Future of Marketing Briefing: The tells and flops that will define Omnicom-IPG mega holdco

Everything else is commentary. 

Here’s how to separate the signal from it. 

The real tech integration (or the Acxiom graveyard tell)

The whole pitch hinges on marrying Omnicom’s Omni platform with IPG’s crown jewel, Acxiom. Omni is the operating layer, Acxiom is the dense, famously hard-to-harmonize data spine IPG staked its future on in 2018. If this merger has teeth, this is where it shows up. 

The tell: Acxiom stops operating as a standalone commercial entity. No separate P&L, no parallel sales structure. Its components get absorbed into Omni’s framework and its identity resolution becomes a baseline capability across every Omnicom and legacy IPG shop. Not a premium add-on, or bespoke project — just part of the system. 

The flop: If, 18 months from now, Acxiom is still a “preferred partner” with its own separate sales funnel and a labyrinth of integration requirements. That would signal a cosmetic acquisition. In agency terms, it’s buying the library and keeping the books in storage.

The great agency branding purge (or the ‘too many kitchens’ tell)

Omnicom and IPG each hold overlapping creative and media networks, assembled over years to avoid client conflict and preserve internal fiefdoms. That sprawl has become untenable.

The tell: The headline creative networks shrinks to forum at most. Picture BBDO and TBWa on one side, McCann and FCB on the other mid-tier banners absorbed into them — or pushed into a quiet conflict management unit that handles the scraps. That’s the restrained version. The bolder, cleaner move is to collapse the whole structure down to two. Either way, the logic points in one direction: fewer kitchens, tighter menus. 

The flop: All the legacy brands stay alive to soothe egos and sidestep awkward client calls, leaving a tangle of global presidents into a co-chief operating officer. It’s the holdco version of a house with too many kitchens — the same ingredients, the same recipes and agencies still competing for the same briefs.

The client hunger games (or the ‘one bill’ tell)

CMOs have no appetite for multiple global contracts, overlapping audits and fractured accountability across media, creative and PR. They want simplicity and one owner of outcomes. 

The tell: A top tier client signs a unified contract with the combined entity — a single P&L covering media, creative and PR, backed by one bonus pool tied to business results like sales or market share. That structure forces true cross-network alignment.

The flop: A clean, early indicator will show up in the client roster. If Publicis or WPP lands a top 20 account that cites “integration uncertainty” on the way out, that’s the tell. A blue-chip IPG advertiser decamping over those concerns would validate the skeptics, It would mark the merger not as a strategic win but as a self-inflicted opening for rivals disciplined enough to keep their own operations stable.

The internal brain drain (or the operator tell)

The headline number for the deal — $750 million in “synergies — is shorthand for sizable back-office cuts. The real measure sits elsewhere whether the combined organization can hold onto the people clients actually follow. This is where the merger either protects the product or hollows it out.

The tell: A year after close, the new entity still has managed to keep hold of most of IPG’s top 100 creative and media revenue leaders. That means the global presidents, regional CEOs and the top creative leadership inside McCann FCB, Initiative and the rest of the high-output  networks. If you buy a competitor, you keep the parts of the product that made it competitive. 

A flop: A steady drip of high-profile departures — to holding company rivals or the hungrier independents — becomes the story. The worst-case version is a signature network losing its global CEO or chief operating officer, followed by a quick merger, fold-in or quiet retirement of the brand. If that happens at a place like DDB or McCann, it mark something deeper: the cultural scaffolding that was supposed to survive the deal has given way and the message to the market is simple — nothing is off-limits. 

The procurement death match (or the zero margin tell)

Scale at this level is designed to unlock financial leverage. That puts procurement — inside the holdco and inside the client — on a collision course. The pitch is better pricing. The risk is a quality slide masked as efficiency.

The tell: The merged group strikes unified global deals with its five biggest media owners — Meta, Google, NBCU among them — that deliver a meaningful margin lift in year one, with half of that improvement verifiably flowing back to clients. This is the core economic rationale for consolidation. If blue chip advertisers see real, documented savings, the scale is delivering what it promised.  

The flop: Client audits uncover a widening gap between what the central trading arm captures and what clients actually receive as savings. The darkest version is a global buying system that becomes another opaque margin engine — higher internal take, no commensurate drip in fees and a degrading fee-to-quality ratio. That’s the point where clients push back, no matter how big the combined entity becomes.

The signals driving Jonathan Chanti’s vision for Reign Maker Group

Jonathan Chanti built Reign Maker Group on a simple diagnosis: the traditional influencer marketing agency model is buckling under its own assumptions. It borrowed the operating logic of Hollywood, but the creator economy behaves more like a fluid media marketplace. That gap has become the fatal flow.  

His argument is straightforward. The old model can’t keep up with a landscape defined by fragmentation, sluggish deal cycles, uneven professionalism and a workflow built for talent agents rather than creators. The future, as he frames it, sits in a structure designed to fix those load-bearing issues — one built around speed, clarity and alignment with how creators actually run their businesses. It explains the rationale behind a recent strategic partnership Chanti struck with Paradigm Talent Agency. 

Digiday caught up with Chanti to unpack how he plans to build what believes comes next. 

What is Reign Maker Group trying to do?

This whole thing is built to answer the fragmentation and efficiency that have made the creator space feel like chaos. Traditional agencies keep trying to shove creators into Hollywood-era systems but creators operate like media companies — fast, iterative and entrepreneurial. We build a structure that mirrors how the market actually works. On the buy side, brands get specialists who can execute with precision. On the sell side, managers get the infrastructure and partnership they’ve never had. And in the middle, we’re educating the next generation so the industry doesn’t collapse under its own weight. If we consolidate the relationships, professionalize the management layer and bring creators, brands and talent under one coordinated roof, the whole ecosystem gets faster, cleaner and more valuable for everyone. 

Why are managers so important to the plan? 

Managers are the real engine of this entire business. They’re the ones with the relationships, the deal flow, the trust of the talent and the day-to-day responsibility of making creators successful. The velocity and volume of this market put the leverage squarely with the people on the ground, A great manager can triple their value in months because the demand is nonstop and the margins are real. The problem is they’ve never had the infrastructure or the ownership to match the impact they have. That’s why I’m betting on them. If you empower managers as entrepreneurs, give them rails, capital and support, and consolidate their relationships, you unlock the cleanest, most scalable path to talent, performance and growth in the industry.

So you feel the market is ripe for consolidation?

The future of this business is about collapsing the distance between creators, brands and the people who represent them. We’re only at 2% of global marketing spend, which means we’re still in the first inning, and the companies that win will be the ones that can deliver the scale without losing precision. My plan is to keep building a system where the buy side and sell side inform each other in real time where managers get real infrastructure, brands get direct access to talent and creators get the support needed to stay relevant in a market that moves at light speed. That’s why we’re expanding, investing , bringing in partners like Paradigm and creating a true ecosystem. If we keep removing friction, professionalizing the system and consolidating the pieces that matter, we can turn this space into a mainstream, multi-billion dollar channel.

Numbers to know

41% of AI-driven conversations now surface brand names without any prompt and a third go as far as offering specific product recommendations, according to Tinuiti.

$270 billion: The amount of money OpenAI expects to make from ChatGPT subscriptions by 2023. 

68%: The percentage of respondents in the IAB latest study, which surveyed over 79 respondents, who flagged the lack of cross-platform data access as the most pressing challenge in terms of addressability.

$622: What U.S. consumers are expected to spend on average between Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping events, per a Deloitte survey of over 1,200 shoppers. 

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