Omnicom quietly moves Flywheel into the media group

Gambino replaces Duncan Painter who is leaving the company to pursue other opportunities. At the same time, Alex McCord, who has been Flywheel’s CEO, was named head of Omnicom Commerce — now that Flywheel is moving under Adamski.

However, no executives were made available to comment or elaborate on the move.

But what does all this musical chairs and shifting of units actually mean for the marketplace? Since Omnicom declined to elaborate, Jay Pattisall, vp and senior agency analyst at Forrester, said he believes this is about taking the outcomes-driven knowledge Flywheel has gained and Omni has helped enable, to inform an investment machine that could benefit from it.

“Commerce media is becoming a specialty” in the media marketplace, said Pattisall, “And Flywheel is quite adept at it, being one of the largest, if not the largest, buyers of media on Amazon … But it wasn’t spent in the way that we think about traditional reach and frequency. They optimize and maximize that media more like a hedge fund would with investment dollars.”

The move within Omnicom “illustrates that Omnicom is aggressively pursuing the ability to tie closed loop attribution together [of] the Flywheel commerce and purchase and sales signals with upper funnel audience signals” on which Omnicom Media trades, said Pattisall. “Understanding where media that is directed to upper and mid funnel, and how that’s creating outcomes based upon transactional data and commerce data — that’s kind of interesting in the way that that could work together.”

The analyst was aware of how much Painter traveled during his Omnicom tenure, and wasn’t surprised to hear Painter is taking a job back in his native England. On his LinkedIn page, Painter already lists his current job as CEO of ATC plc, a British operator of online auction marketplaces — not unlike what he’s done at Flywheel and Omnicom Commerce.

Since Omnicom bought Flywheel from Ascential in 2023 for $835 million, it’s become a major element in the holdco’s commerce ambitions. And Omni has grown into a central nervous system that connects all Omnicom units — and is now fed by Acxiom data, now that Acxiom is owned by the holdco after acquiring IPG last year.

Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect that Omni remains a standalone unit within the holding company