You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: 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.
I hope everyone is keeping well.
As usual, I'll start with a high level view of our performance in the quarter.
Ellen will then provide additional details.
I'll conclude with updates on key developments at our agencies, and then we'll follow that with Q&A.
They are the principal reason we can report such strong results again this quarter.
Our people are delivering insight and execution required for the complex integration of creativity, technology and data at scale as marketers across industry sectors need in order to accelerate their business transformation journeys.
This kind of work is helping set a standard for our industry and further build on IPG's record of industry outperformance and margin expansion.
As we've moved through September and now into October, it's also been rewarding to begin welcoming our people back to office settings and to see many of our teams together again in the places where creativity, collaboration and culture are ultimately rooted and regularly renewed.
Turning to our results in the quarter, our net organic revenue growth in the third quarter was 15%.
That's against the third quarter of 2020 when, as you will all recall, our organic change was negative 3.7% due to the impact of the pandemic.
It's also important to note that our 2-year organic increase was 10.7% relative to the third quarter of 2019, which is a strong result.
Compared to 2020, our growth in the quarter was again broad based by region of the world, discipline as well as client sector.
Organic growth was 14.7% in the U.S. and it ranged between 11% and 20% in international regions.
Both of our operating segments also grew at double-digit rates.
Our IAN segment increased 14.4% organically with all major agencies contributing high single to double-digit percentage increases.
We were led by media, data and technology, R/GA and Huge as well as by MullenLowe, McCann and FCB highlighted by notable contributions from their Healthcare and Advertising disciplines.
At our DXTRA segment, organic growth was 18.6% reflecting double-digit increases across each of our DXTRA agencies and furthering the rebound from the sharp impact of the pandemic last year on our sports and entertainment as well as experiential businesses.
Looking at client sectors, the picture is also one of balanced growth with nearly every one of our major client sectors increasing at a double-digit percentage rate, led by the auto sector and other sector with government and industrials and the tech and telecom retail and healthcare sectors.
Turning to profitability and expenses.
Our results again demonstrate outstanding focus and execution by our operating teams even as we continue to invest to support areas of accelerating growth and to enhance our offerings.
Third quarter net income was $239.9 million as reported.
Our adjusted EBITDA was $369.5 million and our margin of adjusted EBITDA before restructuring was 16.3%, compared with 16.2% a year ago and 14.7% in the third quarter of 2019.
There were several factors worth noting within those comparisons.
We have a solid operating leverage on our expenses for base payroll as we continue to see the structural benefits of the strategic cost actions taken last year.
Those are reflected in our base payroll as well as our occupancy expense.
To-date, our very strong top-line growth is also outpacing the associated hiring and therefore our expense for temporary labor increased from a year ago.
Our travel and related expenses continue to track at low levels but still were somewhat higher than last year.
As we look ahead, T&E expense will pick up over the remainder of the year.
Our expense accrual for employee performance based incentive compensation however increased as a percentage of net revenue which is a direct result of our strong operating performance.
Third quarter diluted earnings per share was $0.60 as reported and was $0.63 as adjusted for the after-tax expense for the amortization of acquired intangibles and other items.
In sum, our quarter as well as our year-to-date speak to strong financial performance across the key metrics of growth, EBITA and earnings per share.
Our growth reflects the cyclical economic recovery as well as the important structural current that favor the kinds of higher order expertise with which we're well resourced.
The work we're doing solves for the increasingly complex world faced by our clients in marketing and media environment that's defined by a very rapid rate of change.
This is a validation of our long-term strategic focus on building offerings that help clients integrate brand experience across all consumer touchpoints, improve their capacity to apply data in the way their business goes to market and capitalize on the benefits of technology and digital channels.
Going back a number of years, we've anticipated transformational opportunities of this type of environment.
Other important drivers of our continued success, our ability to deliver fully integrated solutions through our open architecture model and our emphasis on strong agency brands and best industry talent so as to deliver breakthrough creative ideas and content.
We've also fostered a culture that respects the individual, is transparent with respect to clients and is accountable when it comes to data privacy and media responsibility.
Turning to our outlook, with our seasonally important fourth quarter still ahead, we're pleased to increase our financial performance objectives.
We now expect that we can deliver organic growth for the year of approximately 11% which is ahead of the 9% to 10% range we had previously indicated.
With growth at that higher level and given our strong results through the 9-months, we would therefore expect to achieve adjusted EBITA margin of approximately 16.8% which is an increase of 80 basis points over the level that we had previously shared with you.
Our outlook is based on expectations of a reasonably steady course of public health and global economic recovery.
We begin the fourth quarter well positioned and the strong operating momentum and the tone of the business remains solid, as we had into the year and into holiday season.
As such, we see 2021 as another year of strong value creation for all of our stakeholders.
And on that note, I'll now hand over the call to Ellen for a more in-depth view of our results.
I hope that everyone is safe and healthy.
Adjusted EBITDA before a small restructuring adjustment was $369.5 million and margin was 16.3%.
Diluted earnings per share was $0.60 as reported and $0.63 as adjusted for the after-tax impact of the amortization of acquired intangibles, a small restructuring adjustment and the net gain from the disposition of non-strategic businesses.
On October 1st, following the conclusion of the third quarter, we repaid our $500 million 3.75% senior notes from cash-on-hand further deleveraging our balance sheet.
Turning to Slide 3, you'll see our P&L for the quarter.
I'll cover revenue and operating expenses in detail in the slides that follow.
Turning to the third quarter revenue on Slide 4.
Our net revenue in the quarter was $2.26 billion, an increase of $307.1 million from a year ago.
Compared to Q3 2020, the impact of the change of exchange rates was positive 1.1% with the U.S. dollar weaker than a year ago in all world regions, with the exception of LatAm.
Net divestitures were negative 40 basis points.
Our net organic revenue increase was 15% which brings us to 12% organic growth for the nine months.
At the bottom of this slide, we break out segment revenue in the quarter.
Our IAN segment grew 14.4% organically.
We had notably strong growth across our offerings in media, data and tech, R/GA, Huge, McCann Worldgroup, FCB driven by health and the MullenLowe Group.
At IPG DXTRA, organic growth was 18.6%, which reflects double-digit growth across public relations, experiential, sports and entertainment and branding disciplines.
Moving on to Slide 5, which is a look at our organic revenue change by region.
In the U.S., which was 65% of our net revenue in the quarter, organic growth was 14.7%.
The organic revenue decreased a year ago was 2.4%.
Year-on-year performance was notably strong across both our IAN and DXTRA segments and at almost all of our agencies, led by media, data and tech, FCB, MullenLowe, McCann, Weber and Jack Morton.
International markets were 35% of our net revenue in the quarter and increased 15.4% organically.
You'll recall that the same markets decreased 6% a year ago.
The U.K. increased 13.3% organically, led by our offerings in media, data and tech, DXTRA, McCann and R/GA.
Continental Europe grew 11.8%.
Among our largest national markets, we had notably strong growth in Germany, Spain, Italy and France.
There were a number of operating highlights in the region led by media, data and tech, DXTRA, and R/GA.
Asia-Pac increased 17.4% organically, led by growth across most national markets notably, Australia, Singapore, India, the Philippines, China and Japan.
Our organic growth in LatAm was 20.3% with exceptional results in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Chile.
Our Other Markets group, which consists of Canada, the Middle East and Africa grew 17.1% organically, led by notably strong performance in Canada.
Moving on to Slide 6 and operating expenses in the quarter.
Our fully adjusted EBITDA margin was 16.3% compared with 16.2% a year ago and 14.7% in the third quarter of 2019.
We continue to see efficiencies in a number of different expense categories as we had in this year's first half and these were both structural and variable.
In the structural category, we are seeing the benefit of the strategic restructuring actions, which we initiated in the second quarter last year and continue to execute over the back half of 2020.
As we've called up previously, we also had a sharp decrease in certain variable operating expenses from pre-COVID levels.
I would call out specifically travel and related expenses, which while increased from the third quarter of a year ago were still well below their level in 2019.
As you can see on this slide, our ratio of total salaries and related expense as a percentage of net revenue was 66.8% compared with 65% in last year's third quarter.
The increase was due to higher expenses in two categories.
Our approval for performance-based incentive compensation was 5.8% of net revenue and our expense for temporary labor, which was 5% of net revenue in the quarter.
We had strong leverage on our expense for base payroll, benefits and tax, which was 53.9% of third quarter net revenue, which reflects the benefit of our restructuring actions and the fact of the pace of hiring lagged our strong revenue growth, which has been the case in past economic expansions.
At quarter-end, total worldwide head count was approximately 54,600, an 8% increase from a year ago.
We have added net 4500 people year-to-date to support our growth.
Also, on this slide, our office and other direct expense decreased as a percent of net revenue by 250 basis points to 13.3%.
That reflects lower occupancy expense mainly due to the restructuring of our real estate.
The ratio was 5% of net revenue.
We also reduced all other office and other direct expense by 120 basis points compared to last year, which reflects lower expense for bad debt and leverage as a result of our growth.
Our SG&A expense was 1.4% of net revenue with the increase from a year ago due to higher unallocated performance-based incentive expense and increased employee insurance, which was at a very low level last year.
On Slide 7, we present detail on adjustments to our reported third quarter results in order to provide greater clarity and a picture of comparable performance.
This begins on the left hand side of the page with our reported results and steps through to adjusted EBITDA and our adjusted diluted EPS.
Our expense for the amortization of acquired intangibles in the second column was $21.5 million.
The restructuring refinement in the quarter was a benefit of $3.5 million dollars.
To be clear, this is an adjustment to estimates of the 2020 restructuring program.
Below operating expenses in column 4, we had a gain due to the disposition of certain non-strategic businesses, which was $1.7 million in the quarter.
At the front portion of the slide, you can see the after-tax impact per diluted share of these adjustments, was $0.03 per share, which bridges our diluted earnings per share as reported at $0.60 to adjusted earnings of $0.63 per diluted share.
On Slide 8, we turn to cash flow in the quarter.
Cash from operations was $390.2 million compared to $689.3 million a year ago.
We generated $79.6 million from working capital compared to $376.8 million last year, which was unusually strong seasonal result.
Investing activities is $72 million in the quarter, mainly for capex $61.3 million.
Financing activities used $153.3 million mainly for our dividend.
Our net increase in cash for the quarter was a $152.5 million.
Slide 9 is the current portion of our balance sheet.
We ended the quarter with $2.5 billion of cash and equivalents.
Under current liabilities, the current portion of long-term debt refers to our $500 million, 3.75% senior notes, which have matured since the balance sheet date and we repaid with cash on hand.
Slide 10 depicts the maturities of our outstanding debt.
Again, this includes the October 1st maturity.
Our next maturity is $250 million to April 2024 and following that, there is nothing until 2028.
In summary, on Slide 11.
Our teams continue to execute at a high level in an unprecedented environment.
I would like to reiterate our pride in and gratitude for the efforts of our people.
The strength of our balance sheet and liquidity means that we remain well positioned, both financially and commercially.
The combination of our exceptionally talented people and a balanced portfolio of offerings and capabilities continues to set the standard for growth in our industry.
The strategic steps we've taken over the long-term have positioned IPG as a high value business partner to our clients.
We're able to combine the power of creativity and narrative storytelling with the benefits of data and technology in order to deliver growth for marketers across a broad range of sectors.
These strategic steps are evident in our strong results and position us well going forward.
By helping clients to better understand audiences and to engage with them with greater precision and accountability, we can help company succeed the digital economy.
Today, marketers are responsible for increasing business innovation, building new content platforms and e-commerce platforms as well as adopting emerging tech and leveraging data all while complying with an evolving data privacy landscape.
Our clients are also at the forefront for addressing societal issues and corporate purpose on behalf of their companies and brands.
As a partner, we're helping them solve all of these challenges.
With our ability to deliver complex integrations focused on business results and outcomes, our ability to help marketers proactively address these issues is further assisted by our intentional focus on ESG priorities as core business imperatives.
That's why we've been focused in working on ESG for many years at IPG.
We continue to build on a strong industry record in DEI initiatives which are integral to nurturing the highest quality and most representative perspectives, insights and creative voices across our company.
More recently, we've launched our first formal human rights policy and our work with clients around social issues includes campaigns focused on LGBTQ+ rights, mental health awareness, ways in which we can remove implicit bias from core datasets and also use data to increase the health of our planet as well as sustainable consumption models.
With respect to climate, we're now measuring our total greenhouse gas emissions around the world.
We're committed to setting a Science-based target and to reaching net zero carbon across our business by 2040.
We've also agreed to source a 100% renewable electricity by 2030 for our entire portfolio.
Now turning to the highlights of performance from across that portfolio during the quarter, a key sector that continue to show strength for us is healthcare.
As you know, IPG has significant operations in healthcare marketing totaling approximately a quarter of our total revenue.
This includes specialized global healthcare networks as well as significant healthcare activity and client relationships at our media and public relations operations and within some of our U.S. independents.
As health and wellness continue to be a top concern for people companies and governments around the world, we've seen an increased need for sound healthcare information to be delivered at speed in ways that are highly personal, culturally relevant as well as respectful of privacy regulations.
Within the healthcare sector as well as across other client sectors, our ability to deliver open architecture solutions will continue to drive success for our company.
We have deep experience providing customized, integrated client service models to many of our largest client partners and we continue to perform well and winning new business on this sort of work especially in pitches that leverage the IPG data stack as a key part of the strategy.
This past quarter for example, Morgan Stanley and E*Trade named Mediahub as media agency of record following a highly competitive review.
Data strategy was a key component of the brief.
For this reason our customer intelligence company, Acxiom was placed front and center in our winning proposal.
The Mediahub team is leading media strategy, planning and activation in the U.S. leveraging Acxiom's consumer data and expertise to fuel tightly targeted and effective communication solutions.
In media brands, we continue to see a high degree of engagement with many of the world's most sophisticated marketers across our two largest brands, UM and Initiative.
During the quarter, Initiative U.S. won Adweek's prestigious Media Agency Of the Year honor for 2021.
Last year at this time within media brands, we launched Reprise commerce, the global specialty e-commerce offering and since then, e-commerce revenue within that unit has increased significantly as we've held clients build out holistic approaches to e-commerce including e-retail, supply chain and warehousing, marketplaces and direct-to-consumer programs.
There's never been a more important time to connect the e-commerce opportunity with the full power of clients media and marketing investments.
In addition, we can create and deploy consistent cross channel experiences that dynamically adapt to consumer needs and goals in real-time.
With the expertise as a key part of the news last week that the owner of Werther's Original candy business, Storck USA had selected UM as it's media agency of record.
UM takes on all strategy, planning, buying and analytics duties, including the implementation of Storck's Shopper commerce activity.
Our data and technology offerings continue to be key drivers of performance for us as well, featuring an all major open architecture and new business activity of significant scale.
This month marks the third anniversary of Acxiom becoming part of IPG.
During the third quarter, Acxiom continued to post strong performance and to win in the marketplace bringing in major new clients from the media, retail and financial services sector.
Most recently, a top-10 financial services company engaged Acxiom to build their unified enterprise data layer which again shows the strength and depth of Acxiom's technology expertise.
During Q3, Kinesso launched -- we are calling the Kinesso Intelligence Identity product also called as Kii and this is a new identity solution that works across the open web as well as the walled gardens and is already live with clients across a broad range of verticals.
Along with IPG Mediabrands, the Trade Desk is among the first media partners using Kii and the launch comes at a particularly important moment as brands and agencies work to create and bolster privacy first identity solutions that can assure addressability as third-party cookies and mobile ad ideas begin to be phased out.
Kii can match our brands first party CRM data and map it to key identifiers significantly increasing match rates and reducing the need for third-party onboarders.
When it comes to the strength of our brands in the creative advertising space, McCann, FCB and MullenLowe continued to distinguish themselves this quarter.
McCann Worldgroup was named Global Network of the Year at the 2021 Gerety awards which recognizes the best creative communications from the female perspective.
Also notable McCann Worldgroup named a new President and Global Chief Creative Officer who joins us from Nike where he served in senior brand marketing and creative leadership roles for more than 20 years, most recently leading Nike's men's brands globally.
During his tenure at Nike, he was responsible for many of the world's best known and most iconic campaigns across a range of marketing disciplines and channels.
At FCB, the agency at Chicago office was ranked as the top creative agency in North America in the Lion's Creativity Report.
In that same report, FCB was ranked among the top networks in the world and FCB was also named North American Agency of the Year at the 2021 New York Festival Awards.
MullenLowe was named the second most effective agency at the recent U.S. Effie Awards.
And MullenLowe Group was named the number 2 most effective network globally, in both cases punching well above its weight against larger competitors.
During the quarter, the agency won the TJ Maxx creative account and just this week Mediahub won 3 Adweek Media Plan of the Year's awards as well as seeing it's U.K. office when global media duties [Phonetic] for Farfetch which is a luxury fashion e-commerce brand.
R/GA launched what they're calling a direct to avatar capability and that's going to create virtual stories for brands within metaverse platforms and that really stakes out new territory in direct to consumer sales.
On the growth front, R/GA added projects for digital forward partners like Tonal, Slack, CBS and Roku.
Huge also launched a new commerce offering which we call the experienced stack of the future, and that's a tool that consolidates various elements of SaaS into an integrated growth solutions for brands.
I think we're also going to see the agency's newly appointed CEO to further his plans to infuse data into Huge's core offerings.
IPG's DXTRA growth in the quarter was broad based and it benefited from the return of live events.
Jack Morton won new client assignments with Amazon and Twitch and along with Octagon Sports and Entertainment was listed among event marketers ranking of the top 100 event agencies of 2021.
Audio social media app Clubhouse added Golin as its global agency, lead agency.
Weber was named the Supplier of the Year by GM and security software company McAfee also named Weber Shandwick its global agency of record to help redefine the firm as a consumer brand.
Lastly, Weber launched a media security center in partnership with Blackbird AI to address emerging information bridge and this is an offering that's built to offer solutions to what business leaders say is a really leading reputational issue, which is the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
During the quarter, we also saw continued positive momentum at our U.S. independent agencies.
The Martin Agency won Hasbro's Nerf brand of products.
Carmichael Lynch was named Strategy and Creative Lead for H&R Block where he will take on responsibility for strategy, creative and social media as well as public relations and Deutsch LA added energy drinks brand, A SHOC to its roster.
All in, we are in a positive position from a net new business standpoint for the year and our new business pipeline continues to be active.
As it's typical at this time, we don't have full visibility and project work as we head into the fourth quarter which will include the crucial holiday shopping season.
Now in line with the growth we're seeing across much of the portfolio, our companies are adding staff with the requisite contemporary skillsets as well as expertise.
So hiring is yet to fully keep pace with a very strong growth we've seen to date this year.
We began seeing travel restrictions lifted in certain key markets as infection rates decline and we fully continue to use technology and practices developed during the pandemic to reduce travel and other carbon intensive parts of our business where and as appropriate but we believe that some of what we can call standard cost of doing business will return in Q4 and in larger measure in 2022.
Earlier on the call, we shared with you our perspective on the full year and our updated expectation that we will deliver approximately 11% organic growth and adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 16.8% for the full year 2021.
That view is predicated as we indicated on the assumption that will continue to be a reasonably steady course of macro recovery and we're very proud to have delivered a very strong 9-months thus far this year, on top of the most challenging comps in the industry.
Current performance, combined with the continued execution of our long-term strategy should continue to be significant drivers for sustained value creation for all of our stakeholders.
We're committed to sound financial fundamentals as well as continuing to grow our dividend as we've consistently done, including through the pandemic and returning to our share repurchase program also remains a priority.
As we turn our focus on planning for the upcoming year, we will of course, keep you updated on our progress on that front.
We're confident as well that the investments in talent and capabilities we continue to make, position IPG well for the future.
As Ellen said, this is an unprecedented time, but we have a highly relevant and differentiated set of offerings underpinned by a sound financial foundation and a strong balance sheet.

user
compname posts q3 adjusted earnings per share $0.63.
q3 adjusted earnings per share $0.63.
q3 net revenue was $2.26 billion, an increase of 15.7% from a year ago.
q3 diluted earnings per share was $0.60.
interpublic group of companies - upgrades expectation for fy 2021 organic growth of approx 11.0% and adjusted ebita margin of approximately 16.8%.
expect that we can deliver fy organic growth for the year of approximately 11%.
expect to achieve fy adjusted ebita margin of approximately 16.8%.

assistant