Omnicom’s ‘fewer middlemen’ push is reaching publishers – just not their P&Ls

That kind of rhetoric isn’t wholly new to publishers, who have heard versions of “we’re trying to put more money your way” for years. What has changed, according to an exec, is the candor: they had “never heard an agency so openly admit” it is actively steering away from parts of the ad tech chain, before.

Omnicom buyers are also indicating that working with ad tech owned by a publisher “ticks a really big box” as they reassess which partners fit that strategy, said the exec.  

That message is coming across on both sides of the Atlantic, with Omnicom buyers talking more about direct paths to publisher inventory and trimming the number of intermediaries in the chain.

So far though, the impact is more visible in conversations than in the numbers. Publishers aren’t convinced it will translate into a material shift – if any at all – in where the money goes. 

Four execs Digiday spoke to, who asked to remain anonymous to protect relationships, said that any holding group reaffirmations about investing in publisher-owned tech is more politically convenient than anything that could move the needle for publishers. “In all this noise about AI and supply-path clean-up, holding groups still need to be seen to back journalism and publisher initiatives,” said one exec. 

“No agency wants to be the one saying they don’t support publisher-owned ad tech. So rhetorically, it’s a no-brainer – you say you’ll back it. The harder question is how much budget actually follows that rhetoric.”

One senior publisher-side executive breaks the digital ad economy into three competing “pots” of spend.

–At the top sit the platforms: Google, Meta, Amazon, TikTok, Reddit, which operate in their own sealed category and suck up budgets with scale and baked-in outcome metrics.

–The second pot is the agency-owned ad tech layer (agency hold groups typically aggregate white-labelled SSPs and DSPs and data vendors into proprietary stacks). This is where they manufacture margin, by stitching together intermediaries and open-web inventory into packaged products they can sell back to clients, he noted.

–The third pot is traditional publishing and media. While some premium or specialist publishers are seeing more direct spend, most of the real growth is still being fought, and often lost, in those first two pots, long before the money reaches publishers, he added. 

Some see a gap between the narrative and market reality: very few publishers have the kind of stack Omnicom is gesturing at. There are a handful of examples of publisher-owned tech like People Inc’s Decipher, ad platforms like Ozone (backed by the Guardian, News UK and Reach) – and Reach’s own Mantis tech – but the universe of genuine publisher-owned infrastructure that actually strips out fees is tiny. 

“Agencies absolutely want fewer toll booths in the supply chain,” said one supply-side exec. “That means more working dollars and, in some cases, more they can capture themselves. The question is how many publisher setups really remove those fees in a meaningful way.”

One ad tech exec, who exchanged candor for anonymity, said it’s now standard for holding groups like Omnicom to strike joint business plans with major publisher groups, locking in a target spend pot for the year. Typically, that looks like a contractual commitment to grow investment vs. the previous year – for example, aiming to push $10 million through a given publisher group over the course of the year. 

“Then you’ve got to track that, and it’s a giant pain to track that investment when you’re transacting through 17 different DSPs through 40 different SSPs,” he said. “…to the extent the payment can sort of more directly go to the publisher, it just becomes much easier to track progress against these spend endeavors.”

For now, that’s the promise on paper. Until those “easier to track” dollars show up in publisher invoices rather than holding company decks, most media owners will treat it as a familiar story with a new spin.

What’s different this time, at least, is that the people running these companies are saying it explicitly rather than leaving it to a deck. 

Omnicom’s CEO John Wren said in the group’s latest earnings that agentic media buying, where software can negotiate directly with publishers, is how Omnicom intends to reduce that dependency: not necessarily eliminating DSPs and SSPs from the equation, but diminishing the role they play and, with it, the cut they take.

Meanwhile, speaking at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference on May 19, Wren cast this as a competitive necessity, arguing that Omnicom’s Omni platform can increasingly “go direct to publisher connections as opposed to having to go through DSPs and SSPs, adding that this is a strategic imperative to stay competitive.

The comments fit a broader pattern. As holding companies double down on supply-path optimization and talk up “fewer, cleaner pipes,” agencies are re-examining the layers of ad tech they’re willing to pay for, especially where they believe they can in-house capabilities or lean on publisher-owned tools. For publishers, any nudge toward more direct trading is welcome after years of squeezed margins, signal loss and LLMs mining their content without providing proper attribution or remuneration. 

For independent intermediaries, it’s another sign that proof of performance – not just pipes – will determine who survives the cull.

“…Our whole thesis around agentic media is around the idea of shortening the media supply chain,” said Wren at the J.P. Morgan conference. “That doesn’t mean that we’re eliminating every part of the media supply chain, but shortening that path in order to drive a greater percentage of working media dollars for our clients.” 

He added that the primary driver is efficiency, and making its media buys more effective by shortening the supply chain path. “With every hop in the media supply chain and supply path, you lose a certain level of fidelity across the ecosystem, even if you’re using identity solutions,” said Wren. “What we’re able to do in shorting that path is actually increase the fidelity and visibility of consumers that we’re actually targeting, and coupled with our data solution in Acxiom and our identity graph with Real ID, we’re actually, in the tests that we’ve done, we’ve seen significant increases in effectiveness in the areas of the media buys that we’ve done,” he told delegates. 

Shortening the supply chain, in other words, is a precondition for what comes next. Agentic media buying, which Omnicom is already testing with real clients and real dollars, only works cleanly if the supply chain underneath is already simplified. The fewer the hops, the more an agent can execute with speed and precision rather than building cycles navigating intermediaries. 

Seb Joseph contributed to reporting.