“With industry-leading expertise in critical areas like e-commerce and data, an operating model that can integrate paid/earned/shared/owned investment, a transparent and seamless way of working, and a demonstrated ability to link media investment to business outcomes – all supported by the Omni marketing orchestration platform – Omnicom Media Group enables marketing transformation that unlocks better business outcomes.”
— Helen Brooks, Kimberly-Clark Head of Media for Europe, Middle East, and Africa
At a time when marketing complexity threatens marketing effectiveness, and marketers face increasing pressure to manage brand distinction, customer retention and growth, and data technology, siloed agency solutions built for specialization can no longer meet our clients’ needs. In today’s marketplace, success requires deep specialization and deep integration – to meet that requirement, agencies must be reimagined as flexible ecosystems of talent, capabilities, and technology. Over the past 12 months, Omnicom Media Group has outperformed the market against all metrics – effectiveness, new business, innovation, future-fit capabilities, and client satisfaction – by successfully realizing that vision with Agency as a Platform (AaaP), a client-centric service solution seamlessly integrating and orchestrating modern marketing and media capabilities to deliver better business outcomes for our clients, drive growth for our agencies and create new opportunities for our talent. Powered by Omni, Omnicom’s open marketing orchestration system, AaaP enables OMG agencies OMD, PHD and Hearts & Science to draw talent and tools from across the entire OMG and
Omnicom networks – connecting media, content, and commerce to deliver relevant and compelling consumer experiences that drive sales and grow share. AaaP is fundamental to our agencies’ ability to build distinctive client service models – built for speed and flexibility, designed to be agile and evolve in line with the dynamic needs of our clients and supported by on-demand access to a global network of talent, resources, and capabilities – all while still maintaining their unique processes and cultures that bring a differentiated lens to the solutions they are creating.
The model has made OMG the global media group partner of choice for companies that are defining the future of media and commerce, including Amazon, Google, Instacart, Meta, The Trade Desk, and TikTok.
And Agency as a Platform is allowing all OMG agencies and clients to equally leverage and benefit from the investments that Omnicom is making in connected commerce and generative AI.
The impact can be seen in the wins we’ve earned, the innovative solutions we’ve delivered, the advances we’ve enabled and the accolades we’ve collected over the past 12 months.
THE WINS
“Uber moves at a fast pace, and throughout the pitch, we were impressed with their speed and agility, which along with the quality of their talent, technology as embodied in their Omni marketing orchestration system, strategic thinking and commitment to being a true partner to our business set them apart.” David Mogensen, VP Marketing, Uber
Fueled by wins that included Uber, Grupo Bimbo, Jaquar Land Rover, Under Armour and Virgin Voyages, and expanded relationships with clients like Burger King, Clorox, Delta, Diageo, Hormel and SC Johnson, Omnicom Media Group ended 2023 as the #1 global media group for net new business (wins minus losses).
Source: RECMA 2023 New Business Balance Report
We were the only media holding company with net new business growth across every region…
Source: RECMA 2023 New Business Balance Report
And the only global media group with two agencies in the top three for new business, including Hearts & Science at #1.
Source: RECMA 2023 New Business Balance Report
Continuing our momentum in 2024, the past six months, we have won more than $1.69 billion in new business and successfully defended more than $3.38 billion from existing clients — including the $2.1 billion Volkswagen business.
Click on the images above to learn more about the recent wins
Powered by these wins and retentions, as of this writing Omnicom Media Group has expanded its lead at the top of the new business leaderboard, with more than $1.5 billion separating us from the #2 group.
Source: COMvergence
INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS
“OMG demonstrates a keen understanding of the important consumer shifts impacting the media landscape. They led in the creation of a bespoke operating model for our business that is rooted in deep operational expertise and adaptive full-funnel data strategy to meet the needs of today and to chart a course together for the future.”
– L’Oréal USA
Team Omnicom for Volkswagen
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Volkswagen Group challenged us to deliver a solution that would supercharge their ability to deliver the personalized experiences, precise value propositions and connected decisioning needed to build one-to-one relationships with their customers today and tomorrow – across all brands.
We responded with Team Omnicom for Volkswagen Group – a customized and hyper-connected agency solution powered by the unrivaled breadth and depth of Omnicom and anchored in PHD, combining data-driven insights with cutting-edge technology to craft bespoke strategies tailored to each brand’s distinct personality.
This operating model is built upon three key pillars: synchronization, simplification, and adaptation – all enabled by the Omni open operating system.
- Synchronization of efforts and resources across the individual brands to drive effectiveness and efficiency
- Simplification of complex workflows & process and enhancing transparency.
- Adaptation to proactively respond at pace to business requirements
- Global leadership team at the group level focused on driving and accelerating transformation
- VW Group Global Enablement team driving strategy, innovation, performance, CRM and e-commerce, investment, and media delivery for all brands on a day-to-day basis
- Central Brand HQ teams that establish the global comms strategy and support Local Market Teams, ensuring the consistency and quality of work across markets; enabling agility and flexibility in responding to marketplace shifts
At the core of the Team Omnicom operating model is the Global Center of Data Excellence (GCoDE). GCoDE orchestrates technology, data, and analytics services to accelerate data-driven marketing for VWG.
Fully built and operated by Omnicom – and fully accessible and ownable by the client – GCoDE has three core components that enable digital, data, technology, and operational excellence:
- Specialized service centers exclusive to each brand comprised of experts in advanced analytics, personalization, and biddable digital activation
- Global Data & Technology Infrastructure with exclusive data partitions for each brand
- Global Operations & Delivery Center that operates across the VWG portfolio, enabling efficiencies of scale by centralizing operations of routine repeatable tasks.
We will be leveraging Omni Assist – the generative AI power source in Omni – to enable regionalized planning hubs that can plan, activate, and optimize across multiple markets at lightning speed. Omni Assist will support planners at every stage of the process, acting as a cognitive assistant that extends and amplifies the regional strategists’ capabilities by providing finger-tip access to local market intelligence; and enabling agility and flexibility of response at the local level.
Team Omnicom was the result of our two organizations partnering to create an operating model to drive sustainable growth. By design, it elevates the agency from media partner to business partner – a shift that is reflected in our performance-based renumeration agreement.
We see this solution as a watershed moment – not only in our relationship with VWG but for the role of media agencies moving forward.
The Omnichannel Performance Engine
As the lead agency for the Gap pitch, OMD leveraged the AaaP model to deliver The Omnichannel Performance Engine, accelerating the path from planning to activation to optimization at the speed of connected commerce.
The Engine is powered by digital platform specialists, data operations and hands on activation experts that optimize performance media at speed. The team, a combination of onshore/offshore and nearshore talent, partners with brand leads to understand individual brand KPIs and optimize to sales daily. The Engine team keeps a constant pulse on performance, shifting dollars in real-time to maximize sales. Each Engine team is a mix of firm & flex talent, balancing talent needs based on brand volume throughout the year.
The Engine is fueled by Omni, giving talent real-time access to buying and optimizing systems. Utilizing over 250 million consumer IDs, the performance engine will translate audiences to activation in real-time. On top of this powerful data sits our workflow that enables teams to collaborate in real-time throughout the end-to-end planning process, leveraging inventory availability, cost and campaign performance to optimize campaigns to business results, regardless of channel & partner. An “outcomes” function combines historical data and market forecasting to calculate a guarantee in media performance by using the full power of OMG’s trading strength and commercial partnerships. Our expert team leverages proprietary machine learning to optimize media performance across demand and supply side in real-time using our inventory scale and custom data integrations.
Each Engine team creates a a taxonomy for their client that is universal across the entirety of a brand portfolio, enabling visibility into larger market trends and direct comparisons, creating distinct opportunity for each brand. This unlocks faster visibility into data enabling faster decisioning.
The Amazon Global Supply Chain Playbook
An OMG global CPG client sitting in PHD had significant challenges with the supply chain on Amazon, specifically regarding out-of-stocks (OOS) and poor vendor confirmation rates. This resulted in OOS levels >10% and Vendor Confirmation Rate <60%. This had a significant impact on revenue globally and a direct impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of media campaigns.
Leveraging real-time dashboards commerce dashboards in Omni, PHD identified high levels of out-of-stocks that were impacting the efficiency and effectiveness of the Amazon media campaigns and reduced media spend on those items, subsequently re-distributing that media spend across slower selling products to boost incremental revenue. The tool was also used to identify overstocked items and then increased media spend on those items to clear through excess inventory in Amazon’s fulfillment network, reducing the risk of liquidation or markdown.
The agency then developed a bespoke Amazon Supply Chain Training Playbook that was delivered to Supply Chain teams and local market e-commerce teams, covering the following modules:
- Amazon Operations Overview
- Amazon Inbound Process
- Chargebacks and Shortages
- Fulfilment Programs
- eCommerce Packaging
- Returns
- Supply Chain Programs (Vendor Flex/Direct Import)
Activating playbook strategies delivered improvement in ROOS and vendor confirmation rates translating to $2 million in incremental revenue.
VWG’s Machine Learning Marketing Platform
ADVANCING THE INDUSTRY
First Mover Commerce Partnerships
Building on our established leadership in commerce capabilities and the industry’s deepest portfolio of first-mover retail partnerships – including Amazon, Walmart, Uber, Criteo, Instacart, Kroger, Albertson’s and Tesco – in 2024 we’ve been taking our commerce offer to the next level as the integration of the the Flywheel Commerce Cloud’s product and transaction data with Omni’s audience and behavioral data made us the partner of choice for first-to-market solutions that empower our clients to better plan, optimize and measure their commerce investments across emerging and legacy channels.
Kicking of the year in high gear, at CES we announced a series of partnerships designed to bridge the gap between creators and commerce, moving influencer marketing from buzz tool to a media channel, and driving better ROI for our clients’ spend in the category.
Omnicom partners with TikTok to fold influencers into its Omni platform
The partnership follows an initial testing of proof-of-concept for audience-based planning for creator spend that matched audiences derived from Omnicom’s Omni orchestration platform and/or client first-party data to TikTok influencers. Through the agreement, Omnicom’s clients have access to TikTok’s creators in TikTok’s Creative Exchange (TTCX) based on those clients’ needs. The deal is effective in the U.S. for now, with the goal of expanding globally.
The partnership is part of the holding company’s longer-term efforts to improve influencer discovery and measurement, said Megan Pagliuca, Omnicom Media Group’s North American head of activation. “We’re really using data to plan and select the right influencers and having a horizontal media plan across [multiple] platforms,” she said.
Omnicom sets creator-based audience fusion arrangement with YouTube
This initiative revolves around a first-to-market, generative AI-assisted global effort to more precisely discover YouTube influencers and creators as well as optimize YouTube creator video performance for Omnicom clients. The collaboration allows Omnicom’s “Omni” open operating system to fuse data between Omni’s and Google’s audiences and is expected to be fully operational in Q1.
As Kevin Blazaitis, head of Omnicom Media Group’s influencer practice explained, Omni audience data is translated into YouTube audience data and mapped to YouTube creator audiences, creating a sort of “punch card” that enables planners within the influencer practice to recreate brand-specific audiences within YouTube based on organic followings relevant to Omni’s 10,000 or so audience attributes.
Omnicom makes influencer-driven first-mover deal with Amazon Posts API
Digiday has learned that today, Omnicom will announce it’s the first holding company to strike a deal with Amazon to integrate creator content in Amazon’s Posts API — the commerce giant’s social media-like platform.
Basically, the deal brings influencer content to the biggest e-commerce platform in the world, and the arrangement will roll out in select markets globally, said an Omnicom representative. But it also enables measurement and tracking of that content to help gauge its effectiveness in driving sales.
Omnicom co-develops creator benchmarking insights across Meta’s platforms
The co-development deal with Meta revolves around the ability to benchmark creators mainly within Omni, Omnicom’s central operating system, which was intentionally designed to be open to data inputs from any source (i.e. Meta) to harmonize it with its own data. The benchmarking ability lets planners across Omnicom’s global markets analyze the performance of creator content across Facebook and Instagram against inventory that currently includes more than 28,000 pieces of creator content curated by Omnicom Media Group. Insights within these data lakes can be broken out by industry and influencer to drill down to granular decisioning levels.
In Cannes we revealed first-mover co-development partnerships that will connect upper funnel media spend – specifically video and influencer – to purchases across multiple e-commerce environments, advancing the evolution of investment KPIs from media metrics to sales metrics while driving sales and share growth for our clients.
Omnicom and Amazon Ads partner to connect audience data to browsing and shopping insights
Omnicom will announce today during Cannes Lions a strategic partnership with Amazon around its Amazon Ads service, Digiday has learned. It’s all part of the holding company’s multi-pronged Cannes approach to strike partnerships and deals with major ad-tech and platform players as it works to adjust its investment efforts for clients to the changing needs and actions of consumers.
The partnership with Amazon Ads, which the holding company described as first-of-its-kind, enables Omnicom’s planning and investment teams in Omnicom Media Group to access Amazon’s proprietary browsing, shopping and streaming insights to directly tie linear and CTV investment to purchases made on Amazon.
Omnicom and The Trade Desk co-develop new data solutions to optimize CTV budgets
Omnicom continued to roll out partnerships with several major platforms and players in the digital marketing ecosystem during Cannes Lions. Today it’s announcing what it calls a first-of-its-kind partnership with The Trade Desk to co-develop custom investment solutions for Omnicom clients on the major DSP platform.
The partners have developed a solution that melds The Trade Desk’s TV data (especially streaming) and Flywheel’s commerce data through Omni, Omnicom’s operating system supporting all Omnicom agencies, to optimize planning and reduce redundancies.
Omnicom Media Group already put the solution to use in planning this year’s expected upfront video expenditures for 40 clients, said Megan Pagliuca, Omnicom Media Group’s chief activation officer. It’s all in an effort to break through the cluttered mess that a lot of CTV investment still remains — and connect investments to outcomes. The Trade Desk alone offers 3 trillion streaming impressions per month, according to Omnicom.
Omnicom’s Flywheel gets certified with TikTok Shop as it ties creators to sales results
Omnicom kept up its raft of announcements and partnerships during Cannes Lions this week. The latest move has the holding company’s e-commerce specialist Flywheel getting certification from TikTok Shop, Digiday has learned.
The move is important because by doing so, Omnicom and Flywheel can connect creator content to sales, another example of the holding company striving to move beyond media metrics to reach sales metrics for its clients’ investments. In a way, when it comes to social commerce, it’s a way of finally answering the famous Wanamaker quote on which part of advertising works.
investment practice along with an AI-powered Q cultural insights solution (from Omnicom Media Group’s Sparks & Honey) in a bid to connect commerce, content, and culture to drive sales on TikTok Shop.
Omnicom wraps Cannes with an Instacart API deal to buy directly off influencer content
The easier you can make the shopping experience, the more likely someone will buy something.
Omnicom, in the last of a flurry of partnerships announced at Cannes Lions this year, aims to do just that for its clients via an integration into Instacart’s new Instacart Developer Platform (IDP). Omnicom said it’s the first holding company to access an API program that uses Instacart’s online grocery platform to more directly connect creators’ lists of material needs to the retail outlets that supply them. In other words, creator campaign content such as recipes, projects and “get ready with me” routines can be made shoppable and ready for purchase via Instacart.
Omnicom said it’s building a new platform to enable this functionality across social media platforms, which will be ready by this fall. Consumers will be able to shop for items in creator content from more than 1,500 retailers in 85,000 stores with same-day fulfillment via Instacart. It will be able to attribute orders purchased to a specific creator activation for their clients, via Omnicom’s Flywheel commerce cloud.
Unlocking AI to Drive Efficiency and Effectiveness
OMG’s Annalect data and analytics division – the team that built and manages Omni – continues to lead the development of Omnicom’s industry-leading generative AI capabilities, including the Omni Assist virtual assistant – launched in H2 2023 – that accelerates the planning process and is now integrated within the Omni custom workflow, accelerating functions from audience planning to creative pre-production. If Omni is the engine that drives Agency as a Platform, generative AI is the turbo charger that is enhancing speed and performance. One of Omni Assist’s key benefits: It enables teams across Omnicom to work faster and more creatively when developing and executing strategies and tactics for clients.
In 2024, we have built a constantly-evolving series of Omni Assist “Agents” that utilize Generative AI technology to provide insights, content, notifications and recommendations across every step of the Omni workflow — from audience development, to planning, content creation, activation, measurement, and optimization.
Omni Assist Agents are specific applications of Generative AI, and they are what power Omni Assist. Each Agent may require different training, different data or different underlying foundational models. You can think of an Agent as one part of the greater whole. The Omni Assist Agent Store houses a suite of Agents, or specific applications of Generative AI. It is also a place where power users can build additional Agents, using Omni Assist Generative AI tooling. By activating existing Agents (or by building bespoke Agents) that are most relevant to the business challenge at hand, users can drive greater operational efficiency, produce stronger outputs, and unlock new opportunities.
ACCOLADES
OMD swept the Campaign Global Agency of the Year awards at the global, regional, and network levels.
In Cannes, OMG earned the highest combined total Lions awards (including two Grand Prixes) and shortlist placements among all global media groups.
The Media Network of the Year competition saw OMD and PHD claiming first and second place.
Most significantly, when the Effie Index ranking the world’s most effective agencies, marketers, brands, networks, and holding companies was published in June, OMG earned the highest score among global media groups.