Philippe Krakowsky
Chief Executive Officer at Interpublic Group of Companies
Thanks, Ellen. Our growth thus far this year builds on a record of success that goes back some time and embedding digital across the portfolio as well as adding a layer of data and tech to our offerings have been important parts of that playbook, along with our commitment to talent and strong agency brands. Now the convergence of media and entertainment with the impact of technology on the retail sector, is leading to another major growth opportunity for brands. And that's the evolving world of commerce and direct-to-consumer business models.
To date, we've been successful in helping our clients creating gauging and effective customer experiences across a range of physical and digital environments. During the quarter, we took another important step along this journey when we announced our acquisition of RafterOne. The company is a leading sales force implementation partner that works with marketers and brands to deliver personalized content that engages and converts in a measurable, precise and repeatable way across a range of marketing technology channels. With over 25 years of experience building digital journeys for clients and with more than 500 employees, RafterOne is the Salesforce Summit partner, and that's the highest tier awarded to implementation partners.
By bringing IPG and RafterOne together, we're significantly enhancing our commerce capabilities on a key marketing technology platform in both the B2C and B2B Salesforce cloud. Now RafterOne will continue to work independently with their own roster of clients as well as work directly with IPG agencies, bringing specialized commerce capabilities, whether that's in strategy, service, data or CX implementation to clients across our entire portfolio. Commerce and other forms of business transformation work can be a significant growth driver for us going forward, and the addition of RafterOne is an important step in rounding out our offerings in this space.
Turning to highlights of performance across the group in the quarter, a key sector that continues to show strength is health care. Reputationally, we continue to be the leader in this dynamic sector. IPG Health won Healthcare Network of the Year in 2022 M&M awards. Collectively, our agencies took home 23 wins across 21 categories, making us the industry's most awarded network.
During the quarter, we launched IPG Health Medical Communications, which aligns 8 agencies to create what we believe is the industry's most comprehensive and interconnected MEDCOMs [Phonetics] offering. In this type of specialized offering available to all of our health care clients is precisely the kind of benefit that we foresaw when we launched IPG Health just a little over a year ago. Importantly, the company's thought leadership and creative recognition also converted into growth as IPG Health continued to win new business and grow with existing clients, including AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Teva and Beringer Nigelheim. IPG Health was also a key part of a successful integrated media consolidation with Merck.
In Media brands, we continue to see a high degree of engagement with many of the world's most sophisticated marketers. During the quarter, we on-boarded new clients, including Nike and expanded our relationships with Merck and Teva. Last week, Mediabrands shared the fourth iteration of its Media Responsibility Index, which is proprietary research on the relative safety and fairness of media platforms. And this helps our clients make their media planning decisions in ways that are responsive to issues such as dis and misinformation.
Notably, we also promoted Eileen Kiernan, is exceptionally client-focused and strategic, naming her Global CEO of IPG Mediabrands. In this regard, Eileen becomes the first female leader of a major media management group in the industry. Staying in the media space, as we see travel continue to bounce back, Celebrity Cruises just selected Mediahub as its media agency of record for North America. Acxiom played a significant role in this win as the teams will develop custom audiences through addressable media to power this client's highly personalized marketing efforts.
During the quarter, Acxiom garnered recognition as a great place to work. with Fast Company naming it as one of the best workplaces for innovators, and Fortune naming the company a best workplace in technology and a best workplace for women. As Ellen indicated, the performance of 2 of our specialist digital agencies has been challenged as a result of the macroeconomic uncertainty that we're seeing. Both of these agencies are in the midst of evolving their premium offerings, which is a requirement to stay ahead in their space. When it comes to the strength of our brands in the creative advertising space, McCann, FCB and MullenLowe continue to distinguish themselves.
During the quarter, we announced a new global CEO from McCann, Daryl Lee, who has a remarkable breadth of experience, it spans all facets of our industry and the full range of IPG. As such, Daryl is extremely well positioned to advance the success of the network and drive it to further achieve its ambition, which is to be the global leader of creativity that drives growth for clients. We saw several wins in the quarter at McCann, including Beefeater Gin, McArthurGlen design outlets and Hankook Tire. The Global SE Effectiveness Index, named McCann World Group the most effective agency network for the fourth year running. And McCann was also named Network of the Year by the Guaranty Awards, where an all-female jury rewards the highest standard of creative excellence in advertising and communication.
At FCB, the creative network won new assignments with existing global clients, including Kimberly-Clark, Clorox and AB InBev and SCB's Global Chair and Chief Creative Officer was honored by the AEF, the ANA Educational Foundation with the Inspire Award, recognizing her commitment to education and inspiring young talent as it makes its way into our industry.
MullenLowe Group saw a number of new business wins in the UK market, winning the co-op retail chain as well as Morgan Stanley, Value Retail and the Tic Tac and Nutella Candy brands. Mullenlow continued to be recognized as one of the industry's most creatively effective networks as well for the 11th year in a row was the top-ranked network scored dollar for dollar in the effectiveness index.
And during the quarter, we also created a new integrated agency called IX, which is based in London, to handle global creative strategy and advertising for new client Bentley Motors. Our agencies that specialize in live events continued their strong return to growth. The industry is seeing budgets shift from more traditional marketing for the kinds of engaging experiences that allow consumers to build emotional connections and lasting relationships with brands, often connecting the physical and digital space and having 3 of the industries premier global sports and brand experience companies within our organization is a point of differentiation for Interpublic.
Notable highlights in the quarter here and Octagon included the creation and management of Coca-Cola's FIFA World Cup Trophy Tour as well as a nationwide campaign highlighting the Home Depot's 20th season sponsoring ESPN's College GameDay. Octagon and R&C PMK also worked with our Amazon client to kick-off a campaign celebrating the launch of Thursday night football on Prime Video and the athlete representation group within Octagon negotiated an MLB record-breaking contract extension for Julio Rodriguez with the Seattle Mariners, making it the largest in baseball history.
At Jack Morton, we saw significant wins with clients like McKesson, Siemens, Intel, Cigna, Riot Games and McDonald's. The agency produced the Cadillac US Open sponsorship at the US Tennis Center and brought to life several major events for the first time since the pandemic began, including auto shows, large retail activations and wellness conferences. At Momentum, the network was named Adweek's Experiential Agency of the Year and brought Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show to Fortnite.
Among our public relations firms, Golin won AOR duties for West Monroe, Chicago headquartered digital services firm. And the agency was also named as PR agency in the UK for Spec Savers, the optical retail chain. While at Weber Shandwick, new business included Bot Hero in North America, and working alongside future brand and Jack Morton as part of the DXTRA Health team, Weber was awarded a significant brand launch by life sciences company, PerkinElmer.
Our US independence during the quarter, the Martin Agency stood out as it extended its run of new business by winning Santander, LegalShield, Bud Light NEXT, Bud Light Seltzer. Deutsche LA won Strava the number one, app for runners and cyclists and Carmichael Lynch, on-boarded a new client in Hostess for our public relations remit.
When it comes to our ESG programs, we continue to make notable progress during the quarter. We named our first Chief Sustainability Officer. We announced a new process for evaluating energy and fuel clients. And we once again released our domestic workforce data, which is a transparency commitment IPG established and has now become an industry standard.
Our ongoing work in this area speaks to our commitment to embrace issues that are important not just to our people and our planet, but to our clients and other key stakeholders. For the year, we remain in a positive position from a net new business standpoint. Our net new business pipeline continues to be sound. Activity in new business does seem to be increasing, as we head into the new year. Despite a more challenging macroeconomic environment, as you've seen, our expectation is given our strong performance through the first nine months, we are upgrading our view to organic growth for the full year to 7%.
As this compounds multiyear sector outperformance. And current results combined with the continued execution of our long-term strategy, should remain significant drivers for sustained value creation going forward. Of course, given the macro, we're going to stay committed to sound financial fundamentals as Ellen was mentioning, and that's allowed us to grow our dividend for 11 consecutive years. And we are also committed to continuing our strong share repurchase program.
We're confident as well that the investments in talent and capabilities we continue to make, position IPG well for the future with highly relevant and differentiated offerings, underpinned by the sound financial foundation and a strong balance sheet. As always, we want to thank our clients and our people who are both essential elements of our success. And thank you, as well, for your time this morning.
And at this point, let's open the call for questions.