Omnicom strikes partnerships at Cannes Lions with Disney and Walmart around harnessing live

The Disney partnership centers around live sports, with the holding company working with Disney in concert with The Trade Desk to programmatically take advantage of big moments in live sports events for Omnicom clients. Think a major call in an NFL game or a clutch basket to tie a college hoops game — Omnicom is hoping to help clients take advantage of those moments in real time through programmatic access. 

“It’s about the opportunity to create more addressability, more personalization, and more relevance within live,” said Megan Pagliuca, North American chief product officer at Omnicom Media Group, about what she described as a first-mover partnership. She noted that Disney only started making live available programmatically in late 2024. “Our ability to then personalize and make more relevant the ad experience within live is what’s really exciting about this.”

Charlie Cebuhar, North American managing director of programmatic at OMG, said Disney’s introduction of “Magic Words” is a helpful tool in giving clients the chance to make use of these moments, and OMG is building a custom algorithm for it. Test results are expected in the next few weeks. OMG is “Ingesting those contextual signals, whether it be a lead change, a turnover, a goal, a touchdown, that would indicate some of those high attention, high engagement moments, and then valuing them accordingly based on those signals,” Cebuhar said.

“By leveraging this advanced live streaming technology and decisioning, we’re tapping into key real-time, high attention-driving game moments so that we show up where and when viewers are the most engaged,” said Alyson Griffin, head of marketing at OMG client State Farm, a heavy sports advertiser. “This gives us the ability to seamlessly be part of the viewer’s experience while strategically maximizing both our advertising’s impact and effectiveness.”

Added Jamie Power, Disney’s svp of addressable: ““We’re excited about the growth of live streaming because it lets advertisers engage in high attention moments—with real-time impact. Tools like Magic Word enable brands to show up when it matters most.”

Even Jed Dederick, CRO at The Trade Desk, sees long-term potential in what the holdco and media company are doing. “Disney and OMG are innovating the ways advertisers are buying premium content on the open internet, and that’s especially true in live sports,” he said. 

Omnicom’s second partnership at Cannes Lions on Day One, with Walmart this time, taps into the power of influencers, focusing on those with a proven track record in driving purchases. OMG is getting first-mover access to Walmart audiences (which is how Walmart refers to customer purchase data) that will be used to accelerate discovery of influencers that have proven their ability to drive purchases on Walmart and Walmart Live.

According to OMG research upon which the holdco’s efforts around live have been formed, 49% of consumers make regular purchases based on recommendations from influencers, while half of Gen Z and Millennials report making a purchase based on a single influencer post. The research also showed that just under one-fourth of all consumers are watching live shopping events. We’re a long way from QVC here. 

The arrangement goes like this: Walmart audiences are matched against influencers’ followers made available to OMG by agreement with social platforms, beginning with TikTok (but others to follow). Creators with followings that match against Walmart audiences are then fed into Omni’s Influencer Discovery Agent as an index. (The Influencer Discovery Agent factors into several partnerships Omnicom is announcing this week, and serves as a growing knowledge database on influencers with all the data it’s taking in.)

Here’s where Omnicom’s Creo influencer arm comes into play, by taking that index to identify creators who move Walmart customers to click the purchase button.

“It’s becoming more commonplace [for consumers] to buy because an influencer [them] to do so, and those behaviors that are taking place are really collapsing that purchase funnel,” said Kevin Blazaitis, U.S. president of Creo. “We’re thinking about how to really capitalize on that and use that gain and efficiency to tie creators to commerce as often as we can.”

Keagan McDonnell, senior director of product innovation at OMG North America, explained how the arrangement works. OMG’s brand teams partner with Walmart Connect teams to first understand the target audiences that a client wants to reach, based on purchase data. From there, those audiences are matched to social platform data to identify creators whose followers align with that target Walmart audience. Then that data match allows Creo to identify creators with the same precision that informs audience targeting across other Walmart Connect retail media channels.

“We’re really intrigued by retail media’s potential to bring its audience targeting capabilities and accountability to influencer marketing, from our tests with Walmart Creator to strategic partnerships like this with Omnicom,” said Ryan Mayward, svp of sales at Walmart Connect. “Likewise, we’re exploring how influencer content can boost retail media campaigns – something else we’re testing with influencer agencies like Creo to inform how we expand our broader influencer content strategy.” 

Given that Walmart counts for something like 150 million weekly customers, in stores and online, and that 10.6% of all North American e-commerce sales are Walmart transactions, according to OMG, it makes sense that advertisers are onboard, and one — Noosa Yoghurt, has already kicked the tires. 

The partnership “enables [us] to identify and partner with the right creators to create and amplify content that is anchored in true shopper purchase data,” said Emily Black, senior director of marketing, Noosa Yoghurt. “As the first brand to activate this new capability, we’re eager to explore the full range of insights and opportunities.”