The growth resulted from both increased spending on existing projects as well as the addition of several new assignments. Examining the revenue by capability, the fourth quarter marked a turning point for both our digital transformation and consumer insights businesses after bottoming in the third quarter. While headwinds have not completely dissipated for either capability, the year-over-year decline in net revenue was significantly smaller in the fourth quarter than it had been in the prior quarters during the year. In Q4, digital transformation delivered $133 million in net revenue, a decline of 9% year-over-year. For the full year, net revenue was $529 million, representing a year-over-year decline of 15%. Excluding advocacy, which is in an off election cycle year, the capability declined a much smaller 3% for fourth quarter.
This is a significant improvement compared to the 17% decline in revenue in the third quarter. The sequential ex-advocacy improvement was driven by technology customers, which began putting dollars to work with our digital transformation agencies. This gives us optimism that digital transformation will return to growth in 2024. Consumer Insights and Strategy reported $52 million in net revenue in the fourth quarter, a decline of 3% year-over-year. For the full year, net revenue declined 4% to $199 million. The Writers and Actors’ Guild Strike had a residual impact on this capability running over into the fourth quarter, but we were still able to post sequential improvement overall for the quarter. The decline of 3% in the fourth quarter is a meaningful improvement over the 9% decline in Q3, providing more optimism that the trend is reversing.
Outside of the Media and Entertainment verticals, the capability performed well in ’23, posting 6% growth, led by gains in automotive, consumer products, and transportation. Performance Media and Data reported $75 million in net revenue for the quarter, an increase of 1% over the prior period. The non-recurrence of a large automotive media placement weighed on the growth during the quarter. Despite that, the full year’s net revenue increased 5% to $285 million. Creativity and Communications delivered $235 million in net revenue in the fourth quarter, a decline of 6% over the prior period. Excluding advocacy, the net revenue decline was 5% for the full year. Excuse me, for the full year Creativity and Communications, posted $936 million in net revenue, a decline of 3%.
Excluding Advocacy, the decline was only 2%. The capability was impacted by several factors in a quarter, including the after-effects of strikes on our auto customers and macroeconomic uncertainty weighing on some of our retail and technology customers. Stagwell Marketing Cloud Group delivered $55 million in net revenue in the fourth quarter, representing a 6% decrease over the prior comparable period. $45 million of this net revenue came from our Advanced Media Platforms group, and approximately $10 million was derived from our Software Platform products. For the full year, SMCG delivered $198 million in net revenue, representing a 31% increase over 2022. The suite of software products continues to be a key strategic investment priority for us.
For the full year, we increased our investment in this product group by $20 million over the prior year. International delivered 17% of our consolidated net revenue for ’23 and grew 13% for the full year, led by particularly strong growth of 17% in EMEA and 5% in Asia-Pacific. Management has taken decisive actions in response to the persistent pressure on revenue during the year. In the fourth quarter, we took additional steps to align our staffing costs with trending revenue, eliminating $16 million of annualized salaries and bringing out full-year annualized actions to $98 million. Our headcount exiting the year was 4% lower than at the beginning of the year. Our actions have resulted in a reduction in the staff cost ratio to 64.3% in Q4 from 67% at the end of the first quarter, an improvement of 270 basis points.
And we continue to monitor our staff cost carefully, as we transition to increasing revenues in 2024. General and administrative costs accounted for 18% of net revenue in the fourth quarter. This is an improvement of 60 basis points versus the first quarter as we took steps to lower discretionary spending. Noteworthy specifics include real estate consolidation, which has been a significant priority for us since the merger. In 2023, we realized an additional $4 million of annualized savings, bringing the total annualized savings from real estate actions to more than $7 million since the merger. The implementation of our global ERP and HR systems is now nearly complete. Our focus is now shifting to consolidating our agency’s finance organizations to our Shared Services Platform.
Based on actions taken throughout ’23, more than $4 million of annualized savings have been realized through this initiative, and the HR team has taken further steps to reduce costs by consolidating resources where appropriate. In recruiting, the implementation of a new global applicant tracking system has reduced recruiting costs by more than $2.5 million year-over-year. The totality of our actions has led to Q4 adjusted EBITDA of $95 million or 17% margin on net revenue. For the full year, adjusted EBITDA was $360 million, also at a margin of 17%. As I mentioned previously, we continued to make strategic investments in the Stagwell Marketing Cloud. Excluding the incremental $20 million of investment in 2023, our full-year adjusted EBITDA margin would have been approximately 130 basis points higher, or approximately 18%.
