Intended or not, the new Omnicom will forever change agencies as we’ve known them

CEO John Wren’s quote doubled down on that new reality: “Omnicom is setting a new standard for modern marketing and sales leadership – creating stronger brands, delivering superior business outcomes, and driving sustainable growth.” 

Notice the word sales? Last we checked, sales isn’t part of what an agency does for its clients (save when it’s pitching to win new business). But this is the new reality for holdcos – it’s about amassing scale to deliver principal media in mass quantities, and even selling inventory to its clients on behalf of media companies.  

“They no longer act solely as partners delivering client-centric services,” noted Jay Pattisall, vp and senior agency analyst at Forrester. “They also operate as merchants reselling proprietary media and software … Put simply, your agency is no longer just an agency.” 

Tom Denford, owner of ID comms, a marketing consultancy, goes even farther, describing a world in which the Big Three (Omnicom, WPP and Publicis) negotiate exclusive media deals with major properties now that they’ve made principal media a bastion of their business.

“They’re making more money as a seller than any kind of agency. So the idea of them being agencies, that’s gone – it’s a point of no return,” said Denford. “The next part of it, which, again, holding companies have in private acknowledged, is, if you’ve got those three and they’re trying to dominate the reselling of media, then the logical next step, we think, is for those groups leveraging their scale to try to create some level of exclusivity, some exclusive access” to media properties. 

Will Publicis become the exclusive sales partner of the NFL in three years? To Denford, that’s not out of the realm of possibility. But it certainly means marketers will have to rethink how they pick an “agency” to help place the billions of media spend they have. And that translates to non-exclusive contracts with the holdcos to ensure their advertising lands in the right places. 

It’s why he says the word marketers need to look out for is “outcomes” — it means agencies will do whatever they need behind the scenes to make their nut. “Buyer beware here,” he explained. “When agencies start talking about ‘only pay us for outcomes,’ that sounds awesome. What it really means is you’re not going to see what we buy the inventory for.”

Whether that’s where the industry’s new No. 1 holdco is going remains to be seen. 

 What about the rest of the business?

Besides all that — and it’s not an insignificant change to the way media has been bought and sold for the last 80 years — somehow the acquisition’s closure seems anti-climactic. Sure, the two companies have labored to clear regulatory hurdles all over the world. They’ve quietly worked to sketch out how they will merge – and where $75O million in cost-savings can be found – even if internally some have been heard to mumble “People, we’ve had a year to figure this out” at the end of planning meetings. 

Ruben Schreurs, Ebiquity’s group CEO, wonders how that number will be reached, if as Omnicom’s leaders have said, revenue generating roles will be left untouched for now. “Will that impact the trading teams of both of the agency networks as well as finance, legal, HR, etc? or is it really purely non-revenue generating functions that’s kind of up in the air?” Schreurs asked

Here’s what we know about the new alpha in the agency pecking order. First off, make no mistake — Omnicom is the acquirer here, and when the time comes for brands to merge or shut down, and for personnel to get trimmed, it will more likely be the IPG side that feels it worse. With one major exception: it seems the DDB brand has been earmarked for demolition, per earlier reports.

Although it’s a safe bet that IPG’s Initiative media agency brand will survive in the long-term — several consultants and agency execs reached for this story said they feel it’s the strongest of the media agency brands within IPG — no such promises should be made when in total, Omnicom will have six media agency groups. Denford, in a recent video he made for his clients, noted “by anyone’s standards [six] is too much.” 

How painful will the absorption be?

Acquired companies often take months to truly bed into a parent group, and an absorption of this size could take much longer to settle. But Omnicom’s leadership will want to get the harder tasks on their to-do list out of the way fast.

“The key objective for [Omnicom-IPG] over the next two weeks is to convince the market that this is not the start of the second episode of disruption for those two agencies,” said Schreurs. “They will want to signal continuity, stability and fast integration so that their clients can start to benefit from the groups’ coming together.”

“They need to be able to demonstrate that one plus one equals three, and quickly,” noted Ryan Kangisser, chief strategy officer at MediaSense. “So there’s no use going to the market saying we’re going to do all this, and we’re going to take out all these savings, if it’s not actually contributing to net new revenue.”

Given the global scope of both holdcos, multiple regions’ regulatory approval was required.  Unlike the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), European regulators chose not to apply any conditions to a greenlight. Back in summer, the FTC approved the deal, but added conditions which constrain the combined holding company’s ability to steer clients around politically sensitive media, granting the U.S. government leverage over the flow of ad dollars to publishers.

How the competition sees the deal

Strange as it may sound, some independents actually hold out hope — but they aren’t holding their breath — that the consolidation into three major holdcos will actually help them stiffen their backs against strong-arm tactics by major clients.

“The potential silver lining is, with one less competitor going after some of these clients, the work may end up improving over time,” said David Dweck, president of Go Fish. “Because my hope is that between Publicis, Omnicom and WPP, they’re able to collectively hold the line a bit better when it comes to fee reductions and procurement to actually provide better work to clients.” 

Whether or not that pans out (and Dweck is certainly skeptical despite the optimism above), it’s now clear that the differences between Omnicom (and its immediate rivals) and adland’s indie shops extend to far more than measures of scale. Major advertising companies no longer rely on the diversity of their portfolios to win and keep clients, but in coordination directed from the center. 

“The notion of holding companies is disappearing,” said Ebiquity’s Schreurs. “It’s not about a portfolio of separate, distinct entities anymore. The big prize … is to be an operating company with an AI factory at the heart of it, which brings together the data capabilities and other IP with consultative and the execution capabilities.”

Added MediaSense’s Kangisser: “There’s scaled media, but there’s also scaled data, and that, arguably, is just as valuable to clients. It’s almost becoming the new version of scale, let alone just that of lower priced media buying.”