Five Reasons Why... Omnicom Is Uniting Its Creative Agencies

Omnicom has brought together some of its biggest creative agency names - including BBDO, DDB, TBWA and the Advertising Collective - under the leadership of former TBWA chief executive Troy Ruhanen. The group will be known as the Omnicom Advertising Group (OAG) and is designed to accelerate investment in tools, technologies and AI platforms to evolve Omnicom's creative offering.

Sitting within OAG will also be agencies such as Goodby Silverstein & Partners, GSD&M, Merkley & Partners and Zimmerman, with a leadership team comprised of Nancy Reyes, global CEO of BBDO, Alex Lubar, global CEO of DDB, Erin Riley, CEO of TBWA\Worldwide, Denis Streiff as global chief finance officer and James Fenton, CEO of the Advertising Collective.

“OAG will make the best even better,” promised Ruhanen in announcing the new structure.

Meanwhile, Omnicom chairman and CEO, John Wren said that it would meet clients' demand for access to best-in-class talent, innovation and the delivery of creative services around the globe.

Five reasons why Omnicom has created the Omnicom Advertising Group

• Evolving The Siloed Model: The shake-up allows Omnicom to evolve its creative offer, which has been siloed across agency brands for decades, and pool its global talent in the service of its client base, under one collective leadership. It will offer creative solutions on a scale unseen previously, and while OAG will retain each of the individual agency brands, it will allow them to share experience and knowledge.

  John Wren said: “While we are excited to grow together, we will continue to celebrate and protect the uniqueness of each agency’s culture and entrepreneurship. OAG will deliver on that promise while allowing our agency cultures to remain strong and evolve through shared investments and best practices. With Troy at the helm of this new division, I’m confident our creative agencies and all our incredibly talented minds will continue to set the bar for the industry.” Ruhanen added: "While we are excited to grow together, we will continue to celebrate and protect the uniqueness of each agency’s culture and entrepreneurship.”

• Driving Technological Consistency: Omnicom has been heavily investing in technological solutions internally and has developed its own artificial intelligence powered platform Omni which the Media Group began to share across PHD, OMG and OMD at the beginning of last year. The same investments will now be true for the creative agencies, allowing talent access that platform and to work consistently across the board. “One of the most exciting parts of this new division is that we can collectively invest in innovative offerings – such as Omnicom’s recent first-mover partnerships in GenAI,” said Ruhanen. “This will take our world-class creativity to the next level and keep our clients at the top of their industries."

• Meeting Clients' Needs: With over over 5,000 existing clients in more than 70 countries, the individual agencies and teams will continue to service the brand owners they currently work with, but from January 1 next year those teams will have access to far greater resources than they did previously. While revealing Omnicom's latest results figures, Wren explained: “With the rapid adoption of Gen AI, creativity and talent matter more than ever to address the breadth and complexity of consumers.  To serve our clients with the best, most advanced capabilities, we continue to strategically align our agencies and invest in robust data and technology, scaled content and production, e-commerce, and retail and performance media – all embedded in our industry-leading Omni platform.”

• Maximising Its Biggest Asset: Talent: Not only does OAG allow heavyweight leadership talent like Lubar, Reyes, Riley and Fenton to better collaborate, it also gives more clients more access to talent. Where teams from one agency network have developed unique approaches or platforms, those learnings will now be more easily spread across all the creative networks, while talent can more easily move between networks or 'lend' their expertise to sister agencies to meet specific client or business challenges.

• Competing With A Rampant Publicis Groupe: This shake-up will help to simplify Omnicom as a group and will be expected to improve the financial performance of the business even further. In its last quarter earnings, it revealed organic growth of 5.2 per cent, generating revenue of £2.95 billion ($3.9 billion) which is strong but still trails that of high-flying rival Publicis Groupe which reported growth of 5.6 per cent; Publicis has been pursuing a group structure under its Power Of One banner for almost a decade and despite early criticism of the strategy the Groupe's performance has proved the case.

As arguably the holding company most respectful of the independence of its creative agency brands, Omnicom will have been weighing this move very carefully. But as market conditions continue to bring challenges and new technology continues to offer significant opportunities, simplifying and streamlining their offerings is becoming non-negotiable for every holding company. No-one expects the shape of the industry to look the same in five years time and for Omnicom this seems a very sensible next step on the road to transformation.