Credit: Dose Media via Unsplash
Omnicom has already executed hands off media buys for several clients using the global advertising agency’s AI agent framework.
The agent-to-agent buying was revealed at a briefing of market analysts following the announcement of the group’s March quarter trading update.
Analyst David Karnovsky at JP Morgan asked about Omnicom’s core businesses, the media planning and buying, and communication between parties in the value chain.
CEO John Wren said there’s always a messy middle between the client, the advertiser, what they pay for the media and reaching the consumer.
And that has meant a lot of martech which becomes exciting for a moment or two and then fades away.
“Most of those businesses don’t last very long,” he said.
“There are intermediaries today that stand between us and the publishers, and they take a toll. The toll is paid for by the clients and by the industry itself.
“That is something we’re clearly working on.”
Wren said Omnicom had the best data in the industry, allowing creative and smart thinkers to come up with some different ideas and explore opportunities.
“Part of the agentic revolution … is it reduces the need for what was previously manual work or semi-manual work that was required to put together Excel spreadsheets and to do a lot of other things.
“In the simplest terms, it makes us more productive.”
Omnicom's chief technology officer, Paolo Yuvienco, said Omnicom is leading the charge on agentic media and the agentic media ecosystem.
“We’ve actually executed real media buys for several clients using our agent framework, doing agent-to-agent buying, which is all in service to shortening the media supply chain,” he said.
All in the name of driving higher value for clients, delivering a greater amount of working media dollars and making the entire process more efficient and effective, he said.
Karnovsky at JP Morgan asked what happens to Omnicom’s pricing models in a world where the media supply chain is shortening.
“Are you in a position of strength to leverage to gain better pricing terms for your clients?” he said
Wren said the whole environment expands.
“We will be rewarded as a result of that,” he said.
“Increasingly, we’re moving towards performance. That’s a change that’s ongoing. Nothing’s overnight, even though I know everybody likes everything to be overnight, it’s not overnight.
“The higher quality people with the higher quality approaches and reaching more customers and selling more product and building better brands, that’s where we sit.
“That’s where our clients trust us. That’s why they buy our products. As a result, we will get paid a very fair price for the efforts that we put in because we’ve made these investments.”
Omnicom told an investor day in March that 58% (currently 52%) of revenue is going to be from media and media-related activities
With the takeover of IPG, Omnicom has become the largest buyer of media, representing more than $70 billion in billing, according to COMvergence.
Omnicom told the investor day briefing that scale also allows the company to simplify the media supply chain.
“As the programmatic ecosystem has grown more complex, many transactions now involve multiple intermediaries that add costs without improving performance.
“But by combining our scale with identity-based supply path optimization, we create a more direct path to high quality inventory. That increases the percentage of working media while improving signal quality and campaign performance.
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