Okay. Good morning, everybody. I'm Martin Sorrell. I'm in London. We've got Peter Rademaker, who's in Amsterdam with Victor Knaap, Scott Spirit, who's in Singapore, and Peter Kim. Where are you, Pete?
New York City.
New York City. Okay, good. It's a god-awful time. Thank you for getting up at such an early time. We've got our Q1 update for everybody. I'm kicking off. We're going to hand over to Peter to talk about a trading update. You can see from the presentation, the first section. Victor will talk a little bit about what's happening on content. Pete, Data & Digital Media. Back to Scott to talk about clients, what we've been doing on the merger front. You saw the Raccoon announcement this morning. I'll come back briefly for summary and outlook and Q&A. Over to you, Peter.
Thank you, Sir Martin, good morning to all of you who joined us today on the first quarter trading update. To summarize our first quarter of 2021, I could say very strong growth in top line following a very good Q3 and Q4 in 2020. What we saw was a strong top-line momentum with our largest clients, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Procter, IBM, Netflix, and Scott will further elaborate that later on in his presentation. Next to that, our two whopper wins, BMW Mini and Mondelēz, have started to have significant positive impact in March. This resulted in a Q1 reported revenue of 71% up to GBP 121.6 million. A Q1 reported gross profit up with 71%, GBP 204 million in the first quarter.
More importantly, on a like for like basis, we saw our revenue grow with 35% on a like for like and then pro forma basis, no difference with that. Our gross profit grew with 33% in the first quarter on a like for like basis. What we saw, and I will come back to that slightly later, that all regions showed a very strong growth in the first quarter. Our cash flow, that remains very strong in the first quarter, with average balances of around GBP 15 million net cash, again in the first quarter of 2021. Although there is a strong net cash balance, we are considering near-term bond issue to further enhance our merger transaction firepower. In line with what we did last year in the summer, in July 2020, where we did an equity raise of GBP 113 million, we are now considering a bond issue.
At that moment, we did GBP 113 million, of which around GBP 95 million has been spent till the end of April this year. That's before our final settlement or our payments on Raccoon and on Jam3. We continue to examine merger opportunities in high growth functional areas of both practices, and we are prepared to leverage the group up to around 2 times EBITDA. In other words, we would be looking for a bond issue of around GBP 250 million-GBP 275 million in the course of this quarter. Finally, on this slide, 2021, as you remember, we've given our expectation earlier that we would expect 2021 to grow with approximately 25%, as a result of also doubling in size organically over a three-year period of time, which would have a compound growth of around 25%.
We have upped our expectation, also as a result of Q1 performance, as well as strong pipelines, to now to 30%, sector leading 30% growth on a like for like basis for both revenue and gross profit. If you go to the next slide, you will see the graph over, let's say, five quarters. I would like to take you back to Q1 2020 with 19% growth. Q2, when COVID hit quite hard in our region with a 7% growth. All months contributed positively, but still 7% growth. We strongly picked up in Q3 with 23% growth, and in Q4, 27% growth. Now we continued or even accelerated that fast growth rate to 33% in Q1 2021.
The next slide that shows you the different performances of the practices. Content contributed 76% of total revenue and 72% of gross profit. Therefore, Data & Digital Media performed or had 24% share in the total of revenue and 28% on gross profit. If you look at the reported numbers, our content practice grew to GBP 92.2 million, which is 64% growth on a reported basis compared to Q1 2020. Data & Digital Media grew with 100%. Last year reported GBP 14.7 million, now GBP 29.4 million. All in all, resulting in a 71% growth on a reported basis. If we take into account the mergers that we did last year, our content practice grew with 35% on a like for like basis.
Also, Data and Digital Media had the exact same growth space at 35% on revenues on a like-for-like basis. In relation to gross profit, Content contributed or grew, sorry, with 62% on a reported basis, Data and Digital Media was 101% on a reported basis, delivering 71% growth in gross profit, again on reported. In like-for-like, the Content practice contributed GBP 74.6 million, which was a 31% growth. Our Data and Digital Media practice grew with 36%. What we saw especially in January and February, that growth rate, what we saw in Q4 continued in Data and Digital Media, the Content significantly picked up in March, in the first quarter.
On slide seven, you see the graph with the gross profit comparison by practice or in the first quarter performance. What we saw in Q1 last year, that content grew with 19%, and now in Q1 2021, content grew with 31%. Data and Digital Media last year at 17% in Q1, then in Q1 2021 with 36% delivering the growth rates for the full quarter as I've just described. Going to my last slide by geography. Americas is still very important in our total group performance with a 70% contribution out of total. Last year, that was 72%, slightly decreased, mainly as a result of EMEA.
That is now contributing 21% in gross profit compared to last year at 19%. APAC, as in last year, contributed 9% of the total gross profit. What you saw, what we've seen, and I'll address the like for like numbers, that the Americas grew with 30% to GBP 73.4 million. EMEA grew with 44% to GBP 21.6 million. Asia Pacific grew with 34% to GBP 8.9 million. This was my last slide, a short update in relation to the trading of the financials. I will now hand over to Victor, who will take you through some developments in the content practice.
Many thanks, Peter. Many thanks for joining the call today. Before I start talking about the state of the content business in Q1, I'd like to share the summary of the Forrester report you see at sheet nine, of February 11th. It describes perfectly what our biggest challenges brands need to solve today. CMOs of global brands need to pivot to become truly multi-local operations. That means on a technological, cultural, and behavioral level, brands need to create a global brand message while meeting local customers' expectations. This article with contributions of Sir Martin, Wesley ter Haar, and our own Bruno Lambertini, is exactly in line with the RFIs, RFPs, and briefings we are working on today with BMW, Mondelēz, and recently Allianz. With that in mind, I'd like to start with what have we been up to in Q1. Next sheet, please.
Our main focus in Q1 is building integrated client teams across content, DDM, and countries for our 42 Tier 1 and Tier 2 brands. Next to that, we freed up teams for integration of the labels in tooling, brands, finance, and HR. Besides that, we invested in client carpets and categories like governmental, PR, virtual events, social, and beefing up our APAC presence. Our main focus of the presentation today is the state of the Whoppers. Whoppers are clients that spend more than $20 million revenue. Google, the brand under NDA, Facebook, BMW, and Mondelēz. For BMW and Mondelēz, we started scaling up the teams in market and hubs approximately 120 FTE per brand. While the revenue in January and February was slightly behind, we saw much better numbers in March and see serious tractions in the coming months. What's next?
It's a truly exciting moment in time. It feels like a once in a decade opportunity to get new business across our Tier 1 and Tier 2 clients and adding new logos and opportunities globally. We still need to scale around 25% of the BMW and Mondelēz teams while winning new business for brands like Allianz. We will do a continuous push on reporting, on tooling, branding, and integration, and have a rigorous focus on Tier 1 and Tier 2 client growth. Next sheet, please. A quick peek under the hood. Our client team process. We kicked off integrated reporting, a forecasting process for Tier 1 and Tier 2 clients across content and DDM.
We do monthly forecast and accounts update provided by client leads, we reviewed strategic account updates with senior leadership for Tier 1 and select Tier 2 account bets. We newly appointed our Head of Clients, Amy Michael, who was previously Chief Client Officer at Firewood. This process will be repeated quarterly, and we will add the client margin reporting at reforecast two. We received a lot of questions and interest about how BMW and Mondelēz are doing. Just to zoom into that in the next sheet. We see a significant up forecast for reforecast zero. We see increase in revenue across photo and film, expansion of our retained teams, and we see integration opportunities. The planning is underway to onboard 29 European markets, and we see some cost efficiencies through our near and offshore hubbing.
Besides our work in content, which I will show a couple of examples for on the next sheet, we also see integration opportunities going into AdTech, social media, and Adobe DAM implementations. If we will look at Mondelēz, we see upside possibility, from August onwards, where we are actively engaged in the 2022 planning process and our priorities are unlocking the web work in Europe, which entail around 80 projects, we're trying to move upstream in campaign planning, personalized content at scale, and customer decision journey thinking. If we look at a bit of our work that we created for BMW and Mini in the first months. This is literally what a marketing engine produces. It's very diverse, from landing pages for the BMW i4 release to newspaper ads, to YouTube how-to videos, and to social ads across Mini and BMW.
There's much more in process. There are tens of thousands of assets being produced at this moment, which we are not allowed to show you because it's all new car releases. If we move on to the last page, what's next? In general, we see an enormous client optimism and budget growth, especially in our tier 1 and tier 2 clients, with social and fashion being the fastest growing part of the business. We will see expansion and further integration of Decoded, Jam3, Tomorrow, and Staud, our latest additions to the content part of the business. The growth is also fueled by the expansion of S4 capabilities through integration, especially tech and data cross-selling into the content clients.
Global client teams are realizing additional regional growth opportunities outside of our clients' HQ region. Last but not least, we see experiential popping up again. Opportunities reemerging as hybrid events where we do a crossover between in-person and virtual, in U.S. and parts of APAC. This is it for me. Over to Pete and looking forward to your questions at the end of the presentation.
Thank you very much. We will now be discussing the Data & Digital Media practice. Good morning, everybody from New York City. It's great to be with you today. DDM, the Data & Digital Media practice, had a pretty strong quarter. We're very pleased with those results. Today we'll be talking about a couple of topics in detail. You see in the background on this particular slide, a recent headline from the trade press discussing some of the ongoing travails inside of privacy and first-party data, which will be one of our topics today. Next slide. First trend that we want to just mention is that we see a strong uptick in demand for performance marketing services. We have been responding to this through some of our recent mergers with folks like Metric Theory, Decoded Advertising, and this morning's announcement around Raccoon out of Brazil.
All three represents a very strong addition to what we see as a opportunity that is really unveiling itself in the marketplace. We're seeing performance budgets lift across the board. There's many reasons for this, including the COVID era's acceleration of digital transformation. Some transition of traditional marketing dollars to digital, which once again, has been ongoing but was accelerated by the recent pandemic. Seeing more and more cases of digital branding and awareness budgets being combined with or shifting to performance teams. According to some views, every dollar should be a performance dollar in terms of creating ROI or net measurable ROI for a marketing team, and then the general sort of ongoing uptick that we've been seeing for many, many years.
The opportunity and trends that we see inside of this particular marketplace, as advertisers start to see the third-party data targeting diminish as the death of the cookie continues to ensue, I think that we will be uniquely positioned to help these marketing performance programs through the transition to reliance not on third-party data, but instead on first-party data. The diminishing audience-based targeting and increased automation really creates additional opportunities, to further marry the creative and content excellence from our colleagues over at Media.Monks with the performance marketing execution, really delivering upon the executional aspects of the unitary structure that we were really founded upon. These changes will potentially favor the walled gardens like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, with which we are closely partnered. Moving on to the next slide.
Let's take a slightly deeper look into what's going on with the death of the cookie, and how privacy is disrupting digital marketing, and how S4 is actually uniquely positioned to help our clients and advertisers in general adapt. The first thing is to really understand the broad picture. I think it's safe to say that digital marketing is in the midst of a decade-long state of upheaval, which seems to be accelerating. Virtually no area of digital marketing and advertising will be untouched by the so-called death of the cookie. It's been a little bit of a task for us to kind of explain to the layperson exactly what the death of the cookie means in terms of its import. The closest that I've come is to imagine a change in the physical world akin to the loss of gravity.
Something that has just always been there and that has impacted so many different types of products and the processes is now just seems to be going away, with the predictable changes and upheaval around that. The trends that we're looking at roughly started in mid-2018. There's no real end in sight. We are seeing what we are calling internally a self-reinforcing "Game of Thrones" with multiple constituents and multiple kind of factors occurring, including competition amongst the industry, public opinion regarding intrusive tracking, data breaches, et cetera, government scrutiny and regulation across privacy, geopolitics, antitrust. It all creates a very confusing cocktail that has very high stakes indeed.
Against this backdrop, adapting to the "death of the cookie" is going to require advertisers and their partners around the world to make some very significant adjustments, whether that be in direct-to-consumer relationships and the value proposition of each, collection and processing of consented consumer and marketing data, once again, moving forward to the first-party or even zero-party, as we like to call it, marketing data, digital media and planning and buying, the impacts on creative strategy, and of course, performance measurements.
In our view, we are fairly well-positioned with the multidisciplinary breadth and the focus on these types of technologies and a cutting-edge understanding of what's happening, which is all necessary in order to help our advertisers and clients adapt. As we mentioned before, all of these do seem to be causing a boost inside of an emphasis around the so-called walled gardens, where we're particularly well-positioned. Over to the right, you can see just a kind of blow-by-blow, point-by-point explanation of how we are very well-positioned in each of these areas. With that, I will move it on and pass it on to a discussion around our clients.
Thanks, Pete. Good morning, everybody. I'm going to cover off clients, and what we've been up to from a merger perspective. On slide 19, you'll see it's been an extremely strong quarter from a new business perspective. I think you've seen that in some of the slides Victor talked about, certainly expanding our existing relationships with the BMWs, Mondelēzes, and some of our other Whoppers. We've seen great traction with the Googles and Facebooks and Amazons of the world. Some of our newer clients like Robinhood as well, that have really expanded, and PayPal, their relationships across S4. It's been a great quarter for new business, new clients as well. You can see some of the logos there from new clients that we've won business from across the group and across the world. It's an incredibly busy time from a new business perspective.
I think as Victor said, it feels like a real opportunity for us to get a once in a decade kind of land grab of new business. A fairly frenetic pace of pitching. We're in several major pitches with consumer goods companies, consumer electronics, technology companies, pharmaceutical companies, really across the board. Great traction so far this quarter and all of our metrics that we track internally around where things are going, what kind of pitches we're involved in, and the volume of that are all extremely positive and significantly up on where we were last year. On the next chart, you'll see a chart that you're probably quite familiar with now around our client portfolio. Comparing Q1 last year with Q1 this year, you'll see that technology is still by far our biggest sort of portion of client business.
Has declined slightly, down from just over 50% to just under 50%, and that's natural given the growth we've seen in BMW and Mondelēz and some of the other newer wins that we've had in other categories in the past couple of quarters. Certainly long term, we anticipate that staying around 50% of our business, and we've had good traction from existing and new clients in the tech sector as well. Moving on to the next chart. There's a couple of charts here, a couple of graphs that you'll recognize from the FY 2020 results that we did, so we'll keep these updated as we go through. Again, you can see on the left there, significant uptick in scale of our client business. Top 10, top 20, and top 50 clients by revenue for Q1 2020, Q1 2021. Big increases across the board there.
On the right, this is really what we look at in terms of tracking our larger client relationships and the current Whoppers and future prospective Whoppers. You'll see this time last year, we had eight clients that had done over GBP 1 million worth of revenue with us, and that represented 44% of our cumulative total revenue. This year, we've got 18 clients that represent 47% of our revenue above GBP 1 million there, and then also significantly more in the other larger brackets as well, the GBP 0.5 and up to GBP 0.5 million. Really great traction with clients. As we've talked about in the release, Victor mentioned, and I'm sure Martin will talk about in his comments, getting more visibility on the Whoppers of the future, and really locking in the five that we're projecting this year. Move on to the next chart 23 around mergers.
It's been a busy quarter. We've been fairly active on the merger front. We announced Decoded, the Metric Theory, both of which Pete referenced when he was talking about performance media and our expansion into that. We announced them in beginning of January, although they actually formally closed on New Year's Eve last year. In January, we also closed Tomorrow, which is an expansion of our business in China. That's now pretty much integrated. Rogier Bikker, who runs Tomorrow, is now running the entire content business in China. We merged our Media.Monks business into Tomorrow, and that's going full speed ahead. Staud Studios in Stuttgart, which is our automotive specialist and the backbone of our BMW engine, which Victor Knaap also talked about. We did a deal in Australia and New Zealand with Datalicious, adding to our Google Analytics capabilities in Asia Pacific.
That was in February. In March, we announced Jam3, which is a highly awarded, highly creative digital creative and production firm based in Canada, with a significant portion of their revenues coming from the U.S., and offices in Uruguay and Amsterdam as well. Today, we're very excited to announce Raccoon. Pete touched slightly on this is a fantastic performance marketing business based in Brazil. A very significant business, over 450 people. One of the main partners for Google and Facebook and other digital platforms down there in Brazil. It's very exciting for us to have our existing MightyHive capabilities there in programmatic and to do essentially what we did in the U.S. with Metric Theory, to merge that in with strong performance media assets, and big relationships across the major digital platforms there. That's something we've got high hopes for.
Fast growth company, two ex-Googlers as the founders, something we see huge traction for going forward. That's what we've been up to in mergers. We have a strong pipeline of mergers for the rest of the year. As Peter mentioned in his opening remarks and in the statement, we'll be looking to issue a bond imminently to augment our firepower in that regard. With that, I will hand you over back to Martin.
Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Peter. Thanks, Victor. Last but not least, Pete, getting up so early in the morning in New York. That's a quick summary of what we've seen in what has been a very exciting Q1 for us. Obviously driven by the growth in digital transformation and disruption, and the recovery in worldwide GDP, which over the next two years we think is going to be extremely strong. We've seen an acceleration in our growth rate, not just from Q4 of last year to Q1 and the comparison to this time last year, but also as we progress through January and February, March. We accelerated in terms of the growth rate into March, and we see continued acceleration into Q2 and beyond. Most importantly, our people are generally safe and mostly still working from home.
Our office utilization rates are still very low, pretty much across the world, although where Scott's sitting in Asia Pacific, it's stronger. We still have great concern for our colleagues, particularly in Brazil and in India. The situation in Brazil is not great, as we mentioned in the Raccoon announcement. India, obviously, has been quite serious too, and we are putting a lot of effort to making sure our people there are fully protected. From an overall point of view, S4 Capital continues to lead the industry in both growth and in margin and accelerating growth and accelerating margins. As Peter's pointed out, we still have a very strong balance sheet, strong liquidity and cash flow.
Important to just point out, despite the GBP 95 million or so of M&A payments that we've made since July of last year when we raised the GBP 113 million, in Q1 we had average cash running between GBP 40 million and GBP 60 million, around GBP 50 million average cash balances. Very healthy new business record and pipeline. As Victor and Wes and Pete and Chris, as they look at Content and Data & Digital Media say, we haven't seen these sort of levels of interest in our model since we've started. We've made significant progress on our 20 squared Whopper strategy. We have five, and we've identified another three that we think will be around the $20 million mark or near that this year. We hope by the end of the year, we'll have eight.
As Scott gets extremely worried about me mentioning things like that, because analysts add immediately 3x GBP 20 million or GBP 60 million to our revenue forecasts. Whilst we're very optimistic about our revenue growth rate. We prefer you not to do that, at least to keep Scott happy. We have a robust merger pipeline, as Peter mentioned, we have a bond issue that's imminent around the GBP 250 million-GBP 275 million mark. On the ESG side of things, we set very demanding targets. We've set a net zero target of 2024. Our annual report is coming out on May the 10th. It's our third annual report, and it has a very comprehensive ESG report there, which goes into a lot of detail about our targets.
At net zero, we made a lot of progress as a matter that's very close to Victor's heart around B Corp status, and we hope by the end of this year to have achieved that. As you know, we've increased our gross profit target, our guidance from 25%- 30%, which looks on the surface, as one or two analysts have pointed out, to be pretty conservative. We're already running at 33%, and the target is for the year of 30%. I'd be very disappointed if we didn't get well in excess of that 30%. Our unitary structure is leading to conversion at scale. It's very pleasing that we've seen that. We had brand awareness in 2018, brand trial in 2019, and we're certainly starting to get conversion at scale in 2020 and 2021.
The model that we're developing, the disruptive model, which is faster, better, cheaper, or based on speed, quality, and value, is gaining a lot of traction with clients at a time when the marketing VIX factor, if there was such a thing, is at very high levels particularly because of Google's decisions around privacy, and Apple's too. Finally, I think the best way to think about S4 is not as an alternative to the holding companies. I think that's very passe. I think what we should do, what we feel very strongly is that analysts and share owners and potential share owners should think about us being a royalty on the growth of digital transformation disruption. This weekend was the Berkshire Hathaway AGM, and it reminded me yet again of what Warren Buffett used to say about the global advertising holding companies.
In the 1970s and 1980s, he bought, I think it was Ogilvy and IPG on the back of the fact that they were a royalty on the growth of globalization. We represent, I think, a royalty on the growth of digital transformation and digital disruption, very much the technological bucket, which is front and center in everybody's mind. With that as background, thanks again to colleagues for the presentation. We'll open up for Q&A.
Thank you. We will now take our first question from Emily Johnson from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Morning. Three questions from me, please. First one, can you talk about how you expect the 30% growth guidance for the full year to be split across content and Data & Digital Media? Has new business been evenly split across the two, or should we expect Data & Digital Media to grow faster given easier comps towards the end of last year? Secondly, can you talk a bit about your M&A plans? Do you expect the GBP 500 million of M&A firepower to be spent on a single merger?
Do you have any preference towards mergers in content or Data & Digital Media? Given that you've mentioned that the bond issuance is planned for Q2, does that mean that you have an M&A target in mind already, or is this a more proactive step to give you flexibility if the right opportunity comes up? 3rd question is, you're guiding to strong operating EBITDA margin in FY 2021. Can you provide any color on what exactly that means? Should we expect EBITDA margin up by 50 basis points, 100 basis points in 2021? Thanks.
Okay, Emily. Thanks very much. Maybe I'll deal with the first one. Scott, M&A, and Peter, margins. You want to start, Scott, on M&A?
Yeah, sure.
Single content versus data targets, et cetera.
Sure. Hi, Emily Field. Thanks for the question. Yeah, from an M&A perspective, as Peter Rademaker mentioned, we're looking to get the bond done relatively quickly and raise that money more as a war chest. I mean, it's very similar to what we did back in the summer in July when we raised GBP 113 million through an equity placement, most of that's now spent across the various mergers that we've done since then. There's no specific deal in mind. It's really a war chest against a very healthy pipeline of deals. No one deal that would take all that firepower, certainly at this stage. We're looking at various deals. We don't tend to look at from an M&A perspective, scale is not the key metric that we look at when we're looking for potential mergers.
We're really looking to augment our capabilities, to expand our geographical presence, to solidify and create new client relationships, and to bring in talent. Those tend to be the lenses we look for rather than simply doing stuff for the sake of it based on size. Across content and DDM, we've certainly done more in the DDM side in the past few months. Obviously, the content part of the business is larger in terms of scale, and we'd like to balance that out a little bit more. I don't think we're aiming for 50/50. We'd like to do that a little more. Geographically, trying to do more stuff out here in Asia, although we do still see significant opportunities in the U.S. Hopefully, that answers your questions.
Peter, do you want to talk about margins?
Yeah. Sure. To your question, Emily, on margins, as you remember last year, what we saw, we ended up with 21%, approximately, as EBITDA, as a percentage of gross profit. What I see currently is sort of for this year, a sort of similar range, where we indicated early 20%-22%, we ended at 21%. Also for 2021, I would see a similar margin. First of all, of course, we're growing very fast, which also means ramping up in employees, also similarly like we did last year.
First half, be prepared for the growth of the second half, although we see growth right now. That's one thing. The second thing is that I would expect also some slightly more OpEx investments in some of the categories like we did with fashion and luxury at the end of last year, that we're aiming for certain other areas for this year. All in all, I would expect our margins to be at the sort of same level as we did in 2020.
Just coming back to your 1st question, Emily. We've had a pattern, going back to this time last year, Q2 and Q3, Content outdistanced, if that's a fair way of putting it, because Data & Digital Media wasn't a slouch during those two quarters, Content was growing faster. Then we saw a switch. Again, Content, not a slouch either, in Q4, I think Data & Digital Media was up about over 30%, 35%, if I remember rightly. Peter's saying yes. Then into Q1 of this year, we've seen at a gross profit level, Data & Digital Media at 36% and Content at 31%. Content picking up. If I look at it month by month, in March, Content really started to rev up, and I would anticipate in April, May, and June, it will continue to be the pattern.
We've seen a fluctuation at very high levels. Certainly in an industrial context, the growth rates sort of vary between the two segments. As we go through the year, I would expect content to continue to gain momentum. Data and analytics, because of that marketing VIX factor, if you like, in the marketplace, is driving a lot of concern, constructive concern amongst clients. Clients are really thinking hard about what they should do with their consented first-party data sources. I think third-party data is sort of really in the background now, is being pushed to the background. I know there's a lot of noise around third-party data.
I think basically the focus, we had a couple of conversations as late as last week with two major package goods companies about what they're doing on the first-party data area, and they're trying to consolidate their resources as rapidly as they possibly can. I'd be very disappointed if we didn't have a significantly greater organic growth rate beyond what we've seen even in Q1 by the end of this year. The comparatives in Q2 are weak. They were only 7% last year. We didn't have a bad Q2 last year like others.
The holding companies were down about 10%, 15%, 20%. We have easier comparatives, so I would expect a pickup in the growth rate. Although the comparatives get tougher as we go through in Q3 and Q4, I would expect the underlying GDP growth rate and the secular shift to digital transformation and disruption to help us certainly in 2021 and then into 2022. Does that cover what you want, Emily?
Yes, that's very clear. Thank you.
Thank you.
We'll now move to our next question from Patrick Wellington from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Morning, everybody. A couple of questions. Firstly, for Peter, can you remind us what is the difference between revenue and gross profits? About GBP 20 million difference in Q1. Just can you remind us what the elements are in that difference? Secondly, on the bond issue, is there going to be any equity element? Is there, for instance, a convertible element within that? Then the third question, which is maybe for Martin. Can you talk a bit about traction?
I think at the full year, you talked about S4 really beginning to break through with big clients. You talk in the release about how many major pitches you're on. I'm not sure whether it's two with CPG companies or four major pitches with CPG companies. There was talk about the additional upside with Mondelēz in August, also this once in a decade opportunity. Can you talk to us about traction and how much you're sort of breaking into the big leagues, if you like?
Okay. Peter, you want to deal with those first two?
On your 1st question, Patrick, the difference in revenue and gross profit, I think you can also see that in the tables that we included in the release as well as in this presentation, that it basically applies to our content practice. At Data & Digital Media, you basically see same revenue and gross profit because they hardly encounter any third-party cost. In content, it relates to, just as an example, if we do certain film shoots in combination, maybe for social and even TV, or like Victor was referring to, some more experiential happening right now, that typically in these kind of productions, we encounter third-party costs. We need to engage with, let's say, subcontractor or line producers or the like.
Basically that creates. It's part, of course, of SOWs and offers to clients that we have some certain, I would say, external cost of sales in order to deliver that specific campaign or experiential or that experience to our clients. That's basically where it happens at content, and that's the distinction between revenue and gross profit. To your 2nd question, what we are looking for is not so much for a convertible. We're probably going to do for a term loan B structure/bond. That's to be decided. We're going to probably wrap that up. I've had several discussions with our banks and wrap that up, but it's very likely that it's going to be a normal bond term loan B structure and not so much convertible.
Thanks, Peter. On traction, Patrick, I think we're gaining traction. I think we have to pick our battlefields or our battles. I don't think we want to get caught up in the round robins. If you went to a sort of a helicopter view of what's going on in the traditional industry, you have holding companies fighting with one another, for media business in particular, where they're discounting heavily, giving inflation guarantees, giving pricing guarantees, which raises all, in our minds, all sorts of accounting issues, actually, which probably are not taken into account. That's at one level from a pricing point of view. From a labor cost point of view, there's the round robin of sort of creative directors and people moving from one holding company to another, which again, pushes up costs.
Creative directors don't move from one holding company to another without a significant increase in cost. What you have on those battlefields is revenue being compressed and costs being driven up, and we just don't want to touch that. We really want to be where we think we can add significant value, and we think that's, as Victor pointed out in his brief presentation on the content side and what Pete did on the Data & Digital Media side, really looking at the areas where we think we can add significant value. Having said that, there's a lot of movement in the marketplace. It might have been the pandemic built a dam up of reviews and changes. We think a lot of clients are unhappy with their existing arrangements, and I think the pandemic probably gave them the time to focus on their unhappiness or discontent.
I noticed over the weekend, for example, Alan Jope at Unilever, talking about building, I think it was another 16 in-housing units inside Unilever, for example. You're seeing major shifts, structural shifts, around agility, response, understanding the platforms. Raccoon, for us, in a Brazilian context, is a very good example of where changes are taking place in the marketplace. Their relationships with Google and Facebook, for example, in the Brazilian media markets, are very strong and capable of significant expansion even beyond current levels. I think traction is we are getting a tailwind from the secular trends that we've talked about, GDP and digital transformation.
Tactically, we're doing well, too, because we are differentiated. I think the interesting thing about the holding companies is in Q1, they were up all around 2% or 3% on a pretty dismal Q1 last year. They're pretty much all the same. There's very little differentiation between them. I think we have a differentiated offer, and plus we have the advantage of being the peanut and the smaller scale. All right. Patrick?
Martin, is it four CPG companies or?
Well, we have-
Two.
Yeah, I think we indicated it was actually four, yeah. That we're sort of talking to about various things.
Peter-
It goes beyond the CPG, Patrick. I think there is a general sort of reevaluation taking place of what clients are doing and how they're doing it. I think that's to our benefit because we are a new shiny object in that context.
That's great. Thank you.
We'll now move to our next question from Steve Liechti from Numis. Please go ahead.
Morning, everybody. Yes, I hope you can hear me. I've got one question actually, only. Just a little bit more color on the three Whoppers that you're targeting for this year. I just want to understand, are those existing clients that you're looking to take up to the level of a Whopper, or are they completely new and would-be incremental clients or business to the group? Thank you.
There's beads of sweat have disappeared from Scott's brow. They're existing ones.
Absolutely, I understand.
They're existing ones. They're three, what I would call tech clients, where we have existing relationships. I think what we said before is that we have the five core, let's say, which Victor touched on. We have another three that are trending towards Whopper status, which are what I would call tech telecoms. We've identified, I think it's a total of 15, including the eight that I've just covered, that we think will get to what we call tier 1 status. We have to identify another five. The answer to your question is they are existing, not new.
Just to be clear, are you pitching for new incremental business for them so they'll go to a whole new level, or are they just going to grow naturally at a strong rate anyway?
Well, Victor, do you want to maybe Pete can chip in as well. Our strategy is very much around land and expand. Victor, do you want to talk a little bit about how we're building the relationships? You touched on it in your slides.
It's a bit of both. On one side, it's growth of existing parts of the business that we're in. On the other side, there's a lot of new territories, but also new lines of business. From content to experiential, from content to Data & Digital Media, or from content production to creative or to influencer business. We're opening up new territories plus new lines of businesses, and especially from content to Data & Digital Media is something that is very interesting and will drive the growth in this year and next.
Yeah. Pete, do you want to talk a little bit about how you see the Data & Digital Media clients developing?
Very similar to Victor. It's both mechanisms, right? Increase in budgets in the existing activities as well as additional activities coming in. As Victor noted, a lot of these are kind of cross in between the Data & Digital Media as well as the creative, and really what we see is that this is the beginnings and the emergence of the unitary structure as we continue to evolve and coalesce into something that really hasn't been seen before.
Yeah. I'd just add, I think last year was a sort of tipping point because digital now is what? More than 50% of the market. If the market last year was $500 billion, $550 billion and digital was $275 billion, $300 billion, you've seen huge expansion in Q1 of digital advertising. I mean, look at all the FANGs or however you want to describe them, whether you're talking about Google or Facebook or Amazon or whoever, we've seen very significant increases. You will see Google's ad revenues this year go from $180 billion- $240 billion. You've seen Facebook go from $80 billion probably to about $110 billion. You've seen Amazon was up, what? 73% in Q1 of this year
. It's up with a base of $20 billion. You could see Amazon. We said Amazon will get to $100 billion, driven by small and medium-sized businesses. You are seeing a radical shift, which is being reflected in the FANG numbers, the platform numbers, and indeed in our own numbers, which we think will continue because of this secular shift that's taking place, which has become even more dramatic as a result of the pandemic.
Great. Thanks.
I'll now take our next question from Matthew Walker from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Thanks a lot. Morning, guys. I have three questions. The 1st one is just on digital media and data. You spoke a lot about privacy. We saw WPP come out with Choreograph, which has got some sort of consented data. I was wondering, what is your version of an Epsilon or a Choreograph? Do you have one? Do you need one? Where are you getting your commissioned data apart from just getting your clients' first-party data? Second question was on acquisitions.
You've done a lot of acquisitions, obviously. I was just wondering how many of those are sort of outperforming, what percent of acquisitions that you've done are outperforming the initial acquisition case? Just to see what the track record is like. Final question is, last time on the call, you spoke about the advantages of maybe combining with an IT services company. Any further thoughts on that or any progress on that?
Okay. Pete, do you want to respond on third-party data, Choreograph, et cetera?
I think that the writing is on the wall for third-party data and that third-party data is going to make a, when privacy legislation marches forward. The entire point of all of this is to emphasize the direct data relationship between the consumer and the advertiser. With that in mind, our focus is really to emphasize and play up that angle to help our advertising clients to develop direct relationships, consented relationships, with their consumers and to help them with that first-party data or even zero-party data as we've kind of discussed it. We look at it from the perspective of, you just don't want to be spooky.
You want to have a conversation between the advertiser and the consumer that doesn't leave the consumer wondering, "How did you know that about me?" That's really where we're going with that, and I think that it will just play itself out. That does mean that we are going to be focusing more on the advertiser's data rather than trying to bring our own data to that, because it just flies in the face of everything that we see is happening in the marketplace right now.
Scott, do you want to respond on acquisitions or mergers, as we call them, how they're performing?
Sure. 1st, if I back up a bit, firstly, the projections of these companies are very aggressive when we're looking at them. Obviously, they're in a sales process, so it's in their interest to have aggressive projections. They're also very fast-growing companies. One of the criteria we look at is strong top-line growth. We're not interested in merging with companies that are not delivering strong top-line growth. In terms of how they performed, yeah, the vast majority have either met their projections or outperformed their projections. You can sort of see that in the pro forma results that Peter reveals. We have a reported like-for-like and pro forma. The pro forma is normally stronger, so that illustrates that the mergers have added to our growth, basically.
The one thing I would stress is, in some cases, it's quite difficult for us to track because of that unitary structure and because if you take Tomorrow in China, for example, that's already fully integrated with the Media.Monks business there. We don't track two separate P&Ls. The business is doing great overall in China, so Tomorrow's clearly contributing to that. How much of that I can attribute to Tomorrow versus our existing business, it's impossible to say because we believe in that unitary structure and instant integration. We're not leaving these companies hanging out there on their own for five years like the holding companies do. We're integrating them on day one.
Yeah. There is a sentence, Matthew, buried in the release which talks about turbocharging that we got from the deals, the mergers that we've done. I think on balance, we feel there have been some examples which we've discussed on these calls before. For example, with BizTech in Australia, we took the decision, Victor, remember we were talking on our daily calls about keeping in place the infrastructure we had there because sales engineers, Adobe engineers, or people versed in Adobe software couldn't visit the client. They were in short supply. We took the view that we should keep that cadre of engineers in place. That's proven to be the right thing to do as we've seen a relatively sharp recovery in certainly the digital economy there. On what we might be doing longer term, there are two areas that we've sort of discussed.
One is the one you mentioned, Matthew, IT services in particular. We've used the example of Globant, which is a company which is doing brilliantly well, as well in a global transformation area. That's one area where we continue to build out our services. I mentioned Adobe. We have a very strong relationship there. We have a growing relationship with Salesforce, for example. Obviously, a growing relationship with Microsoft. We want to do more in those areas and in the IT services areas. When you see the growth of the three big cloud platforms, it makes you think that the importance of the marketing cloud is going to become even more so. The other area is sort of moving up the funnel a bit. It's a continuous debate inside our company, our firm, as to what we should do in relation to that.
A number of us feel, or a number of people in that discussion feel that we do have the planning capabilities and the upper funnel planning capabilities that are necessary. There are others that feel we could broaden that. I think those are the sort of two areas where we've got scope apart, obviously, from adding to what we're doing in content and Data & Digital Media. As Scott mentioned, the balance probably between content and Data & Digital Media is too skewed to content, to be fair.
It's 70/30 at the moment. It probably should be at least 60/40, and we probably want to move a little bit more in that direction. Geographically, we want to shift a little bit away from the 70/20/10 to the 40/20/40. As Scott mentioned, it's very much driven by what we see in terms of opportunities. I would say, specifically on IT services, it's still very much top of our mind as to what we can do in those areas, too.
Thanks. I just have one quick follow-up, which is on brand. You mentioned you're doing some steps to move towards unitary brand. Is that going to be Media.Monks as the overarching brand? Maybe you can explain a bit more.
I've always wanted Media.Monks, but I've failed. You'll see that it's actually a very flexible system. If you look very carefully at what's out there from us, you'll see it coming out. Victor, why don't you talk a little bit about the process that we're going through on this?
No, I'm definitely not going to talk about it. It's happening.
Yeah.
It's happening. It will be good, I promise you. What's way more interesting is what's happening under the hood. We're moving into one set of tooling, and we're really building a company with one operating model based on the most modern SaaS products. We move to Slack, to Google, to Salesforce, and so on and so on. I think the unitary structure is one P&L philosophy, is one set of tooling so everybody can work together. The brands, I will make sure to update you when the time is right.
Yeah. I would just add, to be fair, that it's a very flexible framework, and the way that it works is people can introduce their own individual sort of adjustments and refinements. The other thing to say is that we've implemented it cautiously because we don't want to get involved in either any internal fracas or client fracas, as others have got involved in when they've tried to slam things together. I think we've taken it carefully, and we've socialized it with must be about 250, 300 people inside the company so they all know the direction in which it's going, and they've had the opportunity to comment on it. They have done actually. We're pretty much there. As I say, despite what Victor says, if you look very carefully at what we're doing, you'll see it.
Okay. Thanks a lot.
One more?
Now move to our next question from Jessica Pok, from Peel Hunt. Please go ahead.
Hi. Morning, everyone. I've got three questions, please. The 1st is kind of going on from the question earlier about the one set of tooling, especially the one client view. For any mergers which happen, how fast can the mergers be integrated so that you have a good one client view? Secondly, just about the M&A environment. Could you give a bit more color as to whether the environment's getting more or less competitive? Finally, just on what you've mentioned about FMCG pitches, which you're involved in. I know it's a bit of speculation now, but in terms of the size, if one of these pitches are won over time, are we talking about whopper sizes? Indication of scale will be great. Thank you.
Okay. On the 1st, Victor, do you want to talk about tooling and how quickly can you, on integration, get to one client?
Actually, we're super clear on the mergers where we want to go to. All the mergers know we're moving into a singular brand. All the mergers know that we're moving into a singular set of tooling. We also don't want to stick a logo on the wall and then say we're integrated now. It's a step-by-step approach. It starts with Scott and the entrepreneurs that talk to the future merger candidates, to signing the deal and revealing it, like how we tend to do that, to the post-merger integration team that takes it on and does it step by step. In general, we give an entrepreneur that joins. It starts with three months, and it will end in one and a half years to do the full integration.
Every single month when we have our S4 board meeting, we present from each and every of the mergers, where they are in the process and what needs to be done and what the next steps are. Obviously, when we present it to our client of view is, from the top of my head, around 67% of our total revenue comes from our tier 1 clients. That has our immediate focus. The integration on the client side is almost immediately. Does it answer your question?
Okay. Then Scott, do you want to talk about M&A and competition, et cetera?
Yeah, sure. Just touching on what Victor was saying, your specific question around integrating one view of the client, that is the focus and the first focus when we're integrating these mergers. From a tooling perspective, it's normally pretty easy because most of them are already using Salesforce. Most of them are already using Salesforce. To bring two instances of Salesforce together is pretty easy. There's a big sort of manual effort as well in terms of the management and the entrepreneurs across the group welcoming these new companies in and opening up their client relationships to them, whether that's on a geographic basis or a capability basis. It works both ways. On the M&A side, yeah, I think particularly in the U.S., that there's certainly more competition in the kind of targets we're looking at, and that's really driven by private equity.
What we're seeing is that direct investments by private equity funds, or we're seeing private equity invested agencies that are sort of doing roll-up strategies and trying to buy assets. It's mainly focused in the U.S. It is competitive and I guess putting pressure on valuations to a certain degree. We believe we have a very different story and opportunity for entrepreneurs. At the end of the day, if we can match valuations, our belief is that the entrepreneurs that want to be part of S4 and want to continue to be entrepreneurial and take advantage of all that S4 offers in terms of geographic expanse, in terms of access to clients, in terms of access to broader capabilities.
For the entrepreneurs that excites, we do believe that we're very competitive and they're more likely to choose S4. I don't think it's particularly hampering us, but we are seeing pressure.
Just to follow up there, you sort of got a very good example. It came out last week, in the case of Media.Monks, that WPP came in with an extremely aggressive bid valuation up to EUR 1.5 billion, and we merged at a value of GBP 300 million. Obviously, the price of our shares has risen since Victor and Wesley and Peter made that call in July of whatever it was of 2018. It's a good example of what Scott just said, is that every IM we see goes upwards to the right. In fact, I defy anybody to show me an IM which doesn't go upwards to the right. If somebody's offering a four or five-year earn-out, they're going to do better on paper with that offer if they think they're going to hit the IM, they will with us.
I think Pete can attest to the fact that MightyHive had something like 20 bids. I think we were the fourth best from a purely financial point of view. To Scott's point, people are buying in to what we're trying to do, which is to create the new model. Going back to Patrick's question of getting traction with a new model, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to unashamedly disrupt the old. On FMCG size, look, what we're trying to do is to build big relationships. We've totally focused on conversion at scale. Anything that we do of significant scale with clients, we're looking at trying to get to achieve our 20 squared relationship. As Victor mentioned Allianz, which is a recent win out of Germany. That's a good example of where we're trying to build scale through land and expand.
Everything, whether it's in FMCG, in healthcare, in auto, wherever it is, we're trying to continue to build these relationships at scale. The target that we have is $20 million of gross revenue. Hopefully, as we get bigger and we achieve that 20 squared objective, we can either broaden that 20 squared objective to 30 clients or whatever, or raise the $20 million target to $30 million or whatever it happens to be. I think Accenture's diamond clients are around $200 million a year or something like that. I remember when we were at WPP, we looked at clients, to be in the top 10 had to be about $150 million. We have a long way to go. We're very much at the beginning of the journey. We'll see what we can do.
Thanks.
Okay. Are we finished with our questions? Yep.
There are no further questions.
Thank you very much, operator. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for joining us on Q1, and we look forward to seeing you again for the half year and further dynamic progress. Thanks very much indeed.
Thanks, Andrew.