The Interpublic Group of Companies, Inc. (NYSE:IPG) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 8, 2024 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Jerry Leshne - Senior Vice President, Investor Relations

Philippe Krakowsky - Chief Executive Officer

Ellen Johnson - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Adrien de Saint Hilaire - Bank of America

David Karnovsky - J.P. Morgan

Tim Nollen - Macquarie

Steven Cahall - Wells Fargo

Julien Roch - Barclays

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the Interpublic Group Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. This conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time.

I would now like to introduce Mr. Jerry Leshne, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.

Jerry Leshne

Good morning. Thank you for joining us. This morning, we are joined by our CEO, Philippe Krakowsky and by Ellen Johnson, our CFO. We have posted our earnings release and our slide presentation on our website, interpublic.com. We will begin with prepared remarks to be followed by Q&A. We plan to conclude before market open at 9:30 Eastern time.

During this call, we will refer to forward-looking statements about our company. These are subject to the uncertainties in the cautionary statement that are included in our earnings release and the slide presentation. These are further detailed in our 10-Q, 10-K and other filings with the SEC. We will also refer to certain non-GAAP measures. We believe that these measures provide useful supplemental data that, while not a substitute for GAAP measures, allow for greater transparency in the review of our financial and operational performance.

At this point, it is my pleasure to turn things over to Philippe Krakowsky.

Philippe Krakowsky

Thank you, Jerry. Thank you all for joining us this morning. As usual, I'm going to start with a high-level view of our performance in the quarter and for the full year as well as our outlook for the year ahead. Ellen will then provide additional detail and I'll conclude with updates on key developments at the agencies to be followed by Q&A. We're pleased to share our fourth quarter highlighted by our strongest growth of the year, which exceeded expectations during our seasonally largest quarter.

Organic growth in the quarter was 1.7% on top of 3.8% a year ago. Underneath that number, the quarter continued to reflect the cross currency at work in the economy at large and within our portfolio of services and our client roster. Those include the headwinds that we've called out and discussed throughout the year, most notably the austerity among clients in the tech and telecom sector which was evident across our competitive set and the challenges faced by our digital specialist agencies.