Omnicom's new agency model

Omnicom is bringing all of its creative agencies under a unified leadership structure, and it’s taking great pains to let everyone know that it’s not because it needs to cut costs.

The Omnicom Advertising Group (OAG) will be put in place in the first quarter of 2025 and will manage all of the holding company’s creative networks, like TBWA, BBDO, DDB and Goodby Silverstein & Partners.

Troy Ruhanen, the CEO of TBWA, will lead the new management team. He told Fast Company that there were no plans to merge or retire any of the agency brands and that he wouldn’t have taken the job if it was all about finding efficiencies.

‘The story is about really making sure that we can help these agencies, these brands, thrive,’ said Ruhanen. ‘And how we’re going to do that is by obviously using scale to our advantage.’

Similarly, Omnicom has released a statement: ‘Each [agency] will retain its unique brand, culture and people, while capitalising on OAG’s shared and scaled investments in innovative tools, technologies, specialist capabilities, and AI platforms.’

You can forgive Omnicom and Ruhanen for being so eager to get in front of the story with their message about scale and investment. Creative shops have in general been a drag on holding companies’ growth over the past few years, as a result of declining agency-of-record contracts and economic turmoil, and in that time some of the industry’s most storied agency brands, like J Walter Thompson, have disappeared.

Things may well be different at Omnicom, but it’s hard to see how an umbrella management structure addresses any of the deeper issues troubling creative agencies.

Campaign of the week /

Specsavers is using misheard idioms — such as ‘escape goat’ (scapegoat) and ‘wriggle room’ (wiggle room) — to highlight the importance of hearing checks.

The UK’s leading high street optician chain teamed up with British broadcaster Gyles Brandreth for an ad in which he runs through 10 commonly confused sayings (‘Damp squid’ instead of ‘damp squib’; ‘tenderhooks’ instead of ‘tenterhooks’), and reveals that he has recently found out he suffers from hearing loss.

The ad ends with a call to action to get your hearing checked, and ‘make certain our treasured sayings are heard as intended’.

Brandreth teased the campaign by uttering common malapropisms during his slot on British daytime show, This Morning, and on Instagram Reels.

While hearing loss can certainly lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness, this preventative campaign tackles the topic with warmth and levity to engage its target audience in their ear health and overcome barriers to people seeking help.?

The integrated campaign, created by Golin, London, is supported by earned, owned and paid social and radio. Read our full analysis here. Contagious.

Blue ocean blunders /

Companies’ pursuit of moats, flywheels and fresh categories is hubristic and it is killing customer service, says Paul Worthington, president of strategic consultancy Invencion.

In his newsletter, Worthington draws a line between plummeting customer satisfaction and marketing budgets, and companies chasing unassailable competitive advantages.

Only five or so companies around today have effectively insulated themselves from competition, says Worthington, and none of them attained that position through smarts and hard work alone. Trying to replicate the exponential growth of Google or Apple by building moats and flywheels is not only deluded, argues Worthington, it also lulls companies into neglecting their customers. After all, if you operate in a category of one, why bother with customer service?

But brands have started to realise that they can’t realistically expect to avoid the grind of competing against others. Even Nike has learned that giving up the fight for retail space has consequences. You can argue whether or not competition is the natural order of the universe, but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s necessary for a functioning market — not to mention, a healthy marketing function.

Obviously, this is just one person’s musings, and moats and blue ocean strategies (pursuing markets with no competitors) have survived long enough that they must have some value,?but Worthington’s slant on competition is an interesting one and worth reading in full. Off Kilter.