Omnicom strikes partnerships with PayPal and X as its ‘live’ blitz at Cannes Lions continues

Starting with the X partnership, Omnicom is looking to take advantage of the fact that X is working to attract more creators and influencers, given its clout as a major second-screen hub. X has already solidified its status as a real-time reflector of trends too — both elements that Omnicom is looking to tap into, according to Megan Pagliuca, Omnicom Media Group North America’s chief product officer. 

“What’s really different here is the role X plays as this cultural epicenter where we’re able to take this trends data, fuse it with audiences, fuse it with our elements of culture, use it for both brand creative execution on X and then also use it for influencer discovery and influencer activation,” said Pagliuca.

Here’s how the partnership, currently active in the U.S. only,  works: X’s API data and Trends API are fed into Omni, Omnicom’s open operating system. Omni then matches the signals to find moments that work for an Omnicom client to attach itself to. The audience segments and corresponding trends by audience are both used to plan activations, which are pushed back into X for influencer discovery. Finally, all the insights gleaned are fed back into Omni’s Influencer Discovery Agent, an AI-powered agentic tool that identifies influencers and creators with the most impact on consumer engagement and performance, based on multiple criteria including audience match and cultural relevance. 

Similar to Omnicom’s earlier Cannes announcements this week with Meta and Walmart before it, the Influencer Discovery Agent keeps amassing more knowledge with each deal the holdco makes, because it’s collecting input from all the major platforms where influencers and creators reach their audiences, and ostensibly getting smarter with each new input. 

“What I’m most excited about here is looking at what moments of culture are being engaged with on X, and how we could use that to inform the content that those influencers are producing,” added Kevin Blazaitis, U.S. president of Creo, Omnicom Media Group’s influencer arm. “You have a very active base of niche communities — identifying the right voices of those. We’re excited to have our data play a larger role, to again expand voices and have that many to many communication.”

“This partnership is a prime example of how we help marketers take advantage of key moments, conversations and live moments taking place on our platform,” said Monique Pintarelli, X’s head of the Americas. 

Zaryn Sidhu, OMG’s svp of social for North America, shot down any notion that the holdco might have lingering concerns over X’s recent history of eroding brand-safety efforts, citing Omnicom’s CASA efforts at ensuring brand safety protocols. “X iis actually on par in terms of controls and partner verification,” said Sidhu. “We have adjacency and placement controls even down to the keyword level. We have third-party post-bid and pre-bid verification capabilities. We have content violation reporting.”

Omnicom today will also unveiled a partnership with PayPal, which centers on attaching the finance app’s cross-merchant transactional data to OMG’s streaming TV inventory curation. OMG’s negotiated deals and curated supply paths are overlaid with PayPal’s transactional and purchase data via Magnite’s and Pubmatic’s SSPs, enabling Omnicom clients to bid on both live and pre-recorded streaming inventory based on purchase data as a means of connecting with their audiences as effectively as possible.

Available in the U.S. in coming weeks before rolling out internationally, the arrangement lets OMG tap a vast transaction data set that also includes Venmo and Honey — two other payment platforms PayPal has that contribute to its transaction graph. It’s estimated some 430 million consumers use one of them, giving PayPal a 45% share of the global payments market, with $1.68 trillion in total payment volume in 2024.

“Live TV has long made it difficult for brands to reach the right audience in real time,” said Mark Grether, svp and general manager of PayPal Ads. “Bringing our technologies together and connecting transaction data with Live TV inventory improves the efficiency of awareness campaigns.”

“The ability to understand what users are shopping across merchants in this first party, deterministic data set, means we can pair the scale of PayPal and their transaction graph and their data with the Omnicom Media Group negotiated rates and inventory capabilities,” said Keagan McDonnell, senior director of product innovation and partnerships at OMG North America. “We believe that’s a very powerful use case in the market.”

Cox Automotive, an Omnicom client, is tapping into the data to more carefully target its streaming ad efforts. “This collaboration allows us to reach automotive audiences built on signals from PayPal’s extensive network of merchant partners, merging precision and scale,” said Jillian Davis, director of marketing technology at the client, which includes the Auto Trader and Kelly Blue Book brands. “By pairing PayPal transaction data with Omnicom’s media curation strategies, we can reach these hyper-relevant audiences without sacrificing inventory quality.”