The Interpublic Group Of Companies' CEO Discusses Q1 2012 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

During this call, we will refer to forward-looking statements about our company, which are subject to the uncertainties in the cautionary statement included in our earnings release and the slide presentation and further detailed in our 10-Q and other filings with the SEC.

At this point, it is my pleasure to turn things over to Michael Roth.

Michael I. Roth

Thank you, Jerry, and thank you for joining us this morning as we review our first quarter results.

As usual, I'll start out by carving the key highlights of our performance. Frank will then provide additional detail on our quarter. I'll conclude with an update on our agencies and full year outlook to be followed by a Q&A.

Beginning with revenue. In the first quarter, our organic rate -- growth rate was 2.8%. Our comparison to last year was the most challenging among our peer set because of our industry-leading 9.3% organic revenue growth in Q1 a year ago.

Given this difficult hurdle, our 2.8% organic growth represents a solid result. Regionally, we were led by double-digit growth in Asia-Pac, fueled by a broad cross-section of our agencies, followed in turn by growth in Lat-Am, the U.S. and U.K.

Revenue decreased in Continental Europe where macroeconomic conditions, not surprisingly, continued to pose a challenge.

We saw growth at our IAN sector, which consists of our global advertising networks, our media operations, the U.S. integrated independents and our digital specialty agencies.

CMG's strong performance reflects the continuing growth of our marketing services specialist agencies and public relation that is Weber and Golden, experiential and sports marketing, as well as branding and identity.

Once again, digital services made a very strong contribution to our growth. This was true for the embedded capabilities at all of our global advertising networks within Mediabrands, at the U.S. integrated independent agencies and across the marketing services agencies that are part of CMG. It was also the case at our digital specialist agencies which continued to show strong growth and are making good progress in extending this service offerings and broadening their geographic reach.

« First ‹ Previous 1 2 3 Next › Last »