18 Ad Execs React to Omnicom’s IPG Acquisition

However you feel about holding companies, I always find it a little premature to doomsday prophesise in situations like this. Let’s see what happens. I’m always amazed when an industry that functions as the grease on the wheels of capitalism fears or derides growth. Sure everyone loves a boutique, but small can be bad and big can be good too. Using size to determine an entity’s worth seems unnecessarily reductive.

When Omnicom was originally formed in 1986, it was referred to in the industry as the ‘Big Bang’. The original multi-agency merger created what is now RPA. When Omnicom was formed, the combined holding company had three car accounts. Because of the resulting conflicts, Honda was left out of the new Omnicom client roster. Gerry Rubin and Larry Postaer took the Los Angeles office of Needham Harper Worldwide private and kept the Honda business. The clients were more concerned with the people behind our doors than the name on the door.

Almost 40 years later, holding companies are still looking for ways to maximize shareholder value. Shareholders pull the strings and shareholders want profit and growth above all else. RPA is still American Honda’s agency, and we are still independent. It leaves us free to put our clients and our people first. We are partners or ‘agents’ for our clients.

There are operational efficiencies to be gained with mergers. You can reduce redundant back-office staff and pool investments in developing areas, like AI and data/identity platforms. That saves money and creates shareholder value. If those savings were passed on to clients and the companies’ associates, it would benefit the people who service your clients and the people who pay your bills.

If you like what holding companies have done to the agency business, then you should like this even more. If you worry bigger isn’t always better, it should give you pause. The new network will create a huge number of client conflicts within the pharmaceuticals and healthcare, tech/telecom, CPG and financial services industries. It will create unprecedented leverage with partners in media, technology and production. What remains to be seen is, who is going to benefit from that leverage?

The Omnicom-IPG acquisition is yet another indicator of an industry under significant pressure. For publicly traded holding companies, the only viable strategy seems to be merging or acquiring to leverage scale, media clout, and operational efficiencies—measures designed to offset declining top-line revenues and significant margin pressures.

This development will simply not benefit clients. The promised $750 million in efficiencies will predominantly, sadly, come from workforce reductions, creating a challenging environment for existing talent within both organizations. The emphasis on cost cutting and consolidation will deprioritise creativity and also lead to a further ‘juniorization’ of the industry. 

In contrast, this highlights the opportunity for independent creative agencies. Independents are aligned with their clients’ best interests, prioritising the ambition of the work, fostering environments that attract top-tier creative talent, and drawing inspiration from purely creative sources rather than succumbing to a race of efficiency and commoditisation of services. 

For creative independents, business success is a direct result of investment in talent, the environment you create and the opportunities that are available to solve the most interesting problems for our clients. That’s what leads to the quality of the product for indies, not a focus on the engineering of returns for holding company shareholders. Holding companies are therefore the real clients to the agencies within the group. For indies, the clients are simply the clients.

I’ve been in this business for 25 years, and I’ve seen so many changes—some exciting, some frustrating—and somehow, it just keeps evolving in the wildest ways.

Now we’ve got these multi-mega agencies like the new, supersized Omnicom Group, where everyone shares the same email address and the identities of the individual agencies within the group seem to disappear.

Meanwhile, the demands on vendors like us are getting harder and harder to meet while still turning any kind of profit.

Markups are shrinking. Things that were always considered job costs are now things we’re expected to absorb as just the ‘cost of doing business’—on top of the reduced markup. And we’re still expected to carry the costs for months until we (hopefully) get paid back.

The reality is, the demands will keep getting bigger, and not all of us will make it through unscathed. There will always be someone willing to take the job at any cost—even at the expense of their own company. I get the fear behind that mindset, but I can’t subscribe to it.

Still, there’s hope. There are so many brilliant, creative people at these big holding companies, and I think it all comes down to keeping the humanity alive between us.

And then there are the independents—agencies like Mirimar and American Haiku—who are out there playing by their own rules, doing amazing work, and proving that it’s possible to succeed without following the mega-agency playbook.

I have a feeling we’re going to see a lot more of that soon.

More and more it appears that indies and holding cos are serving different gods. Generalisation alert, but for the most part indies are about growth through passion, people, freedom. The holding co model is about math.

There’s a saying that goes, ‘How big do you get before you get bad?’ And with two giant holding companies like Omnicom and IPG merging, the saying is more relevant than ever.

While it does have the potential to reshape the industry, bringing huge efficiencies, synergies and scale, here’s the downside. We could lose a lot of the things that make agencies special—the personalisation, the flexibility, the creative spark, and the ability to move quickly. And in a fast-paced industry where clients need fresh, impactful solutions, that can be a serious problem. Not to mention, we’re not just competing with other agencies anymore, but with content creators who can pivot and execute at lightning speed.

When everything becomes more centralised, it’s harder for individual agencies to stay creative and take risks. Instead, we might see more cookie-cutter, more formulaic and AI-driven ads, rather than groundbreaking work that resonates with people on a whole new level. And given this new structure, the exponential growth of bureaucratic overload and stagnation. The merger could also limit the number of agencies available to clients, especially those looking for more specialised or independent services.

Here's the upside: For those creative leaders with an entrepreneurial streak—people who are passionate about great creative, building unique cultures, free from the layers of bureaucracy — this could be the perfect time to break away from the big holding companies and build something totally new. It could actually turn the ‘big’ into something that benefits the entire industry, injecting a fresh wave of innovation and creativity. While generating an unprecedented influx of new indie agencies and causing the industry pendulum to swing back the other way.

It's no newsflash that tech, innovation and data are essential to marketing going forward. That being said, many of these holding companies have already been promoting their tech/data capabilities for years. I know this well as in my previous roles with Omnicom and WPP, I've been the one tasked with promoting them. Unless the new 'innovations' can be truly ground-breaking, it won't change the market as platforms like Meta, Google, Adobe, Open AI, etc. are innovating faster and with more expertise. Not to mention all the tech start-ups that are exponentially advancing with respect to those players. There are a number of reasons for this but one is certainly that the top people in these fields are not jumping to join 'ad firms'. Fast-follow will be the more likely outcome with all these companies with software already being democratised and available for everyone. As a result, more than ever the competitive advantage for clients and agencies will be creativity - and notably, the merger PR release had no mention of it.

By partnering with the new Omnicom-IPG superstructure, brands risk signing up for mediocrity. These oversized agency networks aren’t built for creativity - they’re built for scale, for shareholders, and for maintaining their own momentum. They’re not focused on making your brand stand out; they’re focused on keeping their machine running.

When scale becomes the priority, ideas slow down. They get safer, more predictable, and less effective. The best talent - the people who truly care about pushing boundaries and making work that matters - won’t stay in a system that stifles creativity. They’ll leave for smaller, more agile agencies where ideas come first, where originality and bold thinking still have value. And what’s left behind? A sprawling system churning out work that feels generic and forgettable for brands that deserve better.

The scale of this merger won’t elevate your brand; it will shrink it, reducing it to a number on a spreadsheet. Efficiency and technology may sound appealing, but the truth is that these promises often come at the expense of the culture and talent that make great work possible.

Brands deserve more. They deserve partners who care about their success as much as their own and who are focused, flexible, and ready to fight for what matters. The future of creativity isn’t in oversized, slow-moving networks - it’s in places that are sharp, nimble, and hungry to make something great. That’s where the magic happens. Don’t buy into their scale. Think small. Win big.

Bigger is not always better. And in the case of the current adland merger, determining that is even more complex particularly for clients looking for ways to culturally connect to grow their business. The idea of limitless scale and efficiency glitters. But greater efficiency doesn’t necessarily translate to any kind of enhanced collaboration across units and disciplines to yield a higher quality creative product. Instead, the risk is that the promise of scale and efficiency leads to what functionally becomes cumulative transactions among units protecting their respective P&Ls, beholden to their bosses, their bosses’ bosses and shareholders. In the end the result may be threefold:  The impact of massive redundancies, loss of agency legacy and culture, and the dilution of the human part of what makes the work great. The silver lining is this will continue to accelerate the splintering off that has led to the formation of some incredible indies, which, while they may not hold a winner-takes-all mentality on revenue, we are all seeing are favored for some of the most coveted brands and briefs.

I certainly think the feeling is that this deal is being done less in service of clients and more to find profit growth through cost synergies in the absence of revenue growth. 

Because we’re seeing clients looking for a much more joined-up approach from their agencies across media, creative, data and tech – and being bigger makes it harder to do that, not easier. 

That’s especially the case as AI becomes more central to our industry. Clients are really looking for more agile, innovative approaches to AI – based on small language models tailored to their needs with data and governance they can control and trust – not enterprise-level large investment partnerships which sound good in a press release but don’t move their businesses forward.

 

This merger is creating one behemoth mega corporation. But good and bad agencies come in all sizes. The question for any company, big or small, is do you have a clear vision and a set of meaningful beliefs and values that will guide your business decisions and inspire your people and your clients? In a merger of this scale, how do you get everyone aligned to a common vision? And how do you keep your top talent engaged while you figure it out? It’s fair to say that this new entity will be very distracted for some time. And ultimately, clients will lose out in the short and medium term until the dust settles. For the top tier of independent agencies that are doing great work and know who they are and what they stand for, this merger is an opportunity.

The sheer scale of the Omnicom-Interpublic merger and the projected cuts - $750 million in 'costs” – boggles the mind.

In a business whose product is glued together by people, teams, and passion – this news immediately made me think of the business of our business and how this move feels anti-people. Technology, scale, and efficiency will never replace humanity and ideas. Clients might buy agencies based on those things in the short term – but in the end, we’re just humans walking around looking for candy bars and jobs and a decent car. We’re the same set of synapses and emotional instincts as we were a hundred years ago. It’s just that our inputs and environments have changed.

Long story short – you can auto serve all the AI-made things you can gin up, but if you want audiences to value a brand – remember it, love it, share it, keep buying it – you must make them feel something.

As a small agency, I love this merger. I love that it could wake clients up whose view of creativity and humanity won’t end up on the cutting room floor for the sake of savings and automation. I love that some genius ad professionals who still want to create ideas for other humans might finally be ready to go small. I love that our well-gelled team at PETERMAYER will be pitching against Team OmniIPG, a group of handpicked people thrown together for a pitch, who have just exchanged business cards a couple hours before.

And finally, I love that the big will get bigger and the small will get scrappier. Let the future begin.

Joe Maglio

President of Cheil North America, and CEO of McKinney and Barbarian

The news of Omnicom’s potential acquisition of IPG is shaking up the industry, but it also creates a significant opportunity for independent agencies to thrive. While the merger consolidates talent and resources under one massive umbrella, it inevitably leaves gaps—gaps that nimble, independent shops are uniquely equipped to fill.

CMOs should ask: in a world of mega-mergers, who’s truly advocating for your brand? Independent agencies (like GLOW) aren’t bound by shareholder demands; our only allegiance is to your results. This merger highlights the risk of becoming ‘just another client’ in an overloaded portfolio. The smarter choice? A boutique partner that’s not only dedicated to your brand but deeply connected to the cultural drivers shaping today’s marketing landscape.

The industry is shifting. With GLOW and other independents leading the charge, forward-thinking brands can shine brighter than ever in this evolving landscape. Are you ready to embrace the future?

A few things struck me when I heard this news – the brands, the people, and the clients. Which ultimately speaks to the role holding companies play in the marketing ecosystem. Consolidation is the natural evolution of things in any industry after its best days are behind it, and this consolidation was climactic.

The storied agency brands like McCann, BBDO, TBWA, and the rest may soon find themselves diluted into some sort of VMLY&R [now VML].

For the smart people that work at these agencies every day, the fact that creativity isn’t mentioned once in the press release, yet “the transaction is expected to generate annual cost synergies of $750 million,” says everything you need to know. Cuts will be made and an already reeling job market will be flooded with new talented people trying to provide for their families.

I also wonder about how this will benefit the clients. After the jigsaw puzzle of conflicts is resolved, how will these “efficiencies” help their clients achieve better results? I don’t buy the technological supremacy line. Everyone knows the money is flowing to Google and Meta.

Holding companies seem to want to become technology companies, well, sorry folks, that’s just not going to happen.

It’s a question of emotional versus computational creativity. 

The agency superpower has always been about tapping into emotion and creating stories that bring the right emotions to life.

Tech is now trying to simulate/replace that emotional creativity with computational creativity.

The ground has shifted under agencies' feet and the trend of consolidations is a sign the old holding company agency model is dying and tech's performance approach has won. At least for now.

I’m not going to pretend to understand the intricacies and financial benefits of this business deal. I’m sure brilliant people and stakeholders are high-fiving in boardrooms, so congratulations to them on the deal. They're creating the largest advertising group in the world, and that is no small feat.

But I will say that this merger clearly reveals two things. One, the now biggest industry player is betting on technology and AI to solve brand problems. And two, the space for creativity to thrive just increased. Not for these large holding companies (in fact, the Omnicom-IPG press release never once mentions creativity) but for smaller independent agencies that have proven time and time again that strategically disciplined and creatively disruptive advertising is the most effective thing a brand can do. At Standard Practice, we’ve seen this shift firsthand. Huge brands trust small agencies to develop creative platforms and brand campaigns, and use those assets/thinking as a sort of ‘trickle-down creative’ through their organisations. I believe this shift from behemoths to indies will continue, and even accelerate, with this merger – and I’m excited about it. The world could use an injection of creativity.