Geoff Clarke. Credit: Omnicom Media
Omnicom Media wants to strip out the patchwork of systems sitting behind its agency network, and has put a newly created transformation unit in charge of doing it.
Geoff Clarke, Omnicom Media’s newly appointed managing director of business transformation, has been handed the task of pulling technology, data and operations into one system.
His new role was established following the group’s acquisition of IPG last year and reflects a broader push to bring operational consistency across technology, data and workflow systems.
Clarke described the aim using a retail metaphor.
"Let's consider each individual brand across Omnicom as individual shops, each have their own shop front window, pitching to the market why they are the very best at what they do," he told AdNews.
Omnicom, he said, is building the systems that sit behind those shopfronts, so agencies keep their own client-facing identity while running on shared infrastructure.
The push follows what Clarke described as 18 months of mounting pressure on the industry over data flow and enterprise structure, driven by disruptive competitors and supply chain strain.
He pointed to a common trap where agencies build sophisticated technology, then let customisation creep in until systems become too complex to scale. The fix, in his view, is specialists who can run projects across the whole network, rather than agency by agency.
Automation is central to that overall plan. Clarke described bots that check work before it moves down the line.
"The bot will review that request and if best practice is not in place, meaning if that person has made an error, it will go back to that person identifying the mistake, asking them to fix it," he said.
The same approach links the media plan, which Clarke calls the most important document an agency produces, directly to finance systems, cutting out a manual step teams have relied on for years.
Clarke has done this kind of work before, and was recognised for it by winning this year's Best Transformation Strategy at AdNews Agency of the Year Awards in February.
He detailed a multi-year overhaul of IPG Mediabrands' operational model in an exclusive AdNews interview last year, while chief operating officer there.
The program had saved more than 86,000 hours of manual work by that point, with automation handling roughly 75% of the agency's investment workflow and returning an estimated $8.5 million to $10.5 million in resource value.
Asked what operational challenges agencies are increasingly being asked to solve for clients, Clarke's first response was a question of his own.
"How long do we have?" he said.
Clients want more face time, faster turnaround, greater agility and deeper category knowledge, he said, on top of the consistency and accuracy they already expect.
None of this is about replacing staff, according to Clarke, who is wary of automation being used to cut costs.
"AI in the hands of the experienced is all powerful, AI in the hands of the in-experienced is an efficiency play," he said.
Clarke, who has worked in transformation roles for six years, said the harder part of the job is not the technology but getting staff to use it.
"The obvious answer is the challenge of building the infrastructure and launching technology solutions faster than the actual advancements,” he said.
“However, after six years focused on large scale transformation, I would say change management.”
People say they want efficiency, he said, then resist when the change arrives.
"You would be surprised by how many people, when faced with technology changes, hold on to their historical manual ways of working," he said.
His answer is to slow the rollout down with more peer feedback, more testing and more time spent explaining what changes for staff before switching anything on.
For Clarke, the new transformation unit's work comes back to one test.
"It is not about technology, it is about improving the lives of our fellow co-workers," he said.
Clarke pointed to two measures for what the unit needs to deliver in the long run: whether staff experience improves, and whether clients are better served.
Anything that fails both tests, he said, is money spent in the wrong place.
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