Media Buying Briefing: Omnicom Media execs begin their pitch outreach ahead of an expected new-business glut 

“They are doing the rounds at the moment,” said Lucinda Peniston-Baines, co-founder of consultancy Observatory International.

Signs suggest Omnicom’s proposition will lean on data capabilities, a pragmatic approach to tech and AI, and an emphasis on how it can leverage its scale, particularly for principal-based media buying. 

Those top execs will be setting out their pitch amid an expected uptick in media reviews – principally the result of marketers deferring reviews while questions remained Omnicom’s IPG deal, WPP’s restructuring of GroupM and Dentsu’s potential sale of its international business. (Omnicom Media is currently in the midst of juggling at least five different pitches – an unusual time for so much pitch activity around the holidays.)

“It’s going to be a very busy year,” said Ruben Schreurs, CEO of Ebiquity. In particular, marketers within the advertising’s middle class – firms which spend between $150 million-$500 million on media a year – will hope to take advantage of a competitive agency market. 

“They’re seen by the big agencies as a kind of second tier,” said Tom Denford, CEO and co-founder of ID Comms. Their CMOs are well aware they’re not always the priority for agencies also working for the likes of P&Gs and Unilever – but their dollars are still green, and their billings can add up. As such, he expected “incredible competition” among agencies for mid-tier clients (Omnicom/IPG incumbents and otherwise) in the year to come.

Against that context, top Omnicom suits are thinking about how to keep the accounts they already have, and about their strategy for capturing new ones. The stakes are high; rivals are ready to pounce on any internal disruption and tempt away clients feeling left out in the cold. At the same time, Omnicom will be closely watched by shareholders keen to see the returns promised by CEO John Wren materialize.

Wren recently promised in a statement that Omnicom “will be the go-to company that shapes how brands grow, people connect and culture evolves.”

Per Schreurs, next year’s Omnicom proposition will hinge greatly on how its agencies can access Flywheel, and Acxiom and its RealD solution – as well as on its Omni unit as an “operating system” for clients. That’s not surprising to those who’ve been paying attention. The benefits of Acxiom, which Omnicom attempted to acquire back in 2018, have been a common theme during the acquisition process. 

Omnicom’s new muscle in principal-based media buying has been less trumpeted. But clients are interested, said Schreurs. 

“The operating companies are starting to really sell products and solutions, rather than only be intermediaries or brokers,” he noted. Clients, he said, are shedding their historic caution towards the practice. “The market is also coming to terms more with the notion of principal based media… it’s a return to benefiting from buying power.”

In practical terms, that’s meant emphasizing the company’s consultative capabilities. One consultant, who exchanged anonymity for candor, told Digiday this was an area that large clients had greater need for. “There’s more and more things that the brands are asking [agencies] that do not fit neatly into media, creative, data, tech. They need a group on top of that to orchestrate all that and make it come to life,” they said.

CMOs reading agency responses to their spring RFIs will have several critical questions in mind over Omnicom, however.

Clients large enough to take advantage of principal based buying, or that need consultative expertise, will be wondering how Omnicom will definitively set itself apart from Publicis Groupe’s well-oiled pitching machine. The two companies can boast similar scale in media buying, similar staff expertise and comparable tech capabilities.

The anonymous consultant noted Omnicom execs had recently taken a more down-to-earth approach in pitch meetings with clients as a way of setting them themselves apart.

“Omnicom really comes off as the antithesis of Publicis in pitches,” they said. Where the French company’s execs had leaned more on razzle-dazzle, they said Omnicom’s leaders had emphasized outcomes and pragmatic strategies. “They’re quieter… more like business people,” they said.

The stoic approach will not alter the knowledge that major changes — such as smashing together two globe-spanning businesses — take time. “In any big organization, even changing your timesheet provider will take six months,” said Ryan Kangisser, chief strategy officer at MediaSense. “Anyone who suggests that this could be done overnight is maybe more optimistic than me.”

Clients looking for stability, therefore, might have reason to hold back. “It’s not over. The deal is just really the beginning of probably a year or two of further disruption,” said Denford.

Observatory International’s Peniston-Baines noted that, following Omnicom’s culling of its creative networks, questions over competitor conflict might yet arise among CMOs. “There is a lot of a lot of nervousness from the sort of mid-tier clients,” she said.

Finally, marketers will also be keeping an eye on Omnicom’s staffing situation. While Omnicom’s not been unique in making job cuts this year, most observers expect further redundancies down the line – potentially as part of further remodeling within its agency networks. “I would be very surprised if we don’t see consolidation with the media labels in 2026,” said Schreurs. In turn, that could blunt the group’s attractiveness to prospective clients.

As Kangisser succinctly put it: “Talent is still king, contrary to the promise of technology.”

Color by numbers

New forms of ads have crept into the CTV business in the last year, including home-screen ads. According to research from Xumo, a streaming joint venture between Comcast and Charter Communications, since viewers take time to figure out what they’re going to watch, home screen ads have the potential to more than double the likelihood of signups. A recent streaming service campaign on Xumo devices, viewers exposed to home screen ads were 142% more likely to sign up compared to those who did not see them. Other stats: 

• Nearly half (47%) of all signups during the campaign were driven by the home screen units.
• Viewers perceive home screen ads as less disruptive and more engaging. 58% say they fit “seamlessly” into the experience (vs. 50% for standard video ads and 44% for banners). 
• 59% find them “unique and novel,” outperforming both banners (47%) and standard video ads (44%). –Michael Bürgi

Takeoff & landing

• Havas continued its acquisitive tear last week with its acquisition of DIGIZIK, an agency specializing in entertainment, music, and culture based in Belgium. DIGIZIK will be added to Havas Media Network’s experiential marketing arm, Havas Play, which now formally launches in Belgium.
• Horizon Media last week said it launched HorizonOS, what it’s calling the first operating system built on an open ecosystem of partners, but one that emphasizes human intelligence over AI. Simultaneously, the media agency is launching HorizonOS Labs, which will test numerous technologies through the lens of clients, including Orkin and Tropical Smoothie Cafe. It also is employing Sightly technology within its Blu platform.
• Dentsu.Connect, the Japanese holding company’s tech platform, partnered with commerce data platform Attain to access the latter’s consumer information panel to inform Dentsu’s activations.  
• Account moves: Publicis landed media duties for spirits firm Pernod Ricard’s North American media, putting it into a bespoke unit called Publicis Santé, which will also serve Corby Spirit and Wine …. Omnicom secured banker BBVA’s global media and creative duties after a 13-month review. It also landed media duties for retail TK Maxx (the European version of TJ Maxx) in Europe, which had been handled by WPP’s Mindshare. 
• Personnel moves: Omnicom Media Digital tapped Andrew Cambridge to be CEO across Australia and New Zealand, coming over from TikTok, where he was the AUNZ head of agency … Stagwell’s Assembly promoted Bridget Hopkins from COO to CEO of Assembly Europe … Tombras hired Bryan Tilson to be its first COO, coming over from Wieden + Kennedy where he was president of Asia-Pacific … Jesse Eisenberg, Tinuiti’s chief growth officer, left that job to become CEO of creative shop StreetTalk.

Direct quote

“Nearly everyone is working with some form of conversational interface with varied degrees of data fidelity. By 2026, AI will move from supporting media workflows to actively orchestrating them. As these systems take on more decision-making, the industry will confront a hard requirement:  AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on. That’s why independent, cross-platform measurement will become essential – not just to optimize media but to make AI-driven decisions trustworthy at scale.”

— Akhil Parekh, chief product officer, Nielsen

Speed reading

• I dug into the reasons some buyers are hesitating to invest clients’ dollars via The Trade Desk’s Open Path, not as much because of cost but more because of lack of transparency.
• I also looked into the growing ways AI agents have become a focal point for media agencies and brands hoping to move AI tech past potential and into practical benefit.
• Seb Joseph and Michael Bürgi checked in with paper product marketer Georgia-Pacific on its innovative in-house approach to programmatic investment.