Disruption is the new normal for advertising holding groups as merger maths, integration and changing client demands reshape the market.
Speaking on the closing panel at a sold-out AdNews L!VE Sydney, Omnicom Media Group CEO Kristiaan Kroon, WPP Media CEO Aimee Buchanan and Publicis Groupe Media ANZ CEO Imogen Hewitt set out how the shift to consolidated group models is playing out behind the scenes.
Kroon gave the most concrete read on the numbers, following the Omnicom-IPG merger that closed locally in December. The combined business now runs six media agencies and just over 1,500 staff onshore, with another 100 roles being hired, sitting inside an Oceania structure of roughly 3,500 people.
He said the merger's cost savings flow from three places: real estate, technology and data and people. Omnicom currently carries 17 offices across five capital cities, with more than 1,000 staff in its Melbourne building alone.
But Kroon was bullish on what the combined business unlocks. With the agencies now settled and delivering, the bigger prize is the ability to move upstream through a new consultancy layer being built within Oceania under Nick Garrett, bringing media, creative and measurement together.
The real shift is reframing brand from something a client rents through paid media into part of its business strategy.
"It's a very different conversation," he said.
Kroon was just as pointed on where the money actually comes from. The engine of the business, he said, is not just the headline-grabbing mega-account but the $5 million to $25 million client. He has 84 of them on his books, and they drive significant revenue share.
On headcount, Kroon was direct.
Forty-three people were made redundant locally out of a 1,500-plus onshore base, with the global reduction set to exceed 10,000 roles against 134,000 staff worldwide, the bulk of it in centralised US functions.
"Any redundancy is tough. I've been made redundant, and it wasn't great," he said, adding that the calls were structural rather than personal. "Redundancy is not about the person, it's about the role."
Buchanan framed WPP's retirement of GroupM and launch of WPP Media as less a restructure than a reset. Much of the back-end consolidation in HR and finance was already underway, she confirmed.
"The biggest change that was enabled through the rebrand was more of a cultural shift," Buchanan said, pointing to how the group decides which capability services which client.
She said the new model let WPP win a client it had previously pitched and lost, by building a bespoke structure around the client's three-to-five year ambitions.
"I don't think a single agency in our group would have been able to give the client confidence in our ability to manage and transact the scale of their business."
Against the global picture of 9,000 roles being cut, Buchanan said the Australian business had stayed resilient on the back of five straight years of growth, an earlier start on transformation and heavy investment in its tech proposition. The local arm is currently hiring 130 to 140 people.
Buchanan was also bullish on what that investment unlocks. WPP has spent the last 18 months building out its tech proposition, utilising global platform WPP Open in the local market, and she said the payoff is people finally freed from the manual work they always hated. AI has solved for that, she said, but the real value sits with the people deploying it.
"It's about the human ingenuity of those people to deploy that technology," she said, adding she remains a firm believer this is still a people business.
Hewitt argued Publicis holds a first-mover advantage, having run a single P&L since 2019. The harder part, she said, was behavioural, not structural. The group had moved from "agency centrism to absolutely categorically client first", and that took practice.
"There are a lot of behaviours that you have to unlearn."
She cited Arnott's, delivering triple-digit ROI improvements across media, creative, PR and shopper under a single chief client officer, and Cancer Council Australia, where a cross-discipline team produced behaviour-change work that won an ARIA and helped reduce skin cancer incidence.
On M&A, she said acquisitions such as Atomic 212 locally and MBM in New Zealand kept their brands, identities and leadership, with integration limited to the back end. "It is always additive, not about buying more of the same."
On conflict and non-competes, Kroon said scale was the answer rather than the problem. Omnicom now holds 15 auto clients, up from 11 pre-merger, managed across separate agencies with different leadership, strategy and planning. Most client questions, he said, centre on delivery and governance, not conflict.
The panel closed on a shared verdict. Kroon said one of his teams had reframed the moment as a move "from transformation to just outright disruption” and warned it would not ease.
“This is the new normal, and it's not going to slow down."
Hewitt agreed, arguing few industries are better built to absorb constant change.
"We are a group of people that are very used to a constant state of change."
AdNews would like to thank our event sponsors: Audience360, Blis, Perion, Ryval Media and Teads, and Friends of AdNews the IMAA and MFA.
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