Philippe Krakowsky: No, I mean, I agree with John. It’s a very different business. So when you talk about what was 10 years ago or took a look at what you wrote this morning, I know that you tried to size it, the addressable universe for us, the nature of what we do for clients is much broader. It’s much more core to their business when you think about, you know say, what a Flywheel does or what an Axiom allows us to do and how close we get to kind of client data, what’s going on at the commercial, the commerce side of things.
And so I think that the nature of the partnerships has evolved. And to John’s point, you clearly need to give people comfort if, for whatever reason, it’s something that they bring up with you. But it’s clearly not the kind of issue it would have been five, 10 years ago, definitely a decade ago.
John Wren: And the second part of your question, do you want to remind me? You had two questions?
Steven Cahall: Yeah, thanks. Just about the timing here, because John, it seemed like you all had, really had a lot of momentum. So I was just thinking about how you thought about your organic momentum versus this opportunity to do something obviously very strategic, very long-term, but with some financial implications and integration risk and all those other things. So kind of why now is the right time for this deal.
John Wren: Okay. Yeah, yes, and we did have a good ‘20 — we’re having a good ‘24. When, again, as I mentioned earlier, Philippe and I have been talking for almost a year now. When you look at the portfolio of assets that Interpublic has, you look at the portfolio of assets that Omnicom has, you look at our diversity, geographic diversity, you look at where the talent is, our companies complement each other quite a bit.
First, from a geographic point of view, it brings further strength in Latin America and Asia to us, probably in Europe to IPG. In the overall, it increases our exposure to North America, especially the Americas, which in this environment, political environment, globally, I think all those are very positive things.
When you look at the investments that they’ve made in Axiom and some of the other moves that they’ve made, similar in some ways to ours, but different, very much different in some ways to ours, the combination of all of our efforts from building platforms to Omni to Flywheel to all that data, and then what the discipline that Axiom has had and the client base and the long history and loyalty of its clients, together, we’ll be able to monetize that asset in many ways that, over a broader client base, then either company or an individual company would have difficulty in doing.
We also bring together an incredible, incredible group of people throughout the world who are recognized annually, no matter what company they work for, of being the best and most talented people in the business. All of that, once you get behind the curtain, it makes an incredible amount of sense, and I’m sure I’m not doing justice to it in answering your question.