Philippe Krakowsky
Chief Executive Officer at Interpublic Group of Companies
Thank you, Ellen. 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. Thanks to our outstanding creative and content capabilities. 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. As always we want to thank our clients and our people. Those are the key pillars of our success and we want to thank you as well for your time this morning. So now, let's open the call for your questions.
