Jason Bazinet : I don’t want to take away from the results you guys put up because they are very good, and I heard what you said about account wins and we can all see the numbers. But your competitors are also doing remarkably well recently. And when I listen to the words you guys used to describe why there are all these tailwinds, whether it’s e-commerce or connected TV or digital transformation. At least to my layman’s here, it feels like those things have been going on as sort of trends for the last five years and yet all the holding companies are putting up great numbers sort of post COVID. And so I’m still I feel like I’m missing the thread in terms of what’s really caused your growth and your peers’ growth to accelerate so much.
So if you were just going to convey this to an institutional investor, and you said, if you buy Omnicom stock, you are net long what — your just two or three things that we’d all understand exactly what’s happening that’s causing clients to use your services so much more than they were in the past.
John Wren : The best answer is the complexity of the marketplace and the complexity of marketing itself. The whole customer journey has changed. Technology has changed that, a lot of things which didn’t in fact exist in the Internet marketing companies existed in 1997 when I first made my first investments in them, but they weren’t really perfected into social media and into Instagram and other things until the period in which you’re talking about. So if I had to sum it up in two words, and I can go deeper, if you’d like, it’s businesses requirements to transform themselves in a digital environment and the complexity that brings and the reason I believe the sector is benefiting is, for the most part, not everybody, and I hope to be at the head of the pack. But I’m happy that my competitor is doing well as well. We’ve changed our product and our approach to be responsive to those client requirements caused by those two broad categories.
Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Craig Huber with Huber Research Partners.
Craig Huber : My first question, John, on pricing. Historically, this industry might not have had great pricing power on a like-for- like basis. I’m wondering if you could help us here how we think about — how you’re thinking about pricing for this year. Do you have more pricing power in this higher inflation environment?
John Wren : Should we? Yes. Are we speaking to our clients about that? Yes. Do they understand that the best and brightest people that are servicing them can demand more because of the inflationary periods that we’re all living through? Yes. I think I tried to — I quickly read over this in an earlier answer but we’ve had some very good success in going to clients and getting increases in our pricing. Not everything we want by any standard, but getting that movement and that recognition. And clients who themselves are facing difficult times and there really are more difficult times, are really maybe not in a position to give us the level of increase that we want but we didn’t stop there even and say, well, guess what, in the past, you’ve been able to fire us and give us six months’ notice.
We want to extend our contract to be a 36-month contract before you could possibly review it, hoping that you don’t at the end of 36 months either. But in getting that, in lieu of a price increase, we’re able to add stability to our revenue base. So we are benefiting. One is more measurable than another. But — and the reason for that is because I think our product alignment is correct in terms of what the market needs are and I think our clients respect the intelligence and the sophistication of the people that we have servicing them on their accounts.
