The Interpublic Group of Companies, Inc. (“IPG”) was incorporated in Delaware in September 1930 under the name of McCann-Erickson Incorporated as the successor to the advertising agency businesses founded in 1902 by A.W. Erickson and in 1911 by Harrison K. McCann. The company has operated under the Interpublic name since January 1961.
About Us
IPG is one of the world’s premier global advertising and marketing services companies. Our agencies create marketing programs for clients in every major world market. These companies deliver services across the full spectrum of marketing disciplines and specialties, including advertising, direct marketing, media buying and planning, public relations, events marketing, internet and search engine marketing, social media marketing and mobile marketing.
The work we produce for our clients is specific to their unique needs. Our solutions vary from project-based activity involving one agency and its client to long-term, fully integrated campaigns created by a group of our companies working together on behalf of a client. With offices in over 100 countries, we can operate in a single region or align work globally across all major world markets.
The role of our holding company is to provide resources and support to ensure that our agencies can best meet clients’ needs. Based in New York City, our holding company also sets company-wide financial objectives and corporate strategy, directs collaborative inter-agency programs, establishes financial management and operational controls, guides personnel policy, conducts investor relations and oversees mergers and acquisitions. In addition, we provide limited centralized functional services that offer our companies operational efficiencies, including accounting and finance, marketing information retrieval and analysis, legal services, real estate expertise, travel services, recruitment assistance, employee benefits and executive compensation management.
To keep our company well-positioned in an evolving industry, we support our agencies’ talent and operational initiatives to expand high-growth capabilities and build offerings in key developing markets. When appropriate, we also develop relationships with companies that are building leading-edge marketing tools that complement our agencies and the programs they are developing for clients. In addition, we look for opportunities within our company to modernize operations through mergers, strategic alliances and the development of internal programs that encourage intra-company collaboration.
Market Strategy
We have taken several major strategic steps in recent years to position our agencies as leaders in the global advertising and communications market.
Although we have seen some signs of economic stability in recent months, the global economic recession made business conditions in 2009 extremely challenging for all our companies, across all sectors. The weak conditions in the broader economy continue to affect the demand for advertising and marketing services and present a challenge to the revenue and profit growth of companies in our industry. During these challenging economic conditions, we have focused on meeting our clients’ needs while carefully managing our cost structure. We initiated significant severance actions in the fourth quarter of 2008, which have continued through 2009. We believe that our company is well positioned to capitalize on marketplace expansion once consumer confidence and client spending return.
We operate in a media landscape that has vastly changed over the past decade. Media channels continue to fragment, and clients face an increasingly complex consumer environment. To stay ahead of these challenges and to achieve our objectives, we have invested in creative and strategic talent in high-growth areas and have realigned a number of our capabilities to meet market demand.
•At our McCann Worldgroup (“McCann”) unit, a premier global integrated network, we have continued to invest in talent so as to upgrade the group’s integrated marketing services offering at MRM, Momentum and McCann Healthcare.
•We combined accountable marketing and consumer advertising agencies to form the unique global offering of Draftfcb.
•We have taken significant actions in recent years to create a more focused and strategic Lowe & Partners (“Lowe”) and this year we aligned Deutsch and Lowe to build on the complementary strengths of the two agencies.
•At our marketing services group, Constituency Management Group (“CMG”), we continue to strengthen our best-in-class public relations and events marketing specialists.
•We have also taken a unique approach to our media offering by installing a single management structure (“Mediabrands”) to oversee all media operations, while concurrently aligning our global media networks with our global brand agencies. This approach ensures that the ideas we develop for clients work across new and traditional media channels and this differentiated media strategy has shown significant traction in the marketplace.
The aspects of our business addressing digital media continue to evolve rapidly. As such, strong, multi-channel talent is vital to our long-term success as a marketing partner to our clients. In order to grow with our clients, we have therefore accelerated our investment in digital talent, professional training and technology throughout the organization in recent years. This reflects our belief that digital marketing should not be treated as a stand-alone function, but instead, should be incorporated within all of our companies. Recruiting and developing digitally conversant talent at all our agencies and in all marketing disciplines is therefore an area where we continue to invest.
To meet these changing needs of the marketplace, we have at times acquired or built specialty digital assets, such as Reprise Media (search engine marketing), The Interpublic Emerging Media Lab and HUGE (e-commerce solutions). We have also invested in existing digital assets such as R/GA, a stand-alone digital agency and industry leader in the development of award-winning interactive campaigns for global clients. These specialty assets have unique capabilities and service their own client rosters, while also serving as key digital partners to many of the agencies within IPG.
Likewise, we continue to look for strategic investments that will position us to capitalize on fast-growth geographic regions. In recent years, we have made investments in India and Brazil, further strengthening our leadership position in these high-growth, developing markets. In 2008, we built on this strategy and completed an important transaction that increased our stake in the Middle East Communication Networks (“MCN”) to a majority position. Headquartered in Dubai, we believe MCN is the region’s premier marketing services management company, with 60 offices across 14 countries. Our partner in Russia is an acknowledged advertising leader in that country. In China, where we operate with all of our global networks and across the full spectrum of marketing services, we continue to invest behind our companies.
Going forward, we will continue to derive benefits from our diversified client base, global footprint and broad range of services. The improvements we have made in our financial reporting and business information systems during recent years provide us with timely and actionable insights from our global operations, which enables us to manage our business more effectively. Our conservative approach to the balance sheet and liquidity, as well as recent measures to further improve our debt maturity profile, have given us a solid financial foundation and the flexibility required to successfully move forward as business conditions improve.
Despite economic challenges, clients continue to invest in marketing to protect market share and enhance brand value. In 2009, IPG units were recognized with many of the industry’s most coveted honors, across many advertising and marketing disciplines. Our agencies are invited to compete for most major new business opportunities and won a number of the year’s biggest and most competitive new business assignments. We believe that the competitiveness of our offering bodes well for us when a broader economic turnaround takes hold.
Financial Reporting Segments
We have two reportable segments: Integrated Agency Network (“IAN”), which is comprised of McCann, Draftfcb, Lowe, Mediabrands and our domestic integrated agencies; and CMG, which is comprised of the bulk of our specialist marketing services offerings.
Personnel
As of December 31, 2009, we employed approximately 40,000 people, of whom approximately 17,000 were employed in the U.S. Because of the service character of the advertising and marketing communications business, the quality of personnel is of crucial importance to our continuing success. There is keen competition for qualified employees.