Stagwell reported net revenue in the third quarter of $615 million, up 6% from a year ago with a nine-month net revenue total of nearly $1.8 billion, up 7%. 

The firm posted a slight Q3 organic revenue decline of 0.4% with organic growth for the first nine months of 0.6%. Organic growth excludes the impact of M&A and currency.  

Underlying organic growth—excluding advocacy revenues which soared last year during the election cycle—was 3.2% both in Q3 and for the first nine months of the year. 

On an earnings call this morning, CEO Mark Penn also announced that Stagwell has entered into what he called a “groundbreaking” partnership with Palantir Technologies-the data management company-- that will focus on developing an AI-driven platform for marketers designed to increase marketing ROI. 

The new solution pairs Palantir’s Foundry with Code and Theory’s orchestration level software and The Marketing Cloud’s proprietary data sources and solutions. The combination creates what the companies called “state-of-the-art tools for large, complex teams to create and implement marketing programs at scale.” Stagwell said it is also using privacy technology to protect the data.  

While announced today, the companies have been working together for months and the partnership is already seeing client adoption in the US through Stagwell’s media agency Assembly.  

The offering will be rolled out to the broader Stagwell network and clients in the coming months. 

According to Stagwell, the platform allows large enterprises to sift through tens of millions of records to identify, segment, and better understand audiences — helping improve brand performance strategies and maximize overall ROI before launching campaigns. 

 It will be sold as a standalone platform (via Stagwell’s suite of Marketing Cloud products) that companies can use to monitor and enhance their marketing efforts. The platform could also be applied to augment supply chain analysis and solve regionalization problems of large networks, according to the company. 

Penn called the platform the “holy grail of marketing brought to life,” asserting that it enables clients to “enhance their marketing processes utilizing advanced targeting and AI capabilities so that data can be used and implemented to increase bottom-line results.”  

The potential is also huge for Stagwell: Penn said that in the coming years the platform could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue.  

Penn told analysts that the company would be diverting much of its M&A budget to investments in technology and AI in the foreseeable future. 

In October Stagwell announced that it acquired a 31% stake in Real Clear Holdings, publisher of the RCP Poll Averages, news publication RealClearPolitics, and 12 other news and analysis sites. On today’s earnings call Penn said that Stagwell would be helping RCP to “re-engineer” its sites to significantly upgrade their monetization potential. 

Noting the company’s growth in recent years, Penn said the firm’s top-25 clients contribute about $28 million on average to the company’s coffers. “We’ve seen tremendous growth,” Penn said.  

Pictured above left to right: Stagwell CFO Ryan Greene, Penn, and investor relations head Ben Allanson discussing Q3 earnings on a conference call today.