2 The single brand emphasizes our shared heritage in creative content and data & digital For us, this is a big growth area. In our early companies will look after the back office. days, we looked at several big data companies, What we offer is that in surrendering your brand but we thought they were overpriced, and you become truly part of something bigger. so we concentrated on building our own And you have more space in doing that. If you capability through merging with around half a want to develop social inside the company, or if dozen smaller analytics companies, including you want to expand into the Americas, then you Digodat in Argentina, Datalicious in Korea and can do that. The companies we merge with do Australia, Brightblue in the UK; now we have so for four reasons. They want access to peak our own worldwide network. The challenge talent; and on that score we have 8,400 digital for clients is that they have pools of first-party specialists. They want access to geography; data that still aren’t integrated. Either they’ve so we’ve made it possible for almost anybody grown organically and they’ve had CIOs or to plug into our platform around the world. CMOs developing different systems; or they’ve They want access to capital, which we have, acquired companies with data systems that (albeit not in unlimited supply). And they want don’t talk to one another. Their challenge is to access to clients. Whilst we can’t promise bring all that data together; the opportunity for that they’ll win business we can help to us is to be the system advisor and integrator develop those relationships so they have and help them make sure that the data lakes every opportunity to do so. flow into one another. Shape shifting The one and only As a company our business is currently Our unification strategy to bring all our segmented two-thirds content, and businesses together under the ‘dot monks’ one-third data & analytics and digital brand is now fully implemented. Wes ter media. Technology services will be small Haar took the lead and did a brilliant job in initially, but we’ll try to expand it rapidly. execution. (Others have struggled to bring From a geographical point of view, the split is even two brands together.) And that was approximately 70% The Americas, 20% EMEA because we spent a lot of time on it, working and 10% Asia Pacific. By that measure I’d like with our entrepreneurial leaders and our key to get to a 60/20/20 breakdown. So we need to clients. MediaMonks and MightyHive became do a lot more in technology services and put Media.Monks with a dynamic logo featuring more weight into Asia Pacific. I’d like to double MightyHive’s iconic hexagon. As a branding up, triple up, maybe even quadruple up in device it gives us great flexibility in how we China – and India is also as important. But one can apply it. You can be anything.monks: tech. of our biggest commercial concerns remains: monks, lux.monks, data.monks, even China. how do you viably operate in the world’s monks. It’s a great way of expressing what you second biggest economy, an economy that are doing. The single brand emphasizes our will soon be the biggest? China has changed; shared heritage in creative content and data President Xi is pursuing a different course, a & digital and brings together our 8,400 digital- much more hardline course, just as Presidents first experts under one roof, working as a single Obama, Trump and Biden have done from P&L across 33 countries. Unification is not an the US side, which means the countries are easy thing to do. When the holding companies diverging in a dangerous way. make acquisitions, the trade is: you retain your autonomy and independence, and the holding S4Capital Annual Report and Accounts 2021 45