Good morning, everybody. We've got Peter Rademaker on the call from Amsterdam, along with Victor Knaap and Wesley ter Haar, the two founders of Media.Monks. They're both in Amsterdam with Peter. Then we've got Scott in Singapore, Scott Spirit. Last but not least, Chris Martin, who's in Boulder, Colorado at some unearthly hour. Having said that, we have a fair amount to get through, so we'll get cracking. Peter will cover the results. Scott will talk a little bit about client momentum, about mergers and integration. Unitary structure, Wes will weigh in. Then Victor will talk a little bit about the content practice. Then Chris will talk about Data & Digital Media practice. I'll come back with a brief summary and outlook. Straight away into the results with Peter.
Thank you, Sir Martin, good morning from the Netherlands, and thank you for joining us on our call. I will present to you in the next slides our financial performance over the first six months of 2021. As a short summary, we had a very strong first half start to 2021. Our results confirmed that S4Capital is converting at scale with our five whopper clients and high traction through land and expand with most other clients. On our third birthday as a listed company, I'm very proud to present to you our significant growth over the first and the second quarter of 2021. Our growth is significant, especially if you can take into consideration the fact that last year, during the pandemic, each month, and as a result, each quarter, showed like-for-like growth.
We don't have the easy comps to 2020 that some companies may have. Comparing 2021 with 2019, we grew with 61%, and this is adding up this year's like-for-like growth of 49% in the first half of this year, plus the 12% we realized in last year. On a real like-for-like basis and a constant currency basis, this was even at 75% growth as a two-year stack. Turning to the financial performance on slide four of the deck. The billings, GBP 547.5 million and pro forma billings were GBP 560 million. To remind you, billings is our revenue, including our pass-through expenses. Our revenue was GBP 279.3 million, up 98% from GBP 141.3 million last year. On a like-for-like, revenue was up 56% and pro forma 57%.
Our gross profit, our most important measure, to GBP 36.7 million, up 91% on a reported basis from GBP 124 million last year. Like for like, that was up 49% and pro forma 50%. Our operational EBITDA, GBP 34.3 million, up 91% on a reported basis to last year, like for like, up 30%, and pro forma up 36%. Our operational EBITDA margin was 14.5%, equal as in 2020 on a reported basis, and like for like 16.7% and pro forma 15.7%. Our operating loss, GBP 16.1 million, versus an operating profit we had last year of GBP 1.3 million, and our operating loss like for like was GBP 18.1 million. Our operating loss is after charging GBP 47.4 million of adjusting items relating to acquisitions, amortization, and share-based payments. That includes a GBP 16.1 million in contingent combination payments tied to continued employment.
This adjusting item was in 2020 a credit of GBP 1.3 million, so there's a big delta compared to last year. Our loss for the period was GBP 21.1 million, which includes this adjusting item after taxation versus a loss of GBP 1.4 million in 2020 and a like for like loss of GBP 21.6 million. Our adjusted basic earnings per share were GBP 0.039 versus GBP 0.029 In 2020. Strong liquidity through the first half, come back to that, of course, after significant merger payments, with a period end net cash of GBP 7.4 million. In early August, the company has completed a EUR 375 million seven-year senior secured term loan and a five-year, GBP 100 million senior secured multicurrency revolving facility. A good start to Q3 2021, and based on this seven-month period, the gross profit, the company increased the guidance for the third time to 40%. We started the year with 25%.
We upped it after Q1 to 30%. At our AGM in June, we increased to 35%. Now, based on these results and a good start in Q3, we upped it again, and it's now at 40% guidance for the year. On the next slide is our quarterly performance since Q1 2020. As I just mentioned, we have been growing our like- for- like gross profit each and every month with strong growth percentages. To remind you, we did 19% in Q1, 7% in Q2 2020, and then in Q3 and Q4, we were back in the mid 20% growth.
Over Q1, we reported a 33% growth, now in Q2 with 66% growth, delivering for the first six months of 2021 a like-for-like growth of 49%. On our next slide, our unaudited condensed consolidated income statement with our like-for-like constant currency numbers and pro forma constant currency numbers, which we typically include also as a result of our mergers and our inorganic growth. That gives a better comparison on a like-for-like and a pro forma basis. I will highlight a few numbers, because in the next couple of slides, there are a lot of numbers involved. The gross profit, our most important measure, again, with 91%, as I just mentioned, versus last year, 49%, and on a like-for-like basis, and 50% on a pro forma basis. In the first half, we realized an operating loss of GBP 16.1 million versus GBP 1.3 million last year.
As you can see, this was heavily impacted by the increase of adjusting items. Last year, the adjusting items were almost GBP 15 million, and this year they are GBP 47 million. In other words, an increase of GBP 32 million. Our acquisition-related expenses are the main component of this increase of around GBP 25 million. The extra charge is the result of our deal structure like we mentioned earlier, or at our prelims last year or this year in relation to 2020. As a result of our deal structure in M&A activities. In our deals, we include protective governance, and one of these is continued employment during the period of the contingent considerations. In line with the IFRS rules, this means that contingent considerations needs to be included as personnel expenses, which we then adjust. As such, and it's not treated as a goodwill or intangible positions.
On the next page, the EBITDA is shown before and after central cost. They're growing before central cost with 91% on a reported basis and 35% on a like-for-like basis, and 41% on a pro forma basis. Before central cost, the margin in 2021 was 16.5% on a reported basis, which is the same as 2020. After central cost, the EBITDA margin as percentage of gross profit was 14.5%. That's again, the same as in 2020, and it's the result of significant investment in human capital integration and implementing unified tooling in the group. Come back to that slightly later. There is 93% growth in adjusted operating results and 102% growth on an adjusted profit before tax. On the next slide, the basic net result per share and adjusted basic earnings are shown.
Main increase in adjusting item consisting of acquisition-related expenses of GBP 7.5 million and share-based compensation of GBP 6.3 million. Revaluation of contingent consideration. This is, as I referred earlier, the contingent consideration tied to continued employment of founders mainly. Finally, we adjusted the amortization of our intangibles that are separated from goodwill and amortized over a period of around 10 years. This all results in a basic and diluted net loss per share of GBP 0.039 and an adjusted earnings per share of GBP 0.039, growing with 66% compared to last year. On the next slide, the balance sheet that increased to almost GBP 1.3 billion as a result of our organic growth, of course, and driven by the completed transactions in the first half year of TOMORROW in China, Staud in Germany, Jam3 in Canada, and Raccoon in Brazil.
It doesn't take into consideration, of course, Destined because that was announced after half-year. Our net cash for the end of the second quarter was GBP 7.34 million, which of course does not contain the refinancing, which was completed very early in August of this year. Turning to the next page on the cash flow statement. The cash flow from operations were 60% of EBITDA as a result of around that, there was around GBP 18 million investment in working capital. Cash flow from investing activities was almost GBP 55 million, mostly relating to combination payments. Finally, from financing activities, we used our existing revolving facilities to finance the combinations, as I just mentioned. Turning into the next page, our gross profit and operational EBITDA. The 91% growth split between content at a growth rate of 66% against reported in 2020, and Data & Digital Media at 169%.
The content operational EBITDA was GBP 16.8 million, with a margin of 10.7%. The content practice operational EBITDA margin, 10.7%, like I just mentioned, compared to 16.4% last year, again, reflecting increased investment in human capital in the first half year to staff our w hoppers and prepare for a stronger second half and build our client team structures. Our integration tools and our software are unified software in our unitary organization for the longer term. That impacted on the EBITDA margin of content. Our Data & Digital Media operational EBITDA was GBP 22.4 million, with a margin of 28.2% compared to 16.9% last year. That's reflecting the positive impact of our organic revenue growth and on operational gearing and a fall in travel office and other operating expenses during COVID-19. Turning to my last slide with the gross profit by geography.
On a reported basis, Americas grew with 90%, EMEA with 101%. That was also the result of BMW and strong presence in EMEA and APAC with 76%. The Americas still count for 71% of the total, which was last year 72%, and pro forma 72% and last year 74%. Slight changes, but not significant. EMEA, 20% now, last year 19%. On a pro forma basis, 20% and last year 18%. Finally, Asia Pacific at 9% of total. Last year it was also at 9% in pro forma this year and last year were both 8% contributing to our gross profit. This ends my part of the presentation. I will now hand over to Scott.
Great. Thanks, Peter. If we head on to the client slides now on client momentum. You'll see here that H1 was extremely strong for us in terms of new business for S4, that was a key driver of the impressive growth figures that Peter's just taken you through. We've seen great progress with our well-established client base, strong, consistent expansionary growth from our larger clients like Google, Facebook, HP, Netflix, Mondelēz, et cetera. There's a couple of examples I'd like to highlight here, which I think really exemplify the speed and scale of growth that our land and expand strategy can deliver for us. If you consider DoorDash, it's a company we won a small project for last year. That was our first entry into DoorDash.
We did a Valentine's campaign for them, which was very successful and led to a few more projects last year. If you look at the H1 this year versus H1 last year, we're doing 20 times the revenue with DoorDash than we were last year. PayPal is another great example. That was also a win early last year, and we had a small embedded team on the West Coast. This has successfully expanded to similar remits in Europe and Asia. Our H1 2021 revenue versus H1 2020 is up 10 times. They've actually just broken into our top 10 clients for H1. All of this is without any time wasted on pitches in the traditional sense. On the land side, you'll see that we've added some impressive logos in H1.
We've got exciting new work launching for Instacart, TikTok, Shopify, Riot Games, OLX, amongst others. Our fashion and luxury team that we hired in London have got off to a great start with multiple wins. Toblerone and Amazon Fashion here, those are new logos for our existing clients, Amazon and Mondelēz. We do continue to be involved in several pitches, which, whilst large for us, probably would not be instant whoppers on the scale of BMW or Mondelēz. Honestly, progress remains relatively slow, versus our established land and expand strategy, which is for sure the focus of our new business efforts. On to the next slide. If we look at our clients by category, there's relatively little change. Technology continues to dominate thanks to strong growth from our existing client base there and some exciting new wins. Auto is the fast emerging category for us.
That wasn't really even on the chart this time last year. Thanks largely to Vic and the team on BMW, it now represents just over 5% of our revenue for H1 2021. It's not just BMW. There are some other auto wins in there as well, but obviously BMW making the bulk of that growth. Mondelēz has provided an almost 2% jump in the FMCG segment too. Next slide. This slide really speaks to the evolution of our whopper strategy and the growth that we've seen in the scale of our relationships with our clients. As you can see on the left chart, the average size of our top 10 clients is up over 60%, our top 20 up over 75%, and our top 50 up over 80%.
The table on the right shows how many clients we have in each revenue band and the progression you can see from H1 2020 to H1 2021. We now have 10 clients over GBP 5 million, versus only two last year. The number of clients in the GBP 1 million-GBP 5 million and GBP 0.1 million-GBP 1 million bands have also roughly doubled. This shows a strong pipeline for our whoppers of the future. This is a result of our successful land and expand strategy and investment in our client management function, which is something Vic will cover in more detail later on and Peter's already referenced. Move on to the next section and next slide. From an M&A perspective, we certainly ended 2020 and started 2021 with a flurry of deals which have all integrated well and delivered some great results for us.
We've continued to add industry- leading capabilities and talent in data, in content, and in digital media. After H1, that's also continued. We've added Salesforce capabilities with Destined and creative and cultural capabilities in the recent Cashmere deal. Peter and his team raised our term loan of EUR 375 million in July. As we've discussed, much of this will be directed at future mergers in the coming months and years. We have a very strong pipeline of potential deals across all areas of the company and all geographies and look forward to revealing more of that in the coming months. Next slide, which is the last one for me. This means that I now have almost 6,000 colleagues around the world, which is very exciting given how far we've come and how quickly we've come in 33 markets.
As you'll have seen, we recently unified all those colleagues behind our single brand architecture of Media.Monks, which is the perfect segue for me to hand over to Wes, who's going to cover that in more detail. Over to you, Wes
Thank you, Scott. Hey, everyone. I will talk a bit about our unitary structure and why we are all so excited about the period. If you go to the next slide, I think it starts with understanding the foundations of S4. Founded in the middle of 2018 to be different to what the traditional networks and consult fees were doing, which means truly single P&L, no acquisitions, but mergers, so we don't get stuck with the perverse incentives of earn-outs, and then no internal commercial billing. On top of that foundational difference, we added lots and lots of amazing teams and talents. If you go to the next slide.
We ended up in August of this year rolling out the unitary brand for a really key reason, which is even though we were operating and organizing in very different ways, from a distance, all of the different labels and logos still made it feel a bit like a network. It was time, if you go to the next slide, to do the one thing that no one else has been able to do in our industry, which is at our scale, roll out a truly single-brand solution. I think also, if you look at what we're trying to do, being a disruptor in our space, I think doing the one thing nobody else was able to do is sort of the core definition of disruption. It isn't just about that. If we go to the next slide, it's also about delivering on our promises.
Promise to our people. We want all of our people to be colleagues because that means they can work everywhere and on anything within a structure that empowers them to keep going and growing. This is about more career opportunities. This is about more opportunities to do best-in-class work. For us and our leadership colleagues around the globe, it also means at scale, we can make this a truly best-in-class place to work. Promise to our clients is easy. They need access to the very best talent and subject matter expertise across all of our integrated capabilities globally, truly operating as a single P&L, because that makes us a real change agent partner. It means we are helping our clients accelerate and innovate their advertising, marketing, media, and technology spend.
Of course, promise to the market, we are building a different, and because of that foundation, better business model that will create more stakeholder value. If we go to the next slide, this is what we rolled out with Media.Monks with two specific areas that I will talk about in a bit more detail. One, of course, the integration of the MightyHive hexagon, which isn't just part of the logo, but is also the way we talk about our internal organizational model, and the dot. If we go to the next slide, the dot creates what we call ownable space. Within Media.Monks, we also have the likes of Data.Monks, Social.Monks, and others, and it means there's lots of ownable space for merged teams to still be entrepreneurial and be in the driver's seat while we are able to turn up as one for our clients.
Go to the next slide. Brand launches and rebrands tend to be quite critically looked at. Lots of focus on it. It tends to be under a spotlight. I think we could not have had a better and more seamless launch, so massive thank you to our marketing team as well. [audio distortion] , we formed a dot and front pages. We had very positive press in all of our flagship publications that we went after the likes of Adweek, Ad Age, Campaign, and The Drum. If we go to the next slide, that sort of flagship positivity led to lots of local and regional opportunities. Just if you were in this industry and on LinkedIn in about a two-week period, I think it was pretty much impossible to not be updated on what we were doing.
We really sort of, as we like to say, we're feeding the feed with this story and what it meant for our teams and talent. If we go to the next slide, I think it culminated in a really great article in The Drum, 'Why S4Capital is just so damn attractive right now ,' which also mentioned our confident rebranding job. That is the rebrand. I want to spend a few slides talking about what this means from a model perspective. We can go to the next slide. Having rolled out as a truly unitary brand, it allows us in more detail and with more confidence to talk about our ambitions and aspirations, which are to win a decade. To do that, we have a mission, which is to change an industry.
When we talk about changing the work, changing who does the work, and changing what the work can do within a mindset of never standing still, which really is a reflection of the entrepreneurial energy that we have throughout the organization. To make those things possible, we have an organizational model, if we go to the next slide, that we call the API. The API, if we go to the next slide, really is just a model that allows our teams to connect, communicate, and collaborate in ways that are pretty much impossible in traditional networks. In part, this is down to the technology that we're building. Everybody is on the same technology stack. We have a team that is doing amazing work around employee experience, but it's also making sure our teams are put in collaborative spaces instead of competitive spaces, and this is about ownable space.
If we go to the next slide, the API connects what we call the C model. We have client teams. Victor will talk about this in a bit more detail later on, and Scott already mentioned this is one of the defining reasons why we're landing and expanding so quickly. They operate globally. We have country teams which are really focused on winning local markets and making sure we can recruit and retain the very best talent in all the markets we now operate in. Both of those teams have seamless access to our capabilities, which is really end-to-end best-in-class subject matter expertise that deliver parts of our promise. A great example of that is our social team. All those teams have access to our cores, which is our hubbing model.
We scaled up our cores massively over the last six months, making sure we have the talent to staff and service our clients quickly. All of these teams are being supported by our best-in-class corporate structure, HR, legal, finance, and the like. We have something called categories, which is really our go-to markets, and we just mentioned the fashion team. We're continuously launching new go-to markets that allow us to be part of emerging spaces, Metaverse being a really popular one at the moment, of course. That's an update on unitary structure, lots of excitement, lots of early success. With that, I will hand it over to Victor.
Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining. In the next few minutes, I will take you through the content practice. If we go to the next slide. In short, it means, if it happens on a screen, we do everything it takes to make it happen. Moving on to the next slide. We're in it to win it. That means, we're focusing on best-in-class craft. Besides our financial growth, we're super proud that we won 17 Cannes Lions, six Webby Awards, and in total, over 170 awards in creative craft. One of the examples that you see on the right side is one of the most iconic pieces of work that we have done, for Reporters Without Borders. If you have a moment, I would love to show you a video in the next 30 seconds that shows a bit more of our work.
[Presentation]
This must be the shortest showreel we've ever showed you. If you look at it, all of this has resulted in becoming Webby Production Company of the Year, something we aimed for for a very long time, with four projects that really stood out. Spotify, Alone With Me. As just previously mentioned, Reporters Without Borders with The Uncensored Library. It's actually the first glance into what the Metaverse can do. For Netflix, DARK: The Official Guide, and for Sanofi, Kiddi World. It's not all about awards. On the next few slides, I will take you and run you through our next six months goals. There are four major pillars we will focus on. How we change the work, how we change who does the work, how we're changing what the work can do, and the impact we're making with the work that we're doing.
I will touch briefly upon all four of them in the next few slides. Let's start with the change of work. One of the most exciting products at this moment is our live event business. Due to COVID, we've set up the stage for flexible hybrid experiences. We built immersive worlds for Pokémon, Post Malone, and we created the Song Festival design. With live multi-user experience will continue as a focus for brands as they set their sights on the coming Metaverse. Through our close partnership with Epic Games, the makers of the popular Unreal Engine, we help brands to build immersive 3D experiences. If we go to the next slide. We're always looking for talent outside of the traditional agency environment and inject fresh perspectives into our team.
We made a lot of high-profile unconventional hires, but also including Jam3's intense commitment to craft and Staud Studios' expertise in real-time personalization in automotive, Cashmere's cultural knowledge and insights. Together, we're casting diverse digital native talent in work that truly excites them. That passion is shining through our award-winning work. Looking at that, I think our work with Mondelēz is really showing off in that. Our Mondelēz partnership almost enters its second year and has caught the attention of research firms at WARC, at Forrester, and is helping Mondelēz to reach audiences around the world with hyper-relevance. In addition to this, our work for the real-time production of Oreo has also served as the basis of Epic Games' Epic Future courses to show how 3D ads should be produced.
If we look at our people, we have long realized that our role to drive diversity and inclusion within the ad industry that has been exclusive for many. In addition to welcoming culture agency Cashmere to our team, we've built pro bono work that cast a spotlight on creatives and entrepreneurs of color. We also placed a greater focus for LGBTQ pride with brands like YouTube, Adidas, Oreo, TikTok, and many more. To conclude this, and I will spend a little bit more time on that, because H1 has been very interesting from the content side. It is the most active new business environment we have ever been involved in in the 20 years that Wes and I are in the business. We're making sure that we win more than our fair share of logos.
With some of them, we expect to become future whoppers, but also local hero clients that will help us retain and recruit the very best talent in many markets we're now active in. There's still a lot of work to do. The client-first model we are building out will pay off well in the future for us and for the brands we work with. We're seeing higher profitability in H2, and bigger gains to come in 2022. We will keep on expanding with our existing client base due to a high pitch rate win and our ability to quickly staff and surface requests as they come in. We need to keep on investing in talents, teams, and subject matter expertise and put them in front of our clients, so we drastically shorten our TTM, time to whopper.
With many clients moving much more quickly through the revenue brackets than we mentioned earlier. That's it from the content side. That's it for me, and I'll hand it over to Scott to tell you more about our Data & Digital Media practice.
I'll pick up for Scott. Hi, I'm Chris Martin. I run our Data & Digital Media practice here at Media.Monks. The theme that Victor brought up was if it happens on a screen, we do everything it takes to make it happen. Much of that magic happens behind the scenes with our Data & Digital Media practices increasingly in lockstep with our content and creative units. Our unitary approach and our six Cs foundational API structure is represented by a very meaningful hexagon in our brand-new name. The Data & Digital Media practice continues to build from that center of the hexagon and uses privacy by design to weave together technology, media, data, and content capabilities for all of our clients, with the glue that brings it all together.
DDM has been delivering significant organic and inorganic growth on both a gross and a contributing margin year-over-year, as well as the two-year stack. In 2021, we started setting our sights on our top content whoppers, making sure that we're delivering the full portfolio to our comprehensive client sets, as well as supporting full agency of record opportunities, which we are increasingly finding ourselves being invited to as a foundational, disruptive change agent into what it means to be an AOR of the future. In the first half of 2021, we've invested in four key areas. First, video end-to-end. Consumer behavior is changing what, where, when, and how video is consumed, and that leads to fragmentation and new formats. The brand marketer's toolkit is changing very, very quickly.
We need to be able to act even faster and get ahead of the curve in enabling brand marketers to be able to reach the audiences with various video formats on many different platforms. To help drive this very important category, we tapped Richard Lawrence, who joined us from his prior role as Amazon Advertising's Advanced TV Product Manager. His role there at Amazon was building the products that Amazon uses to grow brand equity for their clients and capture a very hard-to-reach audience that have long ago migrated away from linear television and are now using and consuming media via Amazon. We're watching Amazon very closely as they make moves to surround consumers, including its latest move into the devices space, with an Amazon television being brought directly to market, actual hardware that Amazon will have in the home.
As it continues to be the largest scaled player in the space with consumer data, capturing consumer data both about what you watch and what you purchase, which is a very interesting construct in our industry. We're watching Amazon very closely as we bring out our video end-to-end offering. We're pushing very hard into weaving together strategies that combine YouTube and Amazon Prime and many other advanced TV formats. For example, subscriptions, CTV or Connected TV, programmatic television, over-the-top television. This fragmentation is making it very confusing for the brand marketer to really reach its audience with the right message, but we're bringing it all together with a best-of-breed practice inside of Media.Monks. The second area I'd like to highlight is marketing effectiveness.
You may or may not remember back in 2019, I launched a plan to build a global analytics deployment capability for Media.Monks, recognizing and anticipating the death of the cookie and, more importantly, the death of the deterministic identifier. These are the unique keys that allow us to stitch together the consumer journey across many different websites, and that technology is now going to end in the next few years. We got way ahead of the curve and built out our measurement group, the marketing effectiveness group. This is primarily powered by our friends at Brightblue, who merged with us in 2019. Very specifically what they do is build media mix model and econometric modeling, which will be the future of digital advertising measurement.
We have a comprehensive solution that we're deploying to a significant number of our customers as not just a bolt-on, but a foundational capability for their marketing practices in-house, fully owned and operated by the brands in-house. The next thing, marketing end-to-end infrastructure. Right now, this is a code word for our Salesforce practice, although we do plan to expand well beyond Salesforce when it comes to CRM and CDPs. Salesforce is the digital journey concierge. They are focusing on investments in e-commerce, consumer data platforms, enterprise workflow with their recent acquisition of Slack. In order to deliver on our promise to marketers, we will be continuing to build out our Salesforce practice and key delivery capabilities to make sure that we are building that digital concierge capability.
You've now heard about our merger with Destined in Sydney, Australia, covering Asia Pacific, which will be the first of hopefully more moves to grow our Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud capabilities with Salesforce. I look forward to the continued momentum in the second half of this year. In the final bucket of investment, what we're calling Performance.Monks these days, this is the concept that SMB growth and challenger brands direct-to-consumer capabilities will need a different type of performance model that historically has been located in your independent agency or your DTC agency type of brands. We need to integrate this not only into our enterprise portfolio, but also take advantage of the significant growth in small business and up-and-coming business that launch brands from effectively zero.
I'm reminded of the Sir Martin interview with Daymond John from "Shark Tank" the other day, where they were discussing our disruptive impact on the marketing industry, similar to the way that Tesla disrupts automotive and Amazon disrupts retail. We're changing the way the work is done and the entire supply chain of the work that we do. That also made me think of the Evan Carmichael "Shark Tank" interview, where he talked about how four years ago, he would have told you that graduating students should be studying engineering and statistics and math in order to be productive in the new economy.
He says he is now changing that view, where folks who are building short, comprehensive, meaningful stories, the content and creative folks, as they are unlocked around a lower cost and activation energy required for direct-to-consumer brands, the storytellers are going to be the drivers of the new economy to be able to bring direct-to-consumer relevance and personalization directly to consumers. I thought that was a very telling interview and supports our view that the performance investments that we're making are going to pay off for our clients in the future. Digging into some of the case studies that have been driven out of these four investments, I'm going to start with an unbranded healthcare client.
This is a philanthropic client, and Media.Monks has been working with this nonprofit client for over two years with a mission of building a best-in-class digital team focused on becoming more audience-centric, data-driven, and nimble, a particular eye on efficiency in order to extract as much value as possible from donation dollars. Media.Monks successfully helped this client reimagine their entire organizational structure when it came to marketing, clean up their paid media executions, enable them to be more data-driven on how they optimize those executions. This came to fruition during their year-end campaign, where we were able to help them achieve over a 90% growth in donations year-on-year, a massive number for a philanthropic, and a ROAS exceeding 240%. For every dollar spent, we brought in $2.40 on this attributable campaign alone.
This year, they set off on a mission to acquire their next 11 million donors, 11 million new consumers, donors, while continuing to cultivate relationships that they have with their existing donors. In order to do this, they're working with Media.Monks to increase maturity across the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and bridge the gap between ad tech and martech by bringing email and paid channels together. In the current state, our work is focused on unlocking the massive amount of first-party data that this client already has and using that to build the foundation for a future-proof model that will enable automation and cross-channel personalization of their marketing efforts. As an anecdotal sidebar, this client received a $ 100,000 one-time donation attributed directly to the direct response TV spot, which we decided to run on YouTube for them for the first time.
This particular person who made this donation called a 1-800 number that was listed on that spot. We were able to directly tie that and measure it against the campaign. That is an enormous success story to bring a DRTV linear campaign to a digital channel and have so much return on investment. Now moving on to the next case is Mattel. I'm excited to say that we are now working with Mattel, who brings joy to hundreds of millions of children with brands such as Barbie, Hot Wheels, Fisher-Price, American Girl, and they've been doing this for over 70 years. We need to help them come a long way in the way that they think about data in a new era of direct-to-consumer relationships, especially because their relationships with consumers are complicated, both children and parents.
They need a significant amount of help in implementing CDPs, understanding the activation points, and bringing all of those brands to a whole new generation of consumer behavior. The next case, Five9, one of the growth or challenger brands I'd love to talk about in the performance space. This year, we began working with Five9 and their paid social, programmatic direct buys, and other buying efforts, which scaled their managed budget by about 15%. As a result, our performance unit is generating about 20%-30% more in revenue because of the pricing model that we have with them. We're going to be supporting the integration of Five9's merger or acquisition with Zoom, which should expand that budget significantly by Q4 of this year. This is a growth or challenger brand story.
How do you get them from zero to $1 billion with a brand new way of building a brand, going direct to consumer, and launching them into the stratosphere? Some other performance clients that have been acquired or IPO'd in our performance unit, Chorus.ai, acquired by ZoomInfo, Silver Peak acquired by Hewlett Packard, and ServiceMax is going IPO shortly, but was also acquired previously by GE. Our final case today is Pearson.
Pearson is an interesting case study because I personally believe that this is not just a DDM story, but a comprehensive Media.Monks story, a truly combined effort across all of our six C's, countries, categories, capabilities, woven together in a single comprehensive engagement, bringing a lean team, important to the clients, a lean team of 50 people with the best, most relevant talent from across the globe, stitching together all of our best capabilities for our clients. We are looking forward to a very strong 2021, rounding out the second half of the year here, and I am excited to hand it back to Sir Martin so he can share our comprehensive H2 and 2022 outlook. Thank you.
Thanks, Chris. Thanks to Victor and Wes and Scott and Peter. Just a brief summary, and before I do that, I think from an analytical point of view, there are really two industries at work here. One is a high-growth digital industry, and the other is a slow-growth or limited-growth traditional industry. This is really shown by the two-year stacks. These are simple stacks, meaning we add just the organic growth rates in each comparative quarter or half-year period. In this case, it is a simple two-year stack for Q1 and Q2. You can see in our own case and in the case of the platforms, Google and Facebook, and indeed the other companies in the digital area such as Accenture and Globant, you can see the scale of the two-year stacks in Q1 and Q2 versus the more traditional media companies.
I think from an analytical point of view, particularly with digital crossing 50% of the industry last year for the first time, probably this year at around 55%-60%, and by 2024, we calculate, or others calculate, it will be 70%. Turning to the final slide of the summary, extremely strong organic growth in H1, 50% organic growth. The accelerating in Q2 from 33%, doubling up to 66%. That growth continuing into July, which is over 50% organic gross margin net revenue growth. Two-year stack, that says July last year, as you know, was about 18%, so 68%. Continued strong liquidity, that has been boosted from a resource point of view by the EUR 375 million term loan that we took out in July.
A very strong and healthy merger pipeline, not just in data and analytics content and d igital media, but in technology services too, as we'll be getting on to shortly. A successful Media.Monks brand rollout as Wes went through. Significant continued progress in our unitary structure. Continued new business success and whopper momentum with five, and in prospect, two or three for next year. We've identified 15% out of 20% as potential. We've raised our like-for-like net profit and net revenue guidance for the third time this year, gross profit net revenue guidance for the thi rd time this year to 40%. The original target was 25%. We took it up to 30% and 35% and now 40%. Of course, in the first half, we've done 50%. We reiterate our confidence in doubling the size of our company purely organically.
That's on a like-for-like basis in not just this three-year cycle from 2021-2023, but the three cycles that we've had from 2019-2021 and 2020-2022. We're starting to look, of course, at 2022-2024 as we start to do our three-year plans and budgets for next year. Strong prospects for the second half of this year. It started well, as you've seen. There will be continuous tailwinds in 2022, not just GDP growth, but digital transformation. Literally, the tailwinds from GDP growth will taper towards the end of 2022 and 2023. Digital disruption and transformation will continue at pace. Usually when GDP slackens, as it looks like in 2023 it will do to around the pre-COVID levels of 2%-3%, digital transformation gears up at stronger speeds.
A good outlook as we move into the back half of 2021 and into 2022, and the prospects for 2023. With that, we'll open up for Q&A.
Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, that's star one to ask a question. And our first question comes from Omar Sheikh of Morgan Stanley.
Morning, everyone. I've got three questions if I could. Maybe the first one for Peter, on margins. Peter, could you just give us a sense of where you think second half adjusted EBITDA margins may land in the context of the investment that you're making in headcount and other areas? If you could maybe also talk about how long that period of investment may last. Maybe it's early in the planning stage, but if you have a sense of how margins might progress next year, that would be very helpful. That's first question. secondly, Sir Martin, in the statement, you've got a new target, 20 clients of over $20 million. I wonder if you could just talk about what timeframe you're thinking about, because I think from Scott's slide, you've got maybe two in that whopper. Two over GBP 10 million.
It's a pretty ambitious target. Some sense of timeline would be helpful. Thirdly, on M&A, As Martin, you mentioned you're looking at maybe acquiring something technology services. Could you maybe expand on what you mean by that, what capabilities you're looking to add? Thank you.
Fine. Peter, do you want to kick off on the margin question?
Yeah, sure. As I presented first half, it was 14.5% like last year. With our guidance upping to 40%, that brings us, let's say for the full year, let's say at around GBP 425-GBP 550 on gross profit. What you also see is that most of analysts are around GBP 105-ish for this year on EBITDA, which means that basically in the second half, expectations are that margins after central cost will be in the area of 22%, slightly lower, again, as a result of gearing up and some investment last year. It was over 24% in the second half. I would expect that to now be sort of 22%. Then to your question, Omar, for next year. All in all, this brings us for this year, our current expectation is very close to 20%, high 19% for this year.
For next year, I would expect as a result of some of the ending investments or turning it into business that we're sort of back on track in the 20%-22% EBITDA margin like we realized last year, which was at 21%. That's the sort of the range what I would expect for next year.
Just on the second question, Omar, on whoppers, we have the objective which we set last year of 20 squared. That is 20 clients of gross revenues of $20 million. We have five this year. I think we had two last year. We have identified two or three that we think will hit whopper status next year. That would take us to a total of seven or eight. We've identified another seven, which takes us to 14, 15 that we think potentially have the potential to reach that sort of status. You asked for a specific timeframe. Difficult to give you that, but I would hope this time next year, we would see our way to seven or eight whoppers by in 2022. Beyond that, we would reach the 20 target over the next few years.
Difficult to put a precise year on it, whether it be 2023 or 2024 or 2025, but I think it's over that time range. On technology services, what it enables us to do is to embrace digital transformation for our clients in another one of the areas that they face. That would be, currently, we really are involved in digital transformation from a sales and marketing point of view. We tend to deal with the Chief Sales Officer or Chief Marketing Officer. We don't tend to deal as much with the Chief Information Officer, well, not Chief Information Officer, but Chief Technology Officer. Obviously, the work that Chris does with Pete around data analytics and d igital media, we touch Chief Information Officers and Chief Digital Officers. I think there is a need for us to provide that end-to-end offer across all those three functions.
Scott, maybe you just indicate the sort of things that we're looking at in the technology services area, which are imminent.
Yeah, sure. Just before going back to that whopper question, just to point out that the chart that I showed with client size was for the half year, obviously. We'd expect at least double that size for the full year. That's also in pounds, and the whopper target is in dollars. We're very comfortable with the target of five whoppers this year and several more to come next year. On the tech services side, yeah, we've spent a lot of time looking at opportunities in this area. We're pretty familiar with the area, having previously owned it when we were at WPP, owned a major stake in Globant. We've got a couple of opportunities that we're pursuing. You'll see something pretty imminently. We're not buying Globant, just newsflash. We're going to start relatively small and build out our capabilities from there.
You'll see hopefully a transaction fairly imminently of moderate scale, but certainly an entry point into this tech services area. We'll build it out from there, just as we have with content, data, and d igital media.
Brilliant. Thanks very much. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Steve Liechti of Numis.
Morning, guys. Please can I have three as well? Just the first question on the two-year stack and the guidance for the full year, for a 40%. That implies the two-year stack growth rate in the second half slows down. Is there a reason for that in your minds, or are you just being conservative? I don't know if you want to bring in July and possibly August commentary within that. Second question on margin, I can see the near-term investment that you're putting in. I guess from my perspective, 20%-odd margin is pretty good in the industry. Is there any way that you can fundamentally increase that to a new level? I don't know whether if you've got any thoughts about productization or stuff like that in the mix in the longer term.
The third question is on the M&A and the tech services target there. Can you give us any feel in terms of the sort of synergies that you might expect within your business by bringing in a tech services business overall? Also, if I was a tech services business, what do you bring for me? Because I can see why a digital agency would love to sort of connect into your network. What do you bring to a tech services business?
Maybe I'll deal with the first one on the second half comparatives, and then Peter, maybe you can talk about margin and where the potential is on margin and operating leverage. Maybe Scott and I can cover off on the synergies. On the first one, the July figure we've given you, we don't have the August figures as yet, but the July figures we've given you are over 50% organic. I think you, Steve, have reminded us in July of last year, we did 18%. The third quarter of last year was 23% growth, and the fourth quarter was 27%. I think Q2 of last year was 7% or 8%, and Q1 of last year was 21%, if I remember rightly. You see that the comparatives are tougher as we go into third and fourth quarter.
Having said that, the two-year stack on a simple basis is 68% for July. I would just point out that Peter did a very sophisticated calculation for the two-year stack for the first half, was actually 75%. If you took the simple calculations, obviously, for Q1 and Q2 last year, they were lower, but actually went back and pro formed the two-year stack for the first half, and that was 75%. That's what we're seeing. If the implication of your question is whether the delta variant has dealt a blow to organic growth rates, I think the answer is no. We have seen some postponement. I think Wes can possibly speak to that. There's been some postponement of live events. We've seen some major film launches, not that we're involved with those that have been postponed, but we've seen some live activity postponed.
On the other hand, stay-at-home, work-from-home companies, if I can use the word, benefit from that status. I would say no indication. We've been pretty conservative to your question in terms of our guidance. We started at 25%, we took it up to 30%, we took it up to 35%, and we've taken it up now to 40%, and we did 50% in the first half. I think to some extent, it's a mixture of the two things. One is the tougher comparisons, and then secondly, it's just innate conservatism. Do you want to talk a little bit about margin, Peter, in terms of potential?
Yeah. Steve, to your question, and in a way, I may have answered it, but I will elaborate a little bit more to the question that Omar raised.
For next year, the 20%-22%. Remember, we're a service company, so yes, we do develop some sort of workflows or automation around workflows, but not so much as sellable products. More for servicing our clients as efficient as possible. We don't do a SaaS or products where a sort of an increase in margin could be expected. We are that service company, which I always sort of try to explain as for every incremental dollar, we need another 65%-70% on employee costs and a 10%-12%, 13% on indirect, which can be travel and offices and these kind of things. There will be, of course, some economies of scale over time. Also with last year performance, with this year expectation, first half in the books, I would expect a 20%-22% as a margin, which we believe is strong.
Also in comparing it, let's say, to others or IT services or whatsoever, it's strong margin. There is some potential to grow, but it will be very limited. I'll stick to that 20%-22% EBITDA margin after central costs, over the next years.
Yeah, I just think on synergies for a minute, Scott chip in as well. What we've seen with the technology services companies that we've been looking at, even in the course of the due diligence and SPA discussions, I think, in one case, I can think of three clients where we've been involved in digital transformation with two media companies, and one hardware company, where we've been involved in discussions on the content side, and indeed the data side. It links into the technology services capabilities that the target has. I think to your question, Steve, again, I come back to what I prefaced it with. Digital transformation inside any client company involves at least three functions. If you're CEO of a client company, you have to deal with three verticals, at least, probably others. Well, there are definitely others, like manufacturing.
You have to deal with sales, you have to deal with marketing, and you have to deal with IT. For example, in the banks, we know that the big global banks spend GBP 10 billion-GBP 11 billion or whatever it is, on digital transformation and disruption. We also know that the CMOs know what goes on in relation, and a lot of that IT work affects consumers like you or I. We know that CMOs spend a lot of time on that. We also know that they don't get to see, or others in the organization like the Chief Technology Officer or Chief Information Officer, they get to see the disposition of that or allocate the disposition of that budget, and they control it. You have three functions. You have to bring them together. If I look at it from a Scott mentioned Globant.
We've got on our slide in comparison of the two cities or the two countries or the two industries, Globant and Accenture. That could apply to EPAM, Endava, ThoughtWorks, which is going public. CI&T, the Brazilian company, which is also in the process of IPO-ing. When you look at those companies, they come at it from the IT end, and we come at it from the sales and marketing end, and there's a natural, I think, overlap between the three areas. Scott, do you want to talk any more about tech services?
Yeah. I think it's important to understand, obviously, that's a broad definition, tech services. It's important to understand what we're focused on. That'll become more apparent when we actually do something. I prefer to announce deals when we've done them rather than beforehand. Since we're talking about it, I think the focus is around digital transformation and launching digital products and services, which are usually consumer-facing or at least customer-facing. It's very linked to the kind of work we already do. These products and services usually have a CX or UX or consumer experience or user experience or design aspect to them, and that's obviously a key core capability of our existing Media.Monks business. They usually have a data capacity to them, so they're usually collecting data, using data for the rest of the company. That's obviously a core capability that we already have.
There's usually some kind of campaign. If you're launching a digital product or service as a company, it's usually followed by some kind of campaign to promote that, which obviously involves creative, it involves media, and marketing spend. There's a lot of synergies between our existing business, and we see this really as an extension of what we already do in the technology area. It's not a departure. It's not a sort of huge 90-degree turn in any way. I think, as I said, it will become a lot more apparent when you see the company that we're going to be working with and Wes is already working with. We have several client engagements and several pitches going on with these guys already, and that's to prove positive that the synergies are there.
That's good. Thanks.
Our next question comes from Matthew Walker of Credit Suisse.
Thanks, guys. Thanks for the questions. The first one is, it looks like if you're raising your number to, let's say, GBP 550 from around GBP 525. There's an extra GBP 25 million there. The EBITDA number is not moving. What is that GBP 25 million of investment precisely going into? If you could just explain a little bit more about what that investment is for. That'll be the first question. The second question is, in IT services, what kind of margin and growth profile are you thinking about? Is it better or worse than the existing S4 profile? Lastly, if you could give us a feel for net debt or net cash at the end of this year, not assuming any future acquisitions, but basically just what you've done so far.
Yeah. Peter, deal with the last one. Maybe Scott talk about margin and growth profile. On investment, we said in the statement there are a number of areas. The first and probably most important is as we gear up for scale with clients, we're investing in client teams. If you take what we call the whoppers, the larger side, we're investing in all that, scaling our client teams there. We're investing, obviously in integration. Wes has gone through that in some detail. There's whether the software is around Salesforce or Workday or Slack or indeed our accounting system. I think those are the major areas. It's building the unitary structure across the whole business.
You can see the investment at the S4 level because that's identified with the central costs. There are also costs, and I think it's fair to say that content has taken the brunt of the investment. Because content is 2/3 of the business and data and digital analytics and digital m edia is the other third. Content has borne the brunt of the investment in the client teams and the software and the tooling, and the unitary branding for the organization as a whole. I think that's where the investment comes. Peter, do you want to add to anything on that?
No, I think that covers it from an investment point of view.
Scott, do you want to talk about profile of technology services in terms of margin and growth?
Yeah, sure. I won't comment specifically on the company that we're looking at. You'll see more of that when the deal gets announced. In general, that sector is actually remarkably similar to S4. Actually it's something that I point out on a regular basis to our analysts when they moan that our share price seems quite high and our valuation seems quite high. That's fair compared to the traditional holding companies, I think. Actually, our growth rates are actually lockstep in line with what companies like Globant, Endava, and EPAM have delivered over the past couple of years. It's essentially doubling the company organically every three years. They're regularly doing 24%, 25% top-line growth, just as we have been. From a margin perspective, very similar to us. Slightly below us, I would say. Our margin historically has been slightly higher.
They're in the very high teens, 18%, 19%, 20%, and we've been at the sort of 21%, 22%. Definitely a sector that's going to be or an addition that's going to be in line with what we're doing or accretive. Hopefully once you take a look at their sort of valuation metrics, you'll understand a little bit more about why we're so bullish about our opportunity.
Do you want to talk a little bit, Peter, about net debt by the end of the year?
Yeah, it's an easy question with a long or difficult answer. Because I have to factor in also our merger pipeline, and if I wouldn't factor it in, I would expect us to be at sort of similar levels as we are currently, because of course, there is operational cash flow expected in the second half or even higher operational cash flow. I would expect also at the end of the year, like we have now in the first half, some investment in working capital, as a result of our growth mainly. That would be similar levels, and we have to do some contingent considerations need to be settled in the second half. Then, of course, the biggest thing is the moment that we realize our deals or execute our deals, complete our deals, and then the payments, in relation to that, the initial considerations.
If you would ignore that, it would be in sort of similar size.
Thanks. Could I just have one quick follow-up, which was on Pearson. What were you doing for Pearson? Was it launching the college app for them, or was it something else?
Chris?
Actually, Wes, you're a little closer to it. I don't know if you want to take it.
Yeah. It's launching the college app as part of it, which was a complete integration between data, media, and content. There are also some other threads running. Some content production, some social work. It's fanning out across the whole sort of ecosystem.
Okay, great. Thanks, Wes. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Julien Roch from Barclays.
Yes, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. The first one is following on Steve's question. You've increased full-year guidance three times, and you're telling us that the slowdown in two-year comps for the second half is partly slightly tougher comps, but you being inherently conservative. When we get to Q3 results, Martin, how would you handicap the chance of going to 45% for the full-year? Is it 25% chance, 50% chance, 75% chance? That's my first question.
Well, let's deal with that one immediately, Julien. When we get to the third quarter, we'll tell you.
Okay. All right. On M&A, as the pipeline, looking very full as normal or more than usual, have multiple increased because there's more competition or is it still the usual multiple? The last one is, overall, everybody's having great results. You can criticize the holding, but it was still okay. All the broadcasters, European broadcasters and U.S. broadcasters are talking about Q3 being much better than expected. The digital guy had really high growth. It is a bonanza for advertising in any category, in any region this year, and everybody will have better than expected results, more or less. How do you feel? Why is that happening? Is it partly because a lot of companies have higher margin than expected this year because they're saving on travel?
The whole hybrid work makes that margin would be much higher than usual. Therefore, people are choosing to reinvest in advertising to kind of keep a lid on margin. Don't have a 2022 year where basically they could have decline in margin and profit because this year was really high. Therefore, part of this year growth will go up next year. Therefore 2022 won't be as good as a normal growth on a great year or there are other reasons. I'm trying to get a sense of how much of the great 2021 everybody's having is one-off in nature or not.
Yeah. We dealt with your first question. Scott can talk about M&A. Let me just come back to that last question. I just think you're conflating two different trends, if you like. There's a bounce back. Some people will argue it's a dead cat bounce. There's a bounce back because of last year. I think Lex ran a column, a few weeks ago saying that people were talking about a strong Q2 this year because Q2 was weak last year. They may have said they had their best Q2 ever this year, but they had their worst Q2 ever the previous year, and this was just even-steven and evening it out. That's sort of one thing. The second thing is there is a digital economy there, which as I've said before, crossed 50% of digital media spend.
If digital media spend is $650 billion, $700 billion this year, an incremental $100 billion will come from the digital platforms. Google goes from $180 billion to $230 billion, $235 billion, $240 billion. Facebook goes from $80 billion to $110 billion, $115 billion, $120 billion. Amazon goes from $25 billion to $35 billion. I'm ignoring TikTok, which was at $32 billion last year, and I don't know where it will be this year. We don't really know what Alibaba and Tencent are doing primarily in China. There's a huge change. You may be right in your supposition. I don't know. You may be right in your supposition. Certainly, we hear from companies, they reduce their travel budgets to zero, and CEOs or CFOs are saying, "There's no way it's going to go back to 100% of what it was. It may go back to 50%." There will be more.
My sort of instinct would be that they would take that, particularly given the volatility that we've seen and commodity price increases and supply chain issues, that they would take that to profit rather than sort of spend it. In a way, when we think about it, we move away from what you just said, Julien. We're not focused at all. We do some traditional work. We do Super Bowl ads, we do TV commercials, but that is a relatively very small part of what we do. Essentially, we focus on the digital ecosystem and in the traditional part of the business, particularly in the big reviews, there's compression of revenue, and then you see the merry-go-round of talent within the holding companies.
That talent is moving from one holding to another, no way at the same price and no way at a lower price, always at a higher price. You have compression on the top line, and you have increase in the costs on the bottom line. I just don't think that that works in the longer term. It might work in a bounce back year, but as I say, you don't know whether that's dead cat bounce or whether that's real growth. I think you, as an analyst, are of the view that it's more than dead cat bounce. We sort of move away from that. It's neither one thing or the other from our point of view. We're just focused on what we see is the growth part of the market. Hope that helps.
Scott, do you want to talk about M&A pipeline and what we see?
Yeah, sure. The pipeline's probably as full now as it's ever been. It's usually quite full. There's always lots of conversations going on and plenty of entrepreneurs that are really keen to be part of S4, which is great. It is pretty full right now. In terms of valuations, all the deals we've announced so far this year have been within our standard metrics of the 5 x- 10x EBITDA. Obviously, I guess more recently, they've been at the top end of that scale, but continue to be done within that. I think that there are a few deals in the top pipeline where we're looking at very specific, very hot capabilities. I think tech services comes into that.
Some of the specific data stuff that we're looking around, data engineering, cloud migration, and consulting and stuff is in high demand, and particularly from private equity-driven companies. Those multiples are probably stretching slightly beyond the 10x, but not significantly. We're looking at 11x, 12x, maybe 13x . We still feel quite comfortable with where those multiples are. From a competitor standpoint, it continues to be, certainly in the U.S., private equity-driven competition, whether that's direct private equity into the company or a PE-invested firm that's doing some kind of roll-up. We see very little of the holding companies, and it's really PE or independent kind of digital specialists that we're coming up against.
Okay. Thank you.
Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one. We'll take our next question. It comes from Joe Spooner of HSBC.
Morning. As the business is getting bigger, are you seeing any change in terms of the churn rates among the employee base? Can you just give a sense of any kind of inflationary pressure you're seeing given the talent you have is, I suspect, in high demand elsewhere?
Wes, do you want to talk a little bit about churn rates and what we see from a people point of view and inflation?
Yeah. I think there's probably a few things that we are seeing, but I think it's sort of impacting the industry at large. COVID, tough time, especially for younger generation of talent. I think there's some restlessness that plays out. I think we were looking at some data, not specific to our company, but just the sort of generational happiness in jobs last week, where there's between 18 and 34, there's a level of anxiety that I think ups churn rates. I do think we're on the right path to tamp that down. I think in part because of unitary brand, in part because we've started building out, I think, some really foundational parts and pieces to career development within the whole organization. There's definitely a general feeling and vibe that this is the place to be if you're building a career.
It's definitely up, but I think not as up as the rest of the industry. We're also still seeing very healthy inbound when it comes to recruitment. Lots and lots of people looking to join, which means we've been able to handle some of the higher churn relatively easily. I think inflation is probably the dead cat bounce quote from Sir Martin. We were really the only player our size that did not fire people during COVID and that actually kept growing at a pretty high clip during COVID. Where lots of the traditional parts of our industry had to let a bunch of people go. The moment the sort of bounce back happened, lots of those companies needed to hire very quickly, and they probably overpaid for some of that hiring, and that's definitely influencing the landscape at the moment.
I think we have upside there that not many of our competitors have, which is a very exciting stock story. The ability to incentivize against our stock, I think is a bit of a moat. I would say that a lot of companies that had to hire quickly to be able to service their clients when the bounce back happened, have probably had to overpay quite a bit for that talent.
Chris, do you want to say anything from a Data & Digital Media point of view?
Yeah, I think the conversations around the generational or stage of life divide are increasing. I think folks are really getting their arms around exactly what's going on, which the grass is greener on the other side type of mentality. People want to change up no matter what it is, and they're willing to take it, even if it's not a good decision for their career. I think that there is, in the broader landscape, a little bit more, U.S., Brazil, EMEA, less so APAC, the 18- 35 range, the migration has been higher than we've seen in the past. When we compare our own numbers to broader industry, I would say that we're handling it very well.
When I'm talking to my peers at other companies, they're saying, "Everyone wants to come to S4." I turn around and say, "Well, everyone says they want to go to you." It's very interesting. It's really more about trading people. I definitely see the wage inflation challenges, and I think that has a lot to do with what Wesley was talking about. It was the pulling the slack out of the supply so quickly, that it just led to an arms race in grabbing top talent. We have some drivers here that not only keep people around, but are still very attractive for net new and incremental. Once again, a challenge for the industry. I think that we're the best of the worst, if you will. We're able to have a net gain out of the great resignation challenges across the globe.
Okay. Does that answer the question, Joe?
It does. Thank you. Maybe just to kind of follow up on that, where you are seeing that kind of inflationary pressure, is it fairly easy for yourselves, again, given that kind of digital focus that you have, to pass those costs through onto clients?
I can take that one pretty quickly. What I would say is that, and I know I'm a broken record with a lot of these, when folks come to us with industry challenges and they're worried about how it impacts S4, I usually have an alternative narrative where it's more of an opportunity for us. I've gotten more retainer-based and emergency break-fix from clients where they lost key talent, and they needed to rely on us and our global bank of key talent to immediately move in and support where they're having resourcing issues. In a way, our clients suffering from the great resignation challenge lean on us and increase their dependence on us because we offer that continuity of business process. If anything, that just indoctrinates us more with the clients. We are benefiting from it in a weird way.
Any more, Joe?
Great. Thank you.
Any more?
That's perfect. Thank you.
It appears we've no further questions at this time. I'd like to hand the call back to Sir Martin for any additional comments or closing remarks.
Okay. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. We have a U.S. call later today, which is at 1:00 PM London time. We look forward to seeing any of you on this call or our American cousins later in the day. Thank you once again. We look forward to seeing you for the third quarter. Thank you