‘People want to follow her’: Jacki Kelley, the IPG exec tasked with retaining clients through Omnicom merger

But whether she wants the spotlight or not, sources point to her relentless work ethic and emotional intelligence as essential ingredients to her winning and keeping the trust of clients.

It remains to be seen whether she can keep them on board by the time Omnicom’s acquisition closes, expected sometime in the second half of this year. So far, all other hurdles, from shareholder approval to regulatory scrutiny (no challenges have been raised — yet) have been cleared.

Should it go ahead, John Wren and Philippe Krakowsky, respective holdco chiefs, will likely lead the headlines. But the success of that merger rests upon the work of a much larger cast of characters, including Kelley — a respected figure on IPG’s side, but one who’s consciously stayed out of the limelight to date, in part because she just wants to do her job.

Here’s what some of her former colleagues and competitors have to say about the former advertising outsider turned media veteran and her approach to her sometimes-fraught brief..

Kelley’s career

Though Kelley’s known as a veteran of the agency world, she started her career on the other side of the advertising aisle. She spent 18 years at USA Today, joining as an intern in the circulation department in 1988 and eventually leaving as a senior vice president.

“She was very driven but also really fun, and probably one of the most emotionally intelligent people I’ve ever met,” recalled Janet Lewis, a former sales executive who worked with Kelley during the USA Today days.

Amid the pressure cooker environment of a national newspaper’s sales department, Kelley honed a hands-on approach to the work of client management and sales as well as an “impeccable Rolodex” of contacts. Lewis added: “She was willing to change things but in a way that made people want to follow her.”

Later gigs included stints at Yahoo! and Martha Stewart’s media company, as well as a chief operating officer role at business publisher Bloomberg.

“She’s strategic and thoughtful, but also very comfortable rolling up her sleeves and getting things done,” said Elizabeth Harz, a colleague of Kelley’s at Yahoo! and now CEO of behavioral analytics firm Awareness Tech.

Agency life came later. In the first of two stretches within Interpublic Group (IPG), starting in 2009, she rose from a role as president of Universal McCann (UM)’s North American business to running IPG’s Mediabrands network in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

Marketing consultant and former L’Oréal exec Benjamin Lord, then a social media executive at IPG Mediabrands, was an informal mentee of Kelley’s during her first run at the holding company.

A still-fresh arrival in the U.S. (Lord is French), he recalled Kelley inviting him for a one-on-one session in her office. “I thought she was going to ask to review my work. Instead it was: ‘who are you? Where are you from? Where were you born?’ Getting to know you as a person,” he recalled. Kelley had a knack for forging and maintaining relationships, Lord said. “That’s how you build an empire,” he added.

She joined Dentsu between 2019 and 2023, acting as its chief client officer and CEO in the Americas region, before returning to IPG and her current role in June 2023.

One former colleague, now a senior executive at a rival holding company who exchanged anonymity for candor, told Digiday: “She possesses an unparalleled ability to cut through the layers of complexity and innumerable opinions and roadblocks [that] exist internally to solve business challenges. During her tenure on the sales side, she had an almost intuitive grasp of clients’ needs, a quality that she carried into her leadership roles at IPG’s media division and later at Dentsu, both of which benefited immensely from her insightful and solution-driven approach.“

In the pitch room, Kelley stays in the background, according to Tom Denford, co-founder and CEO of pitch consultant ID Comms, with deep connections in the industry. As a new business winner, she’s humble — and when the losses come, level-headed. “She’s been on the wrong end of some big decisions, but didn’t even blink. She just goes:  “OK, give me the scoring. How did it go?”,” said Denford.

“Pitches get pretty heavy and pretty serious. There’s always twists and turns,” he added. “What I like about Jacki is there’s no sense of desperation … Most agency leadership is a bit hyper. Everything’s an over-claim, an over-sell. She just doesn’t overplay it. She’s very realistic about what is capable and what’s not.”

‘She’s definitely in the mix’

Her return to IPG came at a tense time for the American owner of McCann, MullenLowe and FCB, as well as data giant Acxiom. In the last 18 months, it’s shed established agency brands like Huge, R/GA and Deutsch NY (it retained the latter agency’s Los Angeles business) and struggled to make gains in the market. And at the end of 2024 larger rival Omnicom unveiled a deal to acquire the holdco, in a move that will create the largest advertising services group on the planet.

Omnicom’s bid to acquire IPG has upped the stakes for Kelley’s role. There’s a lot of ways a corporate merger can miss the mark, but shedding clients along the way is one of the surest routes to failure.

“If you haven’t got your clients and you haven’t got your people, you haven’t got a business,” said Barry Dudley, partner at M&A advisory Green Square. 

The work of reassuring clients is an “ongoing” task for agencies going through a merger, he said, and a “bloody important” one at that.

Assuming the deal goes through, that work will continue inside a new holding company going through a tectonic shift. It’ll take years for the dust to settle on shaken-up agency brands, data units and client domains.

Per Harz, it’s an environment that Kelley, with her background in sales and experience within both publishers and agencies, is likely better suited to than company lifers. “She has seen what good looks like and what bad looks like,” she said.

And once the dust has settled, and inquiring minds turn to the merged agency group’s future leadership, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Kelley emerge from the back of the room. (WPP boss Mark Read, you’ll recall, had a background in client services prior to the top job).

“She’s definitely in the mix,” speculated Denford. Execs at Omnicom haven’t said what the exact new leadership structure will look like.

Should succession become a possibility, Kelley’s former colleagues told Digiday it’s one the executive would bring her trademark workrate, empathy and consensus-building into. 

“I don’t think I would ever go back to the agency world,” said Lord. “But I would definitely do it for someone like her.”

Michael Bürgi contributed to this report. This article has been updated to clarify IPG’s sale of Deutsch NY.