play with it and use a lot of whatever is available hosting capabilities are.
But in general, I probably would have given you a different answer two years ago than I will right now. All of the automation that we’re looking at enhances the capabilities and makes the job easier for our best and brightest people. And it eliminates a lot of the otherwise mundane projects or activities that we also get paid for. So net-net-net, not everybody will love it. We’ll be embracing it as quickly as we possibly can because we think it’s good for our smartest people, and therefore, it will be good for what the work they do on behalf of our clients. So I’m looking forward to it. And I’m looking forward to Microsoft getting behind it and making it something that is on everybody’s desktop.
Operator: And the next question comes from the line of Jason Bazinet with Citi.
