Back in 2018, Omnicom passed on buying Acxiom for $2 billion, which went to IPG instead.
In retrospect, that was a good move twice over, CEO John Wren told investors during the holding company’s Q1 earnings call on Tuesday, which was also its first full quarter with IPG folded in.
Seven years after IPG bought Acxiom, Omnicom was able to buy the entirety of IPG for $9 billion. “I think my waiting paid off from an economic point of view,” Wren quipped.
But he also admitted the deal wouldn’t have made sense for Omnicom back then.
“If I want to be really fair,” he said, “we probably weren’t ready for it in 2018, but we’re certainly ready for it [now].”
Omnicom is plugging Acxiom’s data into Omni, the holdco’s AI-enabled sales and marketing platform, and building customer IDs that tie signals together across channels – a setup that Wren and Omnicom CTO Paolo Yuvienco describe as far more impactful in a world with generative AI and agentic tools in the mix.
“The ability for us to actually drive values from that data is greater now than it’s ever been,” Yuvienco said, “and it is exponentially more powerful for our clients.”
When AI buys the ads
All of that only works, though, if the data is good.
Acxiom has solid data, Wren said, because it works principally with clients in highly regulated industries, including finance and pharma, where the bar for accuracy and fidelity is high.
“Their data is not as haphazard as consumer data can be,” he said.
With Acxiom’s data as the foundation, Omnicom is pushing further into agentic media buying and rethinking how it connects advertisers with publishers.
It’s been experimenting with AdCP, for example, a protocol that lets AI agents from advertisers, publishers and ad tech systems communicate, negotiate and execute ad deals more directly. Omnicom has already “tested the pipes,” Yuvienco said, and run agent-to-agent media buys for several clients.
The goal, he said, is to move more budget into working media and less into the machinery around it, which is usually operated by middlemen. If agents handle more of the planning and execution, it makes “the entire process more efficient and effective,” he added.
Shortening the supply chain
In other words, Omnicom wants a larger share of ad budgets to end up with publishers instead of intermediaries (minus its own margin, of course).
There’s always what Wren called “a messy middle” between buyers and sellers. Intermediaries “take a toll,” he said, “and that toll is paid for by clients and by the industry itself.”
It’s worth pointing out, of course, that principal-based media buying – which involves agencies purchasing inventory directly from publishers as a discount and reselling it to clients with markup – is already a multibillion-dollar business for Omnicom. With the acquisition of IPG, Omnicom is planning to scale up the practice even more.
But pretty much all of the major agency groups are looking to have a more direct relationship with publishers, Wren said, and it’s something Omnicom is actively investing in.
Agentic tools are purpose built for this job, because they’re “in service of shortening the media supply chain,” Yuvienco said.
The real test, though, will be whether advertisers actually see fewer tolls – not just new ones.
Meanwhile, as for the quarter itself, Omnicom reported $5.6 billion in revenue from its core operations, not including the businesses it plans to sell or shut down, which is up 6.7% year over year with 3.9% organic growth.
On the hunt for synergies, Omnicom is stripping out duplicate costs post-IPG acquisition and shifting more of the business toward higher-growth disciplines, like its integrated media unit, which includes media, commerce, data, CRM, consulting and content automation.
