Credit: Lance Grandahl via Unsplash
Omnicom is looking to media, health and precision marketing as areas to achieve revenue synergies with the takeover of competitor IPG.
The marriage of rivals brings together the third biggest advertising group, Omnicom, with the fourth, IPG, to form a company with 100,000 people and revenue of $25.6 billion (net revenue of $20 billion), with 57% of that in the US.
Job cuts at both Omnicom and IPG continue. In the nine months to September, Omnicom spent $127.4 million on severance.
However, CEO John Wren, when briefing analysts on September quarter results, said there’s a great deal of opportunity.
Analyst Craig Huber with Huber Research asked Wren: “Where do you think the three biggest opportunities are for revenue synergies?”
Wren said the media business probably gets to be 50% to 60% bigger than what it is currently with the takeover.
“We have some really very talented people when you put the talent from both groups together who are developing offerings and products, which on behalf of clients do it better, cheaper, and faster.
“We’re also using technology to aid in that effort. That’s number one.
“Our healthcare portfolio, even though it’s had a little bit of a bumpy road in the last nine months … the loss of Pfizer … and then some of the confusion that came out of the change in the administration here (president Trump).
“Going forward, we see unbelievably strong assets, which when you look at the industry, we will punch way above our weight in terms of the people and the offerings and the areas in which we are going to be the leaders in the area of healthcare.
“I’m very encouraged about precision marketing too. We hit a bump in the road with our consulting aspect of it, which we think we see daylight on, and we have action plans to act on.
“Those three areas would be where I see the most growth coming initially, as well as the depth of the portfolio and other areas as well, and the agility that will bring us in order to respond and change with client needs in general advertising and some other areas.”
Wren is highly confident in exceeding the synergies expected when the acquisition was announced. These totalled $US750 million.
He said more detailed plans for the combined group, including updated financials, will be revealed closer to conclusion, now expected late November.
These include the leadership team and organisation structure, strategic priorities, expanded capabilities, services and products.
“Our dedicated integration teams at both Omnicom Group and Interpublic Group of companies have been working tirelessly to ensure we’re ready to hit the ground running on day one,” Wren said.
“We’ve made significant progress developing detailed plans to deliver a seamless transition for our teams and clients.
“Our integration team has also made progress as we prepare to launch Omni+, our next-generation marketing operating system.
“This operating system unifies unparalleled data assets spanning campaign performance, consumer behaviours, demographic insights, transaction intelligence, and cultural and social indicators. These integrated data sources will be unified through Axiom’s Real ID, the industry’s most robust identity graph.
“The collective intelligence of Omni+ will provide a unified, intuitive experience for both clients and our internal teams. Our objective is clear: empower our clients to accelerate brand growth, expand customer reach, and deliver measurable business outcomes.
“A key part of our operating system is our generative AI layer, which is an agentic entry point to Omni+. In the last earnings call, we talked about our agentic framework and how we have been rolling it out across our entire organisation.
“It is now the fastest-growing platform in our company’s history, and our teams continue to create intelligent agents and orchestrate them to deliver faster and better outcomes for our clients. We look forward to sharing more details at its official launch at CES 2026.”
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